Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Golf Course control, Preacher eight-seven-niner, five miles east for landing instructions.”

“Roger, Preacher eight-seven-niner. You are cleared for a straight-in approach to the south on row three. Follow your ground guides.”

The skinny Song Ba River ran beside the eastern perimeter of the camp. Two miles to the south it grew to a hundred yards wide near the village of An Khe. Near the river, between the village and the camp, was a small airstrip built by the French. The Cav’s fixed-wing aircraft were using it now.

Leese rogered the instructions from Golf Course control, and I swung off to the right so I could loop around and come back toward the field on a southerly heading, for a straight-in approach.

“Keep it high until we get closer,” said Leese

“Okay.”

The sun shone brightly as we cruised over the jungle north of camp and turned south to line up on row three. I started my descent about a mile away and a thousand feet high. Our advance party had done a big job. The Golf Course was dotted with thousands of stumps. Around it the trees stood thickly.

“Preacher eight-seven-niner, short final.”

“Eight-seven-niner, cleared to land.”

I reduced the pitch and pulled back on the cyclic to set up my approach flare. The top of Hong Kong Hill rose above the horizon on our right as I descended below it. As we got closer, the Golf Course looked very rough.

“Man, look at all the stumps,” I said.

“Incredible.”

Six straight, parallel rows of helicopters were divided by vehicle tracks that jogged through the mud among ravines and stumps. Olive-drab tents, trucks, water trailers, Jeeps, and people littered the cleared area past the south end of the Golf Course, where we would be living.

At 500 feet I crossed a swath cut through the trees that formed the northern perimeter of the camp. The edge of the Golf Course was still 500 feet ahead. Among the trees below I saw hundreds of pup tents. Thousands of our troopers were camped along the meandering perimeter, guarding the rest of us.

I flared steeply at 200 feet to slow the Huey for the landing. Just above the top of my instrument panel, at the south end of the Golf Course, I saw a man waving his arms as he stood on a Jeep.

“See him?”

“Got ‘im,” I said.

I came to a high hover in the center of the rough dirt row. I was nervous about hitting the tail rotor on the rough ground. The man who had waved us in now motioned us over to a parking slot between two other ships. My inexperience was showing. I overcontrolled the sensitive tail-rotor pedals and waggled toward the slot.

“Takes a while to get used to the tail-rotor control in a Huey,” said Leese.

Six weeks ago I had had no trouble with the tail-rotor pedals. Now I was handling them like a student.

“Why am I having trouble now?” I complained.

“It’s common, Bob. You just need some flying time to get the feel of the ship. There’s no substitute for experience, you know.” Leese used his floor switch to talk to me so he wouldn’t have to touch the cyclic while I hovered.

I floated over a very large stump and nosed into the slot. A reverse slope rose toward the tail. As I pulled the cyclic back to stop, I could imagine the spinning tail rotor smashing into the dirt. The Huey hovers tail low anyway. I was too cautious. I let the ship down so gently that a gust picked us back up. I overcompensated and we dropped rapidly. I overcompensated for that and we rose abruptly.

“Relax,” said Leese. “You’re doing fine.”

That’s what an instructor says to a nervous student. I felt the heat of embarrassment rise in my cheeks.

First the heel of the left skid touched ground lightly, followed by the heel of the right skid, not lightly, and then the ship plopped forward ungracefully and settled flat on the skids.

“A little work on your last three feet is all you need,” said Leese. “Your air work and the approach were top notch.”

The ground guide drew his hand across his throat, signaling me to shut down the ship.

And so I made my first landing on Vietnamese soil.

We threw our flight bags in the back of the Jeep. Reacher stayed behind to supervise the unloading of the booty from the Croatan. As Leese and I rode 500 yards along the waffle-tracked ruts to our company’s area, I saw the five sky cranes I had heard so much about. Even by helicopter standards they were ungainly-looking. They were skeleton-framed helicopters designed to lift 20,000 pounds. Removable, pre-loaded, mobile-home-size pods fitted neatly under them, including a completely equipped emergency-surgery room. And they could sling-load big artillery pieces, as well as any aircraft the army owned, including the twin-rotor Chinook, which usually retrieved the downed Hueys.

“Welcome to Camp Radcliff,” said Captain Owens, the operations officer. He had come out of the operations tent, one of our two general-purpose (GP) tents (these tents measured 20 by 40 feet). He and CW-3 White, the other OPS officer, lived in the back.

“Where’d they get the name Radcliff?” asked Leese.

“A major in the advance party who got killed at the Mang Yang pass,” Owens said.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Up the road about twenty more miles,” said Owens. His olive-drab T-shirt was dark from sweat. “On the way to Pleiku,” he added. He pulled his dark-stained cap off and pulled the bottom of his shirt up to his face. Sweat dripped out of his hair and beaded across his beard stubble. “His ship got shot down from three thousand feet over the pass by a fifty-caliber machine gun. Tracers picked him out and followed him all the way to the ground.”

“So, how is it around here?” asked Leese, as he struggled with his flight bag, pulling it out of the back of the Jeep. It weighed as much as he did.

“Very confused.” Owens leaned up against the front fender, hat in hand. “Every night there’s a bunch of firefights on our perimeter. A lot of it’s our own troops shooting at our patrols coming back to the line.” He turned around to face north. “Up there last night”—he pointed—“five guys in a patrol were killed trying to get back in. My advice to you is not to walk around the camp at night. You’re liable to get blown away by nervous grunts. I don’t blame them, though; some of the action is VC, too. There’s no physical perimeter line around a lot of the camp, so the boundaries aren’t clear to everybody. The guards get confused and shoot at anything that moves or makes a noise.” Owens laughed suddenly as he replaced his cap. “Couple of nights ago, they must’ve put a hundred rounds into a water buffalo.”

“Where do we sleep?” asked Leese.

“You have to set up a pup tent for the time being. Our platoon tents aren’t here yet. Probably still on some boat somewhere in a Conex container. The major said to set up on this side of that GP there.” Owens pointed to the other GP tent, a hundred feet past his. “Good luck,” he said.

That night while rain tapped on my tent I wrote Patience a letter by candlelight. I told her how painful it was to be so far away, how I missed her and Jack, how much I loved her. Small-arms fire popped and crackled in the darkness. I had talked to a guy at Belvoir who had told me how great his Vietnam tour had been. He had a villa overlooking the ocean, willing hooch maids, casinos, and great buys at the PX. He had been stationed with a group of advisers somewhere along the coast, where he flew officials around from one Special Forces camp to another. I thought of him and cursed my luck.

Everybody was busy working in the company area the next morning. I was leaning against a stack of mattresses that I was about to lay out in the sun when a Jeep bounced out of the slop of the perimeter road. A colonel got out. After a brief word with Major Fields, he turned to us.