Legend

by Eric Blehm

  Toward the end of the third day, after two of the 240th helicopters had been shot down, Ewing and copilot Armstrong volunteered to attempt a resupply. The laboring helicopter was so weighted down with water that it began to sink into the jungle canopy while hovering over the American perimeter. Ewing held the helicopter steady, taking fire from the enemy and trimming a few treetops as he descended into the foliage and his crew frantically kicked out hundreds of pounds of water in specially designed water bladders that would not burst upon impact. This resupply sustained the men on the ground until a reaction force was able to extract them on the fourth day of battle.

  “It’s what we do, Sir,” Yurman responded to Drake’s commendations.

  “We’ve got something for you tomorrow,” Drake said. “But it’s a little different than what you’ve been doing. I need you to return to your base and have all your aircraft and crew sterilized—remove everything from uniforms, patches, names, and strip the ships. Nobody will carry personal effects, wallets, wedding rings, ID, nothing. Pass that along to your CO in person—no radio. Have the whole package back here at 0700 tomorrow. I’ll tell you more then.”

  Yurman had briefed his own pilots at the helipad before the fifteen-minute flight back to Bearcat, where he advised his boss, the new 240th company commander, Major Jesse James, of the mission, as well as the Mad Dog gunship platoon’s leader and ranking officer, First Lieutenant Rick Adams. Adams chuckled and shook his head. He’d just been listening to the Armed Forces Network radio, where he heard President Johnson repeat his almost daily message: “My fellow Americans, we are in Vietnam to fulfill a solemn pledge. We are not in Cambodia.”

  Not in Cambodia, thought Adams. Yeah, right.

  —

  IT WAS past 9:00 p.m. and already dark when Adams briefed the Mad Dog gunship pilots and crew about the vague yet ominous plans for the following day. Among them was Mad Dog Four crew chief Specialist 5 Pete Gailis, who listened carefully as Adams ran down the list of exactly what he and the other four crew chiefs and five door gunners—most of whom had yet to eat dinner or complete their post-flight inspections—would have to cover, paint, or remove from their aircraft. The order to “leave all your identification behind” sat about as well with Gailis as a priest delivering last rites. They’d been, as he put it, “working the line” between Vietnam and Cambodia for weeks—launching missions with B-56 up, down, and around Tay Ninh and Long Binh Provinces, from Quan Loi to An Loc to Loc Ninh. The one constant across the board was the overwhelming numbers of Charlie the recon teams encountered right on Cambodia’s doorstep. He couldn’t fathom how many of them they’d encounter once they were actually inside the front door.

  When Warrant Officer Roger Waggie checked on his slick, Greyhound Three, before hitting the rack around midnight, he found his twenty-year-old crew chief, Michael Craig—the remains of his C ration dinner atop the revetment—still at it, giving their aircraft a thorough going-over. Specialist 4 Craig might have been the youngest Greyhound crew chief, but Waggie openly bragged that he was the best he’d ever worked with, as well as the hardest worker. Four years older, Waggie thought of Craig as a younger brother. “You take care of me,” he’d told Craig when he became his crew chief, “and I’ll take care of you.”

  Craig had been in-country since October 14, 1967, becoming a crew chief in just two and a half months, an unusually quick promotion he detailed in a letter to his parents and sister: “Yesterday our flight went down into the Delta to insert some infantry guys,” he wrote on January 11, 1968. “We sent twelve ships down and we have six left that can fly. My ship was in maintenance…so I wasn’t flying. I guess there was Charlie all over the place. Two of our crew chiefs got shot through the head. One died and the other one is coming along fine. By the way, I’m a crew chief now.”

  Craig and Waggie had flown more than two hundred missions together. They had been shot down four times in the past four months. During the first phase of the Tet Offensive, Craig had seen dump trucks full of dead Vietcong. While he’d witnessed his share of American body bags, he had yet to see them stacked up like cords of wood. Contrary to the post-Tet statement by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite that the United States was “mired in stalemate,” Craig’s experience was that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of Charlie killed for every American killed in action. “Don’t believe what you hear,” he told his parents in a letter.

  But Michael Craig didn’t discuss the impending mission as he chatted with Waggie. Instead he talked about his parents and his sister and brother-in-law and niece—even their rescued puppy, Zelda.

  —

  GREYHOUND SENIOR pilots Larry McKibben and Jerry Ewing were preparing for the mission in their hooch when Al Yurman stopped by to give them the lineup for the following day.

  Yurman “hated like hell” to send his men on a mission like this when they were so close to going home: McKibben was only six weeks shy of the end of his yearlong tour, while Ewing was just under two months. The unwritten rule was you’d keep the “short” guys off the risky missions, but in this case he didn’t have a choice. The 240th had had a couple of slicks shot up the week before and they were still in maintenance, plus their pilots were already past their limit for flight hours the previous thirty days.

  “Mac, Jerry—you guys will be primary on this one, a two-slick insertion,” he said to them. By simple seniority, that meant McKibben would be lead, flying Greyhound One, and Ewing would be his wingman, flying Greyhound Two.

  “Will do,” McKibben replied. He’d been on so many missions that the news caused him no more concern than he’d felt preparing to fly his single-prop over the farmland outside Houston when he was sixteen. He trusted his Huey to fly even when it was full of bullet holes and he also trusted the safeguards and procedures employed by the Special Forces recon teams, as he’d told his folks on his latest audiotape. “We’ve got four slicks, four gunships, and one command-and-control slick. We fly in low-level, he vectors us, we drop them off. Actually there’s just two slicks—the infil/exfil slicks are loaded—I’m one of the infil/exfils. The other two are just standby: in case we go down, they come in and pick us up. We go into these places without any gunships or anything, just try to drop them in as quiet as possible, and then go out. We keep the gunships on-station, just in case. And if they do make any contact, we call that position compromised, and we’ll go in and extract them right away.

  “It’s real interesting work, and real different than what we’ve been used to. If we receive any fire going in, we abort the mission right away, or if we miss the LZ, like we’re going too fast to slow down for it, or miss it, we won’t go back to it—there’s an alternate LZ already picked for us. It’s pretty tight security, you know, ’cause when you put in a small team, they aren’t really equipped to take any large-scale-type attacks—they’re just there for recon. They just carry enough weapons for defense, and anytime they get into trouble, they call us up and we go and pick them up. Their job is to find Charlie, not to fight him. They do a good job, really outstanding.”

  —

  JERRY EWING, McKibben’s good friend and wingman for the past several weeks, had always been impressed with how devoted Larry was to his family. He’d listen in sometimes, with McKibben’s permission, to the tapes he received from home. The last one, from McKibben’s mother, was still in the tape player. “It sure made us all feel a lot better to get your tape, Larry, and hear that you’re all right. That day that you got shot down made the cold chills just thinking about it. I sure was sorry to hear the bad news, the bad part of it, but I’m glad you came out of it as good as you did. I don’t see how you did. But I guess you learn how to do a lot of things that you really don’t know how to do, or want to do sometimes. I just hope the Lord keeps on protecting you and be real careful.”

  Hearing their voices—and reading his own letters—often launched Ewing into memories of home and his childhood. He had spe
nt countless hours playing war with his older brother while bouncing from military base to military base. His father was a career Army officer who made sure his sons understood that true superheroes wore uniforms, not capes.

  The Ewing brothers also understood the significance of the different medals for valor, as well as specific examples from World War I and World War II of service members who had earned them. This was critical information in understanding bravery under fire—ignoring wounds, storming enemy bunkers, saving fellow soldiers’ lives—as they played war. Several times his brother bestowed upon him the highest honors, posthumously, for sacrificing his life for his men, usually for jumping on an enemy hand grenade.

  Jerry Ewing would lie there and wait for his brother’s verdict.

  “He was the bravest soldier I ever saw. Thanks, kid: you saved the lives of four men.” Or “Wait! He’s still alive! Get a medic over here fast!” in which case Jerry would regain consciousness, ask for a rifle, and fight on until dinnertime.

  Ewing’s older brother would go on to graduate from Notre Dame, his education paid for by their parents. For Ewing, who took a little time off to figure things out after graduating from high school in 1964, his father had other aspirations. “I think if you learn a trade,” his father told him while handing him a brochure for barber school, “you will always be able to look out for yourself. I can pay your tuition. It’s honorable work. You have a lot of potential.”

  Whether his father was serious about barber school, or whether the brochure had been strategically delivered genius designed to motivate Ewing into action, within a few months he joined the Army and was accepted into helicopter flight school, his sights set on serving his country just like his dad.

  Ewing reveled in every minute of the training. The conflict in Vietnam was already being touted as the “Helicopter War,” and he was in the vanguard of the future of warfare. Many of Ewing’s flying instructors had been wounded during their tours in Vietnam, and they wore their scars proudly. Glass eyes, prosthetics, and back braces were viewed by the students as badges of courage, along with the actual service medals delivered to these larger-than-life heroes at on-base ceremonies each Friday:

  “With complete disregard for his own personal safety, Warrant Officer James flew his damaged aircraft into the withering enemy fire to rescue…”

  “Ignoring the enemy fire, Lieutenant Thomas, his pilot mortally wounded, and grievously wounded himself, nonetheless gained control of the aircraft and attacked the enemy with rockets…”

  The graphic descriptions of battle, the walking wounded on base, and the flag-draped coffins on the evening news could not penetrate the fog of testosterone and bravado that enveloped Jerry Ewing in a force field of confidence.

  The Army had trained him well.

  —

  THE MORNING of May 1, 1968, Yurman flew back to Ho Ngoc Tao with four Greyhound slicks that had been stripped of identification. Their crews were equally anonymous.

  At the base, Lieutenant Colonel Drake ordered him to load up the recon team members and transport them to Quan Loi for a future brief. All he would divulge to Yurman was that an American unit up north in the A Shau Valley had captured a Russian truck a few days before and intelligence needed to know if the same types of trucks were coming up from the south. If the recon team could capture a truck—not just the driver but the actual truck—they’d find a way to get it back to Vietnam.

  Yurman’s eyes widened. Though Drake didn’t identify Cambodia by name, he clearly had said, “Get [the truck] back to Vietnam.”

  Before returning to the slicks to brief his crews, Yurman stepped into the Special Forces communication bunker to radio Major James, who would send the gunships over to Quan Loi from Bearcat. On the occasions when he thought something was BS, Yurman used a certain colorful phrase to express his skepticism. He used it that morning as he briefed his men. “Here’s what we’re doing,” he said. “It sounds like a John Wayne picture to me and I got a case of the ass about this, but we’re going to drop these guys off, then they’re gonna capture a truck and drive it out.”

  He received only silence in return, and a few nods. Everyone knew that this was, in Yurman’s words, “very secret shit.”

  —

  AROUND 11:00 in the morning, five slicks, including McKibben’s and Ewing’s Greyhounds, each carrying half of the twelve-man recon team, landed at Quan Loi. A half-hour flight from Ho Ngoc Tao, this 1st Infantry Division base camp and Army supply base surrounded by the forest of an old rubber tree plantation, was one of the busier aircraft hubs in South Vietnam. It serviced predominantly American forces up and down the Cambodian border and had a runway built by Army engineers to handle the giant C-130 Hercules cargo airplanes, dozens of which flew in and out weekly. The war matériel and supplies were then loaded into, or hoisted up by, the big dual-rotor, heavy-lift Chinook helicopters, whose pilots and crews hauled everything out to resupply the American camps and bases spread across the countryside.

  Amid this buzz of activity, the unmarked slicks of the 240th slipped in and settled their skids on one of the large rectangular tarmacs off the main flight lines—a helicopter “parking lot” reserved for combat assault and search-and-destroy mission staging, medical emergencies, and the increasingly frequent special-mission assignments.

  From this tarmac the pilots, crew, and fully loaded recon team were led by a Special Forces sergeant into a wooded area adjacent to the runway. This was the location of the base camp of the 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade: a grid of wood-framed tents of various sizes, underground bunkers, and latrines.

  A block of tents fenced off by a few coils of barbed wire and guarded by two Chinese Nung from Ho Ngoc Tao’s Camp Defense Company served as the B-56 Special Forces compound. Inside its tactical operations center—a heavily sandbagged tent with an array of wires that trailed up to antennas extending above the treetops—B-56 assistant S-3 Launch Officer Fred Jones, the man in charge of the mission, was reviewing topographical maps when Yurman walked inside and shook his hand.

  The two had worked together previously, and Yurman recalled that Jones was competent and a straight shooter, as well as the same rank, which meant that Yurman felt he could speak candidly.

  While the men of the 240th AHC settled into temporary billets in the B-56 compound, Jones and Sergeant Leroy Wright—the “one-zero” or recon team leader—proceeded to show Yurman the “area of interest” on the map and, within that area, a specific branch of “the trail.” Jones tapped his finger on the spot, clearly on the west side of the line representing the Cambodian border, although how far, it was hard to tell. But it was at least a few miles in, maybe five, “deep in badguy country.

  —

  THE REST of the 240th had been shuffled into a mission-planning tent, where their uniforms were inspected for names or insignia. Next the men put their ID cards inside envelopes to be held in an ammo box until the mission was completed. Each pilot and crewman had also signed an affidavit when they started flying for B-56 that stated they understood that they could not speak or write about anything they heard or did for thirty years. Any slips or leaks would be considered treason and would result in a dishonorable discharge, a ten-thousand-dollar fine, and a long trip to Kansas, with room and board at Fort Leavenworth military prison.

  Yurman slipped into the tent to grab his copilot, Warrant Officer Thomas “Smitty” Smith, and his crew.

  “What are we doing, Big Al?” Smith asked.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” Yurman replied, “but we’re going to Cambodia.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  A visual reconnaissance flight was standard operating procedure for any recon mission. The dual goal was to get eyes on the objective and to pick a primary landing zone and two alternates. The team leader, the launch officer, and either the insertion helicopter pilot or the command-and-control (C&C) pilot
all needed to agree that these landing/potential pickup zones were okay for both the men on the ground and those in the air.

  Aboard the C&C slick, recon team leader Wright sat in the right jump seat behind the copilot, Smith, while Jones was in the left jump seat behind Yurman, the pilot.

  All were familiar with the insertion tactics for recon teams, but Yurman wanted to be sure that this one didn’t deviate. In this insertion the platoon would be running only two slicks—staggered with a couple of rotor-blade distances between them and just above treetop level—with no gunship flanking support; it was all about stealth and surprise. Yurman would fly two hundred or three hundred feet above and a five- or six-rotor-blade distance behind the two slicks. That extra altitude would allow Yurman to “steer” them from above with directions such as “Turn left—stop; turn right—stop; descend—stop; climb—stop.”

  At about one mile out from the LZ, Yurman would give them warning: “Slow; slower; LZ straight ahead; it’s all yours.” From his higher altitude, Yurman would be able to see the opening on the jungle horizon and bank away, not wanting to overfly the LZ. The lead slick pilot would provide visual confirmation, then the two slicks—which would have been flying so close together they would sound like one helicopter to those on the ground—would separate slightly on final approach to six or eight rotor blades apart. One after the other, they would drop into the hole in the jungle, flare, and hover while the troops piled out. In no more than a few seconds, both slicks would rise back into the air and return to base.

  For the visual recon, Yurman maintained an altitude between fifteen hundred and three thousand feet. He was linked up via intercom with Jones and Wright in the backseat, listening to their conversation as he flew northwest to Loc Ninh—a Special Forces camp a mere ten minutes from Quan Loi and a five-minute flight from the border. Jones identified Loc Ninh as a potential staging area from which to launch the mission across the border and where the slicks and gunships would sit standby after the insertion.