Huey set down briefly at Ben Het. They got the survivor off the rope into the helicopter and took him to the 67th Evac Hospital at Pleiku. One survivor, one indigenous soldier, out of a special operations team was saved. The others were dead, their bodies claimed by the enemy.
We flew into FOB II (Forward Operating Base II), the SOG compound outside Kontum, for the mission debrief. A postflight walk-around showed a number of bullet holes in our helicopter. I looked at Mike, shook my head, and said, “I thought the war was supposed to be over.”
“It is pretty well over inside South Vietnam,” Mike said, “but not across the border. They’re all over the place out there and up to no good.” Mike finished the inspection, noting the results in the aircraft’s logbook before we went into the operations hut. After dissecting the mission with the aircrews and special ops staff, we cranked up the three Cobras and flew back to Camp Holloway in tight formation. During the flight, I thought about how I came to be back in Vietnam.
At the concluding ceremony of Cobra school, with our families watching, the director had said, “After you receive your graduation certificates and pick up your flight records, stop by admin and get your amended orders. Most of you who thought you were going to Vietnam have had your orders changed.”
Out of our class of twenty-four, only five of us went on to Vietnam. President Nixon’s policy of pacification, Vietnamization, and withdrawal was under way. It seemed to be working well. More than 400,000 U.S. personnel had already gone home. Only American advisors, support personnel, and a number of Army aviation outfits remained. They, too, were ending operations and heading home.
I spent a thirty-day leave with my family driving across the country visiting relatives. We stopped at every national park, monument, and historic site along the way, the routine we had established in our frequent moves. Separation was part of the job. Everyone kept up a brave façade, but I knew the sadness it created. I’d have to deal with the demands of combat. My wife, Amy, had to run the household as a single parent while worrying about me. Our marriage had been troubled for some time, which added to the tension. My four-year-old son, Spencer, tried hard to be brave and help his mom and his sister. Only baby Vicki escaped the emotional pain, but even she sensed the stress around her.
From Utah, where I left the family, I flew to the San Francisco Airport, then rode a bus to Travis Air Force Base, where I would catch a military contract flight to Vietnam.
I strode through the doors of the flight terminal wearing a shiny nylon Army flight jacket, pilot’s wings on one breast, a large Cobra patch on the other. The Mohawk patch just below identified my unusual combination of aircraft qualifications. The 1st Aviation Brigade patch on my right shoulder, with its golden eagle and silver sword, showed that I was a veteran of a previous tour of duty in Vietnam.
I checked in, dropped off my duffel bag, turned and scanned the room. Forrest Snyder, one of my classmates from Cobra school, stood up as I walked toward him. Forrest was a smart, well-spoken, polite lieutenant, not the image of a flamboyant attack helicopter pilot.
“Hey, Forrest! I’m on the flight leaving in three hours. How ’bout you?”
“Yeah, same flight. It’s kind of ominous, heading out on Pearl Harbor Day.”
“Hadn’t thought about that. Don’t worry. Everything’s good.”
We boarded the plane and sat with Bill Davies, another Army aviator who had managed to smuggle a fifth of Jack Daniel’s on board. We asked the stewardess for three Cokes. When she saw the whiskey, she was quick to bring refills. We drank our fill and passed the bottle around the plane. After it was empty, the flight attendant stuffed it upside down into the magazine rack at the front of the cabin. There was a spontaneous cheer.
In Honolulu, we spent the layover drinking Mai Tais. Back on the plane, I passed out and slept most of the rest of the trip, waking with a hell of a headache when we landed at Tan Son Nhut airbase in South Vietnam’s capital city, Saigon. I survived the bureaucratic processing through the Long Binh replacement center nearby, where the assignment officer had said, “War’s over, son. Not much going on anymore. We need your experience at headquarters, not in the field. Units are standing down, going home.”
“I want to get to a tactical unit that’s still in the fight,” I said. “I’ve trained to fly Cobras in combat. That’s what I want to do. My dad and uncles fought in World War II. I had a cousin in Korea. This may not be much of a war, looks like it’s about over; but it’s the only war we’ve got.”
He stood up and said, “Hang on a minute; let me see.”
When he returned, he said, “Lucky day for you. There’s an attack helicopter company doing special operations work in the Central Highlands.”
“Great!” I said, grinning.
“You depart at 0700 tomorrow morning with another new Cobra pilot, Lieutenant Forrest Snyder. I’m sending you both to the 361st, the Pink Panthers.”
“Forrest’s coming with me? Outstanding!” But I remember thinking, Hope I haven’t gotten him into something I shouldn’t have.
We made it to Camp Holloway in a series of unnerving flights, the first in the belly of a C-130 propeller-driven cargo plane with no seats. We sat strapped to the metal floor with a long piece of two-inch nylon webbing across our laps. We transferred to the back of a CH-47 Chinook, a tandem-rotor medium lift helicopter. At Holloway, we were run out the back ramp like so many cattle.
Map 1. North and South Vietnam
The Army’s airstrip at Camp Holloway, 2,500 feet above sea level, had been carved out of the fields and forests outside Pleiku in the Central Highlands. The camp was dirty and, depending on rain, either dusty or muddy on any given day. Luckily, it was a bit cooler than most of Vietnam because of its elevation. Tin-roofed huts and hangars clustered along both sides of a five-thousand-foot runway constructed of perforated steel planking, or PSP as it was called.
One side of the runway was a regular little town for aircrews and support personnel. The rest was taken up with maintenance hangars, operations shacks, a refueling area, and scores of revetments to protect the parked helicopters. Off a ways was a rearming point and ammo dump. While I was there, the ammo dump was blown up occasionally by rocket or mortar attack. It was always quickly resupplied. The attacks rarely affected combat operations.
On the rust-colored expanse of the base, nothing grew thanks to constant applications of defoliant. A perimeter of earthen berms, pillbox-like fighting positions constructed from sandbags and recycled PSP, and rows of concertina wire surrounded the camp. Guard towers rose above the stretched coils of razor wire. We were an isolated protected enclave, having little contact with the world outside, except for flight missions day and night.
Our
