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“Come on up, Bill. Hope you brought your own beer. I’m not sharing,” I told him.
“Brought my own. How’s your day?” he asked.
“A lot better than yours, evidently. I understand you and Lou had an active day,” I stated.
“It got a bit tense. Have you seen anything like this since you’ve been here?” he asked.
“Hell no. I only got here a couple of days ahead of you—what, two weeks? And then sat on my ass for a week, waiting to get a check ride,” I said with disappointment in my voice. “I feel like I haven’t done shit here,” I added.
“Well, I hope this isn’t the norm. Lou said it wasn’t.” He took a long pull.
“What happened? Lou didn’t say much when he came in.”
“We had a log mission today, and en route to the battalion, they call us and tell us they have a unit in serious contact and need us there ASAP. When we land, they inform us that the company is in heavy contact, needs an ammo resupply, but they have no LZ. They want us to take it in by sling load! Lou agrees and they get it re
ady.” Pausing, he took another drink.
“When it’s ready, Lou moves over the load and they hook it up and we start up and up and up. The sling is a hundred feet long. When it’s taut, we stop because it’s too heavy and we had a full load of fuel. Lou’s pulling the guts out of the bird, but we aren’t going any higher, so he starts dragging the load over the ground. At first, we’re going so slow with this thing banging along on the ground. Finally we get up enough speed with this anchor that transitional lift kicks in and we start rising. But as we get higher and the load is swinging wildly under us at about a forty-five-degree angle, we can see it swinging past the damn chin bubbles! The aircraft’s getting pulled all over the place, and Lou says to release it. We have got to drop this thing before it drags us down. He can’t, because his electronic release isn’t working. I step on the manual release and it isn’t working either. What the fuck!” He took another drink and pulled out a cigarette.
After a puff, he continued. “This thing isn’t going to release and is only getting worse. Lou finally gets this thing under control, and I still don’t know how he did it.” I made a mental note to ask Lou about this.
Bill continued, “As we get close to the unit, I call for smoke, because at this point I’m only a radio operator with Lou flying. When we see the smoke, we also see that there’s no LZ, not even a bomb crater. As we make our approach, the load is snapping tree limbs and steadies pretty much, which is good, but here we are two hundred feet in the air with this load hanging under us as Lou starts lowering us down to the point where I’m eyeball to eyeball with a damn monkey in the treetop. Lou tells me to release the load, and it ain’t going anywhere. The grunts want to cut the load down on the bottom, but that would leave us with the sling flying up into the main or tail rotor. The gooks have started shooting at us and they’re on my side. I tell Lou and he tells me not to worry, right seaters are expendable! I’m attempting to hide behind my seat and the door gunner, Leonard, is shooting. The solution—the crew chief, Grossman, climbs out and hangs under the aircraft in his monkey harness and cuts the sling with a machete. He’s still hanging there when Lou pulls up and out of there. Lou is putting him in for an Air Medal for Valor. He saved our asses.”
As I took another drink, I told Bill he was lucky he was flying with Lou. I hoped I would be as lucky. I was; I never flew a sling load mission my whole time in-country.
Chapter 14
Night Hunter
The jungle absorbed all light at night. With no major cities, there was no artificial light. What villages there were had little or no electricity, so what light they emitted was minimal. On the other hand, if you saw a light along a river or in the jungle, you found Charlie, because only Charlie used light at night. And we were looking for Charlie.
The mission was unique to the 227th and 229th Aviation Battalions. Each battalion put up a Night Hunter Killer team. The teams had two ways of finding the enemy. A large starlight scope was mounted on top of a searchlight, allowing the operator to see clearly at night, but with a green tinge to everything. Any artificial light, such as a candle, was instantly seen as the starlight scope was very sensitive and powerful. If the operator sighted something, he turned on the searchlight and the gunner sitting next to him engaged with a M2, .50-caliber machine gun. Upon engaging, the flare ship, which was flying at one thousand feet or higher, dropped a one-million-candle-powered flare, and an AH-1G Cobra gunship attacked the target with rockets and 7.62 minigun and/or a 40 mm grenade launcher while the low bird continued to engage the target to cover the Cobra. The second way to find the enemy was for the low bird to fly at sixty knots and only five hundred feet, low and slow to draw fire. If the low bird drew fire, the Cobra immediately engaged, giving the low bird an opportunity to clear the area. This night, I was copiloting the low bird with WO Mike Driscoll as AC. Mike had been in-country for about eight months and normally flew this mission when the unit received it.
Our mission for the night was to recon along the Song Dong Nai River for possible sampans moving supplies south towards Bien Hoa. Our mission brief was conducted at the Brigade TOC in Bien Hoa, followed by Mike conducting a briefing on how we would proceed. Mike had flown this mission for the past two weeks. Generally once the company received the mission, the same crews flew the mission for a month as they would sleep in the day and fly all night, opposite cycle from the rest of the crews. To add a bit more firepower to the low bird, the pilot’s doors had been removed and both pilots had M79 grenade launchers on our laps.
“Dan, be sure that thing’s on safe, and when you fire it, be sure it’s not pointed at anything on this aircraft, such as the rotor blades,” Mike warned me. Two bags of 40 mm grenades were on the back of our chairs in case they were needed. In addition, there was a thermite grenade on the back of the center console, in case the aircraft went down and we had to destroy it and especially the M2 .50-cal machine gun. Charlie would love to get his hands on that weapon.
Flying north out of Bien Hoa, we reached the river and then started following the bank northeast. As we descended from one thousand feet, we lost all reference to a horizon on this moonless overcast night. Damn, it’s dark.
“Flying low-level at night presents its own issues. First, you’re going to lose the horizon the lower you go.” Tell me something I’m not seeing, I thought. “You know the elevation and you know the height of the vegetation, so you continue a slow descent to an altitude that will give you a hundred-foot buffer above the vegetation,” Mike pointed out.
As we descended, I felt like I was going down a well as all references started to disappear into blackness. Just my luck that tonight would be a moonless overcast night. Even our instrument lights were turned down to minimum intensity, but the navigation lights were full bright.
“Why do we have the navigation lights on and the instrument lights so low?” I asked.
“The nav lights are on so Charlie can see us, all the better to shoot at us. The instrument lights are down low, all the better for us to see outside.”
Mike continued our descent and instruction. “As we approach that buffer, you’ll start to see the treetops, and that’s when you continue to descend. But slow it down until you’re about fifty feet above the trees, and then you won’t have a problem seeing the trees.” Damn, he was right! Once we reached fifty feet above the trees, the navigation lights were providing enough ambient light for us to see the tops fairly well even on a night as dark as this one.
“Jones, are you on the scope?” Mike asked the searchlight operator.
“Yes, sir. She’s operating okay. If you want to put us over the river and lower, I can get a look under the trees,” Jones replied. Jones actually worked in the vehicle motor pool as a wheel vehicle mechanic but always volunteered for this mission when it came along. Said it made him feel like he was in the fight.
Lower? Are you shitting me?
Mike slid the aircraft over the river and dropped another fifty feet. We were now flying at sixty knots and about two hundred feet above the river. Trees on the banks were higher than us. An engine failure at this altitude and we were going into the river, which, considering the denseness of the jungle, was a preferable alternative to landing in the jungle. As we continued up the river, Mike was chatting with the Cobra and watching the river. I was watching the shoreline on my side of the aircraft along with the door gunner manning the 7.62 machine gun on the aircraft. We continued for an hour and saw nothing, and we didn’t draw any fire. The return trip was equally uneventful, except I was flying this leg. When we completed the leg, we returned to Bien Hoa for fuel and a powwow between the crews.
Mike laid his map out in the TOC and we huddled around with the intelligence officer from the brigade. Pointing at locations on the map, the S-2 indicated possible enemy locations off the river but close by. “We have a trail network in this area, all moving towards the river, with a crossing point here, here and here. Since last night, Mr. Driscoll, First of the Seventh found another crossing point north of their location about here.” I had done a couple of days resupplying First of the Seventh and was somewhat familiar with the area. They were located on a firebase at a bend in a smaller river that fed into the Song Dong Nai. We hadn’t gone into their area as of yet tonight.
