“Damn! They told me there wasn’t a chance you’d be in this unit,” Resler replied. I helped him carry his bag back to the ship.
12. La Guerrilla Bonita
Neither conscience nor sanity suggests that the United States is, should or could be a global gendarme. The U.S. has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so.
June 1966
It struck me as ironic that the Prospectors, located two hundred miles south of the Cav, were assigned to Dak To, the Cav’s last hunting ground. Within a month of my transfer, I found myself once again scouring for VC in an area in which the Cav had drawn a blank. This time, I flew with a different unit in support of the famous 101st Airborne in Operation Hawthorne. The VC had chosen not to fight the Cav, but apparently they thought they’d try their luck against the 101st.
Our camp was west of the village of Dak To, in a grassy plain south of some low foothills. Our tents were set up in three straight lines, paralleling the red-dirt airstrip. A mile from our camp, the 101st bivouacked and maintained security for themselves and for the Prospectors.
We spent a day filling sandbags to build low walls around our tents. On the morning of the second day, it was announced that we would fly a little mission for some ARVNs before we started direct support of the 101st.
“The best thing that could happen to you is to get a minor bone wound,” said Wolfe. He stood in the awning of the tent I shared with Resler and Stoddard.
“A bone wound? I feel weak just thinking about it,” I said.
“I’m saying that if you had to get wounded, that’s the one to get. A bone wound will get you out of this fucking country.”
Deacon walked down the row between the tents. “Let’s go,” he yelled.
“How about no wounds?” I said. “Maybe they’ll just call the whole thing off.” I reached for my helmet. My .45 was already strapped on over my flak vest. I was ready.
“Fat fucking chance,” said Wolfe.
“Good luck.” Gary ducked out of the tent to go to his ship. He and I couldn’t fly together in the Prospectors, because they didn’t let junior warrants do that. We felt safer together. Especially since the pilot who replaced me back in the Cav, Ron Fox, had been killed sitting in the cockpit with Gary. He had taken a round up through his chin. Gary said that his brains poured out when they removed his helmet. Fox’s death was one of the reasons they had sent Gary on a R&R on the way to the Prospectors. We’d both been working on Deacon to let us fly together—told him what a great team we’d made in the Cav—but so far, no dice.
“Good luck,” I said. I left the tent walking a little way with Wolfe. “What do you get for a scratch?” I said.
“A free cup of coffee. What do you think? You got to get something that takes time to heal but won’t be a permanent handicap.”
“Yeah, I see. I’ll work on it.” I saw Sky King waiting for me by the Operations tent. “See you after the mission. Good luck.”
“Right.” Wolfe gave me a salute.
Sky King smiled. “Hey, this is my lucky day. I get to fly with a veteran. I feel so… secure.”
“Yeah, yeah. Spare me, please.”
“No, really. Just being in the same ship with you makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.” We walked toward our ship, one pair of pilots in a long, straggling line of helicopter crews walking over the red dirt to their ships.
“You know, you can be a pain in the ass, sir.”
“Haw!” Sky King yelped. “Got you.” We walked up to our ship. “You know, Mason, I like you. And to prove it, I’m going to let you in on a little business deal. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”
“Thanks.”
“No, really. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”
One thing different about the Prospectors, aside from such informal relations between officers and warrants, was that they had chest protectors up to their eyeballs. They had so many, in fact, that they kept the extras up in the chin bubbles. Seeing one of them at my feet made me feel guilty. For the lack of one of these, Morris had died. Maybe there was another pilot somewhere in Vietnam, right now, who was wondering why the fuck he didn’t have one. Maybe one was dying right now.
“How did you get so many of these things?” I pointed to the armor.
“We’ve always had them,” said Sky King. He looked at me like I had asked a dumb question. “Why?”
“Just wondered.”
The weather was great, puffy white clouds in a brilliant blue sky, a nice day for flying. Since I had been here once before, I knew that there were no VC around. I felt that I had retired from heavy action after leaving the Cav. My only concern was the ARVNs. I kept hearing such bad stories about them. A Prospector told me that an ARVN had turned and fired at his ship when he dropped them at an LZ. I’d heard that before.
We picked up eight ARVN Rangers wearing tight-tailored camouflage uniforms. They stared nervously, smoked cigarettes, and got aboard reluctantly. They did not bolster my sagging opinion of our ally.
The twelve slicks in the mission were to fly the ARVNs a few miles up the valley from Dak To. There we would cut across the eastern ridge and land two at a time on an eight-foot-wide ridge running to a small concrete fortress. While the flight stretched to get the necessary spacing, we heard on the radio that the VC were there, too. From a couple miles away I could see a daisy chain of Phantoms hitting the hill directly across the small valley from the fortress. Sky King and I were to be one of the second pair of ships to land. As the first two ships landed, they called hits.
From several VC machine-gun emplacements on the facing hill, tracers flicked out at the Phantoms. The fighters swooped, releasing monstrous bursts of cannon during their blindingly swift passes. The tracers converged on them.
I had the controls on the right side of the ship. Our buddy ship was taking a spot just in front of the fortress, leaving us the stark ridge nearest to VC guns. I set up the approach. The two ships in front of us took off after what seemed to be an awfully long time on the ground. With a hundred yards to go, our right-door gunner opened up on some muzzle flashes. At the same time, a Phantom began billowing black smoke in the middle of his strike. He climbed up sharply in an almost vertical climb—and we saw one man eject. As we landed, I saw grazing rounds kick through the dirt on the ridge in front of us. The emplacement was just a little higher than we were. The right door gunner blazed away, and I waited for the ARVNs to get the fuck out. When the crew chief hadn’t called that they were off for what seemed to be an hour, I looked back and saw him trying to force an ARVN off the ship from his awkward position in the pocket. The other ARVNs kept ducking their heads in the gunfire, waiting with wide-eyed anticipation for me to leave. I shook my head and started screaming, “Get off! Get off!” and pointed at the door. They sat there. I heard a round go through the air frame. The old, familiar tick. The crew chief pulled his .45 and pointed it at the soldiers, waving it toward the door with murder in his eyes. When they saw I wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the crew chief might indeed kill them, they began to get off. I looked at the fortress to see if we were getting any cover fire. No one in sight. No guns were in action; everyone was on the dirt behind the walls. The black, billowing trail of the Phantom disappeared in the jungle. A pearl-white chute blossomed in the blue sky.
Our buddy ship took off. “They’re out!” yelled the chief. I glanced across the deck through the door to the ARVNs hiding on the low side of the ridge. I took off. As we crossed in front of the fortress, we saw the defenders lying low. Not one gun was in position.