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“How do you do, sir?” I addressed him.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Cory. Mind if I ride along with you tonight? I have my own helmet and chicken plate.”
Wow. A lieutenant colonel from division intelligence riding along and bringing his own gear. That had never happened before.
“No, sir, glad to have you.”
Interrupting, the brigade S-2 piped up, “Do you mind if I come too?”
“Okay, what’s going on?” I asked.
The lieutenant colonel walked over to the map and motioned me as well as the Cobra pilot and the flare ship AC to follow.
“We need you to fly this route tonight, and keep the shooting to a minimum. We need to start here”—he pointed at a point on the river—“and work our way up to here.”
“Sir, that’s over the Cambodian border. We’ve never even been close to it before. No telling what we’re going to get into. And we’re going to be stretching our fuel going there.”
“Yeah, I know, but when you give us bingo on the fuel, you bring us home and we’ll go from there. We need to recon as much as we can tonight,” he admitted. Translation: You are going to fly your ass off tonight. “Oh, and one other thing. I’d like one of my people to operate the searchlight tonight. Give your crew member a night off. Just don’t bring him tomorrow.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what is he supposed to do tonight if not fly?” I asked, a bit confused.
The S-3 jumped in. “I have a cot for him to sleep on tonight.” I was sensing a setup in the making. This was no last-minute party.
“Okay, sir. Are there any other changes you want to make?” I asked.
All three looked at each other. This was not going to be good. The lieutenant colonel pointed at a spot about five klicks south of the Cambodian border. “When we reach this point, the Cobra and flare ship can’t follow us any further on the route, unless we get in serious trouble.”
“You mean you want me to fly across that border with no air cover and no illumination if I need it.” My voice was slightly strained. Now the truth had come out.
“You’re equipped with a minigun tonight, aren’t you?” asked the lieutenant colonel.
“Yes, sir, but—”
“Well, there you have it. Suppressive fire if you need it. No need to have them tagging along up there. Besides, there may be things that can reach up one thousand feet easily up there,” he concluded. I looked over at the AC for Lobo, and he wasn’t objecting, nor was the AC on the flare ship.
“Okay, sir, what’s the intel on the gooks up this way?” I asked.
He went into a detailed description of enemy forces, to include some suspected radar 23 mm and 37 mm antiaircraft positions, concluding, “We’ll be flying low, below their ability to track us.” Now I understood why no high birds.
The Cobra AC spoke. “Dan, we can’t go up there in that.”
“Yeah, I know, but I sure don’t like going up there without you. Okay, sir, let me brief my crew, and when you’re ready, we’ll take off.”
“I’ll be out shortly.”
As the other ACs and I walked back to the aircraft, we were talking about this crazy mission. We concluded that this wasn’t the ordinary, and something must be up. The division must be getting ready for a major push towards the border. Reaching my aircraft, I sent the searchlight operator up to the TOC after explaining to the crew what was in store for the night. He didn’t feel bad about not going with us. Lovelace and Peters, on the other hand, expressed their opinions about this mission, with comments such as “Oh shit,” “I’m too short for this shit,” and “We’re screwed,” just to name a few. When the lieutenant colonel arrived, they quieted down and became professional again. We cranked and got into the air. My copilot, Grandpa, was on his first Night Hunter mission, so this was also a training mission for him.
“Flying with you, Dan, is making my hair turn gray,” he mumbled.
“Hell, it was already gray when you were born, Grandpa.”
“Hope you brought your own cigarettes this time.” He was not grinning.
We proceeded to the start point. The lieutenant colonel was seated in the center of the cargo area, following our position closely on his map. I was navigating and Grandpa was doing the flying. We normally flew at sixty knots on this mission, but Grandpa was attempting to increase our speed as we moved further north. I had to slow him down. He gave me this look each time as if to say, Are you stinking nuts? Some guys were just not cut out to do this mission. They were usually married men, like Grandpa, with two kids. You had to be a little nuts just to be flying a helicopter in Vietnam. You had to be really nuts to volunteer to fly this kind of mission. You had to be flat-ass insane to fly this particular mission.
As we were moving north on the route the lieutenant colonel had mapped out for us, he was talking with the searchlight operator, but they were keyed to private conversation, so I had no idea what they were saying. The operator would be looking, then turn and say something, and the lieutenant colonel would write on his map. A couple of times he asked us to make a 360-degree turn. I asked if they had something, and the answer would be “No, we just want to have a relook.” The searchlight never came on. In fact, the searchlight never got turned on at all that night on this mission. As we approached the Cambodian border, he was having us fly almost exclusively in 360-degree circles, which didn’t hurt my feelings as it made it much more difficult for a ground shooter to track us. Finally I called “bingo” because of fuel and we headed back. I took the controls as Grandpa had been doing most of the flying for the past hour and a half.
“Hey, Mr. Cory.” The lieutenant colonel had my attention over the intercom.
