A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (38 page)

The code called for another rescue attempt, now to pick up two crews. The command pilot of the Huey gunship platoon announced over the radio circuit that he was going in for them. Vann the risk-taker, orbiting overhead in the L-19, was angry at the uncalculating recklessness of this chivalry, but he did not try to stop it. He knew that the pilots would not heed him. The lead Huey circled low over the two H-21s so that the two pilots and the crew chief (the Hueys had three-man crews) could locate the men on the ground. The four other Hueys strafed and rocketed both tree lines in another desperate and confused attempt to suppress the Viet Cong fire. The Huey platoon leader turned his aircraft and banked for a landing in the rear of the two H-21s, seeking to obtain what protection he could by putting the downed machines between his helicopter and the tree line that marked the dike. As he was ending his approach, his airspeed fell off toward a hover, and the guerrillas were able to hit most consistently; they put round after round through his machine until a bullet struck the main rotor blade on top. The Huey flipped over onto its right side and crashed into the paddy about fifty yards behind the two H-21s. The Viet Cong had set a new record for the war. In approximately five minutes of shooting they had brought down four helicopters. (A third H-21 had been so badly damaged that it had been forced to land in a rice paddy a little over a mile away where the crew had been picked up unharmed.) The guerrillas had hit every helicopter out of the fifteen except for one Huey.

Bowers leaped to his feet and ran to the crashed Huey. The water
was shallower over to the right where he had gone with the squad and the paddy was not much more than damp back where the Huey lay, so he was able to make good time. When he reached the wreck the turbine engine was screaming crazily. With the weight of the main rotor blade knocked free it was running amok. Bowers was afraid that at any moment it would heat red-hot, blow up, and ignite the fuel tanks. The pilot in the left seat had managed to climb out and was staggering toward a nearby mound in the paddy which seemed to offer some shelter from the Viet Cong bullets. Bowers shouted at the man, but he did not reply. Bowers assumed that he was too dazed to help him rescue the other pilot and the crew chief, who were still inside.

The machine was almost over on its back against the ground. The door on the right side had been partially crushed into the paddy, but Bowers was able to push the sliding window open enough to unbuckle the pilot’s seat belt and pull him through. The man was also dazed and had a cut in his leg from the crash. He had enough wits left to put his arm around Bowers’s shoulder and hobble while Bowers helped him over to the mound.

Bowers rushed back for the crew chief, an older black sergeant named William Deal. The engine was still screaming, and an occasional Viet Cong bullet cracked into the fuselage. Deal was strapped into a side seat behind the extra machine gun he had been firing at the guerrillas. He was hanging almost upside down because of the angle of the fuselage. The only hope he had of getting Deal out before the aircraft blew up, Bowers thought, was to drag him through the front. He kicked in the Plexiglás of the cockpit windshield and climbed inside. He assumed that Deal had been knocked unconscious by the impact. The plastic crash helmets the pilots and other helicopter crewmen wore were equipped with internal earphones and a mike for the intercom and radio. The wire from Deal’s helmet was tangled. Bowers released the chin strap and removed the helmet in order to be able to haul Deal free once he had unbuckled the seat belt. The moment he took off the helmet, Bowers discovered that he was trying to save a dead man. Deal had been shot in the head and apparently killed instantly.

The engine had stopped screaming, having evidently burned itself out without blowing up. Bowers decided he would pull Deal from the wreck anyway. Bowers was strong from the farm and the Army and he looked like a country boy. His people were third-generation Irish and Germans who had migrated to Minnesota from Iowa via the coal mines of North Dakota. He was taller than Vann, with angular features and long arms, but was built in the same slight and wiry way Vann was at
150 pounds. Deal was a big man. Dragging him was hard work. Bowers had him out in the paddy and was pulling him toward the mound, his hands under Deal’s armpits and his fingers gripping the tough nylon of the gray flight suit Army aviators then wore. The explosion of what sounded like a bazooka rocket fired by the guerrillas at the helicopters told Bowers that he was behaving stupidly. “Hell, I can’t do anything for him. He’s dead,” Bowers said to himself. He laid Deal’s body down in the paddy. He felt no sense of disrespect, because the ground was not flooded here.

In this first of America’s televised wars, Deal’s seven-year-old son back home in Mays Landing, New Jersey, saw his daddy in action on television the day he learned that his father was dead. The family was watching a news broadcast, and a film clip of an earlier helicopter operation was shown. “Look, that’s my daddy!” the boy yelled to his mother. Six hours later a telegram came from the Pentagon.

Bowers crawled forward toward the second H-21 that had been downed. He could see one of the crew lying in the water next to a wheel of the aircraft, which was standing in the paddy like its partner. The explosion Bowers had taken for a bazooka rocket announced an attempt by the Viet Cong battalion commander to cap the success of his men. He was trying to burn the carcasses of the helicopters in the rice field. He had sent a squad out along another tree line that ran parallel to the helicopters on the north side, hoping that the squad would be able to set the helicopters ablaze with rifle grenades. These are fired by mounting the grenade on the end of the barrel and launching it with the propellant force of the powder in a blank cartridge. Bowers had heard the first of these grenades blow up. To the chagrin of the guerrillas and their leader, the helicopters were out of range. The few grenades they fired detonated harmlessly in the air. To burn the helicopters would be another act of great psychological value, and the battalion commander did not want to surrender the opportunity lightly. He parted with half a dozen precious shells from the 60mm mortar of his weapons platoon, the heaviest armament he had. These missed the helicopters too, raising no more than showers of muck and water, because the mortarmen were still amateurs in 1963. By the time Bowers reached the H-21 the mortaring had also ceased.

The young man hunkering down in the water beside the wheel was the rear-door machine gunner, a private first class. He said that the pilots were with the ARVN behind the paddy dike and had abandoned him and his buddy, the crew chief, Spec. 4 Donald Braman, twenty-one years old, who was still inside and wounded. “I can’t get him out.
Every time I try to climb back in there they start shooting at me,” he said, pointing toward the guerrillas in the tree line in front. Bowers told the soldier to crawl over to the dike where the pilots were lying near the Vietnamese lieutenant and said that he would look after his friend.

As Bowers popped up and pulled himself through the door, several of the guerrilla riflemen saw him and started firing. The silhouette of the H-21 standing in the paddy made the Viet Cong tend to shoot high. They also naturally lost sight of Bowers once he was inside. The strings of bullets tearing through the upper part of the fuselage were frightening, but Bowers reasoned that he had a good chance of not being hit as long as he stayed down on the aluminum floor where Braman was lying between the two doors. In a few minutes, the guerrillas ceased wasting their ammunition on a dead machine.

Braman was coherent and did not appear seriously hurt. He had been shot while quixotically firing his carbine at the Viet Cong from the helicopter door when the H-21 landed. He had emptied one clip and was bending over to reload when he had been struck in the shoulder. Ironically, all four crewmen from the first H-21 disabled, whom Braman’s helicopter had been trying to rescue, had escaped into the paddy unhurt. Bowers cut away Braman’s flight suit and examined the wound. It did not seem grave. The full-metal-jacketed bullet, apparently captured American ammunition, had made a clean wound, entering at the top of the shoulder and exiting just below the shoulder blade. There was some bleeding from the exit hole, but not much. The soldiers of most armies carry a first-aid bandage in a pouch on their belt. Bowers used Braman’s bandage to dress the top of the wound. He took his own bandage and also dressed the bullet’s exit below the shoulder blade, tying the cotton thongs of the bandage around Braman’s neck and shoulders so that they would hold the pad in place. He then made Braman lie on his back to put pressure on this lower bandage and stop the bleeding. Bowers decided that Braman would be just as safe inside the helicopter as he would be in the paddy and better off because the filthy water would not get into the wound and infect it. He explained this to Braman. The youth said he understood.

Bowers gave Braman a drink from his canteen and then lay beside him for a few minutes chatting. He could see that Braman was trying to keep up his nerve and he wanted to help him. Braman had taken his wallet out of his pocket and placed it on the floor at his side. He picked it up with his good arm and showed Bowers a snapshot of his wife in one of the plastic photo holders.

“Gee, I sure hope I get home to see her again,” Braman said. Bowers
assured him that he would. “Don’t worry, you’re not hurt bad,” he said. “You’ll be all right and we’ll get you out of here soon.” He told Braman that he had to go, but would stay nearby and not desert him. He crawled back to the door on the far side and rolled out into the paddy, drawing another flurry of shots.

The Vietnamese lieutenant had recovered his ability to speak English when Bowers returned to him. Why had he stopped the flanking movement into the southern tree line? Bowers asked. The lieutenant said that it was too dangerous to divide the company in a situation like this, that they all had to stay together. While crawling back, Bowers saw he had been correct in his original judgment that the company would take a lot more casualties lying out in the paddy field than they would if they maneuvered. Staying put had allowed the guerrillas to first concentrate on the helicopters and then to turn to the company at their leisure. A number of the dead and wounded had been shot in the back and buttocks. Bowers guessed that some of the guerrillas had to be up in the trees to obtain plunging fire that would hit men behind the paddy dike like this. He did not realize that the irrigation dike was sufficiently high to give the Viet Cong a perspective down into the rice field. The guerrilla squad that had worked out along the tree line on the north to try to burn the helicopters had also taken a toll from that left flank. The ARVN survivors, wounded and unwounded, were all now pressing themselves up against the dike lengthwise as the lieutenant was doing. Most of them were not returning the guerrillas’ fire, which had slackened to intermittent shooting. The Viet Cong discouraged those hardier souls who, in imitation of the Civil Guardsmen in the morning, would stick a rifle above the dike wall and pull the trigger a few times blindly. Ten to fifteen well-aimed shots that slapped into the dike or clipped the top were enough to bring the rifle down in a hurry with no threat that it would be raised again.

Bowers had in mind a way to extricate them all from their predicament and get Braman and the Vietnamese wounded evacuated. He would blast the Viet Cong out of the irrigation dike with artillery or air strikes. Bowers could not see the guerrillas (throughout the whole day he had glimpses of only three Viet Cong, the first the figure running through the southern tree line and later two others on the dike), but from the sound of their weapons and the path of the bullets they obviously had to be under the trees on the dike. The lieutenant had a multichannel field radio. Before boarding the helicopter, Bowers had been given, as a normal precaution, the frequency on which Vann, who was carrying a similar field radio in the L-19, communicated with Ziegler at the
division command post, and Vann’s call sign, Topper Six. Bowers was going to contact Vann over the lieutenant’s radio, explain the plight of the company and the helicopter crews, and have Vann relay Bowers’s instructions to the artillery fire direction center or to a forward air controller. Bowers was experienced at such work. He had been trained as a forward observer for an 8imm mortar company and had later served as a mortar platoon sergeant before transferring to staff operations. Batteries of 105mm howitzers and heavy 4.2-inch mortars had been set up along the main Delta road to the south and on a canal to the east so that they could hurl shells out over the entire area of potential action. Bowers told the lieutenant he needed to use his radio, explaining why. Borrowing a radio from the Vietnamese had never been a problem in the past, which was why Bowers had not brought one himself. The lieutenant refused, saying that he had to keep the radio tuned to his frequency to receive orders from division. Artillery or air strikes would save them, Bowers argued. The Viet Cong might sally out of the tree line and overrun the company, he warned. The lieutenant still refused. The artillery forward observer assigned to the company, a second lieutenant who had control of the only other multichannel radio, was lying about ten yards from the company commander. He was in contact with the fire direction center at the division command post back at Tan Hiep airstrip, which relayed instructions to the batteries. The observer was sporadically calling in shells, but he was too frightened to raise his head and see where they were landing in order to correct the range and walk them down the guerrillas’ foxhole line as Bowers intended to do. Bowers watched the shells fall into the paddy between the guerrillas and the company. He had been on previous operations with the same observer and knew that his English was limited. Bowers kept his instruction as simple as possible: “Add one hundred meters,” he called. In his fear, the observer did not seem to hear or understand. Bowers shouted the instruction. Then he asked the company commander to translate his directions into Vietnamese. This Fort Benning graduate again lost his ability to speak English. Bowers crawled over to the observer. “Give me the radio,” he said. “I’ll adjust the fire.” The observer and the company commander both replied in English that Bowers could not have the radio. The observer had to talk to the artillery, the company commander said. It became clear to Bowers that the two lieutenants were afraid that if he got on the radio, the end result might be that they would receive orders to do something, which might mean getting up from behind the dike. After eight shells had been called in to no effect, a bullet wounded the soldier who had the observer’s radio
strapped to his back. Another bullet knocked out the radio. The observer burrowed deep into the ooze.