Door gunner

On a Sunday summer morning I flew door gunner on a two-gunship team covering a convoy from base camp to Long Binh. The gunships flew back and forth along the convoy, from the time it left Blackhorse, through Xuan Loc, and along the main highway to Long Binh.

Gunship crews flew convoy cover, ground support and rotated standby on five-minute alert. Sometimes, you go up hoping somebody on the ground takes a shot at you, and you can go down and cut loose with everything -- flex guns and rockets and miniguns and door guns, eating up the foliage and hoping there's somebody down there.

Most of the time, though, when one bad guy popped a round at a chopper, he was gone into a hole before the ships could return fire. But we raked the jungle anyway, because you never knew. He might be slow getting into his hole, or maybe he didn't have a hole to get into, because you surprised him.

One gunner I knew, Maher, said his gunship team jumped a couple of oxcarts one day in a clearing. The gunships came zipping over the trees and onto the clearing before the people in the oxcarts knew what was happening. The people just looked up, and the gunships were on them. There was a young man walking beside one of the oxcarts, Maher said. The man carried an AK-47. Maher and the VC were eye-to-eye, or at least as near as they could be at a hundred miles an hour closing speed.

Maher said, "I had him. All I had to do was pull the trigger and he was dead. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't pull the trigger." By the time they circled and went in for the run, the people were gone. They had all jumped off the carts and made the trees. So the ships raked the carts and the oxen.

Maher said, "When we got back on the ground, Major Treadway jumped all over me. Really gave me a chewing out. He said ‘Why didn’t you fire? Why didn’t you shoot him?’" But the pilot hadn't had the enemy in his sights; he hadn't seen the young man face to face.

On other flights, particularly if you’re in a slick, you don't want any contact, and if it happens, you're angry because somebody spoiled your day. You go up wanting to enjoy the time, free from the ground, with the green countryside below and blue sky above, and fat cotton ball clouds hanging there for you to see. Those flights aren't adventuresome, just enjoyable. On those flights, you want simple things. Go from here to there, pick up passengers or cargo, go somewhere else. You want the coolness of flight, chop through the air, with the heat somewhere below. Coming down from those flights is . . . well, coming down. When the chopper lands, those small moments of freedom are gone, and you're wrenched back into reality.

I saw the ocean one day on a lethargic flight. The flight wasn't important. We went somewhere, picked up some people, took them somewhere else. The pilot was bored. He took the chopper way high; three, four thousand feet. The air was cold, brilliantly cold, unheard of cold. I looked off to my right, and there was the ocean, an enormous expanse of blue and green water, and I knew the water went all the way home.

Flying convoy cover was no different than other flights, except we always knew where we were going. We lifted off, and when past the perimeter, I opened the feed tray cover on my machine gun, pulled the bolt back, engaged the safety, lay the lead round of the ammunition belt into the feed tray and closed the cover. Then, I waited and watched, looking in four directions -- up, forward, down and back. Looking down, maybe I would spot something unusual, something out of place. I looked up and back and forward to spot other aircraft. Sometimes, people in other aircraft don't watch what they're doing, where they're going, what's around them.

Most of convoy cover is flown low, just off the treetops. Helicopters get shot down when they stray a few hundred feet above the trees. The danger area is between a few hundred feet and two thousand feet. Flying low, we zipped past villages or single hootches. We flew so close to the vehicles in the convoy we could see the drivers and gunners on the tracks. They always waved. We always waved back. We knew we were lucky. Most of the guys in the trucks and tracks slept in their vehicles. The guys in the tanks and tracks lived in their vehicles, worked in the mud and dust, busted jungle, got ambushed, blasted away with main guns and machine guns. In my troop, we went back to base camp at night, most of the time, unless my squad had ambush. We slept in the same tent every night. We got cold showers, because that's the only kind there were. But we got them.

There was a grass airstrip between Xuan Loc and Long Binh, a lush green line, surveyor-straight, that ran between a stand of rubber trees and the highway. Usually it was deserted. On that Sunday, we flew over it about two hundred feet. There were a half dozen civilian planes parked on the strip. The planes were painted bright colors -- white, blue, red, green, orange. People in white and blue clothes stood around the airplanes.

"French," one of the pilots said. "Must be having a fly-in."

We hadn't seen anything that wasn't dirty or army green for a long time. The clean bright airplanes and white-shirted pilots and pilot families seemed obscene. The war was dull green and covered with dirt. What were those clean people doing in our war? We figured they owned the rubber plantations we pulled ambush in, the plantations we flew over and sometimes shot up, the plantation I had an ambush in one night and couldn't get mortar fire because the explosives would kill the young rubber trees and the army would have to pay for them.

Those beautiful clean airplanes sat on that closely-cropped grass strip; gull wings and stagger wings and straight wings and parasol wings, antiques you would see in a museum.

I wondered what they'd look like if we rolled in and stitched them with door guns. It was only a passing thought.

We flew a few miles down the road, dipping over the convoy, waving at the soldiers. We turned back and made a large circle. The grass airstrip and the bright airplanes and the squeaky-clean French were coming up again. The pilot had the AM radio on Armed Forces Radio Network. The Sunday morning rock show was on. The Beatles were singing.

The pilot suddenly dropped the gunship, then leveled out just above the strip. We were doing one hundred knots, four feet off the ground, and in my headphones: "When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way." Then, the pilot lifted the ship over rubber trees at the end of the strip. The French pilots and their clean families looked shocked. What a rush!