Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

As I went about my usual routine on the morning of the sixth, the troop loudspeaker suddenly hissed, telling the troop that an alert announcement was probably coming. I listened carefully.

“Attention. Hunter-killer team on the hot spot. Scramble north.”

I grabbed my chicken plate and survival vest and shot out of the hootch door, sprinting to my parked OH-6. As I ran for the ship, my survival knife, hanging from my vest, bounced around wildly. I always wore my sheath knife on my vest, handle down, so if I were ever shot down, I’d have easy access to the knife to help cut or pry my way out of the cockpit. As it bounced, my handle-down knife apparently jarred out of its scabbard on the vest and fell to the ground. Only it didn’t fall handle down.

Somehow in the drop, it flipped and landed, point down, directly on my right foot. It pierced my boot and entered the flesh, right behind my toes. I flew the scramble mission anyway, with blood oozing out of my boot and my foot hurting so damned bad I could hardly work the right pedal.

Not only did the incident teach me never to wear my knife handle down, it kept me from flying for several days. If my foot hadn’t hurt so much, I would have kicked myself for doing such a dumb thing.

The world got better on 8 May, however. I got a call to see Major Cummings, the troop commander. His news was that scout platoon leader Capt. John Herchert was short on time left in country and was transferring to operations for the balance of his tour. I was to become the new One Six.

My appointment wasn’t really a big surprise. Everyone had known for some time that Herchert was getting short, and as time wore down to DEROS, his natural reaction was to try to keep himself in one piece to go home. Besides, I was the only commissioned officer in the outfit. All the rest of the scout pilots were warrants. So, Major Cummings really didn’t have much difficulty in deciding who would fill Herchert’s shoes. But that didn’t lessen my excitement about the new job.

One of the first things I did was call the scout pilots together in my hootch. Huddled around my bunk were Bob Davis (One Three), Jim Ameigh (One Five), Joe Vad (Nine), Ed Eneboe (One Nine), Jim Morrison (One Four), Bill Jones (One Eight), and Mike Melo (One One). Darkhorse Five (troop XO) Joe Perkins came too, probably to hear what the new One Six might have to say to his scout pilots.

I hadn’t planned a big pep talk. These guys knew me, had flown with me, and some of them had even lived with me in the same hootch. I felt I was one of them. But I couldn’t resist preaching a little about the spirit of the cavalry. “It’s important to remember,” I told them, “that our air cavalry today is a descendent of the old horse cavalry that opened our nation’s frontiers—that aggressiveness, flexibility, economy of force, and shock action are all watchwords of the cavalry. As aeroscout pilots, we have that heritage to live up to.”

They all knew what I meant. Over the past month, every one of them had heard my opinion about scout pilots being more aggressive in carrying out their mission. I didn’t want anybody taking any foolish chances, but I urged the scouts to stay on the target, take the fight to the enemy, and not get out until firepower advantage was lost. Once command of the situation was gone and the scout could no longer influence the action, at that point, and only then, was the scout clear to run and let the snake driver take over. After the target had been worked over by the Cobras, I wanted the scout pilot back into the area to check out the enemy situation. If the area was still too hot, get it worked over again, but keep going back!

At this point I told the pilots I was arming all the scout ships with miniguns. It would now be our intent to close with the enemy and lay cold steel on him every chance we got.

Ever mindful that the aeroscouts was strictly a volunteer unit, I left the men with the thought that they could “unvolunteer” at any time. Whenever a scout pilot was no longer willing to fly and fight, he could go over to slicks and never a discrediting word would be spoken about his decision.

“But in the meantime,” I concluded, slapping my hand down on my bunk, “the mission of this unit is to fly and fight, and don’t you ever forget it!”

Not long after that a sign bearing those exact words appeared in the operations hootch. Joe Perkins must have felt they had application beyond my little scout pilot get-together.

All the scout ships were outfitted immediately with miniguns, and the pilots learned to use them from the manuals and on-the-job training (OJT). We tried the cabin-mounted minigun sight, but ended up not using it. The sight was a rod with oval glass that stuck out in front of you in the cockpit, and it got in the way. It also could have been lethal in a crash. Instead, we devised an OJT way of aiming the guns. Through a little seat-of-the-pants experimentation and expenditure of a few rounds of ammo, we discovered the secret of hitting the target.

The gun was elevated and depressed by using a button on the cyclic stick. When the gun was raised to the point where the pilot in the right seat could look across and see the tip of the minigun barrel sticking up just above the left seat bottom, the gun would then shoot one hand’s width above the cross tube on the front of the canopy.

Having learned that, we flew out to a rice paddy, where we pulled off a few bursts and observed exactly where the rounds were hitting. We started shooting at about two hundred yards out, then used a grease pencil to mark a big X on the canopy where the rounds were seen to impact. That hand-drawn X on the front Plexiglas bubble was used as the sight.

The newer areoscouts, those with fire in their eyes and fewer combat hours, welcomed the addition of miniguns to their Loaches. They didn’t seem to have any trouble, either, with my order that scout pilots stay on the target as long as they were able to control the situation.

Experienced scouts, however, such as Hayes, Jones, and Morrison, cautioned against the new tactics. I respected their feelings that the risks overshadowed the advantages. Certainly, their experiences during the days of the ‘68 Tet Offensive had shown them that flying scouts—even with an armed observer aboard—was damned well risky enough.

Even the Cobra pilots minced no words in saying that the scouts were hanging it out too far when they started mixing it up with the enemy. “That’s what the snake is up there for,” they argued. They thought a scout was nuts to try to do anything more than locate a target for the gunship.

As the new One Six, I found out quickly that there was plenty to keep me busy in addition to flying my regular VR and scramble rotation. There was the administrative side of running the scout platoon. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle paperwork, it was more that I didn’t like handling paperwork.

Fortunately, I had two extremely capable noncommissioned officers who did their jobs so well that I could continue flying my rotation, confident that things on the ground were being capably looked after. First Sergeant Martin L. Laurent kept the platoon’s regular administrative matters going like a well-oiled machine. Platoon Sergeant Tim (“Toon Daddy”) McDivitt, among a host of other things, kept a careful eye on aircraft maintenance and our scout crew chiefs.

The crew chiefs were a particular concern of mine. They were the other half of the scout team and, in my book, were some of the finest soldiers to ever come down the chute. When a Loach took off, the crew chief’s life was in the hands of the scout pilot. And vice versa. The crew chief’s sharp eyes and well-aimed M-60 saved a Loach pilot’s ass more times than any of us could ever know. So I made it an important part of my administrative business to make sure that crew chiefs’ quarters were well maintained, that chow was good, and that they were kept off the strictly bullshit details.