Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

I fought to control the Loach, which seemed on the verge of shaking itself right out of the sky. I tried to accelerate and found that made the ship all the harder to control. So I decelerated and immediately began looking for a spot to put the bird down.

There was a line of nipa palm trees just north of Thunder II and I could just see beyond it. With my eyes jerking from the violent vibrations of the aircraft, I could barely make out a fairly open rice paddy—the size of a small golf course—just over the nipa palm line.

I yelled into UHF, “One Six is hit, we’re hit. We’re going down!” I pointed the nose toward the rice paddy and prepared to enter auto-rotation just as soon as we cleared the trees. The engine sounded so awful that I thought the whole damned thing was either going to explode or shake itself apart before I could get the ship over the tree line.

Seeing our bird wallowing through the air, and having heard me screaming over the radio, the front-seater of Sinor’s Cobra came up on VHF: “Twelve o’clock… twelve o’clock… the open field… the rice paddy. Go for it… go for it, One Six!” He had obviously spotted the same hole in the jungle.

With only about forty feet of altitude, I had decided to autorotate in because I wasn’t sure I still had a functioning engine. This was no time to have it seize up and bind the transmission. I wanted to be able to control the aircraft as I hit the water in the flooded rice paddy.

Jim Parker hadn’t said a word through all of this. I grabbed a quick glance over my right shoulder and saw him leaning half out of the aircraft, looking ahead as if he was trying to help me find a place to put down. I didn’t have to tell him that we were in trouble, but, as superfluous as it was, I managed to key the intercom and say, “Hang on, Jimbo, we’re going to hit hard!”

Autorotation was working. I had rolled off the throttle, reduced the collective to the bottom pitch setting, and come aft with the cyclic. The result was a deceleration with the nose up and the forward motion and mass of the aircraft building up RPMs in the rotor system. This allowed me to better control the aircraft as it settled into the rice paddy. The skids sliced through the water and sank to the mud floor of the paddy, and the bottom of the fuselage smacked into the water like a ton of bricks. Spray and mud flew everywhere.

I quickly followed the emergency procedures—pulled up the emergency fuel shutoff and flipped off the master battery switch. This shut down the fuel and electrical systems in case there was a post crash fire. Then I wanted to get out of that cockpit ASAP. I tried to roll over to my right to jump out of the aircraft and into the water. But I couldn’t move.

“You dumb shit!” I muttered, cursing my stupidity. I was still strapped into my seat. I reached down and hit the handle to release my seat belt and shoulder harness.

The rice paddy water was almost up to the door, so all I had to do was lift my left leg up over the cyclic stick apd roll out. A quick inventory told me that I still had all my body parts and didn’t seem to be hurting anywhere. Parker was still struggling with his seat belt, trying to get out of the aircraft, so I stood up to give him a hand.

Once in the water, Parker leaned back into the aircraft to retrieve his M-60 machine gun and a seven-foot belt of ammo. As he threw the ammo over his shoulder he looked at me and asked, “What in the hell happened, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, but whatever it was sure raised hell with the rotor system.”

We both looked up at the main rotor blades just as they were slowing down to a stop. One of the blades came to a halt right over our heads.

“My God,” I whispered. A .50-caliber machine-gun round had gone right through the leading edge, about four feet from the tip of the blade, shattering the spar. The only thing holding the blade together was the honeycomb structure in back of the blade’s leading edge.

“My God,” I repeated. “By all rights, that blade should have come off four feet from the end. And if that had happened, the aircraft would have come apart in midair.” Then I noticed Parker’s chin. It was bloody and looked like it had been laid open to the bone. He patted the front sight of his 60. When the Loach slammed down into the rice paddy, the impact had thrown Parker’s head forward, into the machine gun. Parker was the kind of guy who would never say a word about it.

I reached back in the ship for the Prick Ten (PRC-10) emergency radio so I could report in to Sinor. The gunship was off to the east, circling at altitude. “Three One, this is One Six. We’re down in the rice paddy. We’re OK, except Parker nearly cut off his chin when we hit. Keep your speed up, Dino, it’s a .50 just west of Thunder II.”

“Roger that, One Six. I saw the tracers. That’s affirmative on the .50 cal.”

“Hey, Thirty-one, why don’t you scramble the ARPs to come in and pick us up. Get Pipe Smoke to yank the bird, then you can get some more guns on station to go after that fifty.”

“OK, One Six,” Sinor rogered. “ARPs are on the way. Have advised Darkhorse Control that we have a Loach down. How are you fixed for Victor Charlies?”

“No sign of enemy,” I answered. “What I’m going to do now is climb up and pull the hinge pins on the rotor blades so Pipe Smoke can zip in here and throw a harness around the rotor head and recover this bird.”

I climbed up on the fuselage to reach the hinge pins. It was a simple procedure of just pulling up the four inverted U-shaped retaining pins and dropping the blades. Parker stood beside me, trying to feel how badly his chin was cut.

Suddenly the silence around us was shattered by a sharp burst of readily identifiable AK-47 fire. The AK was immediately joined by another enemy weapon—probably a .30-caliber machine gun—firing much faster. Bullets were plunking into the water all around the ship, and I could hear rounds tearing through the aircraft. The enemy was still very much present in the area, and they obviously knew exactly where we were.

I instinctively ducked my head, then jumped backward off the fuselage into the rice paddy. I landed on my feet in about twelve inches of water, but immediately fell over on my backside—Parker would probably have been laughing at me if he hadn’t been busy ducking, too.

As the enemy rounds let up for a second, Parker ran around the tail of the aircraft and threw himself, and his M-60 and ammo belt, down on top of a nearby paddy dike. Crawling out of the water, I reached back into the cockpit and grabbed my CAR-15 along with a bandolier of magazines, then rolled around the back of the ship and fell prone on the ground next to Parker. Bullets were kicking up all around us. No doubt the enemy had seen us move out from behind the aircraft and were determined to nail us.

I raised my head just enough to try to see where the fire was coming from. Then I got back on the PRC-10 and fairly well screamed to Sinor: “Three One, we’re in deep trouble down here! We’ve got bad guys to the west of us, bad guys to the west. We’re taking heavy fire on the ground from the wood line two seven zero degrees due west our location, at a range of about three hundred yards.”

“Roger, I’m in,” Sinor said as he rolled the Cobra and began his run right over the tree line. I heard the noise as he punched off several pairs of rockets. The first pair hit a little short; the second and third pairs looked as though they were pretty close to where I thought the fire was coming from.

As Sinor broke to come around again, I said, “Second and third pairs look like good rocks. Give ‘em hell!”

On his next pass, all I heard was his minigun fire. Then Sinor came back up on the radio. “I didn’t get any rocks off that time. I’m coming back in. I’m recycling rockets, so keep your heads down.”