The dinks brought into the AO these radar-controlled .51-caliber antiaircraft machine guns and scattered them around at random in attempts to pick off helicopters and hamper our screening ops. They were terrifying. They had such range that you weren’t safe from them even at three thousand feet.
For some reason, our FM radios picked up the .51’s particular radar signature when it tried to home in on us. You had about five seconds to take evasive action from when you heard the first beep! By the time you heard the third beep! it was already too late. You didn’t encounter the .51s often, but when you did your blood formed instant ice crystals.
Werner, one of my new warrants—it seemed almost everyone was an FNG—and I were working a Purple Team up north. We heard over radio traffic that a second team farther south had encountered a .51. A grunt on the ground broadcast a warning over the radio. “Huey bound for the south toward FSB Phyllis, be warned. You are under fire from a fifty-one-cal to your north.”
You rarely heard gunfire inside helicopters.
A few minutes later I heard the beep! I almost slung Shaky and O’Brien out of the helicopter. I slammed the cyclic forward and dropped the collective, putting the chopper into a nose dive to both gain speed and lose altitude. You had two chances for survival; hesitating got you shot out of the sky. First, you wanted to move faster than the .51 could track you. Second, you dropped low to get out of his line of fire.
If a 7.62mm tracer looked like a flaming basketball coming at you, the .51 cal was a burning trash can. A silent stream of green trash cans lazily sailed above and in front of us as I maintained the dive. I pulled up short above the treetops and shagged out of range before I returned to altitude.
We had the ability to call for air strikes when the target appeared hardened and beyond the capabilities of our Snakes. Often, .51 antiaircraft guns protected important food and arms bunkers or tunnel complexes that could withstand anything short of an Arc Light or a few loads of fast-mover napalm. I located the target. I talked it over with Connolly and Mad Dog in the Red Bird. They agreed with me that we should summon fast movers to obliterate an area next to an abandoned rice paddy.
Requests for air generally took about a half-hour of relaying it up through echelons. I remained over station, circling, while my Loach and Cobra swept on to the west as a Pink Team. The FAC always arrived ahead of the jet fighters to pinpoint and mark the target for them.
We made lazy chandelles in the air, bullshitting over the intercom and listening to a rock ‘n’ roll AEFES radio station out of Saigon. Some DJ REMF-type who opened his program with a rousing Good morning, Vietnam! All of a sudden, Shaky blurted out, “Son of a bitch!”
I did a double take. Right outside my window, flying next to us, was a Bronco. It was so close it looked like Shaky could have stepped out the Huey’s door onto its wing. I knew how fast those things could fly, having been rendered unconscious by excessive Gs during my own experience flying in one. Stall speed must have been next to nothing since this one had slowed enough to fly formation on me.
“Hello there!” the FAC pilot said cheerfully, grinning from his cockpit and waving at us. “I hear you got some excitement for me. What are you shooting at and where is it?”
When I found my voice again, I identified the target and showed him where it was. He in turn chatted with the fast movers.
“F-4s from Vung Tau will be here in about five mikes,” he relayed. “They’re gonna make their runs from east to west, so you need to move to the north. You can come in later for a BDA and see if we killed anything. Okay, I’m going in. Let me know if this is the right place. . .”
He tilted his opposite wing and plunged away into a screaming dive. He really burned along next to the ground. Willie Pete smoked up next to the field and the Bronco seemed to shoot straight up away from it. WP—white phosphorus—was heavy, easy to see from the air and remained in a cloud for a long time.
“Is that the place?” FAC asked.
“Close,” I responded. “Maybe thirty, forty meters to the south.”
He chuckled. “I got it spotted then.”
It was absolutely spectacular. I felt like cheering for our side. Two F-4 Phantoms streaking through the sky like bullets dived from out of the invisible distance, flattened out and dumped their loads in and around the WP smoke. A fiery bright cauldron of flames blossomed in the forest next to the rice paddy as the jets rocketed out of sight.
The Phantoms made one more screaming pass, adding to flames erupting within an area roughly two hundred meters wide by a klick long. Boom! Boom! Like that, it was over and the fighter jets were gone back to wherever they came from.
“Okay, Mini-Man,” the FAC chirped. “We enjoyed it. Call us again if you need us.”
My God, we had that kind of power and yet these little bastards fought on! Didn’t they know they were licked?