To prove they controlled the valley, they not only would know which LZ we were going to use and greet us there but would also wait until we were in the middle of an extraction to shoot again. In between it was snipers from shadows.
I was getting plenty of practice. I got very good at low-level and formation flying. I learned how to function, even though I was scared shitless, by doing it over and over again. I had become efficient, numb, or stupid. I learned that everyone adapts and becomes concerned with the details of the job at hand, no matter how bizarre.
Although I flew with several different pilots as I trained for aircraft commander, I flew the bulk of my time with Leese. He taught me things that saved my life several times.
We were on an extraction mission up Happy Valley to pull out some troops we’d dropped off the day before. We heard the ships ahead calling in hits on the way into the supposedly secure LZ. Leese put the gunners on alert.
“Tell me if you see a target,” he said to me. Putting my hands and feet lightly on the controls was a completely automatic response by this time.
Our company of sixteen ships was the last flight on this extraction, so all the troopers pulled away from the tree lines and jumped on ships in groups of eight. Eight was the load for today. (How much the ship could carry depended on the density altitude, which varied with the temperature and humidity and altitude. The hotter or higher—and therefore thinner—the air was, the less we could carry. The limit was calculated daily.) But there was a fuck-up. After everybody had eight grunts on board, there were four men left over, running around being turned away. Leese saw this and immediately called for them to run back to us. Confused, they ran to the ships that were trying to tell them to come back to us. Everybody was nervous. The four grunts didn’t want to be left behind. Reacher jumped out the back and waved. They finally got the message and came back. I didn’t understand Leese’s decision. We already had eight troopers on board. I’d been in a ship that had dragged the trees trying to get out of an LZ with eight on a day like today. Twelve was impossible. Finesse, luck, experience—none of that would get twelve grunts off the ground today.
As soon as they squeezed inside, Leese brought in the power. I could feel the air pressure build up under the rotors as they struggled, pulling the overloaded ship slowly off the ground. Then he radioed Williams that he could make it. Leese stayed in a hover as the company took off. I glanced at the power gauge. It must have been broken. It indicated that we were using 105 percent of available power. As the company lumbered over the tree line, I heard them firing down into the jungle, then a few calls of hits, then we were alone. Leese nosed the stuffed Huey gently over, letting it accelerate across the ground to gain lift. He kept it just over the grass even as the trees approached. The gauges showed he was pulling maximum power, and we were running out of room. Then, somehow, he pulled in power beyond maximum. The ship groaned up and over the trees. I felt a tug when the skids hit treetops. The company had flown to the left at take off, but Leese turned right. I scanned the clearings and bushes below, looking for muzzle flashes or smoke, but I saw nothing. The ship climbed much slower than normal. It took us a long while to get up to the safety of altitude, but we got there.
“How did you know this ship would be able to do that?” I asked.
“Simple. This is Reacher’s ship,” Leese answered.
“I don’t understand.”
“This is the only ship in our company that can haul a load this big. Right, Reacher?”
“That’s right, sir, and more.” Reacher’s voice hissed in my earphones.
Reacher had made certain fine, illegal adjustments of the turbine. I had never flown the ship before—Leese kept it to himself—so it was news to me. An army training film I saw would prove that it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The ship muscled through an important career for the next two months, saving a lot of lives, until I destroyed it.
The ship may have been stronger than usual, but it still took a lot of experience to know just what the limit was, and how to milk it all out. Leese was good at knowing the absolute limits of aircraft. He made that a part of his bag of survival tricks. It was Leese who taught me that our fixed position in the assault formation was really fixed only as far as our horizontal movement was concerned. You could—as he demonstrated on several occasions—move the ship up and down relative to the formation without throwing the flight off. He would do this rapidly while the flight was being shot at. On final approaches to hot LZs he kicked the tail back and forth, making us waggle into the clearings. His theory was that any movement of the target made it more difficult to hit by confusing the enemy gunners. I adopted this style of flying. Whether it really made a difference didn’t matter; I thought it did. It kept me occupied in otherwise hopeless situations.
We joined our company after the long climb up with the twelve grunts. Miles ahead of us the lead company in the battalion was reporting machine-gun fire near the pass at 3000 feet. Fifty caliber. We had never encountered these heavyweight calibers before. Our company veered off to avoid the fire. We could hear the commotion on the radios as voices in the static told us what was happening.
“Big as baseballs!” A reaction to the fifty-caliber tracers.
“Jesus, Yellow Two is going down!”
“Yellow flight, break formation!” They were spreading out.
I could see those tracers, in their lazy-looking flight upward, from five miles away. In between each tracer were four more bullets. A fifty-caliber machine gun spits out bullets a half inch in diameter and an inch long. When you held one of those slugs in your hand, it had a hefty throwing weight. When blasted out of a gun at 3000 feet per second, it had incredible power and range.
The battalion veered away from the ambush, leaving the gunships behind to harass the VC. I also heard the Colonel call for artillery. Five ships got shot out of the sky; two pilots were killed; the other crews were saved. A gunship was hit sixty-six times and still flew, a record one might boast about except that the pilot was killed. The copilot flew the sieve back to the Golf Course.
Our company flew back to division, dropped off the grunts who had been out for two days, and picked up a fresh batch. We took these to Lima, and for the rest of the day we flew more troops and equipment out to this bivouac. By late afternoon we had logged eight hours of flying time. I was tired and looking forward to getting back to division. Home, these days, was where the hot food was.
This was not to be. It was decided by someone or other that we would stay out at Lima with the grunts.
It was the second time we had done this. As with the last time, there was no warning. No one had sleeping gear, or even a decent selection of C rations.
Half a battalion, thirty-two helicopters, landed at Lima. We brought a load of grunts with us, and they jumped off to join their fellows as soon as we landed. They formed a perimeter around this now valuable patch of Vietnam. Thirty-two hated helicopters and their crews sat in the middle of VC-land waiting for the mortars to come in. Why did we do this? Why park here, seven minutes from the safety of the Golf Course?
“Well, Bob, if we had to get here early tomorrow morning, which we do, what would we do if the pass was socked in?” Farris answered. He stood next to his cargo deck sorting through his C-ration case, looking for something.
“Fly over the pass and circle back,” I said.
“Well, see, that’s a maybe.” Farris’s square jaw was set for a thoughtful reply. “If the weather isn’t too bad, we could; but if it was bad, we couldn’t. If we couldn‘t, we couldn’t be here until the fog burned off.” His brow wrinkled as he paused, pulling his graying crewcut forward. “That would delay the mission, and some people might die because of it.”