No answer.
They were fighting for their lives. I learned years later that when I called taking hits, Flame had banked his Cobra and fired rockets onto the positions shooting at me. As he did so, a big, ugly .51 round came through the cockpit and tore into his chest, high on the left side. Bob took the controls and headed for help, flying from the front seat.
My Cobra came down spinning and burning. It hit the ground hard, nose low on the left side. It bounced back into the air, spun another turn and a half, and crashed. It settled nearly upright. Fire engulfed the cockpit. I called Tim on intercom.
“Let’s un-ass this motherfucker!”
“Roger that.”
As narrow as a Cobra is, it often ends up on one side or the other in a crash. Since the front-seat canopy opens to the left and the back seat to the right, if the helicopter lands on its side one crewmember would be trapped. But we could both get out. We were lucky.
I was badly dazed and barely conscious. I remember smoke and flames and heat. I remember opening my canopy and unfastening my lap belt. I tried to climb out, but I was hung up by something. I dived out the canopy opening. My feet tangled in straps or cords. Wasn’t sure exactly what.
Inside Ben Het, one of the American advisors, Mark Truhan, watched us get shot down and crash. He saw Tim exit the aircraft. He saw me hanging out the side of the Cobra, head down with my feet stuck in the cockpit, the helicopter burning. He’d seen a truck driver die in agony in a blazing semi wreck years before and had sworn he would not let that happen again. He raised the sights of his M-16 rifle to my body. As he began to squeeze the trigger to put me out of my misery, a cloud of smoke billowed from the exploding aircraft. It obscured me from his view. When the smoke cleared, I was gone.
I came to a short distance from the wreckage. I floated in and out of consciousness several times in the minutes, or maybe hours, that passed. I remember the heat from the burning Cobra. I heard and felt the explosions from the fuel and ammunition on board. Then I would fall back into oblivion. When I was finally aware of the world around me again, all was quiet at the aircraft. I could hear the battle raging in Ben Het, a few hundred yards away.
I was dazed. I knew I was hurt badly. I had no idea where I was or what had happened. At first I thought I’d just been shot down in a Mohawk and survived an ejection seat ride. I was back in 1969. I worried about my observer.
I was also paralyzed, numb from head to toe. I could feel back pain through the numbness, but I could not move my arms or legs. I couldn’t budge at all.
Hurt bad. Need to be in a hospital.
My mind was stuck in a time three years earlier, skipping through confusing illusions for some time while I tried to will my body to move. Eventually, my arms began to respond. I worked my hands to the radio pocket on my survival vest. I groped the pocket for a long time before I finally got the radio out. I was about to transmit, but I couldn’t think of my call sign. I tried to form the words. I hit a blank. I tried again. I blurted out, “Panther three-six.”
In that instant, I remembered I was not flying Mohawks. I was a Cobra pilot in the 361st Pink Panthers. I had been shot down at Ben Het. I didn’t have a right-seat observer to worry about. I had a front-seat copilot/gunner.
Tim. Got to find Tim! I keyed the emergency radio, trying to formulate a coherent distress call, but the radio was dead. I kicked myself for not taking the few seconds to check the battery before we launched that morning. I had never had a problem with a battery before. Now I did. The Air Force always carried spare batteries. In the Army we felt lucky to have a radio at all. There were no spare batteries.
Rescue was going to be tough.
Got to find Tim. I struggled to move. My arms worked better, and I fought to get my legs in motion. I rocked onto my belly and got my knees under me. A piece of jagged metal was sticking through the side of my right boot into my ankle. I pulled it out with one swift motion, like pulling off a Band-Aid. Then I pushed up onto my hands and knees and tried crawling. It worked!
I slowly, painfully crawled around the wreckage looking for Tim. No luck. I heard a Huey nearby and rolled reluctantly onto my back, giving up all the progress I’d made to that point. I fumbled with my survival vest to find the signal mirror and flashed some mirror flashes toward the Huey. Nothing. I got back onto my hands and knees and crawled around the wreck some more. Couldn’t find Tim. I hoped he’d be OK. He had a radio. I had no doubt that his battery was fine. He was probably talking to aircraft already.
I crawled farther from the wreck and collapsed under a bush, exhausted. It rained and I got soaked. I lay there and shivered.
Late in the day, I heard the enemy moving and shooting around me. Air strikes increased in frequency and came closer. I heard the Spectre AC-130 gunship ripping the jungle to pieces not far away. If I stayed where I was, I’d be killed or captured. I had to do something. I rolled onto my front again, got in my crawling stance, tried pushing up onto my feet, and was surprised to find I could stand stooped over. I took a few small steps in terrible pain.
I shuffled around, tried to come up with a plan. To get into Ben Het, to the command bunker and safety, I’d have to move through hundreds of attacking North Vietnamese soldiers and tanks, go through multiple rings of concertina wire and mine fields, not get killed by the enemy, and hope that the friendlies would not mistake me for an NVA soldier and shoot me before I got to them.
The Montagnard hamlet of Plei Mrong, forty miles away, lay a bit southwest of Kontum City. That would be a good shot. I could walk there in a couple of weeks, even in my current state. The pain in my back was intense. It was broken. The fire had burned the back of my neck, and I had lesser burns on my face. My hair was singed. I had pulled a shell fragment out of my ankle. Superficial lacerations covered my face and forehead, bleeding badly. I was a mess, but I was motivated. I wanted to get away. I staggered from the crash site and headed southeast, toward Kontum, as it was getting dark.
I had not gone far when I heard helicopters approaching. Cobras came in low, shooting. They set up the familiar racetrack above the trees right over me. I heard a Loach screaming in at a low level, like a hummingbird possessed. I grabbed my strobe light and slipped the blue tinted cover in place over the bulb to make the bright flashing light appear blue, rather than white, so it wouldn’t be mistaken for muzzle flashes. I held the light over my head, pointed toward the aircraft. It flashed a few times. The gunner in the lead Cobra opened up on me with his minigun. A stream of tracers came right at me.
God damn!
I dropped the light and rolled away from the bullets. They missed by a few feet. The stupid strobe light, attached to my survival vest by a cord, was lying there still flashing into the dirt. I fumbled with the switch and got the damned thing shut off before it got me killed. I was badly shaken. I hurt like hell, but I was elated, too. I had heard the Loach hover down to the ground and sit there for a moment. Then it climbed back up and left the area.
They got Tim out. Thank God.
I got back onto my feet in pain and gave thanks. I had not just been killed by friendly fire.
In survival school, they taught us to stay off trails, travel at night, and avoid people. That’s what I did. I pushed my way through the jungle southeast by my compass. Every step was agonizing. When I had to bend or squat to get under a branch, the pain was excruciating. I had to be quiet, but at times I would groan, “Ahgg!”
I don’t think I went far that night. I was still dazed and I tired quickly. The pain was disabling. Fighting my way cross-country through the jungle was taking its toll. This off-trail, at night, in the jungle, is shit. This is impossible!