Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  “Damnit, Four Six, can't you see that I got the holy heck shot out of me!”

  Harris smiled, stroked his chin, and then asked me, “So-o-o, One Six, what in the hell are you doing here?”

  “I just listened to Willis,” I answered, but before I could elaborate Rod cut in.

  “Come on guys, cut the crap. I would like to go home!”

  CHAPTER 16

  TIT FOR TAT

  A couple of weeks later, we had the opportunity to worry about Rod Willis again. This time, however, he was hovering over an old French fort in the bush, rather than over a young Filipino lady in the 1st Aviation club.

  On 25 October, Rod and I took our VR-1 and VR-2 teams up to Dau Tieng to scout the eastern side of the Michelin rubber plantation. It was an area where Charlie was always up to something.

  Rod took the VR-1 slot that day and I stayed at Delta Tango to relieve him on station with the VR-2 team. I was monitoring the radios back at Dau Tieng as One Seven reached the eastern side of the plantation and dropped down low level to start his patterns.

  I listened more closely when I heard that Rod had found a recently trafficked foot trail that was leading him over toward one of the French forts leftover from the Indochina war. Those old forts were readily identifiable by their unusual construction. They were made mostly out of earth that had been mounded up in either a diamond or triangle shape; inside the walls was a little parade ground with a flagpole, living quarters, and fighting chambers. These vacant fortifications were relics of the past, and nobody ever seemed to bother them or occupy them. That was why my ears perked up when I heard Rod say that he had seen movement inside.

  I heard One Seven say to his gun, “I'm going around again to see if a party is going on down there that we weren't invited to.”

  Willis pulled his OH-6 into a hard right turn and rolled the ship so he could look straight down into the fort. I heard him again, “Damn, I just corralled myself a couple of Victor Charlies inside this old pile of dirt. I'm going to come around again and lay some 60 on them.”

  As Rod spoke, in the background I could hear One Seven's crew chief, Ken Stormer, let go with his door gun. Willis yelled, “I'm turning again. The dinks are running for cover in the wall, but Charlie Echo's on ‘em with the 60. Shit! They just dove in a hole. We'll get these two. Stand by, we'll put some CS down on ‘em. Stand by, stand by. Son of a bitch, we've got a jam on the 60. Stand by.”

  Willis apparently was hovering at the side of the entrance where the two enemy soldiers had disappeared into the fort's wall area. The crew chief was shooting into the opening when his M-60 jammed.

  It just happened that on that particular day, Stormer had brought along another weapon he had wanted to test fire. It was a CHICOM RPD, the Communist China version of the Russian PK .30-caliber machine gun. A quick glance at this weapon reminded you of the old U.S. Browning automatic rifle (BAR). It was a big, sturdy shooter with a bipod, but ammunition was fed to it through a drum magazine instead of a twenty-round box magazine as in the BAR. In an earlier action, Stormer had killed an enemy soldier who had been carrying the weapon, and the ARPs had liberated the RPD and brought it back to Stormer as a souvenir.

  In the seconds that it took Stormer to shove his jammed M-60 aside and reach for his RPD, the two VC popped out of their concealment and threw a couple of hard AK-47 bursts at Willis's hovering helicopter. The crew chief's CHICOM went off in return, then we heard One Seven's voice, about two octaves higher: “Taking fire, we're taking fire. Hauling ass!”

  There was a moment of dead silence on the radio. Then Ken Stormer's frantic voice. “One Seven is hit,” he yelled. “We need some help!”

  Stormer was intentionally transmitting outside the Loach. It was a good thing I could hear him because it was obvious that something had happened to the aircraft, or Willis, or both.

  I quickly called my crew chief, Jim Parker, and my gun pilot, Dean Sinor (Three One), then announced a scramble to the Dau Tieng control tower and took off across the treetops of the Michelin.

  The old French fort was located near the Boundary Road where it cut into the eastern side of the rubber plantation, about ten to twelve kilometers from Dau Tieng. I had been over it a number of times.

  As I crossed the Michelin, I could see the Cobra circling in the distance. The gun pilot saw me and immediately gave me some assistance. “OK, One Six, I've got you coming off of Delta Tango. Turn left one zero degrees. One Seven will be at your twelve o'clock at two hundred yards.”

  When I turned left the ten degrees, I saw Rod's ship just as it was passing behind a bunch of trees. I poured on more coal. When I pulled in on Rod's right wing, the first thing I noticed was Stormer hanging out of his door as though he was trying to reach up front to his pilot.

  I could see Willis in the cockpit. He was moving, so I figured he was still able to fly the aircraft. But a couple of things were totally out of synch with Rod's normal flying behavior. First, he was sitting upright, almost at attention, in his seat. That was unusual because Rod normally looked half-asleep as he flew: He slouched down in the pilot's seat with the cyclic between his legs, and worked the stick with barely discernible wrist movements.

  That was the other thing that seemed so wrong: Willis was going berserk with wild, exaggerated moves on the cyclic stick. His arms were jerking all over the cockpit as he violently threw the stick forward, then back into his gut, then to the right and back to the left. I could see that he was getting lateral movement on the ship with the wild left and right swings of the cyclic, but his frantic fore and aft movements were producing no longitudinal change. He couldn't get the nose to go up or down and he couldn't get lift or descent.

  I tried to raise Willis on Uniform. “One Seven, are you hurt? Are you OK, One Seven? What the hell is going on with your bird?” All I got back was a series of hisses and sucking and gargling noises.

  “Come on, One Seven,” I pleaded. “I'm right here on your wing … talk to me. Are you hit? Can you fly ‘er down?”

  Again, nothing came back over my radio but a faint hissing sound, like escaping air, and more god-awful gargling noises. It sent chills down my spine. I thought I had the answer: He had been hit in the chest and his lungs were collapsing. No way was he going to get the ship down.

  I couldn't, however, explain why the cyclic wouldn't control his ship. There are controls on the top of the OH-6 that translate the cockpit movements of the cyclic pitch stick to the rotor head and blades of the aircraft. The stick is linked to push-pull rods through valvelike mixers that end up tilting the rotor head in the direction you want the aircraft to go. Thinking that I might be able to see if something was wrong with the rotor swash plate, I kicked my ship closer to Rod's and a little higher.

  Some parts around the hub seemed to be moving in an odd way, but I couldn't tell what was causing the pitch problem. One thing was obvious, however—Rod was going to have to get his ship down.

  As I kept up my one-way conversation—”Hang with it, One Seven, you're OK. Try to slow it down. OK, One, Seven, try to slow ‘er down …”—I was frantically looking for a hole in the jungle where Willis could put the bird down.

  I radioed the Cobras. “Look, we're in deep trouble down here. Better get Dustoff rollin' because it looks like One Seven is going to crash this thing.”

  Just then I looked up over the trees, and coming right up on our nose was an open area that looked about two hundred yards wide and maybe three hundred yards long. I practically pushed the transmit switch all the way through the stick and hollered, “Rod! Twelve o'clock, twelve o'clock. Take her down. Put it down, Rod … right at your twelve o'clock. Set ‘er down!”

  He must have heard me. I saw his arms and elbows flailing wildly trying to fight the controls, trying to get the aircraft to descend. Finally his nose started to come up a little, but that seemed to start his tail swinging.

  I inched in closer on his right wing and tried to talk him down. “You're OK,” I said. “Come on down, One
Seven. You're doing OK now, drop her down. Take her on down, Rod.”

  I knew he was talking back to me because I could see his lips moving behind his mike. But I still couldn't hear anything except those terrible noises. I tried to see if he showed any other evidence of being shot. I didn't see any blood. Though he looked scared as hell, he didn't appear to be in great physical pain, as he would if he had a bullet through his chest.

  Then his nose dropped. What he apparently had done, in desperation, was chop his throttle. That seemed to slow him down enough to do a hovering autorotation, which was enough to put his bird down in the open field before he overflew it.

  As Willis's ship sank down, hit the ground, and jolted to a stop, Rod and Stormer exploded out of the helicopter and hit the ground running toward my bird like a couple of cheetahs pursuing their evening meal! As I landed close by, both pilot and crew chief jumped into my aircraft—Rod in front with me and Ken Stormer in the back. I yanked pitch and off we went, straight out of that unfriendly jungle.

  Rolling out of the clearing, I had my first chance to look at Willis closely. Rod's face was pale and, for once, he wasn't wearing a silly grin. As soon as he got himself strapped in and his headset connected, I keyed the intercom. “Are you OK? What in the hell happened to you back there?”

  Again, I saw his lips moving, but all I heard were the now-routine hissing, gurgling, sucking noises. Willis didn't look to me as though he'd been hit in the chest. If he had been, how could he have run the way he did, out of his ship into mine? And what about his chicken plate? I didn't see any evidence of bullet damage to that.

  Then his helmet caught my eye. I punched the intercom. “How about your head—you hit in the head? Did one of the AK rounds hit you in the head?”

  He nodded his head back to me … no.

  I cradled the collective on my knee and reached over to Willis with my left hand. Then I twisted my finger into a small, ragged hole in the right side of Rod's helmet. “Son of a gun! Here I am thinking that you were all shot up and next to dead, and you haven't even been hit!”

  What had happened, I surmised, was that a round had gone up through the side of Willis's flight helmet, splitting some of the electrical components in his headset, which caused all that sucking and hissing noise. His “gurgling chest wound” was plain old radio static.

  When we got back on the ground in Phu Loi, it was interesting to observe how differently Ken Stormer and Rod Willis reacted to the harrowing experience they had just been through. Stormer jumped out of the back of the ship, a very concerned look on his face. He was obviously worried about the condition of his pilot. He was also mad because, in the couple of seconds it took him to reach for his RPD, Stormer thought his pilot and his aircraft had been hit by enemy ground fire. The only saving grace was that he himself hadn't been hit or hurt in the forced landing.

  As soon as he discovered that Willis hadn't been hit, and that the downed OH-6 was going to be recovered from the jungle—with all his gear still in it—Stormer was a new man. He hit the hootch telling everybody what a fantastic job his lieutenant had done in landing the damaged airplane. After that, he couldn't stop talking about what a great weapon his RPD was, always adding, “Oh, by the way, if I cut the flash suppressor off the barrel, I'll betcha I can get at least a three-foot flame out of the end of that thing.”

  Rod was a different story. He was visibly shaken by his experience—quite a departure from his usual demeanor. This time Rod wasn't grinning. This time he was scared to death. The fact that an enemy bullet had gone through his helmet, not a fraction of an inch from his skull, didn't bother him a bit. But the fact that he wasn't able to control his aircraft nearly paralyzed him.

  When Willis's aircraft was recovered from the jungle and inspected by maintenance, it was found that he had taken AK rounds through the push-pull tubes and the pitch change links on the rotor head. This was what I saw flapping around near the main rotor swash plate when I nudged in close to his ship.

  A pilot, in order to fly his aircraft, must have instant reaction from his control input. With the damage Willis had sustained to his controls, he suddenly discovered that he couldn't get a nose up-down reaction when he pushed the cyclic forward and back. With a forward input of the stick, the nose, instead of going down, rolled to the right. Everything was about ninety degrees off its plane of reaction, and it took one hell of a piece of flying to keep that thing in the air. It would be like driving your car down a football field at a hundred miles an hour, with the field covered in a solid sheet of ice, then trying to turn left and stop your car at the same time.

  It took a few days for Willis's “pucker factor” to finally relax. (“Pucker factor” is best defined as the reaction to a desperate flying situation, when your butt puckers to the point of almost sucking the seat cushion right up your backside. Unless you've experienced it, you couldn't really understand.)

  Three days later, I had my own experience with the pucker factor. On 28 October, I was up to do an early morning VR of the Saigon River near fire support base Tennessee in the area of the Mushroom. Dean Sinor (Three One) was my gun and Jim Parker was my crew chief.

  The Mushroom was a particularly hot area along the Saigon; it was a major dropping-off point for enemy troops and supplies destined for the Iron Triangle. They would hit the river up at the Razorbacks, their staging area, and bring their loaded sampans down to the western stem of the Mushroom. They'd get off the river there, march overland across the stem of the Mushroom, cross the river again on the eastern edge of the stem, then march on into the Iron T.

  With the curfews we had imposed on river traffic, Charlie used the dark hours of the night and early dawn to make the trip down. As daylight broke, they'd duck into tributaries or little coves to avoid detection. They knew that anything seen on the river in daylight was fair game for our guys.

  When we took off that morning, it was cool and damp. It had rained much of the night and into the early hours of the morning. The mist and fog from all that moisture hung over the river like a blanket, covering the nipa palms and elephant grass along the shoreline.

  As soon as we hit the Phu Cuong bridge, I dropped down as close as I could get to the surface of the river and moved out toward FSB Tennessee. I cranked up my speed because our mission that day was not to provide hard intelligence, but to find and intercept any enemy river traffic that dared to be on the river at first light.

  The flight was uneventful all the way up to the Iron Triangle. Parker, in his typical fashion, lounged in the back cabin looking unconcerned, his left hand on the M-60, and one foot cocked up underneath his armor-plated jump seat. As we neared the Iron T, I noticed that there was some artillery coming out of Lai Khe, impacting in the northeastern corner of the Triangle; it didn't affect us as long as we stayed west of the river boundary between the 1st and 25th Divisions.

  I stayed down on the Big Blue at about ninety knots, flying at about two to three feet above the river surface. Flying was exhilarating, but always with the anticipation that a target could be just around the next corner.

  As we skimmed along, I spotted the telltale sign of a cooking fire up ahead. It looked as though it was coming from my left on the 25th Division side of the river, on the western side of the Mushroom stem. Charlie probably thought he could get away with a cooking fire because of the low-hanging fog, which would absorb the smoke.

  His logic was OK. My gun pilot couldn't begin to see the smoke from a cooking fire at his altitude—everything looked like one continuous gray blanket of fog. But humming along at river level, I could see that little plume of smoke curling up from about a mile away, before it had a chance to diffuse into the mist.

  Not only could I see the camp-fire smoke, I could smell it. The air was thick with moisture and quick to carry the distinctive charcoal odor along, to be picked up by an aeroscout nose waiting for just such an enemy sign. Burning charcoal in Vietnam smelled just like the smoldering coals of a backyard barbecue at home. The only difference
was the kind of food Charlie was cooking. So, from almost a mile away, I knew that we had bad people.

  I radioed the gun, “Three One, this is One Six. I've got a cooking fire at ten o'clock long … about a mile. Must be a turn in the river up there.”

  “Ah, roger that, One Six,” Sinor came back. “That's right up there in the Mushroom stem.”

  “All right, Thirty-one, I'm on it. It is a cooking fire and it looks like it's right on the river. I'm going straight at it.”

  Because of the kind of weather that day, I had no reluctance to head right for the fire. I stayed down on the river below the tops of the trees on the bank. I wanted to diffuse the noise of the aircraft and prevent Charlie from seeing us until I got as close as possible. That way I could pop up out of the river and engage the enemy party before any of them could take cover.

  I increased power and nudged the Loach up to a hundred knots. I continued straight up the riverbed, flying between the two banks, right on the surface of the water, keeping my eye glued on the plume of smoke.

  Getting the distance down to about five hundred yards, I keyed Sinor again. “I know you can't see me very well, but I'm going to make a run. If we've got something we can't handle, I'll put out some smoke.”

  As we rounded the northeastern edge of the stem of the Mushroom, I was ready with the minigun. Parker was leaning out of the aircraft and ready with his 60.

  The enemy cooking fire was beyond the trees ahead of me. I jerked a cyclic climb and popped up out of the river over the trees. As I cleared the nipa palms, the fire was about fifty meters in front of me in a little open area. I snapped a decelerating right-hand skidding turn and looked straight down. There was a large black pot over the fire, and about eight to ten NVA main force troops sitting around waiting for breakfast. Some had weapons lying across their laps; others had them leaning against nearby trees. We had surprised them.