Marble Mountain

I was both proud and scared the first day I saw my name on the flight schedule as the pilot of the medevac slick. As I said before, one becomes addicted to the feeling of excitement. The right seat (pilot’s side) of the ambulance is the ultimate test on a busy day. I would be responsible for landing and picking up the evacuees for the next 24 hours. We were called out four or five times that morning. The zones were not hot, and everything went fine. The afternoon was not eventful until about 1900. We received an emergency call to evacuate three wounded Marines just before dark. Anything coded as an emergency, we consider a life or death situation. When there are more than one or two, it usually means there is a live fire fight. The landing zone they chose for us was a bomb crater on the side of a hill, and the enemy, whoever they were, was shooting down on them. This made calling in an airstrike impossible because any bomb debris would be falling directly down on our Marines.

I wanted to secure the zone before I took the plane in, or possibly have them move to another location, so that we could neutralize the enemy fire and avoid hurting any good guys. Side-hill landings are difficult enough without gunfire. Alternate pickup areas were too far away, and wounded men don’t need the additional stress of being dragged around in the jungle. The best solution that I could come up with was to ask the gunship to have its door gunner shoot the M-60 over the top of the zone and in the direction of the well-concealed VC while I tried to sneak underneath his layer of machine gun fire. None of this was working, and the men were hunkered down in that zone still taking fire. The clock was ticking. I was circling and stalling, trying to think of something, all the while wishing this were just a bad dream.

There was an atmosphere of electricity in the cockpit. It had formed a thin wall that was pressing against my face. I could feel the tension of the three men in the plane with me. We all knew that sooner or later we were going to have to go down where all the shooting was, or somebody else would have to. We also knew that if I procrastinated any longer that it would be dark. The situation would only be more complicated. I knew my wingman was feeling all the same things for me because we had all been there. Nobody envies the manager of a shit sandwich. Only one man could make this decision.

Suddenly, I made the call. No words were spoken. Not a single thing changed except that I leaned forward in my seat. As soon as I committed, all the pressure was replaced by perfect clarity. The cockpit tension and indecision were gone. On the other side of that thin membrane, the world was in focus. My thoughts were clear. I had stepped through an imaginary wall of fear. Unconsciously, I had “split the needles” and separated the engine power from the rotor mast. We were dropping like a stone toward the landing zone. All my focus shifted to the crater and tiny openings between tree stumps on the side of that hill. It was a moment I will never forget and a defining one for me.

I asked the wingman to keep pressure on the high ground while the crew loaded the boys onto the stretchers. Half a dozen Marines swarmed the door to load the bleeding cargo. If we were taking fire, I didn’t know it. My mind was on flying that Huey and nothing else. I looked straight ahead to keep a reference point as I tried to hold a steady hover two feet above the uneven terrain. The rotor tips were inches away from a pile of rocks on the co-pilot’s side. My wingman had adjusted his strategy and was in a hover a couple of hundred feet above me. He distracted the enemy and poured lead into the side of the hill. His spent shells fell all around us, littering the landing zone. Our corpsman had the casualties racked in stretchers and hooked to plasma bags by the time the crew chief squeezed my arm to signal all-clear. I did a wingover down the hill away from high ground, and we were quickly out of there.

By the time we landed at the hospital pad, the sun was setting, and darkness, our other enemy, had stolen what was left of the day. The window had closed. I looked at the clock on the instrument panel. The entire mission took less than 25 minutes from the time the call came until we landed at Bravo Medical. The decision that seemed like an hour for me to make took only a few seconds, probably the most important few seconds of my adult life.

It took years of reflection for me to understand what happened to me on that flight. Fear was the real enemy. I had been swimming upstream against it until that very day. There came a time when no amount of swimming would overcome whatever force it was that pulled me into the powerful current that is the Marine Corps. I had read somewhere that fear exists only to the extent that we give sanction to it. I understood the bravery of some of those grunts on the ground and the corpsmen and crew chiefs. I wasn’t about to let them down. A year ago, some of those kids who were too lazy to make their beds back home were now humping 100 pounds of gear through the bush, cooking their own meals, and sleeping on the ground with a tree root for a pillow. I went down in that zone because I respected those young Marines. We came out of that zone because my wingman took extraordinary measures to make himself a target and to take care of us. We were a brotherhood. That was the day that I became a member of their club.