Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

A few minutes out of Phu Loi I radioed ahead and made the mistake of telling operations, “I’m coming in. One Six is hit. I have been treated at FSB Contigny, but I’m going to need help getting in off the flight line. Get me some help off the line when I get down.”

Unfortunately my help was Davis and Willis. I could hear Willis laughing even before I got the aircraft shut down.

“Tell me it’s not true,” he kept saying. “Tell me it’s not true that you’ve been shot in the ass!”

“OK, OK, you miserable bastard/’ I answered. “I’m shot in the ass. Now help me get the hell out of this aircraft!”

“My God,” Willis went on, “get an ambulance, call in a specialist. This is severe, this is crass. Our fearless leader has been shot in the ass!”

The next day, our troop first sergeant, Martin L. Laurent, came over to the hootch and announced, “Well, Lieutenant, you got your first Purple Heart, and the flight surgeon has grounded you for the next several days.”

I realized my wound was minor, just a scrape compared to the wounds that so many other guys suffered. I was lucky. Even so, every nerve ending in my tail screamed for the next several days, reminding me that a .30-caliber tracer round through the fanny was not as much fun as Willis tried to make it.

The month of September began with Charlie getting more and more aggressive. The enemy was using the Razorback area as the staging point for their offensives, not only into the Michelin and western Trapezoid, but also to renew their attacks on our supply convoys moving up and down Thunder Road between Lai Khe and An Loc-Quan Loi.

On 4 September, Rod Willis and I were asked to fly up to Lai Khe for a G-2 briefing. It was a routine briefing to bring us up to date on what the enemy was doing in the general area of Thunder Road. We left Phu Loi for an early morning flight to Lai Khe. Our flight of two scouts and no Cobra formed a “white team.”

As we passed over an open area just to the south of Lai Khe, I caught a glimpse of movement below. We were no more than three-quarters of a mile out of Lai Khe; I was surprised an enemy soldier would be messing around so close.

I radioed One Seven. “Come right on my wing. I think I’ve got a dink underneath me.”

Willis and I skidded into a tight right-hand turning maneuver over the spot where I thought I saw movement. Sure enough, there was an enemy soldier prone on the ground, amidst a few three-foot-high bushes that made up the only possible cover in this otherwise open area. When he saw us overhead, he made the mistake of jumping up and heading toward some other nearby scrub, firing his AK-47 at us from the hip as he ran. But in this relatively open area, he really didn’t have anywhere to hide.

With Rod tight on my wing, we swooped down over him at about eight to ten feet off the ground, firing short bursts from our miniguns. The enemy soldier dropped dead in his tracks.

As we headed in to Lai Khe, I got on the radio to an ARVN force that was headquartered just to the south in the village of Ben Cat. I told them about our enemy soldier and suggested that they mount a recon party with their adviser and sweep the area.

When we got the ARVN recon report later that day, Willis and I were surprised to learn that they didn’t find just one enemy soldier, but three more KIA. From the information gathered by the ARVNs at the scene, it became apparent that a group of four enemy scouts had been observing and reconning around the division fire base at Lai Khe. I saw only one of them, but the other three were nearby, and when our minigun rounds dropped the one, we got the other three without even knowing it.

The next day we were scheduled to work Thunder Road in support of the supply convoys that were running hot and heavy between Lai Khe and Quan Loi. We had learned in the briefing that enemy forces were deployed along a line from the Razorbacks north to the Parrot’s Beak, with the presumed intention of moving east and hitting our Thunder I, II, III, and IV fire bases to disrupt our supply convoys.

Before first light on the fifth, and before we were even near takeoff time from Phu Loi for our early morning VR, just such an enemy attack was thrown against Thunder III. The fire base was located about ten kilometers north on Highway 13 from Lai Khe and was occupied by our 2/2 Mechanized Infantry soldiers. The enemy attack was very well planned and executed, and was launched at first light. Charlie was obviously aware that our aeroscouts, who probably would have detected their movement, didn’t fly in the dark.

The fighting was nearly hand to hand. The situation at the base got so bad at one point that the enemy actually got through the perimeter wire and was headed with satchel charges directly for the operations bunker. The only thing that stopped him was our Zippo tracks (Ml 13s with flamethrowers), which formed the base’s interior defensive line. Zippos were not stationed on the outer perimeter of bases because they were susceptible to Charlie’s RPG fire. But as the inner defense, they were devastating. And they were on this night. The sappers running for the ops bunker were burned alive as they charged directly into the nozzles spraying flaming jellied gasoline.

With the work of Cobra gunships and the 2/2 guys in the fire base, the attack was repelled. A sweep of the base the next morning found twenty-three NVA dead inside the perimeter wire. All indications were that a hundred or more had been killed trying to get to the wire, but all those enemy bodies had been dragged away by their comrades.

Even in the teeth of his Thunder III defeat, Charlie wasn’t through for that Saturday, 6 September. He struck again later in the day a mile north of Thunder III. There, a battalion-sized enemy force attacked U.S. armored personnel carriers that were moving a small reconnaissance party down Highway 13. A couple of hours after that, and just another mile up the highway, an outposted unit of Bravo Troop, 1st of the 4th Cav (our sister ground troop), was hit.

The enemy didn’t seem to care that they were engaging us in broad daylight, and along a two-mile stretch of our main supply route, where we had massed armor and mechanized forces. The determined Charlie didn’t seem to care, either, about the manpower losses he was taking in such attempts to cut Thunder Road.

In one day, on that little stretch of highway, in those two blatant attacks, the enemy lost more than sixty soldiers. Add those to his losses in the abortive attack on Thunder III, and it became apparent how badly the enemy wanted to stop our flow of supplies north.

The next day, in his continuing battle for Thunder Road, Charlie gave us the surprise of our lives. He not only made our G-2 information look bad, but he slapped us back hard while taking a terrible toll on Darkhorse troop.

Early on that day, Chuck Davison, an Outcast scout pilot, was heading from Phu Loi up to FSB Thunder I to relieve me and Rod Willis on our VR operation. As Davison passed over the same spot where Rod and I had killed four enemy troops a couple of days earlier, he spotted another NVA. Seeing an enemy soldier that close to division HQ shocked him, and he was unable to get a shot before the man quickly dropped out of sight into a spider hole. Not knowing what to think, Davison continued to circle around the area where he thought the hole was. His crew chief, Clinton “Red” Hayes, dropped hand grenades and sprayed a little 60, but failed to see any other enemy.

Then, just as Davison was about to abandon the search and head on to Lai Khe, the enemy soldier popped back out of the hole and emptied an entire magazine of a U.S. M-16 rifle on full automatic right into the cockpit of Davison’s Loach. Bullets crashed through the aircraft and into both of Chuck Davison’s arms, instantly disabling him. Davison crashed practically on top of the spot where he had seen the enemy soldier.