by Dennis Foley
Mike had often asked Hollister to come along on a gun run to test-fire weapons systems. But Hollister had repeatedly dodged the invitation, from a need to stay ignorant about how accurate or inaccurate the gunships were; not wanting to know if the gunships were not surgically accurate.
Hollister had called on Iron Mike on several occasions to walk minigun and 40mm grenade fire to within twenty meters of his position. Iron Mike never hesitated and he never missed. Hollister wanted to keep thinking that Iron Mike was just that good and that the high-speed gun platforms were just that stable.
The six choppers started to bleed off altitude as they approached the landing zone. The door gunner looked over to see if Hollister knew they were approaching the crash site. Hollister nodded, refolded his map in its plastic map case and shoved it down into the cargo pocket on the side of his trouser leg. He then grabbed onto the door frame, leaned out and looked forward and down. The objective area was covered with two-story-high nipa palms and thick bamboo surrounding a crescent-shaped landing zone just a hundred meters long. The LZ was covered with chest-high elephant grass and small clumps of new tree growth. It looked frightening at night.
No one needed to pass the word to the others. They were aware of the slight change in altitude that told them they were on final approach. They watched as the gunships peeled off to line up on the two long sides of the dogleg LZ.
The patrol members moved left and right, up to the edge of the doors. And each man made a final equipment check.
To help conceal the aircraft in the jet-black sky, the pilot had turned off all nonessential navigation lights.
Hollister looked around to see if everyone was ready, tapping a few to make sure that he had eye contact. Distinguishing the team members was hampered by the stripes of green, black, and loam camouflage stick that covered their hands, faces, and necks.
Everyone was ready except Theodore, who was asleep against the bulkhead, his weapon across his lap. It wasn’t uncommon for fear to show itself in drowsiness.
Reaching out, Hollister touched Theodore on the knee. He instantly awoke, pretending that he had not been dozing.
“We’re almost at the office. Time to go to work,” Hollister yelled.
Theodore smiled back at Hollister. It was his first rescue mission; he was cotton-mouthed and had difficulty swallowing. Topping it off, the fading pain and dullness of his hangover didn’t improve things.
Hollister reminded himself to keep an eye on Theodore before he made one last check of the others. He knew Theodore suffered from a lack of confidence and that he would have to work on him.
They were getting close. Hollister leaned back out and got a fix on Allard’s chopper. He then looked down again—for any sign of ground activity—then leaned back in and looked at the instruments. The compass direction was zero eight five—just what he thought it was. He wanted a feel for his orientation once he got out of the chopper. And the chopper’s compass was much better than pulling out his own and trying to read it.
The door gunners picked out likely enemy positions, aimed at them until they were sure that they were dry holes, and then picked out newer, more threatening ones to aim at.
Hollister looked out again. If there was any small arms fire coming from the ground, it would be the door gunners who would be first to see it and return fire. If the machine guns were silent, then they were probably not being fired upon. That was momentarily reassuring. Then Hollister remembered that the Viet Cong might be holding their fire until the choppers dropped off the patrol. Then they could put more accurate grazing fire across the landing zone to cut the patrol down before they got to the trees.
Getting closer, Hollister raised his rifle, pulled the charging handle back, then let it slam forward to chamber a round. He yelled, “Lock and load!” as the treetops reached up to skid level.
The others flipped their safety selectors off safe and raised their weapons to a ready position.
“Remember, move steady, but fast!” Hollister cautioned them. “But don’t kill yourself tripping up in the grass!”
Not everyone got every word over the shrill screaming of the chopper, but they got enough to smile back at Hollister and give him a nod of acknowledgment or a thumbs-up.
The two gunships circled the troop ships in opposing directions while the three Hueys descended in trail formation on short final approach. As the slicks broke over the leading edge of the LZ, the C&C chopper slowed, holding high and short of the LZ, and the chase ship pulled up short behind the two insert ships.
By the time the lead ship crossed over the margin from trees to grass, the team members were all standing on the skids.
The choppers kept losing altitude. Finally they flared—nose high to burn off forward airspeed. Inside, every man stopped breathing. It wasn’t intentional, just some primal defense mechanism triggering the reaction.
A decisive moment was coming up, a window of time when Hollister and the others no longer had any control over their destiny. If they were going to get blown away on landing—well, it was just going to happen. That was totally out of their control. They were completely vulnerable, and nothing would change that.
LRPs felt that when they ran across the landing zone after touching down, there was always a chance to cheat death if they made the right zigs and zags. But they didn’t feel the same way when they were passengers in a slowing helicopter that quickly becomes an easy and defenseless target.
The sensation always gave way to a What the fuck? attitude and a very strong desire to get out of the chopper onto the landing zone and back on the ground, where each man felt he had some control.
The team members watched the tree lines and stole frequent glances at Hollister. If he went, they went. If he signaled to wave off, the chopper would abort the landing, pull out and go around.
It put a lot of pressure on Hollister to size up the ground situation based on a quick look out into the black, without his sense of sound to help him. He had to rely on a seat-of-the-pants feeling he had for things that he couldn’t see.
They all waited for Hollister to make the move. No one wanted to get out of the chopper only to find out that the LZ was crawling with VC and that Hollister had aborted, leaving the eager soldier on the LZ alone.
Suddenly, time and events seemed to speed up to a surrealistic pace. The relative peace and quiet of the flight to the LZ was behind them. The ground seemed to leap up at them. The insert ship hit the grassy field, bounced, rocked a bit while overcoming its own momentum, and slid forward on its skids.
Hollister had seen nothing to stop them and couldn’t wait any longer to make the decision. He jumped from the chopper, leading some, and yelled out to the others, “Go! Go! Go!”
As soon as he was on the ground, he took two long strides and looked back to the right rear of his chopper. Allard’s ship had landed and his team started to spill out.
The chase ship crept up above the insert choppers, kept going, passing over the top of the two on the ground. It then corkscrewed up and to the right to clear the gunships that were still low-level prowling the tree lines.
In less than a second the first man was out from under the main rotor blades of Hollister’s ship and the C&C ship passed over the LZ, broke right shuddering and popping, and joined the orbiting track of the chase ship.
With the last man out of each insert ship, all four pilots pushed forward on their cyclics and sucked the matching collectives up under their sweat-stained armpits as they snapped the choppers forward, up and out of the landing zone.
Having both pilots, in each ship, handle the controls provided a safety redundancy. If the aircraft commander took a hit, the co-pilot would already be on the controls and could take command of the ship.
From a distance it appeared as if the choppers only touched the grass, spit out the patrol, and rocketed back into the sky. Every move was coordinated to eliminate any delays. Making it smooth was what the pilots, LRPs, and air crews practiced over and over again.
The actual LZ was no place for on-the-job training.
Bent over as they ran, most of the team members lost contact with each other as soon as they stepped out into the head-high grass and darkness. The only noise they made was their labored breathing and the zipping sounds from the canvas tops on their jungle boots and the fabric of their trousers rubbing against the elephant grass.
The choppers gone, the patrol moved to a predesignated point in the tree line. Without the screaming turbine engines, they could finally hear if they were being fired upon or not.
Hollister looked around at the edge of the landing zone and tried to pick out the ten other members of the patrol. Closing on Hollister, each patrol member dropped to the ground, orienting on his sector of responsibility. They held their breath, scanned the darkness and listened as they searched for any threat.
There was a distant sound, they thought. They all listened for it again. But there was nothing. They strained to hear something—anything that would confirm the identity of the noise. If it was a noise—but it wasn’t followed by another one.
For them any noise was important. It could be a villager, an animal, a Viet Cong soldier, or a wooden ox bell. Even the absence of noise in an area where they should hear something was a critical bit of information. But squatting on the edge of the LZ, there was only the sound of the night creatures in blended harmony.
Hollister was finally convinced that the landing zone was cold. He snapped his fingers and made an exaggerated gesture in the direction of movement. The flanking soldiers passed on the signal and the patrol moved out at a crouch, deeper into the margins of the dense tree line.
Once inside a large stand of tall bamboo, they stopped again, dropped to one knee and alternately faced out. Again they froze. Again they waited for a sound. And again—nothing.
Hollister didn’t want to linger. He picked up a small pebble and pitched it over Davis’s body, where it struck Camacho on the leg.
Camacho looked back, made out Hollister—understood his message and gave a thumbs-up. He pulled his compass off the loop on his web gear, near his neck, and leveled it. The dial settled, he found the azimuth he had marked with the luminous line on the rotating bezel and followed it to a point on the horizon with his eyes. Satisfied that he had a unique reference point, he stood up and moved out. Each member, in turn, got to his feet and followed the man in front of him.
As they moved, Hollister looked around to make a quick check on the interval between soldiers. They walked silently and efficiently through the random pattern of trees, bushes, and impenetrable clumps of bamboo. Their footing was sure, steady and silent. It was obvious to Hollister that not one of the men was thinking about anything but what he was doing. It was the only reassuring thing about the patrol for him.
It wasn’t that way in the rifle platoon that he had spent the first half of his tour with. In a rifle platoon there was always a mistaken sense of security in numbers. Anytime a maneuver unit reached over twenty-five, there was an increase in daydreaming which was accompanied by a drop in security. Somehow, they felt that whatever needed to be done to secure the movement of the platoon was being taken care of by the others.
Hollister’s gaze moved back up to the front of the file. Camacho was the most skilled point man in the detachment. Newly assigned LRPs would be sent by their team leaders to spend time with Camacho. Except for the medics, everyone on a team walked point at one time or another. In some teams the job of walking point stayed with one man; a permanent volunteer point man was rarely a cause of complaints within the teams.
Camacho and Hollister had talked over the route to the downed Air Force spotter plane back in Operations—giving Camacho his lead on the move from the LZ. There was no time for them to stop and talk about the little decisions that had to be made on the move. It was up to Camacho to decide which route to take when the brush demanded decisions and offered him options. Time was so important that they would sacrifice some of the security that normally came with cautious movement. So, Camacho would pick the faster route over the safer one. That was one of the reasons that the patrol went out heavy-reinforced by Allard’s team.
Camacho made his decisions based on what he could see—and his instinct. He wouldn’t cross open space that would silhouette the patrol against the skyline, making it an easy target. So, he had to make a call each time he found one—left or right? He wouldn’t choose a route that would take the patrol down to lower ground or one that had water or serious mud along the way. He wanted a path that would place the patrol on equal or higher ground than any potential attacker—a route that was dry, level, clear enough to walk through, and covered with enough growth to conceal their movement. And if he was real lucky, it wouldn’t be covered with dead bamboo.
Bamboo was always a problem. New, live bamboo was fairly easy to deal with. It gave way with little resistance, was quiet and felt smooth to the touch. Old, dead bamboo was the problem. It was brittle, rigid, and still strong.
Most dead bamboo seemed to be on the diagonal—requiring a decision. To go over it was to risk making noise by pressing down on it. To go under it was to risk having equipment catch up on it and hang you up while the man behind freed it.
Sergeant Camacho was an expert at sizing up bamboo that he couldn’t even see. His fingers, toes, and shins would tell him what move would make the least noise and hold him up for the least amount of time. A smart slack man, second in line, would watch Camacho’s moves and copy him. Camacho always said that there were only two serious ways of breaking bush—he preferred the easy way.
Hollister checked his compass while on the move. He knew from the footing that they were heading down the ridge line toward the crash site. Camacho was dead on the route of march they had selected.
As they moved down the hill toward the downed aircraft, Hollister hoped the information they had received was accurate. The chopper crew had seen the aircraft, but there was still a possibility that their coordinates were wrong or it could have been just a piece of the plane that had broken off. If that were the case, they could end up hundreds of meters away from the actual site of the fuselage and any survivors.
What Hollister didn’t want was just to be close. He had to find the exact location. Wandering around in heavy vegetation looking for it could be a world of trouble for his patrol and could mean the life of a surviving pilot.
As Hollister stepped into a small spot, open to the sky, he noticed that his shadow stretched out for several feet. Over his shoulder he saw the full moon climbing out of the horizon—a mixed blessing. The extra illumination would make it a little easier for them to move and, ultimately, to identify the crash site, but it would also make them more visible to the VC. He knew that Camacho would adjust his route of march to take the patrol through more vegetation to break up their outline and help conceal their movement.
Regardless of the moon’s phase, the VC would take advantage of the patrol’s destination to hit them en route. Hollister had to assume that there were VC in the area, that they knew as much as the Americans about the available landing zones and the location of the downed aircraft. And that they had everything near the crash site under observation.
If that wasn’t enough to worry about, if either of the pilots had survived the crash and mistook them for VC, they could be shot by the survivors they were trying to rescue. Of course, there was also the possibility that his own people could mistake the survivors for VC and fire on them.
After about thirty minutes Camacho held up the patrol and called Hollister forward. Camacho pointed ahead and down off the top of the finger they had been contouring. He was pointing to where they had estimated the crash site to be.
Without discussion, Hollister motioned to Doc Norris, walking slack, that he and Camacho were going forward for a quick recon and would be back in five minutes. Doc Norris nodded that he understood and gave a raised-hand, crossed-fingers signal of hope.
Hollister led Camacho through the stand of bamboo that marked the stee
p drop-off to the shallow valley sixty feet below. At the far side of the bamboo Hollister saw that it opened up into a small clearing covered by a twenty-five to thirty-foot canopy. He crawled a little closer and then went completely flat to reduce the likelihood of being seen or hit if shooting started. Satisfied with his observation point, he motioned for Camacho to come forward.
Both of them pulled out binoculars and scanned the open area in front of and below them. Field glasses were useful at night because they weighed little, didn’t require batteries, and concentrated the available light—allowing them a better view of the area.
They scanned the area for several moments, looking carefully for any color, texture, or outline in the dark and mottled clearing that might look like something man-made. To be able to detect even the slightest movement, they moved their points of focus very slowly.
Camacho spotted something. Below them, on the opposite side of the clearing, was the exposed tip of the vertical stabilizer on the crumpled fuselage of the light plane. The aircraft’s outline was completely distorted by the shadows falling on it and the feet that the wings had been sheared off in the crash. They couldn’t see the wings, nor could they tell if there was anyone in the hidden cockpit.
They listened for any sign of life. While they did, Hollister sized up the immediate situation. The plane could be booby-trapped or used as bait. Since the fuselage could only be approached from the clearing, there was no way to conceal the movement of his soldiers approaching it. He would have to set up a security element that could place accurate fire across the clearing in order to protect the others who would move to and search the aircraft.
He knew that it would be tricky and that a long night lay before them. A few more minutes of listening, and then he signaled to Camacho to return to the patrol.
Hollister and Camacho rejoined the patrol, explained the situation and made sure that every man knew what was going on and what was expected of him. But even with the situation clear to all, it still took eighteen minutes to move the patrol into position.
