19 Minutes to Live - Helicopter Combat in Vietnam

by Lew Jennings

  “One other thought, since all the while that I was getting ready to wage war, those GBOFs were streaming by both sides of our cockpit at a fairly constant rate. The Scout, bless his little heart, was conducting an excellent screening action for my Cobra, and maybe even for Assault 26 somewhere behind me. I doubt that I actually thought that thought that day, but just wanted to mention it, just in case, in the interest of total transparency.”

  “16, BREAK RIGHT!” I yelled into my helmet mic with the VHF keyed for transmit. Normally, I’d be the gold standard for the calm, cool, collected, suave and ‘dee-boner’ (Pilot speak for debonair) attack helicopter Pilot, but the proximity of the GBOFs and the lack of a reaction from the Scout and my frustration about being ready, but not being able to return fire, were combining together in my cockpit that day to cause me to get a bit anxious. The clock was ticking and we were closing the range to the target, a fact that must be making the gunner of that anti-aircraft weapon grin.”

  “It got worse. Assault 16 did not move. Nothing! Not even a wiggle. And as if he was the ‘Man of Steel’, he was still flying straight and level pointed at the flashes on the ridgeline, the flashes that were at the point of convergence for all trajectories being burned across the sky by the unceasing stream of GBOFs.”

  “16, BREAK RIGHT! BREAK RIGHT!” “Again, I ‘coached’ the Scout to dive off to the right so that I could press my thumb down on the LRB, the little red button on the left side of my cyclic control head, and send pair after pair of 2.75 inch rockets screaming out of my rocket pods to follow the stream of green fire balls down to the anti-aircraft machine gun. Let the man with the bigger balls win!”

  “Assault 16 just wasn’t getting it! He didn’t break right. He just kept on driving straight ahead, getting closer and closer to the ridgeline.”

  “My right thumb rested on my LRB. My front seat kept flexing his turret. I could hear it slew, probably adjusting his sight’s alignment on where he wanted his rounds to impact once the Scout got out of the way. Every time he shifted his sighting reticle in azimuth or elevation, his electro-hydraulic turret followed the shifts, carrying the mini-gun and the grenade launcher to new fire control solutions for the sight-defined gun-target line. We were both anxious to ‘let loose the dogs of war’.”

  “Suddenly, the Scout’s left skid tube rose as the fuselage of the OH-6A rotated to the right, slightly, enough to convince my hair trigger mind that he was at last breaking right and that if I fired now, by the time my rockets got to the airspace that he was occupying at present, he would be gone, and the rockets would have an unimpeded route of flight direct to their target.”

  “That was the plan, formed in an instant, executed even more quickly. So, I pressed the firing button. All systems were GO ‼ And they WENT‼ Two OD painted, M229 17-pound HE warheads riding on their long white Mk40 rocket motor steeds at 2,200 feet per second. Blazing hot, orange-yellow flames streamed out of the rocket motor’s exhaust nozzles, four scarfed tubes designed to impart a slow, stability-augmenting spin to the rockets, the projectiles zooming forward at twice the speed of sound. As the rockets left their tubes, four metal fins swung out from their previously folded positions at the ends of the motors and deployed into the air stream, exerting their critical influence on flight stability and ultimate accuracy.”

  “At last we had steel in the air and they were flying straight, true and hot!”

  “Then Assault 16’s left skid came back down.”

  “The fuselage rolled back to the left and leveled again.”

  “The OH-6A was not going anywhere. Assault 16 was still flying straight and level. He must have been leaning to the right. Maybe he looked out of his empty doorway and unintentionally moved his cyclic to the right as he scanned the terrain below him.”

  “Whatever, he was dead ahead and so were my rockets, both of them!”

  “Time stopped and the angels prayed.”

  “Time started again, but at quarter speed, and I watched, with my heart trying to decide whether or not to beat again. Without blinking, I stared ahead while first the left-hand rocket and then the right-hand rocket flew past the OH-6A, at the same altitude, even-steven, a mere couple of feet to the left and to the right of the helicopter’s thin skin, and then they were gone, flying on to their target, lost to my view because of the God-blessed crew and their flying machine still sitting smack-dab in front of me, now obscuring my view of the ridgeline flashes that continued to spew GBOFs at us.”

  “I switched my SDP radio selector to the numeral two so that I could attempt to contact Assault 16 over the UHF radio, pushed my Chinese hat forward again, keying the UHF radio for my transmission, and repeated my previous direction to break right. The urgency was past as far as my rockets were concerned. He had ‘cheated death’ in that regard, but the GBOFs were still in the air and I still had a burning need to launch more of my rocket load. Plus my front seat was chomping at the bit to put his mini-gun to use, at its full 4000 shots per minute potential. I wasn’t even thinking about Assault 26 somewhere behind me. I am sure he was trying to position himself for a gun run as well, his weapons HOT and his thumb stroking the firing button.”

  “Just as I was transmitting my message, unmistakably now a command, or maybe it was a plea, the OH-6A rolled hard right, extremely hard right, almost over-onto-his-back hard right, and dove down and to the right, finally and completely out of the way!”

  “Rockets on the way? I may have transmitted the an-nouncement to the world, or at least that part of it to whoever were monitoring our UHF frequency right then”

  “Seeing that the first pair had struck the ridgeline, but down and to the left from where the flashes were continuing to blossom into more GBOFs, I applied some Vietnam windage and launched a second pair of miniature 105mm shells, that was supposedly the burst radius for an M229 17-pound warhead, similar to that of a 105mm Howitzer HE round. Seeing the flight of the rockets heading toward the ridgeline as desired but looking like they were still going to strike a bit below where the edge of the ridge fell away to the west, I brought the nose of my Cobra up until the red Pipper of the M73 reflex sight sitting on top of my instrument panel sun screen was high and to the right of my intended target. Again, I fired a pair of rockets, and then a second pair, judging that the first rockets were going to be range and azimuth correct this time.”

  “My peripheral vision was telling me that the other rockets had functioned as advertised as their grey-black smoke rose out of the trees and brush along the ridgeline. Then something else caught my eye, something further to the left, just down the ridgeline to the west of the source of our GBOFs, which, by the way, had mysteriously stopped flying by our cockpit.”

  “A second muzzle flash! Actually, a rapidly repeating, uninterrupted series of muzzle flashes. A new stream of GBOFs! A new anti-aircraft machine gun!”

  “One AA gun was not all that common in this terrain because of the difficulty of packing it and its tripod and all of its ammunition up and down the steep hills and valleys and across the rivers from wherever it was dropped off by some vehicle to wherever they wanted to deploy it. The machine gun and its tripod, assuming from the size of the GBOF that it was a 12.7 mm or .51 caliber anti-aircraft weapon, weighed over 200 pounds and that is without ammo!”

  “Where we were, there were no roads or rails to deliver the heavy stuff directly to the battlefield, and the NVA weren’t flying any helicopters out of Laos or down from north Vietnam, at least not in the daylight and not in the mountains. Men were the beasts of burden, most commonly. To have two AA guns in the same area, on the same ridgeline AND inside the DMZ, actually on our side of the red line and on its southern boundary at that, well, let’s just say it was a surprise, with a capital ‘S’. Hats off to the dedicated NVA grunts that had made it happen, not once but twice, and if there were two, there’s probably more.”

  “The way the two guns were placed provided the gunners with overlapping fires and the ability to support each other to a
degree, while creating something of a crossfire convergence of their impact zones. They had waited until we were within range of their weapons and their accuracy was close to perfect, but not quite. The guy who pulled the trigger first must have thought we were going to continue to drive forward until we over flew his position and discovered him and his weapon standing on the sharp edge of the ridge with not a lot of options, except to smoke us before we smoked him. It almost worked, but for some reason, I call it the hand of God, it didn’t. The dispersion of their rounds as they flew out to meet us was wide enough that they were missing, and misses are good things if you are the target.”

  “I realized that I had closed the range to the ridgeline to the point that sooner or later one, or both of the 12.7mms was going to get lucky. Probability laws were at work as well and they didn’t play favorites, without divine intervention, and I had received more than my fair share of that already.”

  “Breaking right!” I called to Assault 26 somewhere behind me. I had no idea where Assault 6 and 16 were, but it was now up to them to stay out of the way and out of the fight unless I called for them to do something different.”

  “I pulled the cyclic control to the right and rolled my Cobra up onto its right side, pushing on the right tail rotor pedal to bring the nose around to the right and pulling up on the collective control for more power and more lift and thrust from the main rotor. I needed to fly us out of the kill zone and into position for another gun run, both to reengage the targets and to cover Assault 26 who I knew was already inbound on a gun run of his own.”

  “26, there’s a second gun down the ridgeline about 300 meters. Take him and then break left. I’ll be Inbound behind you! I made the call to Assault 26 as I pulled my Cobra through the steeply banked turn to the right, using every pound of torque I could command from my faithful Lycoming L-13 engine, all 1100 shaft horse power, every pony running at full gallop.”

  “This was what we had come for, to find and fix and destroy the enemy. The challenge, of course, was that the enemy had come to this place for the same reason, except he was content to wait for us to come to him. And we had. The fight was on.”

  “I stretched my body around to the left in my armored seat as far as I could during the initial part of my turn away from the ridgeline, trying to maintain my line of sight to what was going on up and down the ridgeline now slipping behind me. I heard our turreted mini-gun working away during our break away from the target and knew that the front seat was filling the air around the target with 7.62mm full metal jacket bullets, every fifth one a tracer burning bright red all the way to the target.”

  “When I couldn’t see back to the target anymore, a matter of brief seconds actually, I looked back to the right and stretched to see up and around my cockpit frame through my rotor blades to make sure I was not turning into Assault 26 or interfering with his run to the targets. There he was, off to my right, higher than I was at the moment but angled downward in a dive to the targets. We were good.”

  “We passed each other as he flew into the target and I flew away; he on a downward dive and I on an upward climb. I heard my front seat bringing his turret around in case I asked him to engage the target on the next inbound run.”

  “Rockets blew out of Assault 26’s tubes, flying like jet-assisted spears down straight lines back to my right rear. Rocket motor smoke appeared briefly at the wings of his Cobra, but was quickly left behind by his increasing velocity and further dissipated by the strong downwash of his massive 540 rotor system and those wide blades with their 27-inch cord, sucking in huge volumes of air and beating it downward and rearward as they propelled the sleek Cobra into battle.”

  “I knew that the enemy on the ridgeline were hearing 26’s Cobra literally roar as it charged toward them, the noise from its main rotor increasing in volume and severity as the airspeed increased and combined with the rotational speed of the advancing rotor blades. I had always loved that sound, ‘the sound of freedom’ one fellow Cobra Pilot had once called it, but for the enemy right now, the roar must be making the hairs on the back of their necks stand up as they watched streaks of fire and smoke scream down to them as if Thor himself was flinging lightning bolts from the heavens.”

  “Trying to finesse my Cobra into gaining more altitude while maintaining airspeed was a struggle. I was still heavy with fuel and unexpended ordnance. My front seat had used some of his 7.62mm mini-gun ammo to cover our break at the end of our first gun run but not much, not enough to make a difference in our Cobra’s performance. The hot, humid air was making it difficult to climb and ‘streak’ at the same time, and I had traded off all of the airspeed I could spare in an effort to scramble upward for my next run in.”

  “Looking back again at 26, I saw him starting his left break off of the target and simultaneously I heard him call. ‘26 Out’. A simple transmission to make sure I knew he was outbound from the target and that I was clear inbound.”

  “He needed my rockets on that ridge to cover him during his outbound leg, so I immediately rolled right and established a run into the second target.”

  “27 Inbound,” I called, making visually sure that 26 was clear of where my rockets would fly and impact.”

  “Both our C&C and our Scout remained silent on the radios, at least on the three frequencies I was monitoring, the ones we were using for in-flight communications. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time but C&C was probably engaged on his other radios in continuous communications with our higher Headquarters (Squadron) and with our Troop Operations Center, reporting to the former that we were engaging a ‘discovered’ enemy and commanding the latter to spin up additional Scouts and Cobras and even another C&C bird for an anticipated relief on station. For all I knew, 6 was calling for Artillery support or TAC air, maybe both. One way or another, if this fight continued, we would run out of bullets or fuel or both before long.”

  “As I began our dive toward the ridge, neither target was firing. Given our current range to the ridgeline, somewhere over 1000 meters, I had to estimate where the second target was located as I could not actually see the machine gun or its crew. Fortunately, 26’s rockets had ‘marked the spot’ well enough for me to align my rocket sight in azimuth and elevation, using the smoke and debris from his warheads. I adjusted the collective to stabilize power (torque), made a slight cyclic adjustment to compensate for the ‘heavy’ 17-pound warheads and their need for some super elevation, and pressed my wing store fire button, the LRB.”

  “This time I fired pair after pair after pair, walking them up the ridgeline from left to right, from the second machine gun position to the first. Again, I broke right at the end of the run, switching from my inboard rocket pods to the outboards as I simultaneously coordinated the covering fire of my front seat, ensured that we were clear outbound, pulled our Cobra through the turn and made my radio call.”

  “27 outbound. This time we’ll be inbound from the east.”

  “Roger that. 26 inbound.”

  “Partway through my right-hand turn, I jinked back to the left so that I could end up in position to attack from the east instead of from the south as I had previously.”

  “Another of those Combat Lessons Learned: ‘do NOT use the same attack route repeatedly’ or maybe it was ‘more than once’. Anyway, we were going to fire them up from the east this time along the back bone of the ridge, instead of from the south.”

  “I saw 26 streaming rockets into the target area, adding his high explosives to mine and covering the ridgeline with High Explosive Composition B4 fire and smoke, black and grey, lots of it.”

  “As 26 broke away from the target and called his break, I estimated that he would be clear by the time my rockets arrived at the target and I unleashed the hounds from hell from my outboard M157 rocket pods. Whereas I had been carrying 26 pairs of rockets when we started this dance, I now had 7 pairs left in the two pods hanging on my outboard hard points. I used them all.”

  “26 followed my lead and expended hi
s rockets into the firestorm that we had unleashed on the ridgeline jungle, chosen by our enemy as their ‘mountain fortress’.”

  “We both added copious amounts of 7.62mm ball ammunition and 40mm HE grenades to the mix, finally giving our front seats the opportunity to flex their considerable firepower up and down the ridge. Both the M134 mini-gun and the M129 grenade launcher were considered area fire weapons and lacking any visible targets at the moment, that is how we employed them, firing up the area, with an emphasis on the top of the ridge and into the brush and trees along the upper slopes.”

  “My own personal Combat Lesson Learned regarding airborne ordnance; ‘never take home what you carry to the fight, give it to the enemy, leave it on the field of battle’.”

  “Finally, it was time to take a breath and to determine what we had accomplished. Notably, the air was clear of all GBOFs. Notably again, no GBOF had found a home in any of our four helicopters. We were ‘unscathed’ as they say in the funny papers, despite how close we had come to being otherwise.”

  “We needed to conduct a BDA, ‘Battle Damage Assessment’. We wanted to conduct a BDA. Higher HQ wanted to know what happened and so did we, but, we had a problem. Normally our Scout, in this case Assault 16, would fly over the target area at a suitable altitude and speed while visually assessing the results of our attack and radioing his observations to the rest of the Team. Our SOP required that the Snake or Snakes in the Team provide the necessary gun cover for the Scout during the BDA. Keep him safe. That was our rule. Exactly what we Snake drivers do for a living, except in our excited enthusiasm while caught up in the heat of the moment, we had expended all of our rockets and bullets and grenades. We had nothing with which to provide the requisite ‘gun cover’.”