Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

With the weight of the minigun and M-60 ammo gone, Vad dropped down into the rice paddy and the three men jumped into the water and started wading toward the ship. Two of the guys climbed into the back cabin with the crew chief, the other in the front left with Vad. With the additional weight, the skinny, thin-skidded scout bird began to settle fast into the slimy mud of the rice paddy.

Wanting to haul ass before the Loach sank in too far, Vad poured on the coal. But the ship didn’t move; it was held down tight by the suction of the mud.

Thinking much clearer than I had when faced with the same problem just days before, Vad immediately yelled for everybody to throw their chicken plate armor and everything else possible out of the aircraft. Then he pulled an armpit full of collective, which immediately freed the plane and sent it to a hover a good fifty feet above the surface of the rice paddy.

When everybody was back at the base, the score was added up. Pony One Six was only lightly wounded and soon recovered. Hayes limped around the area for a few days, favoring that part of his body that took the full impact of the M-60 shoulder stock. Jon Gregory earned and received the Bronze Star with “V” device for his ground actions. Phil Carriss and Joe Vad were each awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross as the key players in the rescue.

I was proud of the way the Darkhorse guys reacted to the situation and were able to successfully extract the people on the ground. It was a dangerous area flush with enemy troops.

But I must admit that I was less than happy with Pony One Six. He had, in my estimation, pretty much brought the situation on himself. Obviously, every scout ran the risk of getting shot down every time he took off on a combat mission. But he should always do everything he could to try and avoid it. That was the bone I had to pick with the Pony platoon leader.

After finding out that his leg wound was minor and that he was feeling OK, I went to talk to him. I didn’t pull any punches. I strongly emphasized what the experienced Darkhorse scouts had been telling them all along: You just cannot hover. You cannot make a lot of slow orbits over a target just looking! The experienced pilots who do those things are hanging it out; the inexperienced pilots who do those things are asking to get themselves, and their crew chiefs, killed.

“You’ve got to impress on your people to start fast, stay fast, and come back in from different directions and at different speeds,” I told him. “As your ability to read sign improves, you’ll begin to discover that you won’t have to make so many orbits over a target. You’ll see more in a single fast pass than you will in three or four slow orbits. But if you don’t live to reach that degree of maturity, it’s not going to make any difference to you anyway. Do you read?”

The place to let off a little steam—in fact, the total social life for the officers in D Troop—was the officers’ mess, or the O club, as we called it. We took our lunch and supper there, drank there, saw movies there, played “Liar’s Dice” there, and shot a lot of bullshit there.

Social activities usually got started at about 1600 or 1700, when everybody began to gather for some drinks and a few throws of the dice. Then we’d sit down for a usual night’s dinner of roast beef, wax beans, and Jello (which was sometimes laced with pimiento bits and diced raw onion).

Following supper, it was generally back to the bar for another drink and a few more rounds of Liar’s Dice while we waited for dark and the movie to begin. Then, after the movie, somewhere around 2100, most of the guys went back to their hootches and hit the sack. Those 0330 calls to get ready for first light VRs separated the social from the hard drinkers. Those who stayed after the movie for more drinks usually closed up the club at midnight.

One evening a few of us decided to socialize for a while after the movie. We were soon joined by a couple of new lieutenants from the 82d Airborne. Just south of us and across a ditch from our base was the 82d Airborne Division Replacement Station. New 82d troops came here before going to the field, and those in the field came back here for stand-down and R and R.

The 82d guys would sometimes come over into our area to do a little hell raising—fire their weapons at our buildings, throw CS gas grenades into our showers, disrupt our movies. We took their horseplay in a friendly spirit, mainly because some of our guys occasionally made “shopping” trips over to the 82d side of the ditch. It was funny how some of the things desperately needed in D Troop were in abundant supply over in the 82d. So we got along swell, and even welcomed 82d Airborne officers to our O club to socialize.

On this night a couple of young, new, in-country 82d officers walked into the club and sat down at the bar between Bill Jones (One Eight) and me. After a few minutes, Jones (as drunk as I ever saw him) and I began getting on these two lieutenants because they were decked out as though they were ready to stand a stateside general inspection. They were all dressed up in their greens and jump boots, with a second lieutenant bar shining like a beacon on each shoulder. They had Airborne and Ranger patches all neatly sewn on. In short, they were a sight to behold at a combat base in the middle of Vietnam.

About that time, Joe Vad wandered by. He took one look at these two bright and shiny objects and decided they deserved a friendly verbal shot across the bow.

“My God,” he said to them, “you guys look like real snake-eating killers. Do you airborne soldiers really eat live snakes?”

To which one of the lieutenants replied, “You’re damned right! We’re airborne Rangers, and one of the lesser things we do is eat real live snakes.”

That kind of bantering kept going back and forth, with our two airborne guests extolling how tough and combat-wise they both were. We egged them on, knowing that neither of them had ever been out of the replacement station.

While this was going on, Bill Jones just sat there on his bar stool, drinking away. Vad and I didn’t even think he was paying attention, because his eyes would close once in awhile, his head would nod, and his elbow would periodically slip off the bar.

Then suddenly old One Eight came to life. He quietly slid off the bar stool and disappeared out the front door of the club. We thought he had reached his limit and was heading back to the hootch to’hit the sack.

In about five minutes, however, Jones was back. He remounted his bar stool, turned to the two green lieutenants, and slurred, “Are you guys really snake eaters? I mean, do you fierce, hard-hearted airborne soldiers really eat live snakes?”

They smirked at each other. “You got it, man. You’re fuckin’ A we do!”

“Well then,” Jones mumbled, “I couldn’t find a snake, but what about this toad frog? Can you eat this poor, little ole toad frog, caught fresh just now out in the perimeter of Vietnam’s famous Quarter Cav aeroscouts?”

Jones pulled a huge toad out of his fatigue jacket and plopped the bug-eyed, wiggling thing down on top of the bar. Vad broke into a crazy laugh, and I just sat there staring at that struggling mass of croaking warts and ugliness. Apparently, Jones, rousing himself from his aleoholic lethargy, was determined to put our two airborne lieutenants to the acid test.

Eyeihg the by-now ill-humored toad, the two hot RLOs (real live officers) saw their masculinity threatened. Even so, they didn’t want anything to do with the kicking creature that Jones was holding down on the bar. After a couple of quick glances at each other and at the toad, they began to allow that maybe they really weren’t snake eaters, that they didn’t have to put up with that kind of chicken shit.