Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

“I think it will be OK, One Six,” Sinor answered. “But if I can’t track you when you get down, you can always turn on your anticollision lights.”

Before heading down, I needed to set the shoot-not shoot guidelines for the day with Parker. I came up on the intercom. “We’re ready to go lima lima… standard rules, Jimbo—if you see anything that looks like it’s hostile, and it checks hostile, go ahead and open up, then we’ll deal with it from there. Any questions?”

“Nope,” Parker answered. “Let ‘er rip, Lieutenant.”

I kicked the ship over into a descending right-hand spiral. The dropdown put me at treetop level right in the middle of the Mushroom. I could see some small cooking fires and a few lights within fire support base Tennessee. Our guys were just beginning to crank up for the day. They waved as Parker and I zipped over the base at about thirty feet and seventy knots. Then I pulled an easy right turn that headed me back to the northwest, to a point on the Big Blue where the river began to form the western outline of the Mushroom. That’s where I would begin my scouting orbits. At this point, also, Highway 14 snugged up close on the east side of the river. That gave me the opportunity to set up my scout pattern to sweep as far as the west riverbank on one end, then east past Highway 14 and two to three kilometers into the countryside beyond.

As the day brightened and we started our sweeps, the river was quiet. Moving our orbits farther north toward a fairly sharp bend in the river, we saw a pair of American boats pulled up tight against the west bank, just downstream from the bend. One boat was a navy patrol boat, riverine (PBR), working upriver from its base at Phu Cuong. The other was what we called a Swift boat. Larger than the PBR, it was reminiscent of an old Louisiana oil field construction boat. Both types of craft were jet propelled, had a shallow draft, and carried plenty of weapons. In addition, they were outfitted with Starlight Scopes and searchlights for operating along the river at night.

The two boats were situated so they could intercept any craft coming downriver around the bend. They had probably been stationed there most of the night, watching and waiting for anything on the river that tried to run the curfew.

We waved and the boat crewmen waved back. I moved our orbits to the north and lamented that so far we hadn’t spotted a thing on or near the river.

As the Saigon snaked along under us toward the northwest, I noticed a small tributary (Rach Suoi) that emptied into the Big Blue. The stream was on the west bank of the river and headed off to the northwest into the 25th Division area of operations. Though technically the junction of the Rach Suoi and the Song Saigon was not in the 1st Division territory, boundary responsibility was, out of necessity, a little loose. The two divisions frequently worked back and forth with artillery and whatever other means were necessary to cover each other, and to keep Charlie from operating more freely at a point where U.S. tactical unit operations were split. So I lengthened the western swing of my orbit to take a look around this area. It paid off immediately.

As we dropped in low over the north bank of the tributary, both Parker and I spotted a group of sampans tied up not more than fifty meters back from where the two rivers joined. The vegetation was extremely heavy and grew right down to the riverbank. But we could still see the shapes of several sampans huddled in a niche of the shoreline and carefully covered with fresh nipa palm branches.

No people were around, though. I headed off over the tree line and searched in vain for several minutes. There were no signs of trails, camp fires, or bunkers—nothing that told us where the people from the sampans had gone. But at least we had found six enemy boats, and it was time to go back and deal with them.

I keyed Parker on the intercom. “I don’t want to waste the time or ammo trying to bust those boats with the M-60. Grab your M-79 and I’ll hover over near the sampans while you thump ‘em off with grenade rounds.”

Parker reached under his jump seat where he stowed the 40mm M-79, and loaded up. I came in slowly, keeping the moored sampans about forty feet from my right door. As I came to a dead hover, I heard the first high-pitched c-r-u-m-p erupt from the back cabin. Then another… another… and then three more times. Six shots from Parker’s grenade launcher, and six enemy sampans quickly settled to the muddy bottom of the Rach Suoi River. I looked over my right shoulder and gave Parker a sharp thumbs-up.

Circling back to the Saigon, we resumed our regular east-west search pattern. We saw no river traffic or signs of enemy activity ashore. It began to look as though six sampans would be our score for the day.

Finally, another seven kilometers up the river, we came to another tributary. This one took off north from the east bank of the Big Blue. Tom Chambers, my Cobra front-seater who read the maps, told me that this little stream was called Rach Can Nom. Since we had had some luck in the other tributary, I pulled in over Rach Can Nom at treetop level, looking for another jackpot.

But there was nothing doing. After a few orbits, I thought about canning the operation and heading back to the Saigon. Before doing that, however, I decided to move a little farther upstream and make a couple of patterns beyond the point where the tributary passed under the Highway 14 bridge. The stream turned back east right about there and passed by the little village of Ben Chui on the south and a large rubber plantation on the north. Just beyond the rubber trees to the north was our fire support base Mahone (Kien).

As I passed over the Highway 14 bridge, I was startled to see six more sampans and a motorized junk pulled up against the north bank. I keyed Parker. “Damn! Did you see that?”

“What do you suppose we got, Lieutenant?”

“That motorized junk must be thirty-five feet long, Jimbo—a hell of a good-sized riverboat to just be out on a little pleasure cruise. You can bet it’s not friendly, and neither are the people who brought it in here.”

Convinced that we had uncovered something pretty heavy, I radioed Sinor in the Cobra. “Bingo, Three One. We just found a small navy down here. We’ve got at least a thirty-five-foot inboard-outboard motorized junk, supported by six more sampans. They’re pulled up on the north bank just beyond the bridge. I’m damned sure there’s a whole lot of stuff down here, and it doesn’t look friendly.”

“See any people, One Six?”

“No people right around the boats, Three One…. Haven’t had a chance to look around yet, but there’s got to be a whole lot of bad guys on the ground near these boats. I recommend that you go ahead and roll the ARPs. Let’s get ‘em started out here because the hair on the back of my neck is telling me that there’s trouble brewin’.”

It was about 0610 by then. An ARP scramble that early in the morning might catch the troop before the lift Hueys had even been hovered out of their revetments. Once that loudspeaker blared “scramble,” I knew that the ARPs would be on their way out in short order.

Since we had a few minutes to wait for the ARPs, I told Sinor that I was going to head up toward FSB Mahone and look around. Mahone was just a few hundred meters over the rubber trees to the north.

I left the river and took up tree-level orbits right over the plantation. Parker and I peered down into the trees, looking for any signs of the people from the boats.

Suddenly Parker came on the intercom. “I didn’t shoot, sir, but we got bad guys under us.”

I broke hard right to pull the Loach away from the spot. “What have you got?”

“There are bad guys under us in the rubber. They’ve got camouflage capes on their backs, and as we went over they ran east. I’m positive I saw ‘em.”