Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

But we weren’t the only ones shooting! When we opened up, so did about a dozen enemy right beneath us. There were obviously more enemy soldiers in that neck of the woods. I could feel and hear the ship taking numerous solid hits.

As I reacted to get the ship out of there, a red flash of light from the right side of the instrument panel caught my eye. It was the engine-out visible warning light. Then I heard the W-H-O-O-P… W-H-O-O-P… W-H-O-O-P of the low RPM audio warning signal in my headphones. That, I knew, was word from the final authority that I had lost all power in the engine. At that moment I was about forty feet off the ground and doing maybe fifty knots. I had just enough time tp get on the radio and shout, “One Six is hit. I’ve lost my engine. I’m going down… I’m going down!”

My next moves were automatic. I dumped the collective all the way to the floor, pulled the cyclic back as far as it would go, and managed to cyclic climb to about 150 feet. With that little extra altitude I was able to enter autorotation and hope that I could get the ship down without splattering us all over the countryside.

I yelled to Parker, “Get your feet in, Jimbo, we’re going down!”

Seeing an open space ahead, I aimed the ship toward an old Rome-plow cut. It was located just to the east side of Highway 14 and about three hundred yards to the southeast of fire support base Mahone. I was coming in from the north, right down the long north-south plow cut.

Quickly losing what altitude I had left, I dropped the ship down. We landed hard, but the skids took the punch; from what I could tell right away, we didn’t do any more damage to the aircraft.

I sat there in the cockpit for a fleeting second, thankful that we were down. The engine was completely dead and, as I looked up through the bubble, I noticed that the rotors were hardly moving. They were dead, too.

Popping my seat belt loose, I radioed Sinor. “We’re down, Three One. We’re OK… we’re exiting the aircraft.”

“Roger, One Six, I’m getting the other team,” came right back.

I reached down, flipped off the battery^switch, and started to jump out of the aircraft. But I had forgotten to take off my helmet, let alone unplug my headset. My head jerked as I started to roll out of the ship, and the communications plug broke off the helmet.

Parker jumped out right behind me, his M-60 in hand. He trailed a long belt of ammo behind him as we ran for a little berm that had been pushed up by the Rome plow. It was only about ten feet away from the ship and offered some protection from the tree line we were facing on the east.

Dropping down behind the dirt pile, we took a quick look around. It was beginning to get dark, and that concerned me. I was suddenly struck with the fear that if the ARPs didn’t get to us before dark, the bad guys might grab us before our people could find us.

I told Parker to set up his machine gun so he could cover the jungle in front of us, and to blast anything that moved. I knew that the ARPs couldn’t be very close to us yet, whereas the bad guys we had just shot at were only about sixty yards away.

Then I remembered the M-79 in the back cabin of the bird. That would give us a little heavier firepower if the enemy decided to rush us. I ran back to the ship and grabbed the grenade launcher and a bandolier of ammunition. No sooner did I get back to the dirt pile when I heard a burst of AK-47 fire coming from my left front at about sixty to eighty yards. The rounds cracked as they went over our heads and we both ducked, almost burying our faces in the reddish earth.

The bad guys obviously knew we were down and could see our aircraft. But they probably weren’t sure where the crew was. The AK fire seemed to be aimed at our ship.

My first response was to get on my PRC-10 survival radio and call Sinor. “Hey, Three One, we got bad guys shooting at us down here. I know about where they are, and I’m going to put some M-79 on ‘em. Let me know when you see the smoke from my rounds, then hit the smoke with rockets.”

“Roger,” Sinor answered. “We got the ARPs moving your way. Put some M-79 on Charlie and I’ll roll on your smoke.”

I laid in several rounds of 40mm in the direction I thought the enemy fire had come from. On their detonation Sinor rolled in from the east, put down rockets, and broke to roll in again. He blasted the target area two more times before the ARPs got close. Then he told me that I could expect to see their slicks hovering in right at our six o’clock on Highway 14 at any moment.

By now it was almost completely dark. I could see the interior lights of the slicks coming up the highway. Then the rifle platoon was on the ground. They moved right on through our dirt pile position and set up a defensive perimeter in front of us.

I was thinking about what a long day this was turning out to be, when Bob Harris walked up. “How bad is the ship, One Six?”

“Not too bad,” I answered. “I got a round through the engine, but if Three One can get Pipe Smoke in here, we can still get the ship out of here tonight. I sure as hell don’t want to spend the night out here!”

While we were waiting for the maintenance chopper, Parker popped the Loach’s blades and we took all our gear out of the ship.

In about thirty minutes the aircraft recovery unit from the maintenance unit came hovering in. It was a Huey, which had enough muscle power to lift out a scout bird. As the Huey hovered over the Loach, a rigger was dropped to put a canvas rigging around the top of the aircraft. Then the rigger hooked the OH-6 onto the end of a cable and motioned for the Huey to lift the little bird up and out.

With our ship gone, Parker and I loaded aboard one of the slicks for the ride back to Phu Loi. On the way back, my head bobbed as I fought off exhaustion. I realized that we had ended the day in the dark. The guys back at the base are probably wondering what happened to us, I thought.

When we landed back at Phu Loi, I stopped in at operations. I found out that the last sixteen hours had been worth it. We had jumped a battalion-sized force in the rubber, and they had come in by boats for the specific purpose of launching a surprise attack on the southern flank of FSB Mahone. But the enemy had been contained, Mahone had been alerted in time to react, and Charlie’s whole show was flushed down the tube.

I was feeling pretty good as I finished up in ops and walked over to the hootch. When I pushed open the door, I expected someone to say, “Hey, man. How in the hell ya’ doin? We were beginning to worry about you.”

Instead, I found my hootch mates huddled together, playing poker. They hardly glanced up. One of them, between reaching for his pack of cigarettes and dealing the cards, finally looked over at me. “Hey, boss, hear you screwed up another Loach today!”

During July, August, and September, the Outcasts were training some new Loach pilots from B Company of the 1st Aviation Battalion. Their outfit was located across the base area from us at Phu Loi.

The Bravo Company guys operated a platoon of attack helicopters called the Rebels, used primarily in general support of the division; a platoon of Hueys called the Longhorns, which provided the division’s command and control aircraft work; and a platoon of OH-6s called the Ponies, which flew the division ATO on liaison missions. The 1st Aviation Battalion commander, Colonel Allen, had the idea that in order to maximize use of all the helicopters in B Company beyond just general divisional support, he would get their crews trained to act also as hunter-killer teams like those in D Troop.

That’s where the Outcasts came in. It became our duty to take the Pony pilots and train them as scouts. The first one we worked with was Pony One Six, their platoon leader.