It had never occurred to us that we could quit. Technically, we were all volunteers, and if anyone couldn’t take it, he could resign from flight status. But actually to do it… just quit. It was definitely an intelligent thing to do, but so dumb. How would he live with himself?
A few days later we flew farewell assaults in good old Ia Drang again, following up reports from the ARVNs that the NVA was gathering strength near the Cambodian border. About twenty-four ships from our battalion, including one with Nate and me, were sent to poke around.
Sherman rarely led a flight. The aging captain—he was in his early forties—needed some combat-command time before he could make major. He was nervous and cocky at our briefing, the dashing leader of a combat mission to the dreaded Ia Drang. His plan had us flying to Plei Djereng Special Forces camp, near the Cambodian border, then breaking up in groups of four to land grunts at strategic points.
Nate flew on the way out and I played with the maps. It wasn’t necessary to navigate during a formation flight, but I was always curious about just where the fuck I really was. We crossed the Turkey Farm at 2000 feet, heading west-southwest. A half hour later I saw what I thought was the camp five miles off to our left, but Sherman continued straight ahead.
“Getting close to the border,” I said.
“How far?” asked Nate.
“Well, it looks to me like we’re almost on top of it right now.”
“Really?”
“Yellow One, Yellow Two.” Yellow One was Sherman; Yellow Two, Morris and Decker.
“Roger, Yellow Two. Go ahead.”
“Yellow One, I think we’d better turn. Real soon,” Morris drawled.
There was a moment of silence. I could imagine Sherman unfolding and folding and crumpling maps, trying to figure out just what part of this miserable jungle he was over.
“Yellow Two, we’re right on course.”
“Ah, that’s a negative, Yellow One. I’ve got us past our target.”
That was Morris’s way of saying that we were over Cambodia.
Another moment of silence.
“Negative, Yellow Two. I’ve got us on course.”
You could hear the static of Morris’s mike as he hesitated. “Roger.”
Poor Sherman had fucked up and still didn’t know it. His very first authentic combat mission as commander. Kiss major good-bye.
Five miles into the jungle marked “Cambodia” on the map, Sherman’s ship lurched. He veered left, then right, before he actually made the turn. He made no announcement, simply turned back.
“Man, it’s hard to navigate around this fucking jungle, the dumb shit,” Nate said.
The radio was silent until our expeditionary gaggle returned to the proper country. From that day on, poor Sherman would get no command more adventurous or prestigious than being put in charge of digging the company’s well.
As we crossed the border, the chatter began once again. Sherman called Connors and told him he wanted our flight to stay on the ground as a reserve when we landed. Then he told us all to stretch out in trail formation.
The gaggle strung itself out in single file for the landing at Plei Djereng. As the first ships flared, red dust billowed up and swallowed them completely. The Special Forces people had bulldozed a landing strip, and the dry season had turned it to dust.
“Don’t try to hover. Put ‘em straight on the ground,” Sherman radioed. We couldn’t even see the ships that had already landed in the red clouds.
I trailed in behind Connors. When he got within fifty feet of the ground, the dust from the ship in front swallowed him up. He called, “Go around.” He pulled up and headed off to the right. I followed. Ships three and four behind us went on in and landed, and then the rest. By circling around, Connors and I put ourselves on the tail of the line. As we set up for the second try, I drifted back farther from Connors to stay away from his dust. Ten feet off the ground, Connors disappeared. Now it was my turn, the last ship in.
Roots and leafless bushes stuck up wildly at the extreme end of the strip. When I flared, the rotor wash stirred up the dust and everything vanished. I felt the ship hit something. I thought it sounded like a stump coming up through the belly, which happened pretty of ten on the assaults, so I elected to land a few feet farther ahead. Which way was ahead? Which way was up? There were only seconds to figure it out. The compass showed that we were turning to the right. I pushed the left pedal to stop the spin. It didn’t work.
This was a tail-rotor failure. The solution was to chop the power quickly to stop the ship from rotating under the main rotors, and then do a hovering autorotation. We had practiced this routine in flight school. Hundreds of times.
I tried to roll off the throttle to stop the spin, but it was locked. Nate, flying right seat, had locked the throttle for cruising. There was no way to release it from my side. There was no time to discuss the problem with Nate. This whole spinning machine was going to go over and beat itself to death, real soon. So I decided to put it down before it spun too fast. The ship hit and twisted on the skids, rocked over toward the left, hesitated precariously, and flopped back level.
We were out long before the dust settled. It didn’t look too bad. The ship sat crooked on its skids. The tail-rotor gear box was hanging by mechanical tendons. The tail rotor itself was twisted and bent.
Connors came back looking genuinely concerned. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure, but I hit something with my tail rotor.”
Nate and I, Connors and Banjo, and the grief-stricken Reacher poked around the ship looking for a stump or a rock or something big that could have done such damage, but there was nothing obvious. Nate finally called us over to where he squatted.
“A root?” I exclaimed.
“Looks that way,” said Nate. “See, you chopped it off right here.” He pointed to a fresh cut on a scrawny root sticking up through the dust. The cutoff point was two feet off the ground.
“Damn,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, Mason. You couldn’t have seen it, not in this dust,” said Nate. “I didn’t see it.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t flying.”
“Couldn’t be helped.”
I bitched some more about my rotten luck, but Nate and Connors kept saying it wasn’t my fault.
Reacher came over and said, “It’s okay, Mr. Mason. She’ll be flying again in no time.” I felt better. Reacher was the one to know. It was his ship, the most powerful ship in the company, the ship Leese had used to haul that impossible load. If Reacher thought it wasn’t too bad, then it wasn’t too bad.
Nate and I walked to the Special Forces HQ hooch to wait for a ride back. Reacher decided to stay with the Huey until a Chinook was sent out to sling-load it home for repairs.
“You guys want a beer?” asked one of the advisers. He wore a camouflage uniform like the Vietnamese Rangers‘, covered with red dust. Red dust collected on everybody’s skin.
“Sure,” said Nate. We weren’t going to be flying any more today, so having a beer was okay.
We sat on a cot under a canvas canopy and sipped our beers while the rest of the gaggle gathered their load of grunts, cranked up, and left. A half hour later, the dust finally settled.
“Well, how do you like it?” asked the adviser.
“The beer?”
“No, this place. Plei Djereng. The asshole of the world.”
“Dusty.”
“Yeah, we keep it that way on purpose. Keeps the shit from stinking.”
A lone Huey courier landed at the camp. Nate and I hitched a ride to Pleiku. We had the pilot call our gaggle en route to tell them where we’d be. Sherman said he’d come fetch us near the end of the day. Camp Holloway at Pleiku was familiar territory. We immediately went to their officers’ club, drank some more beer, and played their slot machines. I still felt bad about breaking the ship. I couldn’t enjoy myself at all. While the rest of the gaggle was out getting shot at, I was acting like a typical adviser, drinking beer, playing slots—jerking off. The whole thing was due to my incompetence; nobody else had hit a root. So I drank more beer than I should have. So did Nate. He suggested that if we had to wait till sunset, we might as well do it downtown. I agreed. We decided that the best way to get there was to walk, and that’s what we started to do. We got a mile down the road when the daylight began to fade.