At dawn, God said, “Let there be light and also let Bob and Len go back and have some coffee.” The excitement left with the coming of dawn, and I suddenly felt wrung out. The relentless, insistent sleepiness that comes with that time of day was getting to me. I made a dreamlike approach to the Tea Plantation and bounced it in roughly. Riker giggled like a drunk at my efforts. I started laughing, too. Not funny laughter. It was more like sobbing with a smile. As we sat in the cockpit, the captain hauled his radio over to a Jeep. He turned and signaled a “cutthroat” because I still had the Huey running at operating speed. His gesture struck me as immensely funny, and I keyed in the intercom to say so to Riker, but he beat me to it.
“See that, Bob. He wants to kill himself!” Oh, that was rich. We laughed hysterically at this for so long it hurt.
Reacher appeared by Len’s door and shrugged. “What’s wrong?” he said. I wiped the tears away and shut down the Huey.
Time to find some coffee. Reacher stayed behind to take care of his ship. He had either nerves of steel or brains of custard, because he had fallen asleep during the last flight. Now he was energetically climbing all over his helicopter, inspecting every nut and bolt and fluid level. It inspired me to see him doing that. It was a tedious job at best to keep a Huey running properly, and Reacher did it without complaint.
“You love that helicopter, don’t you Reacher?” I said.
“Yes, sir. I also don’t like flying around these fucking jungles in a machine that could quit and fall out of the sky.”
We sat at a table made of used ammo crates. I was eating some reconstituted scrambled eggs when the captain with wings joined us.
“You guys must be tired.” He marveled at what must have been a couple of haggard faces. “I tried to get a ship out here to replace you. No dice.” He stopped to light a cigarette. “There’s going to be a bunch of troops lifted down there today.” He pointed to the south. “Looks like we’re stirring up some real trouble. More and more skirmishes. Anyway, your battalion said we were lucky to have you. All the rest of their ships are being used in the lifts.”
“No problem,” said Riker, rising to the occasion. “After this breakfast and coffee, we’ll be ready to go.” His freckled face brightened with a smile.
“Good, because we’re going to need you all day.”
I groaned. I would’ve groaned louder had I known that Resler had been on the ground with the trapped patrol. He was shot down trying to resupply them and spent the entire night crewing a machine gun with the grunts. But I wouldn’t find that out until I got back to the Preachers.
We flew alone in the valley between Pleime and the massif, moving small patrols to new locations. We were so tired that caution, proficiency, and even fear left us while we dropped into virgin LZs without company or cover. I had felt pretty good after breakfast, but by ten o‘clock I was pranging the Huey again. So was Len. “Pranging” was an unofficial term we learned in flight school. It was descriptive of both the sound and the deflection of a helicopter’s skids during a very hard landing—the kind of landing that would get you a pink slip and a dirty look from your instructor.
I was having lapses in concentration. I would set up an approach to a clearing and then just sit there sort of drooling stupidly until the ground hit the skids. When we hit, it would shake me enough to wake me for a more or less good takeoff. But when the flight lasted more than ten minutes, I would fade. Len and I took half-hour turns. We were both rotten.
Noon marked twenty-four hours since we had left the Golf Course. It seemed like a month. We had been flying nearly twenty of those twenty-four hours. No wonder we both snickered when we pranged our landings. We were delirious with fatigue.
We continued to fly all the rest of the day and into the night. I don’t remember refueling. I don’t remember the landings. I don’t remember who I carried or where I took them. I didn’t record the number of sorties or anything else I was supposed to do. We were complimented later about our calmness under fire. I don’t even remember the fire.
Grunt Six’s man called us and said we could quit. We got back to the Tea Plantation at ten that night.
I fell asleep on the Dust Off stretcher without conversation.
At six the next morning, we were back in the air for our zealous commander, whose entire air force consisted of our Huey and us.
It was a very beautiful morning for flying. I had a canteen cup of coffee with me while Riker took his turn at the controls. The coffee and the cool air cleared my mind. I felt much better after my night on the stretcher.
The day was bright. Deep-blue skies blazed over the shrub-covered hills and valleys of elephant grass. Below, on the side of one shallow hill, eroded ravines had exposed the red earth in a pattern that resembled a drawing of a tall-peaked hut, an aerial signpost set there to show us the way to the Montagnard village nestled in the jungle just a couple of miles beyond.
I sipped some coffee as we passed over the village. The familiar ground plan featured one hut in the middle of the village that was at least four times taller than its neighbors. I think this was the chiefs hut. Parallel to this row of huts was another row of small cubical buildings that sat off the ground on four posts. There was one of these directly across from each dwelling. I saw these villages peeking out of the jungles and tangled hillsides all through the highlands. They seemed peacefully removed from the business at hand.
We landed at the hill and were briefed. Same routine as yesterday. The captain on the hill told us, “You gotta move the guys from this list of coordinates to this list of new coordinates.” He handed me a piece of paper. “Keep your eyes open. The net is beginning to tighten up on those gooks, and they might get fidgety.”
When he said “gook,” I saw that dumb interpreter smiling broadly. On the way out of the tent I said, “How are you this morning?”
“Yes.” He nodded.
Riker and I were pissed off about having to go out there and fly single-ship again. Where’s the rest of our company? Why haven’t we been relieved yet? The little sleep we got last night was not enough. We were both “off,” and we were bouncing the Huey again. We finished moving the squads around by noon and returned to the hilltop for lunch and to pick up our new mission. On approach, I noticed that the kid had given up and moved his tent somewhere else. I shut down and the rotors were still turning when an aide from the tent ran out with a message.
“You got to get back up. A Jeep was just mined five klicks from here.”
Reacher, who had just opened the cowling of the turbine to check something, slammed it shut as the four of us jumped back into the Huey while I lighted the fire. A medic jumped in as we got light on the skids.
The medic briefed us by talking through Reacher’s microphone as we cruised over the trees at 120 knots.
“The Jeep was carrying six men from the artillery brigade. The two that were in the front seats are alive. The other four are either hurt or dead. They’ve got a prick-ten radio (PRC-10), so they can talk to us.”
I saw the smoke ahead at the spot that matched the coordinates scribbled in ball-point on the medic’s palm. “There they are,” I said.
We landed in front of the Jeep, or what was left of it. It was twisted like a child’s discarded toy. The edges of the crumpled and torn metal were smoking. It had been destroyed by a howitzer round buried in the road and triggered remotely. Landing in front of the Jeep was dumb; there could be more mines. It was one of those cases where we trusted the ground guys to pick the spot. A sergeant ran up to my door. He told me through my extended microphone that two of the guys in the back were still alive. “Should we put the dead on board?” His eyes were wide.