Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

“What you want to do,” he went on, “is get out of altitude quickly. Come down a good distance away from the area you intend to work, then slide in low and fast so the bad guys have less chance of picking you up. Then as soon as you’re down and start your sweeps of the area, begin looking for anything that jumps out at you, anything that looks different from everything else.”

Jones radioed that he was breaking to go low level and start his pattern. His gun replied, “Roger that, One Eight… and why don’t you take a look at that clearing off your right nose for any signs of bunkers in the tree line?”

Jones had come out of our descent at treetop level a mile or so away from the search area; now he made for the clearing pointed out by the gun.

After a few seconds running along the tree line, One Eight barked at me over the intercom. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” I yelled back as I scoured the ground.

“I’ll come around again, and when I say ‘now,’ you look hard three o’clock right over my helmet visor and tell me what you see.” I still didn’t see anything but a clearing in the jungle; absolutely nothing seemed out of place.

Finally, in desperation, Jones said, “Look where I’m pointing. See the square shape there on the ground just beyond the tree line? That’s a ten-by-ten enemy bunker. The entrances are the dark holes on either side.” He continued in his schoolteacher manner. “The reason the bunker pops out to the scout is that square shape amidst a shapeless bunch of trees. It’s out of place. It doesn’t belong there.”

Circling the area, Jones went on with his observations. “You can see also that the bunker hasn’t been used recently—no beat-down trails in the grass around it, and the color of the camouflage foliage on top of the bunker is browner, deader looking, than the surroundings.” Jones turned to me. “If you’re going to be a scout, you’ve just got to be alert to anything —”

At that moment, One Eight abruptly broke off his comment. I looked ahead to see the top of a dead tree looming in front of the ship. Jones jerked the cyclic stick back into his gut and hauled up the collective nearly out of the floor. The agile little OH-6 literally jumped over the top of the tree. We heard branches brush against the Plexiglas bubble and underside of the fuselage as we blew by.

“Holy Shit!” I gasped.

Jones calmly went on talking. “You’ve just got to be alert to anything that jumps out at you, including the tops of old, dead trees.”

It became obvious that learning to scout from a helicopter would be a continuing process of on-the-job training. There were no army manuals to consult, no special training classes to attend. There was, in fact, no in-place source for helicopter scouting information at all in the army, except the experienced aeroscout pilots who flew every day. Only they could tell and show you what signs to look for, and how to read, report, and react to those signs once you found them in the field.

The aeroscout’s job, I learned, fell generally into four basic types of work (though all four might occur in a single scouting mission):

1. Conducting Visual Recons (VRs).Scouting for enemy base camps, fighting positions, supply caches, trails, and any and all signs of enemy movement and activity.

2. Making Bomb Damage Assessments (BDAs).Scouting areas hit by our B-52 strikes to evaluate bomb damage to the terrain, enemy structures, and personnel. This was generally done immediately following the strike.

3. Evaluating Landing Zones (LZ Recon).Scouting out potential landing areas for the lift platoon’s Hueys. Making a careful aerial check of physical characteristics of the LZ, asking yourself the question, if I were flying with the slicks, would I like to land in that area?

4. Screening for Ground Units (for example, the ARPs).Flying on all sides of the friendly unit on the ground as aerial eyes to help them reach their objective, to give them information to guide their direction of movement, to help them choose the most advantageous terrain, and to keep the unit informed as to the area and situation to its front and flanks.

From 24 to 29 March, I continued to fly as copilot-observer with scout pilots Bill Jones and Jim Morrison. With my new scout call sign, Darkhorse One Seven, I logged 14.4 hours of combat flying, mostly in the Trapezoid area, which included the “Iron T,” and the Michelin rubber plantation.

Both Jones and Morrison were excellent scouts and good teachers. They had been in Vietnam about the same length of time and had flown together, learning their scouting techniques from each other. Their basic methods were pretty much alike, but Morrison emphasized airspeed. “Don’t get under sixty knots. If you do, you’re going to get hit,” he would say.

After much flying experience, I came to agree that Morrison was statistically correct. The more often a scout flew less than sixty knots, the more often he would take hits-^-no question about it. The Vietnamese ground gunners had a habit of firing right at you without applying any lead. By moving across the ground at sixty to seventy knots, their rounds would often hit three to four feet behind the ship.

With Bill Jones, scouting meant paying attention to every detail while still seeing the whole. Concentrating on shapes, colors, and hues, Jones made scouting an art. He understood, and introduced me to, the five basic principles of scouting from a helicopter: strict attention to contrast, color, glint, angles, and movement.

In time, I was able to lend my own degree of perception to these basics. I would discover, and rediscover many times over, just how fundamental these concepts were in finding, fixing, and destroying the enemy—especially an adversary who was so cunning in disguising his activities, and who was at home in his own environment.

Returning to base from those first scouting flights, I was physically drained but emotionally high—excited to get back into the air and do better next time. In self-evaluation, I recognized my problem: I was trying to see everything there was to see on the ground. Therefore I saw only masses of terrain swirling by. I did what every beginner scout pilot did—focused on the macro not the micro. It flooded my senses, overloaded my sensory capabilities.

By 31 March, Bill Hayes was back from leave. That signaled the opportunity for me to start OH-6 transition, with Hayes as instructor pilot (IP) and me as first pilot.

Bill Hayes was a powerful, good-natured black man, who must have weighed more than 220 pounds, stood at least six feet two, and had hands as big as tennis rackets. The scout bird was a small helicopter, and Bill Hayes didn’t simply get into an OH-6—he put it on. Everybody who knew Bill well enough to get away with it called him Buff, which stood for big ugly fat fucker!

The first time I climbed aboard the OH-6 with Hayes, I couldn’t help but notice how that scout bird settled down onto the ground with his weight. The landing gear on the OH-6 had shock dampers on the struts that supported the aircraft, to provide a hydraulic cushion to the skids during takeoffs and landings. As each crew member stepped up into the airplane, you could see the skids settle and spread out. When one of those people was Buff Hayes, you could almost hear the landing gear groan.

I had studied my dash 10 operator’s manual, as well as the maintenance dash 20 and 30, and had been all over the Loach dozens of times, both by myself and with the crew chief. And I had spent literally hours in the airplane cold, in the pilot’s seat with my eyes closed, mentally establishing where all the cockpit switches and instruments were.

On our first flight, Hayes instructed me to “get the ship out here in the area and hover it.” This was the first thing a helicopter pilot did when transitioning into a new aircraft—hover the ship about three feet off the ground, then taxi forward and back, to the left and right. The exercise told you a lot very quickly about the idiosyncrasies of a particular aircraft.