Chickenhawk Page 14

  “Spies?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Did you ever ask one of those smiling interpreters you see running around sometimes to show you his South Vietnamese Good Guy card? I mean, all our plans have to be coordinated with the Vietnamese. That means they have to be translated and passed on to the gooks. So where do you think the leak is? The Pentagon? ”

  John took another belt of whiskey. “It seems hopeless. If we aren’t able, with all our might, to get into landing zones without the VC knowing about it beforehand, what can we do? We should be out there marching, taking real estate and keeping it. Fuck taking little landing zones over and over again.” He stood up suddenly. “Fuck it!” His anger and disappointment showed on his face.

  “It’s not that bad, John. Things are looking up. This war could end on our tour.” I tried joking to cheer him up. “The press says we’re going to win. When the gooks get that last issue, they’ll roll over and quit. Nobody fucks with the press.”

  He smiled, darkly. My best lines were wasted. “Well, Mason, I’m going now.” He turned to leave, but stopped. “Listen, if you ever want to sell your derringer, I’ll buy it.”

  Even John started smiling the next day. We flew a lift to Happy Valley without even sniper fire. Charlie was not responding, almost as though he had read that article. We decided that we had won in Happy Valley.

  As the threat of death seemed to subside, we got cocky. We flew around the division, Route 19, and most of Happy Valley without getting shot at. The VC had been outclassed by our power, seen the light, and would soon be giving up. I was feeling good. I was right-seat qualified, and battle-tested (I thought), and the VC were giving up. I felt my confidence soaring because I was a member of the team and the team was winning.

  I was so happy about maybe living through this war that when we had to scramble just before dinner that night, it didn’t bother me. In fact, when I got back from the screwed-up mission, I wrote Patience an exuberant letter. I submit it here as a record of my last happy letter from Vietnam.

  [October 23]

  We had an alert to pick up some troops as soon as possible at about two minutes before evening chow. We all ran out to the aircraft thrashing through the mud screaming, “Where’s my aircraft? Where are we going? What’s the freqs? Gosh, I’m getting all muddy!” and other confused remarks because somebody screamed fly and didn’t say why.

  With the thought in mind that the first one airborne is the leader, we hurtled into the air like a swarm of blind bugs and flew off into the sunset.

  The leader called for an aircraft to guide him to the area and followed the wrong one. After we landed in the wrong LZ, the leader discovered his mistake and zipped off to find the right place. Since he didn’t bother to say not to on the radio, all the rest of us zipped off with him. It’s rather hard to appreciate the sight of seven helicopters trying to fly formation on a leader who thinks he’s alone unless you’ve done it!

  Hooray! We found the right place! Naturally since it was an emergency, we sat on the ground for half an hour waiting for the “eager, waiting” troops.

  While waiting, the happy, boisterous company pilots all gathered together and sang:

  (The Fuckee’s Hymn)

  He stood on the steeple

  And pissed on the people

  But the people couldn’t

  Piss on him.

  Amen

  After this rousing chorus we grabbed our steeds and leaped into the air, pressing onward, ever onward in the true flying horseshit tradition!

  We didn’t really sing that song while on the mission, but we did when we got back that night. It was the company song from the old days.

  The siege of Pleime was still going strong in Ia Drang valley, but in our battalion nothing was happening. You would think that this lack of combat while we just flew ass-and-trash around camp would please us no end. But as the period of relative calm continued, it seemed to last an eternity. It wasn’t that we wanted to fight so much; it was that if there was no fighting to do, let’s go home.

  As the assaults became routine, even the grunts got lax. As we loaded up for one mission, a grunt got on board carrying an M-79 grenade launcher. He slammed the butt of the weapon on my cargo deck and the thing went off. The grenade went up through the roof of my Huey, up through the spinning rotor blades. After several seconds, it fell back down through the blades and landed next to the ship five feet from my door. It didn’t go off. When I turned around to yell at the dumb grunt, all I could see was me holding a smoking .45 with the same sick smile on my face. However, Resler was with me, and he yelled at the guy. An armorer later explained to me that the grenade had to travel a few feet before it spun enough to arm itself. Its hitting the roof so soon had stopped the process. Nevertheless, from that moment on I had all M-79s checked for safeties on before I would allow them to board.

  We took these troops to Lima for the umpteenth grouping for the umpteenth mission up Happy Valley. They got out, and we got orders to haul ammunition, fuel, and food for our infantry. Many of the loads were rigged as sling loads, so I got some practice. I had sling-loaded stumps once with Connors.

  “Okay, they’ve got the lines on the mule. Let’s go,” said Leese. (A “mule” was a small, four-wheel-drive vehicle.)

  I picked the ship up to a high hover about twenty-five feet above the dry rice paddies. One grunt stood on top of the mule and held a loop attached to four support lines over his head. Another grunt stood fifty feet beyond him to direct me as I approached. I was flying from the left seat. I hovered forward, and the man holding the loop disappeared between my feet as I moved over him. The swirling wind from my rotors whipped the fatigues of interested watchers to a blur. With hand signals he apparently made up as he went along, the guide out front tried to shepherd our whirling beast to squat above the mule.

  “Did he touch his nose?” I yelled. “What the fuck does touching his nose mean?” I wanted to show Leese that I knew what I was doing.

  “It’s all right, Bob. You’re lined up fine,” said Leese.

  “Reacher, lean out and tell me what the fuck’s going on. That asshole looks like he’s conducting a symphony!” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” Reacher lay down on his stomach and pushed the top half of his body out over the edge of the deck, holding on to his monkey strap. “About three feet left and five down.”

  “Look at him. Now he’s telling me to cut power!” The idiot guide was drawing his hand across his throat.

  “You’re far enough down. Just a couple of feet to the left,” Reacher instructed. “There. They put it on the hook.” Meanwhile, the guide became so interested in the hookup, he simply watched.

  I pulled enough collective pitch to take up the slack and let the Huey pull itself to the point of equal tension on the four lines above the load. From there, I increased pitch gently to pull the thousand-pound mule into the air. As the weight transferred to the Huey, the increased pitch of the blades slapped the air loudly. With the load off the ground, the instruments showed that I had enough margin of power for takeoff. The cyclic felt stiff as I corrected for drift.

  The fuselage of a helicopter in a hover is like a weight at the bottom of a pendulum, the top being where the mast joins the rotor hub. The addition of a sling load makes it a sort of compound pendulum. Coordinating the movements of the two takes practice. Pushing the cyclic forward, for example, causes the rotor disk to tilt forward, pulling the fuselage along after the rotors like a rock on the end of a string. With the sling load hooked up, the swing of the fuselage is slowed by the inertia of the attached load. The helicopter acts like it doesn’t want to move forward. There’s a danger at this point that the pilot will apply even more forward cyclic to overcome this resistance. When the momentum of the two pendulums coincides, the ship will be nose low and sinking. Pulling back quickly to correct for this causes the fuselage to swing back first, then the load, each at its own rate. When everything stops tugging weirdly at the ship, it’ll be moving too slowl
y and can stall back to the ground. All this means that when I started to move forward for takeoff, I wanted to keep going.

  “Jesus, I’m up here, twenty feet over his head, and he’s signaling me to come to a hover!” I was getting ready to land and go choke the guide.

  “The load is clear, sir,” said Reacher.

  I moved slowly forward so as not to antagonize the two pendulums. The guide, however, stood his ground, frantically giving me unrecognizable signs. The heavy load swung toward him, accelerating. I was hoping to hit him, but he dove clear at the last moment.

  As we climbed up, Leese said, “Disarm,” and reached up to the overhead panel and flipped off the circuit breaker for the electrical hook release. We kept it on when we were close to the ground because the pilot could hit a switch on the cyclic control grip to drop the load in a hurry. Airborne, the hook was disarmed to prevent it from releasing itself accidentally, which it occasionally did. Somebody in our company had dropped a mule from 3000 feet the day before, and the grunts were still pissed about it. The thing looked as though it had been dug out of a King Kong footprint.

  I could feel the tugging as the mule fought the wind while I flew back to the Golf Course. For the landing, all I had to remember was to start the deceleration early and keep the ship high. Leese armed the release. I settled into a high hover with the mule ten feet off the ground and slowly approached the ground guide at the maintenance depot. I watched him suspiciously, but he knew what he was doing. As I felt the mule touch, he signaled to release, and I pushed the button on the grip that caused the belly hook to release the lines. The Huey lunged toward the sky when the load released, and I let it go, pulling in even more power to urge it up to a nearly vertical climb, turning to the right.

  “Cowboy,” said Leese, but when I looked over to him, he was smiling.

  The combat lull continued, but I was still getting plenty of flight time. Eight or nine hours a day was typical. I could’ve stayed out longer because of the unhappiness at tent city. Boredom was breeding widespread depression. With apparently no one to fight, the Cav was just twenty thousand men sitting in the middle of Vietnam in their mildewing tents, wondering why they were here.

  It didn’t help that the anti-Vietnam-war demonstrators were becoming prominent in the news. With the company in such a black mood, the protesters’ remarks were so much salt in our wounds. No one likes being the fool. Especially if he finds himself risking his life to be one.

  “I think I’d rather kill one of those fuckheads than a goddamn gook!” yelled Connors. He threw a magazine on the ground inside our tent. “Cocksuckers think they know everything! Did you read that?” He spoke to no one in particular. It was late, and I was up, writing a letter on my cot. “That asshole says that Ho Chi Minh was sold out by the Americans! He says that gook was once our ally and that we let a British colonel turn South Vietnam back to the French!” He stopped. I looked over. He sat on his cot in his shorts with a beer in his hand, staring angrily at the canvas wall behind me. His face calmed when he saw me. “You ever hear that before, Mason?”

  “That was the first time,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s true?” he pleaded. To him, I was an educated man, having been to college for two years.

  “No,” I said.

  The siege of Pleime in the Ia Drang valley ended on October 27. For more than a week the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units had launched one fanatical attack after the other. Six thousand uniformed regulars hit the tiny fort, twenty miles from the Cambodian border, with waves of men and mortars and recoilless rifles. They fought from as close as forty yards away, using trenches they had secretly installed under the advisers’ noses weeks before. Inside the triangular compound, hundreds of mercenaries from the Montagnard tribes fought under the leadership of the Special Forces advisers, the Green Berets. From II Corps headquarters, thirty miles north at Pleiku, a relief force of tanks, artillery, and a thousand ARVN infantrymen was sent. Some ships from another assault company in the Cav lifted in 250 South Vietnamese Rangers. Then our air force bombed and strafed. In six hundred sorties, twenty planes were hit and three were shot down. A helicopter was downed, and an American sergeant was killed trying to get to it. When supplies ran low inside, the air force dropped pallets of food and ammunition into the compound. Two men were killed when one pallet landed on them. Another pallet went through the mess-hall roof.

  It ended with heavy losses to the enemy and, finally, their retreat. Time gave us some of the credit for scaring them away. “As elements of the U.S. First Cavalry swarmed in by low-flying helicopter, the Viet Minh faded reluctantly away from Pleime. ‘They’re headed west, straight for Cambodia,’ groaned one Aircav platoon leader. ‘I suppose we’ll have to chase the bastards all the way there.’”

  He was right.

  5. Ia Drang Valley

  You should never believe a Vietnamese. He’s not like you. He’s an Asiatic. The Vietnamese of today has seen too much dishonesty, too much maneuvering, and he doesn‘t believe in anything anymore. He automatically thinks he’s got to camouflage himself. He doesn’t dare tell the truth anymore because too often it brings him unhappiness. What’s the point of telling the truth?

  —Nguyen Cao Ky, in Life, July 23, 1965

  November 1965

  Action walked in the door with Shaker. The wiry black captain watched intently as we packed for the battalion’s move to Pleiku. I saw him suppress a smile as he looked up the aisle at the confusion he’d caused. His half smile faded quickly as several pairs of eyes met his expectantly. Another announcement? He lowered his eyes quickly.

  “What the fuck kind of way is this to live?” he suddenly shouted. “Look at this!” He kicked a clod of dirt from the aisle. “You people like living on a dirt floor?”

  I was about to tell him we hadn’t had time to put the floor in yet when Connors said, “Yes, sir.”

  “What?” Shaker turned to face Connors.

  “That’s right, sir, it’s great like this.” Connors beamed.

  “And why do you think it’s great like this, Mr. Connors?” Shaker asked, smiling reluctantly. He liked Connors.

  “Well, sir, I don’t know about the other guys, but I’m a heavy smoker, and this place is like living in a giant ashtray. Flick a butt anywhere. It’s great!”

  Shaker covered his mouth to hide a smile. He recovered quickly when he turned around and saw us staring at him. We were staring at him because he smiled and also because he never came in here unless he had bad news.

  “You can put the floor in when we get back from Pleiku. Anyway, that’s not why I came here,” he announced. “Where’s Riker?”

  “Right here.” Len stepped away from a rice-mat partition hung between his cot and mine.

  “What’s that for?” Shaker looked at the rice mat.

  “Privacy.”

  “Oh.” He started to say something, but didn’t. “Riker, you and Mason have got a mission to fly a tactical command ship for the grunts. Around Pleime. You gotta leave now because they’re in a big hurry.” The rest of the tent resumed packing. “Leave your stuff here and we’ll take it with us when we go to Pleiku.” He turned to leave. “So get your shit together and come to the operations tent for the details.”

  “How long are we supposed to stay with the grunts?” asked Riker.

  Shaker stoppea at the door. “How the fuck should I know?” he said gruffily. Then, quietly, he said, “Just today, I imagine,” and left.

  I sat in the left seat and watched the road through the chin bubble. I had counted four blown-out bridges so far. Riker had never been to Pleiku before, so I held up my worn-out map and gave him a guided tour. “Up here at the right side of the Mang Yang pass”—I moved my finger to the spot—“this place is known as the French Graveyard.”

  Riker nodded. “Big, grassy mountain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see it. Couple miles ahead?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” I let go of the intercom switch and look
ed over the black ledge of the instrument panel. My hand rested on my knee when I wasn’t talking. On the left side there was no floor switch for the intercom, so I had to put my hand on the cyclic to pull in the trigger switch one click to talk to Len. I clicked in. “When we get closer, you can see a whole bunch of places that look like graves all over the side of that mountain.”

  “I can see them.”

  “Well, down there beside it, in the pass, the French lost hundreds of men in a big ambush.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Ten or twelve years ago?”

  “Damn.”

  “And up ahead there, where the road starts to turn southwest, is where those guys got shot down last month. Fifty-caliber.”

  Riker nodded and pulled in some pitch. The Huey climbed 500 feet higher.

  “That make you nervous?” I asked.

  “Naw. You?”

  “No,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “At the pass we’re halfway to Pleiku and about twenty miles from the Golf Course.”

  “On the horizon now, at about ten o‘clock?”

  “Yeah, that’s Pleiku,” I said. “Actually, what you see is the big airstrip at New Pleiku. That’s where the air force and the II Corps headquarters are. A couple of miles beyond that is the village, and a little bit this side of it is the adviser compound, Camp Holloway.”

  We cruised quietly for a few minutes in the cool air above the pass. I looked down between my feet and watched the road change. After its steep climb up the other side, it gently descended through the foothills into the rolling elephant grass of the plains beyond.

  Camp Holloway was about ten miles from the western border of a long valley extending from Kontum, thirty miles north, to the Chu Pong massif, forty miles southwest. The muddy Ia Drang River, which meanders by the massif on its way to Cambodia, was the valley’s name-sake.