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

^{CHAPTER 11} ENGINE OUT

Once in awhile the Outcasts would catch a mission up on the Saigon River. On 22 August, Dean Sinor and I were assigned the VR-1 flight to recon a section of the Big Blue. The area started down around the Mushroom and FSB Tennessee, then went on up northwest to the outskirts of the village of Dau Tieng. Troop ops had briefed us that division was experiencing an increase in the enemy sampans infiltrating down the Saigon in that area. The sampans were known to be carrying soldiers and supplies downriver to support enemy operations against us in the northwest Trapezoid.

Our job was to put early morning aerial scout cover over the navy riverine and 1st Division engineer boats, to help them search out unauthorized river traffic and, more specifically, to track the ground movements of any bad guys who might have come ashore from enemy sampans. Along that stretch of the Big Blue, there were no settlements or villages, so no Vietnamese civilians should be out on the river. Also, no friendly military troops were authorized to travel the river between the Mushroom and Dau Tieng. Therefore, any craft or people discovered on or in the water, except our riverine boats on patrol, were immediately considered to be unfriendly.

None of the infiltrating enemy sampans risked traveling on the river during daylight hours. This would have exposed them to observation either by our aerial scouts or friendly ground troops. So the enemy moved on the river at night. By day they tied up, carefully camouflaged their sampans, then moved into the heavy foliage near the river.

Sinor and I left Phu Loi at about 5 A.M. It was still dark as we passed over the Iron Triangle en route to our search starting point near FSB Tennessee. From the air, Vietnam at night looked black and desolate, since the countryside was mostly without electricity. Therefore, the terrain below was totally unrecognizable.

The early morning, however, was always the best time for our aerial reconnaissance missions. The smoke and haze had cleared from the air and we could see much better.

As Sinor and I flew along at altitude, I lit another cigarette and decided that it was going to be a fine morning for checking Charlie on the river and seeing what mischief he might be up to. I didn’t realize, watching that fine dawn, that I would still be along the Saigon River some sixteen hours later, watching the darkness envelop us again—from the ground.

Several U.S. fire support bases were strung along the eastern side of the Saigon in the area we were going to work: Junction City and Aachen were just downriver from the Mushroom, Tennessee was located right in the stem of the Mushroom, and Mahone (known after 14 September 1969 as FSB Kien honoring ARVN Lt. Col. Thein Ta Kien, KIA) was situated upriver and located at the edge of a large rubber plantation just southeast of Dau Tieng. Troop ops had instructed me to drop out of altitude and pick up the river at the Mushroom, then move my search pattern to the northwest along the Saigon, checking out both banks and tributaries as I went, as well as creating a search corridor about four to five kilometers wide on the east side of the river.

As Sinor and I neared the Mushroom, I radioed him. “Hey, Thirty-one, will you be able to see me down there? It’s still pretty dark.”

“I think it will be OK, One Six,” Sinor answered. “But if I can’t track you when you get down, you can always turn on your anticollision lights.”

Before heading down, I needed to set the shoot-not shoot guidelines for the day with Parker. I came up on the intercom. “We’re ready to go lima lima… standard rules, Jimbo—if you see anything that looks like it’s hostile, and it checks hostile, go ahead and open up, then we’ll deal with it from there. Any questions?”

“Nope,” Parker answered. “Let ‘er rip, Lieutenant.”

I kicked the ship over into a descending right-hand spiral. The dropdown put me at treetop level right in the middle of the Mushroom. I could see some small cooking fires and a few lights within fire support base Tennessee. Our guys were just beginning to crank up for the day. They waved as Parker and I zipped over the base at about thirty feet and seventy knots. Then I pulled an easy right turn that headed me back to the northwest, to a point on the Big Blue where the river began to form the western outline of the Mushroom. That’s where I would begin my scouting orbits. At this point, also, Highway 14 snugged up close on the east side of the river. That gave me the opportunity to set up my scout pattern to sweep as far as the west riverbank on one end, then east past Highway 14 and two to three kilometers into the countryside beyond.

As the day brightened and we started our sweeps, the river was quiet. Moving our orbits farther north toward a fairly sharp bend in the river, we saw a pair of American boats pulled up tight against the west bank, just downstream from the bend. One boat was a navy patrol boat, riverine (PBR), working upriver from its base at Phu Cuong. The other was what we called a Swift boat. Larger than the PBR, it was reminiscent of an old Louisiana oil field construction boat. Both types of craft were jet propelled, had a shallow draft, and carried plenty of weapons. In addition, they were outfitted with Starlight Scopes and searchlights for operating along the river at night.

The two boats were situated so they could intercept any craft coming downriver around the bend. They had probably been stationed there most of the night, watching and waiting for anything on the river that tried to run the curfew.

We waved and the boat crewmen waved back. I moved our orbits to the north and lamented that so far we hadn’t spotted a thing on or near the river.

As the Saigon snaked along under us toward the northwest, I noticed a small tributary (Rach Suoi) that emptied into the Big Blue. The stream was on the west bank of the river and headed off to the northwest into the 25th Division area of operations. Though technically the junction of the Rach Suoi and the Song Saigon was not in the 1st Division territory, boundary responsibility was, out of necessity, a little loose. The two divisions frequently worked back and forth with artillery and whatever other means were necessary to cover each other, and to keep Charlie from operating more freely at a point where U.S. tactical unit operations were split. So I lengthened the western swing of my orbit to take a look around this area. It paid off immediately.

As we dropped in low over the north bank of the tributary, both Parker and I spotted a group of sampans tied up not more than fifty meters back from where the two rivers joined. The vegetation was extremely heavy and grew right down to the riverbank. But we could still see the shapes of several sampans huddled in a niche of the shoreline and carefully covered with fresh nipa palm branches.

No people were around, though. I headed off over the tree line and searched in vain for several minutes. There were no signs of trails, camp fires, or bunkers—nothing that told us where the people from the sampans had gone. But at least we had found six enemy boats, and it was time to go back and deal with them.

I keyed Parker on the intercom. “I don’t want to waste the time or ammo trying to bust those boats with the M-60. Grab your M-79 and I’ll hover over near the sampans while you thump ‘em off with grenade rounds.”

Parker reached under his jump seat where he stowed the 40mm M-79, and loaded up. I came in slowly, keeping the moored sampans about forty feet from my right door. As I came to a dead hover, I heard the first high-pitched c-r-u-m-p erupt from the back cabin. Then another… another… and then three more times. Six shots from Parker’s grenade launcher, and six enemy sampans quickly settled to the muddy bottom of the Rach Suoi River. I looked over my right shoulder and gave Parker a sharp thumbs-up.

Circling back to the Saigon, we resumed our regular east-west search pattern. We saw no river traffic or signs of enemy activity ashore. It began to look as though six sampans would be our score for the day.

Finally, another seven kilometers up the river, we came to another tributary. This one took off north from the east bank of the Big Blue. Tom Chambers, my Cobra front-seater who read the maps, told me that this little stream was called Rach Can Nom. Since we had had some luck in the other tributary, I pulled in over Rach Can Nom at treetop level, looking for another jackpot.

But there was nothing doing. After a few orbits, I thought about canning the operation and heading back to the Saigon. Before doing that, however, I decided to move a little farther upstream and make a couple of patterns beyond the point where the tributary passed under the Highway 14 bridge. The stream turned back east right about there and passed by the little village of Ben Chui on the south and a large rubber plantation on the north. Just beyond the rubber trees to the north was our fire support base Mahone (Kien).

As I passed over the Highway 14 bridge, I was startled to see six more sampans and a motorized junk pulled up against the north bank. I keyed Parker. “Damn! Did you see that?”

“What do you suppose we got, Lieutenant?”

“That motorized junk must be thirty-five feet long, Jimbo—a hell of a good-sized riverboat to just be out on a little pleasure cruise. You can bet it’s not friendly, and neither are the people who brought it in here.”

Convinced that we had uncovered something pretty heavy, I radioed Sinor in the Cobra. “Bingo, Three One. We just found a small navy down here. We’ve got at least a thirty-five-foot inboard-outboard motorized junk, supported by six more sampans. They’re pulled up on the north bank just beyond the bridge. I’m damned sure there’s a whole lot of stuff down here, and it doesn’t look friendly.”

“See any people, One Six?”

“No people right around the boats, Three One…. Haven’t had a chance to look around yet, but there’s got to be a whole lot of bad guys on the ground near these boats. I recommend that you go ahead and roll the ARPs. Let’s get ‘em started out here because the hair on the back of my neck is telling me that there’s trouble brewin’.”

It was about 0610 by then. An ARP scramble that early in the morning might catch the troop before the lift Hueys had even been hovered out of their revetments. Once that loudspeaker blared “scramble,” I knew that the ARPs would be on their way out in short order.

Since we had a few minutes to wait for the ARPs, I told Sinor that I was going to head up toward FSB Mahone and look around. Mahone was just a few hundred meters over the rubber trees to the north.

I left the river and took up tree-level orbits right over the plantation. Parker and I peered down into the trees, looking for any signs of the people from the boats.

Suddenly Parker came on the intercom. “I didn’t shoot, sir, but we got bad guys under us.”

I broke hard right to pull the Loach away from the spot. “What have you got?”

“There are bad guys under us in the rubber. They’ve got camouflage capes on their backs, and as we went over they ran east. I’m positive I saw ‘em.”

“OK, we’re going back and take another look.”

As I whipped a hard one eighty, I remembered something that other aeroscouts had taught me earlier, something that had held true through my own scouting experience. When discovered in the field, the bad guys had a tendency to run for cover at the base of the largest, tallest tree in the area. Then they’d stay put until the danger was past.

With that little piece of G-2 in my mind, I returned to the spot where Parker had reported seeing the people. Then I decelerated and hovered over the biggest tree I could find. I looked down the trunk to the ground and there were four VC faces staring directly up at me. I jerked an armful of collective. The tail jumped up and the nose dipped as I hauled out.

Parker yelled, “You see ‘em? You see ‘em?”

“I see ‘em. Did you see any weapons? They didn’t shoot.”

“I couldn’t tell, it was too quick. I don’t think I saw any guns,” Parker answered.

My VHF blared as Sinor came up. “What’s going on, One Six? I saw your tail kick… you OK?”

“Bad guys, Three One. We’ve got four enemy troops at the base of that tall tree. They didn’t shoot. I’m going back in to check it again.”

It didn’t occur to me that I may have found just the tip of the iceberg. That motorized junk and the half dozen or so sampans on the riverbank should have instantly told me that a lot of people could have landed from those boats. More than the four VC at the base of that tree.

. But in the urgency of the moment, I didn’t think about that. I keyed Parker. “OK, Jimbo, we’re going back in. I’m going to slow down so we can check it out. Be ready with your M-60 because I’m going to see if I can get them to make a move.”

Keeping an eye on the tall tree, I decelerated and slid the ship into a hover on its right side just over the top branches. Then I looked down the tree trunk to see if the four brown faces were still there. They were, and obviously more frustrated this time by my second interruption to their scheduled morning activities. All four whipped up their AKs and opened up. Parker’s M-60 chattered back instantly. I saw his rounds hit and people fall.

Then fire erupted from the entire rubber plantation. It looked like a hundred or more muzzle flashes, all aimed at me. So that’s where all the people from those boats were.

I jerked the Loach up again. It was a wonder I didn’t yank the collective right out of its socket. As the little bird instantly responded, I shouted to Sinor, “We’re taking fire from directly beneath us… from our six o’clock now, mark, mark. They’re in the rubber… hit the rubber. Shit!… there must be a hundred or more in there… hit the rubber!”

“Saw you kick it, One Six. We’re rolling,” Sinor answered.

I looked over my right shoulder to see if Parker was OK. He was hanging outside the aircraft, shooting his M-60 down under the tail boom. Then I looked for the Cobra. Sinor had already completed his first run on the target and was peeling away from the rubber to come around again for another pass.

He came back on the radio, “How many people down there, One Six? Are you hit? Are you OK?”

“I can’t tell if we took any hits, so we must be OK. There are at least fifty to a hundred bad guys down there in the rubber.”

“We concur, One Six,” Three One came back. “We saw at least that many muzzle flashes.”

“You know what I’m thinking, Thirty-one? We’ve got an awful lot of unfriendly people down there, and I think we better put a cap on them to keep them from moving any farther north. I’ll bet they’re heading on up to pay a little surprise visit on Mahone.”

“Roger that,” Sinor acknowledged. “If we don’t put a collar on ‘em, they’ll didi the area.”

“Right, Thirty-one. We need to hold them in the rubber until the ARPs can get on the ground; otherwise, we’ll never find them all together again.”

“OK, One Six,” Sinor said, “I’ll call the guys at Mahone and tell them that they’ve got some uninvited guests coming up on ‘em from the south. I suspect my rockets have already woken them up.”

Putting a cap on the area meant that the scout got down as low as he could, repeating fast orbits, and doing all he could to not allow the enemy to slip out of the noose. As I started that tactic, I heard Sinor radio FSB Mahone to bring them up to speed on what we had found.

“Fearless Seven Seven,” he called, “this is Darkhorse Three One. You’ve got an estimated fifty to one hundred enemy troops in the rubber to your southeast, presumably moving northwest on your location. Do you have observation posts or ambush patrols out in that area? If not, we’re calling in Dau Tieng arty to do some shooting in the plantation.”

“OK, Darkhorse Three One, this is Fearless Seven Seven. We have no friendlies in the rubber… no friendlies outside the base in that area. It’s a go on Delta Tango arty.”

With that, we headed for altitude and Sinor radioed Red Leg to line up division artillery for the fire mission. It wasn’t long before 105mm HE rounds began thundering into the rubber area, and continued pounding for almost fifteen minutes.

When the smoke and debris began to clear, I headed down again to make an assessment. At the same time, I overheard the radio conversations of the slicks that were getting off from Phu Loi—the ARPs would be on station soon.

Back down at treetop level, I saw the results of the heavy tube artillery barrage. Dirt, debris, and dust covered everything. The artillery rounds had uprooted trees, splintered the wood, and left gaping shell holes and general devastation throughout the rubber. I wondered if many enemy troops had lived through that. Some of them apparently did, because I could see numerous blood trails and drag marks through the artillery dust.

Following one of the trails, I came upon three of the enemy moving slowly through the rubber. They were dragging a couple of bodies. Although dazed from the bombardment, they raised their weapons as our ship came into view. Parker shortstopped the threat by quickly cutting them down with one sustained burst from his M-60.

I was now running low on fuel, so I radioed Sinor to scramble another scout team from Phu Loi. I had just enough gas to hang on until we got the ARPs down. They arrived a few minutes later and I put them down into an LZ about two hundred yards from the enemy boats.

Bob Davis (One Three) was my replacement scout and he came on the scene just after the ARPs landed. He fell in on my six o’clock and we flew over the area while I briefed him on the situation. That freed me up to head on over to Dau Tieng for fuel and rearming.

That refueling trip was only the first of the day. I gassed, rearmed, went back to the rubber and relieved Davis. Then he did the same. Back and forth, back and forth we went, trying to keep a tight lid on the contact area and prevent the enemy troops from escaping.

Finally, the day lapsed into very late afternoon. It was Davis’s turn back at Dau Tieng while I orbited over the ARPs, covering their return to the LZ. They had assaulted and secured the enemy boats, and the slicks were waiting to take them back to home plate.

Suddenly on one of my circles I caught a glimpse of movement over on the ARP’s right flank. I immediately flared that way to see what had caught my attention. It was a group of about fifteen enemy soldiers, about forty yards out from the ARPs and moving laterally with our rifle platoon. They were obviously trying to make an undetected escape from the rubber by moving along with the ARPs.

The enemy hadn’t seen me yet. I had moved in right on top of the trees and was looking at them at an angle through the treetops. I slowed, turned the ship, and dropped the nose to put my minigun square on their column. I pulled the trigger—on through the first detent to a full four thousand rounds a minute—and cut the full burst right across them. Many of the soldiers were blasted down instantly. Others dropped as I turned the Loach so Parker’s M-60 could open up.

But we weren’t the only ones shooting! When we opened up, so did about a dozen enemy right beneath us. There were obviously more enemy soldiers in that neck of the woods. I could feel and hear the ship taking numerous solid hits.

As I reacted to get the ship out of there, a red flash of light from the right side of the instrument panel caught my eye. It was the engine-out visible warning light. Then I heard the W-H-O-O-P… W-H-O-O-P… W-H-O-O-P of the low RPM audio warning signal in my headphones. That, I knew, was word from the final authority that I had lost all power in the engine. At that moment I was about forty feet off the ground and doing maybe fifty knots. I had just enough time tp get on the radio and shout, “One Six is hit. I’ve lost my engine. I’m going down… I’m going down!”

My next moves were automatic. I dumped the collective all the way to the floor, pulled the cyclic back as far as it would go, and managed to cyclic climb to about 150 feet. With that little extra altitude I was able to enter autorotation and hope that I could get the ship down without splattering us all over the countryside.

I yelled to Parker, “Get your feet in, Jimbo, we’re going down!”

Seeing an open space ahead, I aimed the ship toward an old Rome-plow cut. It was located just to the east side of Highway 14 and about three hundred yards to the southeast of fire support base Mahone. I was coming in from the north, right down the long north-south plow cut.

Quickly losing what altitude I had left, I dropped the ship down. We landed hard, but the skids took the punch; from what I could tell right away, we didn’t do any more damage to the aircraft.

I sat there in the cockpit for a fleeting second, thankful that we were down. The engine was completely dead and, as I looked up through the bubble, I noticed that the rotors were hardly moving. They were dead, too.

Popping my seat belt loose, I radioed Sinor. “We’re down, Three One. We’re OK… we’re exiting the aircraft.”

“Roger, One Six, I’m getting the other team,” came right back.

I reached down, flipped off the battery^switch, and started to jump out of the aircraft. But I had forgotten to take off my helmet, let alone unplug my headset. My head jerked as I started to roll out of the ship, and the communications plug broke off the helmet.

Parker jumped out right behind me, his M-60 in hand. He trailed a long belt of ammo behind him as we ran for a little berm that had been pushed up by the Rome plow. It was only about ten feet away from the ship and offered some protection from the tree line we were facing on the east.

Dropping down behind the dirt pile, we took a quick look around. It was beginning to get dark, and that concerned me. I was suddenly struck with the fear that if the ARPs didn’t get to us before dark, the bad guys might grab us before our people could find us.

I told Parker to set up his machine gun so he could cover the jungle in front of us, and to blast anything that moved. I knew that the ARPs couldn’t be very close to us yet, whereas the bad guys we had just shot at were only about sixty yards away.

Then I remembered the M-79 in the back cabin of the bird. That would give us a little heavier firepower if the enemy decided to rush us. I ran back to the ship and grabbed the grenade launcher and a bandolier of ammunition. No sooner did I get back to the dirt pile when I heard a burst of AK-47 fire coming from my left front at about sixty to eighty yards. The rounds cracked as they went over our heads and we both ducked, almost burying our faces in the reddish earth.

The bad guys obviously knew we were down and could see our aircraft. But they probably weren’t sure where the crew was. The AK fire seemed to be aimed at our ship.

My first response was to get on my PRC-10 survival radio and call Sinor. “Hey, Three One, we got bad guys shooting at us down here. I know about where they are, and I’m going to put some M-79 on ‘em. Let me know when you see the smoke from my rounds, then hit the smoke with rockets.”

“Roger,” Sinor answered. “We got the ARPs moving your way. Put some M-79 on Charlie and I’ll roll on your smoke.”

I laid in several rounds of 40mm in the direction I thought the enemy fire had come from. On their detonation Sinor rolled in from the east, put down rockets, and broke to roll in again. He blasted the target area two more times before the ARPs got close. Then he told me that I could expect to see their slicks hovering in right at our six o’clock on Highway 14 at any moment.

By now it was almost completely dark. I could see the interior lights of the slicks coming up the highway. Then the rifle platoon was on the ground. They moved right on through our dirt pile position and set up a defensive perimeter in front of us.

I was thinking about what a long day this was turning out to be, when Bob Harris walked up. “How bad is the ship, One Six?”

“Not too bad,” I answered. “I got a round through the engine, but if Three One can get Pipe Smoke in here, we can still get the ship out of here tonight. I sure as hell don’t want to spend the night out here!”

While we were waiting for the maintenance chopper, Parker popped the Loach’s blades and we took all our gear out of the ship.

In about thirty minutes the aircraft recovery unit from the maintenance unit came hovering in. It was a Huey, which had enough muscle power to lift out a scout bird. As the Huey hovered over the Loach, a rigger was dropped to put a canvas rigging around the top of the aircraft. Then the rigger hooked the OH-6 onto the end of a cable and motioned for the Huey to lift the little bird up and out.

With our ship gone, Parker and I loaded aboard one of the slicks for the ride back to Phu Loi. On the way back, my head bobbed as I fought off exhaustion. I realized that we had ended the day in the dark. The guys back at the base are probably wondering what happened to us, I thought.

When we landed back at Phu Loi, I stopped in at operations. I found out that the last sixteen hours had been worth it. We had jumped a battalion-sized force in the rubber, and they had come in by boats for the specific purpose of launching a surprise attack on the southern flank of FSB Mahone. But the enemy had been contained, Mahone had been alerted in time to react, and Charlie’s whole show was flushed down the tube.

I was feeling pretty good as I finished up in ops and walked over to the hootch. When I pushed open the door, I expected someone to say, “Hey, man. How in the hell ya’ doin? We were beginning to worry about you.”

Instead, I found my hootch mates huddled together, playing poker. They hardly glanced up. One of them, between reaching for his pack of cigarettes and dealing the cards, finally looked over at me. “Hey, boss, hear you screwed up another Loach today!”