Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

I keyed my mike to Carriss: “OK, Three Eight, we’re OK. How about a heading?”

“Roger, One Seven. Turn right heading three three zero degrees to the Little Blue.”

Carriss was still up at fifteen hundred feet and had me in sight all the time. At his altitude, he had the macro view. Being right down on the deck, mine was the micro.

Seeing me pick up three three zero, Carriss came back: “OK, there you go. The river that goes off to the north-northeast is the Thi Tinh. The Big Blue is the Saigon off to the northwest. Follow the Saigon.”

Acknowledging, I came up on the left bank of the Saigon and began working. For the best coverage of the terrain, I settled in on the left bank and then took up a long orbiting maneuver that circled me back and forth across the river. With the pilot’s seat on the right side of the aircraft, homing in on the west bank allowed me to see right down on that bank and straight across to the east bank.

I began my search pattern by flying northbound up the river about a hundred yards, crossing the water to my right, coming back down the right bank about the same hundred yards, then completing the circle by returning left across the river in a series of wide, overlapping orbits. The forward working orbits gave me a clear view of everything fifty yards or so in from each riverbank, plus the ability to look down into the water.

On one of these orbits, I picked up a five-foot by five-foot inactive bunker on the west bank, and a series of fish traps in one of the several little tributaries emptying into the Saigon.

I kept up a steady stream of UHF reporting on what I was seeing, and Carriss’s front-seater, I knew, was marking them on his map. At the end of the mission, he would use that marked-up map in his debriefing with division G-2 and G-3.

After about fifteen minutes down low in the search pattern, I was making my orbit back toward the left bank when something like a black pencil line in the sky caught my attention. About three or four klicks (kilometers) away on my right horizon, pale gray smoke was rising.

I keyed my mike and told Carriss excitedly: “Hey, Three Eight, I’ve got smoke! A cooking fire out there at about three four zero degrees, maybe three klicks off to my right. Do you see? Is it on the river?”

“Naw, I can’t see it. Why don’t you head that way direct and let’s see what we’ve got.” I gave Crockett a “Hang on,” pulled a fast right turn, and took off straight for the smoke.

As I left the river, heading across a large open rice paddy, Carriss came up on the radio. “You’re going right for a bend in the river. It’s probably a cooking fire. Make a first pass but keep it fast; don’t take any chances. Don’t slow it down.”

Intelligence reports we had received made me think that anybody in this neck of the woods with a cooking fire going at this hour of the morning had to be an enemy. But they could be civilians. How could I know before I came up on top of them at sixty to seventy knots?

In those split seconds of breaking away from the river, I suddenly thought of something Uncle Billy had taught me back in the Arkansas mountains. A squirrel up a tree trunk will always stay on the opposite side of whatever he thinks is an adversary. He will back around the tree away from a noise, keeping the tree trunk between him and any possible danger. Uncle Billy had told me to throw a rock around to the other side of the tree; when the squirrel backed around the tree, you would have a clear shot. Coming in behind that cooking fire began to seem like a good idea.

I veered off sharply to my right about a klick away from the smoke, making a broad arc. By dropping down very low, and weaving my way below treetop level where I could, I figured I might be able to circle right in over the cooking fire on a heading of about two two zero. If they did hear us, at least we might confuse them by coming in on their backs from the north, instead of doing the expected and popping in on their front from the south.

Hitting about fifty knots, I suddenly broke in over a small tributary. Smoke from the cooking fire curled up right in front of my bubble. Reacting faster than I knew I could at this point, I dropped the collective, kicked right pedal, and yanked in enough right rear cyclic to abruptly skid into a right-hand decelerating turn. I looked straight down from fifteen to twenty feet of altitude, right into the faces of six people squatting around the cooking fire.

I could see weapons lying around, mostly AK-47s. There was one SKS semiautomatic rifle lying on a log across a backpack. The people were wearing shorts, some blue, some green, and the rest black. Nobody was wearing a shirt. One man had on a vest that carried AK-47 magazines. They all had on Ho Chi Minh sandals but none wore headgear. They obviously hadn’t heard me coming. I don’t know if I keyed my mike or not. All I remember is thinking, Holy SHIT! What do I do now?

As the soldiers dove in all directions for cover, Crockett ended my indecision. Without a word from me, he cut loose from the back of the cabin with his M-60. By now I had the OH-6 in a right-hand turning maneuver over the area, with my turns becoming tighter and tighter. Crockett blazed away with the M-60.

As one man lurched up and ran toward the underbrush, Crockett fired at him; his rounds cut across the dirt in front of him, then down his back.

Tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah… tah-tah-tah-tah-tah. Crockett stitched two more men as they broke and tried to run. I was still in tight right-hand turns, finding myself almost mesmerized as I stared with tunnel vision at what was happening right under the ship.

Suddenly I became conscious of Phil Carriss’s voice firmly commanding: “Get out of there, One Seven, and let me shoot. Get the hell out of there, Mills!”

Breaking my concentration, I pulled on power and headed up and out of the killing zone. Seeing me roll out to the southeast, Carriss said, more calmly now, “I’m in hot!”

As I headed out, the Cobra rolled in right behind me. Carriss bored in with his front-seater’s pipper right on the spot we had just vacated. I could hear the s-w-o-o-s-h-h… s-w-o-o-s-h-h… s-w-o-o-s-h-h as pairs of 2.75 rockets left his tubes.

He pulled out of his run for recovery with the minigun smoking. W-h-e-r-r-r’… w-h-e-r-r-r it spat as the Cobra front-seater flexed his M-28 turret on the target, following the rockets with a devastating blast of 7.62 minigun fire. Smoke and debris boiled up out of the target area. As I watched from my orbiting position out to the southeast, I couldn’t help thinking about the words on the sign hanging on the wall of the troop operations room:

Carriss came back up on VHF. “One Seven, I’m going to roll back in for another pass. Are you OK?”

“I’m OK, Three Eight, and holding down here on the southeast.” With that, Carriss pulled a one eighty, rolled back into the target from south to north, and placed more “good rocks” right into the cooking fire area. The devastation was a terrifying and sobering sight.

Once back up to altitude, Carriss asked me if I wanted to make a recon of the target area. I pulled on power and started back inbound, this time headed from southwest to northeast. The cooking fire, though I hadn’t noticed before, was on the south bank of this little tributary off the Saigon.

The gun’s rockets had blown away most of the vegetation and overhanging growth. There were craters where the rockets had impacted, and the entire area looked as though it had been sprayed with fine dust, dirt, and mud. In spite of all that ordnance coming into this little spot in the jungle, the enemy’s backpack was still in its original place on the log, with the SKS rifle lying across it.