We stayed strapped in our seats with the Hueys shut down. The clearing was pitch black. This LZ had been taken earlier in the day and was supposed to be secure, but no one believed it. We stayed put.
The adrenaline high I had produced during the action was now wearing off. I sat in my seat watching little white spots drift in front of me. I felt drained of my strength. The undefined world of my dark surroundings mingled with my black thoughts. Somehow this has got to stop, I thought. I can’t think straight. If the VC don’t get me I will. What’s Shaker thinking of sitting here in the middle of nowhere? Riker and I did not talk.
I heard a small observation helicopter (H-13) over the spot where the trapped men waited, a scout from our 1/9 Cav squadron. I imagined the pilot bristling with Western .45s and cowboy boots, having a waxed mustache and a firmly set jaw, glaring down into the darkness, looking for signs of the NVA. Theoretically, he would fly low and slow, so the VC would shoot at him. Then, if he survived, he could locate them for the artillery or gunships. Fourteen of the original twenty pilots of that scout unit would be killed in less than six months.
He circled, invisibly. There was no reaction from the NVA. He grew tired of this passive search, and either he or his crew chief started shooting down into the jungle with a hand-held machine gun. His tracers formed a red tongue of flame arcing down from nowhere. That worked. After a few of these bursts, the NVA opened up on him. Tracers leapt out of the jungle to a spot where they guessed he might be. When they fired, he stopped. They had just given away their position. Minutes later, mortars whumped in from somewhere near where we sat. They kept it up for almost five minutes. The whirlybird went back to check it out. He fired into the jungle again and flew even lower than last time, but he could not draw fire. Either the machine gun had been wiped out or the enemy had gotten smart. We would have to find out which.
Shaker sent his gunner back through the blackness along the parked ships to tell us it was going to be one ship at a time: Crank up and wait, and monitor the radios until he got out.
We waited while both Shaker and the next ship got in and out successfully. We were last.
The approach was eerie because I did it without lights. The large landing light and even the small position lights would make excellent targets. The machine gun was apparently out of action, but the grunts were now saying there was some sniper fire from the tree line. I was on the controls, and I decided to keep going. I talked on the radio to a grunt who promised to switch on a flashlight when I got closer. I lined up on the general area and made a gentle descent into the darkness. The grunt on the radio talked me down.
“Okay, now left. You’re doing great. No sweat. Keep it coming like you are. Let down a little. I think you should go more right. Okay, you should see the flashlight. Can you see the light?”
“Roger.” The dull glow of an army flashlight with a special filter on it popped into existence below me, making the man holding it a target.
A single point of light in pitch blackness doesn’t tell you much. You could be upside down for all you know. Without other references to compare it with, the light seemed to drift around in the blackness. I kept my eyes moving, not staring at the light. Disorientation was a common occurrence at moments like this. It was never clear to me just how I did manage, but the ship touched down in front of the flashlight; the skids hit the ground gently before I realized that I was that close. Apparently we got no sniper fire on the way in. Of course, I would know about it only if we got hit or if the grunts told us.
We picked up all the remaining wounded, which amounted to two stretcher cases and one walking. The guy with the flashlight jumped on board, too, just before we took off.
I was very cautious on takeoff and avoided the old machine-gun position by making a sharp turn as we cleared the trees. The Huey was low on fuel and therefore light. I stayed low for a while to accelerate and then pulled the cyclic back hard to swoop up into the night sky. I switched on our position lights so that any other aircraft could see us, and 3000 feet and thirty seconds later we saw fifty-caliber tracers sailing up, glowing as big as baseballs. I switched off the lights, and when we became invisible again, they stopped firing.
During the half-hour flight back to Pleiku, the flashlight bearer never stopped talking.
“Mister Riker,” the gunner said, “that guy that got on board back there is acting crazy. He’s talking fast, but he won’t talk into my mike.”
Riker was taking his turn, so I looked back to see the kid sitting on the bench next to the rushing wind. He made wide gestures with his arms, which I could see, but it was too dark to make out much else. His shadow arms were orchestrating a private nightmare. Make that three wounded and one loony on board.
We dropped off the wounded at 4 a.m., but the kid stayed with us. He wasn’t wounded, at least not physically. Riker thought we should take him to our operations tent. While we walked there, the kid just followed, talking gibberish.
We turned in our flight records and mission report to Sergeant Bailey at the operations tent while the kid stood off to the side, mumbling and looking wildly around at nobody. We didn’t try to stop him. We discovered, through Bailey, that he was not supposed to be with us; he was supposed to be out where we got him. Bailey did not call his unit but used the field phone to call the hospital tent as we left. As Riker and I trudged off to find our tents, his voice faded to silence.
Someone got me up at six and said I had to fly. I remember only that I stumbled into the operations tent and said, “I can’t fly now. I have flown too much.” A simple statement of fact. I turned and stumbled away. I heard a voice say, “He can’t fly. He and Riker just got back two hours ago.”
There was a moment of pleasure as I slipped back into my blankets. My air mattress was flat, but I didn’t care. I was awake enough to realize that they all had to work, but I was going to sack in.
I was forced to get up again three hours later. Not by the army. God did it. He wanted me to get up. His method was simplicity itself. Just heat up that miserable tent with the sun and bake me out. I felt myself cooking and rolled off my deflated air mattress and pushed my face into the cool earth. My eyelids were swollen shut, and I was drenched with sweat. The cool-earth remedy wasn’t working. For one thing, it tasted terrible. Enough! I reached over to my flight bag to find something clean to wear. The bag had been sitting in this dank tent for the last three days and smelled like an old laundry hamper. I pulled out a set of clean fatigues that smelled dirty and dressed while lying on my back. Boots. My hands found them next to the canvas wall. I noticed that the tent had been designed to hold moisture inside; my hand got wet looking for the boots. I tried to open my eyes again, but the sun was so bright through the fabric that I couldn’t stand it. With my eyes still shut, I laced the boots automatically, and minutes later I launched myself outside. I staggered around feeling like Frankenstein’s monster. I tripped over the tent rope, and during the resulting fall I was forced to open my eyes.
The watery view through my swollen eyelids revealed the general layout of the camp well enough for me to know where the latrine would be. I probably could’ve just closed my eyes and sniffed it out, but I didn’t want to fall in.
The latrines at the Turkey Farm were long frame benches built like ladders with maybe four places to sit placed over a corresponding number of sawed-off oil drums. The neat thing about the Cav’s latrines was that they were not enclosed for privacy. I mean, real men can sit out in the middle of a busy camp and shit. No one will watch when you wipe your ass.
I got a cup of coffee at the operations tent and stumbled over to a homemade tent the guys had jury-rigged while Riker and I had been away. They called it the Big Top. It was, basically, a giant tarp stretched over two thick twenty-foot poles. Compared to the tent I just got out of, it was cool and breezy inside.