by Hugh Mills
Out of the right corner of my eye, I saw another NVA jump up from the ground and start to run toward the center of the clearing. Just as I was coming around I saw him dive into some bushes. It was a small vegetated spot, out there all by itself—the only piece of cover in the clearing.
I hit the intercom and told Parker, “Shoot into the bushes. An NVA just jumped in there. Spray the bushes … he's got no place to go. Get ‘im!”
Parker yelled back, “I can't, sir, I'm out of ammo!”
I could hardly believe it. In several minutes, Jim had gone through thirty-two hundred rounds of M-60 ammo. “OK,” I said, “I'll pull around and take him with the mini. Hang on!”
I whipped around, zeroed out airspeed, eased the nose down, and squeezed the minigun trigger back all the way to the stick. Nothing happened. It didn't shoot. All I heard was the gun motor running. I was out of ammo for the minigun.
I punched the intercom again. “I'm dry on the minigun, too, Jimbo. Do me a Willie Pete.”
Parker yanked a dark lime green canister off the bulkhead wire, pulled the pin, and held the grenade outside the aircraft ready to drop on my command.
As I came up on the man's hiding place, I keyed the intercom again. “Ready … drop!” The grenade sailed down right into the center of the bushes. I accelerated away just as the explosion erupted in the vegetation, sending up arms of hot-burning white phosphorous.
I called the gun immediately. “OK, Three Four, target my Willie Pete. Hit my mark, hit my mark! One Six is out.”
As I headed out I glanced back at the little vegetated area. The man was running frantically out the other side of the scrub. Patches of his clothing were burning fiercely where fragments of the white phosphorous had landed on him.
He had taken about five steps when Three Four's first rockets came in. They were the last he ever took. One of Fishman's rockets impacted directly between the man's legs.
As Three Four rolled out and away from his firing pass, I got on UHF. “Good rocks, Three Four. One Six is back in. You better scramble the ARPs because I've still got beaucoup people moving on the ground and lots of equipment lying out in the open all over the place.”
Of course, the guys back at the troop had been monitoring our transmissions, so Three Four's request was almost after the fact. The next thing I heard over the radio was, “OK, Three Four, this is Darkhorse Three. Stand by over the target area. ARPs are saddled up and about to be underway, and I've scrambled another hunter-killer team to relieve you. Stand by.”
As I arced back down over the clearing, more enemy rounds came up at the airplane. I jigged and jogged, trying to keep the remaining bad guys corralled and to convince them that I still had ammunition. Parker had resorted to a backup M-16, which he promptly emptied on anything that moved. Then he hauled out a twelve-gauge Ithaca pump shotgun that he had stashed under his jump seat and shot it point-blank until it was dry.
I followed his lead and pulled my Colt .357 Python out of the shoulder holster. I was able to shoot the big revolver out the cockpit door by hooking the collective stick on top of my left leg, holding the cyclic with my right hand, while resting my left elbow on my right forearm and firing with my left hand. I'm sure I didn't hit a damned thing with the Colt, but I may have scared a few NVA to death. Every time I fired that .357, which had Super Vel Magnum cartridges in it, flames shot about a foot and half out the muzzle and it barked like a howitzer.
As I emptied the last .357 round, I got a call from Bob Davis (One Three) telling me that he and his gun were now on station. While I was taking him on a high-speed pass of the battle area, I heard him say, “Damn!”
“What's the matter, One Three?” I jumped back at him. “What have you got … what the hell have you got?”
“Damn, One Six, I've got nothin', and that's the trouble. I count about twenty-two bodies down there and you guys didn't leave a thing for us!”
On the way back to Phu Loi (I never did make the meeting in Dau Tieng) I keyed the intercom and told Parker, “Let's get a red smoke rigged on your M-60 so we can let the boys back home know that we stung Charlie today.”
I heard him chuckle. “Sir, the red smoke is already there.” I glanced back and saw it already wired to the muzzle of his machine gun.
We made our traditional pass of the base trailing a stream ofbil-lowing red smoke. The field personnel waved and cheered us on. Hundreds of people worked on the base, and when the hunter-killer teams came back home trailing red smoke, you could hear them slapping each other on the back and yelling, “Hey, our guys did good today!”
It was a morale booster for us, too. We knew we were doing the job that we had been sent to Vietnam to do. Maybe, just maybe, we had shortened the war a few minutes or hours.
As quiet and reserved as Jim Parker was, his emotions showed as we came back into base and settled the bird down near the revetment. My emotions probably showed, too.
I cut the battery switch, then twisted around in my seat to look back at my crew chief through the open panel in the bulkhead. Jimbo broke into a broad grin and shot me a big thumbs-up. That said to me, You did good, sir. We stuck it to Charlie pretty hard today.
I nodded and smiled back, then gave him a thumbs-up. That was my way of saying, Good job yourself, Georgia farm boy. I wouldn't have survived that engagement today with any lesser man in the crew chiefs cabin.
By that time, Paul Fishman had walked over to the ship. He clapped his arm around my shoulder as we walked together toward the ops bunker. “Goddamnit, Mills,” he said, “you scare the shit out of me! If you don't quit mixing it up down there for as long as you have a tendency to do, you're going to get your ass shot full of holes. And I'll just be sitting up there at fifteen hundred feet watching it happen!”
I told him the truth when I answered, “I scare the shit out of myself sometimes, Pauly, and this was one of those days that I nearly scared myself to death!”
The base maintenance guys went over my OH-6 after we got back, and their report scared me even more. Altogether, about twenty to twenty-five enemy rounds had impacted the airplane. My airspeed indicator had been shot out. The altimeter had a round through it, smashing it to pieces. The armor plate under Parker's seat had been hit twice. The armor around my pilot's seat had been hit several times from the rear, indicating that enemy bullets had gone through the crew chief's compartment, missing Parker but smashing into the back of my seat armor before ricocheting somewhere else in the ship.
Also, Parker's M-60 door gun itself had caught an AK-47 round near the front sight, right between the barrel and the gas operating tube. The almost impossible hit put a neat half-moon gouge in the bottom of the barrel and blew the gas cylinder right off the gun.
Then there were four or five NVA bullet holes in the Plexiglas of the bubble, a couple more in the tail boom of the aircraft, and at least three through the rotor blades. For good measure, one AK slug had gone into one side of the engine compartment and exited on the other—completely missing any engine vital, without which we would have gone down into the middle of those thirty or so bad guys.
The way I figured it, between the NVA and our Loach, in just the 120 seconds of that battle, somewhere between eight thousand and ten thousand rounds of ammunition had been fired in a jungle clearing no bigger than half a football field. And through it all, that miraculous little OH-6 kept flying. Even more miraculous was the fact that neither Parker nor I was hit. Man … we both must have been living right!
That same day when the ARPs got back from their ground sweep, we found out just how much havoc we had actually caused those enemy soldiers we caught on the paddy dike. We learned that there were two POWs and twenty-six KIA—four more dead than the twenty-two bodies Bob Davis had quickly counted from the air when he relieved me. Also, ARP leader Bob Harris brought back a load of enemy weapons and equipment that his platoon had found strewn around on the ground after the fight was over. Among the recovered items were numerous late-issue AK-47 assault rifles, a 60mm
mortar, a skid-mounted SGM machine gun, and two Russian handguns.
But, to me, the most interesting piece in the lot was the rice cooking pot that was strapped to the back of the soldier I caught running off into the jungle. The ARPs had found it on the jungle trail, took it off the body, and brought it back to show me the twenty-four minigun slug holes right up through the bottom of the pot!
I hit the sack that night having already been told that, for the day's action, Parker and I had been written up for the Silver Star medal (my second such award). That was a good feeling, but not half as good as also knowing that the aeroscouts had finally discovered a fair-sized element of the elusive Dong Nai Regiment.
The enemy unit that we jumped in the clearing had definitely been identified as a heavy-weapons platoon belonging to the Dong Nai. We had been hunting those bastards for a long time. Now we had found them, and stirred them up pretty good by destroying one of their crucial subunits in that jungle clearing.
After rehashing the morning's activities, I finally dropped off to sleep, knowing that I was going to be back out at first light the next morning looking to find the Dong Nai again. I wanted to help deliver the coup de grace.
CHAPTER 13
BAD DAY FOR THE ARPs
The next morning, 29 August, we went back out and searched and searched. Nothing. It looked as though, after a day of scouring, we were going to go home empty-handed. It was getting late and we had found absolutely no evidence of recent enemy activity, let alone any traces of the Dong Nai Regiment itself.
It got to be last light and I finally keyed the intercom. “It looks like a dry run, Jimbo. We've lost ‘em again.”
I decided to make one more run before heading home, so I pulled in low over a strip of trees that ran from southeast to northwest right near FSB Kien. Watching intently in the fading light along the edge of the tree line, I suddenly spotted people.
Coming into view low, out my right door, was a group of what could only be enemy soldiers, lying on the ground at the base of a couple of trees. They were being perfectly still, weapons resting across their chests, and they were looking straight up at me. They apparently thought that if they didn't move, I'd pass them by unseen. But they looked ready to shoot if they had to.
I punched the intercom to Parker. “Don't move a muscle … don't do anything. We've got beaucoup bad guys right below us … right below us in the tree line.”
“I see them, Lieutenant,” he came back calmly. “Looking up at us like they're waiting for us to make a move.”
I jumped on Uniform to Sinor in the Cobra. “Three One, I got dinks, out my right door in the tree line now. Mark, mark. When I break, you roll.”
Sinor answered, “Roger, One Six, on your right break.”
“Breaking … NOW!” I jerked the ship hard over on her right side to get out of Sinor's way. In the split second that I put the ship into the turn, the enemy opened up on me with everything they had.
Sinor was back on Victor to me instantly. “You're taking fire, One Six … heavy fire, heavy fire! Break left… break left now.”
Just as he finished his transmission, I heard a loud impact on the aircraft, and felt a sharp burning, stinging sensation in my right hip. I bent forward to look down at the cockpit floor. I didn't see anything that looked like a bullet hole. But leaning forward was painful as hell.
I continued my turn out for about five to seven seconds before I noticed that my seat was beginning to fill up with blood. “Ah, son of a bitch!” I groaned. “If I had only flown right on by them instead of making a break and settin' them off.”
Then it became obvious that my body just didn't feel right from the waist down. I keyed the intercom. “Hey, Jimbo, I'm bleedin' like a stuck hog. I've been hit.”
“Do you want me up front to help?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, “just hang on tight. I can still fly this thing, but I don't know for how much longer. I'm going to try to put her down at Contigny.”
Thank God I was close to that fire support base, because I was beginning to feel woozy. Contigny had a small helicopter landing area within the wire near the center of the complex, and I managed to put the bird down in that spot. Parker jumped out of the back, stuck his head in the cockpit, and calmly asked, “Whatcha got, Lieutenant?”
“What I got, Jimbo,” I said, looking for bullet holes and rubbing my hip, “is an AK round in my ass!”
“I see what happened, sir,” Parker said as he pointed to the instrument panel. There was the bullet hole I had been looking for. An AK round had come up through the instrument panel, hit the inner side plate of my seat armor, and ricocheted into my hip. After going through both cheeks of my backside, the bullet then hit the other side of my seat armor, ricocheted again, and flew back out of the airplane through the floor of the ship!
Just then a young soldier came running up to the helicopter. “What, can we do for you, Lieutenant?”
“Have you got a surgeon here?” I asked.
“Yes we do, sir. What do you need?”
I very tenderly lifted myself out of the cockpit and stood—a little wobbly—outside the aircraft. “Well, buddy, I've been shot in the butt.”
A smile broke across the young infantryman's face. “But, sir, that's not a very dignified place for an officer to get shot.”
“Be that as it may, Private,” I fired back, “I'm still shot in the ass, and would appreciate it all to hell if you would please get the surgeon!”
The battalion surgeon just happened to be at the fire base, and it wasn't long before he came out to the helicopter carrying his little aid bag.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, “if I don't have to move double-time anywhere.”
He grabbed my arm. “Well, then, come on back over here to the aid bunker and we'll take a look at you.”
Parker wanted to stay with the airplane, and I noticed that quite a little crowd of soldiers was beginning to gather around him and the ship. They were interested in looking over the OH-6 and asking Parker questions about it, but in typical Loach crew chief manner, Parker shrugged off their queries. I overheard him tell one man, “Keep your hands off… don't touch the fuckin' helicopter!”
But when the doctor got me over to the aid bunker and dropped my flight suit, the crowd wandered over, seeking some new entertainment. As my posterior came into open view and the doc began his examination, I began to hear a lot of one liners followed by muffled yuks and snickers. By that time my fanny hurt so bad I didn't care.
Finally, after probing and sending spears of pain through my punctured buttocks, the doctor said, “You're awfullylucky, Lieutenant. No bones were hit. It's a through-and-through flesh wound, but you'll have a beautiful scar to show off.”
Finally the doctor told me I could lift my flight suit back up, and a Dustoff was ordered to take me into Doctor Delta.
“But I don't want a Dustoff,” I said. “I've got an aircraft out there on the pad and I've got to get it home. I'm sure as hell not going to leave it out here all night.”
The battalion doctor stiffened at my response. “No, you're not flying! We'll take care of your gunner here tonight while Dustoff gets you to the hospital, so just go on out there and secure your helicopter.”
When I told Parker what the doctor had said, his eyes got as big as dishes, then his boyish face screwed down into a hard frown. “Oh, no you don't, sir,” he said to me. “If you think I'm staying out here at a fire base in these boonies, you're crazy.
“And furthermore, Lieutenant Mills,” Parker continued, “I'd be awful pleased if, right now, you'd get your ass—shot up as it is—back into this airplane and take me home!”
I knew Parker was right. I turned to the medic who had helped me walk back out to the ship. “Tell the doctor thanks, but I'm going on back home to Phu Loi. I feel fine, and I'm not going to leave my crew chief and airplane out here overnight.”
It was about a twenty-minute flight back to Phu Loi. Th
e only way I made it was to roll over in the pilot's seat so I was resting on my left hip. Also, Parker sat up front with me and I let him fly to take the strain off.
But God, my ass did burn and hurt. I didn't know why it was throbbing so badly, but I did know what the burning was. The doc had told me that the AK-47 round that passed through my buttock was a tracer!
A few minutes out of Phu Loi I radioed ahead and made the mistake of telling operations, “I'm coming in. One Six is hit. I have been treated at FSB Contigny, but I'm going to need help getting in off the flight line. Get me some help off the line when I get down.”
Unfortunately my help was Davis and Willis. I could hear Willis laughing even before I got the aircraft shut down.
“Tell me it's not true,” he kept saying. “Tell me it's not true that you've been shot in the ass!”
“OK, OK, you miserable bastard/' I answered. “I'm shot in the ass. Now help me get the hell out of this aircraft!”
“My God,” Willis went on, “get an ambulance, call in a specialist. This is severe, this is crass. Our fearless leader has been shot in the ass!”
The next day, our troop first sergeant, Martin L. Laurent, came over to the hootch and announced, “Well, Lieutenant, you got your first Purple Heart, and the flight surgeon has grounded you for the next several days.”
I realized my wound was minor, just a scrape compared to the wounds that so many other guys suffered. I was lucky. Even so, every nerve ending in my tail screamed for the next several days, reminding me that a .30-caliber tracer round through the fanny was not as much fun as Willis tried to make it.
The month of September began with Charlie getting more and more aggressive. The enemy was using the Razorback area as the staging point for their offensives, not only into the Michelin and western Trapezoid, but also to renew their attacks on our supply convoys moving up and down Thunder Road between Lai Khe and An Loc-Quan Loi.
On 4 September, Rod Willis and I were asked to fly up to Lai Khe for a G-2 briefing. It was a routine briefing to bring us up to date on what the enemy was doing in the general area of Thunder Road. We left Phu Loi for an early morning flight to Lai Khe. Our flight of two scouts and no Cobra formed a “white team.”
