A Requiem for Crows: A Novel of Vietnam

by Dennis Foley

  He checked his weapon again to make sure it was ready in case he needed to use it and looked back to the other three. They too were watching Minh’s chopper slowly circle a safe distance from the ground.

  Scotty checked his watch, trying to gauge how much longer they would have to wait for the gunships to rearm, refuel and then return to pluck them from their exposed position in the marsh. Then he heard it, a sucking noise. Someone was trying to pull a foot out of the muck. Someone not more than fifty meters from them. Scotty tried to look over the grasses without giving his position away.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught Nguyen moving up next to him, his rifle at the ready. He too had heard the movement between them and the now evacuated hamlet.

  They waited. Scotty didn’t have to ask Nguyen why he didn’t call the General’s chopper to tell him they had heard movement. The risk was he’d be heard and the movement just might be the Viet Cong soldiers from the hamlet trying to get back to their base area across the border without getting caught by the choppers.

  They held their breath and Scotty wondered if Minh and Pascoe could see anything from their orbit. Before he could speculate on how hard it might be to see men in black pajamas moving cautiously through the muddy marshes from above the first burst of enemy fire crossed near his right ear and hit its mark. Sergeant Tran gave out a clipped cry as he fell forward, his face dropping into the muddy stream forehead first.

  Scotty turned to make eye contact with Nguyen as he slammed the radio handset to his face and called out for the only help they could count on.

  Inside the chopper Pascoe heard the voice “We are taking incoming small arms fire and have no, I say again no cover. One KIA!”

  While Pascoe replied over the radio he could hear Minh screaming at someone in Vietnamese over his. He assumed it was about the return of the gunships who could make the difference between the survival of the three remaining soldiers on the ground and them being overrun by the enemy forces escaping from the hamlet contact back to the border. “Roger your situation. Standby.”

  Minh craned his neck to look out the side window in the door of the circling chopper for signs of the three huddled in the streambed. “We cannot wait.”

  “What do you want to do?” Pascoe asked.

  “Tell your sergeant to throw smoke.”

  Pascoe realized that asking Hayes to throw a smoke grenade meant Minh wanted to be able to pick them out on the ground because he intended to fly in to pick up the survivors himself—even though they were still under attack and even though the gunships and the lift ships had not returned. He turned to Minh and stalled. “Are you sure you want to do this, General? You need not take this risk. Maybe we should wait for the gunships.”

  Minh gave Pascoe a clear expression of disapproval. “Colonel, I have soldiers down there. You have a soldier down there. We will go down. Get me smoke.”

  Pascoe made one more look over his shoulder toward the Sugar Mill searching the sky for the other choppers while he called Scotty using his radio callsign. “Sample Pirate 9 Alpha I need you to throw smoke and prepare for immediate extraction. Over.”

  There was no answer. He repeated the call.

  On the ground Scotty helped Nguyen pull the medical gear and ammo off of Tran’s body. The radio handset bounced on Scotty’s chest, the coiled cord wrapped around his neck to keep it out of the water.

  Two more sharp bursts of automatic fire crossed over the three remaining in the streambed. It became obvious that there was more than one Viet Cong and they had the three in a crossfire.

  Khoi jumped to his knees and angrily returned the fire of one of the Viet Cong but couldn’t spin fast enough to fire on the other before he cut Khoi by down placing two AK-47 rounds in his mid-section.

  Scotty saw Khoi fall and picked up the handset only to hear Pascoe’s voice telling him to throw a smoke grenade. He dismissed the instructions feeling he should tell Pascoe their situation had worsened and they needed someone to get the VC off their backs before attempting to get them out.

  Pascoe told Scotty to stand-by again and tried to change Minh’s mind one more time. “General, Hayes says they’re taking fire and he needs suppressive fires first.”

  Minh did not respond. He looked out and down. He heeled the chopper over into a steep descending left turn.

  Pascoe watched the altimeter unwind as the ground started to rush up toward the chopper. Just below twelve-hundred feet he heard a sharp metallic clap and hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was. “General, I think we are taking fire.”

  Minh scanned the instruments searching for any sign of flight systems failures and kept the chopper on a steep and steady glide path toward Scotty and Nguyen. “I can see them.”

  Scotty gathered up as much as he could—half of the extra gear from the two dead soldiers. He turned to Khoi and began to lift his lifeless body as he kept an eye on the chopper closing on their position.

  Nguyen grabbed Scotty’s arm, looked at Khoi and shook his head.

  Scotty was unsure. Over the firing and the growing sounds of the thumping chopper blades he asked, “Leave them?”

  “Yes.” Nguyen helped Scotty slide Khoi back down into the stream bed.

  Pascoe felt the chopper slowing, its nose coming up, as it approached the two stranded soldiers waiting on the ground three hundred feet below and a few hundred meters in front of him. Suddenly the sky outside the came alive with bright bursts of red and green tracer fire much of it heavier than AK-47 rifle fire. He knew what it was but didn’t want to believe it. They couldn’t be taking such potentially lethal fire. They just couldn’t.

  He looked out the side window of the chopper. About five hundred meters to the west he saw it. There, inside Cambodia, a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun manned by two helmeted gunners was spitting hundreds of bullets a minute at the descending chopper. Each round was the size of his thumb and longer than his fingers. Each capable of tearing huge chunks of the chopper away as it ripped through the aircraft’s thin outer skin. Pascoe found himself completely frozen in fear as rounds zipped by the front of the chopper and they kept flying nearer to the path of the enemy fire. He couldn’t believe they were still in the air. He looked over at Minh, hoping he would break off the approach and get out of the enemy’s gun sights.

  Minh’s gaze was fixed on a landing point he had selected on the ground. His fingers opened and closed repeatedly on the hand grip of the chopper’s cyclic control as the chopper closed on the landing zone.

  Nguyen and Scotty forced themselves to dial out the enemy fire coming from several directions and gauged the distance to the same spot the chopper was headed for. They jumped to their feet and began to run to meet their rescuers hoping to arrive at the chopper’s touchdown point the moment it landed.

  The enemy fire got worse. Scotty and Nguyen tried to spray fire back at the shooters more concerned with how much fire they could put out than how accurate it was.

  Once the chopper came into better range the enemy riflemen shifted their fires to the larger target.

  Nguyen stopped long enough to drop to one knee, fired and cut down one of the Viet Cong soldiers foolishly standing in the marsh firing at the oncoming chopper.

  The two kept running toward the chopper gasping for the air the needed to fuel their straining muscles.

  As the ground got closer and in spite of the growing sense of panic he was feeling, some of Pascoe’s training kicked in. He lightly and automatically put his hands on his matching set of controls and his feet on the pedals in the event he had to take over the flying. He held his breath and watched as Minh flared the chopper to bleed off forward speed and land it in the muck.

  Scotty and Nguyen were still twenty long strides from the chopper, each step made more complicated by the extra weapons and equipment they carried while running in water a foot and a half deep. They splashed muddy water into their own faces as they ran, making visibility that much more difficult for them.

  Pascoe watched t
he two struggling soldiers slog through the muddy marshes and heard himself urging the two on in his head. Come on. Run! Faster! Hurry! We can’t wait…!

  The long waiting moment inside the cockpit was jarred by the explosive sounds of two enemy rounds coming trough the windscreen on Minh’s side of the chopper. One round struck him just below the collarbone and the other went into his helmet above his left eye.

  Minh’s blood and brain tissue flew across the cockpit hitting Pascoe face and shoulder. He was stunned. He watched Minh’s head slump forward and felt the cyclic come free in his hand as Minh’s fingers went limp, released their grip and fell from his matching flight control.

  The unrelenting enemy firing continued throwing up spouts of water as rounds hit the wet ground around the chopper. Pascoe wasn’t sure where the fire was coming from, but he was sure if he stayed there one more second he would meet the same fate as Minh.

  He looked out at Nguyen and Hayes fighting to stay on their feet as they slogged through the marsh burdened by their awkward loads.

  The longer Pascoe sat there waiting for the two soldiers the more intense the enemy fire became. He looked out the door and his eyes met Hayes’ running as fast as he could toward the chopper. They were wide and wild.

  Pascoe just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t wait that few more seconds for them to take the last strides needed to get them to his waiting chopper. There was just too much enemy fire. They’d all perish.

  While his mind spun clear of rational thinking, focusing instead on the extreme danger he found himself in, his hands and feet committed him to action. He sucked the collective control up under his left arm putting maximum power into the turning chopper blades and pushed forward on the cyclic stick between his knees quickly bringing the chopper’s tail up off the ground.

  The powerful aircraft continued to respond to his touch as the toes of the skids immediately broke ground and cleared the landing zone. Pascoe leaned his controls over and added body English putting the aircraft into an ascending left turn. As he climbed out of the landing zone he watched the ground fall away below—Hayes’ and Nguyen’s darkened images getting smaller as he did.

  Pascoe pushed the chopper beyond its safe flight limits in order to tap out the chopper’s power and speed his departure. He quickly put as much distance and altitude as he could between him and the lethal spot on the ground where they took the fire that killed Minh.

  Finally, leveling up and rolling off some of the top end power, he reigned the nose around and headed in an easterly direction, careful not to get any closer to the heavy machineguns still capable of reaching up to snatch his chopper out of the sky.

  Scotty wiped his face to clear the muddy spray from his eyes. He was sure he was mistaken. How could the chopper leave without them. They were just a few strides from the cargo door when the added power to the blades created a wash of swampy water and a blast of rotor wash blowing the two of them backwards and blinding them.

  He wasn’t completely sure what was happening. The chopper had landed to pick them up and almost before it stopped rocking it lifted off again and headed away.

  Exposed in the open landing zone, Nguyen and Scotty ran for the nearest clump of thick brush and dove into it. Inside the thicket they turned back to back, each taking responsibility for half the terrain outside the brush.

  As the chopper put more and more altitude and distance between it and the enemy gunners Pascoe looked over at his slain counterpart. General Minh’s head bobbed, his body restrained by the waist and shoulder harness holding him upright in the seat.

  Pressing the transmit button on the floor, he called back to Operations again to ask what the hell happened to the other choppers. He was told they were grounded by low ceiling and heavy rains. But he got a promise from the Vietnamese duty officer the choppers would be dispatched back to his location as soon as the weather conditions permitted.

  There was no telling how long that would take. Pascoe’s mind raced. He had a dead co-pilot. His chopper had taken hits but was still flying. He scanned the flight instruments and saw he was low on fuel. All this and he had two soldiers on the ground in the middle of a hornet’s nest sure to turn on him again should he make another attempt to pull them out.

  He set the chopper up a high orbit east of where he’d last seen Hayes and Nguyen and tried to clear his head and decide what to do.

  On the ground Scotty cupped the radio handset to his mouth in order not to be heard in the now silent marsh and called Pascoe’s chopper.

  He got no answer even after several more tries.

  In the chopper circling only a few miles away, Pascoe heard Scotty’s hushed voice over the radio and didn’t answer. He told himself he would answer as soon as he had something to tell Hayes, but he didn’t have anything yet. After the third try the sound of Scotty’s voice grew weaker—his battery was dying. Pascoe still did not answer. He had nothing to tell Scotty and was becoming more convinced he couldn’t possibly survive another touchdown near the border to pluck the two off the ground.

  He looked back in the direction of the landing zone and saw no tracers. But he knew enemy gunners were still there and they expected another rescue attempt. He convinced himself that it was over. He couldn’t get in and they couldn’t get out. He looked over at his compass and laid the chopper over into a turn taking him northeast—away from Scotty and Nguyen and even away from the Sugar Mill.

  Thinking his radio was not working, Scotty shrugged off its harness and started looking for some reason why he could not raise a chopper.

  Nguyen tapped Scotty on the back and pointed off at the chopper—Minh’s chopper. Both were puzzled by its flight path—it was flying farther away from them. They watched as the navigation lights and rotating beacon got smaller and dimmer.

  Scotty gave up on the radio. He had no other battery and the radio was filled with water from their run to the aborted chopper rescue. He tossed it aside and took a breath. They were in trouble. Low on ammo, far from home and in a place sure to be known by all enemy forces in the area. He looked at his watch. It was almost eight p.m. He whispered to Nguyen, “We must move.”

  Nguyen didn’t take his eyes off the terrain outside the thicket watching for anyone looking for them. He nodded and spoke softly, “Yes.”

  In only minutes on its new heading, the chopper was close enough to Nui Ba Den for Pascoe to see the mountaintop clearly—even in the dark. The charcoal layer of clouds only a few hundred feet above the chopper promised more weather dangerous for any aviator to try to fly through, especially one who had done as little bad weather flying as he had since graduating from flight school many years earlier.

  He knew a few facts: The weather was too bad back at the Sugar Mill for him to fly there and land. He certainly was not going to put down out in some bad-guy’s rice paddy to wait for it to clear up and he had less than twenty minutes fuel left on board. Nui Ba Den was the only place he could put down with some margin of safety and wait for the weather to clear around the Sugar Mill.

  The landing pad on top of the mountain Minh had taken him to his first week on the job came into clearer view. He set up to make a pinnacle landing and felt his gut and his grip tighten. There would be no second chance. If he didn’t put the chopper down safely on the right spot he would probably roll the chopper down the far side of the mountain and surely die.

  Chapter 19

  THE TURBINE WHINE QUIETED as the blades of the chopper spooled down to a stop. Pascoe finished a hurried and half-hearted check list of shut down procedures then turned off the main battery power.

  He sat back in the seat and tried to take his first real breath in nearly a half hour since Minh had tried to take them into the hot landing zone to pick up Scotty’s small patrol.

  The only noise he heard was the light rain ticking on the tinted plexiglass windows over the pilot’s seats and a light wind blowing. He looked up at the cloud cover for some sign it might clear up between the mountain top and the Sugar Mill but co
uldn’t see much since the bulk of the aircraft blocked his view having landed the chopper into the wind.

  Pascoe checked his pistol to make sure it was loaded, picked up his carbine from its place, slung over the back of his seat and stepped out of the chopper.

  True to his training, he walked around the front of the chopper as was every pilot’s habit to stay clear of the tail rotor, turning or not. As he passed the shattered windscreen in front of Minh’s body still strapped to the seat he avoided the sight of his dead counterpart. He couldn’t look at the man. He was even angry with him. Had he not insisted on trying to pull those soldiers off the ground he might still be alive and Pascoe would not be in the mess he found himself in.

  Pascoe found a large rock near the chopper and leaned up against it. At first he looked around the hilltop for any sign there might be someone there bent on doing him harm. He shielded his eyes from the rain and looked out over the paddy land surrounding the mountain. He started with the Sugar Mill for some hope the clouds would clear soon. Since it was dark he could not see much and had to hope there would at least be enough visibility and a high enough ceiling for him to follow the highway flying low level all the way back to the Sugar Mill.

  He decided to walk around the chopper to see how much damage had been done. Clouds or no clouds, if the aircraft was too damaged to take off from the mountain top it wouldn’t make any difference if the skies completely cleared out and the moon lit up Vietnam.

  He let his fingers follow his eyes as he touched, looked and inspected the critical areas of the chopper involved in flight control, avionics, engine and hydraulics. In addition to the holes blasted in the windscreen killing Minh and the two holes in the tail boom he found another in the horizontal stabilizer. It was a small caliber hole not near anything vital. And it had done no damage short of puncturing the thin chopper’s skin.