Not long after our crash landing at Vung Tau, I was flying X-Ray for the Swede on a river sweep for sampans south of Tay Ninh. I had accumulated about twenty hours total in a Snake, most of it in the nose as X-Ray, but some of it as AC when I occasionally volunteered to fly one to Cu Chi for higher-echelon maintenance. Swede and I had also gone out a few times to shoot up a “mule” or practice firing on a VC hooch with his miniguns, just for fun. You didn’t get much opportunity in a Huey slick to personally get your licks in. Door gunners saw most of that action. Once or twice, I chunked grenades out the helicopter window with my M79 at smoke, flitting figures in the jungle, or a bunker, but that didn’t really count as aerial combat.
It was a perfect day for flying after last night’s rain. The world glistened. Swede and I chattered over the intercom and were having a pleasant time of it when an alarm went out over the emergency guard freq.
A truck convoy of the 82d Airborne Division, my old outfit, had driven into a major ambush on the highway between Cu Chi and Bien Hoa. The on-site commander was desperately requesting air support. Anything he could get, but it had to be fast. The convoy was stalled at a U in the road and under heavy enemy fire.
A call like that was akin to an “officer needs help” plea in a police precinct. Everybody within a certain radius scrambled to get there. Swede poured on the coal. We were twenty minutes away. We arrived along with about ten other Cobras and some lift and medevac ships from various other units. The scene from a distance looked like vultures circling in the air above a roadkill. I spotted the smoke from ten miles out.
A Blue Max Cobra on his way back from Cu Chi had taken charge in the air and was attempting to traffic-cop things into some kind of order. He got the gunships racetracked out to start making gun runs while the dustoffs and slicks floated high in orbit prepared to medevac wounded men or rescue downed aircrews.
About thirty or so deuce-and-a-half trucks were dispersed around a horseshoe bend in the road. Some were pulled off into ditches in a defensive posture while others had nosed into jungle cover. A number were abandoned on the road. Several appeared damaged. At least one suffered a direct hit from a mortar round. It looked crumpled like an empty tin can. Flames licking from its engine coughed oily black smoke high into the air.
The ambushers were concealed in forest in the center of the horseshoe in such a way that they could bring fire upon the entire convoy, from front to rear. Paratroops sprawled among the trucks anywhere they could find cover. Muzzles winked and flickered. Tongues and snippets of rifle fire licked back and forth. Green tracers webbing across the road drew red tracers in retaliation. There seemed to be a lot of shooting down there, judging from the thickness of dueling tracers. A haze of gun-smoke and black fuel smoke obscured the action.
Swede brought the Snake low and fast over the site, checking it out as we took our place in the racetrack with the other gunships. Flying front seat in a Cobra was like being inside a plastic bubble stuck out in the sky with a wide-open view of the entire world. The road passed below my feet. GIs glanced anxiously up at us. One grunt was dragging a wounded comrade across the road away from the horseshoe toward a ditch on the other side. A few green streaks traced across the sky in the midst of the massing helicopters. I heard nothing of the battle, of course, because of the vibrations and roar of our aircraft and the excited chatter of radios in our ears.
Blue Max was talking to the guys on the ground, asking them where the hottest fire was coming from.
“Where?” he asked. “Where do you want us to shoot?”
“Them, Blue Max!” the convoy commander snapped back. “Shoot them! They’re in the woods!”
I was really pumped up for this. I had my legs stuck straight out and braced and my thumbs on the triggers. I controlled through a robotic arm–looking apparatus inside the cockpit both the 40mm automatic grenade launcher in the aircraft’s nose and the 7.62 minigun below it on a turret that could be rotated up or down, right to left. The minigun looked like a Gatling gun from an old western movie. It had six spinning barrels and two electric motors to pull ammo into the gun. It fired six thousand rounds a minute, making a low wailing sound as it did. The pilot had sole control of the 3.5 rockets. When he fired a rocket, it overrode the other weapons systems.
Swede edged our Snake into the racetrack pattern with the others, all one behind the other at intervals. Like sharks closing in on a kill. The lead chopper dived and made its run with the long axis of the convoy to reduce the chance of erratic fire. It was fast and nimble, cutting through the air at around two hundred mph. Rockets emitting smoke contrails stabbed toward the trees with their tails blazing. Tracer tracks from the minigun resembled a red laser beam that arced delicately as it chewed through the treeline like a tornado, blasting timber and vegetation. Pure destruction gnawing pathways through the jungle.
When it came our turn, Swede poised the Cobra an instant at its highest apex of the racetrack, as though gathering himself for the attack. Then he dropped it out of the sky to build speed for sweeping past the enemy position.
“Hold on, Mini-Man.”
Earth rushed up at me with dizzying swiftness. I glimpsed a black-clad figure below darting, then disappearing. The rats were in there. I lay on the minigun trigger. A minigun for Mini-Man. I heard the low groan and purring sound of the Gatling-like barrels turning. That was the only sound of firing inside the cockpit.
I ate at the forest with my red laser beam. My God, that gun was awesome!
Swede released a brace of rockets. His interrupter switch cut off my guns when he fired to keep me from nailing our own rockets in the air. Rockets streaked in twin flames into the thick foliage. They exploded with white resounding puffs, silent to us, and brought down trees.
My gun cut back in, startling me. My thumb was still pressed on the button and both hands gripped the aiming and firing mechanism. I let off as the helicopter’s nose began to rise.
“Say hello to Ho Chi Minh for me,” Swede cracked as we sailed by, ascending out of the action on the other side and crossing above the road and the burning truck. Smoke left an oily film on the windshield.
“Ho Chi Minh is dead,” I shouted back through the intercom.
“When did that happen?”
“A coupla months ago.”
“Damn. I wanted to shoot him myself.”
Adrenaline surged through my body. Aerial combat was a hell of a high. I was so excited I almost forgot to be scared for a change.
Swede brought the Snake back up onto the apex, all the birds flying around and around in a tilted elliptical circle, like a twisted merry-go-round. Smoking the dinks. I looked back and down in time to watch the next chopper in line make its run. Trees toppled and the forest filled with smoke, like a textile comb clotted with wool. A couple of green tracers searched for it, but didn’t even come close. They sailed high into the sky until they burned out and vanished.
We made a second run. I chunked 40mm grenades in a mini-Arc Light. As we broke out on the other side, I glanced off to my left and spotted a strange Cobra racing to join the fun. It was painted flat black and bore no markings or numbers of any kind. It sailed across our bow so near the X-Ray gave me thumbs up. He and the pilot wore international orange flight suits in contrast to the dull green ones we wore.
“Rooster One,” intoned the new arrival, coming up on the air to Blue Max with his call sign. “You guys need some help?”
“Rooster, this is Max. Whatta ya got?”
“I got pods full of eight-pounders with fleschettes.”
“Fleschettes?” Max sounded cautious. “We got friendlies near.”
“I see that, Max We can put fleschettes into the eye of a needle.”
“If you can do it, welcome to the party, Rooster One.”
The black Cobra swept down and screamed past the target lower than any of the other birds, releasing rockets. As each rocket detonated, it scattered smaller charges which themselves exploded to deliver about ten thousand razor nails into anything within its radius. Big pink clouds hovered in the aftermath.
“Max, let me make three more quick passes,” Rooster One re-quested.
He jumped rotation and made his runs. He climbed out of the fray after expending his munitions.
“See you later, Blue Max,” he said. “I hope we were some help.”
“Who was that masked man?” Swede quipped.
We had heard rumors of unmarked CIA Cobras running clandestine attack missions across the border into Cambodia. The only thing we could figure was that it had to be one of them. It was the only. Cobra of its kind I ever saw in Vietnam.
What with a half-score of shark-grinning Snakes working out on enemy positions, the center of the horseshoe was reduced to smoldering wreckage within a few minutes. How could anyone live through a pounding like that?
“Them goddamn gooks will never learn . . .
Napalm sticks to kids
After exhausting a cool accumulative million dollars or so of ammunition, the original Cobras took off for home while other Cobras took our place and continued thumping Charlie. Nui Ba Den loomed green-crusted on the horizon ahead of us. We navigated to the left of it. Swede gave an exaggerated sigh.
“Another day at the office, Mini-Man,” he said.
I sighed back. “Yeah. We could always be one of them poor bastards with a stuffy nine-to-five job. Ain’t we lucky?”