WAR ZONE D, South Vietnam — Tom Baca and
Larry Liss used the main rotor blades of their helicopter to chop down through
the bamboo and into the battle raging along the narrow road below.
It was their second trip into the battle
and the second time they used the Huey’s rotors like a “Weed Whacker” to clear a
20-foot descent to the ground. Twenty minutes earlier they had rescued 6
wounded CIDG soldiers from the road.
Tom and Larry landed three helicopter
lengths behind my Huey. Before we had taken off to extract the survivors of the
CIDG company, Tom and I agreed my helicopter would fly first, with Tom and
Larry following closely in formation. The decision was based on the weapons
aboard each Huey. Mine carried two M-60 machine guns, Tom and Larry’s aircraft
was equipped for VIP missions and had no mounted weapons. Aside from sidearms
carried by the crew, their Huey was unarmed.
Tom and Larry knew what they were getting
into as they chopped through the bamboo.
“You don’t have
a chance to play it out on the first time in because you don’t know how bad it
is. The second time around, you know how bad it is, and then you know the
opportunity of continued existence … the odds are shrinking, dramatically,”
Larry later would say in a television documentary about the mission. “It
doesn’t take a genius to figure the perimeter has to shrink and ultimately you
have to be left with no perimeter, and ultimately you have to be left with
little or no odds.”
Before taking off from Cau Song Be to
begin the extraction of the CIDG company, Tom had considered shutting down his
helicopter’s engine to examine the main rotor blades, which were making an
unusual, whistling sound. He knew the descent through the bamboo on the medical
evacuation flight had damaged the rotors, but he did not know how severely.
“I kind of
looked up at the blades and I thought, ‘Do I really want to look at those? I
wonder if I really need to shut down the engine and take a look at those?’ But
we didn’t have time,” Tom said years later during filming of the documentary.
 |
| Documentary cameraman Stuart Dunn attaches a wireless microphone to Tom Baca in landing zone 41 years later. |
He also made
certain he centered his helicopter’s tail rotor over the middle of the road. “My
margin of error on knocking that tail rotor off was maybe a 15- or 20-degree
turn in either direction. It was that narrow. Had we lost that tail rotor, we
would have lost the aircraft.”
Tom thought his
chance of surviving the rescue was slim.
Larry remembered the look on Tom’s face
when he told the Special Forces officer he would attempt the extraction, which
Larry described as a “suicide” mission. “Tom had the look of death on his face,
like he knew he would die.”
However, Larry said Tom’s facial expression
changed within seconds to a look of “commitment to the mission, even though he
knew he had only a few days left in country.”
On the ground, the scene was chaotic. Tom
and Larry saw CIDG soldiers in the back of their Huey being shot to death. To
help the soldiers board quicker, Larry got out of the cockpit and began pushing
them into the rear of the helicopter.
Larry said he was concerned he would be
shot in the back, “live and become a paraplegic.”
Years
later, Larry said, “Coming up on 70 years of age, I had to ask myself where the
hell did I ever get the energy and certainty to fly that mission and jump in
and out of the helicopter, gathering together the remaining soldiers, so that
we could save as many as possible before the NVA got one or all of us.”
The crews of the two helicopters, knowing
they had little chance of surviving the extraction, flew their Hueys loaded
with survivors back to Cau Song Be Special Forces Camp. After carrying 24 CIDG
soldiers to safety, they would return to the battle four more times that
afternoon.
During
filming of the documentary in the landing zone, Tom said he sat behind his
helicopter’s controls on the ground, “just waiting to die,” while Larry was outside
helping the CIDG soldiers climb aboard and defending the perimeter.
Larry
said after the mission his assault rifle was empty, though he did not remember
firing any rounds during the medical evacuation and the subsequent 5 flights to
extract survivors of the company.
Tom
clearly recalled the wives and mothers of the CIDG soldiers waiting at the Cau
Song Be airstrip when the two helicopters returned with each load of rescued troops.
As the soldiers were lifted from his helicopter, Tom watched the family members
searching for loved ones.
*****
After the 2
helicopters extracted the first 24 troops from the landing zone, the aircrews
knew they would have to return for the remainder of the survivors.
“During the second
evacuation and through the fourth sortie, it was becoming apparent the
perimeter at the LZ was becoming untenable,” Tom said. “Due to the friendly
troops’ movement, we had to cut through new bamboo to land close to them and
remain inside the shrinking perimeter. Conditions were difficult, with enemy
forces barely 50 yards from our aircraft.
“Intense, small-arms
fire, panicked troops, poor communications, lack of tactical air or artillery
support, and continuing damage to the main rotors challenged us on each
subsequent return to the LZ,” Tom said. “Each approach to the LZ was more
dangerous due to a shrinking perimeter and fewer troops to defend the LZ.”
*****
Two UH-1C helicopter gunships escorted us
on the first 2 extractions. As we were carrying our second load of CIDG
soldiers back to Cau Song Be, the gunship team leader called me on the radio.
“We have to break off and fly to Tay Ninh
to refuel and rearm,” he told me.
Now we would be completely on our own.
*****
Captain
Wallace “Wally” Johnson, Special Forces A Team commander at Cau Song Be, said,
“We totally lost communication between the second and third extraction.”
He said, “The
pilots, Baca, Liss, Swickard and Dolan managed to fly 5 or 6 sorties each while
extracting our entire CIDG company and 2 U.S. Special Forces soldiers. Each
time that they returned, the pilot flying that particular sortie had to again
use his rotor blades to make more room to maneuver to get close enough to our
remaining forces. The enemy force that our folks encountered that Sunday
afternoon was much larger and more determined than any other VC/NVA force we
had met on previous missions.
“The pilots and
crew members of those two helicopters were extremely brave and demonstrated
extraordinary heroism by flying a non-medevac and unarmed helicopter into the
midst of an intense firefight that resulted in saving 80 or more lives with no
fire support from gunships, artillery or A-IE aircraft support.”
Wally said,
“had it not been for the heroic efforts of the helicopter pilots and their
crews, the entire team of close to 100 would have been killed or captured and Camp
Cau Song Be/Chi Linh, underequipped on that day, would surely have been
overrun.”
The A Team
commander and camp medic James “Jim” Dopp had flown on the medevac mission with
Tom and Larry.
“What we were looking
at was a medevac-type operation when there was a hell of a lot more than that
going on,” Wally said. “Then, when we started to get some of the wounded back,
Dopp stayed back to tend them and then it was in the hands of Jack and Tom. You
all were going in and out.
“That particular
operation, I was trying to block a lot of it out of my memory. Maybe I did that
subconsciously because we’d been so successful on all the other operations up
until that time. We got 1 or 2 people wounded, but we’d never had so many
people killed, so many people shot up,” Wally said. “Two Americans and 5
Vietnamese were killed and 15 were wounded. It was pretty tough.”
*****
Jim Dopp said,
“By the end of May, the 1st
Division had moved several
battalions into the area adjacent to Cau Song Be. They determined that COSVN (The
North Vietnam Army’s Central Office for South Vietnam) had been moved to the
other side of the
Song Be River during
this time, and that the force encountered by the helicopter crews doing the
extractions was battalion size or greater.”
 |
| Camp medic Jim Dopp in 2008. |
“With the exception of the protracted engagement at
the Special Forces Camp Loc Ninh in October 1967, the level of fire was the
most intense I encountered during the war. What was most remarkable was the
willingness of the helicopter pilots to work in an area with such dense cover,
such poor landing conditions and so much concentrated firepower. On other
occasions I experienced having pilots decline to even set down in areas far
less hostile,” Jim said.
“Later that night I wanted to medevac a
CIDG to Saigon. The Vietnamese helicopter slated to do the medevac refused to
even fly into our camp that night, based on the earlier reports they had
received regarding the intensity of the ground fire. The CIDG died,” Jim said.
*****
Warrant
Officer Ken Dolan, my copilot on the mission, years later would hear the same
high-pitched sound our helicopter’s main rotor blades made after chopping
through the bamboo.
Ken had left active Army duty and joined the Ohio National
Guard. “The facility commander wanted to take a flight from where our armory
was over to the fairgrounds. We jumped on board and I was flying. About a third
of the way there, maybe about half the way there, we were at about 5,000 feet
and all of a sudden we got a shudder and a noise. It was like a flashback. It
was the same noise I had heard that day at Cau Song Be. He declared an
emergency.
“By that time we were almost at the location and we just
descended gently and landed at the fairgrounds, shut the engine down, and a big
chunk of skin from the blade had come off,” Ken said. “They just flew out some
mechanics, put some 100-mile-an-hour tape (duct tape) on it, and said, ‘Fly it
back to the armory.’
“I can distinctly remember having the flashback and
thinking, ‘Oh shit. I’ve heard that before,’” Ken said.
He remembered the high-pitched noise from the damaged rotor
blades was “about the same” during his five flights into the landing zone. “The
damage we did was on the first flight in.
“I remember when we flew back that night the back of the
aircraft was all blood. There was blood all over the floor in the back,” Ken said.
*****
“On our second sortie into the landing zone, I noticed one soldier
manning a circular fire pit. He was dug in the center of a defense position,
which appeared to be a pit outlined by a circle of rocks. They looked like
rocks, but where he got them, I have no idea. He was within 25 or so feet from
where we touched down,” said Lieutenant
Al Croteau, who was flying as doorgunner aboard my helicopter.
 |
| Al Croteau with Dinh Ngoc Truc, a former Viet Cong soldier, near landing zone in 2008. |
“The last trip in finally came. On our approach, I noticed he was still
there defending his position. We landed and I loaded the ship to the max,
hoping you would be able to lift off. I guess in the moment of high stress and
fear I had forgotten Tom’s ship had followed us in. As the ship struggled to
get airborne, I glanced back and saw this lone man still defending his position,”
Al said.
“My mind yelled out, ‘Oh my God, we left him
behind to his death.’ Through the years, I often relived that event, thinking
of the one, brave soldier who, by his action, may have saved our lives.
“When we returned to Vietnam to relive the battle, his memory was very
much alive.
It was only when Tom spoke of the last extraction and of Larry holding
that man against the ship’s outer hull that I asked if anyone had seen that
brave soldier. Larry spoke these words: ‘No one alive was left behind. We got
them all.’
“I could never put into words the affect those words had on me. For over
40 years, I regretted leaving someone to die. To this day, I still think of
that one, brave comrade and how he was willing to give up his life for us. The
U.S. Army should award him the Medal of Honor. I have. If there is an
afterlife, maybe I can find him,” Al said.
*****
Larry Liss
remembered, “clearly seeing the Vietnamese soldier Al was focused on.”
He said the
soldier “wound up being the last or second to last to board” the helicopter he
and Tom Baca were flying. “He was one of the guys I was holding on to. It could
be that Al was distracted with his own loading and didn’t see the guy finally
make a run for it.”
On the last
flight out of the landing zone, the helicopter flown by Tom and Larry struggled
to get airborne, overloaded with the last 18 living soldiers in the landing
zone and the Huey’s crew of 4.
A normal,
maximum load for UH-1D Huey like those in the Cau Song Be mission was 12
Vietnamese soldiers and a crew of 4.
*****
After
the 2 helicopters had brought all the survivors back to Cau Song Be, the crews
quickly took off for Bien Hoa Airfield. On the flight home, the Hueys bounced,
their main rotor blades screeching.
Tom
was concerned about his fuel level, but figured he had enough to return to Bien
Hoa. He was right. During engine shutdown, the low fuel warning light lit up
the dash of his Huey. The light comes on when there is enough fuel for 20
minutes of flight.
As
the adrenalin began to wear off, the crews of the helicopters began to sag from
exhaustion.
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