Rain fell for three days. Great billowing clouds rushed angrily in from the South China Sea and dark grayness covered the land. A violent two-hour torrential downpour, followed by an hour or so of sun and steam, then another two-hour downpour. It fell in driving sheets that pounded the jungles and rice fields until every stream, every canal, every river swelled and overflowed. Men and machines bogged down. The runways at Tay Ninh flash-flooded. Streams of water almost knee-deep gushed through the culvert pipes that were our bomb shelters and pooled in lakes underneath hooch barracks. Now I understood why everything was built on blocks above the ground.
Mighty Morris stood on the little overhanging porch of our hooch and gazed out toward the Black Virgin. The mountain was invisible in the overcast.
“You’d think weather like this would drive the dinks to their holes,” he said. “It won’t. The little fuckers’ll take advantage of our being grounded to start moving shit forward out of Cambodia for another round of fighting.”
It wasn’t like monsoon season appeared suddenly one day and rained continuously for the next forty days and forty nights. It came incrementally in a series of weather fronts. In the beginning, there would be more sunny days, broken only by normal tropical showers, then monsoon ones in which the clouds opened. Later, however, as the season got into full swing, the rainy days would take over. That meant a lot of pilot downtime. Charlie brought out his canoelike sampans and went to work.
As soon as the weather broke, a patrol from FSB Jamie made contact with a large NVA force. The FSB sent out a reaction element on foot and requested help from Tay Ninh. Red Platoon dispatched Cobras while I loaded four of my slicks with our Blue infantry platoon.
By the time my airmada reached station, Swede and a couple of other Snakes were darting and diving at the enemy. The North Vietnamese were attempting to close “belly to belly” with our grunt patrol and wipe it out.
“Dalton Four-Six?” Swede’s unmistakable accent came up on FM, talking to the patrol. “I’m running hot. Danger close! Danger close! I’m gonna shoot over your heads!”
Most of the time, gunships made their runs parallel to friendly lines and out front of them in order to reduce accidental “friendly fire” against our own guys. But because of the L-shaped defensive configuration of the GI defenders and the nearness of enemy soldiers, the Snakes were forced to dive in behind friendlies and shoot over their heads. Swede later described how he placed rockets ten meters in front of the battling grunts. Ten meters was about three steps.
The bursting radius of a 3.5 rocket was about twenty-five meters. However, because of momentum, the burst and shrapnel traveled forward and away from the defenders. It was dangerous business and called for precision, but it kept the NVA at bay.
My ships dumped Blue infantry into a clearing about three-hundred meters to the rear. I then led my helicopters to the FSB about three klicks away where we sat down on the road to wait to pick up our platoon after the firefight. Most of us broke out C-rats and heated them over pinches of C-4 explosives. C-4 burned with a hot blue flame and would not explode unless you added a concussion to the fire. That meant you didn’t want to try to stomp out the flame. Every pilot carried a half-pound of plastics underneath his seat for fuel; we spent a lot of time like this parked and waiting to go somewhere else.
When the excitement ended a couple of hours later, we lit up the choppers to go back out to get our platoon. The four Hueys were not much more than off the ground than we were socked in by rain and fog. Weather often moved in quickly during the tropical monsoons, suddenly dropping down from high blowing clouds to make pea soup in the jungle. During times like that, there might not be a top for five thousand feet.
Scattered across our AO was the wreckage of thirty or forty downed birds, most of which had been picked out of the air by enemy fire. Some of them, however, were victims of weather. Pilots sometimes suffered vertigo, refused to believe their instruments and actually flew into the earth. Disorientation in weather or at night increased your pucker factor at least tenfold. While you grew accustomed to Charlie duck-shooting at you, if you could actually get used to something like that, vertigo struck by total surprise and left you dizzy, short of breath and with sweating palms. It was damned near as scary as getting shot at. You could almost be flying upside down and not realize it.
Wouldn’t that be a hell of a note—Mini-Man, impervious to enemy fire, brought down by vertigo and his own stupidity?
I hated flying instruments. I better interpreted IFR, Instrument Flight Rules, as I Fly Roads. I hadn’t done well under the hood during flight training. Half the time my body told me I was flying upside down while my instruments assured me I was straight and steady. I knew the instruments had to be lying.
But you had to go with them in this kind of weather—the turn-and-bank indicator, the artificial horizon, air speed indicator, altimeter, and compass. It was white knuckle flying at its finest. Conrad flew my second seat. He sat stiff and silent, his eyes glued to the instruments, hands gripping his thighs. He was white-knuckled. Flying in formation doubled or tripled the danger.
I tried to appear casual and unconcerned, like I did this all the time.
There was heavy rain inside the cloud cover. Rain didn’t fall; it was just there swirling around inside the fog. I switched on my windshield wipers, for all the good that did, and kept trucking. It wasn’t like you could pull over to the side of the road. The Farmer was my wingman. I radioed him to back off a little. I didn’t trust him not to blunder into my blades and bring us both down.
“If I back off too much, Mini-Man,” he responded, “I’ll be like a chicken with its head cut off. I won’t be able to see you at all.”
Mighty Morris flew wingman to Farmer Farmer while an FNG warrant from California named Hal Bijorian brought up Tailend Charlie. By twisting my head and looking back, I made out the ghostly form of Farmer’s bird riding slightly higher and to my right. All I saw of Mighty Morris was the dim blinking of his red-and-green position lights. For all I knew of Bijorian, he was lost in the fog. I kept track of everyone over the radio.
“See anything, Mini-Man?” Bijorian asked.
“Fog,” I said.
I almost whooped with relief when I broke out of the storm. Suddenly, the earth appeared wet and green below and stretched off toward the horizon and the sun shone through the recent rain like burnished copper. Rays of light stabbed translucent through the high clouds and gashed splashes of gold on the forest. I thought the world absolutely beautiful.
Mighty Morris, always the poet and itinerant minstrel, came up on the radio. “And He saw what He had made and declared it good. . . .”
“Amen,” said the new guy, Bijorian.