Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

The Scramble 1 scout that day was Bob Davis (One Three). He and his Cobra were launched immediately and were quickly at the contact scene to join up with VR-1 for briefing.

Davis was known in the troop for his happy-go-lucky, charismatic radio chatter, but when I heard him call his Cobra, I knew the situation was bad. When he dropped down in the contact area Davis lost his cool. “Holy shit… h-o-oly s-h-e-e-it! I’m taking lots of ground fire. But look at the dinks! I got dinks everywhere down here. I got bunkers everywhere. Everywhere I look there’s bunkers and everywhere I look there’s people! There must be a hundred unfriendly sons a bitches in here!”

While he was talking, I could hear the M-60 chatter in the background as Davis’s crew chief, John Studer, fired out the rear cabin door. Then Davis came back up on the intercom to his crew chief. “Quit firing! Quit firing! We don’t know where the ARPs are; we can’t shoot!”

Then Davis’s Cobra broke in. “One Three, you don’t have to stay down there if it’s too hot. It’s your call.” Davis responded that he would stay down, keep circling, and see if he could get a handle on how big the enemy base camp was.

Faced with the facts that his ARP platoon was pinned down, that Cobra gunships on the scene couldn’t shoot, and that artillery could not be called in, the troop commander decided to go airborne in his C and C and size up the tactical situation at the crater for himself. Once over the contact area, Major Moore elected to call in the infantry reaction force. This was an infantry unit of about company size that the troop could activate when ARPs on the ground needed backup. They were on combat standby and available within a fifteen- to twenty-minute time frame. With Major Moore’s decision, they were immediately loaded and transported directly to the contact area.

Jumping out of their slicks at the LZ and rushing across low scrub and underbrush to relieve Lieutenant Harris, the backup company was stopped cold in its tracks. The enemy opened up on them from the base camp and cut Harris’s relief to pieces! The infantry company, now stung by the hail of accurate enemy fire, began shooting back into the base camp area.

I could hear Bob Harris yelling into his radio. “Cease firing! Cease firing! Goddamnit, you’re shooting into my people! You’re shooting into our guys!”

Confusion reigned, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I turned to Darkhorse Three. “I’m going up there. I’m taking my remaining scouts to Dau Tieng so we can react to the fight.” I burst out of the ops bunker and headed back to the hootch to get Jim Bruton and crew chief Jim Downing. It seemed like just seconds before we were on the pad, in the bird, and off with Chuck Koranda (Three Nine) piloting my Cobra.

Just as soon as we got to the contact point, I dropped down low and got on One Three’s tail so he could brief me. We had to maintain sixty to seventy knots because VC rounds were coming from all over the place. Ground fire out of that enemy base camp was as bad or worse than any I had ever seen. Davis was beside himself as he filled me in on the critical situation below. His voice was up about three octaves.

“Holy shit, One Six, there’s nothing we can do down here except get our asses shot off! There’s dinks everywhere! It’s all screwed up. Four Six is pinned down in the crater with a badly wounded guy who’s been shot in the head and needs more blood. They’re going to lose him if he doesn’t get more blood. And now we’ve got the reaction company of infantry pinned down with them, shooting back into our own people in the base camp. Man, we just plain got a shit pot full of trouble right here in Dodge!”

The words were no sooner out of One Three’s mouth when over the net came the troop commander’s voice. He had been flying around in his C and C Huey somewhere near the contact point. “I’m going on the ground to take command of the operation,” said Major Moore very succinctly. “One Six, find me a lima zulu!”

My first reaction was that Major Moore was a cavalry officer. What in the hell was he going to do down on the ground in a strictly infantry situation. He ought to stay in his C and C and call his shots from there. But as that old saying goes, he’s the boss.

I left Davis and scouted out a place big enough to get Six’s Huey in and out, and that would provide some cover from the base camp’s line of fire.

The C and C ship hovered into the LZ, landed, and out went Six and his artillery observer, Lieutenant Allen. Allen had his PRC-25 radio with him, and they hadn’t moved fifteen feet from their helicopter when Major Moore’s now more concerned voice came back up on the radio.

“This is Darkhorse Six. They’re all around us! We’re taking fire. We’re pinned down!”

“Well, shit!” I muttered.

So now, besides the ARP platoon and the backup infantry company, we had the troop commander and his artillery observer down and ineffective. Here I was on station over all of this mess, and there didn’t seem to be one damned thing I could do to help the situation.

Not knowing where else to start, I radioed Bob Harris. “Four Six, this is One Six. I’m just coming on station. Seems to me that you guys in the ARPs get all the no-sweat details. How’s it looking down there?”

He came right back. “This is Four Six, One Six. Good to hear your voice. We’re in a world of hurt! One man’s hit—shot in the head. We’ve used all our blood expander. Doc says he’s still alive but we need a blood expander kit fast or he’s not going to make it.”

“How’s everybody else?” I asked.

“I’ve got point and his element out there somewhere in front of me,” Harris continued. “I can’t see them… I don’t know where they are. I don’t know if they’re dead or alive, but we can hear a man moaning, and every time he moans, Charlie shoots.”

“How can I help you?”

“You can start by seeing if you can find Gratton and his point backup. Also see if you can get Dustoff in here to pick up my head wound. That Huey will make a hell of a target, but he needs help fast. We’ve got to try to get Dustoff in here.”

Before I could respond to Harris, Koranda in the Cobra broke in, “Four Six, this is Three Niner. That’s a roger on Dustoff. I’ll work on getting a medevac up here.” Then Koranda went off frequency to get that process started again.

I began looking for Sergeant Gratton. I dropped down to about forty feet, making tight little circles over the area to the front of the crater. Maintaining my airspeed at about sixty knots, I jinked to the left and right, trying to make the little OH-6 a more elusive target.

There was plenty of ground fire coming up, but I was jinking and moving fast enough that rounds aimed right at the ship were actually passing in back of my tail. Thank God, I thought, Charlie hasn’t quite got the hang of leading a target!

I was cussing to myself because I couldn’t return any of that ground fire. The friendlies and enemy were too close together for us to shoot. We could see all kinds of Cong in their bunkers and the trenches that connected their firing positions, and it was frustrating not to be able to blow them away.

The enemy had really played it cool. They had allowed Harris’s men to walk right into the middle of the base camp before springing the ambush, and they knew that we couldn’t shoot at them without hitting our own people.

I couldn’t fire in any case because the minigun had been removed from my bird before leaving Phu Loi. We had to reduce weight to make room to carry Jim Bruton, who was flying as an observer in the left front seat. Jim Downing’s M-60 in the back cabin was all the firepower we had.

After two passes, I spotted Four Six’s point men. They were lying about forty meters northeast of Harris’s crater, one on his back looking up at me and the other face down on the ground. I knew Gratton from the times I had been on ground missions with the ARPs. He was the one on his back.