Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

The column commander, about 150 yards out by then, responded, “OK, One Six, let’s back off. We’re going to recon by fire.”

One of the things that low-flying scout birds had to be very careful of while working around our armor was their 90mm main gun canister rounds. The shells were essentially filled with lead pellets, perhaps an inch in length, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and shaped like a miniature soup can. There were hundreds of them in a single 90mm canister round. When our tanks let go with canister fire, everything in front of the main guns went to hell in a hurry. It cut down trees, mowed the grass, and neutralized everything in the area. An aerial scout had to be sure he didn’t catch a bellyful of pellets. So I immediately pulled back to the rear of the column and did figure eights, watching the enemy base camp area literally explode.

After a few rounds forward by the lead tank, Strider Eight in the second M-48 came up on FM. “Darkhorse, we’re taking a little AK fire now that we’re starting to enter the bunker complex. Can you…”

There was a long pause in Strider’s transmission. Then he went on, “OK, Darkhorse, I’m back. We’ve got a slight problem down here. One of our tankers has hit an obstruction and thrown a track. We’re going to circle the wagons around him and get some people reshoeing. Keep us covered and we’ll get it fixed as fast as we can.”

Reconnecting a tank track is difficult even on a good day. In jungle terrain and oppressive heat, I knew that they had their work cut out for them. While that job was going on, I worked back into a 360-degree orbit over the armor, letting my circles out just enough so that I could sweep a corridor all around the halted column.

I was on my third pass around when Farrar hit the intercom. “My God, sir, there’s gooks down there!”

“Where?” I shot back.

“Right in front of the lead tank.”

“No,” I answered, “that’s our guys working on the tracks.” Just a second before I had looked down and seen one of our people with a tanker bar in his hand wave to me as we went over. I was sure that was what Farrar had seen, also.

“No, sir,” Al shouted back at me, “they’re dinks… they’re dinks! Go back, go back!”

I swung around hard and looked straight down. What I saw was a VC antitank team… two people! One man had an RPG-7 rocket launcher in his hands, camouflage cape on his back, and a back-mounted carrier for extra RPG rockets. The other Victor Charlie was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and was wearing the same paraphernalia on his chest and back as the first guy. He was the loader.

During the lull after the tank firing, while our guys were working on the busted track, these sons of bitches had sneaked in to within fifteen to twenty meters of the lead tank. And there they were, getting ready to blow M-48s!

Farrar opened up again with his M-60. As I swung around, I let go a blast with the minigun. Everybody in the tank column dove for cover.

Strider Eight shouted at me over the radio, “We’re friendlies down here, for Christ’s sake! Knock off the shooting. Do you read, Darkhorse? Check fire! Check fire!”

I swung the ship abruptly away from the point of contact and keyed Strider. “Negative! Negative! RPG team to your direct front. Danger close. Depress and shoot everything you’ve got—twelve o’clock!”

I could hear Strider Eight’s order to the column. “Full depression… main guns… fire canister… twelve o’clock!”

I wasn’t able to get the Loach any farther away than the middle of the armor column when the whole jungle to the front exploded. All three forward vehicles in the column fired canister. At the exact same time, the enemy team let go with an RPG round.

The best place for me was right where I was—oyer the middle of the armor column doing tight three sixties to stay out of the way of those canister rounds.

After the lead vehicles, had fired, all the other tanks let go with canister that literally sliced down the entire circumference of jungle around the column. Flame erupted, trees flew, debris rained down, dust and smoke billowed up in almost a perfect circle. And I continued my tight little orbits, right above the center of it all.

Suddenly my FM radio came back alive with Strider Eight. “OK, Darkhorse,” he said, “we’re going to check fire. We’d like One Six to jump out there in front and see what you’ve got now.”

I pulled the OH-6 out of the protective circles and headed back over the lead tanks toward the spot where Farrar had spotted the RPG team. Looking down, I came back up to Strider. “You’ve got five or six bad guys down here; all appear KIA. One of them has on a red scarf—damned if that’s not the first guy with a red scarf I’ve ever seen in Nam. They are all not more than fifteen meters dead front of your lead vehicle. You’ll need to send your infantry up to check ‘em out. I’m going to continue on over to the base camp to see what the live Charlies are doing.”

I arrived at Boundary Road just as the enemy fleeing out of the base camp was making contact with the blocking armor patrolling the road. This put Charlie in a hell of a fix. He was now caught between the advancing armor-infantry column on the south and the tanks waiting for him on the north.

With the ground forces now fully committed, there was not much more Koranda and I could contribute. But we could give Charlie one more kick in the ass before departing station. I re-marked the area with smoke and asked the Cobra to expend his ordnance in a good hose-down of the entire base camp.

I also contacted the Sidewinder FAC, who brought up a flight of F-100s with napalm, as well as an ARVN flight of Douglas A-l Skyraiders. After watching them put down their ordnance, Koranda and I broke station and headed back to Phu Loi, knowing that we’d be back in a day or two to make a BDA of the entire area.

It took about three days for our ground friendlies to finish mopping up the enemy contingent that had occupied the base camp. Most of the VC had to be flushed out of their bunkers. Those who wouldn’t flush were dealt with by 2/11 ‘s M-48s. They would simply poke the muzzle of the main gun into the bunker entrance and let go with a single 90mm canister round.

The ground guys found—not more than ten meters in front of the lead tank—the five dead bad guys that we had spotted and engaged from the air. There were actually three RPG gunners and two loaders armed with AK-47s. If there was a third loader, he either got away or was vaporized in the hullabaloo.

The three RPG weapons and gunners meant that Charlie was setting up to knock down the three lead tanks in the column. If that had happened, the rest of the column would have stalled behind the halted lead elements, then, one by one, been disposed of with RPG rounds.

Another interesting thing the ground guys discovered was that our tank 90s and the first RPG round from the enemy had indeed fired almost at the same instant. The lead tank had a huge gouge cut into the armor plate on the left side of the vehicle’s turret. The hastily aimed RPG round had actually hit the tank, but with only a glancing blow. The projectile did not penetrate or detonate when it hit. The nasty scar it left, however, was witness to the massive destructive punch that the Russian RPG-7 carried, even in a near miss.

I learned something from the experience, as I did every single time I flew in the aircraft in combat. I discovered that an up and running armored column can take a lot of the heat off a noisy helicopter. When tanks are nearby, they not only terrify the enemy, they also make so damned much noise that the helicopter overhead can’t be heard—thereby shifting Charlie’s attention from me to them. I was fairly certain that that was the case with the enemy RPG team.