by Hugh Mills
Colonel Allen's idea of getting more air cavalry assets in the field was a good one for several reasons. The first was that Outcast scout crews were flying 130 or more combat hours a month and were still not covering all the ground. Plus, our scout platoon was never up to its full complement of pilots. So the prospect of having more qualified aeroscouts in the air was welcomed. Bravo Company had pilots who had already been in country for six to eight months, they were flying the same types of aircraft we had in D Troop, and they were operating over much the same Vietnam countryside. We all, therefore, were enthusiastic about the cross-training of 1st Aviation Battalion pilots to Darkhorse tactics. Creation of a new mini-cav “Lighthorse” organization promised to put even more pressure on the enemy in the field.
Overall, the scout pilot training went fine. There were a few areas of disagreement, however. Even though their pilots were experienced in the OH-6 aircraft, normal liaison missions for the 1st Aviation Battalion were generally flown at altitude, fifteen hundred feet or more. Pony pilots simply weren't used to flying on the deck, down low and slow, where the working aeroscout spent most of his time. And there was sometimes a reluctance from the guys from B Company to accept our combat scout tactics.
For instance, while out on recon, if a Pony pilot discovered a ground object, such as a bunker, he would rein up, hover in circles around the point of interest, and study the situation. It was not even uncommon for him to come to a dead hover over the scene while he examined his find. Of course, an experienced scout knew that that kind of flying could get you killed … in a hurry.
On every occasion, we tried to impress on the Pony pilots—DON'T hover, DON'T return to the target area twice from the same direction or at the same speed, and DON'T give Charlie the chance to anticipate your movement, or lack of it, or he will set you and shoot you out of the sky. That advice came from the aeroscout school of hard knocks.
Either forgetting or choosing not to follow that advice, Pony One Six took a dose of enemy AK medicine and was shot down on 23 August 1969. “Red” Hayes, one of our experienced Outcasts crew chiefs, was flying with Pony One Six that day. Phil Carriss (Darkhorse Three Eight), a very experienced Cobra driver, was his gun. While searching an area that showed some fresh traffic, Pony One Six became more or less fixated on a particular detail that he was studying below. Hayes became concerned and spoke to his pilot over the intercom. “Sir, don't slow down. We're getting too slow, sir … we're getting too slow.”
Pony One Six's scouting technique, however, had not developed enough at that point to quickly identify what he had on the ground. So he felt that he must slow down and stay in the area long enough to read the signs. It was his misfortune. His slow, lazy, easy-to-figure-out circles made him an easy target for the enemy gunners. Charlie's rounds came up in a fury.
The Pony platoon leader took one bullet through the leg. Another enemy round bit into the fuel line of his OH-6. The engine quit and the Loach went down in a sheet of flames fed by the spewing jet fuel.
Carriss, in the Cobra above, was shocked to see his scout suddenly engulfed in flames and heading for impact in a tree line below. He called Phu Loi for assistance, then went down dangerously low to circle the area and try to determine if the crew had survived.
Three Eight couldn't tell whether anybody in the burning wreck was still alive, so he had a real dilemma: wait for the scrambled scout team to arrive and get to the wreck, or take the terrible risk of landing his own Cobra. One thing was for sure: somebody had to get to the downed Loach in a hurry. If the crew didn't get out within seconds, the flames would have them.
Realizing that the scrambled scout team from Phu Loi was still ten to fifteen minutes away, Carriss made a quick and gutsy decision. He decided to put his Cobra down in a rice paddy near the crash and send his front-seater, Jon Gregory, through the tree line to try and get the scout crew out of the ship and bring any survivors back to the clearing, where they could be extracted.
Carriss eased his big, heavy bird down into the water of the rice paddy. As the Cobra's skids settled onto the bottom, Jon threw back his front canopy and jumped down into the foul water. He immediately went ass-deep into the muck, while Carriss's rotor wash drove him like a nail even deeper.
With his pistol held above his head to keep it dry, Gregory struggled through the rice paddy water. By the time he reached the bank of the paddy and hauled himself ashore near the tree line, Carriss had lifted off again to cover the people on the ground. With the front seat now vacant, all Carriss could do was throw the override switch for the M-28 gun turret, lock it into a straight-ahead position, and make low-level firing passes to deter any enemy drawn to the crash site.
As anybody in his right mind would have been, Gregory was scared. Cobra crews didn't make a practice of being out of their aircraft and alone on the ground in hostile territory. But as he ran through the trees, slowed by his wet and foul-smelling flight suit, his thoughts were on getting to the burning wreck and helping Hayes and Pony One Six.
When he got there, the ship was still flaming, but the crew was nowhere to be seen. “Thank God,” Gregory mumbled to himself. “But where in the hell are they?”
Then he spotted Hayes about fifty feet away—on his feet but doubled over and holding his groin. Pony One Six was on the ground trying to nurse his wounded leg. Hayes was obviously in pain. When the Loach hit the ground at about 2 g's, the impact had shoved the shoulder stock extension of his M-60 machine gun up into his crotch.
Finally, Gregory was able to lead both injured men back to the edge of the clearing to await assistance.
At that moment, Carriss was still trying to cover the friendlies on the ground with his firing runs, but he had no idea how Gregory was faring or whether he had found anybody alive in the crash.
Just then, the scrambled scout team arrived on the scene. The new Cobra went to work shooting with Carriss while Joe Vad (Nine) dropped his Loach down to the tree line to look for Gregory. Niner soon spotted the three men waiting at the edge of the clearing. He could see that the Pony platoon leader was wounded and that Hayes was bent over in agony. Gregory was frantically waving and jumping up and down to make sure that Vad saw them.
What to do next was answered rather quickly. Both Koranda (Three Nine) and Carriss had begun to take ground fire on their firing passes. They had to get back up to altitude fast or risk the danger of having their Cobras shot out from under them. Besides, a snake didn't have room to carry anybody except a pilot and gunner. This meant that Joe Vad, in his scout ship, would have to go in and pick up Gregory, Hayes, and Pony One Six.
For a split second, Vad pondered the fact that there were three men on the ground and two already in his bird. Besides all that potential weight, he was just fresh out of base and was still carrying a full load of fuel and ammo. Another impossible job for the incredible little OH-6.
In order to quickly lighten his ship, Vad hovered directly over the guys on the ground and began to expend minigun ammunition. He kicked left and right pedal and arbitrarily sprayed fifteen hundred rounds of 7.62 into the countryside. Niner's crew chief began emptying his box of belts with long, chattering bursts from his M-60. He couldn't just dump his machine gun ammunition out the door because the enemy looked for that kind of stuff, and when they found it they cleaned it up and shot it right back at you.
With the weight of the minigun and M-60 ammo gone, Vad dropped down into the rice paddy and the three men jumped into the water and started wading toward the ship. Two of the guys climbed into the back cabin with the crew chief, the other in the front left with Vad. With the additional weight, the skinny, thin-skidded scout bird began to settle fast into the slimy mud of the rice paddy.
Wanting to haul ass before the Loach sank in too far, Vad poured on the coal. But the ship didn't move; it was held down tight by the suction of the mud.
Thinking much clearer than I had when faced with the same problem just days before, Vad immediately yelled for everybody to throw their chicken p
late armor and everything else possible out of the aircraft. Then he pulled an armpit full of collective, which immediately freed the plane and sent it to a hover a good fifty feet above the surface of the rice paddy.
When everybody was back at the base, the score was added up. Pony One Six was only lightly wounded and soon recovered. Hayes limped around the area for a few days, favoring that part of his body that took the full impact of the M-60 shoulder stock. Jon Gregory earned and received the Bronze Star with “V” device for his ground actions. Phil Carriss and Joe Vad were each awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross as the key players in the rescue.
I was proud of the way the Darkhorse guys reacted to the situation and were able to successfully extract the people on the ground. It was a dangerous area flush with enemy troops.
But I must admit that I was less than happy with Pony One Six. He had, in my estimation, pretty much brought the situation on himself. Obviously, every scout ran the risk of getting shot down every time he took off on a combat mission. But he should always do everything he could to try and avoid it. That was the bone I had to pick with the Pony platoon leader.
After finding out that his leg wound was minor and that he was feeling OK, I went to talk to him. I didn't pull any punches. I strongly emphasized what the experienced Darkhorse scouts had been telling them all along: You just cannot hover. You cannot make a lot of slow orbits over a target just looking! The experienced pilots who do those things are hanging it out; the inexperienced pilots who do those things are asking to get themselves, and their crew chiefs, killed.
“You've got to impress on your people to start fast, stay fast, and come back in from different directions and at different speeds,” I told him. “As your ability to read sign improves, you'll begin to discover that you won't have to make so many orbits over a target. You'll see more in a single fast pass than you will in three or four slow orbits. But if you don't live to reach that degree of maturity, it's not going to make any difference to you anyway. Do you read?”
The place to let off a little steam—in fact, the total social life for the officers in D Troop—was the officers' mess, or the O club, as we called it. We took our lunch and supper there, drank there, saw movies there, played “Liar's Dice” there, and shot a lot of bullshit there.
Social activities usually got started at about 1600 or 1700, when everybody began to gather for some drinks and a few throws of the dice. Then we'd sit down for a usual night's dinner of roast beef, wax beans, and Jello (which was sometimes laced with pimiento bits and diced raw onion).
Following supper, it was generally back to the bar for another drink and a few more rounds of Liar's Dice while we waited for dark and the movie to begin. Then, after the movie, somewhere around 2100, most of the guys went back to their hootches and hit the sack. Those 0330 calls to get ready for first light VRs separated the social from the hard drinkers. Those who stayed after the movie for more drinks usually closed up the club at midnight.
One evening a few of us decided to socialize for a while after the movie. We were soon joined by a couple of new lieutenants from the 82d Airborne. Just south of us and across a ditch from our base was the 82d Airborne Division Replacement Station. New 82d troops came here before going to the field, and those in the field came back here for stand-down and R and R.
The 82d guys would sometimes come over into our area to do a little hell raising—fire their weapons at our buildings, throw CS gas grenades into our showers, disrupt our movies. We took their horseplay in a friendly spirit, mainly because some of our guys occasionally made “shopping” trips over to the 82d side of the ditch. It was funny how some of the things desperately needed in D Troop were in abundant supply over in the 82d. So we got along swell, and even welcomed 82d Airborne officers to our O club to socialize.
On this night a couple of young, new, in-country 82d officers walked into the club and sat down at the bar between Bill Jones (One Eight) and me. After a few minutes, Jones (as drunk as I ever saw him) and I began getting on these two lieutenants because they were decked out as though they were ready to stand a stateside general inspection. They were all dressed up in their greens and jump boots, with a second lieutenant bar shining like a beacon on each shoulder. They had Airborne and Ranger patches all neatly sewn on. In short, they were a sight to behold at a combat base in the middle of Vietnam.
About that time, Joe Vad wandered by. He took one look at these two bright and shiny objects and decided they deserved a friendly verbal shot across the bow.
“My God,” he said to them, “you guys look like real snake-eating killers. Do you airborne soldiers really eat live snakes?”
To which one of the lieutenants replied, “You're damned right! We're airborne Rangers, and one of the lesser things we do is eat real live snakes.”
That kind of bantering kept going back and forth, with our two airborne guests extolling how tough and combat-wise they both were. We egged them on, knowing that neither of them had ever been out of the replacement station.
While this was going on, Bill Jones just sat there on his bar stool, drinking away. Vad and I didn't even think he was paying attention, because his eyes would close once in awhile, his head would nod, and his elbow would periodically slip off the bar.
Then suddenly old One Eight came to life. He quietly slid off the bar stool and disappeared out the front door of the club. We thought he had reached his limit and was heading back to the hootch to'hit the sack.
In about five minutes, however, Jones was back. He remounted his bar stool, turned to the two green lieutenants, and slurred, “Are you guys really snake eaters? I mean, do you fierce, hard-hearted airborne soldiers really eat live snakes?”
They smirked at each other. “You got it, man. You're fuckin' A we do!”
“Well then,” Jones mumbled, “I couldn't find a snake, but what about this toad frog? Can you eat this poor, little ole toad frog, caught fresh just now out in the perimeter of Vietnam's famous Quarter Cav aeroscouts?”
Jones pulled a huge toad out of his fatigue jacket and plopped the bug-eyed, wiggling thing down on top of the bar. Vad broke into a crazy laugh, and I just sat there staring at that struggling mass of croaking warts and ugliness. Apparently, Jones, rousing himself from his aleoholic lethargy, was determined to put our two airborne lieutenants to the acid test.
Eyeihg the by-now ill-humored toad, the two hot RLOs (real live officers) saw their masculinity threatened. Even so, they didn't want anything to do with the kicking creature that Jones was holding down on the bar. After a couple of quick glances at each other and at the toad, they began to allow that maybe they really weren't snake eaters, that they didn't have to put up with that kind of chicken shit.
By then, however, all the Darkhorse warrants still in the club had gathered around the bar and weren't going to let those two hotshot RLOs off the hook.
The taunting went on until one of the lieutenants, finally feeling that he had to defend the honor of the airborne, grabbed the toad and began trying to get it into his mouth. The lieutenant closed his eyes, opened his mouth as big as he could, and tried to stuff the creature down his throat. The toad was kicking and croaking and making a hell of a fuss.
Every time the lieutenant would just about get the toad's body inside his mouth, he'd gag and retch and throw the thing back up on the bar. We'd grab the regurgitated toad and christen it “airborne qualified” by lifting it up to arm's length and dropping it back on the bar. Then, pouring some beer on the bar top, we'd slide the toad along through the foam and duly pronounce the poor thing “carrier qualified.”
After all this foolishness, I finally said to the lieutenants, “You guys can quit trying to shit us now. You obviously can't hack it!”
That inspired one of the jump troopers to try again to get the now-slimy toad down his throat. He had gotten it about halfway down when the toad hitched his legs and let out a thunderous croak. Back out it came, with the bewildered lieutenant leaning against the bar dry-heavi
ng.
Now Bill Jones, in his obviously inebriated state, shifted himself on his bar stool, looked the lieutenants in the eyes, and announced: “You know, I don't think you guys are snake eaters at all. Let me show you what a real Darkhorse aeroscout can do.”
With that, Jones picked up the toad, threw back his head, dropped in the creature and, in one gargantuan gulp, swallowed it down whole!
The two lieutenants looked at each other in total disbelief. They began to turn green. Then they both raced out the front door and began heaving.
Jones's eyes were bugged out and he had a funny look on his face. As soon as the two lieutenants were out the front door, he immediately took off for the back door. Once outside, he began making violent groaning noises. Then he coughed, gagged, and retched until, finally, he heaved up the still-struggling toad. As the dazed toad limped away, our equally dazed aeroscout returned to the bar and ordered up another drink. We never saw the two airborne lieutenants again.
Wednesday, 26 August, was the start of a three-day series of events that culminated with a most unusual combat engagement.
During that time most of our scouting operations were concentrated in the western Trapezoid—a hotbed of enemy activity. Enemy soldiers and supplies were almost constantly infiltrating south into the area from their sanctuaries behind the Cambodian border and from their intermediate staging area in a string of low mountains called the Razor-backs.
On 26 August, while looking for trails and other signs of these infiltrators, a Darkhorse scout team out on routine VR made an enemy contact up near FSB Kien. The contact appeared heavy enough that Darkhorse ops decided to alert elements of 2d Battalion, 2d Mechanized Infantry Regiment, which were then located at FSB Kien.
When the infantry (call sign Dracula) moved out to where the aeroscout had made his initial contact, our troops ran into the outskirts of a huge bunker area. At that point I went up to the contact area with my gun-ship to help coordinate operations.
