Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  I needed to quickly scout out a landing zone. They would require a spot close to, but not directly on, the target area. I found a suitable place in a nearby dry rice paddy and radioed the location to the gun for transmitting to the slicks. I didn't put a smoke down at the spot for fear of it being seen by the enemy. No reason to tell the VC just where our men would be setting down. The smoke would go in just before the slicks landed, to give them wind direction and the exact location of the LZ.

  Having reported our fuel situation, it wasn't long before another hunter-killer (H-K) team came up on station to relieve us. Hootch mate Bob Davis was my scout replacement. As soon as he joined up, we went back down to about five hundred feet over the sampan area and I began filling Davis in on the action.

  “OK, One Three, see where the rockets worked out up that little tributary off the Blue? The rocks hit on the south side of the bank and right under me now—mark, mark—we got three bodies, a pack with an SKS lying across it, some AK-47s. Right at the edge of the water are two sampans—cut one in half… a guy was in it… it sank. And there's another one behind it. Took no fire after our initial runs. Follow me for the proposed LZ.”

  With Davis on my tail, I came around to the southwest of the sampan area and keyed One Three again. “Right under me now—mark, mark—is the dry rice paddy recommended as an LZ for the ARPs. I'm low on fuel … you got everything?”

  Davis gave me two clicks from his transmitter and I headed back to altitude to join up with the Cobras. Having received our briefing, One Three and his gun were now in control of the area and would wait for the slicks to show up with the ARPs. I got on Carriss's wing and we headed back to Phu Loi to refuel and rearm. On the way back to base, we passed the Hueys carrying the aerorifle platoon. They gave us a wave and a thumbs-up. Not having touched base with Crockett for a while, I hit the intercom switch and asked him if everything was OK in back.

  “Yup,” he said, “I'm rigging a smoke.”

  Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw him wiring a red smoke grenade to the muzzle cover of his M-60.1 knew it was traditional for red smoke to be trailed when an H-K team returned to base after having scored a kill. It was a visual symbol to everyone at the installation, like the submarines during World War II lashing a broom to the bridge, signifying a clean sweep.

  Coming in on the downwind, Crockett's M-60 poked out the door, trailing red smoke for all the world to see. I was coming back from my first scout mission, in command of my own ship, and trailing red smoke marking our kills—including my first from the air.

  The emotion was one of excitement mixed with horror. My hands were trembling and there were no words. There was no need for them. I had engaged the enemy in combat, face to face. I had made mistakes, but I had accomplished a mission and survived. And I had drawn my first blood.

  Happy twenty-first birthday.

  CHAPTER 5

  IMPACT AWARD

  During March and April 1969, the 1st Infantry Division mounted three in-strength offensives to flush out Charlie and try to make him fight in the open on a larger unit scale.

  The first operation, Atlas Wedge (18 March to 2 April), was designed to hit elements of the 7th NVA Division in a pincer movement in the Michelin rubber plantation. The second was Atlas Power (10 April to 15 April), calculated to go back again after the 7th NVA in the Michelin.

  Intelligence reports had pinpointed the enemy's propensity to reoccupy an area once U.S. units had been withdrawn. Taking G2's lead, Atlas Wedge troops were pulled out of the Michelin to see if the enemy would filter back in. They did. Then we did—hitting them with Operation Atlas Power.

  Plainsfield Warrior was launched on 18 April against VC-NVA main forces in the Trapezoid.

  Sandwiched between flying Atlas Wedge and Plainsfield Warrior cover missions, I flew a regular early morning VR mission, assisting the movement of a mechanized unit northeast of the “Testicles” (named for the two distinctive bends in the Song Be River at that point). An armor column, with M-48A3 Patton tanks in the lead, was busting jungle for Ml 13 armored personnel carriers. The column was moving in on an enemy base camp that had been discovered on one of the hilltops. We were to scout ahead of the column to keep them on the best course to the camp and to alert them to any trouble we might spot out in front of them or to their flanks.

  My gun pilot on 17 April was Pat Ronan (Three Three). All the scouts enjoyed flying with Pat. He was an aggressive and flamboyant Cobra driver, yet, outside the cockpit, he was quiet and reserved. He had the most impressive and distinctive mustache in the entire troop—a blond, bushy “Yosemite Sam.”

  At first light, Pat and I lifted out of Phu Loi and pulled around to a heading of zero three five. It didn't take us long to reach the target area and pick up the column, which was already en route toward the NVA base camp.

  Pat put me down in front of the column to check out the area and sweep the base camp a time or two to see if I would draw any fire. We didn't know if the camp was still occupied.

  The call sign for the mechanized team leader on the ground was Strider One One. Working to his front and flanks, I saw nothing that caused me any concern for his column, so I told him to keep rolling toward his objective grid coordinates.

  Flying over the base camp location, I didn't draw any fire, though there was evidence of recent foot traffic around some of the bunker entrances. I also noted that fresh camouflage had been placed here and there.

  On my next sweep over the camp, my crew chief, Al Farrar, suddenly hit the intercom: “Sir, I smell dinks. They're in here, I know it. I smell ‘em! Don't get too slow, Lieutenant. They're in hero, I can smell the fuckers!”

  Relatively new to the outfit, Al Farrar was a good-looking nineteen-year-old from Rhode Island. I had flown with Farrar before and knew I could trust his hunches. You actually could smell concentrations of the enemy from the air. I don't know if it was a lack of basic personal hygiene, their mostly fish diet, or a grim combination of the two. But you could catch a very distinctive odor when enough VC were together in one place—a pungent, putrid odor, heavy and musklike.

  I switched my radio to FM transmit. “Strider One One, this is Darkhorse One Seven. My chief smells bad guys. Keep moving heading zero three five, straight for the base area.”

  The column commander came back: “Darkhorse One Seven, Strider One One. Roger that. Moving on zero three five.”

  Turning out of the base camp area, I came back over the armor column. I checked out Strider's flanks and then began a slow orbit over the column, watching it work.

  Even as an armor officer, I had never seen anything like this. The two main battle tanks in front literally knocked down trees and burst through jungle undergrowth, making a path for the lighter, more vulnerable Ml 13 personnel carriers.

  Then I headed back for another look at the column's front and the base camp just beyond. Damn! As I swept back in over the base camp, there was an enemy soldier—big as life—standing on top of one of the bunkers. I could see his face clearly. No question, he was as surprised as I was.

  In the split second it took me to pass over him, I could see that he was wearing a pair of tiger-striped fatigues and was holding an RPD light machine gun. The weapon had a wooden stock, pistol grip, drum magazine, and a bipod hanging from the end of the barrel—not yet pointed at me!

  Just as I went over the soldier, he jumped down into the bunker and I could hear Farrar scream, “I've got a gomer!” The crew chief didn't even have time to key his mike. He let go with a yell that I could hear through my helmet and over the noise of the turbine and rotor blades.

  Farrar triggered his M-60 and sent a hail of lead at the VC as he dove into the bunker entrance way. I banked a hard, quick right and decelerated to give Farrar a better shooting angle, then got on Uniform to Ronan: “Hey, Three Three, we've got enemy on the ground here and taking them under fire.”

  Watching what was happening below like a mother hen, Ronan came back instantly: “OK, One Seven, come on out
of there and let me work the area with rockets.”

  I had been chided the last time for mixing it up too long with the sampans, so I rolled straight out of the area and got on FM to the mechanized team commander. “Strider One One, this is Darkhorse One Seven. You've got people in the bunkers ahead of you. I'm going to pull out of here and go up to altitude … the gun is going to work a little bit. Continue your movement and I'll be back with you as soon as we put some rockets on the ground.”

  Strider came back: “OK, Darkhorse, I roger that. We'll be clear to do a little fire to the front, and we've got the Cobra in sight.”

  Ronan made a run into the area, shooting rockets. Just as he was beginning to pull out of his run, green tracers arced up out of the base camp, directly toward the Cobra. Ronan broke over the radio, yelling, “Three Three's taking fire … TAKING FIRE!”

  My eyes were glued to the Cobra. As Ronan broke off his run and peeled to the left, I could see his turret depressing underneath him, spraying the area with 7.62 minigun fire.

  Hearing Ronan yell and seeing green tracers reaching up for his ship, I snapped. Without another thought, I rolled the little OH-6 practically on her back and aimed the ship right straight back into the bunker complex with my minigun trigger depressed.

  “One Seven's in hot!” I managed to shout. It never occurred to me that, up to this point in time, no scout pilot had ever rolled in on a target in an effort to protect a gunship. I shot a descending run right in on top of the bunker, firing the minigun all the way. Coming up off the guns, I moved out a distance over the trees and then climbed back up to altitude.

  By this time Ronan was back up to altitude and ready to let fly again. Peeling over to his left, he asked, “Are you out of there, One Seven?”

  “Yes,” I answered, “I'm coming out to the right.”

  “Three Three will be in hot from the north.” With that, the Cobra rolled in shooting a second time, and again I could hear his pairs of rockets leave the tubes and trail smoke toward the base camp bunkers below. And, again, green tracers arced up toward him. “Three Three is taking fire … taking fire again.”

  Watching the base camp carefully for the source of the fire, I called Ronan. “One Seven's in hot from the south. Three Three, make your break to the left so I won't shoot into you.”

  In I went with minigun blasting, chewing up the terrain where I had seen the green tracers coming from. Between the rockets and minigun fire, the VC must have been taking casualties, or else they were burrowed awfully deep into the tunnel complex beneath the bunkers. We were causing a hell of a commotion topside.

  We made one or two more hot passes, then Ronan went in cold a couple of times to see if he drew any fire. He didn't, so I went down for a fast scouting pass to confirm Charlie's demise.

  While I was making a low, quick check of the damage done by Ronan's rockets, I caught a glimpse of another enemy soldier out the corner of my eye. This one was dressed in dark navy blue clothing and was hunkered down in a stretch of trench line that ran between two bunkers.

  I instantly slid the OH-6 around into a decelerating right turn and looked the soldier square in the face. Probably thinking that he had me cold—which he did—the VC raised his AK-47. His weapon seemed aimed right between my eyes. As I stared, my crew chief let go with his M-60. The soldier lurched backward, practically cut in half by machine-gun fire.

  Holy shit, I thought. HOLY SHIT! Beads of sweat pricked my forehead as I realized the situation that Farrar had just pulled me—us—out of.

  Just then Ronan radioed that another hunter-killer team had come up on station to relieve us. The scout pilot taking my place was Jim Ameigh (One Five), one of my hootch mates. I briefed him on the situation, flying him through the base camp area and back over Strider One One, then joined Ronan for the flight back to Phu Loi. On the way back, I really didn't think too much about the action. It didn't seem like any big deal. But I had forgotten about ops officer Capt. John Herchert.

  He was smoking! I went into the operations hootch just behind Ronan, and Herchert was waiting for me. He stuck his face right into mine and stared me in the eye. Then, as if to punctuate his words, he poked me in the chest with his finger while he raked me over the coals. “You are not a gunship. I didn't teach you to be a gunship, and you had no business running in there hot like that. The gun on that scout ship is going to get you killed.”

  I didn't intend to be insubordinate, but anger showed in my voice when I shot back, “What in the hell did you expect me to do? Nothing? Do nothing while Ronan is down there getting shot at?”

  Luckily for both of us, Ronan stepped in at that moment. “You know, John, if Mills hadn't fired when he did to take the enemy pressure off me, they might have had me cold.”

  Herchert turned to Ronan as if to ask what the hell he was doing in this conversation, but Pat finished his comment: “I don't think what he did is a bad idea. He fired from altitude in a diving pass and, frankly, I just don't think it was a bad tactic at all.”

  Herchert's jaw went slack. Ronan turned and walked out of the room and off toward his hootch. So did I. Herchert never mentioned the subject to me again. Pat Ronan, however, did not forget the incident. Unknown to me at the time, he recommended me to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  It was not something I was consciously trying to do, but I was developing a reputation—especially among the gun and slick pilots—as a “hot dog.”

  I was flying scouts the only way I knew to fly scouts. I wanted the firepower of that minigun on my ship. I wanted to stay in there and duke it out with the enemy as long as I could, not just simply haul ass and take cover every time my scout ship took a round from the ground. I felt strongly that the accepted scouting tactic of making enemy contact and then backing off for the gun to come in and blast was bullshit.

  Charlie wasn't dumb. He knew that a few AK-47 rounds thrown at a scout ship was a sure way to get the scout off his back. It was definitely to the enemy's advantage to shoot at a scout ship every time he had a chance. But when the scout stayed and slugged it out, the rules of the game changed in the scout's favor.

  The enemy, once discovered, had a decision to make: Am I going to throw a few rounds at the scout to try to get him to back off, or am I seriously going to try and shoot down the scout? If I decide to shoot down the scout, can I? If I do knock him down, what the hell is that Cobra going to do to me?

  That's the way I wanted to play with Charlie's mind. But I had definite limits on staying and playing with the enemy. I knew when to get myself out of Charlie's airspace in a hurry. When I saw that I had lost fire superiority and had failed to influence the action, it then became foolhardy to continue engaging the enemy. But until that time in a firefight, I saw no reason for the scout to break off.

  If I was, indeed, becoming the hot dog in the troop, the younger, more aggressive scout pilots seemed to support it. However, my good friend and mentor, Bill Jones, told me in no uncertain terms that he thought I was crazy. “If you keep up that kind of stuff,” he said to me one day, “you're going to get your ass loaded with lead. You're just plain going to get yourself killed!”

  For the duration of Operation Plainsfield Warrior, we were flying four, five, six, or more hours a day. I was learning more about the OH-6 with every flight. With the added experience of every mission, I was becoming a better scout pilot. I was beginning to realize that the essence of scouting really hadn't changed over the years. From the cavalry scout of the Indian wars to the aeroscout of the Vietnam War, the essential quality for being a good scout remained the same: the ability to read sign.

  I discovered that I was developing something of an instinct—a little warning bell that went off when danger was near. It was a feeling in my gut, coupled with a tingling on the back of my neck, almost as though it was electrified. When I got that feeling, my senses automatically doubled guard. I could trust my senses, too. When the internal alarm went off, I generally found trouble.

  On 26 April 19
69,1 was just four days away from wrapping up my first full month of flying scouts. That day I was lined up with Cobra pilot Bruce Foster (Three Two) to fly another routine reconnaissance mission up north of the Iron Triangle in the western Trapezoid area.

  As VR-2 that morning, we left Phu Loi at about eight o'clock and headed up north into the Thi Tinh River valley. The G-2 had instructed us to look for enemy traffic along trails, VC base camps, new construction, signs of occupation—anything that might show us the location or the movement of enemy troops. Charlie had been making himself fairly scarce these days.

  We came on station up in the Trapezoid, roughly on an east-west line running from fire support base (FSB) El Paso to FSB Lorraine.

  Foster put me down over an area we called the Easter Egg and I began working along the trees. I twisted and turned, trying to get a look down through the jungle vegetation. We took no fire, saw no enemy.

  Suddenly Foster came up on VHF: “One Seven, turn left to a heading of one eight zero degrees, southbound. I'll give you steering corrections. We've got infantry troops in contact down to our south. I just got a frag order to move us down there to look at the area.” I rogered the transmission and pulled a hard left turn to come up on a reverse heading of one eight zero.

  Getting the order to make a move wasn't that much of a surprise to us. We had heard Sidewinder come up on the Guard frequency a minute or two earlier, asking for any aircraft in the vicinity of grid X Ray Tango 677367 to give assistance to an enemy-engaged ground unit. Guard was the universal distress frequency. Sidewinder was the radio call sign for the air force FACs (forward air controllers) who operated in this area supporting the 1st Infantry Division. The FACs had the basic mission of directing artillery, rescue, and calling in fighter-bomber strikes. They flew USAF OV-10 Bronco twin-engine, twin-boom reconnaissance aircraft.

  Sidewinder was also unique in that it had a number of exchange pilots from the Australian Air Force. On this day, the accent coming up on Guard told us immediately that this Bronco driver was from down under: “This is Sidewinder Two Two. I've got infantry just inserted on the ground and not even out of the landing zone. They've been hit… their column is cut… got troops missing, and the company is bloody well pinned down.”