Dust-Off Three-One

The only mission I’d had of any real significance occurred while Chuck Clap and I had been on first-up. We had gone out to pick up a soldier who had received a gunshot wound to the leg while on a search and destroy mission in the mountains north, northwest of Qui Nhon. The terrain had been such that we had to use the hoist. During this type mission the ship is brought to a hover over the area where the patient is located and held as motionless as possible as the hoist is lowered to the ground, the patient strapped on, then lifted to the ship.

The patrol had disengaged from the enemy just before we arrived on station. Clap was flying and, although we had taken no fire, our two-cobra gunship escort was circling the area and laying down an almost steady barrage of suppressing fire. We hovered thirty feet above the ground—like sitting ducks on an invisible pond—while the patient was being strapped onto the hoist, and I looked directly into the eyes of an NVA soldier. And those eyes were staring down the sights of a rifle barrel. He was about thirty degrees to my right...his rifle, head and shoulders visible around the right side of a boulder. He had me cold! We stared at each other for a long second, then he lowered his weapon and disappeared behind the rock.

I had not panicked. I had not frozen. I remember ticking off my options in the first milliseconds that we stared at each other.

Number 1: Chuck didn’t see him; And, even if he had, we couldn’t evade fast enough to save me with the patient coming up on the hoist.

Number 2: The gunships couldn’t react fast enough to help me. I’d have to get them on the radio and tell them where to look. They’d have to locate the area, swing into position and then fire.

Number 3: I could duck and try to avoid a killing wound. Then the thought occurred to me, “Had he intended to fire, I’d be dead already.” Somehow I knew I was right, so I had simply looked above the rifle barrel and straight into his eyes.

Funny; I don’t remember what thoughts ran through my mind, but for some reason, I had smiled. I have since thought it through many times. I had not frozen, but perhaps strangest of all, I had not been the least bit afraid. Maybe I was crazy, but I think I had known from the first that he was not going to fire. I had asked God, on the flight from San Francisco, to just let me live long enough to see my new child and I truly believed He would. Maybe that had something to do with it; I don’t know. I only know what happened.

Anyway, NVA soldiers did not usually fire on med-evac ships. It was the Viet Cong who paid no attention to the red crosses other than using them as target. There had actually been one occasion where the NVA had, themselves, called in a mission to Lane Dust-off. The crew had gone on the mission thinking it had been called in by a South Vietnamese Army field unit. Everything had gone normally, including radio calls and smoke signals, until they landed and found themselves surrounded by a company of NVA soldiers. It had been too late to take-off so they had waited while an NVA officer was placed aboard and they were allowed to leave. The NVA major had been shot in the abdomen and would have died without the best medical care.

For whatever reason, I am still alive. And I had not told the story to anyone. Later...maybe.

Captain Nguyen Van Trang had trudged miles in the underground tunnels that ran from Qui Nhon to An Khe and still had not been able to forget the episode with the med-evac pilot. Ordinarily it would not have bothered him in the least, but he had aimed at the pilot with every intention of pulling the trigger and ridding his country of one more of its intruders. For some reason, he had been unable to fire. Perhaps it had been because he was an officer in the NVA and the rule was not to shoot at the rescue ships. But he had known this when he centered the pilot’s forehead in his sights. He had intended to fire—rule or no rule.

Now he remembered, again and again, the look in those eyes. There had been nothing menacing there. Those eyes had just seemed to bore into him as if reading his entire being. He had waited for the pilot to reach for a gun or to make some defensive move. Instead, the man had simply stared at him...and then he had smiled. How could that be? Trang had told himself that he had been mistaken; but he knew he had not made a mistake. The pilot had actually smiled while looking at him across the sights of his AK-47. Maybe the man was demented. Maybe he had flown on too many missions.

Trang’s men had completed their resupply mission to the local NVA and Viet Cong fighters in Qui Nhon Province. They had begun their return journey to their regional base of operations in the tunnels north of An Khe when they had been seen before reentering the eastern end of the tunnels. He had ordered his men to wage a running battle with the American patrol to lead them away from the tunnel entrance. It was better to sacrifice a few lives than to let the Americans find that vital entrance.