Tour of Duty Part Dieux

[rotorwash]

I got back to Qui Nhon just in time to catch the last convoy north as our company was finishing its move to Duc Pho. I still was very weak and my clothes just hung from my shoulders and belt, but it felt good to be back around familiar happenings. Most of the ground elements of the company had gone up on an LST but there still was much of the supply and admin stuff that needed to go, so a convoy up Highway 1 from Qui Nhon to Duc Pho was planned, passing through such exotic locals as Phu Cat, Bong Son, past Uplift and English. Seating was tight, I was given a few options, none of them good, so I finally chose the high seat. Two storage containers had been loaded on a five ton truck and the counter from the supply room had been strapped on top, open side up. That was my seat. It turned out to be one of the best seats in the house, being on the lead truck, about twelve feet above the road. Padded with sandbags, it was quite comfortable.

Everything was going great until just past Phu Cat we observed a group of soldiers in open formation on each side of the road, a few guys on the highway itself. When we were about a mile away from them, it dawned on us that this was a mine sweeping detail and they were coming toward us. We stopped, and they stopped, and we stared at each other for a while, then with a wave from the guy in charge they continued their methodical, careful pace down the road in our direction. None of us wanted to get out of our trucks. Finally they reached our lead truck and swept past it. The GIC (guy in charge), a lowly 2LT, walked up to the truck and shouted at the driver, “Whadaya guys think yur doin? This road could be mined.”
Sgt Davenport, who, as soon as he could get back to Tennessee, would return to his previous occupation of running moonshine and driving in NASCAR races, leaned out the window, spat Red Man past the 2LT, and drawled, “It’s clear thataway, Lootenant,” indicating with a jerk of his thumb the way back to Phu Cat, then dropped the clutch and off we roared.

We stopped in Bong Son for lunch and then proceeded uneventfully toward Duc Pho, arriving late in the afternoon. It had changed dramatically since I had left, all of the aircraft revetments were finished and the company was now housed in tents laid in neat rows with white beach sand between to keep down the dust. I went looking for the 1st Platoon. For about a half hour I wandered around feeling like a lost kid at the carnival. None of the faces were familiar, not the supply man, not the company clerk - no one. Until I rounded a corner and heard my name shouted. Turning around I was face to face with my old buddy Perkins. He took me into what passed for the club, a GP small with the sides rolled up and a four row high wall of sandbags around the outside. Tables and benches were crudely made from rocket boxes. He proceeded to bring me up to date and it was not a pleasant experience. My old buddies from the platoon had either rotated home or went out wounded, none had been killed. The cocky little turd who had taken my place on 863 had gotten shot, failed to cover his butt on an extraction and collected a bullet for his troubles, along with getting an infantry guy killed. That meant my aircraft was available and Lucero was still my gunner for a few months, that made me smile. Then Perkins told me about how a few nights earlier we had been mortared and a round had made a direct hit on the mechanic’s tent, killing some wounding many. As he was telling me this, some bonehead shot off a hand flare, man, those things can sound like an incoming mortar sometimes. Perkins thought so too, without missing a word of his story, he was under the table up against the sandbag wall. I was impressed, and sadly out of form because I hadn’t moved and found myself sitting alone in the tent, everyone else was on the ground or in a bunker. Obviously, I was going to have to get up to speed. It seemed that we were mortared on such a regular basis now, that in Chu Lai circles, Duc Pho was referred to as “mortar mountain.”

The more he talked, the more he smiled, a funny little smile like someone who was just waking up to the fact they had been rescued from a fate worse then death. At first it was just a curious little smile, but the more he talked and narrowed down the subject, the more the hair on the back of my neck stood up. By default, he was the acting platoon sergeant. Higher up had been sending us platoon sergeants, but like mud thrown at a wall, none had stuck yet. And he was going home in two weeks. And I was the next senior guy. There I was, by default, now in charge of the platoon. Like I had been slapped with a wet rag I realized my fat, dumb and happy days of boring holes in the sky were over. Already the mantle of responsibility was drifting toward my shoulders and it was uncomfortable and heavy. Not that it was much of a mantle, ten crewchiefs, ten gunners, one 3/4 ton truck complete with driver, and partial responsibility for 10 aircraft. If I just didn’t do anything stupid, the outfit would run itself. It was the “stupid” part that troubled me most.

The transition from being one of the troublemakers to being in charge of the troublemakers is a sobering experience. Before, it was always us and them. Now I was one of them and they were still us. The line between the old us and them, and the new them and us was thin, but very solid. Fortunately, only a few of the old us (now them) remembered me, so Perkins tended to present my reputation in glowing terms and stories that made me blush, and Lucero roll on the floor with riotous laughter. As usual, a moment like this can’t last, and when I stood up to say my part, my voice cracked and the third word out of my mouth came out as a squeak. Lucero was really having a fit. When Perkins left a week or so later, I walked with him down to the aircraft, and as it took off, he waved. I waved my most sincere, friendly wave with one hand and flipped him off with the other.

Jeffrey’s Math

I wasn’t long in my new position when I became acquainted with what life was like in the ivory towers of command. A young gunner by the name of Jeffrey came to me.
“Sarge,” (man, I hated that) “I need to go home on emergency leave.”
“Why?”
“Well Sarge, I have to marry my girl.”
“You what?”
“Yeh Sarge, she’s pregnant.”
“And you need emergency leave to go home and marry her?”
“Yeh Sarge. To marry her.”
“Jeffrey, you know the Army is not going to give you leave for that. How far along is she, anyhow?”
“Five months.”
“How long you been in country, Jeffrey?”
“Six months.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this, “Let me get this straight. You been here six months and she’s five months along?”
“Yeh.”
“Jeffrey, . . . did you take math in school?”
“Well, yeh.”
“Jeffrey, if you been here six months and she is five months pregnant you can’t be the father.”
I thought he was going to cry, “But . . . she said that sometimes it takes a while.”
“Takes a while for what?”
“From . . . you know . . . until she gets pregnant.” I just hung my head. It was now my turn to cry. Jeffrey had passed math, it was biology he failed.

My engineer truck driver

The truck driver I inherited had been in the engineers when he extended so he could become a doorgunner. Stupidity is not choosy. However, he was competent and savvy, caught on quick and could teach me a thing or two about what’s hot and what’s not in the Duc Pho area. And he loved Lifesavers. Each supplementary pack contained several rolls of Lifesavers and he collected as many as he could. When I asked why he liked Lifesavers so much, he told me that he didn’t like them, he just liked to give them to the local kids. Very commendable, he went up several notches in my book. Then we took the laundry down town. After dropping it off we went to get charcoal, we had successfully relieved the Air Force of some fresh steaks and they were on the menu for supper. As we drove south of town to the charcoal dealer, we passed several groups of kids standing beside the road. He grabbed a role of Lifesavers, and I was proud to be riding with such an upstanding civic minded soldier. Then he stood up behind the wheel, wound up his pitching arm and let fly a roll of Lifesavers into a crowd of kids. I was in a state of total shock, my mouth hit my knee. Quickly I looked back, expecting to see some poor kid lying dead. Then I started yelling. He explained that he was just giving the kids some candy. A roll of Lifesavers delivered as hard as they could be thrown into a crowd of kids from a fast moving vehicle did not qualify as giving kids candy in my book. That thing must have been traveling at the speed of sound.

I was still yelling as he was gleefully ignoring me, and the next roll he threw was at a man riding a motorbike with about a hundred chickens loaded on behind. He hit the guy square in the forehead, the bike started wobbling and cut across behind us. A dump truck following us had to frantically weave to prevent picking up the motorbike as a hood ornament and creating chicken patties all over the road. I grabbed all of his candy and began tossing it to kids, gently, in high arcs, something that could be caught by someone other then Johnny Bench.

As soon as we got back, he got his wish to become a doorgunner before he recruited any more VC. Let the VC throw some things his way for a change.


Rotorwash

[Bombardier]

Great post RW :)


I couldn’t believe I was hearing this, “Let me get this straight. You been here six months and she’s five months along?”



Whats wrong with that ? :rolleyes:

[Frisco-Kid]

Good anecdotes, RW. You're a natural born storyteller. Eagerly waiting for my presentation copy of the book, my friend.

[Zofo]

Good anecdotes, RW. You're a natural born storyteller. Eagerly waiting for my presentation copy of the book, my friend.

Me too, me too! Great stuff RW!

[Bombardier]

Kepp us posted RW, would like a copy myself of course :)

[rotorwash]

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement. Of course, if it ever gets published there will be presentation copies all around.

Here is this week's installment. Know what, guys? I miss Silky's stories, hope he is OK.

John T.

One sunny afternoon the company was called together in the messhall where we were addressed by a member of CID, the criminal investigative part of the Army. Personally, I didn’t think the guy looked like he could catch a Saint Bernard in a phone booth, but that was just my opinion. The subject of his talk was that the company had a drug problem. I scoffed, after all, I had seen nothing to confirm this, but within a few minutes I would be a believer and within a few days I would be in charge of the biggest part of the problem. The CID man, to better enable us to recognize pot when we saw it, passed around a small glass jar half full. After the jar had traveled the length and breadth of the messhall, it was returned to him - full! It seemed that not only did we have a problem, we had a surplus.

In what I believed to be a totally unrelated incident, a few days later I was assigned a new truck driver to replace the one that threw candy at the kids. Naive as I was, I put out a request among the other senior NCO’s for a person who would make a good driver. God, I was stupid. I must have had it written on my forehead. I figured just anyone could be a truck driver so I spent very little time checking credentials and references. That’s how I ended up with John T.

He was a funny little guy, short, chubby, unkempt, unshaven, laughed at odd times and had a nervous twitch that seemed to affect his entire body, different parts at different times. And his eyes. Sometimes they would spin like artificial horizons that needed their gyros stabilized. If I had only known what I know now, I would have taken a clue when I found out he was from Venice, California. Later in life I found from personal experience that you could probably see two of anything you had ever had nightmares about in Venice. John T. had screwed up every job he had been given and would continue this string of successes under my command.

A couple of days after I inherited John, the CID man, still sniffing around, asked if he could ride into the village of Duc Pho with John when he took our laundry. I smelled a rat, so I decided to go along, after all, my driver, my truck, my laundry, heck - my platoon. In other words, I was going along in self defense. The truck had no canvass at all - was completely open, so the CID man sat in back, I rode shotgun. We left the base and headed downtown and as we stopped before turning onto Highway 1 - I believe we waited for two cyclos, a Lambretta and a farmer herding pigs - a small crippled boy who could move surprisingly well for having his legs damaged, ran out from beside a hootch, jumped up on the running board on my side and started yelling at John, “Hey John, you want pot? Good stuff. Numbah one.”
John T. was turning a furious shade of red and was trying desperately to pretend he didn’t know the kid, waving him off with his hand and telling the kid in a stage whisper, “Go away, man, I don’t know you. Get outa here, kid.” It took every ounce of strength I could muster not to kill John T. on the spot and throw his body to the dogs.
Finally the CID man spoke up, “Do you think we could get a beer at that little place with the shade over the tables? Is it safe? What do you think?” The guy was dumber then a bag of hammers.

We were in the process of improving our living conditions - needed to make the infantry jealous - right Frisco? and were putting wooden floors and a wood framework under the tents we were living in. Protection around the outside now amounted to fifty five gallon drums filled with sand plus about ten rows of sandbags on top of the drums. We were wising up. Throw enough mortars our direction and we catch on.

We had gotten a new exec and he had been placed in charge of the drug interdiction program. Right away he suspected John T. I don’t think the CID man, now departed, had told him, I think he had sniffed it out on his own. But then, he wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the tree, either. We had it on good authority that when he couldn’t make E-6, he went to Officer Candidate School.

He was in charge of our supplementary packs, those huge boxes we received everyday that contained enough goodies for 100 men each. We got five a day and the exec put them in a conex container beside the supply room. It took no time at all for me to figure out that the key that opened our platoon conex also opened the supply room conex, and every other day when he would put five in, I would take one out. These things were the coin of the realm. They contained candy, two types, one to give you the runs and one to constipate you. Toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, shaving cream and razors. And cigarettes. Enough cigarettes to give the whole company lung cancer. I personally chose pipe tobacco, a burning cigarette could attract bullets. On the open market of Duc Pho, the cigarettes paid for our laundry, charcoal, beer, and ice to keep the beer cool.

But I digress. The Exec decided it was time for a showdown with John T. so he collared me one day about midmorning and off we proceeded in a military like manner to our hootch. With John T. standing by looking like he had already peed his pants, the exec went through everything John T. owned. He found nothing and was getting frustrated until he picked up an open pack of cigarettes. An evil smile crossed his face, John T. started to cry. One by one the exec took the cigarettes out of the pack and smelled them. He got to the last one and found nothing but North Carolina’s finest broadleaf. Furiously he threw them down and kicked over the bunk before stomping out. John T. dissolved into a puddle on the floor gasping with relief. Now I needed to pee. I stepped out the back door of the tent and there on the top of the sandbags was a Band-aid can. I popped it open and discovered John T.’s stash of pot. The exec had been within three feet of it. John T. answered my summons that reverberated off the mountains by standing at attention, trembling in the tent door, tears running down his cheeks as I carefully spread his stash on the east wind, making sure he would never retrieve a single molecule.

The platoon was virtually running itself, I had my hands full with John T. My goal was to keep the fool alive until he rotated, the first short timers calendar I ever kept was his, mine was secondary. One day I walked into the line shack and as my eyes adjusted, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. John T. had an M-60 with the barrel firmly planted on his foot. He was about to pull the trigger. My first inclination was to let him shoot, heck even help if it was possible, but he had a hundred round belt of ammo loaded in the gun, he could kill half the camp before he hit his toe. I yelled and hit him in the chest with a flight helmet I had been carrying. He dropped the gun and started crying. I concluded that potheads weren’t glued together real tight.

On two occasions I made the mistake of letting him go to Qui Nhon for a little rear area relaxation, I tried to rotate the flight crews down there when their aircraft went into maintenance. The first time he came back looking like he had been forced through a keyhole backwards. I never saw anybody look so ill used. What little voice he had left squeaked out the story, he had spent his time in an opium den until he had run out of money and they threw him out. He swore up and down in his pathetic little squeaky voice that he would never do that again. The next time I let him go, he had plenty of money and after three days I had to go get him. Either that or report him AWOL which would have reflected on my inability to run the platoon, a fact I was well acquainted with. I spent two days searching every opium den in town and finally found him shacked up with a toothless old woman who had an endless supply of opium and was willing to help John T. stretch his money as far as it would go. On the rare occasions when he got hungry she was feeding him rat sandwiches. He swore by em. By the time I found him I had searched so many opium dens my voice sounded like his. Someone might have thought I had been den crawling with him but for the difference in our eyes, his were in a spectacular uncaged condition, mine were black with rage.

The final straw came not long after when John T. returned from a laundry run carrying a suspicious looking laundry bag. He clawed and fought but at last I got it away from him and opened it up. Inside, in a clear plastic bag was at least a bushel of Duc Pho’s finest weed. I grabbed him by the collar and drug him screaming and kicking down to where the s**t burning detail was doing their thing and threw the bag of pot into a burning barrel. He tried to jump after it, but against my better judgement, I held him fast. Then he tried to get downwind but I held him where he was. When the fire had consumed the evidence I marched him to the orderly room and planted him in front of the first sergeant’s desk with the admonition that if I ever saw him again it was death for him and prison for me.


Regards,
Rotor ps, I miss my helicopter here

[Bombardier]

Great post RW, its nice to hear of the real things that happened in VN and not just the hype of Hollywood.

PS when I get home from work I will put your Helo back for ya. :)

[rotorwash]

After dealing with John T. I was firmly convinced that being a platoon sergeant was not at all in my future. It didn’t take long for me to weasel my way back into a crewchief’s seat, and they replaced me by taking an incompetent crewchief from another platoon and making him a buck sergeant. You know the type, he immediately went down to the Korean tailors and had a set of oversized sergeants stripes made. I used to tell people that it would take two good men to replace me, but, much to my chagrin, it only took one incompetent clown.

Not being a platoon sergeant anymore put me back on the duty roster and I found myself Charge of Quarters on night. All this involved was sitting in the operations shack doing my best to stay awake. We also had a duty officer, but he got to sleep in the ops shack. I also had an E-4 to run errands, keep me supplied with coffee and wake people up on time. This night was less boring then normal because an old friend of mine, sergeant from the artillery, had dropped by prior to going on a searchlight mission. He had a starlight scope with him and we stood in the door and looked at things in the dark. That thing was amazing, you could read the tail numbers of aircraft on the flight line when you couldn’t even see the aircraft with the naked eye. We were also offered another diversion, the Army had recently set up a MARS station, which stood for Military Amateur Radio System, or something like that. If you got your name on the list in the middle of the night, they would try and raise an amateur operator near your home town and he would call your family. Then it would be arranged for a set time, your family would call the operator, connections would be made and you could talk to the folks back home. I was about a minute and a half into a conversation with my mom and dad when I heard mortars landing in beautiful downtown Duc Pho. Still on the phone I went to the door and could see them landing. My arty buddy was looking through his starlight scope and told me they were mortaring the orphanage that did our laundry. I started getting choked up and angry and tried to find a reasonable way to sign off. I don’t think it was a good moment for my folks. In just a couple of minutes counter battery fire had silenced the mortar - my folks could hear the 155's hitting. Meanwhile, the base had erupted into life - trucks, jeeps and ambulances were headed for the gate, lights blazing and loaded with people. There was a tension in the air, kind of an electric fury. God help any VC that tried to get in the way of these guys tonight.

That starlight scope that I looked through that night had an interesting history. About two weeks later a 2LT was riding as an arty observer one night and dropped it out the door of the helicopter at about 1500 feet. It went into a flooded rice paddy, one of many flooded rice paddies in the area. He could not accurately pinpoint his exact location on a map. Starlight scopes, being few in number and brand new technology, were controlled by serial number from the Pentagon. For the next few weeks that 2LT spent every waking moment combing flooded rice paddies, protected by a squad of GI’s that, frankly my dear, didn’t give a damn. He never found it. Months later, after the rice had been harvested, and I’m assuming, the 2LT was stripped of his merit badges, a tired GI trudging through a dry paddy kicked something that sounded metal. After determining it wouldn’t explode, they dug out the long lost starlight scope, in pretty sad shape after its long immersion.

People were always thinking up new uses for helicopters and one day out of a large wooden crate rolled a huge searchlight that belonged on a tank but had been mounted on a plate that could be secured to a helicopter floor. It came complete with electrical connections for a helicopter and a cute little cyclic controller that you could use to point it around. Reading the instructions, we discovered that you could use it as an infra-red light or a searchlight. There were even a set of infra-red binoculars that you could use to see what the infra-red spotlight had in its sights. I don’t know if I had “sucker” written on my forehead or what, but under the excuse of looking for the most “experienced” crewchief to take over the project, all eyes turned toward me and I could not hide fast enough. The thing was dubbed “firefly.” Loaded and ready, the thing was impressive. You could read a newspaper at 1500 feet, I know, we tried. The first night out, we were to patrol the beaches for intruders. A huge fishing fleet of sampans went out nightly with torches attached to their boats and fished all night, returning in the morning. The VC had been using them to smuggle arms ashore. The Navy and there swift boats patrolled the seaward side to keep them from receiving cargo and we had told them that if the stayed at least a quarter mile from the beach until daylight, we would leave them alone. But, as usual there was always one fool that had to try the rules and sneak back to the beach in the middle of the night. That is where the firefly came in. The idea was that we would patrol up and down the beach using the infra-red to spot someone breaking the rules, then we could light him up and either engage him with our door guns or call for back up. There were problems from the start. First, with the light turned on infra-red, you could not see where it was pointing. And the infra-red binoculars weren’t that great either. The next time you see someone in a movie riding in a helicopter and watching something on the ground through binoculars, you have my permission to laugh. A helicopter is just one big vibration, like a pogo stick. It was impossible to focus on anything. Abandoning the infra-red, we just turned on the light. Everybody in the aircraft was blind. After our eyes adjusted, we turned it off and we were blind again. You could see things real well with the light on, but the converse was true, they could see us real well, too. This made pilots nervous. About the third night of this we were flying down the beach south of Duc Pho, near the border with II Corps, when we saw an airburst at our altitude about two miles to our front and directly in our flight path. Now, one airburst is not significant by itself, but as we discussed it, we could not think of an American weapon that might have made it except a 40mm Duster, there were some on LZ Uplift. None of us knew if an artillery round could airburst that high or why anyone would want to do it, however, the First Cav operated in that part of II Corps and had reported, on at least two occasions, seeing 37mm AA guns. Then a second airburst exploded, we were much nearer now. Discretion being the better part of valor, we decided we were at the south end of our AO, so we headed north and changed altitude.


RW

[rotorwash]

Medevac for Mike

Mike Force was a rapid reaction force assembled by Special Forces to respond to situations where other Special Forces troops were in trouble. Essentially a two company battalion with HQ and Commo detachments, the force was made up of Montagnards with SF advisors leading the way. Mike Force was the cavalry of the old movies that arrived just in time to save the day, and more often then not, they did. They were a force to be reckoned with, a bunch of mean, little, no nonsense guys carrying 100 pound packs loaded mostly with ammo, very few creature comforts. They did not intend on walking far or staying long, but they were going to get down to business.

Because their job was to get there quick and kick butt, they usually were inserted as close to the action as possible and sometimes that meant that they were landing right in the middle of the bad guys. The lift ships usually arrived without knocking, no LZ prep, just helicopters setting down, so Mike Forces soon developed a different strategy for their combat assaults. The lift ships would arrive, drop off the troops and take off, but remain close by until it was determined the LZ was safe and secure, then they went home. If the landing was contested and the troops were getting shot up, gunships and Air Force were used to beat back the bad guys and the lift ships would return, pick everybody up and try another landing in another location. So they wouldn’t have to wait for Dustoff or take their casualties with them when they extracted and went to the new LZ, a chase medic ship would follow the slicks into the LZ and pick up the dead and wounded so the living could get on with the job. When the LZ was hot, the chase ship was not a fun place to be. Come to think of it, Mike Force lifts were generally not fun at all.

On one occasion we were called on to insert a Mike Force that was going to rescue a recon element that was in trouble. My aircraft was designated the chase medic ship. An SF medic climbed aboard carrying a kit bag bursting with bandages and IV’s and we took off. The lift ships went on ahead, maintaining a tight formation, the idea being to get as many guys on the ground as quickly as possible. We tagged along with the gunships behind and above the lift ships. The LZ was a clearing on a ridge line about a mile from the action. It looked good, our approach would be over a steep side hill with very little cover for Charley to hide in. The first group of lift ships set down and guys jumped off, then the second set came in and the rest of the guys jumped off, then Charley cut loose. As the last flight was clearing the ground the whole place erupted in flame and fire. Immediately the gunships scooted ahead and started firing up the tree lines. We waited until we made radio contact with the ground element who informed us they had casualties and were considering extraction. We started our approach, it was going to be fast and furious, a fast run in with a nose high stop ending in a hover about six inches off the ground. The rule was, if the aircraft touched down it was because it could no longer fly, abandon ship and join the infantry.

Even though the approach was made as fast as we could go, it still seemed like it went by in slow motion. The inevitability of the situation, the idea that we were going in, that there was no place to hide on a helicopter, no turning back, no option other then to do the job regardless of the outcome, gave the situation a surreal feeling that can’t be described, maybe can’t even be imagined, only experienced. The setting sun was shining on our right front, my side of the aircraft was in shade so the treelines on my side were sunlit, but on the right side of the aircraft, the treelines were dark, lit by points of fire like fireflies. It was interesting to think that soon those points of light would be searching for us, and there were probably just as many on my side, only more difficult to see. I glanced forward and down and saw crawling people pulling bodies towards what would be our hover point, right in front of a dying purple smoke grenade. My only option was to get as much of me as possible behind my chicken plate, swing my M - 60 as far forward as I could and pull the trigger using the tracers to search for targets. At about the same time I heard the machine gun on the other side begin firing and that all too familiar sound of bullets hitting the aircraft. I could dimly remember the gunships hosing down the treeline in front of me as they made passes right on the treetops.

Even before we were completely at a hover people were being thrown on board and in about five seconds the medic slapped the pilot on the shoulder. He pulled the collective into his armpit and shoved the cyclic forward, the tail came up and the aircraft clawed for altitude and airspeed, the RPM bleeding down in our overloaded condition. We were clear with no apparently critical damage. Then the medic started working. His job was to plug holes, keeping brains and guts where they belonged, injecting morphine to deaden pain and inserting IV’s, which he then handed to me to find a place to hang. As he worked, the dead were gradually rotated to the bottom of the pile, the wounded on the top, and the medic walking around on his knees on the bodies. During the process he would occasionally motion to me for help in rearranging the pile. Long before we got to the hospital he squeezed up behind the pilots seat where he was out of the wind and lit a cigarette, passing it to one of the wounded, obviously feeling he had done all he could. Somewhere during this I remembered hearing over the radio that the guys on the ground had the situation under control, they were continuing with the mission as planned.

We landed at the hospital and were unloaded by people with stretchers. The SF medic made sure that the wounded were successfully sorted out from the dead and that the dead Yards were reloaded back aboard the aircraft to be returned to their families. They were done long before I had checked out the bullet holes and when I climbed back in and we took off I realized that we had not carried a single American dead, only one wounded and he walked off the aircraft with help. To the SF medic, these were his people and he had saved quite a few.

This situation was totally new and a bit strange to me, but to the Mike Force it was business as usual. As I reflected more on this, I realized that we carried a lot of people out of there, many more then the aircraft could normally lift, but then we carried none of their equipment. Most of the ammo they carried in would probably replace what was used to secure the LZ. An interesting way to live.

Later, after more reflection, I thought I understood the Montagnards of Mike Force. I was fighting for one year of my life, they were fighting for the rest of theirs.

Rotor