Another company—led by a West Point football player, Bud Carpenter—became famous because Carpenter called in an airstrike on his position as he was being overrun.
Sky King and I were in the air, orbiting Carpenter’s position. Carpenter was trying to get to an old LZ to be extracted. We listened on the radio and watched the LZ, waiting for him to show up.
“We can’t make it to the LZ,” radioed Carpenter. “They’re all around us.”
“What’s your position?” implored Gunfighter Six, Carpenter’s CO.
“I’m one hundred meters east of the LZ,” said Carpenter calmly. Gunfire crackled with his voice. “I see only six men around me,” he lamented. “They’re moving closer. I want an airstrike here, now.”
“On your own position?” asked Gunfighter Six.
“Yes. Hurry.”
Two A1-E’s were already on station. They got their instructions in seconds and began to hit the coordinates. They dropped napalm, bombs, and then strafed. Carpenter’s position was covered in smoke. A long silence followed.
“That did it,” said Carpenter’s tired voice. “They stopped.”
Gunfighter Six said, “If things don’t work out to the good, I want you to know that I’m putting you in for the Medal of Honor.”
No reply.
“Also, I’m sure that when we get to you, we’ll find a lot of dead VC.”
“All I can see are my own people…” said the quiet voice.
“We’re sending help,” said Gunfighter Six.
Moments later, Gunfighter Six called us. He wanted us to land at his position, near the artillery emplacement.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. He sat on the deck of our Huey holding a plastic-covered map board. He looked gaunt and sad. He pointed to a circled spot on the green paper. “I don’t understand it. They’ve got to be here.” He was talking about a platoon he was trying to send to Carpenter’s position. But the platoon wasn’t there, because when the men fought in the direction he directed, they found nothing and became pinned down. Gunfighter Six was depressed. He had it all worked out on his game board, and the labels were all in the right place, but the men weren’t.
“I want you to fly out and find this unit.” He pointed to the map. “Find them and give them an azimuth to here.” He moved his finger across the board to Carpenter’s position.
A major and a captain got in the back of our ship with a big radio. We took off.
I flew slowly across the treetops, listening to the grunts’ radio instructions. They could hear our ship. Using our sound, they directed us right over them. During the crisscross search pattern, the enemy did not shoot. But when I found and circled a unit, they opened up from the high ground around us. I heard one tick. I flew past the unit, turned, and came back over them in the exact direction they were to go. “Go this way,” radioed the major from behind us.
The unit rogered its orders. The major had us look for another lost patrol. Again, while we cruised back and forth over the jungle, right in front of the enemy’s hillside, they did not shoot. But as soon as I circled, they opened up. The hillside was peppered with muzzle flashes. We were so close to one NVA barrage we could hear the crackling rifle fire. I felt a thump in the air frame and turned around and saw the major hitting the deck—not shot, but following his instinct to hit the deck under fire. It was kind of funny that he thought the deck was any protection—bullets went through it like tinfoil—but I didn’t laugh.
I turned and came back over the invisible men on the heading they were to follow. As we crossed them, Sky King radioed, “Two-six-zero degrees.” The lieutenant below rogered.
And we did it again. And again. In a couple of hours, we had redirected all the lost units. The ones who still talked, anyway. They were converging on one spot to join up. Gunfighter Six was not only going to secure Carpenter’s position; he was also getting his men together to pull out. He had had enough of this shit. It was time to call in the Cavalry.
We landed back at Gunfighter Six’s position and watched while he told his aides what he had in mind. The plan amounted to this: He was going to have the First Cav send out a battalion or so of troopers and position them north of the fighting, to wait on some ridge tops. He believed that if the air force bombed this area, and then the 101st went back in, they would beat the NVA up to the Cav. The crazy thing was that he believed that the NVA would travel along the ridge tops, not in the valleys. Looking at the map, I could see a thousand ways the NVA could get away, but then I wasn’t an infantry commander. I’m glad I wasn’t.
The briefing was interesting, but we were called out in the middle of it to rescue wounded men.
Sky King told me later that he didn’t believe we were going to make it. The clearing was a tight circle cut out of a stand of saplings, and the grunts had put too many wounded on board for us to hover. To top it off, we were under continuous fire.
What I did was considered reckless. The solution was automatic. The ship lost rpm at a one-foot hover, I could not leave anyone behind—because men were dying—and we were surrounded by fifteen-foot bushes and saplings. But we were on a hill. My instincts told me that if I could get through the barrier, the ship could dive down the side of the hill and we could fly. So, while Sky King advised me that we would have to drop at least one man, I shook my head and headed for the thinnest section of the vegetable wall. Luckily, the rotors are so high above the ground that they had to cut only the thinner tops of the saplings. Our nose forced through the branches and leaves, the skids tugged on clinging things, and the rotors exploded into the stuff. It sounded like we were crashing. Men screamed in the back of the ship. But even as we struggled through the trees and leaves and bushes, the ground dropped beneath us. The rotors cleared the tops, and we dragged the fuselage through the last of the foliage. We burst out of the thicket in a swirl of debris—a turbine-powered brush cutter. I sailed down the side of the hill, picked up some airspeed, and then climbed out. Sky King said, “I don’t fucking believe it!”
I laughed. I was surprised myself.
By that evening, the scattered patrols, platoons, and companies consolidated themselves. It turned out that Carpenter had lost fewer men than he had thought. Only half his company were among the dead or wounded. The others had been separated in the tight brush. The jungle was the enemy’s ally, and as long as he forced us to fight in its strangling hold, we would lose. Carpenter’s heroic, suicidal solution left him miraculously unscathed—and had stopped the rout. But we lost the battle.
The grunts were pulled back past the artillery position to wait for the Cav and the air force. The air force was sending B-52-loads of one-thousand-pound bombs from Guam.
The bombs were supposed to kill a lot of NVA; the survivors were to race up the ridges, pursued by the 101st; and the Cav—way up north—would smash them. The scope was too big. The delay caused by waiting for the air force was too long.
Early the next day, Gary and I and the rest of the Prospectors stopped in our tracks in the company area. A monstrous storm thundered up the valley from the south. The noise grew so loud you couldn’t hear the voices around you. The storm was the monster gaggle sent by the Cav.
The Cav raced up the valley, at least eighty ships, at low level, and fast. The gaggle flew over us and continued north to their assigned objective. Minutes later, the last of their formation disappeared, and the roar silenced.
“Damn! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Hueys flying all at once,” someone said. I admit that I felt a sense of pride on seeing my old unit. They were—in this part of the world—the big time.
The Cav’s image lost some of its gloss that same afternoon.
The 101st fought scattered firefights among a hundred branching valleys. A Cav gunship company was borrowed to help out. It was to support a ground commander who had radioed that he wanted the Cav to pulverize a spot where he would throw smoke. Yellow smoke.
Near where the 101st wanted the Cav to strike, a radio operator walked along with his patrol. He carried several smoke grenades on his belt. One of them, of course, was yellow.
At the moment the grunt commander, a mile away from the radio operater, announced that he had thrown yellow smoke, a branch pulled the yellow-smoke grenade from the radio operator’s belt, popping the pin. The radio operator and his platoon were immediately swallowed up in the chalky yellow smoke. The Cav gunships happened to be only a few hundred meters away, looking for the yellow smoke that marked their target.
The gunship rogered that they saw the smoke, and attacked. They even saw people running around under the smoke and thought they were getting old Charlie.
When the commander noticed that his yellow smoke was not being hit—that someone else’s yellow smoke was being attacked—he screamed at the gunships to stop.
It was lucky he did. In just a few seconds they had already killed the radio operator’s platoon leader and wounded twenty-one others, including the radio operator himself.
It was a freak accident, but the Cav was labeled clumsy. And after such a dramatic entrance, too. It ruined their image. The Prospectors and the 101st felt safer, knowing that the Cav would be way up north, somewhere, as the anvil. We were the hammer.
The following day, all the 101st units were pulled back in preparation for the bombing.
The NVA were not dummies. They knew that something was up. They faded into the jungle. According to the hundreds of grease-pencil marks on the maps, the NVA were surrounded, about to be driven along the ridge, north, into the hands of the clumsy but mighty Cav. The next morning, the air force was due for its part of the squeeze.
Sky King and I were assigned to carry a television film crew up and down a dirt road that marked the western boundary of the bombing zone. Pictures of bombs, especially gigantic bombs, going off have great PR value, everyone knows.
The clouds sank into the valley, hiding the mountaintops. Sky King and I cruised nervously, at 500 feet above the road. We had been assured that the air force did not miss, that it was practically impossible to be hit by a stray bomb. Our feeling was, “Bullshit.” The air force misses, a lot.
At the exact moment the bombs were supposed to hit, they did. I had just turned back, heading up the road, when we saw the hillsides a quarter mile away begin to erupt. Intersecting concussion spheres, visible in the close air, suddenly expanded away from the ground. Circles in the heavily wooded hills became instantly nude. The thousand-pound bombs fell in rapid succession, systematically and devastatingly, traveling along the ridges, in the ravines, against the hillsides, a visual staccato of overlapping blasts, tearing the earth asunder. We heard oohs and aahs from the film crew. The pattern of destruction had started across the valley from us and moved closer. Somewhere, 30,000 feet above the cloud cover, some very good bomber crews were keeping the bombs within the designated area. Charlie must be turning into hamburger.
After a half hour of this, the bombs had reached the road. The concussion rings were not only visible; they were tangible. The ship rocked in the explosions. They were going off right on the road, so I moved off the track. One bomb exploded in front of us, past the road, and for a minute I thought we might be seeing just how well a Huey holds up to thousand-pound bombs, when the bombing stopped.
Silence. The valley swirled in stringy smoke. Leafless trees stood at bizarre angles. The ground was gray and charred between monstrous craters. No one could have survived that apocalypse.
The end of the bomb run was the cue, and scores of Hueys flew in, dropping grunts all over the torn valley floor. It was the end of our mission, so I lingered only a little while before turning back to the airstrip.
I was impressed. The film crew was impressed. The grunts were impressed. But the gooks were not impressed. They were gone. They did leave behind a few men, and these were captured, dazed but intact—something like twenty NVA.
So now it was up to the Cav.
The Cav searched the ridges and the valleys for two days. And then they closed back to the bombed valley. When the net was closed, no fish were found. The dumb little barbarians had got away, showing not the least respect for superior technology. They had used judo, and bent with the force.
But a bombing was a bombing, and fighting is fighting, and many men had been heroic indeed. The battle, though lost, had been impressive.
General Westmoreland himself flew up from Saigon to pin on medals. Captain Carpenter was given a silver star and was put on Westmoreland’s staff.