Low Level Hell

by Hugh Mills

  Instantly, Parker opened up with his M-60. I was so momentarily mesmerized watching Jimbo's tracers, that I hardly noticed when some of the soldiers jerked their AKs out of their laps and began firing full magazines back at us as they jumped to their feet and ran for cover.

  For several seconds, it was AK-47 versus M-60 in a vicious, blazing duel. I couldn't join in the exchange because I was too close to get an angle with the minigun.

  We slugged it out for about a minute before I decided it was too hot to stay over the camp site any longer. I punched the intercom and hollered, “Dump a red, Jim!”

  Parker, in his usual state of preparedness, already had a red smoke grenade attached to the carry handle of his M-60. He quickly pulled the pin and let the canister go. As I saw the red smoke land in the middle of the camp-fire area, I dumped the nose, pulled power, and keyed Sinor. “Red smoke is out, Thirty-one. Hit the smoke!” I moved off and watched as the Cobra made its run on the target.

  Sinor sent pair after pair of rockets crashing into the camp site in what was becoming known as Three One's “ripple fire maneuver.” On a normal Cobra rocket run, it was common for the gun pilot to shoot a couple of pairs of rocks, break at about a thousand feet, then come around on the target again. Since Sinor didn't break off his run until about five hundred feet from the ground, the several pairs of rockets that he could pump into a target created a ripple, or salvo, effect that was absolutely devastating.

  Standing off a couple of hundred yards, I saw the enemy camp site literally explode with Sinor's fusillade of 2.75s. Then he broke away very low and punctuated his run with a trail of minigun tracers.

  As the smoke and debris cleared, I went back up on Uniform and told Three One to cover me as I went back in for a BDA. In what had been the NVA camp site before Parker and Sinor's blistering fire, twelve enemy soldiers lay dead in a fifty-meter circle.

  I keyed Uniform again. “Good shooting, Thirty-one. Between your good rocks and my crew chief's 60, we've got about a dozen NVA regulars KIA down here.”

  “Roger, One Six,” Sinor answered. “If you've done everything you need to do here, let's head on up the river on the VR. We'll either put the 25th or our ARPs on the KIAs later.”

  With that, I turned back toward the Saigon River. Just as I started to drop down on top of the Saigon, Parker keyed his mike and said, in his typical low-key way, “Lieutenant, if we've got all those bad guys back there taken care of, how about taking me to the hospital.”

  Thunderstruck by his calm, matter-of-fact statement, I jerked my head around. “My God!” I gasped. Parker was slumped over in his jump seat, his M-60 lying across his lap. Both of his hands were clasping his neck in a futile effort to stem the sickening squirt of blood that was streaming through his fingers.

  I couldn't react fast enough. I punched UHF and told Sinor, “Three One, One Six has a crew chief hit… he's bad. Give me a steer to Doctor Delta and I'm en route direct. Clear my way with arty.”

  I heard Sinor shoot the message right back to Lai Khe artillery. “Red Leg, this is Darkhorse Three One. We've got a helicopter inbound to Doctor Delta with a wounded crew member on board. Shut down all artillery. I say again, need you to shut down all arty in the vicinity of the Iron T.”

  “Roger, Darkhorse,” Lai Khe came back, “artillery is shutting down. However, we do have mortars coming out of fire support base Lorraine going into the northern edge of the Iron T. It will take us a minute to shut them down.”

  Sinor then keyed me. “OK, One Six, you heard. Lima kilo arty is shutting down, but it will take a minute or so to stop the mortars. Turn right and give me a couple of orbits.”

  “Negative,” I yelled back. “Negative, Three One. I can't do that. Charlie Echo is hurt too bad. I'm going to take it down on the deck and head straight in!”

  I took another fast look at Parker. The blood pumping out of his neck was getting caught up in the slipstream and was splattering all over the gunner's compartment. I didn't have much time!

  I took the bird down to ground level and picked up Highway 14. It was Rome-plowed, and the wide-open space gave me some standoff from the jungle as we headed east along the western edge of the Iron Triangle. Then I swung right and cut off over the northern edge of the Iron T directly toward Ben Cat, which was just south of the Lai Khe base. I kept looking back at Parker. The way he was bleeding, I didn't know how I was going to make it in time.

  In a couple of minutes, I was closing Lai Khe. I notified Sinor that I was switching off fox mike and going up on Doctor Delta frequency.

  “Doctor Delta, Doctor Delta,” I called, “this is Darkhorse One Six inbound. I've got a Charlie Echo shot in the neck. I need a surgeon and litter on the pad.” I was doing all the ship could give me, 110 to 115 knots, and passing over Ben Cat.

  As I got back an affirmative to land at Lai Khe, I remembered to reach down and safe my minigun. Then I spun the Loach around and dropped it down right in the middle of the PSP pad that formed an H adjacent to the hospital emergency building entrance. A group of soldiers was waiting nearby with a litter.

  The instant I touched down, I flicked the emergency shutdown switches, unbuckled, and jumped out of the ship. I wanted to help with Parker, but the medics were right there. They already had him out of the airplane and were jogging his litter toward the receiving hut.

  I started to follow, but one of the medics called back to me over his shoulder. “Hey, Lieutenant, we need you to move your aircraft because we've got a Huey inbound with a bunch of wounded.”

  I continued to watch until Parker was out of sight, then climbed back into the Loach and moved the bird over about seventy-five feet. I ran back to the building where they had taken Parker. The emergency room was just inside the door. Moving quietly into the almost too familiar surroundings, I thought of the other times I had been there. Ameigh. Me. Now Parker.

  Jimbo's whole upper body was a gory mess from the blood he'd lost. I figured that he must have been hit in the initial exchange when we first swooped in over the camp site—before Sinor made his run, before our BDA. Why hadn't he let me know so I could have gotten him out of there?

  My thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a Huey landing—the one, I guessed, that I'd had to move my Loach for. The emergency room double doors suddenly slammed open and litters of wounded from the Huey were rushed in. I was numbed anew by the appearance of the wounded men.

  There were six of them, all young soldiers from the 82d Airborne who were also based at Phu Loi, just a stone's throw from my hootch. They had been, I heard the medics say, in an APC when the vehicle hit a mine while working near the Iron Triangle. The arriving soldiers were flash-burned, concussion-damaged, shrapnel-riddled. They were all desperately injured, and I knew that this was no place for me to be standing around.

  I backed out of the room, still looking at the frantic emergency room scene and wondering how many of the men in there, Parker included, would see the light of the next day.

  I waited just outside the emergency room for a while. Someone, I was sure, would let me know as soon as they had some word on Parker. The minutes crawled by like hours, and I kept imagining the life and death struggles that were going on in the next room.

  Deciding that a cigarette and a little fresh air might help, I decided to walk down to the ship. In my earlier haste, I had left my pack of Marlboros lying on the console between the two pilot seats.

  As I walked across the PSP, my eye caught Parker's bloodied chicken plate. It was lying in the middle of the landing pad, where the medics had tossed it. Almost hesitantly, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. When I looked at it, it was obvious what had happened. There were five AK hits square on the front piece of the body armor. One of those, most likely an AK-47 armor-piercing round, had apparently deflected off the chicken plate and hit Parker in the throat.

  Walking over to the Loach, I carefully laid Parker's chicken plate in the back cabin and just happened to notice that his M-60 wasn't s
afed. It had an ammo belt in it, with a round probably still in the chamber.

  To fix that situation before an accident could happen, I crawled into the gunner's spot and sat down in Parker's jump seat. I lifted the feed tray, took out the belt of ammunition, and let it drop back down into the ammo box on the floor. Then I pulled the bolt back to clear the chamber and put the gun on “safe.”

  While I was going through those almost automatic motions, I began to look around the cabin interior. The mess was appalling! Blood and pieces of flesh were splattered on the sides and top of the cabin. My mind replayed the fierce exchange of gunfire at the enemy camp site, then Parker's unembellished announcement.

  I felt sick to my stomach. I didn't know if it was the thought of Parker being hurt so badly, or the sight of those six young American soldiers brought in after being blown to pieces inside that APC. It didn't matter. I was suddenly violently ill. Gagging and vomiting, I added my own mess to the already defiled gunner's compartment.

  The next thing I knew, one of the hospital medics was leaning his head inside the cabin door. “Are you OK, Lieutenant?”

  I lifted my head out of my hands and answered in a shaky voice, “No, I really feel like shit.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We all do once in awhile over here.”

  As the medic turned to walk away, I started to call after him, to tell him what I really felt at that moment. But I kept it to myself. I had just begun to think—for the first time in the ten months I had been in Vietnam—about the futility of it all. I was suddenly struck by the futility of doing the same thing day in and day out—the same kind of flying, the same kind of enemy, the same kind of engagements—only one day the enemy got hurt; the next day it was our own people. It seemed as though the only real significance of the war was tit for tat.

  “Your door gunner's going to be OK.” It was the doc, who had walked out to my parked Loach to give me the news. “He was hurt pretty badly, but it was a clean wound and he's going to make it.” He confirmed that the enemy bullet had probably ricocheted into Parker's lower right neck. It just missed the jugular vein, went all the way through, and exited just below the base of his skull.

  “If you gotta get shot in the neck,” the doc said finally, “he did it the right way, believe me. We'll still have to evac him out of the country for convalescence, and we don't know right now if he'll make it back.”

  Doc's news that Parker would survive sent a shower of relief over me. But I knew Jimbo was gravely hurt and, at that moment, I couldn't help wondering if I'd ever see him again.

  I got back to Phu Loi a little before noon that day and turned my Loach over to maintenance. I couldn't take it out again before it got a thorough check; besides, I didn't have another crew chief available to replace Parker.

  So, to finish the VR we had started early that morning, I rode shotgun in Three One's Cobra. With another Cobra covering, we made up a red team and went back up the river to VR the area from the Mushroom on up to Dau Tieng. It was a fast, uneventful flight, but we did have the satisfaction of checking out the rest of the Big Blue leg that we had missed after locating that cooking fire.

  I was dead tired when I went to bed that night. Parker was so much in my thoughts that I couldn't sleep. Pictures of the day kept running through my mind, and they all kept coming back to the hospital at Lai Khe. To the torn bodies of those young 82d Airborne soldiers as they were carried into the emergency room, to the doctors working over Parker.

  The pictures kept coming: the bullet gouges in Parker's chicken plate … safing his 60 … getting sick and asking myself what in the hell was the sense of it all.

  It all played back. Even my gruesome effort of taking the water hose that the medics had used to clean out the gore in the medevac Huey and hosing-out the back of the Loach before flying it back to Phu Loi. Thank God, the blessing of sleep finally came.

  CHAPTER 17

  COURAGE

  Three days later, the troop took another morale drubbing.

  On 1 November, we had a hunter-killer team working up in the Thi Tinh River valley, just south of the Easter Egg. While down low working his pattern, the scout picked up a well-traveled trail that led to several bunkers of an enemy base camp. The scout put down a marker, the gun recorded the grid, and the contact information was radioed back to Darkhorse operations. As a result, the ARPs were scrambled to conduct a ground reconnaissance and find out exactly what enemy activity, if any, existed.

  I had been assigned Scramble 2 on that day, so I stationed myself in the ops bunker to monitor the radios. I listened as the Horsemen, the four lift platoon Hueys carrying the ARPs, took off north, cleared the base fence, and headed on out over Dogleg Village.

  “Two Six, this is Two Three,” the number four Huey called flight lead. “You have a flight of four.” Having thus been notified that his fourth Huey was up in trail, the flight leader, Capt. Morgan Roseborough, ordered, “OK, Horsemen, go echelon left at my command. Ready … now!”

  The four Hueys broke trail, with number two sliding over to the left, number three holding its position, and number four sliding over left in behind number two—into an echelon left formation. Captain Roseborough then rogered number four with a couple of fast squeezes on his radio transmitter trigger.

  Flying that day in Chalk One (the lead Huey), in addition to flight leader Captain Roseborough, were pilot Bob Holmes, new ARP platoon leader Lt. Jim Casey, crew chief Spec. 4 Eric Harshbarger, door gunner Danny Free, platoon medic Spec. 4 Mike Smith, and a full squad of ARP riflemen.

  As the four Hueys passed over Ben Cat and headed toward the Easter Egg, the aeroscout at the contact point was asked to mark the LZ with a colored smoke. This not only told the Horsemen where to put down, but the flow of the smoke also marked the wind direction. In addition, the colored smoke provided a center sector marker for the Cobra, who would normally roll into the LZ for a couple of antipersonnel gun runs to clear any enemy hiding in the grass before the Hue/s dropped in to unload.

  Now well into the last leg of their flight to the contact point, the lift Hueys began to drop out of their fifteen-hundred-foot cruising altitude. Reaching about six hundred to seven hundred feet in their descent toward the LZ, Roseborough called for his flight to again go into trail.

  Falling back into a straight line, and flying with their main rotor blades not more than ten to fifteen feet apart, the ARP-laden UH-lHs turned onto final. They were fast descending into the marshy little clearing that had just been swept by the Cobra's several fléchette runs.

  At two hundred feet of altitude, Two Six came up again: “OK, Horsemen, we're clear to suppress both sides of the landing zone … no friendlies … suppress at my command.”

  The eight door gunners, with four machine gunners on each side of the formation, were to commence firing on his order and sweep the LZ on both sides before touchdown.

  “Open fire,” came Roseborough's command as the flight of four passed through one hundred feet and steepened its angle downward toward the yellow smoke-marked landing point.

  Suddenly the air was shattered by the sound of eight machine guns going off all at once. Hundreds of 7.62mm rounds hammered into the marshy earth with every-fifth-round tracers spitting out a tongue of fire that streaked into the wood line surrounding the LZ.

  Bob Holmes, at the controls of the lead Huey, decelerated and brought the flight straight in toward the still-billowing yellow smoke. He had made scores of hostile LZ landings, and knew that he had to move in fast, touch down for maybe three seconds to discharge his load of ARPs, then get out before any trouble developed. Yellow smoke swirled into Chalk One's windshield. Down … down … the big Huey's skid shoes settled to within inches of the marshy ground.

  At the moment of near touchdown, a thunderous, blinding explosion erupted underneath Holmes's aircraft. Chalk One lurched upward, shuddered in its death throes, and dropped to the ground.

  Following just feet behind, the cockpit crews of Chalk Two, Three, and Four were horr
or-stricken by what they had just witnessed. The Chalk Two pilot, who now became flight lead, instantly realized that it was imperative to get the ARPs out of the remaining three Hueys and clear the LZ. He urgently yelled into his radio to the two ships behind him, “Get out of here! Chalk One's hit. Door gunners, no suppression, no firing. Lift off and break right… break right. Let's get out of here!”

  Right on top of that radio message, the Cobra was directing his scout: “Get in there … get in there and cover the LZ. You can't shoot, there are friendlies on the ground. Don't know the situation … get in there and advise.”

  By that time, the ARP platoon sergeant (who always rode in the trail UH-1, whereas Four Six, the platoon leader, rode with the flight lead) had run forward to assume command of the remaining three ARP squads and secure the landing zone. Though both painfully wounded, Bob Holmes and Doc Smith somehow emerged from the shattered Huey and began helping others out of the smoking, hopelessly wrecked aircraft.

  Later the news came from the crash scene that Chalk One had hit a mine as it was about to touch down. It was thought to be a “tilt rod-actuated” mine, which was hard to see once planted because the body of it was covered with dirt. A fine, wire tilt rod poked up about twelve inches off the ground through the grass like a miniature car radio antenna. When something like the belly of an aircraft came in contact with the rod, the mine was actuated and set off the explosion.

  The enemy had apparently realized that the clearing was a likely spot for our helicopters to land and insert troops, so they had planted the mine in advance. It was Chalk One's fate to set down on top of it. The resulting explosion ripped through the belly of the Huey—right under the passenger cabin—and sent fire, shrapnel, and tar-black smoke throughout the interior of the helicopter. Every person in the aircraft was injured in the blast. One man was killed.

  Not only was the aircraft and its crew immediately out of action, but one fourth of the ARP platoon's personnel (including its Four Six, Lieutenant Casey) was lost as an effective fighting force. What more could Charlie have hoped for, with just one randomly placed mine?