Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

While I was trying to figure this out, I switched to FM and reported to Gangplank. “I took heavy fire from an AK-47 right underneath me, maybe from a trench line. The jungle is too thick for me to see who was firing. I did see one of your point men… at least one leg, that was all I could see. Couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.”

Gangplank rogered as I tried to decide what tack to take. We had to think of something. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that the only way I could do any good was to define what was on the ground.

“Gangplank,” I radioed, “I’m going to hover back into that last contact area on a heading of zero four zero, then widen up my orbit to see if I can draw their fire. When I do, you have Three Six begin crawling forward on zero four zero to see if he can link up and get his people the hell out of there.”

Then I keyed the intercom to fill in Farrar. “Stand by, Al. The only thing I can figure out to locate the bad guys is for us to go in there low and slow and let them shoot at us, then hope that the infantry on the ground can see where the enemy fire is coming from and try to suppress it long enough to move forward and get their people out. How do you feel about that?”

There wasn’t a sign of unwillingness or hesitation in his voice. “Whatever you say, sir. Let’s do it now!”

I went in right on top of the trees at thirty to forty knots. I knew I was going to get shot at again, so I squirmed down inside my seat armor plate and waited for the rounds to come.

Realizing that OH-6 crew chiefs had no back or side armor on their jump seats, I snatched another fast look over my shoulder to see how Farrar was situated. He wasn’t even on his jump seat! He had propped his left buttock against the leading edge of the little seat, anchored his right foot on the edge of the door, and swung his entire upper body outside the airplane. He had his M-60 pointed straight ahead with his finger on the trigger so he could shoot back the minute we were fired on.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself. Here I was all hunkered down in the protected pilot’s seat, and there was Farrar hanging outside the aircraft!

It doesn’t make any difference if you are expecting it or not; the instant you take fire, it is a razor-sharp shock to your whole body.

R-R-R-R-R-R-I-P-P! The sudden AlObursts came back up again from the jungle floor.

“Taking fire… taking fire!” I shouted into the radio again. My voice had gone up a few octaves. “Mark. Mark! Right underneath us. AKs… AKs… again!”

I broke a hard right, then a hard left to zig me out of the line of fire. All the Cobra could say was, “Roger… roger… we mark.” Foster was still in the unenviable position of only being able to locate on his map where all this was happening, rather than rolling in with all ordnance blazing.

Coming in from different directions, I repeated the decoy action several times during the next thirty minutes, each time marking the location we thought the fire was coming from.

As busy as I had been flying, trying to dodge fire, and searching the jungle floor below, I hadn’t looked much at my flight instruments until Foster finally asked, “How are you doing on fuel?”

A quick glance at the gauge and I answered, “Wow! I’ve got to come up, Three Two. I’ve gotta go get some gas. How are you doin’?”

Foster came back. “I’m OK, I’ve got plenty for now. You think we better get another hunter-killer unit up here?”

I thought about that for a second. “OK, Three Two, roger that. But you better have the scout go on over to Lai Khe and shut down. No sense putting another scout down here and having him go through the same thing I’ve done. But we should probably keep the guns up full time over the contact area in case something develops.”

Foster agreed and I switched back to FM. “Gangplank, this is Dark-horse One Seven. I’ve gotta get out of here for some fuel. Two more guns are on their way up here now. If you need ordnance on the target, contact Darkhorse Three Two on this push. We’re not putting down a new scout to stomp around in this mine field. As soon as I can gas up, I’ll be back. Hang in there, Gangplank.”

“OK, roger that.” Gangplank had a calm but urgent tone in his voice. “We appreciate what you’re doing, Darkhorse. We’ve made some progress, but Charlie is in a bunker line and our people who are down are on the far side of their trench line, so we’ve got gooks between us and our point men, and they’ve got us cross-fired. So get back to us, One Seven, as soon as you can, OK?”

Rogering that, I pulled the ship around to head southwest down the LZ, so I could build up some speed for an altitude climb. When I reached 100 to 105 knots, I leaned hard aft on the cyclic and pulled a cyclic climb up through about eight hundred feet, then leveled off at a thousand feet and made a direct course for Lai Khe.

Now that we were up and out of the contact area, I took another look at Farrar. “How ya’ doin’ back there?”

He was back on his jump seat. “I’m fine. You OK, sir?”

“I’d be a hell of a lot better, Al, if you’d light me a cigarette.”

“I don’t know if I can,” he laughed, “my hands are shaking so goddamned bad!”

I grinned back at him. “I’m sure glad to hear you say that, because my hands have been shaking ever since that first pass.” Then we both started laughing, which broke the tension of the last hour.

I switched my radio to Lai Khe artillery and told them that a single OH-6 was en route tö their fueling pad to take on a little gas and ammo. No artillery was coming out of Lai Khe at the time so they cleared me direct.

The refueling pad was nothing more than a pinta-primed assault pad with JP-4 lines running up and down the sides and nozzles about every forty feet. There were no support people there to help you. The crew of the aircraft needing fuel was expected to do that.

I hovered into the pad area and set down near a nozzle that was on the right side of the airplane. The fuel intake port on the OH-6 was just under and slightly behind the crew chief’s position.

We were refueling hot (not shutting down the airplane’s engine), so Farrar stepped down out of the ship, lowered the visor on his helmet (a refueling safety precaution), picked up a nozzle, and started pumping JP-4. I stayed in the aircraft at the controls (I have a good, strong four-hour bladder) and kept the OH-6 at flight idle RPMs.

When Farrar finished fueling, he jumped back in the ship. I picked up to a hover and moved about a hundred yards down the strip to the rearm point.

We hadn’t expended any rounds up till now, but Farrar wanted to throw in a handful of extra belts just in case. As he was laying in the fresh ammo, he plugged himself into the intercom. “Hang tight here for a minute, Lieutenant, and let me look over the ship.”

Unplugging himself, Farrar began walking around the helicopter, looking at the blades, nose, underside, skids, and tail rotor. He came back to the cabin, shaking his head and with a grin on his face. “Lieutenant, you know the battery vent back there?”

“Yes, so?” There was a single vent on the bottom of the aircraft; while the engine was running, you could see battery fumes puff out of it every once in awhile.

“Well, sir, we’ve got three of them now—the one the factory installed as original equipment, plus two modifications that were just put in during the last flight.”

Two rounds of AK-47 fire had hit the bottom of the airplane, passed up through the self-sealing section of the fuel cell, and come out the top of the ship, putting holes in the transmission cowling in the doghouse area.

Thinking that some vital engine parts may have been hit, Farrar asked me to inspect my instruments. I carefully checked out the gauges that monitored engine functions. The turbine gas temperature (TGT) was OK, and everything else checked out within normal limits. “Everything seems OK,” I reported to Farrar. “How big are the holes?”