by Hugh Mills
As soon as I moved in over the enemy base camp, about four AK-47s let go at me. Things were really hot down there! Dracula had advanced to the base camp perimeter ançl run into a veritable buzz saw.
What we needed, and fast, was for some tac air to get fast movers and heavy stuff in there to bust up the bunkers so our friendlies could break into the area and clean it out. I immediately went up on the net for our FAC, who turned out to be our Australian OV-10 driver, Sidewinder One Five. We gave him the target information and asked specifically for any heavy stuff he might have around.
It wasn't long before Sidewinder had a brace of Martin B-57 Canberras loaded with five-hundred-pound bombs vectored into the area. Guided by Sidewinder's Willie Pete rockets, they gave the base camp a hell of an iron bomb shellacking!
When Sidewinder's jets were finally winchester, he asked that a little bird be put back down for a BDA. I dropped back down when the smoke and dust started to clear. The Canberras had raised a lot of hell down there. The bombs had blown away all the overlying jungle vegetation and I could clearly see the square outlines of the bunker structures. It was immediately obvious that this was a very large base camp with many bunkers, connecting trench lines, and doughnut positions for .50-caliber antiaircraft guns.
I reported in as I circled the base area. “We have three bunkers, five by five, partially destroyed. There are two bunkers, five by seven. Looks like about 50 percent destroyed. We've got two bunkers, probably eight by eight. One bunker ten by ten. We'll call those destroyed—the roofs are caved in. We've got numerous small arms and equipment spread in the area. We've got about forty feet of trench line, looks like four, negative … make that five bodies KBA. They're in the trench line.”
With the BDA, we had to break station. It was beginning to get dark and fuel was low. All the time we were doing the BDA, Drac had been moving in closer to base camp. We wondered how much more trouble they would run into that night.
As I climbed away, I contacted them on FM. “Dracula, this is Darkhorse One Six. We are breaking station because of fuel and darkness. The base area has been hit good and is pretty well opened up. You do have some KBA bodies down there. Good luck to you tonight. We'll be back on top of you first thing tomorrow morning.”
We were back out at first light on 27 August. As we came up on the enemy base camp, my gun, Paul Fishman (Three Four), radioed the friendlies on the ground to report our presence and tell them we were ready to go back to work.
“Drac Three Two, this is Darkhorse Three Four. We're overhead with a hunter-killer team and I'm going to put the little bird down to do a VR for you. Is there any particular area that you want him to work?”
Dracula came back. “Negative, Darkhorse. We fought an engagement here last night until about 2400. The enemy backed off about then and we're going to try to reestablish contact this morning. So let the scout go whatever direction he wants and keep us posted on what you find. We had light casualties but we got to Charlie pretty good. Their KIA are unknown, however, because they dragged away all the bodies during the night.”
As I listened to the conversation, I was looking down at Drac's night defensive position. I could see ACAVs and some supporting M-48 tanks all loggered up in a wagon wheel situation. I figured that right over them was the best place for me to go down low level; then, if I had any problem, I could put the bird down in the middle of friendlies. I dropped down to the treetop altitude and pulled a hard right-hand turn to bring me right on top of the NDP. I intended to start working concentric circles outward from our position.
As I rolled around and started outbound, I caught a glimpse of an enemy soldier's body lying on the ground face up, not more than forty yards from the tanks and ACAVs. I went back for another look. It looked like an NVA soldier in a dark, electric blue uniform, no sandals, no headgear. His brown eyes were wide open and staring right up at me. An AK-47 was beside him on the ground and he had the weapon's ammunition pouch on his chest. He had obviously been hit because I could see some wound damage to his leg and quite a bit of blood on the pant leg of his uniform.
I wondered what the heck he was doing lying out here. Why hadn't he been dragged off with the rest of the enemy wounded and dead during the night?
I got on FM and dialed up our friendlies. “Drac Three Two, this is Darkhorse One Six. Have you swept your perimeter since the firefight last night?”
“Darkhorse, this is Dracula Three Two. Roger. We have done some sweeping. Why? Have you found something?”
“Roger, Drac. I've got an enemy soldier down here. He's lying on the ground about forty yards off the backside of one of your ACAVs. Do you see where I'm circling?”
There was a moment's delay while he looked, then he came back. “Roger, Darkhorse, I see you. How about dropping a smoke on the body and we'll police it up later.”
“That's negative, Dracula. This is not a body. This is one live NVA soldier. Looks like he's been hit in the leg but his eyes are wide open and the little son of a bitch is staring straight up at me!”
Drac must have thought that I was seeing things. “Darkhorse One Six, this is Dracula Three Two. Confirm the enemy soldier in our vicinity is alive”
“Roger, Drac Three Two. He's alive. He's watching me. His head is moving and he looks like he's trying to wave. He appears injured and he does have a weapon. If you can send somebody over here on foot, I'll cover your man. Over.”
“Roger, Darkhorse,” Drac responded. “We'll be right there.”
I came to about a forty-foot hover over the trees and keyed the intercom to Parker. “Watch that guy, Jimbo. If he moves toward his weapon, if he even looks like he's goin' for that weapon, blast him with the 60. We've got troops coming over here from the NDP, so watch for them, but if that bad guy moves, blast him!”
In a few minutes, an ACAV came rumbling up and a couple of our friendlies jumped out of the back. The two American troopers didn't look as though they were quite ready for combat that morning. They had on jungle fatigue pants, boots, and T-shirts. They were carrying their M-16s but didn't have any web gear on. One of our soldiers appeared to be an NCO and the other a specialist.
Because of the vegetation they couldn't see exactly where the enemy soldier was, but they could see me hovering over the trees nearby. The guys didn't have a radio, so I told Parker that I was going to guide them in with hand signals. I put the Loach over on her right side so I could see beneath me and hovered to a spot directly over the wounded enemy soldier. I steadied the collective with my knee, flew with my left hand on the cyclic, and started motioning with my right hand.
The two infantrymen finally got close enough to see the NVA lying on the jungle floor. They crept toward him, covering each other with their M-16s. I backed away to get the rotor wash and noise off them while they took him prisoner.
As I continued on with my VR, I began to hear reports on the radio about the NVA soldier. Though wounded badly by one of our .50-caliber machine guns—his leg was shattered and just barely hanging onto his body—he was hustled back to Dau Tieng for medical attention and interrogation by the 3d Brigade's S-2. The S-2 learned from the unusually cooperative prisoner that he was a member of the infamous and elusive Dong Nai Regiment. He had moved out of the Fishhook area in Cambodia with the regiment, gone on into the Michelin rubber plantation, then on down into the western Trapezoid.
The 1st Division had more bones to pick with the Dong Nai Regiment than a dog had fleas. We had been looking for that unit: We wanted desperately to know where it was, what it was doing, and what its tactical intentions were. This was the first good link to the Dong Nai's recent whereabouts and activities—an intelligence windfall. The wounded POW turned out to be a noncommissioned officer. Because of his rank, he was privy to a lot of planning and, during his debriefing, revealed considerable information about the movements and activities of the Dong Nai. Afterward, the prisoner indicated strong willingness to join our Hoi Chon program and convert to one of our Kit Carson scouts.
Back at Phu Loi that evening, I was given a mission for the next morning to fly up to 3d Brigade HQ at Dau Tieng. I was to attend a briefing by the brigade S-3 on what the POW had said, then plan some scout team VRs in the sectors that the prisoner had designated as Dong Nai Regiment operational areas.
From Phu Loi, it was a straight-shot flight up northwest to 3d Brigade HQ. The route—without artillery firing path deviations—would normally take us up over the heart of the Iron Triangle, on to the north of the Mushroom, then right on across the western edge of the Trap-ezoid to Dau Tieng. From my standpoint, staying at altitude always made for a boring flight, so before we got started that morning I asked my snake driver, Paul Fishman (Three Four), if he had any objection to me going down low for the course of the flight instead of camping on his wing at fifteen hundred feet. Realizing that with his scout down on the deck, there was always the chance of scaring up a little enemy activity, Fishman had no problem with my plan.
As soon as we cleared the base boundary, I flipped my weapons system to “arm” and the fire selector switch to “fire norm,” then settled in for the flight at an altitude of about twenty feet off the ground. After a couple of minutes I heard Three Four check in with Lai Khe artillery. They reported that they were firing 105 s into the northern area of the Iron Triangle, meaning that we would have to either detour up north around Lai Khe or head south to the Saigon River and follow it on up to Dau Tieng. Rather than go north, which was farther out of our way, Paul gave me a heading for the river. We turned west, picked up the Saigon River, and started following its general course around the southwestern edge of the Iron Triangle. I was cruising along right on top of the trees and holding airspeed at a consistent ninety knots.
I was relaxed. So was Parker. He was sitting on his little jump seat just watching the scenery go by. The collective control was resting on my left knee; I had hold of the cyclic and was flying the airplane with my left hand. With my right hand I was leisurely puffing on a cigarette. My right foot was dangling outside the cockpit door. It was another beautiful morning in sunny Vietnam.
We came up on the vicinity of our FSB Kien. It was just a few more minutes from there to Dau Tieng, and I was having so much fun that I thought I would play a little “pop-up” for the rest of the way. I dropped the bird down to an altitude of about two feet and moved the airspeed up to a hundred knots, then up to one hundred and ten. As we ripped along, I would yank back on the cyclic, which tilted the rotor disk to the rear, and pop the bird up and over the rice dikes and tree lines. Then I'd shove the cyclic stick forward again, which tilted the blades sharply forward and pushed the nose down, and drop to two feet. I was just plain hotdoggin' it, and I loved it!
My antics didn't escape my gun pilot, however. As always, Paul was carefully watching me. “Hey, One Six, what the hell are you doing down there?”
“I'm having a ball,” I answered. Then I warned Parker to hang on for the next pop-up as yet another tree line loomed ahead through my bubble.
It was still early in the morning, and the semidarkness made it difficult for me to see really well. But the approaching tree line looked clear of obstacles on the other side, making it a piece of cake to pop up over the trees and then right back down again without missing a beat. I could just barely make out a rice paddy on the other side with a dike going through the middle of it. No sweat.
I closed in fast on the tree line, waited until the very last split second, then jerked back a chest full of cyclic stick. The little OH-6 jumped straight up about forty feet as though she had suddenly been kicked in the tail boom by a Missouri mule.
As we leapt up to the crest of the trees and the OH-6's nose depressed for the letdown on the other side, I looked forward through the bubble. Spread out across my front from left to right was a string of thirty NVA soldiers in column, walking on the paddy dike, taking their own sweet time.
I was moving very fast and very low, so the sound of my engine and blades was muffled by the vegetation, and my Cobra was high and too far behind me to be seen or heard. The enemy was taken completely by surprise.
When I popped up over that tree line, doing more than a hundred knots and less than thirty to forty yards off their left flank, those poor bastards were thunderstruck.
I could tell as soon as I saw the column that these guys were NVA regulars. Unlike guerrillas, they were loaded down with equipment, such as mortars, SGMs, radios, and web gear. It looked like an NVA heavy weapons platoon. They had probably scouted the open ground ahead, satisfied themselves that there was no potential danger, then started to move the whole platoon across. And at that very instant, up I bounced over the tree line, catching them bare-assed in the open with no cover and no place to run.
Snapping back from my initial shock at seeing a whole column of enemy soldiers strung out across my front, I started to look at them more carefully. My eyes focused on their point man. He was no more than thirty yards in front of me, frozen in place, staring right at me. Then he started to jerk up his weapon.
I hit my radio transmit switch and yelled, “Dinks! Dinks! They're right under me!” Then I squeezed the minigun trigger to two thousand rounds a minute. My initial blast caught the wide-eyed point man square across his belt line and literally cut him in half.
I kicked hard right pedal, held the bird's nose down, and spun around in order to bring the minigun to bear on the rest of the column. Squeezing the minigun trigger again—this time all the way back to four thousand rounds per minute—my second burst raked through the next four men. The bullets slammed them to the ground in a cloud of dust, debris, and body parts.
The paddy dike now seemed to explode as the NVA soldiers shot back at me, running every which way trying to find cover. I again broke hard right in order to bring Parker's M-60 to bear on the maze of trapped enemy in the clearing below.
He ripped off a three- to four-second burst, then keyed his intercom button. “Level out, sir. Level it out!” he yelled at me.
The right turn I was executing was so sharp that Parker couldn't fire without the risk of hitting the bird's tilted rotor blades. I slammed the cyclic stick to center, leveling out the aircraft, and instantly heard Parker's M-60 go to full bore. He had caught a group of three NVA soldiers trying to make it out of the clearing and back to the jungle. He dropped them all in their tracks.
I was pulling the ship around for another circle over the mass of enemy confusion when Three Four's voice suddenly erupted in my earphones. He was shouting, “One Six, One Six, what the hell's going on down there? What have you got? What have you got down there, One Six?”
“Dinks … I got dinks, lots of dinks,” I blurted. “We've got ‘em trapped. They're running all over the place!”
I didn't hear his reply because Parker was going crazy with his 60. Besides, I had just spotted an NVA with an AK-47 rifle running toward the jungle. Another soldier was running in front of him and they were both hell-bent for election.
Determined not to lose them, I pulled the bird hard around to come up on their rear. It was then that I noticed all the shooting that was coming up at us from the ground. There was a constant stream of AK-47 fire, and I could hear rounds beginning to impact the aircraft. But I was still not going to let those two soldiers make it back into the jungle. I pulled up to about forty yards behind them. They knew I was on their tail and they were running for their lives.
As I raced up the trail behind them, I noticed that one of the soldiers had a large black rice cooking pot strapped to the back of his pack. It was the size of a large wash bucket and was bouncing furiously up and down as he ran. I pulled the nose down a little, watching the bottom of the cooking pot come into view through the cross hairs grease-penciled in front of me on the bubble's Plexiglas. I touched a shade of right pedal, then I pulled off a short minigun burst.
My rounds walked right up the trail behind the last man, then tore into the bottom of the rice pot. The man pitched forward to the ground. So did the soldier running in front of him.
My bullets had apparently gone through the last man and hit the soldier in front, killing them both. There were nine enemy down in less than a minute of battle.
I jerked the bird around in a hard right turn to get back over the main group of trapped enemy soldiers. Again, intense ground fire poured up. We offered a pretty choice target at only five to seven feet off the ground, and I could hear bullets ripping and snapping all through the aircraft. I was trying to bring my minigun to bear on Charlie again, and Jimbo's 60 was firing in long sustained bursts.
Things were so frantic that it took me awhile to realize that Three Four was yelling at me through the headset. “Get out of there, One Six … get the hell out of there and let me in!”
I snapped back to reality. “Roger, Three Four. One Six is out to the west.”
As soon as Paul saw my tail kick up, he was rolling in and firing rockets. I could see his 2.75s impacting the rice paddy and the nearby jungle. The last pair of rockets that he fired into the swarming enemy soldiers in the clearing contained nail fléchettes. From my circling position nearby, I saw the puffs of red dye explode as the nail fléchette canisters blew open and saturated the whole area with thousands of naillike metal spears.
As Three Four broke from his last firing pass and headed back to altitude, I punched my transmit button: “One Six is back in from the east on BDA.” I pulled back into the clearing from the east, made a couple of fast turns over the area, and discovered that there were still plenty of people moving around. They were still shooting at me, and Parker opened up again with his M-60 on everything he saw moving. I could hear more of Charlie's rounds impacting the aircraft, and I wondered how much more punishment the OH-6 could take.
Coming around again, I engaged two more enemy soldiers with the minigun and knocked them down. Continuing the turn I saw Parker's rounds splatter up the dust around two more, then slam them both to the ground.
