Ch 6: Snakeyes
In the ensuing carnage we had inherited, we stood bloodied but not beaten. B Troop, 2 Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment was seeing the elephant and did not flinch.
The conundrum I faced was getting some stick time in the AO to facilitate being branded an official target, yet we were running out of LOHs and pilots. Day two after I returned from Pleiku, early in the day, a ruckus started when the LT got shot down. He'd been flying over rolling hill scrub country and had splattered down on a gravel bar a bit down stream of where we'd seen the floater on my first day out. Mad Gary was on the scene but running low on fuel, so the XO had been alerted to launch to take over Command and Control (C&C) duties to orchestrate their recovery. I had nothing to do, he needed a copilot and next thing I knew I was left seat in a C model gun bird, launching into the clear blue western sky.
A word about our aircraft inventory: Our authorized equipment included 10 LOHs, 9 Snakes and 8 slicks, or Hueys. The general mission profile would be comprised of 1 LOH and 1 (Light Pink Team) or 2 (Heavy Pink Team) Snakes. The color was a derivative of the platoon colors: Red for Snakes, White for Scouts and Blue for slicks. Sometimes we had White Teams, or two scouts on a mission not expected to draw fire. Sometimes we had Red Teams, like when we tried to intercept Gen. Giap during a visit to the A Shau Valley in a Rooskie Chopper. Anyway, if something went astray or if we intended to insert the blue platoon grunts, the CO would be airborne in a C&C bird, or slick. In Mad Gary's case and due to the not yet completed upgrade to H model Hueys, we had 2 C model guns configured for C&C, that meaning they had an FM radio rack in the cargo compartment and carried an FO, or artillery field observer. That's the fellow that would coordinate arty fire missions when appropriate. One thing to be said about the Cav, we could deliver more hell in a hurry than most people can comprehend. I haven't even begun to describe the resources available to us. Our organic resources included, along with the three aviation platoons mentioned, a platoon of infantry, a vehicle and aviation maintenance platoon and mess hall plus a supply facility.
Back to the LT's situation. There had been no immediate effort to recover the crew because 1) Mad Gary tried that himself and took .50 cal fire from the same position that downed the LT, and 2) the gunner had a friend in another doughnut about 200 meters away. 3) The crew was covered by terrain from the gunners and were somewhat secure. So was the briefing we received when we arrived on station. Gary broke station and the XO got a fix on the gun pits while the snakes got their relief. The XO, a fellow I'd learn to respect greatly in coming months did something I thought remarkable, mostly 'cause I didn't know much of dick about what was going on and he did not want another bird shot down. He called our friends from the Corps at Chu Lai. You may recall I mentioned the MAG 13 O'club earlier? Biggest grass hut on earth, about 30 by 50....yards. It was the watering hole for Marine Air Group 13, a bunch of rowdies that ran amok with F4s, splattering VC cabbage patches at every turn. Now I'd never seen an airstrike up close before but I was sure looking forward to it. There was a FAC on station in a Corps OV10 and after a bit of discussion the XO pointed him at gun #1 and #2. Usually they would mark a target with a white phosphorous rocket (WP rock, or willy pete) and tell the fighters where the target was in relation to the smoke when they briefed the fighters. Not this time....
Y'all ever see the thing on the History Channel on Nam where they have an aft facing camera that records the dropping of a bomb and after it's pickled there are 4 big drag plates that open up? That configuration is called a Snake eye.....I dunno why. In this case it was appropriately named. The purpose of the drag mechanism is to slow the bomb to allow the fighter to egress before it goes off....it is intended for low level application. Now I thought I knew what low level was.....I mean, I been flying below the tree tops already at a blistering 80-100 knots, right? The FAC called inbound and I'm looking up....the XO says, "There he is..." and he's looking down. I looked thru the open cargo door in the direction of his gaze and see a sliver of shadow racing across the ground....took a second to assimilate it....fuggin' F4 was so low he was squatin' on his own shadow at about 9 AM that sunny day. Unusual to be sure, but the FAC had shown the Phantom jock where the pits were and they had almost simultaneous strikes going w/o smoke. The one I saw was inbound from the SE, the other from the NE. Sun behind the first one, and numba 2 was about 15 seconds behind the first. Cute. Those lads were clippin' along about 400 knots and about 30' off the ground.....
Did I ever tell you what a .50 pit looks like? I call 'em .50's cause that's what they are. The 12.7mm gun is .50 caliber although the case is a hair longer than the US .50 cal round. They use a tripod that straddles a mound of dirt left over from the excavation of the pit, leaving it to appear as a doughnut from the air. There is also a small bunker immediately adjacent, entry from the pit a direct and protected path. The pit is about 8-10' in diameter...the weapon is crew served and generally very effective against choppers of that era...unless they shoot back...so the dinks would sometimes use two....a helicopter trap if you will....very effective against Snakes if they were surprised. So.......I'm looking at this gray streak rushing across the ground directly at the #1 doughnut...thinking....OMG! He's gonna get shot down! Flew right directly over it too.........and about two blinks after he passed the pit, there was an enormous blast, centered on the pit. The dust drifted off a few minutes later and there were two great big holes in the ground where the gun pits had been before. As Lee Ermey would say, "OUT-[bleep]-STANDING!" I assumed the sky rained dink mist for some time afterward.
The Dustoff had been loitering to the north while all this was going on and as soon as they were advised of the strike's success they were inbound, more or less north to south on the river channel. As they approached the LOH litter on the gravel bar I saw another cute thing not taught in flight school. A serious deceleration maneuver wherein the rotor was used as an airbrake by laying baby Huey on its side, then eventually using the tail rotor to execute a 180* turn before they came to a stop. Whiff-bam-boom, they were on the ground and the medics were out the door to recover the crew. In and out....musta learned that in a Saigon bar one night?
The Lt had had his controls shot out and the last thing he'd seen before impact was 125 knots on the airspeed indicator. The Observer had a strained back and the gunner had been hit in the triceps of the left arm. There was not enough of the LOH left to identify it as a helicopter by the uninitiated. This was common as I learned later on. During the course of the war the Army lost about 1400 LOHs to combat and accidents, mostly combat. Of that number, over 95% of the crew members survived. Over 86% survived without injury. It was and remains an incredibly crash worthy design....believe me...we tried all manner of things and could not, no matter how we tried, win a CMH for our parents. The LT came back to the unit about 6 months later but the gunner and observer were sent home. Color me jealous.
You know what? I'd been in country for about 3 weeks and it was about to get really nasty.... We were also about to get a lesson and some help from a sister unit up on the Z...Alpha Troop. The Mad Men of the North....
