Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

After just a couple of minutes, Chambers came up on troop net to the ops radio watch and very matter-of-factly reported: “One Eight believes that he has spotted movement below. He’s going to swing back around and make another pass to confirm.”

The next thing we heard in the bunker was Chambers yelling into the radio, ‘One Eight is taking fire, taking heavy AK-47 fire. He’s going down. One Eight is hit and going down!”

I jumped to my feet and clunked down the coffee cup. Reaching for my CAR-15, I headed for the door without even waiting for the scramble alert.

As I reached the bunker doorway, I heard the rest of Chambers’s radio transmission. “My God!” he said, “when One Eight hit the ground, his bird exploded and burst into flames. The Loach is burning and there’s a pillar of smoke and flame shooting up out of the trees. My God, my God! He’s burning up!”

Those words stopped me cold for an instant. Loaches didn’t explode on impact. I had never heard of an OH-6 exploding and burning on impact. It simply never happened.

I rushed toward my aircraft, yelling to Parker, who was busy cleaning and polishing the bird’s bubble, “Scramble, Jimbo. We’re scrambling north. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

As I approached the ship, the scramble siren began to whine. People exploded out of their hootches—pilots, door gunners, ARP infantrymen all headed for their ships and a full troop scramble north.

In the case of a downed aircrew, both Scramble 1 and Scramble 2 scout-Cobra teams got off immediately to get to the scene and put an aerial cap on the crash site. Willis was my Scramble 2, and his crew chief was Ken Stormer (like Willis, from Texas). We were both cranked and off in less than a minute, leaving our Cobras behind to catch up. It took awhile for their heavily armed and fueled machines to get wound up and airborne. But once in the air, their big engine and blades gave them up to 165 knots of speed, and they caught up and passed the scouts in short order.

I had no more than cleared the Phu Loi perimeter when my VHF radio came to life. It was Tom Chambers calling in to troop operations. I was dumbfounded to hear him say: “Darkhorse Control, this is Darkhorse Three Five. We’ve got movement out of the wreck. It’s one of the crew members—pilot or crew chief, don’t know which. We’re putting down!”

What the hell’s he doing? I thought. Three Five must be making a low pass because he sure as hell can’t be thinking of putting that Cobra down on the ground!

Woods then proceeded to drop his big bird down to about five hundred feet. He could see that the man staggering around the burning Loach was Bill Jones. He looked dazed and was burned all around his head and shoulders. There was no sign of Potter. They concluded that the crew chief must still be in the aircraft.

Three Five got as low as he could to take a better look. But there was heavy jungle all around the area, and thick black smoke was pouring up out of the little clearing where the Loach was still burning furiously.

Then Woods made a daring decision. He had spotted a small open piece of ground about seventy-five yards south of where Jones’s ship had gone in. Knowing that it would take crucial minutes for help from the troop to arrive, and assuming that Sergeant Potter was still inside the burning Loach, Woods didn’t falter for a second. He proceeded to put his Cobra down on the small LZr

Once down, Woods left the aircraft engine running and told Tom Chambers to grab the portable fire extinguisher and go try to find Jones. Chambers left his canopy open, jumped out of the cockpit with the fire extinguisher in his hand, and took off through the jungle.

Woods stayed in the ship and, not knowing if he would be attacked by enemy soldiers, locked the nose turret in the forward-only firing position. Woods could then fire the front turret straight ahead by just aiming the helicopter.

After Chambers had been gone a couple of minutes, Woods began to get concerned. He realized that Chambers couldn’t get both Jones and Potter back to the LZ without somebody to help him. So, leaving the Cobra engine running, Three Five jumped out of the airplane and raced through the jungle after Chambers.

By the time they both reached Jones, they could tell that he was very badly hurt. His neck and shoulders were deeply burned. The top of his Nomex flight suit had been completely burned off, exposing charred and blackened flesh.

Knowing that Jones might not be coherent, Woods tried anyway. “Jonesy, it’s Mike. Where’s your crew chief? Where’s Sergeant Potter?”

Somehow in his agony, Jones was able to mutter, “He… he’s still in the ship… he… he didn’t get out.”

Chambers rushed over to the still-burning Loach. He aimed his little five-pound cockpit fire extinguisher at the searing flames fed by the ship’s leaking JP-4, but it was like pissing on a roaring forest fire. Then Chambers looked into the ship. On the floor of the burning crew chief’s compartment was Potter’s body, now fairly well consumed by fire. Knowing that it wasn’t going to make any difference, he emptied his pitiful little extinguisher into the ship anyway. Then, in disgust, he slammed it into the ground. There was no way anybody could help Sergeant Potter.

Chambers turned back to Woods. “So what do we do now?”

Three Five was struggling to keep Jones’s limp body upright. “We gotta get him back to the ship. Come on, help me carry him.”

Supporting One Eight under each burned shoulder, Woods and Chambers half-carried and half-dragged the pain-stricken pilot back through the jungle toward their still-running gunship.

As they approached the Cobra, Chambers asked, “What are we going to do when we get him to the bird? How are we going to get him out of here?” The Cobra had only two intandem cockpit spaces, and no place to put a third man inside the aircraft.

“He isn’t going to last if we don’t get him to a hospital right away,” Woods puffed. “We can’t wait for a Dustoff. We’ll just have to get him in the ship some way and take him ourselves.”

Chambers had an idea. “The ammo bay door—we can drop the ammunition compartment door and lay him on that.”

Struggling with the then totally unconscious Bill Jones, Woods and Chambers finally reached the helicopter. As they were trying to get Jones in the Cobra, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter arrived at the scene, having heard the transmissions about the downed aircraft. The “hook” hovered over the airmen and lowered its cable with a jungle penetrator for hoisting personnel. With Tom holding Jones, they were both winched upward into the belly of the Chinook. Woods climbed back into the Cobra and roared into the sky, following the rescue ship to Dau Tieng. He advised operations that they were safe and approaching Delta Tango, but that the crew chief had not been recovered and was believed to be KIA.

Willis and I overheard this message just as we reined in over the site of Jones’s crashed Loach. Given the situation, our first mission responsibility was to get down out of altitude and put an aerial cap on the area surrounding the crash.

I keyed the intercom to Parker, “OK, Jimbo, we’re going lima lima. Watch your ass. We just lost a scout down here so we’re going to have bad guys. You’re clear to fire… anything that moves, take ‘em out!”

“Gun is hot, sir. I’m ready!”

I saw him tense up and lean farther out into the slipstream as he set his M-60.

With Willis tight on my tail, I went into a descending right-hand turn that would put me down about a hundred yards from the smoke of Jones’s downed bird. Then I made a fast ninety-knot pass over the wreck to check it out before taking up a scouting orbit around the site.