Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

We picked up eight ARVN Rangers wearing tight-tailored camouflage uniforms. They stared nervously, smoked cigarettes, and got aboard reluctantly. They did not bolster my sagging opinion of our ally.

The twelve slicks in the mission were to fly the ARVNs a few miles up the valley from Dak To. There we would cut across the eastern ridge and land two at a time on an eight-foot-wide ridge running to a small concrete fortress. While the flight stretched to get the necessary spacing, we heard on the radio that the VC were there, too. From a couple miles away I could see a daisy chain of Phantoms hitting the hill directly across the small valley from the fortress. Sky King and I were to be one of the second pair of ships to land. As the first two ships landed, they called hits.

From several VC machine-gun emplacements on the facing hill, tracers flicked out at the Phantoms. The fighters swooped, releasing monstrous bursts of cannon during their blindingly swift passes. The tracers converged on them.

I had the controls on the right side of the ship. Our buddy ship was taking a spot just in front of the fortress, leaving us the stark ridge nearest to VC guns. I set up the approach. The two ships in front of us took off after what seemed to be an awfully long time on the ground. With a hundred yards to go, our right-door gunner opened up on some muzzle flashes. At the same time, a Phantom began billowing black smoke in the middle of his strike. He climbed up sharply in an almost vertical climb—and we saw one man eject. As we landed, I saw grazing rounds kick through the dirt on the ridge in front of us. The emplacement was just a little higher than we were. The right door gunner blazed away, and I waited for the ARVNs to get the fuck out. When the crew chief hadn’t called that they were off for what seemed to be an hour, I looked back and saw him trying to force an ARVN off the ship from his awkward position in the pocket. The other ARVNs kept ducking their heads in the gunfire, waiting with wide-eyed anticipation for me to leave. I shook my head and started screaming, “Get off! Get off!” and pointed at the door. They sat there. I heard a round go through the air frame. The old, familiar tick. The crew chief pulled his .45 and pointed it at the soldiers, waving it toward the door with murder in his eyes. When they saw I wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the crew chief might indeed kill them, they began to get off. I looked at the fortress to see if we were getting any cover fire. No one in sight. No guns were in action; everyone was on the dirt behind the walls. The black, billowing trail of the Phantom disappeared in the jungle. A pearl-white chute blossomed in the blue sky.

Our buddy ship took off. “They’re out!” yelled the chief. I glanced across the deck through the door to the ARVNs hiding on the low side of the ridge. I took off. As we crossed in front of the fortress, we saw the defenders lying low. Not one gun was in position.

A half mile away, it was over for us. That was it—one load to the ridge. I cruised the five miles back to the camp, steaming.

“I’ve never seen anything like that. How the fuck are they going to win this stupid war if they fight like that!”

Sky King nodded gravely and said nothing. He’d worked with ARVNs before.

When we landed, I thanked the crew chief, Blakely, for using his brains and getting the ARVNs off.

“Any time, sir. Next time I’ll do it sooner.” He grinned. We all went around the ship to count hits. There was one. It was hard to believe that they had shot down a Phantom and missed us as we parked on the ridge, but that was the way it was.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Sky King.

“Astounding,” I said.

We walked back to the Ops tent and waited for the rest of the gaggle to return.

“Wolfe just got hit,” said Maj. Richard Ramon, the operations officer, as we walked inside. “Friend of yours, isn’t he?” He looked at me.

“Yes, sir. A classmate.”

“Well, he got his arm messed up. He’ll be here in a minute.” He shook his head. “Hell of a way to start the day.”

I kept seeing ARVN asses glued to the deck of my ship.

“Daring’s boys are out there now trying to get that gun position,” said Ramon. “And we had a slick and a gun out looking for the air-force pilot.”

“One?” I asked.

“Yeah, your friend Resler picked him up, the other guy never got out. Poor bastard.”

Two more Hueys cruised in fast, low level, down the airstrip. When they landed, Wolfe staggered out, helped by the crew chief. He held his arm across his chest, dripping blood down his pants. Doc DaVinci met them half way and walked them to the tent. Wolfe was pale, as if all his blood had drained out of his arm. He smiled blankly at me as Doc used scissors to cut his sleeve away.

“Fuckers shot my smokes!” exclaimed Wolfe. With his arm down, we could see that his chest-protector pocket was blown away, revealing the ceramic strata beneath the green cloth. The round had torn through his right forearm and blasted into his chest protector.

“Do you see that? The fuckers blew away my smokes!”

I nodded and handed him a lit cigarette.

“Can you move your fingers?” asked Doc.

“Sure.” Wolfe puffed the smoke.

“Well, move them.”

“I am.”

Doc looked at Wolfe. “I think you’re going to get home on this one.”

“I told you, Mason! A bone wound will do it every time.”

I raised a weak smile. “You got it right.”

Doc wrapped Wolfe’s arm in a bunch of bandages while Sky King and I went back out to the flight line to get the ship ready. We were going to fly him to Pleiku.

During the flight, Wolfe chain-smoked cigarettes handed him by the crew chief. When I dropped him at the hospital at Pleiku, his color was better and he was smiling like a man who just won a lottery. He had landed right after me in the same spot on the ridge. I almost wished it had been the other way around.

Later that day, Sky King and I flew out to lift a load of grunts from the 101st—to rescue the ARVNs—and back. We had experienced fairly heavy fire the second time out, but no hits. Meanwhile, Daring’s gun platoon was swooping all around the hill, trying to get at the emplacement. It seemed impossible that the gooks could last through the Phantom strike and a whole gunship platoon, but they had. When the sun dropped behind the ridge, the guns came back one by one. They had taken many hits. Two pilots had been wounded and were taken immediately to Pleiku.

“Where the fuck is Seven-oh-two?” Major Ramon asked no one in particular. A group of us sat around in the operations tent listening to the radios: 702 was the last of the gunships out there. He had called five minutes before that he had been hit, but then there was silence.

“Let’s get somebody back out there.” Ringknocker spoke from the tent door. “Maybe he forgot how to get back here.” He frowned at his own joke.

Then we all heard the familiar whopping of rotors, and in the dusky light we saw the ship skid across the dirt fast and slide to a stop on the strip.

“Fancy landing,” somebody said.

With a collective sigh of relief, the crowd began to break up. I stopped outside with some others because something odd was happening with 702. Nobody was getting out. The ship just stood there hissing. Its rotors swung lazily. Somebody ran over to the ship and started waving frantically, calling for Doc. All four people on board were unconscious from wounds.

While they loaded the crew of 702 on a slick going to Pleiku, I walked back to the tent. Stoddard was showing Resler a six-foot section of a Huey tail-rotor drive-shaft tube. As I got closer, I could see a bullet hole in the tube.

“My first hit,” said Stoddard proudly.