In April of 1967 I was sitting around on standby, awaiting any action that would call for more ground troops being brought into an area where contact had been made.  The rest of my helicopter company was participating in what we called "eagle flights". A bunch of them would fly into different parts of the delta, into suspected areas of enemy concentration, in hopes of making some contact. Then a back up force would be quickly dropped into the LZ (Landing Zone) to overwhelm the opposing forces. My ship was the command and control ship (C&C) and I had the ground commanders onboard my aircraft.
We were supporting the ARVIN (Army of the Republic of South Vietnam) Rangers out of our area. It was not a very large force, perhaps just a hundred and fifty men plus about six American advisors. They had been looking all morning for suspected VC (Viet Cong) elements, hiding in the delta area about 18 miles south west of Saigon, without making any contact at all.
Late in the morning we got some frantic radio calls that they were under very heavy fire. They needed help right away. We jumped into the helicopter and took off with all the ARVIN commanders on board my ship. We headed out as fast as we could to the hot (under fire) LZ. We could hear all the radio chatter going on between helicopters. It seemed that all nine of our ships had taken hits and been damaged. The gunships were escorting them back to a safe landing zone out of the combat area. All of them would make it back the few short miles to Phu Loi and the safety of the base camp.
By the time we arrived in the sky above the LZ, there was a full engagement of hostility going on below us. The ARVIN had stumbled upon a very large group of NVA (North Vietnamese Army troops) who had infiltrated down from across the border in Cambodia. There was an estimated force of around 500 NVA fighting the smaller and out-gunned ARVIN Rangers. The battle was not going well at all. My problem was that the gunships, which had been protecting the other aircraft and ground forces, were out of the area taking the crippled helicopters back to camp. This meant that there was no one to protect our naked ship as it approached the LZ. Worse yet – there was no one there to rescue us if we got into any trouble.
As we came down to just about 20 feet above the flooded rice patties, all hell broke loose. The sky was filled with red and white colored tracers (red were NATO ammo and the white were from Chinese and Warsaw ammo). Each tracer round usually represented five rounds of ammo. On my own weapon (M-60 Machine Gun) my ammo belts had a tracer every fifth round as the packaged set-up from supply. However, I had altered it by making my own ammo belts for combat assaults. I had filled them with solid tracers for the first 2-3 thousand rounds, just to make the enemy think I had more firepower then I really had.
So, as we got lower and closer to the ground, my ship was being hit by dozens of rounds from automatic weapons. You could hear them ripping holes in the metal walls of the ship. The sky was full of tracers. Yet, I had orders to not fire back. There were friendly troops on the ground. They did not want any of them hit by "friendly fire" (from our own guns). So I sat and facing the wall of fire that came at me from all angles. Everything was being directed at our small helicopter. It was being shredded apart by the impact of the heavy firepower.
Then just as we hit the ground, the ARVIN commanders scurried off as fast as they could run from our ship. Then one of them stopped and turned around to face me. He pulled his automatic weapon up to his shoulder and sighted in on me sitting naked behind my idle machine gun. He pulled off a short burst. I could feel the impact of something hitting me in the chest, directly in the heart. At the same time, the radio cords to my flight helmet disconnected. I was sitting there in total silence with smoke whirling up from a large hole in my chest protector. For a few short moments I had no fear – I thought I was dead.
Just three days prior to this mission I was asked to test out a new ceramic chest protector. Previously, I had been using just a flak vest, which could not really stop anything. I had been wearing this new ceramic vest for three days. Now when I looked down at it, with smoking still seeping out of a very deep cavity right over my heart – I was not sure if I was dead or alive. The force of the round that hit me pushed me back and bruised my chest – but I saw no blood and there was only a dull hurting and no sharp pain.
We somehow managed to pull the ship up into the air, perhaps about 10 feet above the ground and we moved as far away from the LZ as we could manage. Our ship could not stay up. So we were only able to move a few hundred yards past the fighting. We crash-landed and skidded to a stop. I rushed over to the other side of the aircraft to check on my left door gunner (I was on the right side exactly opposite of where he sat).
When I got to him I could see that he was in trouble. He had blood running down his whole upper body. There were holes in his neck, shoulders, all over his back and butt. He had 17 holes in him, caused by bullets and fragments from explosions. He was in a great deal of pain. I tried to do what I could but we also had a minor concern about the NVA troops that would soon be coming after us within a few minutes. So time was important. I pulled off one of the M-60 machine guns from the gun mounts on the side of the helicopter. I took a few thousand rounds of ammo and put the gun on my hip.
In the meantime, an UH-1B gun ship came back to help us. I turned around and saw the Major and the wounded door gunner getting into the chopper. I began to walk back towards them to get myself on the chopper with them, but they waved me and the Captain off, saying there was no more room for us – too much weight.
As I watched in disbelief, the gun ship disappeared beyond my sight, leaving us very alone and very close to the enemy. The Captain and I were more than just a little bit concerned about our safety. We knew we were just a football field or two away from 500 NVA troops. We also knew that we could not trust the ARVIN forces either, since we were shot at by their own Commander.
There was a tree line along the shore of the river. I wanted to make sure that the NVA did not approach us from that covered position. I walked towards it with the M-60 blazing away on my hip. Little did I realize that after a few minutes, and a few thousand rounds later, my gun barrel had melted from the heat. It was actually bent and smoking badly. It also no longer worked.
To make a very long story short, much happened that afternoon that I do not want to write about. I was nominated for a Silver Star that day. But this is not the story I wanted to tell you. So here is the rest of the real story.
We finally got rescued and taken back to the base camp. The damaged helicopter was also hoisted out of the delta and dumped back at the base camp. So we had the chance to go look at it and see what had happened to it. Upon examining it, we were all struck with disbelief. There were 17 holes coming out of the transmission-housing wall. Those were the holes where the bullets and fragments had exited from and into my left door gunner. That was what we had expected to see. But what we also thought we would find would be 17 entry holes on my side of the ship. In fact, if you took a straight line from where they exited and where they should have entered, it would have had to come directly through my body. We were like shadows, each facing off in the opposite direction. Each of us facing out the door of the helicopter so we could operate our machine guns. Our backs were directly in line with each other. There was a transmission and a wall between us. But on his wall there were 17 exit holes and on my side where I sat – there was nothing. Not one hole. Nothing seemed to have entered from my side of the aircraft at all.
Common sense told us that something was wrong with this picture. We all knew that the gunfire had come from the right side of the ship. We all saw the sky which was aflame with tracer rounds heading into where I was sitting – but the facts of what had happened and what we were seeing did not make any sense at all.
No one could offer us an explanation of what had taken place. No one even had a theory. It was just impossible for 17 holes to appear and exit from one side of a wall without having ever entered the other side. The Army investigated and was as puzzled, as were all of us that lived through the experience. It was impossible that it could have happened as we saw it happen. But the entry holes were not there. We saw what we saw. I can offer nothing more to explain this, except to believe that there must have been some kind of "spiritual armor" that protected me from harms way on that morning in the delta. |
