Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

With my last word, Fishman rolled in, making a rocket pass down the tree line. When I saw that Paul’s rocks were right where I needed them, I backed out of the airplane and told Calloway to raise the ship off the guy while I jumped down to get him.

As the Loach lifted, I was back in the water reaching for the SOB. His eyes bugged as I grabbed him by his shirt collar with one hand and punched him in the face with the other. His eyes rolled back in his head and he went out like a light, his limp body falling into the water.

Calloway moved the Loach in closer so I could pick the guy up and dump him in the back of the aircraft. I didn’t even tie him in, just grabbed a cargo strap and bound his arms and legs behind him. He was still unconscious, so he didn’t give me any more trouble.

Jumping back in the left front seat of the bird, I grabbed the controls and told Calloway, “I’ve got it. Let’s get out of here!”

As we lifted off the paddy, Calloway looked over at me, his nose crinkled up. “Jesus! You smell like shit!”

“Thanks a lot! By the way, for a student pilot, you did one hell of a job flying back there. A hell of a job… and I appreciate it very much.”

We flew our suspect down the river to an ARVN compound, where he was quickly identified as a major from a VC division located near Dau Tieng. More than that, his interrogation revealed that he was a VC tax collector. It was his job to go out among the local civilian population in that area along the Saigon River and force them to pay taxes to support the VC. He’d hit up the farmers for food and money, and even pressed them into service to carry supplies to the Viet Cong forces. This guy was a pretty big fish to capture—a damned lucky stroke for us, since we were on a routine training mission.

This incident actually provided excellent training. I could have thought forever and never come up with a better example of one of aerial scouting’s most basic principles—contrast, or, what’s wrong with what you see below you? What’s in the picture that shouldn’t be there? What’s not there that should be there?

In the case of our VC major-tax collector, all the clues were there. The farmers were all planting rice in one direction; this single person was going off in a different direction, moving away from them. Everyone in the group of farmers wore a conical hat; this guy was bareheaded. The farmers paid no attention to our aircraft as we orbited nearby; this person kept sneaking glimpses at us over his shoulder and was moving away from the aircraft. Everybody else in the group was either very old or very young; this man was of military age.

When we got back on the ground at Phu Loi, Fishman came running over from his Cobra. He couldn’t believe that the enemy soldier in the rice paddy had turned out to be a VC major. Paul slapped us both on the back. “A VC major? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you guys… I just can’t believe you guys!”

The crew chief of our airplane had a different reaction, however. He came over to me with a thoroughly disgusted look on his face. “Shit, sir, have you looked at the back of my aircraft? There’s blood, swamp water, water buffalo shit, and all kinds of other crud back there. Ah, shit, sir…”

But that was a mild reprimand compared to what I got when I arrived at my hootch to shower and change clothes. As I walked in the door, Mai, our hootch maid, immediately stopped what she was doing and looked at me. There I was, still soaking wet from my jousting match in the rice paddy. My boots were fouled. Nastiness dripped from my flight suit and made a smelly, dark-colored puddle on the floor.

Mai’s nose curled up and she came at me with an up-raised broom. “Ding-wee! You stink bad. You smell like water buffalo. Get out and take shower, and no come back anymore until you no smell so nasty!”

Over the next week or so, the troop got a lot of feedback on the VC major-tax collector incident. Division G-2 and ARVN G-2 were ecstatic about having a VC field grade officer to interrogate. It turned out that he was the chief tax collector for that area, so he was able to tell interrogators where all the local and main force VC units in the area were located. He also knew all the shadow government and chain of command in the villages along his stretch of the river.

For his absolutely masterful piece of flying that day, Bob Calloway was awarded the Air Medal. But the thing that made the episode really unique was the fact that Calloway received this meritorious award for flying the OH-6… before he was even signed off in the Loach as a scout pilot.

We had a little saying around the troop, which was probably common among American forces all over Vietnam; “We own the day; he [Victor Charlie] owns the night.”

During the day the American soldiers and our allies generally controlled the war. We were the aggressors; in daylight we usually had tactical advantage over the enemy. At night, however, when our forces went back into defensive positions, Charlie stayed out in the jungle. He used the night as a cover for his resupplying and offensive actions. He couldn’t stand against us during the day, but he sure could cause us a lot of difficulty once darkness set in.

We received a lot of night mortar and rocket attacks on our base at Phu Loi. Scouts didn’t fly operationally after dark, and we valued a good night’s sleep to be ready for those first light VRs, which had us in the air by 5 or 5:30 in the morning. The VC seemed to have some insight into this fact. When they hit us after dark, the scout pilots would have to spend the night in bunkers instead of in our hootch bunks. It was cold and damp in those damned bunkers, and the only place to sleep was on hard, rough board benches. Not conducive, you can be sure, to a decent night’s rest.

Since it was not unusual for us to catch a few rounds of enemy mortar fire during the night, we’d sometimes just stay in our hootch bunks and try to sleep through it. Rockets were another story, however. Russia supplied Charlie with an individual heavy 122mm rocket that weighed 112 pounds, had a 42-pound warhead, and had a range of ten miles. This weapon could be fired from an easily made and highly portable launching stand. The enemy could set it up in short order by resting the body of the weapon on top of two crossed tree branch supports, preaiming it, and then arming the rocket to fire when two wires made contact after the pan of water they were in evaporated.

One night, after softening us up with a few rounds of 81mm mortar fire, Charlie let us have a few rockets. I was just about asleep in my bunk when a rocket hit out near the runway. The resulting explosion actually lifted the roof right off my hootch. I could see starlight through the gap between the roof and the sidewall! Needless to say all of us spent the rest of that night in the bunker, hard board benches and all.

Trying desperately to sleep that night, I couldn’t help but think about those enemy rockets and what it must have taken to get them from their initial supply point to a spot where they could be fired into our airfield at Phu Loi.

Charlie’s supply system was rudimentary, but with his dogged tenacity, somehow he was able to transport 122mm rockets—about the size of a telephone pole and weighing every bit as much—from an arsenal somewhere near Hanoi all the way down to Phu Loi. Through monsoons, B-52 strikes, snake-infested streams… along dust-choking trails. Amazingly, these rockets reached a Viet Cong encampment in American III Corps area. All to keep American aerial scout pilots in Phu Loi from sleeping at night.

It didn’t take us long to understand what our new troop commander, Major Moore, meant when he told us on that first day that he was going to be involved in everyday combat operations. The previous commander had essentially run the troop from his office desk. Major Charles Moore liked to be in the air in his command and control bird, right above the action.