Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  Dragging him into the open, Doc tried to rip away the top of Slater's flight suit to start working on him, but the chicken plate was in the way. Doc had never seen a chicken plate before, so I reached down with my knife and cut it loose.

  Doc quickly checked all the vital signs, then looked up at me. “I'm sorry, sir, he's dead.”

  It took a moment for the realization to sink in. “OK, then, let's go back. We've still got a pilot in there.”

  I knew Ameigh had to be on the right side of the aircraft, which was still against the ground. “Everybody!” I yelled. “I need everybody over here to turn this bird over.” In seconds a dozen or more soldiers were lifting and pushing.

  As the aircraft moved, a hand fell out the pilot's cabin door. I let go of the aircraft and grabbed the hand to search for a pulse. My heart nearly jumped into my throat. I felt a pulse—a strong but irregular beating against my trembling fingertips. “This man's alive,” I screamed. “Push this thing up … get the airplane up … and be careful as hell!”

  Ameigh was still strapped in, but sideways in his seat. The aircraft had rolled over on him. Doc was at my side again as I reached for Ameigh's seat belt and shoulder harness release. When I popped it, he fell loose into our arms and free of the aircraft.

  As Doc and the others started working over Ameigh, I ran back over to Cheek, who was still hovering precariously over the fallen tree limbs of the LZ. I leaned in the cabin door, plugged in my helmet, and hit the intercom button. “Three Five, this is One Six. We've got the charlie echo kilo [crew chief-engineer dead]. Charlie echo is kilo. One Five is still alive. Let's get a Dustoff. Scramble a Dustoff. We've got Ameigh still alive down here. Get Dustoff over here as fast as you can.” I rushed back over to Ameigh. “How's he doing?”

  The medic looked up at me. “I don't know … it's touch and go.”

  I told him I had called Dustoff, but that maybe both Doc and Ameigh could get into the back of my Loach for the short lift over to Doctor Delta (Lai Khe hospital).

  Doc quickly turned down my offer. “Negative. I want him in a litter. I don't want to curl him up—he's had massive internal injuries.”

  “Can you keep him alive?” I pleaded.

  “I think I can if we can get a Dustoff in here and not waste any time getting him over to the hospital.”

  Doc and another one of the soldiers strapped what looked like a tourniquet around Ameigh's lower body, then hooked up an IV. Ameigh was a really handsome guy with black wavy hair. Standing there looking into his ashen face, I just couldn't believe that he had been on my wing one second, then gone without a trace. Now this!

  I went back to the hovering Loach and got on the radio just in time to hear Mike Woods say, “One Six, Dustoff is coming off Doctor Delta right now. I need to get your Loach out of there and get Dustoff down in your lima zulu. Will the Huey fit?”

  Looking around me, I said, “Yeah, it's big enough for a Huey, if he's good. Dustoff can make it in here, but it'll be tight as hell.”

  Then I turned to Cheek. “Dwight, I'm going to go with Ameigh in Dustoff. Can you get this bird out of here, then get up on Three Five's wing and take this ship home?”

  “Sure. Roger. Do you need any help?”

  “No, I just need room down here for Dustoff. Get up on Mike's tail and stay with him. Do what he tells you and you'll have no problem.”

  I backed away and watched the OH-6 climb up into the night. Seconds later, Dustoff arrived and started descending into the jungle hole just vacated by Cheek. Then its light came on, illuminating the whole area in a blinding white glare.

  As the ship floated down, the jungle began to rumble and roar. The rotor wash of that Huey blew things all over the place. Soldiers grabbed for their hats and other gear. I saw Doc lean down over Ameigh to protect him from the fury.

  The air ambulance couldn't set down on that pile of torn-up forest any better than we could. So the ship hovered, and a medic jumped out and helped Doc work over Ameigh for three or four minutes. Then Ameigh was lifted onto a Stokes litter and we carried him over to Dustoff.

  The crew chief turned to me. “What about your dead?” he asked.

  “No time … let's take care of the living. We'll come back for Slater.”

  He signaled the pilot to get going, and we lifted up into the night. Lai Khe was only a couple of minutes away. We were no more than up when Dustoff s light came on again and we settled down onto the Doctor Delta pad, with a huge red cross painted in the middle of it.

  Waiting at the medical pad were five or six hospital people with a gurney. A wooden ramp went directly from the pad over to a Quonset hut with double doors.

  The instant Dustoff touched down, Ameigh was transferred to the gurney and a doctor bent down over him with a stethoscope. I followed behind the gurney as it moved toward the double doors. The medical people were all in their gleaming hospital whites; I was still in flight gear with helmet, chicken plate, survival vest, and gun belt.

  When they kicked open the double doors, we were suddenly in an operating room with emergency medical equipment all over the place. Still nobody told me what to do, so I stepped aside and watched the flurry of activity. As they lifted Ameigh off the gurney and onto an operating table, I whispered, “God, please save him.”

  The team worked feverishly. Then, suddenly, CPR was ordered. I began to feel very nervous, light-headed, and almost nauseous. I steadied myself against the wall. My God, I thought, Ameigh's not going to make it.

  For eight to ten minutes more, the medical team worked over Ameigh. Then, as suddenly as they had begun their lifesaving efforts, they stopped. I heard the lead doctor say quietly to his associates, “OK, that's it.”

  The doctor had apparently noticed me standing nearby. He pulled off his face mask and rubber gloves, and stood motionless over Ameigh for a moment. Then he walked over to me. “I'm sorry, we've lost him. There's nothing more we can do.”

  I nodded and looked past the doctor at Ameigh lying there on the table. I felt totally lost. With my flight helmet still in my hands, I turned and walked out the door of the emergency room. There was a bench there, and I sank down on it.

  For what seemed like an eternity, I sat there listening to the muffled blasts of artillery shooting into the night out of Lai Khe. I could see flares bursting over the Iron Triangle. I could hear the cracks of small-arms fire in the direction of Ben Cat. Then my world went silent.

  For the first time since the ordeal had begun, I realized that my body was drained. All my energy was gone. My senses were dull. I was dead tired.

  I don't know how long I sat there on that bench outside the emergency room before one of the Dustoff pilots walked up and snapped me back to reality. He told me that the hospital had received an FM radio message that Darkhorse was sending its C and C Huey to take me back to the troop.

  I thanked him and continued to sit there staring. I smoked a cigarette and thought about what had happened. I still couldn't believe that one second Ameigh and I were flying and talking together, and the next second he was gone. Irretrievably gone. I just couldn't believe it!

  About fifteen minutes later, the troop C and C landed, and just behind that ship came Dustoff returning from its second trip to the crash scene with Jim Slater's body. Realizing that there was nothing more for me to do at the hospital, I climbed aboard the C and C ship for the trip back to Phu Loi.

  Wayne McAdoo (Two Six) and Bob Holmes (Two Nine) were the pilots, and they wasted no time asking me, “How's Ameigh? Is he OK?”

  “No,” I mumbled. “Ameigh's dead … Slater's dead … they're both dead.”

  There was a long pause while my announcement sank in. Then McAdoo turned to me. “What should we do?”

  All I could say was, “Let's go home … that's all we can do.”

  Without another word said, the Huey lifted off from Lai Khe, leveled off at fifteen hundred feet, and headed southeast to Phu Loi.

  I sat on the floor with my legs drawn up, my arms folded ove
r my knees, and my head cradled in my arms. The wind rushed through the open rear compartment doors and the Huey's rotors beat a steady rhythm in my ears.

  My body demanded sleep, but the pictures in my mind of Ameigh and Slater kept playing over and over again. Even in the misty fog of my exhaustion, I kept thinking just how fragile life really is. This was my first close-up exposure to death, and it was a deep, hurting shock to my twenty-one-year-old mind.

  CHAPTER 8

  MAD CHARLIE

  Rod Willis (One Seven) completed his scout training flights and moved onto the active flying roster, taking the place of Jim Ameigh. Jim Morrison had left the scout platoon for troop maintenance, so there was another vacancy in the Outcasts. Filling that slot was a new pilot, Bob Calloway, who took the scout platoon call sign One Zero. I made it a point to fly with new pilots coming into the troop as often as I could.

  Calloway had been flying as door gunner for about a week, getting the feel of things. On 7 July, I decided to take him out on a pilot training mission, with him doing the flying out of the right seat and me riding along as observer in the left seat. I chose an area where I felt we could work without a great deal of danger—out along the Saigon River north and west of the Mushroom.

  At that time of year, the Vietnamese were harvesting their rice crop and planting a new crop right behind it. In the area where Calloway and I were to fly that day, there were lots of U.S. Army and ARVN troops, protecting the farmers while they harvested and planted their rice. I felt, therefore, that the area would be relatively free of bad guys and potential combat situations. Besides, there were old forts, winding trails, Highway 14, various types of bunkers, tiny villages, and rice paddies on which Calloway could practice scouting techniques.

  When we reached the area, I asked our Cobra pilot, Paul Fishman (Three Four), to put us down over a small open field. I wanted Calloway to practice how to drop out of altitude into a low search pattern, orbit a given area, and report everything he saw to the gun pilot.

  I counseled One Zero, remembering that not so long ago, / was the trainee. “The good scout pilot never stops talking to his gun from the moment he goes down out of altitude until he comes back up again. It not only keeps the Cobra happy and informed, but it tends to keep your own guts stabilized when you're down low working and, at any instant, could catch a bellyful of AK-47 fire.”

  Then, while Calloway practiced, I relaxed. I hung my left foot out of the aircraft and let it flap in the breeze. I lit a cigarette and began watching the ground out the left side of the ship.

  I noticed a group of people working a rice paddy out to the west, just off the east bank of the Big Blue (Saigon River). It looked like about thirty Vietnamese men and women all wearing the usual conical hats and traditional pajama tops and bottoms, pants rolled up above their knees.

  Calloway didn't see them at first because he was looking straight down in his right-hand orbits over the field. But each time we came around, I watched their progress as the group waded through the paddy, all heading in the same direction and working in almost perfect unison.

  It was fascinating to see how smoothly and quickly they worked. They had bags of rice shoots strapped to their backs. With each step, they'd withdraw a shoot from their pack, plunge the shoot into water up to their elbows, leaving it standing erect in the mud, then move on to insert the next shoot. I was momentarily captivated by their almost military cadence as they moved down the watery furrows.

  Then, the little alarm twitch in the back of my neck went off. Something about the group was just not right. I couldn't figure it out.

  My attention began to center on one of the workers near the middle of the group. He didn't seem to be doing things the way the others did. As he moved forward with the group, he seemed also to be inching his way ninety degrees out of the knot of workers and toward the riverbank.

  He didn't have a hat on, and all the other workers were wearing hats. I studied his face. He appeared to be about military age, not very young or very old like the rest of the workers. While they marched steadily on, planting their rice and paying absolutely no attention to our orbiting aircraft, this person kept nervously glancing up at us, keeping close watch on where we were and what we were doing.

  To distract him from the fact that we were keeping an eye on him, from our orbits over the adjacent field, I dropped a couple of smokes. I hoped that would make him think we were interested in something right beneath the airplane.

  But he was too nervous to take the bait. Every moment or two he glanced over his shoulder at us—all the time trying to give the appearance of feverishly planting rice—while hurrying his movement across the main body of the group to make his exit.

  That did it for me. I got on the radio to the gun. “Three Four, this is One Six. We got a guy over there in the middle of those farmers who's planting rice the wrong way and looking suspicious as hell.”

  “What do you think you've got, One Six?” Fishman came back.

  “I don't know, Paul,” I answered. “But I don't think he's a farmer. I think we've got a dink over there who's trying to look like he's planting rice, while trying to pull a didi-mau out the other side and make a run for the river.”

  “What do you want to do, One Six?”

  “I'm going to tell Calloway to go over there and make a few passes near them to see what this person does. Then I'll let you know. In the meantime, why don't you get up on the ARVN push and find out who the controlling agency is for this area, so we can bring an interpreter in here and run a few questions by this guy.”

  Three Four rogered that and I pushed the intercom button to Calloway. “OK, Bobby, roll out of here easy and move on over to that group of farmers. Then take up an orbit at a respectable distance away, not directly over their heads. There's a guy acting weird. We're going to see what the hell he's doing in there and nail his ass if he keeps looking phony.”

  Just as we were getting to the group of farmers, Fishman came back up on VHF. “Sorry, One Six. None of our friendlies in the area have anybody right now they can plug into this area to pick up your guy and interrogate him. What do you want to do now?”

  I thought for a minute while we watched below. Calloway now had the bird in right-hand turns about twenty feet off the ground, just to the west and on the river side of the group.

  Our bareheaded rice planter was looking more suspicious than ever, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that he knew our every move. The other farmers were ignoring us, planting their rice without ever breaking stride.

  I was convinced by this time that the fellow didn't belong in that group of farmers, so I suggested that Fishman call up the troop and scramble the ARPs. We could put them down somewhere around here and they could take the guy into custody and find out what he was up to.

  In less than a minute, Fishman was back to let me know that the ARPs were on strip alert for an infantry operation someplace else in the 1st Division area. So they weren't available to us for anything other than a major priority situation.

  Well, damn! I thought. I keyed the gun back. “OK, Three Four, cover me, please. We're going in there and land, and I'm going to get that sucker myself.”

  “You really want to do that?” Fishman responded.

  “Well, he's right out there in the middle of that rice paddy, and it doesn't look like too big a deal to me to take my M-16 and round him up. Then we can fly him to the ARVN unit just down the river and they can talk to him.”

  With that, I pointed Calloway to a thin dike in the flooded paddy near the group of farmers. “Make a circle and drop the bird on the dike just as close to that guy as you can. Then just hold her right there while I get out and get him.”

  Flying beautifully, Calloway settled the Loach on the little bare piece of ground. I jumped out of the aircraft, carrying my M-16 with a thirty-round magazine in it. As usual, I was dressed in my Nomex flight suit and was wearing my chicken plate, which alone weighed about thirty pounds. Then my survival vest on top of th
at. My APH-5 flying helmet, flight gloves, a pistol belt with my .45 Colt and survival knife hooked onto it, plus a shoulder holster where I carried my own personal Python 357.

  I walked in front of the aircraft, where I could look over the heads of a couple of rows of farmers and right into the face of my fidgety suspect. Since I didn't know how to say, “Get your ass over here,” in Vietnamese, I simply pointed my finger directly at him and motioned for him to come to me. He looked back at me with an “In your face!” grin.

  So I waved to him again, this time using the M-16 instead of my finger. I looked him straight in the eyes and snarled, “Come over here to me!”

  By this time you would have thought that all the people in the rice paddy would have stopped what they were doing to watch the confrontation. But, not so. They paid no attention to me or to him; they just went on planting their rice more furiously than before.

  This was their obvious signal to me that this guy was no part of their operation, that the rest of the group wanted nothing to do with him, with me, or with whatever we were arguing about.

  I motioned to him a third time and said again, as sternly as I could make it sound, “Come over here to me right now!” He looked at me with that stupid, toothy grin and slowly shook his head. Then he started backing away from me, as though he was looking for a fast way out of this deal.

  “OK, you little son of a bitch,” I yelled. I dropped to one knee, leveled the M-16, and let three quick rounds fly, aimed at a spot right in front of him. Mud and water kicked up in his face.

  Immediately his hands went up over his head and he started walking toward me, nodding and grinning like a Cheshire cat. When he got to me at the dike, I patted him down for weapons, forced his hands behind his head, and made him lock his fingers together. Putting my hands over his, I pushed and prodded him around the front of the aircraft. My intention was to put him in the crew chiefs jump seat and strap him in so he couldn't go anyplace.