Low Level Hell: A Scout Pilot in the Big Red One

^{CHAPTER 6} FSB GELA

On 1 May, a billet opened up in our troop for an R and R to Bangkok. I hadn’t had any time off since arriving in Vietnam, so I took the opportunity to get a little rest and see the capital city of Thailand.

I had a week’s leave, but ended up taking only four days because I really didn’t like Bangkok. I enjoyed seeing the imperial temples and doing a little shopping in the market area, but I was sick the whole time I was there. My digestive system just couldn’t tolerate the highly seasoned Thai food. So cutting short my leave, I got back to the troop on the fifth and was marked up to fly Scramble 1 the next morning.

The VR teams were sent out to fly regularly scheduled reconnaissance missions. The scramble teams, numbers 1 and 2, usually stayed at Phu Loi until they were needed to support either a particular tactical situation or an enemy contact made during a routine VR mission. It was top priority at the base to get the scramble team in the air the moment the call came. Controllers even stopped all normal traffic on the strip until they got off the scramble team.

As I went about my usual routine on the morning of the sixth, the troop loudspeaker suddenly hissed, telling the troop that an alert announcement was probably coming. I listened carefully.

“Attention. Hunter-killer team on the hot spot. Scramble north.”

I grabbed my chicken plate and survival vest and shot out of the hootch door, sprinting to my parked OH-6. As I ran for the ship, my survival knife, hanging from my vest, bounced around wildly. I always wore my sheath knife on my vest, handle down, so if I were ever shot down, I’d have easy access to the knife to help cut or pry my way out of the cockpit. As it bounced, my handle-down knife apparently jarred out of its scabbard on the vest and fell to the ground. Only it didn’t fall handle down.

Somehow in the drop, it flipped and landed, point down, directly on my right foot. It pierced my boot and entered the flesh, right behind my toes. I flew the scramble mission anyway, with blood oozing out of my boot and my foot hurting so damned bad I could hardly work the right pedal.

Not only did the incident teach me never to wear my knife handle down, it kept me from flying for several days. If my foot hadn’t hurt so much, I would have kicked myself for doing such a dumb thing.

The world got better on 8 May, however. I got a call to see Major Cummings, the troop commander. His news was that scout platoon leader Capt. John Herchert was short on time left in country and was transferring to operations for the balance of his tour. I was to become the new One Six.

My appointment wasn’t really a big surprise. Everyone had known for some time that Herchert was getting short, and as time wore down to DEROS, his natural reaction was to try to keep himself in one piece to go home. Besides, I was the only commissioned officer in the outfit. All the rest of the scout pilots were warrants. So, Major Cummings really didn’t have much difficulty in deciding who would fill Herchert’s shoes. But that didn’t lessen my excitement about the new job.

One of the first things I did was call the scout pilots together in my hootch. Huddled around my bunk were Bob Davis (One Three), Jim Ameigh (One Five), Joe Vad (Nine), Ed Eneboe (One Nine), Jim Morrison (One Four), Bill Jones (One Eight), and Mike Melo (One One). Darkhorse Five (troop XO) Joe Perkins came too, probably to hear what the new One Six might have to say to his scout pilots.

I hadn’t planned a big pep talk. These guys knew me, had flown with me, and some of them had even lived with me in the same hootch. I felt I was one of them. But I couldn’t resist preaching a little about the spirit of the cavalry. “It’s important to remember,” I told them, “that our air cavalry today is a descendent of the old horse cavalry that opened our nation’s frontiers—that aggressiveness, flexibility, economy of force, and shock action are all watchwords of the cavalry. As aeroscout pilots, we have that heritage to live up to.”

They all knew what I meant. Over the past month, every one of them had heard my opinion about scout pilots being more aggressive in carrying out their mission. I didn’t want anybody taking any foolish chances, but I urged the scouts to stay on the target, take the fight to the enemy, and not get out until firepower advantage was lost. Once command of the situation was gone and the scout could no longer influence the action, at that point, and only then, was the scout clear to run and let the snake driver take over. After the target had been worked over by the Cobras, I wanted the scout pilot back into the area to check out the enemy situation. If the area was still too hot, get it worked over again, but keep going back!

At this point I told the pilots I was arming all the scout ships with miniguns. It would now be our intent to close with the enemy and lay cold steel on him every chance we got.

Ever mindful that the aeroscouts was strictly a volunteer unit, I left the men with the thought that they could “unvolunteer” at any time. Whenever a scout pilot was no longer willing to fly and fight, he could go over to slicks and never a discrediting word would be spoken about his decision.

“But in the meantime,” I concluded, slapping my hand down on my bunk, “the mission of this unit is to fly and fight, and don’t you ever forget it!”

Not long after that a sign bearing those exact words appeared in the operations hootch. Joe Perkins must have felt they had application beyond my little scout pilot get-together.

All the scout ships were outfitted immediately with miniguns, and the pilots learned to use them from the manuals and on-the-job training (OJT). We tried the cabin-mounted minigun sight, but ended up not using it. The sight was a rod with oval glass that stuck out in front of you in the cockpit, and it got in the way. It also could have been lethal in a crash. Instead, we devised an OJT way of aiming the guns. Through a little seat-of-the-pants experimentation and expenditure of a few rounds of ammo, we discovered the secret of hitting the target.

The gun was elevated and depressed by using a button on the cyclic stick. When the gun was raised to the point where the pilot in the right seat could look across and see the tip of the minigun barrel sticking up just above the left seat bottom, the gun would then shoot one hand’s width above the cross tube on the front of the canopy.

Having learned that, we flew out to a rice paddy, where we pulled off a few bursts and observed exactly where the rounds were hitting. We started shooting at about two hundred yards out, then used a grease pencil to mark a big X on the canopy where the rounds were seen to impact. That hand-drawn X on the front Plexiglas bubble was used as the sight.

The newer areoscouts, those with fire in their eyes and fewer combat hours, welcomed the addition of miniguns to their Loaches. They didn’t seem to have any trouble, either, with my order that scout pilots stay on the target as long as they were able to control the situation.

Experienced scouts, however, such as Hayes, Jones, and Morrison, cautioned against the new tactics. I respected their feelings that the risks overshadowed the advantages. Certainly, their experiences during the days of the ‘68 Tet Offensive had shown them that flying scouts—even with an armed observer aboard—was damned well risky enough.

Even the Cobra pilots minced no words in saying that the scouts were hanging it out too far when they started mixing it up with the enemy. “That’s what the snake is up there for,” they argued. They thought a scout was nuts to try to do anything more than locate a target for the gunship.

As the new One Six, I found out quickly that there was plenty to keep me busy in addition to flying my regular VR and scramble rotation. There was the administrative side of running the scout platoon. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle paperwork, it was more that I didn’t like handling paperwork.

Fortunately, I had two extremely capable noncommissioned officers who did their jobs so well that I could continue flying my rotation, confident that things on the ground were being capably looked after. First Sergeant Martin L. Laurent kept the platoon’s regular administrative matters going like a well-oiled machine. Platoon Sergeant Tim (“Toon Daddy”) McDivitt, among a host of other things, kept a careful eye on aircraft maintenance and our scout crew chiefs.

The crew chiefs were a particular concern of mine. They were the other half of the scout team and, in my book, were some of the finest soldiers to ever come down the chute. When a Loach took off, the crew chief’s life was in the hands of the scout pilot. And vice versa. The crew chief’s sharp eyes and well-aimed M-60 saved a Loach pilot’s ass more times than any of us could ever know. So I made it an important part of my administrative business to make sure that crew chiefs’ quarters were well maintained, that chow was good, and that they were kept off the strictly bullshit details.

Those first several months of 1969, the enemy in III Corps avoided, when they could, any large-scale military actions. The Tet Offensive of 1968 had cost the NVA so much in human casualties and material losses that they had pulled remaining manpower back behind the Cambodian border to lick their wounds. Charlie employed mostly sapper actions, small force ambushes, and standoff attacks with rockets and mortars to disrupt allied operations.

Using these kinds of methods to conserve manpower and equipment, the enemy was hard to find banded together in any numbers. Therefore, most of our aèroscout VR missions went out to search the 1st Division’s TAOR, trying to find, fix, and hold these small enemy elements for their intelligence value.

Since I was used to finding the enemy only in either singles or very small groups, I was shocked at what I saw while flying over fire support base Gela early on the morning of 13 May 1969.

I had been asleep when the CQ came into the hootch and awakened the Firefly team (a Huey equipped with searchlights and night flares, and two Cobra gunship crews). I roused myself and looked at my watch. It was 0230. I heard the CQ tell the groggy pilots, “Gela is under attack… need to scramble a team north.”

I was marked up as scout Scramble 1 for first light that morning, but, lacking a full complement of navigational instruments, OH-6s did not fly at night. When a scramble call came in during the dark hours, a red team (two Cobras) responded along with a Huey flare ship.

I couldn’t get back to sleep after the Cobra crews took off, so I finally just got up, dressed, and went over to troop operations. I wanted to see what was going on. Besides, it wouldn’t be long before daybreak. After a few minutes of listening to the radios and checking out the operational maps and condition boards, I began to get an idea of what had happened.

The 1st Battalion of the 28th Infantry was positioned at Gela, a fire support base located south of the Michelin and just east of an area we called the Onion. At 0143, an enemy force of unknown size had hit Gela with heavy 82mm mortar fire, followed by a strong ground attack that had made its way into the perimeter wire.

The scrambled Firefly and gun team had arrived at the scene, and the ops room radios blared the high-pitched talk between the infantry commander on the ground and the gun pilots circling overhead.

With first light at Phu Loi, my Cobra cover (Dean Sinor, Three One) and I got off as Scramble 1 and headed to Gela. It was about 0600.

Arriving on station, we fell into trail with Mike Woods, Three Five, and Bruce Foster, Three Two, the red team of guns that had been scrambled at 0230.

Woods and Foster gave us a situation report (sitrep) as we circled and looked down on the still-smoldering fire base. “OK. The attack occurred at 0143 and continued through the night. They took some initial fire down on the southeastern side of the compound from the tree line at seventy-five yards. Fire was returned. But the heavy enemy attack came from the northwest with a supporting attack out of the tree line on the northeast. The enemy got as far as the wire. There are bodies in the wire, multiple dead on the outside of the wire. They did not reach the perimeter. They had sniper fire… most of fire was returned. Base artillery is now cold.

“We have engaged one heavy machine gun and two recoilless rifles due north of the compound at seventy-five yards and another heavy machine gun southeast of the compound at one hundred fifty yards. All known gun locations have been hit by our air strikes or Spooky [AC-47 aircraft armed with miniguns and illumination flares] and some tac air. Ground wants to get a scout down over the base and fan out in concentric circles for a BDA and body count. Try to find the enemy guns, and make sure there aren’t a lot more people out there still kicking around between the jungle and fire base.”

I rogered all that and then got my rules of engagement.

“OK, One Six, you got friendlies on the inside of the wire. You have no friendlies on the outside of the wire. I say again, no friendlies outside the wire. You have a complete free-fire outside the wire.”

Before I headed down, Sinor came up on FM to the infantry commander on the ground. “Four Six, this is Darkhorse Three One. I’d like to get you to hold your external fires, hold your indirect fires. I’m going to put the scout down now directly over the base and let him work outward to give us a bomb damage assessment and also try to locate survivors, wounded, and the direction of enemy retreat.”

I monitored Four Six’s response. “Darkhorse, roger. We see the scout on station. We’re going to hold our external and indirect fires. Last fire received on the perimeter was from the direction of three two zero degrees at two hundred yards—light automatic weapons fire. Haven’t had any fifty or recoilless rifle fire since you guys took out that position about three minutes ago. We’ve got a Dustoff inbound, and while fire is shut down for the scout we’ll go ahead and bring in Dustoff if you’ll be good enough to cover him.”

“Roger, Four Six, I’m putting the scout down. I’ll cover the Dustoff insertion. Your contact this frequency for the scout is Darkhorse One Six.”

Then Sinor came back to me. “OK, One Six, are you ready to go down? You’ve got free-fire but use caution toward the friendlies. Any questions?”

“No, I’ve got what I need.”

From fifteen hundred feet, Gela looked like a five-pointed deputy’s badge lying on the ground, with a wreath of three strands of concertina wire around it. Dropping down on top of the base, I could see that each star point was protected with gun positions that swept—with a wide field of cross fire—anything that came across the clearing and into the wire.

The adrenaline always flowed as I dropped down onto a target. You never knew who or what was down there. I made my first couple of passes at about forty feet, smokin’ between eighty and ninety knots. That gave me a quick look around out to the base perimeter without much worry of getting rounds into my bird.

“My God!” I murmured as I slowed and dropped down on Gela’s perimeter wire. This had to have been one hell of a fight. There were bodies everywhere!

Grotesquely entangled on the barbs of the concertina were numerous enemy corpses—ripped, bloodied bodies dressed in black shorts and pajamas, blue tops, and Ho Chi Minh sandals, AK-47s still gripped tightly in their hands. The sight burned an image in my mind.

Taking in the devastation, my crew chief, Crockett, hit the intercom. “Shit, sir, look at all the bad guys. They’re everywhere! There’s more enemy below us right now than I’ve seen all together in Nam since I got here!”

I was thinking the same thing. This was the first time I had ever seen this kind of enemy concentration. I wondered if the bad guys had decided to come out of Cambodia in larger force and start hitting us in strength.

Fixated on the battle scene below me, I suddenly realized that I needed to get away from the wire and start looking for any live enemy who might be around. Our infantry in Gela needed answers to some questions: Was the base still under siege? If not, where did Charlie go? How many dead did he drag away? What kind of weapons were out there? Could the base finally come down off full alert?

I moved my orbit out to the tree line. It looked as though Gela had been completely surrounded by the enemy, with the major attack coming out of the northwest. At three two zero degrees, I saw many body drag marks and blood trails leading off into the jungle. The enemy usually tried to recover his dead and wounded from the battlefield by dragging them back along their route of attack. By leaving as few casualties as possible on the field, he hoped to confuse U.S. and ARVN forces as to the extent of his losses.

Following this well-beaten trail off to the northwest, I soon spotted their hastily dug mass graves back in the jungle, and the location of the seventy-five recoilless and .50 caliber that covered their main attack. The guns weren’t there now, though; they had been dragged away, too.

The fresh, heavy foot trails through the jungle definitely headed back toward the Michelin. Charlie was probably holed up there by now, licking his wounds.

As I made my orbits, I kept up a constant stream of talk to Sinor on what I was seeing. His front-seater logged it on the map and radioed the information to the infantry ground commander and back to troop operations.

This was the first time I had seen the results of a large unit action, of the enemy coming in after us. The U.S. forces were hunkered down behind the fortifications of their fire support base, which was totally out in the open with no jungle overhead cover whatsoever. The enemy—possibly a unit of the 7th NVA Division’s 165th Infantry Regiment, known to be operating in the vicinity of the Michelin rubber plantation—was probably attempting to execute what we called a “hugging” tactic, that is, trying to overpower an installation by quickly charging their soldiers in so close under the artillery that our heavy fire-power was nullified by the extremely short range.

But to no avail at Gela. Caught in the cleared, open area between the fire base outer wire and the jungle tree line, the enemy was pounded by our mortar, artillery canister rounds, and aerial ordnance. The bare earth outside the wire had been pulverized by hundreds, if not thousands, of projectiles, then scorched by napalm from the tac air, and by Phougas drums of jellied gasoline half-buried in defensive positions around the perimeter and pointed to explode liquid fire onto incoming attackers. The enemy bodies beyond the wire looked like ripped and burned rag dolls. Many had made it as far as the wire before being caught in the deadly defensive small-arms fire generated from within the fire base.

God, what a battle! I thought over and over to myself.

Official afteraction reports listed three U.S. soldiers killed in the attack, twenty wounded, and forty-one enemy killed. But forty-one bodies were all the enemy left to be counted; as my observation had confirmed, scores of their dead and wounded had been dragged from the field and left hastily buried just a few yards into the jungle.

I have often heard it said that an aviator fights an impersonal war, that he never sees, hears, or smells the close-up reality of the battlefield. But on 13 May 1969, looking down into that pit of death and devastation at Gela, Crockett and I knew the reality of war.