After this rousing chorus we grabbed our steeds and leaped into the air, pressing onward, ever onward in the true flying horseshit tradition!
We didn’t really sing that song while on the mission, but we did when we got back that night. It was the company song from the old days.
The siege of Pleime was still going strong in Ia Drang valley, but in our battalion nothing was happening. You would think that this lack of combat while we just flew ass-and-trash around camp would please us no end. But as the period of relative calm continued, it seemed to last an eternity. It wasn’t that we wanted to fight so much; it was that if there was no fighting to do, let’s go home.
As the assaults became routine, even the grunts got lax. As we loaded up for one mission, a grunt got on board carrying an M-79 grenade launcher. He slammed the butt of the weapon on my cargo deck and the thing went off. The grenade went up through the roof of my Huey, up through the spinning rotor blades. After several seconds, it fell back down through the blades and landed next to the ship five feet from my door. It didn’t go off. When I turned around to yell at the dumb grunt, all I could see was me holding a smoking .45 with the same sick smile on my face. However, Resler was with me, and he yelled at the guy. An armorer later explained to me that the grenade had to travel a few feet before it spun enough to arm itself. Its hitting the roof so soon had stopped the process. Nevertheless, from that moment on I had all M-79s checked for safeties on before I would allow them to board.
We took these troops to Lima for the umpteenth grouping for the umpteenth mission up Happy Valley. They got out, and we got orders to haul ammunition, fuel, and food for our infantry. Many of the loads were rigged as sling loads, so I got some practice. I had sling-loaded stumps once with Connors.
“Okay, they’ve got the lines on the mule. Let’s go,” said Leese. (A “mule” was a small, four-wheel-drive vehicle.)
I picked the ship up to a high hover about twenty-five feet above the dry rice paddies. One grunt stood on top of the mule and held a loop attached to four support lines over his head. Another grunt stood fifty feet beyond him to direct me as I approached. I was flying from the left seat. I hovered forward, and the man holding the loop disappeared between my feet as I moved over him. The swirling wind from my rotors whipped the fatigues of interested watchers to a blur. With hand signals he apparently made up as he went along, the guide out front tried to shepherd our whirling beast to squat above the mule.
“Did he touch his nose?” I yelled. “What the fuck does touching his nose mean?” I wanted to show Leese that I knew what I was doing.
“It’s all right, Bob. You’re lined up fine,” said Leese.
“Reacher, lean out and tell me what the fuck’s going on. That asshole looks like he’s conducting a symphony!” I said.
“Yes, sir.” Reacher lay down on his stomach and pushed the top half of his body out over the edge of the deck, holding on to his monkey strap. “About three feet left and five down.”
“Look at him. Now he’s telling me to cut power!” The idiot guide was drawing his hand across his throat.
“You’re far enough down. Just a couple of feet to the left,” Reacher instructed. “There. They put it on the hook.” Meanwhile, the guide became so interested in the hookup, he simply watched.
I pulled enough collective pitch to take up the slack and let the Huey pull itself to the point of equal tension on the four lines above the load. From there, I increased pitch gently to pull the thousand-pound mule into the air. As the weight transferred to the Huey, the increased pitch of the blades slapped the air loudly. With the load off the ground, the instruments showed that I had enough margin of power for takeoff. The cyclic felt stiff as I corrected for drift.
The fuselage of a helicopter in a hover is like a weight at the bottom of a pendulum, the top being where the mast joins the rotor hub. The addition of a sling load makes it a sort of compound pendulum. Coordinating the movements of the two takes practice. Pushing the cyclic forward, for example, causes the rotor disk to tilt forward, pulling the fuselage along after the rotors like a rock on the end of a string. With the sling load hooked up, the swing of the fuselage is slowed by the inertia of the attached load. The helicopter acts like it doesn’t want to move forward. There’s a danger at this point that the pilot will apply even more forward cyclic to overcome this resistance. When the momentum of the two pendulums coincides, the ship will be nose low and sinking. Pulling back quickly to correct for this causes the fuselage to swing back first, then the load, each at its own rate. When everything stops tugging weirdly at the ship, it’ll be moving too slowly and can stall back to the ground. All this means that when I started to move forward for takeoff, I wanted to keep going.
“Jesus, I’m up here, twenty feet over his head, and he’s signaling me to come to a hover!” I was getting ready to land and go choke the guide.
“The load is clear, sir,” said Reacher.
I moved slowly forward so as not to antagonize the two pendulums. The guide, however, stood his ground, frantically giving me unrecognizable signs. The heavy load swung toward him, accelerating. I was hoping to hit him, but he dove clear at the last moment.
As we climbed up, Leese said, “Disarm,” and reached up to the overhead panel and flipped off the circuit breaker for the electrical hook release. We kept it on when we were close to the ground because the pilot could hit a switch on the cyclic control grip to drop the load in a hurry. Airborne, the hook was disarmed to prevent it from releasing itself accidentally, which it occasionally did. Somebody in our company had dropped a mule from 3000 feet the day before, and the grunts were still pissed about it. The thing looked as though it had been dug out of a King Kong footprint.
I could feel the tugging as the mule fought the wind while I flew back to the Golf Course. For the landing, all I had to remember was to start the deceleration early and keep the ship high. Leese armed the release. I settled into a high hover with the mule ten feet off the ground and slowly approached the ground guide at the maintenance depot. I watched him suspiciously, but he knew what he was doing. As I felt the mule touch, he signaled to release, and I pushed the button on the grip that caused the belly hook to release the lines. The Huey lunged toward the sky when the load released, and I let it go, pulling in even more power to urge it up to a nearly vertical climb, turning to the right.
“Cowboy,” said Leese, but when I looked over to him, he was smiling.
The combat lull continued, but I was still getting plenty of flight time. Eight or nine hours a day was typical. I could’ve stayed out longer because of the unhappiness at tent city. Boredom was breeding widespread depression. With apparently no one to fight, the Cav was just twenty thousand men sitting in the middle of Vietnam in their mildewing tents, wondering why they were here.
It didn’t help that the anti-Vietnam-war demonstrators were becoming prominent in the news. With the company in such a black mood, the protesters’ remarks were so much salt in our wounds. No one likes being the fool. Especially if he finds himself risking his life to be one.
“I think I’d rather kill one of those fuckheads than a goddamn gook!” yelled Connors. He threw a magazine on the ground inside our tent. “Cocksuckers think they know everything! Did you read that?” He spoke to no one in particular. It was late, and I was up, writing a letter on my cot. “That asshole says that Ho Chi Minh was sold out by the Americans! He says that gook was once our ally and that we let a British colonel turn South Vietnam back to the French!” He stopped. I looked over. He sat on his cot in his shorts with a beer in his hand, staring angrily at the canvas wall behind me. His face calmed when he saw me. “You ever hear that before, Mason?”