Firefights, I was always surprised to discover, were silent if you flew a helicopter. What you had instead were vibrations and deafening noise. You only heard the bullets when they struck the bird—a tick! sound—and you never heard them if they hit you inside the bird. I tried not to think about all that. The night snapped and cracked with rifle and machine gun fire. Green tracers streaked silently past as I tapped the Huey’s skids on the black forest’s leafy roof. Clouds of leaves and small branches blown about by rotor downwash rattled against the ship’s belly.
Radios were going ape shit. Three separate channels and they were all going ape shit.
“You got to get us outa here, Mini-Man! Fuckin’ gooks are all over us!”
Nothing like getting shot at to make you sound like someone was yanking up on your shorts. You got shot at, you got excited. Those were the game rules.
I triggered the radio switch on the cyclic stick between my legs. Trying to sound calm, to get through to our five guys down there in the trees. It required cooperation and concentration—and luck—from everybody if we hoped to jerk their asses out of there before the bad guys overran them.
“Four-One?” I snapped into my helmet mike. “Awright, listen up. I gotta find out exactly where you are down there, understand? I’m down on top of the trees. Gimme a long count and I’ll home in on you. Roger that?”
“Roger, Mini-Man. You’re gonna have to hurry, man!”
“How far away are they, Four-One?”
“I smell fish on their breath. I smell their armpits
“Okay, start the long count. . .”
Immediately: “One . . .two . . .three . . . four. . .”
Chief Warrant Stockton, my copilot in the right seat, kept an eye on the RDF gauge. When the two bars met, it meant the radio transmission was directly below. He looked stiff and tense in the faint red glow from the instrument panel. He looked like a giant insect, with his helmet and face bubble reflecting back the instruments like burning eyes. His hands rested lightly on his controls, in case one of us got it and the other had to take over.
“Seven . . . eight. . . nine
A helicopter was not like a truck. It was never designed for close-in maneuvers, but we did whatever we had to do to get our guys out. They would have done the same for us.
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. I floated the Huey slowly forward, concentrating. Feet on pedals, left hand squeezing the collective and throttle, right on the cyclic. Steady . . . steady . . . One fuckup and the chopper became a jungle weed eater.
Inside on the cargo deck, 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. Monkey lines led off their bodies like umbilical cords and secured them to the chopper’s womb.
Tracers dueled below us in the trees. Green for the North Vietnamese, red for the Americans. Darting back and forth, crisscrossing and leaping about in the night like a bunch of psychedelic supersonic fireflies gone bugfuck. Swarms of the green erupted from off the forward right flank, overwhelming the responding red.
Sweat rolled from underneath my helmet and streamed down my face. I sweated all the way to my crotch. I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or if I had pissed my pants. My bone joints felt fused together. Whereas most pilots flew with their heels braced against the floor, I was too short. I had to fly with my legs stuck straight out. Same for my arms, which were likewise too short. It had always been a handicap not to be able to steady my elbows on my thighs. Other pilots ribbed me about looking like a little kid trying to reach the pedals to drive his dad’s Chevy. Lieutenant Ron Alexander, call sign Mini-Man. Shortest helicopter pilot in Vietnam and the U.S. Army. A quarter-inch shorter than regs allowed. And getting too short in Vietnam for this shit.
The two bars on the RDF met. I hovered.
“Four-One?” I said into my keyed mike. “I’m directly above. Can you see me?”
“Negative. I can hear you, but I can’t see you. They’re getting closer, Mini-Man.”
Rifle fire snapped and chattered through his mike.
“Stand by,” I directed, then switched to VHF to talk to the Cobra gunships.
“Apache Red, can you see me?” I asked the Cobra leader.
“Affirmative, Mini-Man.”
“Look to my right. Almost all the tracers are coming from one side. You should be able to see the flashes. Can you keep their heads down while I get these guys out?”
“Roger Roger. We’re coming hot, Mini-Man.”
The two Snakes rolled into racetrack mode, one behind the other. Their miniguns sparkled and laid streams of red eating into the trees as they immediately dived to the attack. They bounced in, bounced out. Their running lights blinked and smeared across the stars as they rose swiftly on their track and came back for a second pass.
At the same time, the bad guys started homing in on me. They probably couldn’t see me through the foliage, but that didn’t keep them from reconning by fire. Tracer bullets were much brighter at night. Especially when they came close. Greenish-white balls of fire, each appearing about the size of a basketball, rushed up out of the darkness of the forest and past the helicopter like a string of UFOs in a hurry. Quiet, relentless, almost pretty. First a short string of them, then a larger burst leapt up from the dark. They glowed bigger and looked closer than during the day. Just being in the same sky with them was enough to make you nervous.
I instructed my crew chief, O’Brien, to drop the McGuire rigs, lines 110 feet long with harnesses on the ends to which men strapped themselves preparatory to being yanked up through the jungle canopy and spirited away across the sky.
“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.”
“Mini-Man, that’ll pinpoint our location!”
“You have to give me some light if you want me to get your butts out of there. I have to be able to see my rotor tip path plane.”
Radio traffic went into momentary seizure as the impact of what I proposed struck home. A prayerful, “Jesus, Mini-Man!” over the air broke the hush.
If I intended to risk flying a helicopter into jungle, where choppers were never meant to fly, the least the LRRPs could do was light the way. Below, a flare suddenly went off like an exploding miniature sun, illuminating in black silhouette a latticework of tree branches all being whipped violently about, clawing and rattling at the Huey’s metal underside.
“Be ready!” I said. “I’m coming down!”