Authors: Thom Nicholson
Shouting and laughing, we cruised on down the valley, shooting at anything that moved. The aerial hunters got better with every try, and within an hour there were six dead animals slung under the chopper. “Time to head for the barn,” the pilot announced as we tied the last animal to the skid of the aircraft. “We’ve just about burned up a full tank of jet fuel.” His face was hidden behind the silvered sunscreen of his flight helmet, but you could hear the excitement in his voice. The pilots had enjoyed the chase as much as we had.
We dropped the load of meat at the edge of the FOB airstrip and invited the flight crews to that evening’s cookout. In return, we got their promise to return the next day, to “continue the training,” if the weather cooperated and more important missions didn’t get their choppers.
We had a grand barbeque with lots of venison and beer, and more laughing than I’d had in a long time. The Aussies were in rare form, telling outrageous tales, and every one of them crocked to the gills. It was a great party.
I saved one of the racks from a little buck. It now hangs in my office. The chase was hardly sporting, and today when I think about it, I feel a little ashamed at the cavalier way we killed the little animals so cold-bloodedly. Perhaps we were so hardened by the killing of humans that the slaughter of defenseless deer seemed unimportant. At the time, it was just a big lark. Later, I paid a more haunting price for the memory.
Low clouds and gusty winds kept us and our Aussie friends grounded the next day. We had satisfied our hunting lust, and each Aussie owned a souvenir rack of antlers. I suggested that we fly over toward the Laotian border, and “sightsee/recon” the place where Charlie lived.
“Bloody marvelous,” Sergeant Rader crowed. “Maybe I’ll get me that shot at a dink after all.” He proceeded to check his borrowed M-16. The Aussie NCO was positively bloodthirsty.
The next morning as we climbed on the waiting choppers, I quickly briefed the pilots where to fly, then we lifted off, the wind knocking the straining chopper about, and finally headed due west toward the dark mountains of Laos, visible through the wispy cloud cover. Everyone clutched his weapon a little tighter as we swooped over the tree-covered landscape not far from the border. The Aussies were all hanging out of the doors, scanning furiously for any sign of the bad guys, while I was talking with the pilot and watching him fly the aircraft. Like the previous day, I flew with Barney, and with Flight Sergeant Rader, who was the biggest cutup of the crew, even more so than McQuade. Sergeant Saal also came along, hoping to add some spice to what was mostly a staff job, although awfully close to where Charlie owned the territory.
We made a couple of passes along the border area and turned back into Vietnam, meandering toward the FOB, when I saw the copilot’s head snap up, and he poked the pilot’s arm. They both talked on the radio for a couple of seconds and then banked the chopper hard toward the north. A quick turn in a helicopter is enough to bring your breakfast up fast and leave you quite breathless.
“What is it?” I asked over the intercom as we headed toward a line of dark green mountains to our front.
“A Marine recon team has run into some trouble, and we’re the closest aircraft to the scene. They need an extraction ASAP.”
He turned back to his flying and talking on the radio, while
I sat back, fastened my seat belt, and starting checking my weapon.
“What’s up, mate?” Barney asked, seeing the seriousness of the expression on my face. He and Rader looked around, their faces suddenly reflecting extreme discomfort.
“Trouble ahead.” I quickly briefed them as to what I knew. “Fun and games are over, Barney. You two do exactly as you’re told, and nothing else, got it? If we get shot down, stay close to me.” You should have seen the look on their faces at that statement: they were green, fast turning white.
We waited as the chopper roared on, the tension so thick you could cut it with a knife. Suddenly, the chopper swerved in a steep bank and dropped, leaving me looking straight down at the ground several hundred feet below. I looked out the door. Off to the left, yellow smoke was swirling away as the downdraft from the chopper blades hit it. A couple of dirty Marine grunts, carrying a body between them, ran toward our settling chopper. Our skids had not touched the ground before the men were pushing the limp form on board and jumping in themselves.
With a roar of full power, the pilot forced the Huey back into the air, and as he did, I saw the other three Marine recon troopers clamoring onto our companion helicopter. As we banked hard, clawing our way into the air, the door gunner opened up with his machine gun at numerous dark shapes bursting out of the tree line and converging on our landing site. Where the bullets hit, they kicked high splashes of water and mud into the air, just like on television.
I saw the orange and gold twinkle of rifle muzzles as the NVA shot at us. “Open fire,” I screamed at the two Aussies, and I did the same. The noise of our firing precluded any talking. We all shot as fast as we could load and squeeze the triggers. Of course, we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of hitting anything, but maybe it kept the enemy from aiming as carefully at us.
A crack whistled past my ear, and helicopter insulation
fluttered down. One of the VC bullets had hit the side of the chopper. I glanced at Barney and Rader. They were wide-eyed and pale. The levity of earlier that morning was dying as fast as the Marine lying at their feet.
We pulled higher into the cloudy sky, and the door gunner ceased his continuous firing. The two dirty, sweat-streaked recon grunts lay aside their rifles and turned to their injured companion. He’d been shot in the chest, and foamy red blood was everywhere, from his mouth to his waist. His face was white in fear or shock, and it was pinched tight with pain. With practiced haste the one Marine tore open a field bandage and pressed it over the bubbling hole in the wounded Marine’s chest. The man’s labored breathing slowed, and I think he passed out. Luckily for him, he might live, since we had gotten there so quickly. If his friends had had to drag him around longer, he would have bled to death.
“Hold this,” the Marine commanded of Rader, who was the closest man to him. He pushed the terrified Australian’s hand down against the bloody field dressing. The Marine put another bandage on the hole in the wounded man’s back, and settled down to ride out the trip home. It was old stuff to the Marine, who might have been twenty, going on fifty. I smiled at him and lit a cigarette, which I put in his mouth. He nodded his thanks and relaxed a little. He was safe, comparatively speaking.
Rader’s face got paler as he did what he’d been commanded to do. Blood had oozed over his fingers, and I could see he desperately wanted to wipe them clean. The bloody froth finally slowed, and the wounded man lay still, held securely in his buddy’s arms. Barney’s countenance had a decidedly green cast as we hurried through the warm air toward the LZ at Vandegrift.
We unloaded the wounded man at the waiting ambulance. Then we bid our brave chopper crews farewell and trudged over to the truck sent for us by the FOB crew. It was a
subdued bunch of Aussies who rode back up the hill with me to the FOB.
The next morning, it had dried enough that we were able to dig their wheels from the sticky mud and ready their plane for departure.
A quieter Australian clumped over to me, shaking drying mud off his combat boots. “Cheerio, mate.” Barney shook my hand. “I think we’re bloody content to just hop in the old crate here and scoot on back to Da Nang. We’ll leave the ground work to you chaps.”
Suddenly flashing his patented cheery smile, he climbed into the waiting plane, and they gunned the engines into the takeoff fury required to break free of the muddy earth. As they gained altitude, they turned and roared overhead, the wings of their plane wigwagging a last good-bye.
The radio crackled. “FOB, this is Wallaby. Airborne and homeward bound. Cheerio and good luck. Wallaby out.”
We watched the Aussie plane fade into the distance. Our feelings of comradeship and affection had increased with the time we had spent together. It’s a shame all people couldn’t share the same sort of feelings we did just then. If they could, we’d have been home instead of where we were. “Roger, Wallaby. Have a safe flight. FOB One, out.” I walked out of the commo bunker and glanced up at the heavens. I could still faintly hear the roar of the Aussie plane as it climbed toward the blue sky, somewhere above the cloud cover. It looked like rain.
Every four weeks, on a rotating basis, one of the two combat companies in CCN was the alert company for two weeks. The alert company had to be ready to launch within fifteen minutes to provide support for any ongoing operation. The one we most wanted to support was what we sometimes called an Angel Flight, the search and rescue of a pilot downed behind enemy lines. I think Bright Light was the official name for an SAR operation.
The chance to go in on an Angel Flight didn’t occur very often. The entire time I had the raider company, we went only once, but it was one wild afternoon.
It was sunny for a change, and since the rainy weather had grounded the air force a lot over the previous several weeks, the boys in blue had put just about everything that could fly into the air.
It was midafternoon when the alert came in. An F-4 fighter with two men on board had crashed just over the border in Laos, about sixty miles southwest of Da Nang.
The S-3 sent for me. “Nick, I want you to take a reinforced platoon out to cover an Angel Flight extraction. The choppers are on the way. You’ve got ten minutes to get ready for liftoff.” Major Skelton pointed to the spot on the map where we were headed. “You’re gonna be close to the entrance to Base Area 910, so there’s a good chance Charlie has a lot of triple-A (antiaircraft artillery) in the vicinity. There may or may not be ground troops to bother you, but be on your toes. A rescue
beacon has been activated, so somebody must be alive. There’s a Covey headed to the spot, so you’ll have air support if you need it.”
I hustled off to get my reaction force armed and ready for the pickup. “Hell,” I eagerly announced to Lt. Ray Lawrence, my gangly, redheaded platoon leader, “I’m coming with you. Who knows if we’ll ever get another one of these?” Judging from his less-than-enthusiastic reply, I don’t think he was thrilled with the idea. But, I loaded my pack with ammo and rations and hustled out to the helipad just as the five green Huey choppers from the 101st were making a landing approach.
Pham and a couple of other Yards were with me as bodyguards, and Sergeant White, the supply sergeant, came along as a supernumerary. He’d been begging me for a long time for a chance to go into the bush; now he would get his wish. He was as excited as I was.
Huffing and puffing, the NCO was wearing even more gear than I was. Between the two of us, we could have fought off a VC battalion. He grinned as I waited for him to get loaded up. “Thanks for rememberin’ me,
Dai Uy
. This is gonna be fun.”
We scrambled on the first helicopter and lifted, and once again I had that sickening feeling that the shuddering contraption was never meant to fly. To this day, I tip my green beret in amazement at the bravery of pilots who fly helicopters; nobody in his right mind would want to fly such an ungainly beast for a living. Our pilots were aviators from the 101st, the best in the business, so I was in good hands.
We
whopped
across the green and brown Vietnamese landscape and entered the high mountains of the border region. The pilot informed me that we would fly clear around the crash site and come in from the west: “Less ack-ack on that side.”
“The CAP (combat air patrol) drawing ground fire?” I asked. I instinctively squeezed my buttocks a little tighter together as I awaited the answer.
“Bad, man,” the busy pilot replied. He had his silvered faceplate down, which was how I remember all the aviators I saw in country. There must have been some regulation about their always looking cool and collected. Maybe to give us terrified passengers confidence.
“The CAP says there’s fire from all over the valley.” The CAP were the cover planes assigned by the air controllers that I had flown with when I went to Thailand. Their job was to suppress the ground fire enough so that we could land and effect the rescue. It was a tough assignment, since they had to stay close to us and low to the ground. Every NVA in the area would be shooting at them.
“What size?” I asked, praying that he’d say BB guns and slingshots.
“Everything, right up to 40mm and even more,” was the less than heartening reply. I was squeezed so tightly by then that the others in the chopper with me, who couldn’t hear what had been said, could see my tension. Theirs reflected mine, without a word being passed between us. With a tension that squeezed the breath out of our lungs, we waited in silence for the end of the ride.
The young warrant officer pilot in command swung his ship in a tight spiral, and the ground rushed up to meet us. He’d spotted a small clearing and was putting us in it. He spoke to me over the headphones. “The crash site is about half a klick due north of the LZ, Captain. I’ll get into orbit and hold until my fuel starts to go. When I call, you’ve gotta come, no matter what, ’cause I can’t wait.”
“Roger, I understand. We’ll cut an LZ at the crash site if we can.”
As the skids of the shuddering Huey touched the ground, I jumped off the chopper and waddled over to the edge of the trees. Already, I was sorry that I’d brought so much stuff. I assumed that we would land right on top of the site, not half a klick away through heavy jungle.
I watched while the rest of my troops unloaded and the
noisy helicopter lifted off. It would find some safe spot and circle while we raced to get to the crash site before the chopper had to come back and pick us up again.
I whispered to Lieutenant Lawrence, even though any VC within miles knew where we were, “Ray, head due north about five hundred meters.”