Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

Jimbo’s whole upper body was a gory mess from the blood he’d lost. I figured that he must have been hit in the initial exchange when we first swooped in over the camp site—before Sinor made his run, before our BDA. Why hadn’t he let me know so I could have gotten him out of there?

My thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a Huey landing—the one, I guessed, that I’d had to move my Loach for. The emergency room double doors suddenly slammed open and litters of wounded from the Huey were rushed in. I was numbed anew by the appearance of the wounded men.

There were six of them, all young soldiers from the 82d Airborne who were also based at Phu Loi, just a stone’s throw from my hootch. They had been, I heard the medics say, in an APC when the vehicle hit a mine while working near the Iron Triangle. The arriving soldiers were flash-burned, concussion-damaged, shrapnel-riddled. They were all desperately injured, and I knew that this was no place for me to be standing around.

I backed out of the room, still looking at the frantic emergency room scene and wondering how many of the men in there, Parker included, would see the light of the next day.

I waited just outside the emergency room for a while. Someone, I was sure, would let me know as soon as they had some word on Parker. The minutes crawled by like hours, and I kept imagining the life and death struggles that were going on in the next room.

Deciding that a cigarette and a little fresh air might help, I decided to walk down to the ship. In my earlier haste, I had left my pack of Marlboros lying on the console between the two pilot seats.

As I walked across the PSP, my eye caught Parker’s bloodied chicken plate. It was lying in the middle of the landing pad, where the medics had tossed it. Almost hesitantly, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. When I looked at it, it was obvious what had happened. There were five AK hits square on the front piece of the body armor. One of those, most likely an AK-47 armor-piercing round, had apparently deflected off the chicken plate and hit Parker in the throat.

Walking over to the Loach, I carefully laid Parker’s chicken plate in the back cabin and just happened to notice that his M-60 wasn’t safed. It had an ammo belt in it, with a round probably still in the chamber.

To fix that situation before an accident could happen, I crawled into the gunner’s spot and sat down in Parker’s jump seat. I lifted the feed tray, took out the belt of ammunition, and let it drop back down into the ammo box on the floor. Then I pulled the bolt back to clear the chamber and put the gun on “safe.”

While I was going through those almost automatic motions, I began to look around the cabin interior. The mess was appalling! Blood and pieces of flesh were splattered on the sides and top of the cabin. My mind replayed the fierce exchange of gunfire at the enemy camp site, then Parker’s unembellished announcement.

I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t know if it was the thought of Parker being hurt so badly, or the sight of those six young American soldiers brought in after being blown to pieces inside that APC. It didn’t matter. I was suddenly violently ill. Gagging and vomiting, I added my own mess to the already defiled gunner’s compartment.

The next thing I knew, one of the hospital medics was leaning his head inside the cabin door. “Are you OK, Lieutenant?”

I lifted my head out of my hands and answered in a shaky voice, “No, I really feel like shit.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We all do once in awhile over here.”

As the medic turned to walk away, I started to call after him, to tell him what I really felt at that moment. But I kept it to myself. I had just begun to think—for the first time in the ten months I had been in Vietnam—about the futility of it all. I was suddenly struck by the futility of doing the same thing day in and day out—the same kind of flying, the same kind of enemy, the same kind of engagements—only one day the enemy got hurt; the next day it was our own people. It seemed as though the only real significance of the war was tit for tat.

“Your door gunner’s going to be OK.” It was the doc, who had walked out to my parked Loach to give me the news. “He was hurt pretty badly, but it was a clean wound and he’s going to make it.” He confirmed that the enemy bullet had probably ricocheted into Parker’s lower right neck. It just missed the jugular vein, went all the way through, and exited just below the base of his skull.

“If you gotta get shot in the neck,” the doc said finally, “he did it the right way, believe me. We’ll still have to evac him out of the country for convalescence, and we don’t know right now if he’ll make it back.”

Doc’s news that Parker would survive sent a shower of relief over me. But I knew Jimbo was gravely hurt and, at that moment, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d ever see him again.

I got back to Phu Loi a little before noon that day and turned my Loach over to maintenance. I couldn’t take it out again before it got a thorough check; besides, I didn’t have another crew chief available to replace Parker.

So, to finish the VR we had started early that morning, I rode shotgun in Three One’s Cobra. With another Cobra covering, we made up a red team and went back up the river to VR the area from the Mushroom on up to Dau Tieng. It was a fast, uneventful flight, but we did have the satisfaction of checking out the rest of the Big Blue leg that we had missed after locating that cooking fire.

I was dead tired when I went to bed that night. Parker was so much in my thoughts that I couldn’t sleep. Pictures of the day kept running through my mind, and they all kept coming back to the hospital at Lai Khe. To the torn bodies of those young 82d Airborne soldiers as they were carried into the emergency room, to the doctors working over Parker.

The pictures kept coming: the bullet gouges in Parker’s chicken plate… safing his 60… getting sick and asking myself what in the hell was the sense of it all.

It all played back. Even my gruesome effort of taking the water hose that the medics had used to clean out the gore in the medevac Huey and hosing-out the back of the Loach before flying it back to Phu Loi. Thank God, the blessing of sleep finally came.

Three days later, the troop took another morale drubbing.

On 1 November, we had a hunter-killer team working up in the Thi Tinh River valley, just south of the Easter Egg. While down low working his pattern, the scout picked up a well-traveled trail that led to several bunkers of an enemy base camp. The scout put down a marker, the gun recorded the grid, and the contact information was radioed back to Darkhorse operations. As a result, the ARPs were scrambled to conduct a ground reconnaissance and find out exactly what enemy activity, if any, existed.

I had been assigned Scramble 2 on that day, so I stationed myself in the ops bunker to monitor the radios. I listened as the Horsemen, the four lift platoon Hueys carrying the ARPs, took off north, cleared the base fence, and headed on out over Dogleg Village.

“Two Six, this is Two Three,” the number four Huey called flight lead. “You have a flight of four.” Having thus been notified that his fourth Huey was up in trail, the flight leader, Capt. Morgan Roseborough, ordered, “OK, Horsemen, go echelon left at my command. Ready… now!”

The four Hueys broke trail, with number two sliding over to the left, number three holding its position, and number four sliding over left in behind number two—into an echelon left formation. Captain Roseborough then rogered number four with a couple of fast squeezes on his radio transmitter trigger.