“Comanche, this is Arizona Three. Are you in posture to move within one zero? Over.”
“Uh… negative. Still have my Three Six on the hump. They should close my location within two zero or so. Over.”
“This is Arizona Three. Okay, tell ’em to hustle it up. I’m inbound with four, plus two, plus two in two zero. Arclight opened up a large bunker complex on the side of a mountain to the northeast of you, and you’re the closest and fastest thing we can get on top of it. How copy?”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger, solid copy. We’ll be ready.”
En route to our objective, Major Byson informed us we would have to work our way into the bunker complex from the valley below since he simply couldn’t find a suitable LZ atop the mountain. This was an atypical method of air-assaulting a target inasmuch as one of the division’s tactical strengths lies in its ability to land a force above the enemy and then attack downward. It never ceased to amaze us that, regardless of how many times we so conducted our assaults, the NVA, I suppose being set in their ways, continued to defend downward, in the opposite direction from which we were attacking.
Overflying the B-52 (Arclight) strike before landing, we saw it had made an ugly mess of the untouched tropical rain forest. The double-and triple-forested canopy had been torn asunder, revealing a maze of giant teak trees and other jungle vegetation lying in disarray. Yet in another, somewhat morbid sense, the strike was beautiful! Beautiful in its manifestation of destructive power, in the near-perfect symmetrical pattern its bomb craters formed upon the face of the mountain below.
“Comanche, this is Arizona Three. We’ve seen some movement in the strike area, so I’d like you to get up there as quickly as possible.
You’ve got Blue Max and red leg on call, but don’t think you’re gonna need ’em. Charlie’s probably still in a post-arclight daze… you know, walking around with his head on backwards, mumbling to himself. So the sooner you get up there, the less time he’ll have to recock his brains.”
I rogered his transmission and, noting that we were speedily approaching the LZ, quickly passed the headset back to the crew chief. Then I mounted the skids of the Huey (located approximately three feet below each of the aircraft’s doorless door frames). The rest of those on board followed suit. We grasped the aircraft’s door frame or floor attachments with our inboard hands while holding our weapons in our outboard hands. We were now just seconds from touchdown, coming in low and fast, the Huey’s fifty-to sixty-knot backwash creating a comical pattern of moving wrinkles on even the youngest of our faces.
Suddenly the Huey slowed and flared, tail down, preparing to land. When it was within three feet or so of the ground, we jumped.
Simultaneously, the helicopter flared again, this time in a nose-down attitude, immediately picking up forward airspeed. In seconds it was gone, having never touched the earth. If one learns little else in the Cav, he quickly becomes adept at swiftly off-loading a UH-ID Iroquois slick.
One Six, having conducted the assault, speedily secured the LZ, permitting me to signal Byson that we were green. Moments later the Chinooks landed with the rest of the company. It takes longer for thirty or forty armed cavalrymen to disembark these huge troop-transport helicopters—perhaps five or six seconds.
The platoon leaders and I hurriedly planned our incursion into the strike area, wanting to get in and out as quickly as possible since darkness would be upon us within a couple of hours. Having noted during our flyover several trails that seemed to lead from the valley floor up the mountain, we decided to approach the strike area from two directions.
Two Six would attempt to access it on the left, while Three Six did the same on the right. We would accompany Three Six. One Six, already in position around the LZ, was to remain in place, securing the landing zone as our NDP. They would, of course, be augmented in this task by Four Six.
We had been climbing for thirty to forty minutes when our trail fizzled out, and we had to start chopping our way through the dense foliage. I was the fourth or fifth man in the file. Suddenly, a dazed NVA soldier plunged at us from the thick uphill vegetation, less than ten feet to our right!
Our reaction was simply a matter of reflex. I habitually carried my CAR-15 (a shortened version of the M-16) in my right hand, its muzzle pointed forward, my finger in the trigger guard and thumb on the safety selector, the weapon’s weight supported by a carrying strap across my right shoulder. Spinning to the right, I fired at the charging blur before me! The soldier in front of me did the same. The dead man’s forward momentum carried him crashing through us, throwing me to the ground. Quickly, but a bit tremulously, I got to my feet.
“You okay, sir?” Sergeant Buckley, the man who had been in front of me, calmly asked.
“Uh… yeah, sure. No problem,” I replied, hopefully with more conviction than I felt.
“Must’ve been a crazy whose brains were scrambled by one of those five-hundred-pounders,” someone commented.
Sergeant Buckley had turned his attention to our lifeless intruder, an officer of the People’s Army of North Vietnam, in whose outstretched hand was a tightly gripped P-38 Walthers pistol. Buckley looked at the weapon, then at me.
“Hey, Sergeant,” I said unhesitatingly, “it’s yours. No doubt in my military mind that you were the one who got him, and God bless you for it.”
We began moving again and within a few minutes were in the strike area. Our progress then became far more difficult, for no jungle is quite so impenetrable as one that has been rearranged by an Arclight strike. Trees and foliage that had been growing as nature intended them to, vertically, were now a chaotic horizontal entanglement.
As we slowly worked our way through this wooded clutter, we were suddenly confronted by three unarmed NVA soldiers just standing there as if in a daze, staring at us. Momentarily, we stared back.
Three Six’s point man yelled, “Chu Hoi!” (surrender). They didn’t respond. Seconds passed. Then, as if in slow motion, one of the three enemy soldiers raised his arm, which he had held behind him, and in a wide overhand sweep threw a grenade into our midst! He was dead before he hit the ground, but his two companions, miraculously and instantaneously recovering from their post-Arclight trance, made good their escape.
As was often the case, the hand grenade was a dud. The luck of Charlie Company was holding.
After marrying up with Two Six, we jointly worked the bunker area for another half hour or so, counting the dead and occasionally recovering a weapon. It was dark by the time we rejoined One Six in our NDP. We were ready to drop, too tired to even talk.
But Major Byson wasn’t. “This is Arizona Three. Good show, Comanche. break. Be advised there’s gonna be another Arclight flown in your vicinity tonight. You’re well out of range, but it might spoil your sack time… break. Unless we find something on first-light recon in that area, I’ll probably be moving you again in the Alpha Mike. How’s your copy?”
An hour or so later, the world to the northeast of us exploded! We could only imagine the stark terror felt by those who found themselves on the business end of an Arclight mission. You could not hear or see the B-52s: they flew too high. With no warning the earth simply turned itself upside down.
That night’s target, the reverse slope of the mountain on which we had worked earlier in the day, was at least a mile from us and it was still a frightening experience—frightening but fascinating. The sky suddenly lit up in multiple brilliant-vermilion flashes, silhouetting the mountain to our front. Moments later, the crashing sound of these 500and 750-pound bombs reached us in an awesome, earthshattering shock wave.
We had been told that the U.S. Air Force considered the Arclight mission to be “demoralizing to an enemy force caught within its periphery.” This had to be the understatement of the year.
7. Area 506
The following morning we were picked up and inserted into area 506, so called because Route 506, an unpaved secondary road running east-west from Highway One into Binh Dinh’s mountains toward Konturn, was the only distinguishable cultural feature therein. In reality, however, it was distinguishable only as a thin red line on our 150,000 tactical maps; like much of the country’s secondary-road network, it was a communicable roadway in name only. Its surface was marred by artillery and bomb craters, its bridges had long since collapsed, and much of it had been overgrown with vegetation by the surrounding jungle as it went about reclaiming the land, inch by
