Former Blue lift pilot Meeker, whom I had sent to Loaches in exchange for Bird Dog when Bird Dog started getting shaky at the end of his tour, got shot out of the sky up near the Cambodian border. It was his second time being gunned down. Neither he nor his crew were injured. The extraction was more or less routine. We were all used to the procedure by this time.
Lieutenant Douglas flew my right seat. He had yet to come under fire. Consequently, none of this was more or less routine to him. We dropped off Meeker and his bunch at Tay Ninh, where we picked up three more lift ships and our platoon of Blue infantry to provide security while maintenance hooked up to the crashed Loach and pulled it out. Charlie prowled the area and I wanted to make sure we had sufficient firepower to keep him back. The maintenance Huey hovering over the Loach during the extraction provided a juicy target.
Meeker had gone down at one end of a large clearing. Maintenance guys hooked up to the Loach, slung it underneath, and tugged it swinging into the sky. Just then, at the other end of the clearing, boonirats on security encountered a concentration of NVA forces on its way to the scene. By the sustained crackling of the firelight, it was obvious the force was of some size.
Of course, we couldn’t hear the shooting from altitude, but we saw the stabbing blinking of muzzle flashes, smoke and tracers. Our guys, overwhelmed by the odds, retreated across the open field, running like a football team after the kickoff. They dug in their heels in the opposite treeline, whereupon the fight resumed with the gooks in one treeline and our guys in the other, exchanging fire across the clearing. There was so much spiderwebbing of green and red across the meadow that a dragonfly would have avoided it. Our Blues wanted out of there in the worst possible way.
Douglas looked as though he could pull his helmet down to about his knees and crawl into it. I remembered my own first missions. It was obvious he feared we might try to land in all that garbage. He needn’t have worried. Even in my reckless early days I wouldn’t have attempted to place a chopper directly in a crossfire.
“Mini-Man, is there any place you can pick us up?” the ground platoon leader asked. His name was Lieutenant Sorenson, also an FNG with that strident FNG first-time-under-fire voice.
“Four-Six?” I replied, looking over the terrain from two thousand feet above. “There’s a small clearing less than two hundred meters directly behind you. If you can get your men through the trees to it, I think we can pick you up there.”
“Roger that, Mini-Man.”
Lieutenant Douglas’s posture relaxed slightly. He looked relieved.
Several Cobras from our neighbor, Blue Max of the 2/20th, were in the air. We coordinated our resources and quickly planned tactics. I asked Blue Max if they could keep the bad guys pinned down and out of the large clearing long enough for our Blues to scurry back to the second clearing and be picked up.
“It’s Christmastime for Charlie, Mini-Man,” Blue Max leader said. “We got lots of presents for the little suckers.”
With that, the Cobras formed a racetrack and rolled in on the enemy positions one behind the other. I pitied the poor dinks when all that shit started falling on them. Talk about unfair logging practices when an entire strip of forest could be eradicated within minutes and turned to smoke and fire and kindling. One of the pilots sang while he worked.
“Here comes Santa Claus,
Here comes Santa Claus,
Right down Santa Claus Lane. . . .”
“Jesus God, what’s wrong with him?” Lieutenant Douglas cried over the intercom. “That lunatic is singing.”
“What kind of men are these . . . ?”
I didn’t have time to explain it to him. He would understand soon enough.
I went down to fly over the second clearing for a quick look-see. It looked bigger from the air than actual size. Not only that, it was a daisy cutter opening. The Air Force sometimes dropped “daisy cutters,” which were bombs on a stick, in order to clear forest. The sticks stuck in the ground and the bombs exploded about three feet above the surface, blasting down the surrounding forest but leaving snags and stumps. Hueys couldn’t land here because of them. We would have to McGuire the platoon out.
Murphy’s Law. Anything that could go wrong, would.
Boonirats were already bursting into the opening. When you were as spooked as they were, there was no such thing as being delayed by wait-a-minute vines. These guys were coming through the jungle like little bulldozers.
Palma, my crew chief, was already getting the McGuires ready. There was enough room over the clear-cut for two choppers to hover at the same time. I circled high and picked up my wing mate, Rouse. Mosby and Bijorian hovered at altitude, waiting to come in on second shift. Each of us, because of the ample size of the clearing, could hoist out four or five troopers. They traveled much lighter than LRRPs.
Rouse and I flew in low and side-by-side above the jungle. There was one brief span of time when we offered ourselves as targets to Charlie in the distant trees. Green tracers streaked past and between us, arcing as though lobbed. Once we reached the clearing, we dropped below the line of fire while we McGuire’d troops out of the field.
We were again vulnerable when we lifted out with boonirats strung on lines below us like fish. We had to come out slowly, affording even more tempting targets. The only thing that saved us was the long range. Even though Cobras were pounding the enemy, Charlie still spun tracer webs in the air. I understood how flies in an old haunted house must feel. Lieutenant Douglas looked like a fly about to be captured.
If we were scared, imagine the boonirats hanging exposed in the middle of the air with all that lead and steel flying. Several had to be pried from the ropes when we landed at the nearest FSB to bring them aboard. They were white-faced and speechless. One guy fell to his knees and threw up.
Douglas’s hands trembled. So did mine, but I had become adept at concealing my fears. Even now, when I was a short-timer and my fears were magnified.
I threw Douglas’s words back at him: “What kind of men are these? They are guys who’ll go anywhere they have to in order to get you out. They’re Headhunters. Look around you, Lieutenant. Soon, this will be all yours.”