WAR
ZONE D, South Vietnam — Our 2 Hueys stopped at a high hover over the bamboo
growing along the narrow road.
Smaller
branches leaned over the road. Purple smoke was drifting up from the ground,
swirling when caught in the rotor wash. This was where we would begin
extracting the surviving CIDG troops and their U.S. Special Forces advisors.
 |
| Smoke from canisters mark runway in vicinity of ambush in War Zone D in 1967. |
Below
our Hueys, the fighting raged. Now it was time to land.
I
knew we would have to cut our way to the ground. I had nicked leaves with my
helicopter’s main rotor blades on previous missions. The rotor blades had a
steel leading edge to protect the aluminum body of the blade from debris during
normal landings.
I
weighed the odds of success, and then contrasted them with what would happen to
the soldiers on the ground if we left them behind in the ambush. We had to
attempt the rescue.
I
held the helicopter as still as I could in a hover 20 feet above the bamboo.
Slowly I lowered the collective pitch lever and began the descent. With the
foot pedals, I kept the tailboom and the tail rotor at its end centered on the
road. If we lost the tail rotor, we would spin out of control.
As
the main rotors hit the leaves, I could hear a “tick, tick, tick.” I had heard
this before. So far, I wasn’t worried about serious damage to the rotors.
The
noise soon would change as the rotors began cutting past the leaves and
hammering into the stalk of the bamboo.
*****
Warrant
Officer Ken Dolan, flying as my copilot that day, recalled thinking: “He’s not
going to use the rotors as a mower, is he?”
“I
was a relatively new pilot at the time, about 2 months. I vividly remember
using the blades of the Huey as a mower to chop down bamboo to get to the road
where the wounded and dead were staged, which didn’t seem like a particularly
good idea at the time,” Ken said.
“The
noise was almost like a high-pitched whine. It was a singing noise. I knew we
had done damage, I just didn’t know what the extent was.” Ken said he also
could hear a whistling through the rotor blades as they spun.
*****
During
the descent, Lieutenant Al Croteau said, “I just looked down and said, ‘Where
are we going to go here? There’s no road, there’s nothing. I could see the
people running around. I asked myself, ‘What’s he going to do here? There’s no
place to land.’”
Al
said he knew the aircraft was going to land. He added that his only fear was
“Once we loaded, we weren’t going to get out. That we were going to get out,
but then we were going to crash.”
Al was seated behind an M-60
machine gun in the rear of my helicopter, “on the right side of the aircraft,
on the copilot’s side.”
As
the Huey chopped its way to the ground, it sounded like a whirlwind,” Al said.
“It
was an absolutely devastating noise. It was almost like a tornado type of
noise. My mind was just picturing those rotor blades. I thought, ‘He’s just
destroying this aircraft.’ It was horrifying. The noise was tremendous. And the
debris was flying everywhere.”
Earlier, during their approach
to the landing zone, Al’s M-60 machine gun had jammed.
“As
we were coming in, I was returning fire. I could see the flashes. They were
firing at us and I was returning fire,” Al said.
After
his machine gun had jammed, Al emptied his .45-caliber automatic pistol, firing
at the enemy. He later would describe it “as a useless gesture.”
“I
said, ‘Jack, the gun’s jammed,’ and Jack said, ‘Well, take pictures.’
It
was clear to me the CIDG soldiers were stretched out along both sides of the
road. The defense perimeter was no wider than the span of our main rotor
blades. I knew we could not fire any of our weapons on the ground without
hitting a CIDG soldier.
After
the helicopters touched down, the soldiers began rushing toward our cargo
doors. I turned around to see how long until we had a full load of soldiers so
we could take off.
I
could see Al helping the soldiers board our helicopter. The troops already on
board were reaching out to their comrades as they, too, climbed aboard our
Huey.
Then
I saw soldiers begin to collapse onto the floor of the helicopter in pools of
blood. More began to drop onto the floor. The enemy was shooting the soldiers
after they had boarded our chopper.
To
make room for the living, the CIDG troops began throwing the bodies of the dead
out both cargo doors. No one was safe in the helicopter.
I
turned around in my seat and began reading the instruments on the dash, waiting
for Tom Baca to tell me his helicopter was fully loaded so we could depart for
Cau Song Be.
I
made a conscious effort not to watch the soldiers in the rear of the
helicopter. I tried to tune out the killing in the rear so I wouldn’t panic and
lose my wits. The takeoff would require considerable finesse.
Ken
Dolan and I had ceramic armor protecting our upper bodies on both sides. The
enemy had a clear shot at us front on, and our heads were exposed above the
armor. The shots raking through the helicopter’s open cargo doors were from the
side.
I
knew the enemy marksmen soon would get off a successful headshot. I waited for
the shot.
 |
| Carbine Al Croteau took off dead soldier. |
Al
said to himself, “We’re going to crash. We are overloaded.”
“I
actually can picture it in my mind. I said, ‘We’re going to come out, we’re
going to turn, and when we make that turn, we’re going to go down.’ I knew when
we made the turn we were going to lose lift. I said, ‘That’s when we’re going
to crash. We’re going to go down, and all I’ve got is this goddamned carbine.’
And I said, ‘I really don’t have any combat training,’” Al recalled.
“As
long as we’re in the airplane, Jack’s in command, but the minute we hit the
ground, I am in command,” Al remembered thinking. “We don’t really want to do
this, but we’re going to crash.”
Tom
came over the radio. “We’re up,” which meant his helicopter was loaded and
ready to take off from the battlefield.
Al
and Jack knew their helicopter was overweight as it hovered back up through the
hole the rotors had cut in the bamboo on the descent.
Al
said he “had counted the CIDG soldiers on board the Huey. I knew we were
overweight. I said, ‘We’re overloaded.’ I knew we weren’t getting a running
start. I had flown enough to know what was supposed to happen. I knew we were
not going to make it. But we did.”
*****
Overhead
Al said he “saw the jets coming in. It was a pretty sight, they came in, they
did a run, but they didn’t let go of any ordnance, of course. Then they winged
off. All they did was a show. They came in low.”
The 2
UH-1C Huey gunships flew over the battlefield. Like the Air Force jets, they
could not fire on the enemy without hitting the CIDG soldiers and their Special
Forces advisors.
*****
On
the ground, Al remained busy with the Vietnamese soldiers. It never occurred to
him he would be hit by enemy gunfire. “I never had a fear of being hit, only
the fear of crashing,” he said.
“What
I was doing was almost mechanical,” Al remembered. “There wasn’t much thought.
Get the people in, get back in the aircraft, and tell Jack we were all set to
go.”
Al
recalled when he was younger he wondered how he would react in combat. “I
wondered what would happen; would I go into shock and not perform?”
“It
was like running a fast film. I didn’t have time to think about it,” Al said.
No comments:
Post a Comment