365 Days (19 page)

An M-60 opened up on their right. It was soon joined by the sharp whipping sound of 50’s.

“36/6...33 Sierra is near Quin Yon. Dust Off notified.”

Ten minutes later the Dust Offs were over them. The firing picked up. Reddish tracers were skipping out from every quadrant of the perimeter.

“They’re gonna rush us,” the RTO said. “Sooner or later, they’re gonna really hit us.”

The radio interrupted. “36/ Dust Off 3. Request smoke.”

The Sergeant motioned to the RTO, who wiped the sweat from his hands and picked a smoke grenade out of his webbing.

“Dust Off 3/36 roger that,” he said, shifting his position a bit to let the radioman slip by. An RPG whistled across the NPD, exploding with a blinding flash near the flame track.

“36/6 Dust Off 3, is the LZ secure?” The Sergeant waited while the RTO, head down, zigzagged toward the darkening perimeter.

“Dust Off 3, negative. Repeat, negative.”

“36, can you give effective suppressive fire?”

Another RPG hit in front of the hedgegrove just as the RTO was throwing the smoke. Blown back, he lay there twisting on the ground, while the thick green smoke curled back over him.

“Negative. Dust Off 3. Repeat, negative.”

There was a long, crackling pause. Over it, they could hear the choppers.

“36, Dust Off 3. Got green smoke.”

“Dust Off 3, confirmed—green smoke,” the Sergeant said, turning to face the choppers.

They were coming in low and quick—two of them, switching from side to side to shake off the gooks’ aim. The first Dust Off came in right over the trees and went straight into the ground at over eighty knots. The second suddenly cut out, drifted out over the perimeter, and then, with its engines howling, quickly cut back toward the landing zone. Above the ground fighting, they could hear sledge-hammer blows as the 51’s slammed through its thin, aluminum skin. The Huey sputtered a moment over them and then skidded heavily into the LZ, cracking its landing gear. It sat tilted on its broken skid while the pilot, his adolescent face drawn tight and thin, leaned out the window and motioned for them to hurry. He kept his rotors turning while the medics, moving swiftly through the great clouds of swirling, choking dust, carried on the wounded and dying. When it was loaded, he got it light on its broken skid, lifted it a few feet off the ground, then quickly spun it around. Giving it full power, he got it moving along the ground. At about fifteen feet it started taking fire—a dark shape moving out across an even darker sky. The troopers on the ground could see the bright greenish-blue tracers bracket it, then lose themselves as if the chopper were some kind of color dampener. It kept moving along at the same height until finally—out of sight—its engines sputtered and the craft, rising suddenly out of the jungle, drifted off to the left and was gone.

A second later, the darkness behind the NVA positions was broken by a brilliant flash of yellow-green light. Fifteen minutes later the gunship arrived from Qui Nhou. Over the rockets and mortars and the intermittent rattling of automatic fire, they could hear the dull thudding of its turbine engine churning toward them through the evening sky. The NVA heard it too and stopped firing. Listening, they raised the sights on their weapons and waited.

It had taken over a hundred and fifty years, a century and a half of trial and error, sometimes without theory, always on faith, to go straight up. It took more than just providing a curved surface and a power source to move that surface through the air, to develop a helicopter. It took a whole evolution—a desperate and at times deadly struggle between man with his dreams, and physics with its laws.

For over a hundred years, since the middle 1880’s, foolishly shaped machines had kept trying to fly by going straight up. In almost every country, from Holland to Italy, wood-framed monstrosities were built, tested, crashed, and rebuilt again. A few did manage to get into the air, some even stumbling forward a few yards, but none really flew. Not only were the early helicopters under-powered, but once off the ground, they tended to spin embarrassingly about their centers, and if flown forward too quickly would simply flip over. The maneuverability was atrocious, and directional control was almost impossible, but the helicopterists continued. Without knowing what was wrong men tinkered with their mistakes until they found the answers, persisting despite the laughter and the danger until one by one each problem was solved by solutions so definitive and so structurally necessary that even today every chopper that rises in Nam carries in its modern configuration the whole history of its race.

The early spinning was found to be the result of torque—the tendency of the engine to twirl the chopper one way while it rotated the blades the other. This was solved in the early 1920’s by extending the tail of the craft and mounting, not an engine, but a small rotor on the end of the extension—that little propeller you see spinning at the back of every chopper today. The propeller works off a drive shaft coming off the main rotor engine. When the engine speeds up to give the main rotor more rpm’s, the anti-torque propeller speeds up as well, literally pushing the tail back in place, offsetting the torque the engine is developing to spin the craft. But the forces are still there, and when they are let loose today they are as disastrous now as they were funny back in the 1920’s. It doesn’t take much: if the shaft from the main engine goes or the blades themselves are hit, if the tail is damaged or the tiny rotor is shot away, the physics of the whole affair takes over and the chopper begins to swing to the left. The fuselage begins to turn on itself. The gathering centrifugal forces push the pilot and co-pilot against their armor-plated seats, the crew chief and door gunner against their aluminum-sheeted walls. All control is lost, and like some crazy spinning top, the chopper, gathering momentum, begins whipping around itself, whopping through the air, spinning faster and faster—all the way down. It is a new way of dying—unique and very modern.

The flipping over, even at minimal forward speeds, was finally solved, without anyone knowing why, by the fortuitous assembling of flexible blades for the main rotors. It was only much later that the reason for these blades’ success was discovered. The problem was asymmetry of lift. The ability of the rotating blades to overturn the craft was found to be due to the unequal lifting power of the advancing and retreating of blades—the advancing blade picking up speed and therefore lift with the forward movement of the helicopter, and the retreating blade losing speed and relative lift as it swung back around the hub away from the forward direction of the craft.

At forward speeds of as little as twenty miles an hour, this dissymmetry between the advancing and retreating blades provided an unequal force great enough to overturn the early choppers. The flexible blades—flapping up and down under the increasing and decreasing lift—allowed the rotor system and the blades themselves to handle the unequal forces without transmitting them to the aircraft frame itself. Later, with more powerful engines and the need for stronger nonflexible blades, the new blades were flexibly hinged to the rotor hubs, giving the drooping effect so familiar today.

But the solution was at a price—an articulating rotor hub is an incredibly complex piece of machinery. The intricate hinges and flaps that allow the eight-foot, 1000-pound blades to rise and fall while they’re spinning at 1800 revolutions per minute are difficult to maintain and service. Linkages can rapidly weaken, rotors can freeze; the numerous hinges and flaps necessary to allow the blades to twist and turn continually fatigue and wear out. At best, under the most ideal conditions of support and supervision, things go wrong. In Nam, where chances must be taken and where there really are not enough choppers to go around, the helicopters are overflown and under-maintained. At eighty knots and a thousand feet it is the same as dying.

By the late 1930’s the helicopter, at least in its present configuration, was basically finished. It took a few more years for the problems of directional control, maneuverability, center of lift, and ground resonance to be solved. Linkages that worked directly through the rotor hubs were added. The cyclic and pitch control were improved. Gears were perfected, and engine power was increased. By the time the chopper was ready, though, the world had become beguiled by the grace and speed of the Spitfires and numbed by the destructive power of the Stuka and Liberator. The choppers of the early 1940’s were still a bit too clumsy for all that flash. They vibrated, and fully loaded, they had a poor center-of-gravity travel. There were still understandable concerns about rotor bearings, blade strength, and frequency of repair.

You’d think that the military would have pushed for an aircraft that could land anywhere, hover for hours about an area, and supply close-in continual aerial support. But the fighters and bombers were rolling out of the factories, and the military could afford to be skeptical. Even today, thirty years later, it is still the few Migs shot down, the Phantoms, and the carrier-based Skyhawks that hold the glamor.

“I guess I could have said no, but you sort of don’t think about it; I mean, you don’t say it, anyway. I guess you could call it a frame of mind. You know, there are guys out there that need you. I mean, you see how they live—sweeps during the day, ambushes at night, the shitty water, and the heat—dirty and wet all the time. It’s not just for a while, it’s for months. Some of them are out there for a whole year. I mean, they’re just like you, same age, same feelings, only they’re stuck there on the ground, and at least we can get clean sheets at night and a beer. Nobody talks about it, but you can see it on their faces every time you come into an LZ. They know you’ll be there; the Dust Offs have to go in whether the landing zone is secure or not. They try at least once. Hell, I knew a Dust-Off pilot who went into a landing zone that was being overrun. The rest of us, the guns, and the guys that fly slicks—if it’s hot we can just as well hang it up—but that don’t make it any easier for the guys on the ground. They’re still there. It’s hard to forget.

“Like I said, I could have refused the mission, but the 25th had been fighting all day, they’d burned out all their 50’s, and had gone into a night lager while the gooks were still pushing ’em. Two Dust Offs had been lit up just a few minutes before, but they needed the barrels. The gooks were really getting their asses up to hit ’em during the night or early in the morning. There should have been a Chinook around, but it was getting dark fast, and it was too far away to sortie. I was the only one close enough to get to Quin Yon and back before the place really got shocked in. So I said yeah. I knew the LZ would have to be hot.

“Anyways, I had that gunship so fucken loaded with water cans, boxes of 50-cal ammunition, barrels, and medical supplies I couldn’t even get it off the runway at Quin Yon. I was bringing them everything I thought they could use, see. Hell, the damn chopper was so heavy I had to bounce it down the runway to get enough air speed to lift off. I swear to God I had the skids smoking before I got it up.

“By the time I was over the LZ, it was pretty dark. I asked them to mark it, but I couldn’t see the smoke. They used a strobe, but I couldn’t tell how big the zone was. Their sergeant taking me in told me about some trees. I asked for strobes around the zone, but they didn’t have enough. I had to turn on my landing lights for a second, then come around again. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the lights, but I had to. I mean, it just gave the gooks a better chance to line up on me. That second time I could hear the 51’s over my own engine, but I was too busy trying to get us down. I just told the door gunner to open up, and I kept her going in. I got to the bottom of my approach when I started losing engine and rotor rpm—I was just too damn overloaded—Christ, the g’s on the hub must have been tremendous. I pulled back on the pitch to get some more pressure on the blades and I just made it. Man, did I come in steep. Just cleared the trees, and bamb!—right in. It was like a controlled crash landing. I bounced the portside skid off the top of the track. I took the wounded out with me and I swear to God I clipped the same damn trees going out. I went around three times like that, Quin Yon and back. The third time they got us, killed my door gunner and co-pilot. But dammit, they sure as hell had enough practice.”

“It’s not your country. How long will you

be willing to stay there?”

Japanese nurse

Pediatrics Clinic

U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan

“I
’M TELLING YOU,” JUSTICE
said, waiting impatiently while Kelly, in the next bed, struggled to get the straw into his mouth. “I’m going back to the 4th Division and I don’t know any more now than when I got here. This time they’ll fucken kill me.”

Kelly sucked noisily on the straw. Unable to turn his head, he was forced to look at Justice out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m not kidding, man; we couldn’t keep a point. The first time we went out we got lost. Circled the base camp for three hours. Hell, even when we do move it’s like a herd of fucken elephants. Everybody smoking grass, things jingling all over making noise. I know guys been high since they got to Nam. They’re paranoid as hell.”

“I know, I know,” Justice went on defensively. “I’m as bad as everyone else. We ain’t the 1st Air Cav, I’ll be the first to admit, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Talking to Kelly, he didn’t see the nurse until she was there standing between the beds.

“Sorry,” she said pleasantly. “Mind if I borrow your friend for a minute?”

Kelly pulled the straw out from between his teeth.

“Mind helping?” she asked Justice.

“No, not at all,” he said, swinging his feet over the edge of his bed.

The nurse took Kelly’s glass of juice. “This isn’t going to hurt,” she said, putting the glass down on the night stand. Brushing the hair out of her eyes, she bent over the bed and began unrolling the length of gauze from around the soldier’s chest.

“Here.” She handed the gauze to Justice. Despite her sweat-soaked fatigues, there was a faint odor of perfume about her.