Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  Since I was just approaching the scene, I didn't know the extent of the situation. I only knew that there was heavy enemy contact, that the LRRPs were isolated and pinned down with casualties, that the ARPs had been hit and had taken casualties in the LZ, and now we had the aeroscout down with at least one crewman hurt.

  Arriving at the scene, I made one fast pass to try to get everybody's position on the ground. I saw Four Six (Bob Harris) and his medic working desperately over a couple of their downed soldiers. Here we go again, I thought.

  As we made eye contact, Bob began making hand signals. He pointed to the northeast, touched his index and middle fingers to his eyes, then pointed again off to the northeast. That told me he saw the enemy in that direction.

  When I moved off on the heading Harris had indicated, I saw the wreckage of Niner's OH-6. The aircraft was on its side, with a crumpled tail boom and all four blades gone. It was smoking but hadn't burned on impact.

  As I made one circle over the crash, I saw Vad with his pistol drawn, half dragging and half carrying Farrar. Al was still hanging onto his M-60 and had a very long belt of ammunition dragging along behind him. It took more than a crash and twisted leg to separate a crew chief from his machine gun!

  Wanting to make sure that they made it to cover, I stayed over Vad and Farrar until I saw a couple of ARP point men move out to escort them back into the middle of the ARP formation. Satisfied that the scout crew would be taken care of, I headed off in the direction that Four Six had indicated.

  Hitting about sixty knots and flying about ten feet off the trees, I crossed over a tree line not far from the LZ. Immediately I began to draw heavy automatic weapons fire from all directions. The rounds coming up at me were from both .30- and .50-caliber enemy weapons, probably positioned in bunkers. My airspeed, and the fact that the gunners weren't leading me enough, kept me from taking any hits, however.

  Parker opened up with his M-60, spraying the general area. I didn't ask him to check his fire, but I did remind him to be very careful, since we had a lot of friendlies down there.

  After about three orbits, we spotted the LRRP unit huddled together at the base of a large tree. It looked as if three of the men had been hit. There was a small open area nearby, but it wasn't big enough for a rescue aircraft.

  One of the soldiers had a radio in his hand but was apparently talking on a frequency I didn't have. I got off a quick call to Sinor, asking him to find out the FM push that the LRRP team was using. He was back to me right away, and I immediately called them.

  “Ranger, Ranger, this is Darkhorse One Six. How do you hear?”

  Normally those LRRP guys were pretty cool and collected over the radio, but this soldier was fairly screaming. “Roger, roger, Darkhorse! I've got you. I see you. Can you see the enemy? They're everywhere! They're all around us. You gotta get us out of here fast!”

  “OK, Ranger, sit tight. I've got an infantry platoon on the ground about eight hundred yards to your southwest and they're moving toward you.”

  “Negative! Negative!” he shouted. “There are more enemy troops in here than that. They're company force … company plus. It's gonna take more than a platoon. Do you copy?”

  “I roger that, Ranger, but you've got more than just any platoon to help you out. You've got the Darkhorse ARPs. Do you copy?”

  Everybody in the 1 st Division knew and respected the aerorifle platoon. It was made up of select infantrymen from all over the division who had distinguished themselves in combat and had volunteered for the ARPs. This multiskilled, multifaceted group of twenty-eight young men really knew their business.

  The LRRP leader immediately understood that I wasn't just bullshitting him. “I copy, Darkhorse ARP platoon. So get us the hell out of here. We've got wounded. We need a doc for our wounded.”

  I rogered, “There's a medic on the ground. Sit tight where you are. The ARPs are moving toward you from your sierra whiskey, so control your fire to the southwest. Now give me a target for the gunships to hit.”

  “That's a roger, Darkhorse,” he answered, “controlling fire to sierra whiskey. Can you see my cardinal direction for the ground fire … in this direction fifty to seventy-five meters? We're taking heavy .30-and .50-caliber machine-gun fire from bunkers. Can you get on them?”

  “OK, Ranger. Can you give me a smoke?”

  “Roger, Darkhorse … stand by.”

  A second later I saw the flash of the grenade fuse going off, then a puff of purple smoke. “OK, Darkhorse, smoke's out. Do you identify?”

  I answered, “That's affirmative … I've got grape.”

  “Roger, Darkhorse, grape smoke is out. Enemy target from the smoke is fifty meters my direction … enemy bunkers. Give ‘em hell!”

  By this time, we had three Cobras over the contact area: Sinor (Three One), Koranda (Three Nine), and Carriss (Three Eight).

  “OK, guys,” I came up to the guns. “LRRPs are pinned down by bunker fire. Grape smoke is out just north of the LRRP position. In trail, make your runs east to west with a south break … a left break. LRRPs are going to be danger close … watch your rocks and keep impact twenty to thirty meters north of smoke.”

  Sinor acknowledged for the Cobras, “Roger, One Six. East to west run with south break. You cover the ARPs while we get busy. Inbound hot … now!”

  The Cobras made three firing passes, expending about twenty rockets. They put their rocks right on the money, and probably not more than forty to fifty feet to the LRRPs' front.

  Seeing that the gunships had temporarily taken the heat off the LRRPs' position, I went back for a pass over the ARPs to see how they were doing. “Four Six, this is One Six. Snakes have got Charlie off Ranger's back for a minute. Have instructed Ranger to control fires to sierra whiskey your direction. Now, how are you doing?”

  “Not good,” Harris came back, “not good at all, One Six. I've got two men hit bad and down, and another not so bad. We need to medevac these people so we can move on up to our friendlies. Can you get a Dustoff in here?”

  I immediately radioed Sinor, who was just back to altitude after hosing down the enemy bunkers. “OK, Three-One, good rocks, good rocks. But right now Four Six has got three badly wounded. He needs a medevac before he can move up to the LRRP team. Get me a Dustoff in here as quick as you can.

  “Also, Three One,” I continued, “get hold of One Seven, who's on his way out here right now, and have him link up with Dustoff and escort the Huey into the LZ where the ARPs are down.”

  In just a few minutes my radio told me that Dustoff was inbound with Willis leading the way. I turned and saw the medevac Huey on short final with One Seven breaking over the LZ ahead. They had made good time.

  While Dustoff was loading the ARP wounded, I briefed Willis on the LRRP position and enemy bunker locations. “All right, One Seven,” I told Rod, “come on around and get on my tail. And for God's sake try for a change to not get your Texas ass shot out of the sky, OK?”

  “That's one big roger, One Six,” Willis drawled. “I am on your tail, pardner!”

  We orbited the LRRP team position and found them all OK after the Cobra runs. In fact, they were looking up and smiling at us, indicating that they were not taking any more bunker fire.

  I told Ranger that Dustoff was picking up the ARP wounded and would be right back to get his. All he had to do was sit tight until the aerorifle platoon got up to him with their medic. Then we'd pull them all back to the LZ for extraction. This all went like clockwork.

  Just to be sure the enemy bunkers were out of business, the Sidewinder FAC was then called in. It wasn't long before he had fast movers on the target to massage the bunker complex with their hot stuff. Our work was done.

  Not many missions involved the entire troop, but this was certainly one of them. Every available Darkhorse scout, gunship, and slick had been brought into action. Fine-tuned coordination and esprit de corps was typical of D Troop people—it was always there, in all our operations day in and day out. But it
was especially keen when ground guys were in a tight spot and committed to a firefight. Or when an aircrew was down. These were high-priority situations.

  Only a week later another Darkhorse aircrew was shot down by Charlie's heavy automatic weapons fire and ended up down and stranded. Only this time it was a Cobra gunship and not a Loach.

  The OH-6 was the usual victim of enemy ground fire because we flew right down on the deck, and slow enough to make a juicy target. The Cobras were usually high, fast, and heavily armed, so getting shot down by enemy ground fire was not their greatest worry.

  On 18 August, Dean Sinor (Three One) and I took off on a routine VR mission up over the Saigon River near the northwestern corner of the Iron Triangle. Larry Kauffman, a hootch mate of mine, was Sinor's front-seater in the Cobra. Jim Parker was my crew chief.

  As a flight of two we rolled out of Phu Loi at first light, bound for the areas known as the Coliseum, the Onion, and the Onion Stem, located between the Michelin rubber plantation in the north and the Iron Triangle in the south. Reaching station, we started in the north near the edge of the Michelin and scouted in east-west legs on south down to the Mushroom and the Saigon River. Other than an occasional bunker and a few trails showing relatively fresh traffic, we didn't see anything unusual or make any enemy contact.

  We intentionally did not fly any farther south than the river because the Saigon was the boundary line between the operational areas of the 1st and 25th Divisions. Everything west of the Saigon belonged to the 25th; everything east to the 1st. About the only thing that operated back and forth over the river between the two divisions was artillery. Many times 1st Division artillery fire was coordinated at unfriendlies on the 25th side of the river, and vice versa.

  As we finished our VR and got ready to head back to Phu Loi, Sinor ran his procedural radio check to see if any friendly artillery was firing near our route of flight back home. He found out that artillery was being fired south out of Lai Khe in 1st Division O A, as well as rounds coming north out of the 25th Division base at Cu Chi, right through our route of return.

  Sinor came up to me on the radio. “One Six, we've got an arty problem going home. We'll either have to take the long way back to papa lima or go lima lima to Dogleg.” That is, we could either fly all the way around the artillery that was crossing our return flight path, or we could drop down to low level (lima lima) and fly all the way back on the deck to Dogleg Village, which was the IP (initial point) for the northern approach into Phu Loi.

  We decided to take the short route. Though it was unusual for a Cobra to spend much time traveling down low, it wasn't any big deal for a scout. We did it every day for a living.

  Kauffman checked his maps and plotted a heading of one two zero degrees. The course would take us straight south and east across the heart of the Iron Triangle, over the Saigon River at Phu Cuong, north to Dogleg Village, and then the short descent south into Phu Loi.

  We dropped down out of altitude, took up one two zero, and began zipping along at about a hundred knots. Though fairly fast for the Loach, that speed was kind of lumbering along for the Cobra.

  We were in trail with me leading and running about twenty to thirty feet off the ground. Since we hadn't worked this particular area, we flew with guns hot and everybody watching. With big bird in tow, we were being especially cautious.

  It couldn't have been more than three to four minutes later when I looked down at the ground and was shocked to see troops below in contact! U.S. ground pounders were running through the marshy terrain and firing their weapons in the same direction.

  As I passed over the American soldiers, I saw what they were shooting at. Coming up under my nose were twenty to thirty VC slogging through the mud and firing their AK-47s like crazy back at the Americans.

  I hit the mike button for Sinor and yelled, “Three One, break right, break right now! I got gooks under me. Get the hell out of here!”

  As I spoke, I slammed hard right pedal and jerked the cyclic to whip the Loach up and away from the danger zone, hoping that Sinor's Cobra would be right behind me.

  At the same moment, Sinor shouted, “Three One's taking hits. I'm taking hits. We're hit!”

  Still in my hard right turn, I looked around and saw Sinor veer off slightly to the left, then back to the right. I hoped nothing serious was wrong. Sinor was out of his element—actually hearing ground fire and seeing the people who were shooting. Maybe he was just over-reacting.

  No such luck. “One Six, they got my hydraulics. I've lost my hydraulics and I've got to put it down!”

  I swung around behind him and got on his right wing. We would have to find a place fast to put her down before Sinor lost his accumulator auxiliary. When something caused hydraulic fluid to escape the aircraft's system, an emergency accumulator provided a small reservoir of fluid, which permitted some movement of the aircraft's hydraulic controls. But that emergency fluid was soon pumped right out the same hole in the lines that caused the initial loss. Sinor had to get his aircraft down before he lost complete control of his ship.

  From my position on his right wing, I could see Sinor and Kauffman in the snake's cockpit wrestling with the now-hardening controls. In his struggle to help fly the aircraft, Kauffman had dropped his map and wasn't able to pinpoint a grid of our location. Well, I thought, I'll figure that out later.

  Suddenly I saw a clearing ahead that looked big enough for the Cobra. The ground looked wet and soggy, and there was a tree or two, but otherwise it was OK, considering our state of affairs.

  I circled around off Sinor's wing and keyed the mike. “All right, Dino, there's the clearing. I've got you covered. Go ahead and put her down. Watch the tree … watch your tail to the right, you've got a tree.”

  Three One powered the big bird down into a controlled landing. He must have used the last drop of fluid in his system before the accumulator locked up. I started breathing again.

  I circled close above as Sinor cut emergency power and fuel switches and the rotors began to wind down. The aircraft, other than the skids being stuck down halfway in the mud, looked in pretty good shape. And the crew was OK; I saw both men unbuckle and throw open their individual canopies.

  Kauffman exited on the left side with his CAR-15 in hand. He ran around the nose of the ship to Sinor, who was just jumping out on the right. The two men crawled underneath the ship's right rocket pod. Kauffman was down on all fours, getting his CAR-15 into firing position.

  I couldn't believe where they had taken up their defensive position. The Cobra's fuel cell, containing probably three hundred to four hundred gallons of JP-4, was right over their heads. In addition, there were the two rocket pods, one on each wing, still full of thirty-eight 2.75-inch explosive rocket rounds. What a place to be with the possibility of somebody shooting at you!

  As I looked down again, I noticed that Sinor was doing something funny with his right arm, kind of shaking it with short, choppy jerks. It looked as though something had happened to his arm or hand, probably when he put down the ship.

  My speculation was interrupted by Kauffman, who had gotten his PRC-10 radio out of his emergency vest and was talking into it. “One Six, One Six.” His voice was a bit shaky. “Are you there? Can you hear me, One Six? I'm on Guard freq. Come in, One Six!”

  “I'm here,” I answered. “I'm circling just to your sierra echo. Is Three One all right? Looks to me like he's hurt. Did he injure his hand or arm?”

  “Nope, he's not hurt, One Six. He's just got his pistol caught in his sock and can't get it out.”

  Cobra pilots seldom had reason to use their personal weapons when they flew, so they carried their sidearm in their shoulder holster, wrapped in a sock. They'd clean, oil, and load the weapon (usually a Model 10, 4-inch barrel Smith and Wesson revolver) and stick it into a sock to keep out dust and dirt. It worked well except when the knot in the top of the sock pulled tight and the weapon wouldn't come out.

  With Sinor jerking away, Kauffman continued to set up a
defensive firing position under the right wing of the Cobra—with thousands of pounds of fuel and ordnance over his head. I radioed again.

  “OK, Larry, you and Dino get the hell away from that wing and move down to the tail of the aircraft where you won't have all that JP-4 and ammo on top of you. I'm going to sweep around the area and find out where Charlie is, then see what I can do about getting somebody to get you guys out of here. Sit tight for now.”

  I keyed Parker on the intercom. “Jimbo, get ready back there. We've gotta keep the bad guys from coming down this way and messin' up the rest of Sinor and Kauffman's day. I don't have a push on the friendlies up here, but I imagine they're 25th Division on this west side of the river. Watch out for them if you have to shoot.”

  I pointed the bird straight north from the downed Cobra and almost immediately began taking heavy AK-47 fire. I heard hits in the fuselage and the tail boom area.

  “Sir,” Parker yelled, “we're catching it but I can't see them! And I can't shoot because of the friendlies!”

  My God, I thought, those gooks can't be more than seventy-five to a hundred meters away from Sinor. I whipped the Loach around in a sharp 180-degree turn to get back on top of the Cobra. I could see Sinor and Kauffman huddled underneath the tail boom, looking north, where they must have heard the AKs open up on me.

  Their faces showed their predicament. They looked alone and scared. The airborne power, speed, and heavy armament of their AH-1G gunship was gone. Sinor and Kauffman were on the ground, with nothing more than a rifle and a revolver (maybe still stuck in its sock) to try to ward off an enemy that had obviously seen the Cobra go down.

  Having been in similar circumstances, I knew what they were feeling. Every nerve ending in your body flashed red hot, then ice cold, feeling like thousands of little pins repeatedly stabbing you. Your eyes strained, trying to penetrate the dense foliage and see the soldiers whom you knew were closing in with their AKs. Tightening the clammy grip on your weapon, you breathed in short little gasps, wondering how you were going to get out of this mess.