A Shau Valor

by Thomas R. Yarborough

  Whether teams in the A Shau were compromised or remained undetected, they all enjoyed the privilege of serving under one of Detachment B-52’s legendary commanders, Major Charles A. Allen. A huge SF trooper weighing in at 250 pounds with the build of an NFL linebacker, Chuck Allen loved his men, but the mission always came first. He instilled that same attitude in the members of Project Delta, and because of his physical stature, most Delta men simply referred to their boss by his radio call sign: Bruiser. There was one exception; General Westmoreland always called him “Big Un.” Before joining the Army, Bruiser had played a little semipro football and worked as a bouncer in a few bars. His career in the military hit a snag in no less a place than the office of the 82nd Airborne Division commander at Fort Bragg. According to various accounts, the higher ups attempted to put pressure on Allen to play Service League football. When he refused and turned to leave the commander’s office, a colonel blocked his exit and placed his hand on Allen’s chest to stop him. Chuck Allen’s maverick legend started right there when he cold cocked the colonel. Some claim that the episode was the reason the big man remained a captain for 12 years.

  As head of Delta, Bruiser was a no-nonsense sort of guy, but one with a slightly irreverent demeanor who commanded the undivided loyalty of his clannish, unconventional warriors. They came to love his lopsided grin, his chipped front tooth, the perpetual gleam in his eyes, and the sight of the “Big Un” wearing his tiger-striped fatigues. But most of all the men of Project Delta came to genuinely admire the man who led them from out front, personally taking charge of every insertion/extraction by flying over 1,500 missions in his command and control helicopter. All his men smiled broadly when they recounted stories about their leader, especially the occasion when a young, newly assigned officer radioed Bruiser circling overhead and requested an extraction because he had inadvertently left his weapon on the chopper during the insertion. The answer the young officer received was classic Chuck Allen: “Cut a fucking spear and continue the mission.”17

  By May 4, Delta had inserted 12 teams into the A Shau. That same afternoon Roadrunner Team 8 detected two persistent enemy tracking squads about 75 meters to its rear. When a blocking squad moved to the team’s front, the leader requested and received the help of gunships from the 281st “Intruders.” All through the ensuing extraction the nimble gunships suppressed heavy enemy fire with the lethal placement of 2.75-inch high explosive (HE) rockets and machine gun fire within mere meters of the friendlies. During the operation a Marine F-8 from Da Nang ran afoul of the formidable network of triple A positions along the valley’s west wall and was shot down. The pilot, Major Edward F. Townley, ejected and was rescued by a 281st AHC Huey and a Delta FAC.18

  For SFC Robbie Robinette, multiple missions into the Valley of Death went with the territory and the job, but his adventures with a brand new recon team leader tested his mettle. In a demonstration of excellent judgment, the young lieutenant from the tiny town of Speed, NC, decided to run his first mission with Robbie Robinette as his assistant. Primarily he chose Robbie because he was a veteran of many Delta missions, but the second reason was much more personal. At six feet five inches tall, the big lieutenant wanted a strapping, powerful man like Robinette who was strong enough to carry him in case he was wounded.

  The team inserted at last light on the east wall of the A Shau opposite the abandoned Special Forces camp at A Luoi. As they jumped free of the helicopter, the flat crack of small arms fire greeted them from a tree line about 200 meters down the slope to their left. As the lieutenant led his team in a dead run into the tall elephant grass, one of the LLDB troopers began to cough loudly, while just below them the NVA pursuers shouted back and forth and began shining flashlights into the approaching darkness. In an effort to throw off the enemy, the team changed directions several times and even reversed course and moved back down the steep slope. Finally, masked by the total darkness, the team once again climbed up the slope and away from the agitated enemy voices. After running for what seemed like hours, the team finally fell exhausted into a thick clump of bushes. As they lay there gasping for breath, the LLDB trooper continued his noisy cough. The lieutenant grabbed the Vietnamese lieutenant’s arm and said, “If you don’t keep him quiet, he’ll get us all killed.”

  The Delta recon team evaded throughout the next day with the NVA in hot pursuit; the soldier almost never stopped coughing. By sunset of the second night they were already completely out of water and beginning to feel the effects. Their tongues became sticky and swollen, yet the ARVN soldier kept right on hacking. After a sleepless night, as they saddled up to move out at dawn, the lieutenant and Robinette realized that the coughing had stopped. On inspection, the reason quickly became obvious. Sometime during the night the Vietnamese lieutenant had either strangled or smothered the man, an act that was grisly but necessary.

  After evading all through the second day without water, the team’s physical condition deteriorated rapidly as severe dehydration set in. Their skin began to shrivel while each man experienced intermittent dizziness and confusion. As they doggedly continued to move, the team stumbled across an NVA base camp with rows of neatly placed pith helmets on the ground next to small cooking fires. It appeared to be a bivouac area for at least a battalion, and the owners of those helmets had to be close by.

  As the team cautiously moved away from the camp, the lieutenant suddenly heard a rustling noise in the brush directly ahead. There in front of him was a huge tiger not ten feet away. The big cat dropped to a crouch, its ears back and its striped tail swishing nervously. After a few agonizingly long seconds of ocular sparing, the tiger snorted and moved off in another direction. Still unnerved from the encounter with the tiger, the team had not moved more than 50 meters when there was a loud crashing sound overhead. Instinctively putting his CAR-15 selector switch to auto, the tall lieutenant anxiously looked up to see a large, furry animal swing through the tree branches. “What the hell was that?” he whispered to Robinette.

  “Beats the shit outta me, sir. Orangutan maybe,” he said with a weak grin.

  On a high ridge near a clearing the exhausted and desperately thirsty team flopped to the ground. They had finally reached the breaking point. At that exact moment thunder rumbled and rain began to pelt down through the jungle canopy. They rolled their ponchos into makeshift funnels and caught enough rain to fill their canteens.

  That third night the team rigged an antenna wire and tapped out a brief message in Morse code pinpointing the location of the NVA base camp and arranging for a helicopter extraction. It took most of the next morning to reach the LZ, a small clear area not large enough for a Huey to land. When he at last heard the wop-wop-wop of the approaching Huey, the team leader talked the bird into his location. At that point the daring pilot extended his winch cable to its full 165-foot length, went into an incredibly vulnerable hover, and began hoisting the Delta team aboard using a jungle penetrator, a metal, bullet-shaped steel contraption with three spring loaded fold-down seats, each big enough for one person to straddle. Just as the team leader, the last on the ground, grabbed the jungle penetrator for his ride to salvation, blasts from multiple AK-47s ripped through the foliage around him. As green tracers zipped by, the lieutenant just managed to grab the chopper’s right landing skid and hang on for dear life. Half way back to the FOB the crew chief finally hauled the lanky team leader inside.19

  The lieutenant who had just survived his first mission in the Valley of Death as a Project Delta team leader was none other than Henry “Hugh” Shelton, a future four-star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Just like young Colin Powell four years earlier, Hugh Shelton’s baptism of fire took place in the A Shau Valley.

  During Operation Pirous, Delta’s harrowing intrusion into the A Shau confirmed at least two undeniable trends. First, the place was crawling with bad guys. It became painfully obvious that team firefights were not just against a few NVA trackers or LZ watchers. Rather, the frequent and deadly encounters
often involved entire companies of well-armed and disciplined enemy soldiers bent on wiping out Delta teams. The second trend was equally disturbing. NVA antiaircraft units had deployed automatic weapons around all likely LZs, and therefore took a terrible toll on the helicopters of the 281st Assault Helicopter Company. Between April 27 to May 14, enemy gunners shot down four helicopters supporting Delta and damaged twice that many. In spite of the high risk to the choppers, to a man the Delta teams knew that during an emergency extraction the 281st AHC aircrews would either rescue them or die trying. This was indeed a brotherhood of warriors.

  Although many Delta missions in other areas of South Vietnam went undetected, that scenario did not hold true for Operation Pirous. The battle on May 14 in the southeast corner of the A Shau characterized the unique dangers faced by both recon teams and the helicopters that supported them while operating in a North Vietnamese-controlled sanctuary. Sergeant First Class Joseph M. Markham’s adventures on that date proved to be typical.

  Late on the afternoon of the 14th, Recon Team 1 attempted infiltration near the village of Be Luong. As the Huey approached the LZ flying at 75 feet above the ground, it encountered a heavy volume of automatic weapons fire from several .51 cal machine guns. The 281st AHC bird received a number of hits causing it to lose oil pressure completely, but the pilot managed to keep the aircraft flying long enough to make a controlled crash-landing. SFC Markham’s recovery helicopter quickly descended into the intense fusillade and picked up the crew and a portion of the team. When he realized that the aircraft was overloaded, Markham voluntarily jumped 15 feet to the ground to lighten the load. He found three members of Recon Team 1, organized a hasty defense, and began returning fire. During the fight, as Markham guided another recovery helicopter into his position, enemy gunners blasted the bird, causing it to crash near the first downed Huey. In spite of the intense and highly accurate small arms fire, SFC Markham led his men across open ground to the crash site and pulled the crew from the wreckage. He then contacted the Delta FAC and coordinated suppressing fire from several Intruder gunships, two F-4s, and an orbiting Spooky gunship. When a third recovery helicopter arrived, Markham remained on the ground alone holding off the advancing enemy soldiers while the crew and remaining team members scrambled up the rope ladder dangling beneath the hovering Huey. Only when they were safely aboard did Joe Markham grab the rope ladder and signal the pilot to depart while he was still climbing the swaying ladder, all the while taking fire from every NVA soldier in the immediate area. For his gallant actions, Sergeant First Class Joseph M. Markham was awarded the Silver Star.20

  Around the hot LZs in the A Shau, extractions under fire were the rule rather than the exception, and the Delta teams literally owed their very lives to the unwavering valor of the crews from the 281st Assault Helicopter Company. Arguably the best tribute to the Intruders was written by longtime Delta recon team leader Don Taylor about a spectacular rescue in the A Shau. Here is the story in his own words about two old friends he had first met at Fort Bragg in 1963:

  Probably the greatest bit of flying expertise of the Vietnam War was when CWO-2 Donald Torrini, a 281st pilot, pulled Jerry L. Nelson out of the A Shau Valley. It is highly doubtful that if any helicopter unit other than the 281st had supported the Project during that deployment, a pilot would have gone to such an extreme effort to extract a recon team from what had appeared to be a hopeless situation.

  Jerry had been inserted with his six man recon team to “snatch” a POW, and on the second day in, he saw an opportunity to do so. He had observed two and three man groups of NVA moving down a trail in one or two hour intervals and had decided to go for it. He selected a good ambush site beside the trail and moved his team into position to ambush the next group that came along.

  However, the next group to come down the trail was a 15-man point element of a much larger NVA unit, and after a brief interval of the customary claymore popping, shooting, stabbing, kicking, and grenade chunking, Jerry had destroyed the point element and had his POW. Jerry’s POW snatch technique was simply to try his level best to kill everyone in the kill zone and then look for a survivor; somehow, there always was at least one.

  But now, Jerry had a company plus of pissed off NVA after him, as he dragged his badly wounded POW toward his extraction LZ. As luck would have it, Jerry found his route blocked by a flanking NVA element, while the main NVA element pushed him towards the river and away from his LZ.

  When Jerry arrived at the river, he found himself facing a 75-meter wide river too deep to ford, too swift to swim with gear and surrounded by triple canopy too thick and too high for either ladder or McGuire rig extraction. Near the river, the canopy thinned just enough for Jerry to obtain a “shiny” [signal mirror] fix from Sheriff [FAC call-sign], and an extraction helicopter flown by Torrini, already on station, immediately descended into the trees to recover Jerry and his team. Torrini attempted to chop the treetops out with his rotor blades in order to get down low enough, but he failed.

  By this time, Jerry was in a fierce firefight to his front, most of his team was wounded, his back was to the river, extraction appeared to be impossible, and the enemy was too close to effectively use TAC air support. All seemed to be hopeless for Jerry and his team, but Torrini had not given up.

  While Torrini had hovered high over Jerry’s position trying to get down low enough to extract him, he had noticed that the trees, though thick along the river bank, only hung over the river and there was space enough under the tree branches and along the surface of the river for his helicopter to narrowly fit. Torrini flew up and down the river looking for a hole in the tree canopy over the river large enough for his helicopter to drop into until he finally found one about 500 meters down river from Jerry, and he dropped into it. Torrini put his skids in the water and flew his ship up river and under the overhanging tree branches, with his rotor blades, at times, only clearing the branches above by a few feet.

  Jerry could not believe his eyes when the helicopter suddenly appeared behind him in the river, with its skids completely submerged, its troop deck awash in the swiftly moving water, and the M-60 delivering over-head fire into enemy positions to his front. Torrini moved his helicopter as close to Jerry’s team as possible, and with the rotor blade tips chewing into the bark of the tree trunks along the river bank, and the door gunner’s M-60 firing closely over their heads, Jerry swam his team, with POW, the short distance out to and into the waiting helicopter.

  But now there was another problem to deal with; there was not enough room to turn the helicopter around, and Torrini would have to back the helicopter out in reverse hover to return to the hole in the canopy that he had previously entered. As the gunships made repeated runs down each side, Torrini slowly backed his helicopter down the river.

  All along the way, the NVA continued to appear on the river-bank and were met by fire from the door gunners and from Jerry’s team. By the time the helicopter finally reached the hole in the canopy and Torrini lifted them up and out of the river, both door gunners and Jerry’s team had expended all of their ammo.

  The helicopter was so badly shot up and the rotor blades, transmission, and engine were so badly damaged from tree strikes and enemy fire that Torrini determined that it probably would not make it back to Phu Bai. So he sat his faithful helicopter down in a clearing, transferred his crew and Jerry’s team to other helicopters, and the brave little bird was destroyed in place; it was the only U.S. casualty of the day.21

  For his conspicuous gallantry in the remarkable rescue of the recon team, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Donald G. Torrini was recommended for the Medal of Honor. The award was subsequently downgraded, and he received the Silver Star.

  Of all the teams put on the ground during Operation Pirous, perhaps the most costly engagement for both Delta and their supporting helicopters occurred between May 21 and May 23. During the attempted extraction of Roadrunner Team 107, enemy gunners zeroed in on a 281st recovery Huey flown by a veteran Intruder pilot.
As he slowed to a hover, the pilot suffered a head wound and the recovery NCO was hit in the arm by shrapnel from the shattered instrument panel. The damaged bird managed to limp out of the area and return to Phu Bai. On the second recovery attempt, a 281st AHC gunship was shot down by heavy small arms and automatic weapons fire. The aircraft crashed on a very high ridge along the west wall of the A Shau; on impact it rolled into a ravine and burst into flames. Observers doubted that anyone had survived.

  While an Air Force HH-3 Jolly Green helicopter extracted Roadrunner Team 107, a Marine CH-46 from the 1st MAW located a crash survivor, Crew Chief Craig Szwed, and lifted him to safety. He was convinced the other crewmembers died in the violent crash. However, several hours later, orbiting aircraft spotted signals from possible survivors. When a 281st recovery chopper approached the area and began to hover ten feet off the ground, it was hit by a heavy volume of enemy fire, killing the left door gunner.

  At first light on May 22, the command and control chopper spotted signals from two possible crash survivors, and Ranger Company 1 was inserted under fire to search for the two crewmembers. One of the CH-46s exchanged bursts with a .51 cal position with one enemy killed, but a stream of green tracers hit the Sea Knight’s rear engine, causing it to crash on the LZ. Fortunately, a second CH-46 immediately rescued the crew. On the ground the ranger company located a very lucky door gunner, Specialist 4th Gary D. Hall, and had him extracted. The rangers then moved on, searching for the two remaining crewmembers.