Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

As I came up on the man’s hiding place, I keyed the intercom again. “Ready… drop!” The grenade sailed down right into the center of the bushes. I accelerated away just as the explosion erupted in the vegetation, sending up arms of hot-burning white phosphorous.

I called the gun immediately. “OK, Three Four, target my Willie Pete. Hit my mark, hit my mark! One Six is out.”

As I headed out I glanced back at the little vegetated area. The man was running frantically out the other side of the scrub. Patches of his clothing were burning fiercely where fragments of the white phosphorous had landed on him.

He had taken about five steps when Three Four’s first rockets came in. They were the last he ever took. One of Fishman’s rockets impacted directly between the man’s legs.

As Three Four rolled out and away from his firing pass, I got on UHF. “Good rocks, Three Four. One Six is back in. You better scramble the ARPs because I’ve still got beaucoup people moving on the ground and lots of equipment lying out in the open all over the place.”

Of course, the guys back at the troop had been monitoring our transmissions, so Three Four’s request was almost after the fact. The next thing I heard over the radio was, “OK, Three Four, this is Darkhorse Three. Stand by over the target area. ARPs are saddled up and about to be underway, and I’ve scrambled another hunter-killer team to relieve you. Stand by.”

As I arced back down over the clearing, more enemy rounds came up at the airplane. I jigged and jogged, trying to keep the remaining bad guys corralled and to convince them that I still had ammunition. Parker had resorted to a backup M-16, which he promptly emptied on anything that moved. Then he hauled out a twelve-gauge Ithaca pump shotgun that he had stashed under his jump seat and shot it point-blank until it was dry.

I followed his lead and pulled my Colt .357 Python out of the shoulder holster. I was able to shoot the big revolver out the cockpit door by hooking the collective stick on top of my left leg, holding the cyclic with my right hand, while resting my left elbow on my right forearm and firing with my left hand. I’m sure I didn’t hit a damned thing with the Colt, but I may have scared a few NVA to death. Every time I fired that .357, which had Super Vel Magnum cartridges in it, flames shot about a foot and half out the muzzle and it barked like a howitzer.

As I emptied the last .357 round, I got a call from Bob Davis (One Three) telling me that he and his gun were now on station. While I was taking him on a high-speed pass of the battle area, I heard him say, “Damn!”

“What’s the matter, One Three?” I jumped back at him. “What have you got… what the hell have you got?”

“Damn, One Six, I’ve got nothin’, and that’s the trouble. I count about twenty-two bodies down there and you guys didn’t leave a thing for us!”

On the way back to Phu Loi (I never did make the meeting in Dau Tieng) I keyed the intercom and told Parker, “Let’s get a red smoke rigged on your M-60 so we can let the boys back home know that we stung Charlie today.”

I heard him chuckle. “Sir, the red smoke is already there.” I glanced back and saw it already wired to the muzzle of his machine gun.

We made our traditional pass of the base trailing a stream ofbil-lowing red smoke. The field personnel waved and cheered us on. Hundreds of people worked on the base, and when the hunter-killer teams came back home trailing red smoke, you could hear them slapping each other on the back and yelling, “Hey, our guys did good today!”

It was a morale booster for us, too. We knew we were doing the job that we had been sent to Vietnam to do. Maybe, just maybe, we had shortened the war a few minutes or hours.

As quiet and reserved as Jim Parker was, his emotions showed as we came back into base and settled the bird down near the revetment. My emotions probably showed, too.

I cut the battery switch, then twisted around in my seat to look back at my crew chief through the open panel in the bulkhead. Jimbo broke into a broad grin and shot me a big thumbs-up. That said to me, You did good, sir. We stuck it to Charlie pretty hard today.

I nodded and smiled back, then gave him a thumbs-up. That was my way of saying, Good job yourself, Georgia farm boy. I wouldn’t have survived that engagement today with any lesser man in the crew chiefs cabin.

By that time, Paul Fishman had walked over to the ship. He clapped his arm around my shoulder as we walked together toward the ops bunker. “Goddamnit, Mills,” he said, “you scare the shit out of me! If you don’t quit mixing it up down there for as long as you have a tendency to do, you’re going to get your ass shot full of holes. And I’ll just be sitting up there at fifteen hundred feet watching it happen!”

I told him the truth when I answered, “I scare the shit out of myself sometimes, Pauly, and this was one of those days that I nearly scared myself to death!”

The base maintenance guys went over my OH-6 after we got back, and their report scared me even more. Altogether, about twenty to twenty-five enemy rounds had impacted the airplane. My airspeed indicator had been shot out. The altimeter had a round through it, smashing it to pieces. The armor plate under Parker’s seat had been hit twice. The armor around my pilot’s seat had been hit several times from the rear, indicating that enemy bullets had gone through the crew chief’s compartment, missing Parker but smashing into the back of my seat armor before ricocheting somewhere else in the ship.

Also, Parker’s M-60 door gun itself had caught an AK-47 round near the front sight, right between the barrel and the gas operating tube. The almost impossible hit put a neat half-moon gouge in the bottom of the barrel and blew the gas cylinder right off the gun.

Then there were four or five NVA bullet holes in the Plexiglas of the bubble, a couple more in the tail boom of the aircraft, and at least three through the rotor blades. For good measure, one AK slug had gone into one side of the engine compartment and exited on the other—completely missing any engine vital, without which we would have gone down into the middle of those thirty or so bad guys.

The way I figured it, between the NVA and our Loach, in just the 120 seconds of that battle, somewhere between eight thousand and ten thousand rounds of ammunition had been fired in a jungle clearing no bigger than half a football field. And through it all, that miraculous little OH-6 kept flying. Even more miraculous was the fact that neither Parker nor I was hit. Man… we both must have been living right!

That same day when the ARPs got back from their ground sweep, we found out just how much havoc we had actually caused those enemy soldiers we caught on the paddy dike. We learned that there were two POWs and twenty-six KIA—four more dead than the twenty-two bodies Bob Davis had quickly counted from the air when he relieved me. Also, ARP leader Bob Harris brought back a load of enemy weapons and equipment that his platoon had found strewn around on the ground after the fight was over. Among the recovered items were numerous late-issue AK-47 assault rifles, a 60mm mortar, a skid-mounted SGM machine gun, and two Russian handguns.

But, to me, the most interesting piece in the lot was the rice cooking pot that was strapped to the back of the soldier I caught running off into the jungle. The ARPs had found it on the jungle trail, took it off the body, and brought it back to show me the twenty-four minigun slug holes right up through the bottom of the pot!

I hit the sack that night having already been told that, for the day’s action, Parker and I had been written up for the Silver Star medal (my second such award). That was a good feeling, but not half as good as also knowing that the aeroscouts had finally discovered a fair-sized element of the elusive Dong Nai Regiment.