by Eric Blehm
Finally there was a pause, and O’Connor, who had become increasingly frustrated, was heard shouting obscenities along the lines of “Fuck you guys! We’re getting wasted down here!” and “Boy, if you assholes could work that out later, we could sure use some tac air!” His garbled cursing, accompanied by the tat, tat, tat of gunfire in the background, sounded very much as if the team was in the process of being overrun. They weren’t yet, but—without air support—they would be soon.
When O’Connor heard Tornow come back on the station, he quickly directed Tornow to go “up ten” to a private frequency, skillfully detouring the radio traffic jam and, after fifteen-plus minutes of frustration, O’Connor was able to report the situation on the ground.
“We have a gunship down,” Tornow told O’Connor. “Support is on the way.”
“Roger that,” O’Connor confirmed.
Even as he listened to Tornow, O’Connor was keeping his eyes on the grass. Wright was a few feet in front of him, leaning against the anthill and doing the same. Suddenly Wright’s head “bobbed up” and a bullet hole appeared in his forehead.
The team leader was dead, O’Connor reported to Tornow. Mousseau was the new team leader.
“Air support is two minutes out,” Tornow replied. “I need your position and target identification.”
O’Connor could now see Tornow’s Bird Dog banking wide to the east and coming in for a pass. He took out his signal mirror “and as he neared,” says O’Connor, “I angled and hit him with a flash, or two, or maybe three. He replied with the most beautiful of sights—he tipped his wings.”
On another channel Tornow was tracking the jet fighter-bombers, the “fast movers” that were converging from all over South Vietnam; on another, he talked to Mousseau and O’Connor, who vectored him in on the team’s dual positions and identified where the most imminent enemy threat was developing. On still another, Yurman updated him on the ETA of slicks for the next extraction attempt. Then there were the two Mad Dog gunship pilots, Louis Wilson and Gary Whitaker, whose leashes Tornow had to yank to keep them from going straight into the fight on yet another run.
Tornow dropped his plane in altitude and lined himself up to fire a white phosphorous rocket at the enemy-occupied tree line approximately forty yards west-southwest of the team. The rocket would mark the target for the first two fast movers, F-100s, that carried napalm bombs, cluster bombs, and strafe (miniguns).
The trick was to place the marker at the immediate edge of the PZ so the fighter-bombers had a visual on where to drop their napalm, to eliminate the enemy and not the team. Tornow would need to fly moderately fast at a low-altitude, low-angle dive; when the Bird Dog appeared above the clearing, every NVA in the area would fire directly on him.
But enemy ground fire was the least of his concerns.
—
“WE HAVE two teams down here,” O’Connor started to repeat into the radio as Tornow prepared for his final approach. Before he could complete the sentence, a bullet slammed into his right thigh. Another shattered his left ankle.
“I’m hit,” O’Connor groaned.
“Stay with me,” Tornow said. “I’m coming in to slow them down.”
O’Connor was writhing in agony, barely conscious, slipping into shock from the blood loss and pain, but he kept on the radio. Somebody tugged at him, and he turned to see Tuan; his arm hung at his side, barely attached to the shoulder by muscle and skin. Tuan pointed at Mousseau in the other thicket. He was clasping his bloody cheek with one hand and holding the emergency radio to his ear with the other.
“Ammo?! Ammo?!” Mousseau shouted to O’Connor. “Grenades?!”
O’Connor gave himself a morphine injection and crawled to the two dead CIDG lying between the thickets. He pulled the rucksacks off their bodies, pocked with bullet holes, and stripped them of their ammo. He dragged the ammo and grenade pouches a few yards and threw them to a CIDG lying prone at the edge of the northern thicket, who in turn crawled back and tossed them to Mousseau.
—
AT LOC Ninh, Roy Benavidez watched a slick come into view over the rubber trees west of the tarmac. Instead of taking a standard longer approach, it came straight in as if the helicopter pad was a hot PZ, dropped down fast, and flared just off the deck. The moment the skids hit the ground the left door swung open and the pilot frantically waved over the ground crew.
Roy joined them, rushing forward through the red dust in a crouched run. “Medic!” he could now hear the pilot, Roger Waggie, shouting. “Medic!”
Like all Special Forces, Roy was cross-trained as a medic. He could handle battlefield trauma and even perform minor surgical procedures to sustain life while transporting a wounded soldier to a hospital. But when he saw the extent of Michael Craig’s chest wound as he lay on the floor of the slick, which was awash in his own blood, Roy knew there was virtually nothing he could do.
Roy spoke to him with encouragement, as he’d been trained, to fight the shock and try to instill in him the will to live. “We got you now, buddy, you’re going to be fine,” Roy said. “You’re going home.” Craig, who was taking short, shallow breaths, looked up at Roy as he lifted him down carefully onto a stretcher.
Throughout his tour—which began October 17, 1967—Craig had written biweekly letters to his sister, brother-in-law, baby niece, and his parents, both of whom were retired Navy. His father had served on a sub tender (submarine support vessel) in World War II and had survived the attack at Pearl Harbor.
While he’d kept them updated on the reality of the war, admitting in one letter how scared he’d been when he was shot at, Craig always remained in good humor and tried to temper their fears. “We took another hit yesterday,” he’d written in a recent letter. “You know we do wear armor plating and a ballistic helmet so even if I do get shot, I probably won’t even get a scratch. The armor plating works real good. So don’t worry about me.”
In the next letter home he told his sister, Sherry, that he had decided to order his mother a “bouquet of flowers for her birthday as there just isn’t any time to go out and buy her anything over here. I sure wish there was more time. I tell you, I wish I could buy you all the world. I sure do miss all of you. Why don’t you borrow a tape recorder and make me a tape? I really want to hear your voices. I figure it’s the next best thing to being there with you.”
Smiling down at Craig, Roy did his best to convey that there wasn’t a care in the world. The crew chief was only twenty years old—he had his entire life before him.
But Michael Craig knew, as only the dying do.
He opened his mouth, and the last words he spoke before he passed away were “Oh, my God. My mom and dad.”
—
THE WHITE phosphorous rocket Tornow fired from his aircraft impacted the tree line behind the most heavily concentrated group of NVA crouched in the clearing. White smoke billowed up from the jungle like a fog, from which the steady gunfire persisted, splintering the branches above the team’s positions and kicking up dirt in the anthill where O’Connor, Chien, and Tuan covered their fields of fire.
As Tornow climbed in altitude, he switched to O’Connor’s frequency. “On target?” he asked.
“Roger,” O’Connor confirmed. “On target.”
“Stay low,” Tornow said. “They’ll be coming in close.”
“Roger,” O’Connor said again. He signaled to Mousseau in the northern thicket, who pointed up to the sky and flat-handed down. He’d gotten the message too.
Every second seemed to drag, the voices of the NVA loud as they maneuvered toward the team. The men pressed themselves as flat into the earth as possible, unsure what would come first: the charge of the enemy or support from the air.
The answer was like a thunderclap, the prelude to the drawn-out concussion from multiple impacting incendiary bombs. The roar of the jets’ afterburners was heard almost simultaneous
ly as a bright flash engulfed the tree line, followed by a blast of heat so intense O’Connor thought his hair would catch on fire.
These guys are pros, marveled Tornow, who watched the two F-100s arc away from the PZ, leaving in their wake parallel walls of protective flame between the split teams and the advancing enemy troops. “How’s that?” he radioed O’Connor.
“Beautiful!” O’Connor replied. “Thanks.”
There was a lull in the gunfire, during which O’Connor injected Tuan with morphine and tied off his mutilated arm with a tourniquet. Weak from blood loss, O’Connor ran an IV of serum albumin into his own arm, while the remaining two CIDG on his team—also wounded, but not critically—watched for enemy movement.
In the northern thicket, Mousseau and the three of his five CIDG who had survived the firefight were also injecting themselves with morphine and patching their wounds—mostly bullet holes through soft tissue with no major bleeding—as best they could. Mousseau had taken the worst of it. A bandage was wrapped tightly around his left elbow and biceps, and a CIDG now wrapped Mousseau’s head with a battlefield dressing, attempting to cover the new team leader’s mangled eyeball, which had been blown from its socket and was hanging down his cheek.
The backdrop to the carnage within the team’s bloody perimeter was a plume of black-and-brown smoke that swirled as it rose off the ground, allowing glimpses into the clearing’s edge, where fires glowed red-hot and the screams of dying and burning men echoed. The NVA soldiers who had been assembling in the open to overrun the team were motionless, smoldering heaps.
—
GREYHOUND ONE had gotten a new battery and was now airborne and full pitch as its pilot, Larry McKibben, tried to catch up with his wingman, Jerry Ewing, in Greyhound Two.
“I’m inbound,” McKibben heard Ewing report to Yurman, who diverted Ewing from an extraction attempt in order to intercept and escort Greyhound Four—piloted by the critically wounded Armstrong and copilot Fussell. Greyhound Four had continued deeper into Cambodia for two or three minutes before Armstrong realized there was no Nui Ba Den mountain in the distance. They discovered the compass was broken, and immediately Fussell initiated a long, banking turn and headed back toward the border and the airstrip and field hospital at Quan Loi.
McKibben did not announce he was inbound to Yurman, who assumed he was still sitting in reserve back at Loc Ninh. In fact, Yurman had done everything he could to keep McKibben out of the fight, calling for any other available Greyhound slicks and even checking the inventory of their sister platoon, 1st Platoon, at the 240th.
“What’s the status on Greyhound Three?” Yurman radioed back to Loc Ninh. “They’re trying to patch it back together,” said a ground crewman, “but there’s a lot of holes—a big one on the cover of the tail rotor driveshaft. And Waggie doesn’t have a crew.”
With Waggie’s aircraft shot up and unable to fly and Ewing escorting Greyhound Four to Quan Loi, McKibben knew he was it. If an opening presented itself, they needed a slick to pull the team out. And so he continued to fly west, into Cambodia.
There was no need for vectoring; he could see the billowing smoke from miles away. McKibben heard the call that Mad Dog One was down and requesting emergency extraction and saw Mad Dog Two, piloted by Michael Grant, racing back and forth above the jungle, covering the gunship on the ground.
McKibben switched over to the Mad Dog frequency and was receiving a situation report from Curry when Mad Dog Three and Mad Dog Four announced their presence beside him, ready to provide cover. Grant vectored McKibben over the tiny clearing that Curry had managed to set the helicopter down in, and McKibben and his crew chief, Specialist 4 Dan Christensen, were able to identify the downed gunship below, sitting upright on its skids. Twenty yards off to its side was the bomb crater where Curry’s crew had formed a defensive perimeter.
On his second pass, McKibben flared at treetop level above the clearing and began to descend “like an elevator,” according to Christensen, who watched a Mad Dog streak past his left-side door as they sank downward. A moment later one of the gunship pilots reported NVA fifty yards—half a football field—away.
Christensen gripped the handles of his M60, relaxing into the intensity of the situation; he’d done this enough times to know that it did no good to get worked up. He felt the weapon’s weight; even mounted, it had a distinct heaviness as he moved it through its arc. He dreaded the need to use the weapon yet yearned for the kick and deep-voiced thud, thud, thud that ripped holes in the jungle and the enemy. Letting his eyes do the work, he searched the trees for a shape, a sign, any reason to engage, until the helicopter hovered just off the ground.
The crew from Mad Dog One poured into Greyhound One’s cargo area behind Christensen, who counted the men as they came on board—pilot, copilot, crew chief, and gunner—a full gunship crew. “We’ve got ’em. Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said over his mic, and they began their vertical exit, Christensen still fixated on the trees.
Crew chief Pete Jones on Mad Dog One would remain forever grateful to Curry for his “beautiful landing” and to McKibben for his no-nonsense extraction. “We weren’t on the ground more than five minutes when McKibben and his crew pulled us out. The NVA were looking for us, but he beat them to us. He never asked if we were taking fire; he just wanted to know our position, and that was that. He was coming in to get us, and I knew it. For a few minutes I got to feel like a grunt, waiting for that slick, knowing if it came I was fine, but if not, I was dead.”
—
AT THE PZ, the reprieve from enemy gunfire lasted only a brief time before the screams of misery were joined by heavy automatic-weapons fire announcing that the NVA had dug in and was determined to win this battle. It was approximately 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, about three hours since the B-56 team had been inserted.
O’Connor heard the explosions hitting the jungle floor almost the same time that Mad Dog Three and Mad Dog Four passed overhead, the smoke from their just-fired salvo of rockets hanging in the air, miniguns spinning. Picking up the gunships on a direct channel, Mousseau directed them to hit the trees to the southwest of the clearing, but it seemed that the jungle held enemy soldiers all around.
On Mad Dog Three, crew chief Paul LaChance manned his M60 as his pilot, Louis Wilson, came around. With a deadly arc, Wilson leveled the gunship’s nose and let loose with rockets while his copilot, Jesse Naul, saturated the tree line with his miniguns. LaChance and Jeff Colman, the right-door gunner, were picking up the gaps, hitting everything that moved, “knocking them down, ripping them to shreds,” says LaChance. “We’d come around and more were coming, a steady flow of replacements. They were stepping over the dead, and we’d just add them to the piles. Jesus, though, talk about discipline. But they were doing their best to knock us down. It’s hard to see tracers in the daylight, and you can’t really hear much, there’s so much noise, but there’s this static—you don’t need to take a bullet to know you’re getting shot at. We had bullets hitting us galore, hot lead and tracers coming through the doors, in one side and out the other. And that’s okay, you just keep returning fire, and you know if they’re shooting at you, that’s taking a little heat off the team on the ground.”
Mad Dog Four, piloted by Gary Whitaker, took his run just as Mad Dog Three was pulling out, a figure-eight pattern in the air that kept continuous suppressive fire on the jungle that surrounded the team. Crew chief Pete Gailis on Mad Dog Four could never get used to the smell after a napalm run. It was horrible as they passed over the clearing, a sweet, foul medley of burning flesh, burning trees, and cordite that he could only describe as a wood-fire barbecue, with crap barbecue sauce.
Monitoring the battle in progress on the radio, Jerry Ewing in Greyhound Two escorted Greyhound Four back across the Cambodian border and to the base at Quan Loi. He heard Armstrong telling the tower they were coming in to land, and watched the slick line up with the runway and then almo
st get taken out by another helicopter also coming in to land. “Bastard!” Armstrong shouted over the radio.
Without hydraulics, there would be no hovering or flaring in Greyhound Four’s bag of antigravity tricks—they were going in on a shallow dive, hot and fast. The skids hit the blacktop, sparks flew, and the aircraft slid more than a couple of hundred feet before stopping. Ambulances were rushing toward it as Ewing banked to the west, dropped the nose of Greyhound Two, and headed back into Cambodia.
The smoke rising from the PZ was horrendous. A slight breeze kept it from blowing away more quickly, and it looked like “doomsday on the horizon,” according to Ewing, who continued to monitor the situation on the ground through the C&C: reports of both dead and wounded, and there was gunfire, lots of gunfire. Greyhound Two was on-station, Ewing reported to Yurman; he was ready to go in. The fast movers had just finished a run, and Yurman cleared Ewing to try for an extraction.
“Identify smoke?” he heard the team below request.
Visibility was very limited, making it difficult for Ewing to orient himself within the context of the clearing he’d flown into during the insertion, so he and his copilot, First Lieutenant Bob Portman, relied on their crew to spot the team’s position through the wafting smoke. The crew chief, Specialist 5 Paul Tagliaferri, leaned out over his M60 on the left, scanning the ground through the open side door while the door gunner handled the right side. They were across the PZ in what seemed like the blink of an eye.
Ewing banked hard into a tight sweep back over and into the smoke. He could see glimpses of grass and some clumps of trees, but no colored smoke to identify the team’s location. Something nicked his pant leg, and then his microphone casing jerked an inch away from his mouth—a bullet had ripped through the floor and glanced off the microphone.
The microphone still worked, and the close call hadn’t broken Ewing’s concentration. He continued to fly, alternating glances at the horizon and down through the bubble beneath his feet.
