The Dirty Thirty

Vietnam is a miserable place at any time, but during the wet season it becomes almost intolerable. Mildewy clothes, muddy boots, skin rashes caused by wet, hot skin all the time. White, wrinkly feet with boot blisters that won’t heal. And this was in a rear area! I felt really sorry for the guys out on the LZs and the poor ground-pounders in the ‘Boonies’.

"They must be up to their necks in it!" I commented to Jim one evening as the monsoon waged outside our door.

They were. I found out first hand on Tuesday of the next week.

Since I wasn’t hauling rations that day I was ‘volunteered’ again for another sandbag detail. We flew out at 0630 that morning and made a stop at a small outpost with an airstrip called Quan Loi, just north of An Loc in the ‘Fishook’ area. The Chinook we were on picked up a group of 2/7^th grunts there and we were to fly on to LZ SANDY, a new temporary FSB. We didn’t know it at the time, of course, but SANDY was set up to supply arty support for 1^st CAV troops preparing for the upcoming ‘Cambodian Incursion’.

There was a little delay at Quan Loi, while the grunts got themselves assembled on the pad. Our detail, which included Jim and Pagans, Terry Leonard, and a guy from commo whom I’d seen around, but hadn’t met ‘til now, Rudy Anderson, and me, were allowed to get out and sit on the flight line while we waited. I climbed up on a guard tower and snapped a picture of the crew from above with my little Ansco camera that my Aunt Polly had given me as a going-away present. I waited up there, talking to the day guard, mostly ‘cause I could smoke up there, ‘til the Infantry Sgt. trooped his guys out and they started loading into the chopper.

We flew out of Quan Loi at 0845, low-leveling over the dense jungle of the ‘Fishook’. We’d also picked up a sling-load of 155 rounds and a ¾ ton truck, which now dangled, under the chopper, swinging from a large strap anchored to a beam that stretched across the 4’x 4’ floor hatch. The hatch was open in the deck almost directly in front of my sling-seat along the inner wall. I could look straight down at the jungle, two-three hundred feet below, and watch the truck and ammo swing back and forth, back and forth, back and…..well, you get my drift. It made me a little woozy.

Rudy’s sitting just forward of me and some infantry guys are to my right. The other three in our group were somewhere back in the bay with the twenty or so grunts. A pallet of equipment is lashed down in the middle of the bay, covered by a tarp.

All conversation is pretty much impossible due to the roar of the twin Turbo-prop engines, the whopping of the blades and the whoosh of the wind coming in through the hatch. You could be heard if you yelled, but basically, nobody bothered. I just stared out the hatch and tried not to puke.

We cruised along, slowly gaining altitude ‘til, after fifteen minutes, we were at two thousand feet; nothing but green jungle below. We passed through a pocket of air turbulence that jerked all our necks and the chopper slued sideways momentarily.

Before I could think ‘What was that?’, there was a loud ‘BANG’ and the engine noise was suddenly much quieter. We, in the back, looked around at each other and I wondered ‘Can this be good?’.

It wasn’t!

I looked forward, into the pilot’s cabin, in time to see one of the door gunners leave his post at the side bay window and lean into the cabin. Then he turned and ran back to the hatch by my seat, reached out and pulled a big red pin out of the sling anchor on the beam. The one marked ‘EMERGENCY’. I watched in awe as the sling loads, truck and all, fell, in slow motion, into the jungle below.

"WHAT’S GOING ON?" I yelled at the crewman. A question that showed on everybody’s face right now.

"STRAP IN TIGHT! I THINK WE’RE GOIN’ DOWN!"