Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

As I moved toward the base area, Al primed the grenades and held both of them out the door, ready to drop them on my command. I asked Foster to tell the FAC to watch for the Willie Pete and the red smoke.

When we passed directly over what I thought was the base camp location, I hollered, “Now!” and Farrar threw both grenades straight down. From the jungle floor came a solid white explosion, with fingers of burning white phosphorous boiling and shooting out of it. I knew we were right on the button because the AK fire started again.

Just as I was about to pull power, the Cobra came back, “OK, One Seven, FAC has got your smoke. Get out of there. Get out of there now and come on up to altitude.”

As I rolled out, Farrar got my attention. “Hey, Lieutenant, take a look at that.” Off to the right, out of the lowering cloud level, came two North American F-100 Super Sabres, one behind the other, drilling in on the white smoke that was still billowing up at the enemy base camp.

Screaming in fast, the first Sabre ticked off two napalm canisters that landed smack-dab on top of the white smoke and erupted into balls of flame. As the first F-100 peeled off the target, the second one rolled in right behind him and pickled off two more napalm canisters. The long axis of the base camp was completely enveloped by a fierce wall of fire.

The jets dropped two more canisters each, then streaked around one more time as the Cobra warned, “All right, everybody stay clear.” In they came, one behind the other, with 20mms blasting up and down the long axis of the base camp. As I watched their maneuvers, I thought to myself, there is no way any living thing could have survived all the ordnance those F-100s had dumped in there. The FAC came up: “The Sabres are Winchester,” which meant they had expended all their napalm and internal guns.

One last time, I got on the radio to Gangplank. “Gangplank, this is Darkhorse One Seven. I’m going home. The guns are going to stay with you for a little while in case you need them. We’ve got Dustoff inbound to pick up your wounded. Take care.”

“Hey, man,” he came back, “we really appreciate it. Darkhorse sure saved our ass!”

When Farrar and I touched down at Phu Loi, I could hardly get out of the aircraft. After thirteen hours in the seat of that OH-6, my legs were numb, my buttocks were numb, even the bottom part of my thighs had no feeling in them. My entire body was so exhausted that I even had trouble working the pedals to hover the ship onto the strip.

Bruce Foster had shut down his Cobra at the same time, and we walked in from the parking area together. He put his arm around my shoulder. “One Seven, you are one crazy son of a bitch!”

I grinned back at him. “Man, I didn’t envy you one goddamned bit, because there you were hanging up there in orbit and couldn’t do one single thing all day to help me.”

After a meal at the O club, I mustered enough energy to get back to the flight line and the little OH-6 that I had flown the hell out of all that day. By thetime I arrived at the ship, Farrar was there, as was the scout platoon sergeant, Tim McDivitt. Sergeant McDivitt had some of the maintenance people going over the aircraft to assess the damage. All the crew chiefs called McDivitt “Toon Daddy,” short for “platoon daddy,” the patriarch of the unit.

As I reached the ship, I called out to him, “What kind of shape is 249 in, Toon Daddy?”

He looked at me, and I quote his exact words. “Lieutenant…” He had a way of accenting that first syllable so it came out, L-E-W-W-tenant. “You have screwed up one U.S. Army helicopter… to the max!” He shook his head in disbelief. “Not only is all the goddamned nose Plexiglas blown out of this ship, but you’ve got thirty to forty holes in her, spread out from the rotor system to the belly and tail boom. It’ll sure as hell take some major surgery to get her back in shape!”

But what had both of us scratching our heads was the fact that this OH-6 aircraft had hung together through thirteen hours of beating, with nothing vital hit, and was still totally flyable. What an aircraft!

As Toon Daddy was finishing his lecture to me, I noticed that Farrar was still walking around the ship, studying the damage. (As I said before, the crew chief considers the airplane his.) He was especially noticing the two AK holes through the cabin where he had been sitting. I knew he was wondering how in the hell we ever got us and that airplane back to Phu Loi in one piece.

Suddenly realizing that I was scheduled to fly VR-1 the next morning, I asked Al to help me move my personal gear from 249 over to the bird slated for first up VR. We walked together toward our hootches, then sat down for a minute near the orderly room and lit up cigarettes. As tired as we both were, it was good to “decompress” over a smoke and think back over what we had been through that day.

Farrar looked at me and hissed out a stream of inhaled smoke. “Shit, sir… holy shit!”

I grinned back at him. “You know, Al, we flew thirteen hours today. Would you believe that we could ever be in the saddle that long in one operation?”

“All I know, sir, is that my ass is numb. No, not numb… my ass is dead!”

“Mine, too,” I mumbled, “but I want you to know that you did pretty goddamned good work today, for a Yankee.” Coming from Cumberland, Rhode Island, Al was used to the Yankee kidding.

With that, I walked on down to my hootch and hit the rack. I didn’t talk to anybody… didn’t see anybody… didn’t even take off my boots or flight suit. I just stretched out with my feet resting on top of the metal bar at the end of the bunk. I was asleep in moments.

An hour later the flip-flop noise of shower shoes tracking across the hootch floor awakened me. It was Bob Davis. He shook me by the shoulder until I finally growled, “Huh, what is it?”

“Hey, Hubie… you asleep?”

“I’m sure as hell not now,” I groaned, my eyes still riveted shut.

“You know you got first up VR tomorrow,” he whispered. “Do you want me to take it for you?”

I answered through my fogginess, “Nah, that’s all right. I’ll take it.”

“Well,” he said, “you better go back to sleep. You need the sleep because you look like shit.”

“Thanks a lot,” I snarled, and drifted off again.

It didn’t seem like more than five minutes when I felt my shoulder being shaken again. This time it was the assistant operations charge of quarters (CQ). “Lieutenant, it’s four o’clock. You’re first up… it’s time for you to get up.”

I struggled up to a sitting position on the side of the bunk. It was almost like being in a drunken stupor. As I held my head in my hands, I looked down and saw I was still dressed in the same flight suit and boots I had worn the day before.

My feet were like two blocks of ice. I couldn’t move them, and they tingled with prickly pain. I remembered that I had fallen asleep with my feet hung over the rail of the bunk. My limbs were dead from the knees down. I couldn’t even walk!

When the feeling in my feet finally returned, I picked up my CAR-15 and chicken plate and stumbled out to the flight line. I started to run up the aircraft, but decided to wait until I was ready to leave. Maybe by then I’d be more awake and alert.

I walked over to operations and talked with the gun crew to find out what we were supposed to do that day. The mission called for some VR in the Quan Loi area, looking for base camps and trail activity.

We got off about 5 A.M. It was a cool, crisp morning, which did its best to snap me back to reality. Our instructions called for us to fly up Highway 13 to An Loc, shut down, and get a briefing from brigade before moving on over to Quan Loi to scout for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR).