Things Along the Way

The following passages are excerpted from the chapter.

". . .In 1965 they used Korean War-vintage helicopters, UH-34s, to ferry marines to battle. Not the sleek UH-1Es, the 'Hueys' used by the Army and by Hollywood. We were only allocated a few of those for reconnaissance, fire support, and medical evacuation missions.

I haven't been near one of those helicopters since 1966. UH-34s were rare outside the Marine Corps, anyway, but the UH-1Es found a variety of uses outside the military. I still have queer feelings -- momentary butterflies and a feeling that the hair on the back of my neck has bristled -- when I hear a police Huey above the trees in the woods that protect the back of my home. There is something quite distinctive in the sound of the rotors and in the engine's whine, something that evokes an image of the inherently evil gunship. There was an awesome feeling of anticipation when one watched one of these helicopters as it deliberately approached a target. There was a sense of an enormously powerfully beast, supremely confident, stalking its prey.

It is the transports, the UH-34s, that I often think of. They always reminded me of grasshoppers. I think that was partly because of their shape and their green color. Mostly, though, I think it was the picture they presented when they were lined up for loading, rotors turning slowly, trails of marines running crouched to board. From a distance, they looked like some deviant breed of grasshoppers, consuming trails of ants who were unknowingly scurrying along with their burdens. I remember the morning dawn of D-Day for Operation Piranha when 40 UH-34s were formed up on the ground, engines idling, rotors slowly spinning, waiting for the signal to load. We boarded them nearly simultaneously, and when the order was issued the entire flight swarmed from the ground at once, heading out over the trees to find Charlie."

". . .I think often of those old mechanical-grasshopper machines. . .my memories momentarily interject themselves. And I am back aboard a UH-34 as it tries to beat its way free from its landing zone in a rice paddy. I'm the last one on, and I'm looking out past the gunner at the rippling whorl in the paddy water as the rice plants are pressed down in the pulsating wind from the rotor blades. All the colors are so deep, and the images are so crisply defined. Someday the load will be too great, and they will put me off and have me take the next one in line."

". . .We were moving on a trail that meandered up and over the top of a hill. Nothing but the sounds of men marching, the creak of webbing, the dull slap of canteens against hips. Then a muffled explosion. By the sound, it was about 75 meters ahead of me, very near the top of the hill. The area was obscured by the brush that bordered the trail on both sides. There was yelling, a call for a corpsman, and some obvious excitement, but no further explosions or any gunfire. The men in the formation hit the ground and assumed a tense defensive posture.

The word came back that someone had stepped on a booby trap in the middle of the trail. It appeared to be a small mortar round -- one of theirs, one of ours that we had left behind, a dud. Who knows? It had been rigged, somehow, so that the impact fuse would be activated if someone stepped the right way on the rock that concealed it.

Shortly, a medical evacuation helicopter came in low and touched down a short distance away. Several men, crouching as they ran, their open shirts whipping in the artificial wind from the helicopter, loaded a man aboard the aircraft and it was gone."

". . .The Regional Forces and the Popular Forces (RFs and PFs) were quasi-military 'friendly' Vietnamese. The RFs were organized on a province basis and were a rough equivalent to the US Army National Guard. The PFs served in their own villages and hamlets and were more like a local police force. Both organizations, however, seemed to have less military training and presence than the Boy Scouts of America. Each was suspicious of the other and claimed that the other was infiltrated by the Viet Cong. Our feeling was that each was correct in its assessment of the other, so when they occasionally exchanged fire, we were generally ambivalent.

The PFs and RFs would have been only a nuisance except that we were obliged to work with them and assist them in establishing defenses for the hamlets and in providing protection from the Viet Cong for the civilian population. We would jointly man various check points on roads and bridges. And we would often include members of these units in combat and reconnaissance patrols.

Both forces were largely unreliable, yet it was necessary to include them on many occasions when marines could be in jeopardy. In joint activities they not only did not represent additional manpower (they had a tendency to disappear), they in fact were considered a possible threat to our safety. For our own protection we would have to assume that some number of them were actually Viet Cong who were spying on our activities. So whenever we worked together, we would need to expend a portion of our resources watching our backs."