by Eric Blehm
—
PER THE directive of the Special Forces major, the C&C slick returned to Quan Loi to refuel and wait. Upon landing, Jones immediately headed for the headquarters of the First Infantry Division’s Brigade Commander—the ranking officer at Quan Loi—while Yurman headed for the B-56 compound to monitor the radio.
Approaching the TOC, Yurman recognized Larry McKibben’s tall, lanky frame standing on a rise just outside the sandbag walls that surrounded the tent.
“Contact,” Yurman said, and McKibben nodded, staring off into the distance. When a team announced they’d made contact, the next call, in their experience, was for extraction and both Yurman and McKibben suspected this was going to be a hot one.
As long as Yurman had known him, McKibben had never shown an ounce of trepidation. Less than two months before, on March 8, his part of a combat assault mission near Dong Tam had earned him a recommendation from his commander for a Distinguished Flying Cross award, currently under consideration.
Today, Yurman sensed a change in McKibben—in his eyes, in his mannerisms. He had seen it before, especially when a pilot was as short as McKibben was, only a few weeks shy of going home.
“Even the coolest pilots have a limit,” Yurman says. “They’ve been holding it together for three hundred days plus, and whatever day it is they cross that line and they start to think, and up till then they hadn’t done that. At the beginning of your tour, maybe you think you’re not gonna make it home, so screw it, just fly the guts out of the helicopter, make it do things the manufacturer says it can’t do, why not? Then you hit that magic number and you start thinking the opposite, like ‘Holy shit, maybe I will make it.’ And your mind starts playing games.”
Knowing that McKibben had never questioned any order, never even hesitated before, and would never ask to be taken off a mission, Yurman decided to give him a break if he could. “Larry, everybody knows you’re lead, but listen, I want you to be my reserve for extraction. Waggie, Armstrong, and Ewing will be primary. You sit tight in reserve.”
“Sir—” McKibben started to say.
“What are they gonna do to me?” Yurman said. “Send me to Vietnam? You and Ewing head to Loc Ninh and sit standby with the rest of the guys. If I don’t call you, we don’t need you. Keep your skids on the ground. That’s an order.”
—
BACK ON the north side of the clearing, O’Connor was the second man in the column, just behind Bao. He scanned their flanks as they moved west, looking for anything that didn’t fit the landscape—a horizontal line that could reveal a bunker, a shape among the branches of a tree that might betray a sniper.
Mousseau was positioned in the center of the patrol, and Wright took the tail, warily monitoring their rear. All were on high alert, relying on their intuition and training as they crept west toward the main road, through progressively thicker vegetation, catching occasional glimpses of the clearing far to their left. Every step they took away from their insertion point was distancing them from where the enemy would most likely start to track them. After more than a hundred yards and just as the jungle’s darkness was beginning to cloak the team in a degree of invisibility, light filtered more brightly through the layers of cover—the telltale sign of thinning vegetation.
They had reached the far end of the clearing where it curved and tapered into an arm—the narrower side of the kidney. Pausing to survey the distance needed to cross the thirty or forty yards of the opening, they noted a few scattered trees and bushes at the near end, and a cart path heading north to south. Both the clearing and path appeared devoid of any movement, and Bao moved quickly forward. He was approximately a third of the way across when O’Connor followed, the rest of the team behind him and just inside the edge of the tree line.
At that moment, eight to twelve NVA soldiers, fully armed and in their signature green uniform, emerged from the jungle on the other side of the clearing.
Both units stopped abruptly in their tracks.
10
AS BAD AS IT GETS
JONES ENTERED THE First Infantry Division, brigade headquarters tent, and asked to speak with the commanding officer. Three days before, Lieutenant Jones had briefed him about the impending mission they were to launch from his base camp across the border into Cambodia.
Much of the B-56 recon missions had, in the early months of 1968, been focused within South Vietnam and on the infiltration routes along the Cambodian border. The May 2 mission was the deepest B-56 had probed into Cambodia; the strategy, according to Jones, was to fly over the enemy that was massed and entrenched along the border and insert the men where they were not expected.
Now Jones found the colonel in his office, along with his S-2 (intelligence) officer, a First Infantry Division major, up to their elbows planning San Diego (search-and-destroy) missions. They looked up from the map they were studying.
Anticipating that the team on the ground was about to get into trouble, Jones said to the colonel, “Sir, we have a Daniel Boone Emergency.”
“He looked at me like I had three heads,” says Jones. “He had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Sir,” the S-2 officer interjected, “they’ve got troops in contact in Cambodia. Across the border, Sir.”
That got the colonel’s attention. He walked around the desk, faced Jones, and with a thick, reassuring Southern drawl said, “Well, now, what do ya’ll need, Lieutenant? What can I do to help?”
“They’re far beyond your artillery range,” Jones replied. “I just wanted you to be aware of the situation, and if you have any extra gunships on alert, we might need them real soon.”
“I think we can spare a light-fire team [two helicopter gunships],” the colonel said. “You can count on that.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Jones said, feeling he had done all he could as he hurried out of the office and to the B-56 TOC to monitor the radio.
—
THE NVA squad and the B-56 team faced each other in the clearing. Then Bao moved confidently ahead and began talking loudly to the NVA squad leader.
Looking down at his boots to hide his face, O’Connor casually pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. He continued to stare at it while walking a few steps backward to stand beside Mousseau. The two men kept their heads down, studying the paper as if it were a map. Tuan came up beside them. “They think we’re from the other unit,” he whispered.
“Tell them we’re looking for a chopper that was shot at, that we heard go down,” Mousseau whispered back. Tuan nodded, but before he could move ahead and deliver the message, Bao turned around and commanded the team to search the thickest jungle area, as if he was in charge.
Mousseau and O’Connor immediately obeyed, but as they headed toward the clearing’s edge, Mousseau quietly said to O’Connor, “I think they might have seen your face. When Bao is clear, you take the left and I’ll take the right, but only if things look bad.”
Bao continued to bark orders, and the NVA leader waved what appeared to be a parting “good-bye.” Suddenly, the enemy officer called out harshly to Bao.
“They know!” shouted Tuan.
What happened next was instantaneous as Mousseau, O’Connor, and Bao went on autopilot: Mousseau targeted the enemy soldiers to the right, O’Connor took those on the left, and Bao, not privy to the impromptu plan, joined them in sending a hail of bullets into any still standing. Their marksmanship under pressure was astounding: all but two of the twelve NVA were dead within seconds. The two survivors dropped to their knees and returned fire. One let loose a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that passed over the team’s head and exploded in the trees.
Mousseau, O’Connor, and Bao continued to fire while back-stepping into the jungle, where the rest of the team remained concealed, and Wright was calling for immediate extraction. Once the three men were clear, their CIDG teammates opened fire and killed the two remaining NVA.
> Twenty or thirty yards into the jungle, the team formed another perimeter, and Wright informed Mousseau that the extraction slicks were “on the way and ready for a hot one.” Reaching into his shirt, he pulled a few documents from the waterproof pouch he kept secured by a lanyard around his neck and handed them to O’Connor. “Destroy these,” he said. “They’re no good to us now.”
As O’Connor and Mousseau ignited a chunk of C-4 explosive and lit the papers on fire, Wright motioned for the team to head back east toward their original insertion point. It was a risky move, but there were no other clearings in the vicinity, and the helicopters were inbound. Between their own firepower and the cover fire of the extraction slicks and their gunships, with any luck they’d be picked up and gone before a large-scale NVA reaction force converged on the area.
—
INSIDE THE Forward Air Controller’s Bird Dog, the radio sprang to life with the sound of gunfire, and the firm voice of Leroy Wright declared the obvious: “We are taking fire. Request immediate extraction. We are in heavy contact. What is your ETA?”
Almost an hour had passed since Jones had been relieved of his command of the mission. Yurman did not wait for an order, but immediately radioed the 240th reaction force on standby at Loc Ninh, telling aircraft commanders Jerry Ewing in Greyhound Two, Roger Waggie in Greyhound Three, and William Armstrong in Greyhound Four to launch immediately as the primary extraction team. McKibben would be reserve.
“Be advised,” Yurman said, “it’s going to be a hot one.”
The pilots at Loc Ninh, including McKibben, ran to their slicks and gunships that their crew chiefs—having anticipated what was to come—had prepped for takeoff. Jumping into his seat, McKibben got on the ship-to-ship radio and told Armstrong and Waggie to stand down, and told Ewing to crank. “We put them in,” he said. “We’ll get them out.”
But when he attempted to fire up the engine, there was no juice. His battery was dead, perhaps from monitoring the radio. Throwing his arms up in frustration, McKibben radioed back to the other pilots, “I’ve got a dead battery here—you’d better launch. I’ll catch up.”
Waggie’s crew chief, Michael Craig, piped in with the line he used whenever his aircraft got the green light for an extraction: “Let’s go get ’em, then.”
On the ground, the B-56 team was concealed just within the trees beside the clearing. As O’Connor and Mousseau divided the men into two groups of six, Wright contacted Tornow to reconfirm that they were ready for extraction and standing by at the “exact location” they had been inserted at nearly two hours prior. A hush had enveloped the jungle, an eerie calm after the explosive firefight. This quiet did not mean the men were alone. They waited, ears tuned for any sound—the creaking of a tree, the snap of a branch, the sudden cry of a monkey—that might betray the enemy’s approach. The harder they listened, the longer the minutes seemed to stretch.
—
WAGGIE AND Armstrong had launched from Loc Ninh a few minutes after Yurman’s order. They didn’t take the time to gain altitude; instead they flew low and fast, a couple of hundred feet above ground level, Waggie in the lead, his copilot, Warrant Officer David Hoffman, beside him. Behind Waggie, his crew chief, Michael Craig, pointed his M60 machine gun down toward the jungle canopy to cover the seven to eleven o’clock of the aircraft. The right-side door gunner was covering the five to one o’clock.
Fifteen minutes after they’d taken off from Loc Ninh, Yurman got a visual on both slicks, flying in a staggered trail formation with Armstrong about thirty seconds—or half a mile—behind Waggie. While James held the C&C slick in a wide clockwise orbit, giving Yurman an open view of the clearing—no longer considered the LZ, it was now referred to as the pickup zone (PZ)—he vectored the two Greyhounds in from the east, northeast. Standard operating procedure called for both aircraft commander and copilot to have their hands on dual controls that moved in unison; the commander kept a firm grip on the stick and did the actual flying, while the copilot “covered” the controls with a light hand, ready to engage the controls and operate the aircraft at a moment’s notice if the commander was wounded or killed.
In the event that either the pilot or copilot was wounded or killed, the crewmen behind could yank on a red lever on the back of each of their seats, reclining them. This allowed the crewmen to pull a wounded or dead pilot backward into the cargo area of the helicopter, clamp a spurting artery, or climb forward to assist the surviving pilot. If both pilots were dead, a crewman could take the stick himself—the stuff of crew members’ nightmares.
Greyhounds Three and Four were joined by their gunship support, Mad Dogs One and Two piloted by William Curry and CW2 Michael Grant. Curry, the gunship fire team leader, had—during the insertion—remained airborne at the border with his wingman, Grant, ready to provide close air support with their full complements of four thousand rounds of M60 ammunition, six thousand rounds of minigun ammunition, and fourteen rockets. After the first half hour of quiet, Curry and Grant had flown back to Quon Loi to refuel. They had been on their way to stand by on alert at Loc Ninh with Mad Dog Three and Four when the B-56 team’s emergency call for extraction came in.
Still concealed at the edge of the clearing, the team heard the faint but distinct whop, whop, whop of the approaching helicopters. Wright held off throwing a smoke grenade that would help the pilots identify their position because it would also reveal their location to any enemy in the vicinity. If the slicks hit the original insertion point, the men—now divided into two teams of six—would have a twenty- or thirty-yard sprint to the open side doors. A half hour later, they’d be sipping a cold one back at Quan Loi.
“Two miles out, Greyhound Three. Stay on your current heading,” Yurman radioed, vectoring Waggie toward the PZ at shorter and shorter intervals.
The B-56 team had readied themselves to sprint across the clearing when they heard what O’Connor described as “the roar of small-arms and heavy autofire” to the east that “intensified as the slicks approached.” In Greyhound Three, a half mile out, Waggie saw Mad Dog One lurch to one side, then start trailing black smoke.
Detail left
Detail right
The platoon sergeant for the Mad Dogs, Sergeant First Class Pete Jones, was so “short” he could almost taste the cold beer he planned to order on his freedom bird home in two weeks. But his crew chiefs had been flying so much the previous week, he’d decided to give one of them a break by volunteering for the mission, aboard Mad Dog One. Now the gunship was bucking through the air, and he was peppered by fragments of bullets as they ripped through the floor and bounced around the cabin. His gunner—a guy everybody called Swisher because his fake front teeth made a swishing sound when he talked—was blown off his M60 and lay motionless on his back, his eyes closed.
Jones looked for a wound, then found it: a bullet had hit the edge of Swisher’s helmet and entered his forehead, leaving a tiny hole from which blood oozed. The impact had cracked the helmet from front to back. Jones barely had time to register that Swisher was dead before he smelled the burning oil, saw the smoke, and heard the change in the tone of the engine. The helicopter banked away from the PZ, leveled off over the trees, and began to gain altitude as it accelerated west.
An instant later, Waggie flew Greyhound Three into the same wall of anti-aircraft fire. He could hear the bullets coming up around his feet, distinct thuds and pings that penetrated the Plexiglas nose bubble, ripped through the thin metal skin of the aircraft, and impacted with the underside of their armored seats.
Leaning over their M60s, the gunners returned fire into the jungle, but the deep, stuttering roar from Michael Craig’s gun stopped abruptly as a bullet cleared the underside of his “chicken plate” (ballistic armor worn by air crews) and tore into his ribs and chest. The impact from the round flung him up and backward onto the cabin floor. “Your crew chief is hit!” yelled the Special Forces bellyman on board to
assist with the extraction. He reached over to help Craig just as the door gunner was spun backward by a bullet to the shoulder.
Copilot Hoffman instinctively gripped the controls and yelled, “Breaking right!” as Waggie radioed Armstrong, who was hot on their tail in Greyhound Four and about to fly into a wall of fire. “Bank right, Greyhound Four, bank right! We’re taking hits! Abort extraction! Abort extraction!”
—
O’CONNOR THOUGHT it sounded as if the slicks “had the whole jungle firing at them,” yet the area surrounding the team remained silent. Suddenly Greyhound Four raced into view over their left shoulders, skimming the treetops from the northeast. Its nose flared upward to arrest its speed and the slick dropped into the clearing, whipping and flattening the grass below in the hurricane created by the rotor wash. The helicopter hovered there momentarily about a hundred yards away from the men, close to where the team had originally encountered the woodcutters.
There was no time for Wright to signal Armstrong—smoke or mirror—because a half-dozen NVA immediately emerged from the trees adjacent to the helicopter. They approached Greyhound Four, waving. The slick’s skids tapped the ground, then settled into the grass, ready for the team to board.
My God, thought O’Connor, they think that’s us! At the same moment, the team’s CIDG came to the same realization and fired on the NVA that were nearing the helicopter. From within Greyhound Four, Specialist 4 Robert Wessel, the right-side door gunner, identified the CIDG’s fully automatic gunfire as enemy fire and strafed the B-56 team’s position.
“Cease fire!” Wright yelled at the CIDG. The guns fell silent, and Wright shouted into his radio, “Get that chopper back in the air!” There was no response, and he switched channels, attempting to reach the forward air controller, the C&C slick, the extraction pilot across the clearing—anybody who could get the message that Greyhound Four was about to be ambushed by the NVA: “Get that chopper back in the air! Get them out of there! That is Charlie, I repeat…”
