Chickenhawk Read online

  The idea is to get going fast enough for the rotors to start swinging through undisturbed air rather than in their own turbulent downwash. When the whole rotor system is spinning in clean air, it suddenly lifts very strongly—translational lift.

  So I was skidding and bumping along the runway, trying to get the beast to translational-lift speed. It felt like the Huey was disintegrating with all the noise and shaking, but Leese smiled confidently from the left seat. “No problem.”

  With about a third of the runway left, the overloaded and suffering Huey finally got to flight speed and struggled into the air. Reacher cheered his baby from the back.

  We wanted to climb to 3000 feet, but during the thirty-mile flight I got no higher than half that altitude. As we lumbered along, I realized we were so heavily loaded that an autorotation would be a lot rougher than anyone would like when carrying more than a ton of high explosives.

  The one factor that was actually improving as we la bored along was that we were burning a bunch of fuel. The ship would be lighter for the running landing I was prepared to make at our destination.

  At the camp we were going to, the commander had left the job of picking the landing spot to a sergeant especially schooled in the workings of the aviation branch. However, this sergeant was not around, so the job of picking the spot had passed to his assistant, who, although he looked as though he knew what he was doing, didn’t.

  We made a long, very gentle descent toward the camp.

  I spotted the assistant. He had his arms held high, indicating the grassy strip near the forward edge of the camp. It looked as though the spot he was pointing to was just outside the stretched-out coil of concertina-wire fence that ran between the perimeter of the camp and the nearby trees. There was enough room to land, so I didn’t question his judgment.

  As I got closer, lower, and slower, I brought in the power. It would take all we had just to cushion the impact.

  I crossed the small wall of trees that ringed the camp, and flared. I was six feet over the grass outside the fence when I heard a panicky voice in my earphones.

  “Don’t land there!” the voice screamed. “That’s a mine field!”

  “Minefield!” Even Leese was impressed.

  If Leese was impressed, I was petrified. The Huey was mushing inexorably toward the ground. I was too low to extend my landing beyond the fence. I pulled the collective to my armpit and waited for the noise. The Huey, God bless it, came to a shuddering, engine-wrenching hover just inches from the ground. The low-rpm warning siren blared in my ears, and for a few horrible seconds I wondered if it could hold the hover. The engine was bogging down with the strain. I had to reduce the power or lose it, so I reduced the collective a bit to let the ship drift down closer and give the turbine a chance to wind up a little. When the skids almost touched the grass, the siren stopped and the rpm slowly returned. When it finally stabilized, I hauled it slowly back up to about six inches above the minefield.

  Reacher’s illegal tune-up had just saved us, but we still had a problem. The four-foot fence in front of us was too high to get over, and the trees behind us blocked any retreat.

  “Well, at least we can stay off the ground,” said Leese.

  We were, from my point of view, 2500 pounds of high explosives tearing at the air to stay away from the high explosives under us.

  We could just stay there, hanging, until we got lighter, but there was the problem of getting shot at near the edge of the camp, and neither of us knew how long the Huey—even Reacher’s Huey—could grind away like this at full power. And we couldn’t dump the cargo.

  I pulled in more power, and the Huey climbed another foot, but when it got that much farther out of the ground cushion, the engine strained and the ship settled back down toward the grass. I tried it a few more times and discovered that while it settled back down from the climb, I could milk a few more rpm out of the engine. In this way, I figured I could use the little extra power gained on the way down to pull it a little higher on the next try. I did this over and over, floating a little higher each time.

  This technique, and the fact that we were getting lighter by burning fuel, finally allowed me to get the skids fence-high. But when I tried to cross the fence from the top of a bounce, the Huey sank too fast. By moving forward, I had moved out of the ground cushion.

  What now? I had Reacher look behind us. He said there was another row of concertina wire about fifty feet behind us. I hadn’t even noticed that. My hope was that by backing up a little, I could get some room for a forward run to clear the hurdle. So I backed up as far as Reacher could clear me, and went for it. No good. I was within a foot of making it, but I had to flare to a stop before I tangled up in the wire. I drifted backward to resume my low hover over the mines.

  Leese said, “Try a right-pedal turn.”

  Perfect. That’s why Leese had lived to fly through two wars. He understood his machines. The pedals control the anti-torque rotor, the tail rotor. Turning to the right—with the torque—would make more power available to the main rotors.

  So I backed up again. Instead of charging straight ahead, I hovered parallel to the fence for a few feet and then banked hard right toward it. It worked! This was the extra boost I needed to clear the trap.

  I kept turning as I crossed the fence and landed sideways on the other side. Drenched with sweat, I felt as though I had just flown the Atlantic with my arms.

  “Not bad,” said Leese as we landed on the safe side of the concertina wire. “Now, I hope that this has taught you a lesson.” His voice was calm.

  “Lesson?” I said weakly. “What lesson?”

  “Never trust a grunt,” he said.

  That night at the Turkey Farm we were not allowed to go into the village. Somebody had been stealing from the adviser compound again. There were complaints about a missing refrigerator.

  After my first night in that miserable tent, I moved to the Big Top, where I built a kind of bunk—a shelf, really—to sleep on. I used the wood from some old ammo crates. I put my leaky air mattress on top and set it in a corner of the airy tent. Several other guys did the same; it was cooler and drier than the tents we had with us.

  Since we couldn’t go to town, we sat at a long wooden table in the Big Top, playing chess and listening to the radio. We were listening to Hanoi radio, the best music on the dial. Every night the news was broadcast on this station by Hanoi Hanna. There was more than one woman who announced the news, but we called them all by one name. We wanted to believe she was another Tokyo Rose.

  Hanna, for the first time in nearly three months, mentioned our unit by name. She said that it was too bad about us, poor guys, but we were going to get mortared at midnight.

  We all looked at each other and laughed. Bullshit. Heh heh heh.

  “Hey, I was thinking of digging a hole anyway. Weren’t you?”

  Minutes after her announcement, digging foxholes became a popular pastime. Dirt flew. The rule that forbade the digging of holes that would ruin the grass was ignored. The men inside the Camp Holloway compound slept behind sandbag walls and had bunkers to duck into if the mortars came. But camped out in their front yard, so to speak, we suddenly felt very exposed.

  The red ground at our campsite was so dry and hard that the holes weren’t even waist deep by midnight. When the predicted hour came and went without incident, the digging slowed down. I dug mine near the end of my bunk, and it was one of the deepest.

  Mortars came, not at the Turkey Farm, but at our refueling depot at the Tea Plantation. Of all the mortars that hit in that attack, one lousy little mortar landed right in the middle of the tent where our refueling crew slept. Seven people, including three privates from our company, were killed. We comforted ourselves by saying that they never knew what hit them.

  The next morning at our briefing, we learned that the French owner of the real tea plantation next door had complained.

  “To the VC?” Connors asked from the back of our crowd of forty pilots as
sembled in the Big Top.

  “No, not to the VC, to us,” said Williams. “He says that our being so close to his farm is going to cause him damage. He wants us to move the refueling depot and the troops.”

  “Are we?” somebody asked.

  “I don’t know. The Colonel went to see him this morning.”

  “Unbelievable!” Connors said. Williams stiffened as Connors continued. “We’re donating lives to free this stupid country, and that French asshole is still paying off the VC and doesn’t want us to get our scummy army too close to his tea bushes. I think we should accidentally napalm the cocksucker!”

  Williams ignored Connors and continued the briefing, but a lot of us agreed with Pat.

  As it turned out, we didn’t napalm him; nor did we move the depot. The Cav simply agreed to stay away from his plantation. We were instructed to avoid flying over the place, especially at low level.

  “The longest week began on a sun-drenched Sunday morning in a small clearing, designated Landing Zone X-Ray, in the Chu Pong foothills. Intelligence had long suspected the Chu Pong massif of harboring a large Communist force fed from the Cambodian side of the border. X-Ray seemed like a likely spot to find the enemy, and so it was.” I read this in Time, the week after the Tea Plantation incident.

  The results of nearly two weeks of searching and probing by the Cav were hundreds of dead NVA soldiers and a very good idea of where to find the main force of three NVA regiments. On November 14 our battalion lifted the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Custer’s old unit) into LZ X-Ray, where they were expected to make contact. Our sister company, the Snakes, made the first assault in the morning and received very little opposition. By early afternoon, though, the two companies of the Seventh Cav they had lifted in had been surrounded, and suffered heavy casualties. Our company was assigned to support the Snakes, to lift in reinforcements.

  We picked up the troopers at the Tea Plantation, eight to each Huey. It was easy to tell where we were going. Although we were still fifteen miles away, the smoke was clearly visible from all the artillery, B-52 bombers, and gunship support concentrated around the LZ to keep the grunts from being overrun. As we cruised over the jungles and fields of elephant grass, I had the feeling this was a movie scene: the gentle rise and fall of the Hueys as we cruised, the perspective created by looking along the formation of ships to the smoke on the horizon, the quiet. None of the crews talked on the radios. We all listened to the urgent voices in the static as they called in air strikes and artillery on their own perimeters, then yelled that the rounds were hitting in their positions.

  LZ X-Ray could accommodate eight Hueys at once, so that was how the ships were grouped in the air. Yellow and White in the first group; Orange and Red in the second. Leese and I were Red Two. As we got closer to X-Ray, the gap between us and the first group got bigger to allow time for them to land, drop off the troopers, and take off.

  Five miles away, we dropped to low level. We were flying under the artillery fire going into the LZ.

  A mile ahead of us, the first group was going over the approach end of the LZ and disappearing into the smoke. Now the radios came alive with the pilots’ calling in where the fire was coming from. The gunners on all the ships could hear this. Normally it was helpful, but this time, with the friendlies on the ground, they could not fire back. Yellow and White were on the ground too long. The artillery still pounded. The massif behind the LZ was completely obscured by the pall of smoke. We contin ued our approach. Leese was on the controls. I double- or triple-checked my sliding armor panel on my door side and cursed the army once again for not giving us chest protectors. I put my hands and feet near the controls and stared at the scene.

  “Orange One, abort your landing. Fire in the LZ is too heavy,” a pathfinder called from X-Ray. Orange flight turned, and we followed. There was a whole bunch of yelling on the radios. I heard two ships in the LZ call out that they were hit badly. What a mess. Orange flight led us in a wide orbit two miles away, still low level. Now A1-E’s from the air force were laying heavy fire at the front of the LZ along with the artillery and our own gunships. What kept everybody from flying into each other I’ll never know. Finally we heard Yellow One call to take off, and we saw them emerge from the smoke on the left side of the LZ, shy two ships. They had waited in the heavy fire while the crews of the two downed ships got on the other Hueys. One crew chief stayed, dead. One pilot was wounded.

  We continued the orbit for fifteen minutes. I looked back at the grunts who were staring at the scene. They had no idea what was going on, because they had no headsets.

  “Orange One, make your approach,” the pathfinder called. Apparently a human-wave attack by the NVA on the LZ was stopped. “Orange One, all eight of the ships in your two flights are keyed to pick up wounded.” “Keyed” meant that they had groups of wounded positioned to be loaded first.

  “Roger. Red One copy?”

  “Red One roger.”

  Orange One rolled out of the orbit and we followed. The A1-E’s were gone, but our gunships came back to flank us on the approach. Even with the concentration of friendlies on the ground, the gunships could fire accurately enough with their flex guns and rockets, so the grunts allowed them to. Our own door gunners were not allowed to fire unless they saw an absolutely clear target.

  We crossed the forward tree line into the smoke. The two slicks that had been shot down were sitting at the front of the LZ, rotors stopped. That made it a little tight for eight of us to get in, but it was okay. The grunts jumped off even before the skids hit the ground. Almost before our Hueys had settled into the grass, other grunts had dumped wounded men, some on stretchers, into our ships. No fire. At least nothing coming our way. Machine guns and hundreds of rifles crackled into a roar all around us as the grunts threw out withering cover fire. The pathfinder, hidden in the tree line somewhere, told us everybody was loaded and to take off to the left. Orange One rogered and led us out. Fifty yards past the perimeter, some of the ships took hits, and we cleared all our guns to fire. Our ship was untouched.

  After we dropped off the wounded, Leese and I were delayed by taking some men to an artillery position, separating us from the rest of the company for a half hour.

  We were on our way to rejoin them when we saw a fighter get hit near X-Ray. It was a prop-driven A1-E. This scene, too, was right out of the movies. Orange flames burst from the root of his right wing and billowed back toward the tail, turning into coal-black smoke. The flames flared thicker than the fuselage and in moments hid the multipaned canopy. The pilot was either dead or unconscious, for he did not eject. The plane screamed toward the ground from about 3000 feet, not more than half a mile from Leese and me. Black smoke marked its path as it streaked into the jungle at a steep angle, exploding instantly, spreading wreckage, and bursting bombs, unspent ammo, and fire forward, knocking down trees.

  I made the mistake of calling our headquarters to tell them of the crash.

  “Roger, Red Two, wait one,” was the answer in my phones.

  “Ah, Red Two, Grunt Six has relayed instructions that you are to proceed to the site of the crash and inspect same.”

  T wanted to go flying around where an air-force plane just got shot down like I wanted to extend my tour. Leese advised flying by very fast and taking a quick look-see. I dumped the Huey from 3000 feet, using the speed of my dive to swoop over the burning swatch in the jungle.

  I told headquarters to tell Grunt Six that nobody had jumped out before the plane had hit and that there now remained only some smoldering pieces of airplane and some exploding ammo in the middle of the burnt clearing.

  “Ah, roger, Red Two, wait one.”

  Whenever they asked you to wait, you knew they were up to no good.

  “Ah, Red Two, Grunt Six says roger. But the air force wants you to land and do an on-site inspection.”

  Leese shook his head. “Negative, HQ,” I radioed, “this area is hot. We will return to do a slow fly-by and check it again, but we know
there’s nobody left.” Leese nodded.

  Now, you would think that that would be good enough. I had just volunteered the four of us in our lone Huey to fly back over a very hot area to double-check the obvious.

  It was not good enough. The air-force commander, via a relay through our HQ radio, wanted more.

  “Red Two, the air force wants you to land and inspect the crash site for survivors,” announced the voice in my flight helmet.

  I told them to wait one, that I was in the process of doing another fly-by to check it out.

  While our guy at HQ got back to the air-force commander, Leese and I and Reacher and the nervous ex-grunt who was our gunner approached the crash site. I wanted to be sure this time. I slowed to about thirty miles an hour just above the trees surrounding the new clearing. I started to circle the smoke and flames below us when we heard explosions. Leese, who always stayed off the controls, said, “I got it.” He took the controls and dumped the nose of the Huey to accelerate. “Probably just some leftover ammunition from the fighter exploding,” he said, “but I want to come back around in a fast turn just in case.” He glanced out his window. “Somebody shot down this guy, and they’re still around here somewhere.” Leese began a turn to the left to circle back to the smoke. He picked up speed fast, and when we got to the clearing again, he banked very hard to the left. We all sank into our seats feeling the pressure of at least two Gs as Leese put the Huey into an almost-90-degree bank. I looked across at him in the left seat, through his side window and directly down to the wreckage. I had never experienced such a maneuver in flight school. My first thought was that the Huey would disconnect from the rotors, that the Jesus nut would break.

  The view was, however, unique and totally revealing. And we were moving so fast we would be harder to hit.

  From this dizzy vantage point we could see a few metal parts that hadn’t melted and the flashes of exploding ammo. We hoped that all his bombs had gone off in the crash. We radioed that the pilot was definitely dead.