by Hugh Mills
Just back on station with my third load of fuel, I made a pass through the enemy base camp to see what was happening. Our armor was drawing near from the south.
Just as I rounded the northwest corner of the base camp, Farrar's M-60 opened up in several quick bursts. Shooting with one hand and keying his intercom with the other, Farrar yelled, “I got dinks under me, lots of them, sir. And they're running north out of the camp.”
I had to immediately alert Koranda, as well as the tanks patrolling the back door along Boundary Road, so I keyed Three Nine on UHF. As soon as Major Moore heard us say we had seen enemy and taken them under fire, he opened up on UHF from his command and control ship. Right in the middle of my transmission to the gun pilot, and completely overriding what I was saying to Koranda, Major Moore began hollering, “Where are they, One Six? Go get ‘em! Knock ‘em down … kill the little bastards. Get in there One Six … shoot their asses off, Mills. Get the fuckers!”
Seeing the impossibility of trying to outscream the Old Man over UHF, I flipped off the toggle switch for UHF, put the selector on VHF, and came up to Koranda. “Three Niner, this is One Six. I'm on Victor. Can you hear me now?”
Koranda came back, “OK, One Six, good copy. Glad you switched. I couldn't hear a damned thing you were saying.”
Now, without “Mad Charlie” screaming in my ear, I pulled the Loach around hard in a decelerating right turn and looked straight down at where Farrar had fired.
There they were! Probably fifteen to twenty VC, dressed in brown, green, and blue uniforms, some with camouflage cloaks, all wearing Ho Chi Minh sandals, carrying weapons, and running like hell to the northwest out the back door of the base camp.
Farrar's M-60 began to chatter. Two VC dropped instantly, one right out in an open area, the other crumpled up under a tree. Continuing bursts from Farrar's gun nearly drowned out my FM transmission to the armor, telling Strider Eight that we had people running from the base.
The column commander, about 150 yards out by then, responded, “OK, One Six, let's back off. We're going to recon by fire.”
One of the things that low-flying scout birds had to be very careful of while working around our armor was their 90mm main gun canister rounds. The shells were essentially filled with lead pellets, perhaps an inch in length, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and shaped like a miniature soup can. There were hundreds of them in a single 90mm canister round. When our tanks let go with canister fire, everything in front of the main guns went to hell in a hurry. It cut down trees, mowed the grass, and neutralized everything in the area. An aerial scout had to be sure he didn't catch a bellyful of pellets. So I immediately pulled back to the rear of the column and did figure eights, watching the enemy base camp area literally explode.
After a few rounds forward by the lead tank, Strider Eight in the second M-48 came up on FM. “Darkhorse, we're taking a little AK fire now that we're starting to enter the bunker complex. Can you …”
There was a long pause in Strider's transmission. Then he went on, “OK, Darkhorse, I'm back. We've got a slight problem down here. One of our tankers has hit an obstruction and thrown a track. We're going to circle the wagons around him and get some people reshoeing. Keep us covered and we'll get it fixed as fast as we can.”
Reconnecting a tank track is difficult even on a good day. In jungle terrain and oppressive heat, I knew that they had their work cut out for them. While that job was going on, I worked back into a 360-degree orbit over the armor, letting my circles out just enough so that I could sweep a corridor all around the halted column.
I was on my third pass around when Farrar hit the intercom. “My God, sir, there's gooks down there!”
“Where?” I shot back.
“Right in front of the lead tank.”
“No,” I answered, “that's our guys working on the tracks.” Just a second before I had looked down and seen one of our people with a tanker bar in his hand wave to me as we went over. I was sure that was what Farrar had seen, also.
“No, sir,” Al shouted back at me, “they're dinks … they're dinks! Go back, go back!”
I swung around hard and looked straight down. What I saw was a VC antitank team … two people! One man had an RPG-7 rocket launcher in his hands, camouflage cape on his back, and a back-mounted carrier for extra RPG rockets. The other Victor Charlie was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and was wearing the same paraphernalia on his chest and back as the first guy. He was the loader.
During the lull after the tank firing, while our guys were working on the busted track, these sons of bitches had sneaked in to within fifteen to twenty meters of the lead tank. And there they were, getting ready to blow M-48s!
Farrar opened up again with his M-60. As I swung around, I let go a blast with the minigun. Everybody in the tank column dove for cover.
Strider Eight shouted at me over the radio, “We're friendlies down here, for Christ's sake! Knock off the shooting. Do you read, Darkhorse? Check fire! Check fire!”
I swung the ship abruptly away from the point of contact and keyed Strider. “Negative! Negative! RPG team to your direct front. Danger close. Depress and shoot everything you've got—twelve o'clock!”
I could hear Strider Eight's order to the column. “Full depression … main guns … fire canister … twelve o'clock!”
I wasn't able to get the Loach any farther away than the middle of the armor column when the whole jungle to the front exploded. All three forward vehicles in the column fired canister. At the exact same time, the enemy team let go with an RPG round.
The best place for me was right where I was—oyer the middle of the armor column doing tight three sixties to stay out of the way of those canister rounds.
After the lead vehicles, had fired, all the other tanks let go with canister that literally sliced down the entire circumference of jungle around the column. Flame erupted, trees flew, debris rained down, dust and smoke billowed up in almost a perfect circle. And I continued my tight little orbits, right above the center of it all.
Suddenly my FM radio came back alive with Strider Eight. “OK, Darkhorse,” he said, “we're going to check fire. We'd like One Six to jump out there in front and see what you've got now.”
I pulled the OH-6 out of the protective circles and headed back over the lead tanks toward the spot where Farrar had spotted the RPG team. Looking down, I came back up to Strider. “You've got five or six bad guys down here; all appear KIA. One of them has on a red scarf—damned if that's not the first guy with a red scarf I've ever seen in Nam. They are all not more than fifteen meters dead front of your lead vehicle. You'll need to send your infantry up to check ‘em out. I'm going to continue on over to the base camp to see what the live Charlies are doing.”
I arrived at Boundary Road just as the enemy fleeing out of the base camp was making contact with the blocking armor patrolling the road. This put Charlie in a hell of a fix. He was now caught between the advancing armor-infantry column on the south and the tanks waiting for him on the north.
With the ground forces now fully committed, there was not much more Koranda and I could contribute. But we could give Charlie one more kick in the ass before departing station. I re-marked the area with smoke and asked the Cobra to expend his ordnance in a good hose-down of the entire base camp.
I also contacted the Sidewinder FAC, who brought up a flight of F-100s with napalm, as well as an ARVN flight of Douglas A-l Skyraiders. After watching them put down their ordnance, Koranda and I broke station and headed back to Phu Loi, knowing that we'd be back in a day or two to make a BDA of the entire area.
It took about three days for our ground friendlies to finish mopping up the enemy contingent that had occupied the base camp. Most of the VC had to be flushed out of their bunkers. Those who wouldn't flush were dealt with by 2/11 ‘s M-48s. They would simply poke the muzzle of the main gun into the bunker entrance and let go with a single 90mm canister round.
The ground guys found—not more tha
n ten meters in front of the lead tank—the five dead bad guys that we had spotted and engaged from the air. There were actually three RPG gunners and two loaders armed with AK-47s. If there was a third loader, he either got away or was vaporized in the hullabaloo.
The three RPG weapons and gunners meant that Charlie was setting up to knock down the three lead tanks in the column. If that had happened, the rest of the column would have stalled behind the halted lead elements, then, one by one, been disposed of with RPG rounds.
Another interesting thing the ground guys discovered was that our tank 90s and the first RPG round from the enemy had indeed fired almost at the same instant. The lead tank had a huge gouge cut into the armor plate on the left side of the vehicle's turret. The hastily aimed RPG round had actually hit the tank, but with only a glancing blow. The projectile did not penetrate or detonate when it hit. The nasty scar it left, however, was witness to the massive destructive punch that the Russian RPG-7 carried, even in a near miss.
I learned something from the experience, as I did every single time I flew in the aircraft in combat. I discovered that an up and running armored column can take a lot of the heat off a noisy helicopter. When tanks are nearby, they not only terrify the enemy, they also make so damned much noise that the helicopter overhead can't be heard—thereby shifting Charlie's attention from me to them. I was fairly certain that that was the case with the enemy RPG team.
A short time after the base camp incident, I learned that I had been recommended to receive the Air Medal with “V” device for discovering the enemy RPG team. I decided that it was time to grind an old troop-policy ax that had bothered me (and Bob Davis) for as long as we had been in aerial scouts. Policy was that when an aircraft commander was put in for an award, the copilot was automatically put in for an award one step down from the pilot. Then the crew chief generally was recommended for an award one level down from the copilot. In the case of the scout platoon, where we did not normally carry a copilot-observer, the crew chief was recognized right under the pilot. In other words, if the pilot was put in for a DFC, the crew chief might be awarded an Air Medal with “V” device for the same action.
Bob Davis and I both thought that it was a stupid way to handle the awards situation, particularly since that crew chief was up there in the same aircraft, yet had no control over his destiny. He was totally at the mercy of the pilot. If a pilot made a mistake that cost him his life, the crew chief generally died too. On the other hand, in order for the pilot to do his job effectively, he had to have a good crew chief who would keep the enemy's head down, knock out enemy gun positions before they could come to bear, and provide a second pair of sharp eyes to help spot trouble.
As scout platoon leader, I told Davis that I would write up anew policy and present it to the Old Man. That new policy simply stated that I would no longer endorse any awards for combat flight unless the crew chief got the same award as the pilot. If the pilot got a Silver Star, the crew chief got a Silver Star.
Major Moore agreed.
CHAPTER 9
THE CRATER
Stuff really began to hit the fan in late July and August of 1969, as far as enemy activity was concerned. We believed that the war in Vietnam was close to being over just a month before. But things had changed.
Instead of looking all day and seldom finding the enemy, the scout platoon was making two, three, or more solid enemy contacts a day. We were beginning to find bigger groups of enemy soldiers in the field—more NVA soldiers than Viet Cong. We were beginning to get more people in the troop hurt and killed as a result of the increased enemy contact. And more scout helicopters were being wrecked and lost due to heavier ground fire from a determined enemy.
We were finding that our OH-6As never got to three hundred hours for regular maintenance. We were darned lucky to get to one hundred hours before handing it over to the maintenance people—generally in pieces. There were, in fact, many times that we didn't even have a chance to get a new factory-fresh bird painted with troop markings before it was pressed into scout service to replace one shot up beyond flyable use.
The enemy was getting busy as hell in the 1st Infantry Division area, and none of us really knew the reasons why. We speculated, of course. President Johnson had stopped the bombings of North Vietnam on 1 November 1968, and we figured that this had allowed Charlie time to rebuild forces decimated in their last big Tet offensive. With forces and supplies so strengthened, more and more enemy troops were probably heading into the field from their protected Cambodian sanctuaries.
There was also the fact that newly elected President Nixon had formally announced a schedule of planned withdrawals of American forces from Vietnam, beginning 8 July. With some of the Americans starting to leave, and ARVN forces replacing them in the ranks, the unfriendlies may have felt that the moment was right to rekindle their offensive.
It could have been one, none, or all of these factors. But we were just taking the days as they came. Flying every day, up to 130 hours or more a month, and doing what we could to find and bloody Charlie's nose every chance we got.
We took a little bloodying, too. Bob Harris's aerorifle platoon took 30 percent casualties in one day's fighting while holed up in an old B-52 bomb crater in the western Trapezoid.
It all started with a report from VR-1 that an abandoned base camp just south of the Michelin and west of the Onion was showing some evidence of rehabilitation and reoccupation by the enemy.
Scout pilot Bob Calloway was first up that morning on VR-1, and had reported seeing a platoon-sized group of VC move into a heavily wooded area near the old base camp. At this time in 1969 finding a platoon or larger element of enemy all together in a single group was unusual, and Calloway's report immediately caught the attention of G-2. The intelligence people wanted the troop to insert the ARPs ASAP to do ground reconnaissance and check out the enemy situation.
Even though Calloway wasn't a seasoned scout pilot, he still recognized the potential danger of the situation. After making two passes over the site and seeing the enemy running from the open area into the woods, Calloway radioed his Cobra. “Don't put the ARPs in. I think there are a lot of bad people in here.”
On this day I was scheduled to fly VR-2. While Calloway was up on VR-1, I was training another new scout pilot in the unit, a warrant by the name of Jim Bruton. While I was doing some chalkboarding and maneuvers with Bruton around the base area, I.was also monitoring the radio conversations between VR-1 and Darkhorse operations.
It wasn't long before Major Moore was in the ops bunker and personally involved in the situation. He radioed Calloway's snake driver. “Look, if there are a lot of people down there, we need to put in the ARPs. Let's get Four Six on the ground and see what's going on.”
At that point, Calloway made another pass over the area and again reported to his Cobra. “There are a lot of people down here. I don't think you ought to put in the ARPs.”
The Cobra responded, “Do you see anybody down there, One Zero?”
“Negative,” Calloway came back.
Since no additional movement of enemy troops was seen and the scout was not taking any fire, the decision was made to scramble the ARPs for a ground sweep and investigation of the area. Since it was a scramble alert for the ARPs, Bob Harris didn't get a mission briefing before lift-off; therefore, he had not heard about the size of the enemy force. Wayne McAdoo and his platoon of slicks whisked the ARPs out of Phu Loi in short order and headed up the Saigon River toward the western Trapezoid.
Harris, following his normal procedure, was in the lead slick listening for any radio information that would help him size up the ground tactical situation. If he had known that a platoon of enemy troops was involved, Harris probably would have called for a reinforcing company of infantry. This was routine in order to provide the normal three to one numerical advantage, which the attacker is traditionally deemed to need over a defending force.
Once out of the Hueys and about three hundred meters to the we
st of the objective area, ARP Sgt. Jim Gratton and Specialist Mitchell took the point and led the platoon toward the wooded area. Gratton had his usual shirt full of frag grenades and carried a shotgun. Mitchell had an M-16.
Harris waved his Kit Carsons forward to take up positions near Gratton and Mitchell. The situation called for cautious movement because the aeroscout had seen enemy in the area, and there was always the possibility of booby traps. The Kit Carson scouts, being former Viet Cong themselves, were generally better at spotting booby-trap situations than our people.
As the ARP formation reached the edge of the wooded area objective, Gratton sensed real danger. The Kit Carsons were beside themselves with fear. The point got on the radio to Harris, who was just in back of the lead element.
“There's a lot of people around here, in the woods. We think this thing is occupied.”
Four Six radioed that information back to Phu Loi ops and was again told that he should move in and make contact with the enemy, to fix them in place. If necessary, additional forces would be brought in to support the twenty-eight ARPs already on the ground.
With that order understood, Harris pressed the platoon on into the woods, fully expecting to begin receiving fire at any moment. But, strangely enough, no enemy fire came.
Four Six radioed his point men again. “Why aren't we getting shot at? What's it look like up there?”
Of course, Harris knew that Gratton couldn't see much through the dense vegetation. No one in the formation could see more than a few inches in any direction. There was no way to detect enemy positions or firing lanes. Daylight itself was almost shut off by the thick growth of the stifling jungle foliage.
Without realizing it, Harris's ARPs had pressed about halfway into the enemy base camp. Charlie was sitting in his bunkers all the way around the ARP formation—waiting, watching, allowing the whole platoon to enter the lair before slamming shut the ambush door. Harris's men, though properly deployed and proceeding with all the skill and jungle savvy at their command, didn't have the slightest tip-off that they were already amidst the cunningly camouflaged enemy bunkers.
