“Yellow One, do you read?”
No answer.
“Yellow Two, take the lead. Come left forty degrees.”
“Roger.”
We had a leader again. Yellow One’s radios were shot out, and he had been trying to hand-signal Yellow Two to take over, but Yellow Two just followed him as he tried to break away.
Below us, the villagers were having a picnic, shooting at a lot of helicopters flying low and slow. At one village I saw fifty people just standing around, their hands shielding their eyes from the sun, watching the show. Somebody down there was shooting, because the ships were calling in hits. I couldn’t see any guns, just women and children and men watching the helicopter parade.
As the gaggle crossed the next village on our flight path, many ships called in hits. Connors got his fuel bladder raked and had to break away from the flight. Another ship called in that a pilot was killed, and it turned back. Someone in that village was doing a real job, but so far he was invisible. Meanwhile, we still wallowed around, flying low and slow.
One of the ships just ahead of us called in hit. At the same moment, I saw where the gun was. Among all the people, water buffalo, thatched huts, and coconut trees, an innocent-looking group of people stood bunched in a crowd. From the center of the crowd I saw smoke and then the gunner. He had a machine gun.
Before I got into the army, they had asked me a question they asked all prospective grunts: What would you do if you were the driver of a truck loaded with soldiers, traveling very fast down a muddy road, flanked on both sides with steep drop-offs, and a small child suddenly walked into your path? Would you try to avoid her and drive off to certain death, or would you keep going and kill her? Well, everybody knew the right answer: You kill the kid. And it didn’t much matter, because the kid and the situation weren’t real anyway. So I had said, “I’d stop the truck.”
“No, no. You can’t stop the truck. It’s going too fast.”
“Well, then, I wouldn’t be going so fast down a very bad road in the first place.”
“You don’t seem to understand. It’s assumed that you have no choice but to kill either the little kid or you and your comrades.”
“Since I have no choice, I’ll go ahead and kill the kid.”
“That’s what we like to hear.”
Now the question was, How do you kill that gunner, who has just killed some pilots, without killing the screen of innocent people around him?
“I see the gun, sir!” said Rubenski, the door gunner.
“Shoot at the ground first. Scare those people away,” I said.
“Yes, sir.” Rubenski, one of our most accurate gunners, opened up as we drew closer to the gun position. The spectators were at the edge of their village, directly off our right side, a hundred yards away.
The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group. The VC gunner was concentrating on another ship and didn’t see Rubenski’s bullets yet. I really expected to see the black pajamas, conical hats, and the small children scatter and expose the gunner. Were they chained in place? When the bullets were smashing fifty feet in front of them, I knew they weren’t going to move. They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. Rubenski kept firing. The VC’s gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him. The truck had smashed the kid.
Twenty ships were damaged and five were shot down, killing two pilots and two gunners, while we floundered over the villages on the way to Dog. Dog itself was an ancient Vietnamese graveyard, and we took it without too much trouble. The ships landed in groups, dropped off the grunts, and returned for more. By that night, Dog was an outpost of Americans in a Vietcong wilderness. Nate and I and three other ships were selected to spend the night there with the grunts as emergency ships for the grunt commander. It drizzled all night.
“Why didn’t they duck?” I sat in my seat staring into the night.
“The VC forced them to stand there.”
“How can you make people stand up to machine-gun bullets?”
“He would have shot them if they had run.”
“But if they had all run, he couldn’t have shot them, not with us right there shooting at him.”
“Obviously they were more afraid of him than they were of us.”
“That was it? They were so afraid that they would get killed that they stood there and got killed?”
“Orientals don’t think like we do.”
Firefights chattered all night, but I didn’t lie awake because of that. I kept replaying the scene. The faces were clear. One old woman chewed betel nut and nodded weakly as the bullets boiled in. One child turned to run, chewed up even while he turned. A woman shrieked at the child; then she was hit, too. The gunner kept firing. I saw it over and over, until I knew everybody in that group. And they all knew me and nodded and smiled and turned and whirled and died.
At three in the morning the firefight got suddenly louder at the edge of the graveyard. A grunt ran up and told us to crank. Fifteen minutes later the firing slowed, and the grunt came by and told us to shut down.
The next morning, Nate and I flew fifty miles south to a place called the Rifle Range, where the rest of our battalion and part of the 227th had set up camp. We moved into a GP with Morris, Decker, Shaker, Daisy, Sherman, and Farris. Resler was still gone. My cot was missing, so I built a stretcher out of two poles and a blanket set across two ammo crates.
We were camped on an old ARVN rifle range near the village of Phu Cat, next to Route 1. About a thousand ROKs from the Korean Tiger Division surrounded us as our security. That was nice, because the ROKs (from Republic of Korea) were devout killers. They spent their dawns beating each other up just for fun.
After a quick lunch Nate and I were back in the air in a flight of two squads going back to Dog. At Dog we loaded up with grunts and set out on the mission.
Farris led the flight. A command ship was to meet us en route and show him the LZ.
“Preacher Six, do you have me in sight?”
“Roger,” said Farris.
“Just watch me. I’m going in now.”
The ship dropped from 1000 feet and set up an approach to one of the clearings below. I thought he was just going to fly over it, but he flared and hovered into the LZ. Rice plants rippled in a circle around him.
“Right here, Preacher flight. It’s all clear.”
That was the only time I ever saw this technique. It looked pretty good. Here was an LZ that really was quiet. The ship nosed over and took off to the north over a stand of trees.
Farris called, “Man your guns,” and we pulled up nice and tight and followed him in.
“Pick your spots,” radioed Farris. The LZ was narrow, so I dropped back a little to land behind the number-two ship.
As we flared, spray from the rice paddy swirled around us. I decided not to land completely but to hover with the skids lightly touching the paddy. The grunts jumped out before we touched, not because of the excitement of the assault but out of habit. A routine landing to a cold LZ.
We waited for thirty seconds while Farris made sure everybody had unloaded. Machine guns opened up from three points. They had us pinned with fire from the front, the left flank, and the rear. I could see the muzzle flashes in the tree line fifty yards away, which blocked our take off path. I pushed pedals furiously and wiggled the ship as we hovered, waiting for Farris. The only gun position I could watch was the one up front, and he was raking us at will. Our door guns couldn’t swing that far forward, so the gunners concentrated on the flank attacks. As I oscillated left and right, I heard one tick, then Farris took off just to the right of the forward VC gun with the rest of us hot on his tail rotor. As we crossed the trees, another VC gun opened up, showering tracers through our flight. I pulled up higher than the rest of the flight and made small, quick turns left and right. As we climbed out, all the guns below us converged on our eight ships. I just kept floundering around, believing firmly that Leese was right: Anything you can do to make yourself a bad target is to your benefit. Moments later we were out of range. Six of the eight helicopters were damaged, and two gunners had been killed. Our ship had taken the one round that had hit us on the ground.