LRRPs were commonly inserted just before dark to give them time to set up and camouflage in a listening post before the lights went out and cockroaches started scurrying about. They pegged Claymores around their hide in case they needed to set them off to delay bad guys while they pulled an E&E to the nearest PZ. Then they hunkered alongside the trail counting feet and dividing by two.
When they went out, they often went deep and they stayed deep. That made extraction hell when you had to get them out. It seemed when they did run into shit, they ran into it in the middle of the night.
Stockton and I scrambled Three-Seven around midnight when the TOC alarm went off. A single blast—ground troops in contact. Mighty Morris and Rouse flew wing, while Swede and a Red Platoon FNG took up a pair of guns for support and cover. While we were en route, TOC explained that we had a team of five LRRPs in jungle surrounded by a pissed-off company of NVA. As far as the LRRPs knew, there wasn’t a suitable PZ within five hundred meters. We were going to have to jerk them up through the trees with McGuire rigs.
It didn’t take long once we were over station to determine that this was a chopper pilot’s absolute worst nightmare scenario. The jungle was triple canopy, down inside which gunfire and explosions flashed and flickered. NVA soldiers were closing in on our guys. And, sure enough, there wasn’t a PZ within five hundred meters.
I raised the terrified LRRPs on FM and explained what I intended to do—come down on top of the trees and drop lines for them. Flying at such low altitudes, in the dark, with the lives of nine guys—five on the ground, four in my chopper—riding on how much balls I had and how good I was at the controls demanded total concentration. I knew when I choppered down toward the forest and the firefight blazing inside it that I was going to be tested in ways I had only had nightmares about. I hoped I could pull it off.
The backup slick with Mr. Morris at the stick rode high, temporarily out of the action, waiting for me to start the ops. His red-and-green position lights blinked rhythmically against a sky full of stars but without a moon. I radioed him with instructions.
“Apache Three-Two?” I felt the edge in my voice, felt it cracking and rough in my throat. “I’m going to drop three lines and pull three of ’em out.” Three lines were all I had aboard. “I want you right on me, coming in low and slow. I’ll inform you when I’m through. You come in to the same place and drop your lines for the other two. Roger that, Apache Three-Two?”
“Roger that, Mini-Man.”
The other slick shifted in the sky. Its lights floated swiftly down and toward me from the rear. In the darkness, I eased the chopper toward the forest roof above the firefight. Red tracers told me where our troopers were dug in on the defense.
I tried not to think about how the night snapped and cracked with rifle and machine-gun fire and how green tracers streaked silently past as I tapped the Huey’s skids on the black forest’s leafy roof. It required cooperation and concentration—and luck—from everybody if we hoped to yank our guys’ asses out of there before the bad guys overran them. I looked out over the black ledge of the instrument panel or peered intently down through the chin bubble at my feet where foliage swirled dimly violent in the glow of my position lights. Sweat rolled from underneath my helmet and streamed down my face.
My gunner and crew chief, O’Brien and Renko, each took an open doorway and dropped down on his belly to act as observer, helmeted head stuck out into the darkness. I instructed them to drop the McGuire rigs. The two supporting Snakes rolled into racetrack mode, one behind the other, their miniguns sparkling and laying streams of red eating into the trees as they dived to the attack.
“Four-One, the lines are down,” I reported to the ground patrol leader. “Get on.”
“We can’t!” The voice was strident, accusing, desperate, threatening, and terror-stricken. All at the same time. “They’re too short! The ropes are about ten feet above us. You gotta get lower.”
Lower? How? I already had the chopper nesting in leaves and limbs. Frantic thoughts raced through my mind. Options, Plan B.
There was only one way. One chance. Maybe.
“I’m coming down and under the trees,” I radioed. “Throw a trip flare out in front of me so I can see.”