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

^{CHAPTER 18} I THINK WE WON

I had been hearing that there would be a Christmas drop. In other words, if your tour in Vietnam ended near the first of January, as mine did on 1 January 1970, the army would make an effort to get you out of country in time to be home for Christmas.

The prospect was sounding better to me every day, but I really couldn’t let myself think about it. A scout pilot whose concentration was distracted by anything—let alone the prospect of going home for Christmas—was looking to get himself and his crew chief killed.

In any case, I was getting very short in country. My picture in the 0 club was moving up to the number one position over the bar, and 1 would be transitioning out of scouts soon and passing on the platoon leadership to my successor.

Charlie, however, was unimpressed. The enemy remained extremely active and was showing himself in the field in even greater numbers. Still, the infamous NVA Dong Nai Regiment remained elusive. These North Vietnamese main force regulars were hitting our 1st Division units with disgusting regularity. Then, almost phantomlike, they would steal away into their sanctuaries, defying our best efforts to find them.

On 10 November, I was flying with a young new crew chief by the name of Bolin (Parker was still out with his neck wound and had, in fact, been sent back to Okinawa for recuperation). We were out on VR in the western Trap, not far from where I was shot down last time near FSB Kien.

I was down low working my patterns when we picked up movement of a single enemy soldier. We jumped him out in the open near a bunker complex. Bolin engaged with his 60 and dropped the man almost where he stood.

That brief encounter suddenly brought about fifteen more enemy soldiers into the fight—more than I could handle with my firepower. So I had Bolin drop a red grenade, and asked my Cobra to hit the smoke.

My gun that day was Bill Church (Three Six). He rolled in immediately and made several passes to hose down the area with rockets and minigun. Then I went back in for a BDA. But the area was still hot—I took so much enemy fire that I had to get back out fast before getting shot to pieces. I realized that we didn’t have enough horsepower to neutralize the contact, so I went up on the FAC push and told Sidewinder that we needed him to bring in fast movers, and whatever else he had available.

After two heavy air strikes, we inserted the ARPs and found a base camp with five enemy KIA. With the extraction of the ARPs, elements of the 2/2 Mech Inf—call signs Label Eight One and Label Eight Nine—were called in to stay in the area and sweep the base camp.

Since we hadn’t known about this enemy base, I flew back out the next day to see if I could pick up anything else around that area. Sure enough, about thirty meters from where Label Eight One was working, we jumped one more enemy soldier. Bolin again quickly dispatched a stream of 60 fire that cut the man down.

Not finding anything more on the ground to warrant their presence, the 2/2 element was extracted on 11 November. We had apparently lost contact with the main enemy force that had occupied the base camp.

Just a week later (17 November), Rod Willis (One Seven), with Sp4 Joe Cook in the back cabin, was working a reconnaissance in the western Trapezoid. I was back at Phu Loi standing by on designated Scramble 1 alert. As usual, I was in the ops bunker monitoring the radios and drinking coffee.

One Seven was working down very low on top of the trees. He was just to the southeast of the Michelin rubber plantation and about four kilometers north and east of FSB Kien. The area was covered by very thick vegetation. The triple-canopy jungle was so dense, in fact, that Willis and his crew chief could catch only fleeting glimpses of the ground as they flew over. At one point, however, the foliage beneath them opened up and they thought they saw evidence of an enemy base camp below.

Rod immediately hauled the OH-6 around to go back for a closer look. As One Seven attempted to hover over the area in question, a fierce explosion suddenly erupted beneath Willis’s Loach. The force of the blast violently rocked the scout ship and sent hot fragments flying, with some pieces of shrapnel catching Joe Cook in the left hand.

(Coincidentally, Cook was the second crew chief to be hit in the left hand in the last two weeks. It had also happened to Ken Stormer. This was mainly the result of how Loach door gunners positioned themselves in the ship; when at the ready with their M-60s, their left hands were forward out on the gun and more exposed.)

Willis didn’t know what had exploded, but he could see that the explosion had obviously detonated in the top of a tree. The tree had nearly disintegrated, in addition to nearly blowing his aircraft out of the sky.

Though wincing with pain, Cook immediately began to throw M-60 fire into the enemy base camp area. A barrage of enemy weapons burst forth in response.

One Seven increased his speed and his radius of attack, and simultaneously broadcast a request to his Cobra that the ARPs be inserted to find out just what they had stumbled upon.

Major Moore was in the ops bunker at Phu Loi when the request came to scramble the ARPs. He quickly consulted his maps and surmised that the enemy outfit probably would try to make it back up into the Michelin and, ultimately, on into their sanctuary in the Razorbacks. With that thought, Six told One Seven to scout out an LZ to the north of his contact; then, if the enemy tried to make a run for it out the back door, the ARPs would be in position to block their escape.

Within thirty minutes, the ARPs were on the scene, led by the new Four Six, 1st Lt. Stuart J. Harrell, replacing Lieutenant Casey, who was badly wounded in the Huey-mine incident. As ordered, Willis had picked an LZ north of where he had been rocked by the tree explosion.

Once the ARPs were down, One Seven established FM contact with the platoon’s RTO and set about the task of steering Harrell’s infantrymen through the dense jungle toward the enemy base area. Leading their ground movement was the point man, Pfc. William J. Brown. To work point, a man needed a lot of experience and almost a sixth sense to detect impending danger. Unfortunately, Private First Class Brown had very little of either. He had recently arrived in country and had just been transferred into the ARP platoon as a casualty replacement.

Willis shepherded the ARPs closer and closer to the enemy bunker complex. As he did, point man Brown became more and more cautious. Quietly, warily, Brown approached the first bunker.

When he was just a few feet away, Brown prudently moved off to the side and took up a position of cover to study the potential firing lanes of the enemy emplacement. As he crouched for a brief moment to observe his front, a single SKS carbine shot suddenly cracked out of the heavy undergrowth to Brown’s flank. The ARP point man crumpled forward onto his face, dead before he hit the ground. The carefully aimed round was fired from another bunker to his left—one he hadn’t seen.

The whole jungle area immediately erupted into a thunderous hail of gunfire, as the entire enemy camp opened up with its full complement of machine guns, rifles, frag grenades in layers, and RPG rounds, which seemed to be going off in the trees and everywhere else around the surprised ARP platoon.

In that initial enemy fusillade, six more ARPs went down, including the platoon’s new Four Six. Both senior squad leaders, S. Sgt. Mark K. Mathewson and S. Sgt. James A. Jordon, were hit, Mathewson with a frag wound to the right leg and Jordon with a ripping gunshot wound to his left hand. Pfc. Sammy G. Lindsay crumpled to the ground with an enemy bullet piercing his left thigh. A CHICOM grenade went off right in front of Four Six, Stu Harrell, and the fragments shredded his left arm from shoulder to fingers. A Soviet RPG-7 round exploded right at the feet of Sgt. Allen H. Caldwell; he was dead before he hit the ground. Pfc. Robert L. Foster caught shell fragments in the thoracic area and was slammed down onto the blood-spattered jungle floor. The murderous barrage had, in just seconds, put one fourth of the ARP platoon out of action.

Flying right over the ARPs, Willis was enraged. But there was little he could do to help the aeroriflemen.

Aeroscout Bob Davis (One Three) had been sitting with his gun at Dau Tieng waiting to relieve One Seven on station. Davis and his Cobra immediately lifted off and arrived at the contact point in less than five minutes.

With One Three on the scene and briefed to provide cover over the beleaguered ARPs, One Seven beat it back to Phu Loi. Joe Cook, his left hand bleeding badly from Charlie’s grenade fragments, needed attention beyond the makeshift bandage he had bound around his fist.

I was leaning over the radios back at the ops bunker listening when the troop commander walked in. Davis’s gun, Bruce Foster, was yelling at One Three to get out of the way so he could shoot. Concerned that the ARPs were in over their heads, Six asked me to get cranked and fly up there.

I raced for my aircraft. Jim Parker met me there. Just back from his recuperation, he was scheduled as my Scramble 1 crew chief. Willis was also set to fly out with me. He had gotten Joe Cook to the medics, picked up another crew chief, and was ready to get back over the contact area.

As soon as we arrived at the scene, I dropped down low over the ARPs to get a firsthand report from S tu Harrell. I needed visual contact to assess what the enemy force was doing. Zeroing in on the area where Harrell was down with his RTO, I hit FM. “Four Six, this is One Six. What’s your sitrep?”

I could see him take the mike from his RTO. “We’re in bad shape, One Six. I’ve been hit either by a very well initiated L-shaped ambush or by a hell of a heavy and well dug in force.”

“What about your people?” I questioned.

Harrell’s bloody left arm lay limp at his side and, though his voice was sharp and clear, I could hear that he was in pain. “We’re completely covered. We’re taking very, very heavy fire… machine guns, rockets, grenades. I have at least two KIA, another five or six wou—”

His last words were smothered as the jungle below me opened up again with devastating fire—directed this time not only at Four Six’s position but also up at me as I flew just twenty to thirty feet off the ground.

Damn! I thought. We must have stepped on a lot of bad people down there. It must be at least a company plus—or, more likely, a battalion-minus-sized base area. But, whatever, it’s full of bad guys. They’re mad, and they sure as hell want to fight.

I pulled an armful of collective and moved away until the firing calmed down. But I knew I had to get back in there and find out from Four Six where his men were.

I hollered back at Harrell. “Get me a position report on your people. I can’t shoot until I know where all of your people are.”

I swooped back in again—this time faster—to see if I could get a better picture of Harrell’s situation. It was hot down there—like touching a light switch and having the lights come on. When I dropped down, the enemy fire came up. Instantly.

But this time, I got a better lay of the land. There was an old tank bust trail that ran from the southeast to the northwest, which roughly bisected what I could see of the enemy base area. Harrell’s ARPs had been inserted in an LZ to the west of the trail. They had started advancing directly east toward the base camp when point man Brown was hit, and all hell broke loose.

The enemy base camp most likely had.been alerted to impending trouble when the initial explosion had rocked Willis’s ship. Probably reacting to the fact that they had been discovered, Charlie decided to get out of his base area and escape north before the aeroscout brought more firepower down on them. When the ARPs were inserted and headed into the base area from the west, they cut the old tank bust, just as troop commander Moore had foreseen. The tactic had blocked the trail and posed an obstacle to the enemy, who wanted to use it to escape north, back to their established sanctuary in the Razorbacks. The enemy soldiers were obviously getting set to ram the ARP’s right flank from the south, bust through their ranks, then head on home up the trail.

With this scenario in mind, I dropped down again on a fast run-by. Looking closer this time, the only people I could see moving around the trail were Four Six and his RTO. I spotted several more of our people who were down and not moving. It didn’t look good.

Harrell—typically not wearing his helmet—was crawling on the tank bust, M-16 in his right hand and dragging his shrapnel-riddled left arm beside him. Every few seconds, he’d pull himself up on his knees, brace his rifle on his bloody left arm, and fire off a burst down the trail to his southeast. He had plenty of targets down that way—and they could easily overrun his position and split the ARP blocking force.

It was a frustrating situation. The Cobras had worked up some artillery, and Sidewinder Two Two had been called to the scene to order up some of his fast movers. But we couldn’t use any of that muscle until Harrell could get organized and tell us where our friendlies were located on the ground. Time was running out. It didn’t look to me as though Four Six could hold much longer against what was surely a very large force hammering against his flank.

There was only one thing I could think of that might help relieve some of the pressure. It was not exactly a happy thought, but it was the only one I had at the moment.

I keyed the intercom to Parker. “OK, Jimbo,” I said, “we’ve been here before. The only thing I know to do is get back in there low and slow, make ourselves enough of a pain in Charlie’s ass that he pays more attention to us and leaves Four Six alone long enough to get his people reorganized.”

I got back two quick squelches from Parker’s intercom. He understood and was ready.

As I hovered back toward the trail, I hit the intercom again. “If you can definitely identify the enemy and can make a positive shot, fire at will, but don’t hang it out too far. I’m hanging it out far enough for both of us. Here we go!”

I hovered in toward the contact point at a very low airspeed, fish-tailing the boom and rocking the aircraft back and forth as I went. As I figured, the heavy fire was suddenly diverted to us. We began to take hits; we could hear and feel the rounds crashing through the Loach’s skin and passing through the open interior of the ship.

I yelled to Harrell on the FM freq. “I’m trying to draw the fire away from you. Get your people into one area. Get yourself reorganized into a position so we know where you are and can shoot.”

I could see Four Six trying to drag himself along the trail. His RTO, who had also been hit, was crawling slowly behind his platoon leader, painfully trying to keep up.

Still taking intensive enemy fire, I hovered right in over Harrell and looked him square in the face. He was badly hurt. I could see the anguish in his eyes. His left arm and hand looked like punctured raw meat, covered with blood and red dust from the trail.

He let his RTO catch up with him, then grabbed the radio handset. “We’re in deep shit, One Six. I think I’ve got only about twenty men left to hold them off. They’re trying to overrun us. Every time we move, they come at us again.”

I empathized with him, but there still wasn’t a damned thing more I could do. If the enemy had chosen that very moment to overrun our people down there, we couldn’t have fired a single shot for fear of shooting into the midst of our own soldiers.

The stalemate continued for almost another thirty minutes. I would draw away from the trail for a minute or so, then run back in to decoy Charlie’s fire. The ship was taking terrific punishment, but neither Parker nor I had been hit. Somehow, that sturdy little OH-6 just kept on flying.

The time was enough, however, for Harrell to get his people consolidated and organized on the trail. His earlier guess was accurate—he had only about twenty ARPs left to try to keep the enemy at bay.

Suddenly Four Six’s voice boomed into my phones. “Fire’s picking up, One Six. I think they’re pushing… I think they’re coming!”

I looked down. Harrell was standing up in the middle of the trail, pointing his weapon to his southeast and letting go with a full magazine of ammo. All his other ARPs were firing off in the same direction. The lid was obviously coming off.

I yelled at Parker. “Open up. Do what you can… fire at will!”

We found ourselves sitting on top of one of the fiercest firefights I had ever seen. We, of course, couldn’t see the enemy, or whether Parker’s barking 60 was knocking any of them down, but it was obvious that our twenty friendlies were holding off a much larger force… and could be overwhelmed at any second.

Four Six finally got enough of a breather to talk to me again, in a calm but noticeably apprehensive voice. “We got a lot of people down here, One Six. I shit you not, we got a whole lot of people, and they’re trying to flank us. They’re moving off the trail and heading northeast on our flank. My God, there’s a lot of people down here!”

“Four Six, One Six. How many people have you got?”

“More than a hundred,” he answered.

I silently mimicked his, my God! This was the largest concentration of enemy troops we had ever jumped in the field. And here we were not able to shoot at them, not even able to see them as they prowled around in the jungle.

Harrell came back again. “One Six, they’re definitely moving toward the northeast. They’re trying to move around me on my east flank and head on up north. What in the hell is up there that they want to get to so bad?”

While airborne, scouts never had the free hands or time to even look at a map, but Harrell’s question caused me to reach for mine. I cradled the collective on my knee, then reached around with my left hand to pull the chart out of its pocket, located between the two pilot seats. I probably looked like a juggler in his first talent show as I tried to watch where I was going, handle the controls, and spread out the map.

But I managed it, and my eye quickly went to the grid where the ARPs were located on the tank bust trail. Looking north of that point about two hundred yards, I saw a little stream that apparently carried runoff water down south; at that point, the stream ran mostly east and west through some pretty rough terrain. It looked to me as though the stream formed a natural obstacle that the enemy would have to cross in order to escape north to the Michelin.

I decided that was a fine place to throw in some heavy stuff. Even though it was only a couple of hundred yards from our friendlies, we could blow up everything around the stream at that point and contain the enemy’s flight.

I called up the FAC to set the plan in motion. “Sidewinder Two Two, this is Darkhorse One Six. You see where the Little Blue crosses through that low area just north of the ARPs about two hundred yards?”

He answered in his now-familiar Aussie twang. “Roger, One Six. I got it.”

“OK, then,” I continued, “I’ve got heavy enemy troops moving that way from the south, probably a hundred or more on the run, trying to flank our friendlies and didi to the rubber. You work up your first set of fast movers and I’ll make one pass over and give you a smoke.”

Sidewinder rogered, and I headed into a big sweeping right turn over the area just south of the streambed. As I looked down, I saw whole groups of underbrush and bushes, but they were moving! The “bushes” were, in fact, enemy soldiers with camouflage capes across their backs. They were obviously the lead element of enemy troops who had flanked Harrell’s ARPs.

No wonder Four Six had his hands full. His little unit of twenty riflemen was all that stood between what must have been a battalion of bad guys and their otherwise open and clear flight path.

As I passed low over the stream, I yelled to Parker. “Smoke… drop the smoke… now!” and the red smoke canister was on its way.

I keyed Sidewinder. “Hit the smoke… red smoke is out. Enemy troops are moving north-northeast.”

Sidewinder came right back. “Negative smoke… negative smoke!”

I jerked my head around and looked back. Damn. Parker’s grenade had dropped in the stream and gone out.

We were catching it from below, taking hit after hit in the aircraft. But there was nothing left to do but pull around and make another run over the stream to put down a good mark for Sidewinder.

This time Parker dropped two grenades to avoid a repeat of the problem. He let the spoons fly and both grenades popped in his hands before he dropped them. Parker’s gloves protected his hands as the smoke poured from the ports at the bottom of the canister. Red smoke billowed up at us as we hightailed it back toward the ARP’s position.

We stayed down as low as we could, fairly brushing the treetops. I felt myself sucking down into the armor plate and tried to keep my pucker factor from totally eating the seat cushion.

Sidewinder’s voice popped back into my phones. “OK, Darkhorse, we’ve got your marker. Get yourself clear. We’re inbound with high-drag snake and nape.”

As I pulled back in over the ARPs, the whole northern area exploded into great balls of black smoke and fire. Sidewinder’s fast movers had just hung a detour sign on Charlie’s back door escape route.

Through the roar of explosions I suddenly heard the troop commander’s voice over VHF, advising us that he was overhead in his command Huey, and that we’d soon have a supporting infantry company on the scene. The plan was to put about 150 troops on the ground, on the backside of the ARPs, engage the enemy soldiers that had flanked the ARP position, then drive the bad guys back toward their base camp.

About eight minutes later a flight of ten Hueys flew in. They descended below the tree line to my north, then took off again, apparently heading back to Dau Tieng for another load of friendlies.

Moments later, the Cobra broke in on FM. “OK, Four Six, get your heads down. Inserted unit reports fifty to seventy-five, possibly one hundred enemy troops coming your way. They have engaged and turned them around. They’re now headed back toward your position on the way into their base area. They’re comin’ fast!”

I could tell that Harrell had read the Cobra’s warning. He was crawling around to his men, checking their ammo and trying to get them better positioned to fight off the next onslaught.

The jungle below me literally exploded again with heavy firing. As predicted, the enemy soldiers were rushing back down the tank bust

in full retreat, apparently determined to take down everything that stood in their way.

The ARPs opened up with blistering fire. The enemy surged ahead, The battle became head-to-head and nearly hand-to-hand before the surge of oncoming soldiers veered off the trail to the east, trying to bypass the merciless fire of Harrell’s aeroriflemen.

Their move off to Four Six’s flank gave me the room I needed to shoot. I dropped down to a hover over Harrell, dumped the nose, and took aim over the heads of the ARPs, pulling the minigun trigger back to the four-thousand-rounds-a-minute stop. Kicking left and right pedals, I hosed out everything I had into the tree line. Parker was leaning out of the right side, spraying down the running enemy soldiers with 7.62.

I suddenly went dry on the minigun. Parker, just seconds later, went dry on the M-60. We had thrown everything we had at them, except for Parker’s backup. In desperation, he reached back for his “Thumper” and started pumping out M-79 40mm rounds, followed by a full thirty-round magazine out of his “stowed for last resort” M-16.

As abruptly as the furor had started, it ended. There was almost dead silence, except for the whirring sound of my rotors.

I maneuvered back over the ARP’s position, about twenty feet off the ground, and looked down at Harrell. He was sitting on the ground, still without his steel helmet, legs stretched out in front of him. His bleeding, grimy left arm was cradled in his lap and his jungle fatigues were black with sweat. The bolt of his still-smoking CAR-15 was in the open position, indicating that he had expended his last round and was on an empty ammo magazine.

I could hardly tell if he was dead or alive, until he finally turned his sweat-drenched face up toward me. Through his pain and exhaustion, he managed a grin.

As I smiled and waved back, he reached over to his RTO and picked up his radio mike. He looked back up at me and flashed another big, toothy grin. “Goddamnit, One Six, I think we won!”