Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

I punched the intercom and yelled at Parker. “Dump everything! Throw everything out you can, because we aren’t gonna make it otherwise!”

He reached over and broke off his M-60 ammo belt, then kicked his nearly full ammunition box out the cabin door. Sinor and Kauffman ripped off their chicken plates and threw them out on the ground beside the ship. But it didn’t help. We were still stuck.

I tore my eyes off the instruments long enough to see that Three Four had finished his second firing run and was headed out. By then the enemy troops had recovered from Paul’s last rocket rounds and were rushing toward us. We could see them coming at us. But we couldn’t shoot. My minigun was pointed in the wrong direction, and we’d just thrown Parker’s M-60 ammo overboard.

I looked back at the instruments. Everything was passing through the yellow arcs and climbing toward the red lines. Screw it! If I don’t get this bird out of here now, I ain’t gonna get it out of here… ever! I applied all the collective that was left, beyond the governor and as high as it would go, then started pushing the cyclic stick forward and back. Maybe rocking the skids back and forth lengthwise would dislodge them.

Pilots are very sensitive about not exceeding the operating limits of an aircraft. So I felt the pricks of hot sweat stab my face when I looked back at the instruments and saw that my gauges were no longer in the yellow arc. They were in the red. Not just in the red—the needles were hard up against the red pegs. I didn’t know what was keeping the OH-6 engine from blowing itself up.

As I pulled up harder on the collective, I sensed that the aircraft might have moved up a slight bit. I continued rocking the cyclic, pleading, “For God’s sake, hold together engine. Don’t quit on me now. Please… please get us out of here!”

Suddenly I heard a loud, slurping, suction* sound. Then all at once the ship broke loose and popped out of the mud. Under all that power, it literally catapulted fifty to sixty feet in the air, as though we had been shot out of a cannon.

“We’re out!” I yelled. I kicked hard left pedal and yanked the cyclic over. Responding instantly, the bird went into a tight climbing left-hand turn to put my tail to the enemy.

Grins broke out all around. Kauffman reached over and gave me a grateful swat on the helmet. “Hey, man… all right! We did it… we’re out!”

We all looked back at the little clearing where we had been just seconds before. Charlie had overrun the spot and his AK rounds trailed us as we squirted away.

Thinking that he had successfully cheated the hangman, Kauffman added his personal gesture of triumph to the moment. He leaned out the door, presented a stiff middle finger to the enemy, and yelled, “And fuck you, too!”

The brief celebration ended for me as I lowered the power on the engine and saw that my torque and TOT needles were still tight against the red pegs. That told me for sure. I had flat-out lunched the engine. God only knew how much power I was pulling when the OH-6A finally popped loose and lifted out of the mud. The army allowed you to operate—if necessary—up to thirty minutes in the yellow arc. But even in an emergency, the pilot was never to exceed five to ten seconds with indicators in the red. I wondered what the army would do to a pilot who had destroyed a $20,000 engine.

To hell with that, I thought. The amazing thing was that we were out of there, and the engine was still running, still carrying four heavy people back home to Phu Loi. And with the needles still in the red.

When everybody was home safe and sound, we learned that Two Six had put the ARPs down in the contact area and secured Sinor’s airplane. Sidewinder had put in the fast movers, planting a lot of heavy ordnance on Charlie, chasing him out of the area. Pipe Smoke then went in and lifted out Sinor’s crippled bird.

The Hughes tech rep examined my OH-6 with a fine-toothed comb, and he couldn’t believe what he found under the engine cowling doors. Every piece of machinery in the hot end of the engine was burned to a crisp! He couldn’t figure out how that engine continued to run without blowing up. Neither could I.

But it took Kauffman to provide the last word for the day. He came over to talk to me after we had set down at home plate. “Well, god-damnit, One Six, one thing you can be sure about. It’ll be a long cold day in hell before I ever fly around lima lima again behind a friggin’ scout ship!”

Once in awhile the Outcasts would catch a mission up on the Saigon River. On 22 August, Dean Sinor and I were assigned the VR-1 flight to recon a section of the Big Blue. The area started down around the Mushroom and FSB Tennessee, then went on up northwest to the outskirts of the village of Dau Tieng. Troop ops had briefed us that division was experiencing an increase in the enemy sampans infiltrating down the Saigon in that area. The sampans were known to be carrying soldiers and supplies downriver to support enemy operations against us in the northwest Trapezoid.

Our job was to put early morning aerial scout cover over the navy riverine and 1st Division engineer boats, to help them search out unauthorized river traffic and, more specifically, to track the ground movements of any bad guys who might have come ashore from enemy sampans. Along that stretch of the Big Blue, there were no settlements or villages, so no Vietnamese civilians should be out on the river. Also, no friendly military troops were authorized to travel the river between the Mushroom and Dau Tieng. Therefore, any craft or people discovered on or in the water, except our riverine boats on patrol, were immediately considered to be unfriendly.

None of the infiltrating enemy sampans risked traveling on the river during daylight hours. This would have exposed them to observation either by our aerial scouts or friendly ground troops. So the enemy moved on the river at night. By day they tied up, carefully camouflaged their sampans, then moved into the heavy foliage near the river.

Sinor and I left Phu Loi at about 5 A.M. It was still dark as we passed over the Iron Triangle en route to our search starting point near FSB Tennessee. From the air, Vietnam at night looked black and desolate, since the countryside was mostly without electricity. Therefore, the terrain below was totally unrecognizable.

The early morning, however, was always the best time for our aerial reconnaissance missions. The smoke and haze had cleared from the air and we could see much better.

As Sinor and I flew along at altitude, I lit another cigarette and decided that it was going to be a fine morning for checking Charlie on the river and seeing what mischief he might be up to. I didn’t realize, watching that fine dawn, that I would still be along the Saigon River some sixteen hours later, watching the darkness envelop us again—from the ground.

Several U.S. fire support bases were strung along the eastern side of the Saigon in the area we were going to work: Junction City and Aachen were just downriver from the Mushroom, Tennessee was located right in the stem of the Mushroom, and Mahone (known after 14 September 1969 as FSB Kien honoring ARVN Lt. Col. Thein Ta Kien, KIA) was situated upriver and located at the edge of a large rubber plantation just southeast of Dau Tieng. Troop ops had instructed me to drop out of altitude and pick up the river at the Mushroom, then move my search pattern to the northwest along the Saigon, checking out both banks and tributaries as I went, as well as creating a search corridor about four to five kilometers wide on the east side of the river.

As Sinor and I neared the Mushroom, I radioed him. “Hey, Thirty-one, will you be able to see me down there? It’s still pretty dark.”