It was the strangest damn thing, everybody said so. George Gerard in his Loach spotted them. He was sniffing around on top of triple canopy as low bird for a Purple Team that included Hal Bijorian and me in the lift and Mad Dog in the Cobra.
He suddenly interrupted a long exchange of mostly bullshitting on the radios. We had been out an hour so far without seeing anything.
“Apache Red Two-Two?” he said to Mad Dog, his voice suddenly gone tense. “There’s something shiny down in the trees. We can’t tell what it is, but it’s big.”
“Want me to make a run on it, George?” Mad Dog asked.
“Nobody’s shooting at me. It’s just there. It’s not moving.”
The sighting warranted enough interest at TOC that our CO, Major Powdrill, decided to put the Blue Platoon on the ground to check it out. It was a three-bird insertion onto a clearing less than two hundred meters away. I took my Hueys to the nearest FSB to await developments.
The platoon worked its way to the location without encountering resistance. Soon, it came upon a Cobra that had crashed through the jungle canopy and come to rest inside the moist womb of the forest. Finding a crash site in III Corps wasn’t that big a deal normally. There were dozens of helicopter wrecks scattered about. What made this one different was that it was not plotted on any of our charts. It was a bird from Bravo Troop that had been MIA, missing in action, for about a month, along with its pilot and X-Ray.
Jungle vines and lianas grew and crawled all over it. Another month and it would have been completely overgrown and probably never found. Other than the blade having been sheared off, the Cobra appeared virtually intact. There were no bullet holes in it. GIs climbed up on the stubby stabilizers and looked inside the cockpit. What they saw startled them.
A Cobra cockpit was air-conditioned and airtight. That seal had not been broken in the crash. Insects and animals had therefore not gotten to the corpses. They looked to be dried out by the heat and remarkably preserved, almost like mummies. They sat in their seats, still wearing helmets, hands on the controls and open eyes staring straight ahead. Some of the grunts said it was the eeriest thing they had ever beheld.
I carried out the body bags. They had no odor or anything. The mystery continued to grow and was a topic of conversation and speculation at the O Club for many weeks. Nobody could figure out how the jocks died or what caused the crash. The aircraft seemed to have simply mushed in. It was solid and not broken, not blown up or shot up or anything. At least one of the pilots should have survived; the impact didn’t appear to have been that violent.
Swede speculated that they had made a gun run, failed to pull out in time and flew the Snake right into the jungle. But what killed the pilots? They weren’t shot, cut, smashed, or broken.
“It was a heart attack,” Whoppa guessed.
“Both of them at the same time?” Mosby countered.
“You explain it then.”
Swede got up, went to the fridge and got himself another brew. He came back to the table and popped the top as he sat down.
“There’s only one explanation,” he said in his crisp accent. “It could happen to any of us. Whatever occurred out there, it was enough to scare them to death. They died of fright.”