“What do you mean, ‘immune’?”
“It’s one of the advantages of being an officer. We get ‘nonspecific urethritis.’ Enlisted men get the clap.”
The shopkeeper spoke no English, but with the objects we wanted in plain sight, we had only to point. I bought nine fluorescent light fixtures—bulbs, ballast, and wire. Now if I only knew what to do with them.
The old salts had been through the development of air-assault techniques in the 11th Air Assault, plus the full-scale test of Air Assault II in the Carolinas; but the bullets had been fake, the enemy was really on the same side, and judges told you when you were dead. Now that we were flying in the real world, the old salts were unhappy about how their commanders forgot their training.
“I cannot fucking believe it,” said Connors. “You’d think that we never even heard of air assaults, much less done it.” We sat around a picnic table in the new mess tent after our first big assault in Happy Valley.
“Captain Farris, who decided to fly low level across the rice paddies like that?” Connors pleaded as he leaned toward Farris.
“Wasn’t right, was it?” Farris answered.
“How the hell can they ignore all that fucking time we spent trying out every conceivable way there is to approach hot areas. Rice paddies don’t offer any cover. You only fly low level when there’s cover—trees, riverbeds, valleys—something.” Connors looked deflated; Farris didn’t answer. There was no answer.
I was depressed. I was supposed to be learning how to be an aircraft commander in an air-assault company. I wondered if I would live through the training program.
The day before, at six o‘clock in the afternoon, sixty-four ships forming an entire air-assault battalion gathered on the Golf Course, loaded troopers, and flew to Lima, the laager area just on the other side of the An Khe pass.
At that point the old salts were already pissed off. We were to spend the night at Lima, only ten miles (seven minutes) closer to our objective, Happy Valley, than if we had stayed at the secure Golf Course.
After we landed, some of our ships went back to the division to fetch hot chow for us and for the five hundred grunts. Wendall, Connors, Nate—all the old salts—complained about being there. Wendall kept pointing out that the VC were famous for their surprise ambushes against the French right around where we were camped. It was not a good night. We slept in the Hueys. Everyone was jumpy, and the mosquitoes were intense. At 0400 hours we were awake, and at 0545 we cranked up and flew the troops to an already secured LZ north of Lima to group with another Cav unit for the big push.
Instead of flying at 1500 feet, this flight leader flew low level all the way. There were no shots fired, but it was a curious move. The gaggle landed and dropped the troops only to find out it was the wrong LZ. We reloaded the grunts, and on the second attempt we made it to the correct LZ. There we waited.
During the half-hour wait, the old salts really went wild.
“Why the fuck did we come up here low level?” Connors shouted, cornering Shaker. Shaker just shrugged and looked unhappy. Apparently someone new was leading this assault, but Shaker was a platoon leader and wouldn’t comment about what his brethren in the braid were up to.
I was flying with Leese, but he didn’t say anything either, just looked pissed off. The second stage of the assault was ready to commence. The word came back that we should expect to receive opposition on the flight route.
“I sure wish we had chest protectors,” said Resler. “You know, if they know we’re going to get shot at and they still fly low level, they ought to give us some armor, don’t you think?” I nodded, distracted. Seeing the regulars bitch like this wasn’t good for my morale.
The other unit stayed behind to form a second wave. Our gaggle loaded up.
From there to the real LZ were ten miles of rice paddies, spotted with villages ringed with trees and an occasional lonely coconut palm or clump of bushes—the kind of place you’re supposed to stay away from, especially if you know it is controlled by the VC.
If it was going to be low level, then Leese was going to make it low level. He actually tried to fly the contours of the paddy dikes at 100 knots. I sat in the right seat with my hands and feet near the controls, waiting, tense, scared. We were Orange Three. On our right front, Nate and Farris flew Orange One; on our left rear, Sherman and Captain Daisy flew Orange Four. Across the V, Resler and Connors flew Orange Two. The distance between us varied as each ship dodged occasional coconut trees and tall bushes. Over the radios I could hear the prestrike commentary going on in my earphones. From 5000 feet above us I heard our battalion commander, the Colonel, telling us to maintain a neater formation as we spread out over the flat plain.
Up ahead, from the trees around a village, I could actually see muzzle flashes. Then I heard ships in the Yellow flight calling, taking hits. Then from small brush clusters I hadn’t noticed before came more bullets. Soon the radios were jammed with hit reports. Above the din I heard “Do not fire into the villages; do not fire into the villages,” from the Colonel. On our left, Sherman and Daisy kept lagging back and then lurching forward, sometimes beside and sometimes behind us. I heard them call “Orange Four, we’re hit!” Then they dropped back out of sight. They had taken a burst through the cockpit, and the debris from the shot had temporarily blinded Sherman. Leese tried to stay away from the villages, but there was no way to do that; they were on the flight path. Tricky flying was to no avail here. I could stare at muzzle flashes for long moments as we flew straight at them, and the VC had the same amount of time to fire at us. Low-level flying was supposed to minimize exposure time, but it wasn’t working here.
The flight up the valley was lower, faster, and much hotter than anything I had yet seen. By the time we got to the LZ, my brain was numb. I don’t know what I would have done if Leese had got hit.
The LZ was no different from the rest of the valley except that there were more bushes. Despite an artillery prep and rockets from our gunships, it was hot. Bullets came from the bushes, from behind paddy dikes, from hidden trenches. The grunts leapt out as soon as we touched down, increasing the confusion. Up ahead a VC jumped out of a hidden hole and charged Connors’s ship. Nobody on Connors’s ship saw him, but his wing man’s door gunner did. He shot him in the back.
The flight leader, noticing that we had indeed “received opposition,” led us back to the first LZ at 2000 feet, proving that the concept that helicopters can fly higher than four feet was known to him.
Although most of the ships had been hit, only two pilots were seriously wounded and had to be evacuated. Ten more, including Wendall, Barber, and Sherman, got minor face cuts from flying Plexiglas. Leese and I were untouched.
A few days later Farris assigned me to fly a mission with Captain Daisy—another troop lift into Happy Valley. Half the ships were from the Snakes, half from the Preachers. The LZs were getting hotter by the day. No one ever figured how the VC always knew which clearing we would use for an LZ. There were thousands of possibilities, but Charlie would almost always be waiting for us in the one we picked.
Daisy thought of himself as a war historian. He was always the most vocal in the late-night discussions about how the war should be fought. As a matter of fact, I agreed with his premise that we should be taking real estate instead of bouncing all over the place in hit-and-run exercises. But except for the bullshit of our late-night strategy sessions, we had little in common.
I was in the right seat, first pilot’s position, a courtesy extended by Daisy. Later I almost always flew from the left seat, even when I was the first pilot, because the left side of the Huey’s instrument panel was chopped and I could see straight down to the ground between my feet.