Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

“You really want to do that?” Fishman responded.

“Well, he’s right out there in the middle of that rice paddy, and it doesn’t look like too big a deal to me to take my M-16 and round him up. Then we can fly him to the ARVN unit just down the river and they can talk to him.”

With that, I pointed Calloway to a thin dike in the flooded paddy near the group of farmers. “Make a circle and drop the bird on the dike just as close to that guy as you can. Then just hold her right there while I get out and get him.”

Flying beautifully, Calloway settled the Loach on the little bare piece of ground. I jumped out of the aircraft, carrying my M-16 with a thirty-round magazine in it. As usual, I was dressed in my Nomex flight suit and was wearing my chicken plate, which alone weighed about thirty pounds. Then my survival vest on top of that. My APH-5 flying helmet, flight gloves, a pistol belt with my .45 Colt and survival knife hooked onto it, plus a shoulder holster where I carried my own personal Python 357.

I walked in front of the aircraft, where I could look over the heads of a couple of rows of farmers and right into the face of my fidgety suspect. Since I didn’t know how to say, “Get your ass over here,” in Vietnamese, I simply pointed my finger directly at him and motioned for him to come to me. He looked back at me with an “In your face!” grin.

So I waved to him again, this time using the M-16 instead of my finger. I looked him straight in the eyes and snarled, “Come over here to me!”

By this time you would have thought that all the people in the rice paddy would have stopped what they were doing to watch the confrontation. But, not so. They paid no attention to me or to him; they just went on planting their rice more furiously than before.

This was their obvious signal to me that this guy was no part of their operation, that the rest of the group wanted nothing to do with him, with me, or with whatever we were arguing about.

I motioned to him a third time and said again, as sternly as I could make it sound, “Come over here to me right now!” He looked at me with that stupid, toothy grin and slowly shook his head. Then he started backing away from me, as though he was looking for a fast way out of this deal.

“OK, you little son of a bitch,” I yelled. I dropped to one knee, leveled the M-16, and let three quick rounds fly, aimed at a spot right in front of him. Mud and water kicked up in his face.

Immediately his hands went up over his head and he started walking toward me, nodding and grinning like a Cheshire cat. When he got to me at the dike, I patted him down for weapons, forced his hands behind his head, and made him lock his fingers together. Putting my hands over his, I pushed and prodded him around the front of the aircraft. My intention was to put him in the crew chiefs jump seat and strap him in so he couldn’t go anyplace.

As I laid my M-16 in the left front seat, he suddenly twisted out of my grasp and bolted away from the airplane. He darted underneath the tail boom, just missing the still-turning tail rotor, and made a running jump back into the rice paddy.

“You little son of a bitch!” I screamed, as I grabbed the M-16 back out of the front seat and ran around to the rear of the aircraft. I intended to fire one round over his head to make him stop and come back to me.

In my haste, I jerked the selector of the M-16 to full automatic, inadvertently firing all twenty-seven rounds that I had left in the magazine. “Damn!” I muttered in disgust.

I watched for an instant as my adversary bounded through the paddy toward a tree line that separated the paddy from the river. He was getting away, and all I had was an empty M-16 and a mind-set—I was either going to get that little bastard or bust my ass trying!

With all my gear on, I probably weighed two hundred pounds or more. But I jumped in the paddy to go after him… and immediately sank to my waist in that water buffalo shit-stinking muck!

I could hardly move. Waving my empty M-16 above my head, I yelled, “Stop! Come back here or I’ll let you have it!” He wouldn’t know that I had a dry weapon.

But I was losing him. In desperation I turned back to Calloway, who was still holding the idling Loach on the dike. I pointed to the guy and shouted, “Go get him… run him down!”

Calloway, I learned fast, was the kind of pilot you didn’t have to tell twice. He picked up the aircraft and took off at a dead gallop, holding the Loach about two feet off the ground.

He cut an arc right over the heads of the rice planters, who started diving into the water in every direction. It made a tremendous splash as all thirty of them screamed (probably a choice Vietnamese obscenity) and simultaneously hit the deck.

My guy was running through the water for all he was worth, with Calloway hot on his trail. I could only watch—my boots were so deeply mired in the slimy gunk at the bottom of the rice paddy that I could hardly move.

I managed to struggle forward a couple of steps while Calloway tried to corner the running Vietnamese. Bob had caught up with the suspect and circled above his head a couple of times, to let him know that he wasn’t going anyplace. Then Calloway dropped the helicopter down right in front of him to cut off his route of escape. Rotor wash made the paddy look like a full-blown geyser in Yellowstone Park.

Every time the Loach let down in front of the Vietnamese, he would change direction, like a halfback doing a fancy piece of broken field running. Calloway’s OH-6 looked like a yo-yo on a string as he jerked the little Loach up and down, always managing to get down again right in front of the fleeing man and block his progress. Bob, through some damned skillful flying, had the man cornered like a rat in a trap.

As I made my way toward the sparring Loach and the frustrated escapee, I heard a sound in the water very near me. Then I noticed little splashes of rice paddy water kicking up on both sides of me, not more than a few inches away.

What in the hell is that? I thought. Then it quickly occurred to me: Those were bullets hitting the water, obviously aimed at me!

Looking toward the riverbank, about 150 yards away, my eye caught a pair of muzzle flashes coming from the tree line, no doubt a couple of AK-47s winking right at me.

So, there I was, standing ass-deep in the rice paddy with an empty M-16 and no spare ammo, and no way I could tell either the Cobra or scout ship that I was being fired on.

Determined to do something , I reached down into the water and fumbled with the holster flap of my .45. Withdrawing the dripping weapon, I let fly with a couple of rounds toward the river, before realizing how futile it was. Using my .45 at that distance was like fighting a fire a hundred and fifty yards away with a twenty-five-yard hose.

Calloway in the scout ship was about twenty yards away from me by then. He was making diving passes at the prey, forcing him to fall flat down into the water each time he brought the ship around. Every time the man got up to run, Bob would turn his ship sideways in front of him, then rock his skids back and forth, slamming them into the man. Using the side of the skid like a boxing glove, Bob kept knocking the guy ass-over-appetite back into the water.

Having dropped the worn-out man several times, Calloway then expertly maneuvered the Loach over the flailing suspect until one skid rested across the Vietnamese’s shoulders, pinning him to the bottom of the rice paddy.

As Bob held the man down in the water, I finally made it to the hovering ship and crawled up to the rear crew compartment. Plugging in my helmet mike, I keyed Fishman: “Three Four, I’ve got bad guys on the bank of the river at six o’clock right off our tail. They’re shooting at me out here. Can you hose down that riverbank before they close in on us?”