Why I Don't Talk About It

I went to Vietnam in September 1968, straight out of flight school on orders to join the 1^st Cavalry Division. However, at the replacement depot at Cam Ranh Bay I was reassigned to the 23^rd Infantry Division (AMERICAL), headquartered in Chu Lai, in I Corps, south of Danang. At Chu Lai I was further assigned to the 123^rd Aviation Battalion, and to F Troop, 8^th Cavalry (Blue Ghost), a true air cavalry troop, consisting of OH-6A (Cayuse) observation helicopters, AH-1G (Cobra) gunships, and UH-1H (Huey) utility helicopters. I was assigned to the lift platoon, consisting of the latter.

As an air cavalry troop, our primary mission was reconnaissance. The OH-6As would seek out the enemy, flying low and slow to check out particular areas. Two AH-1Gs would be following the scout birds at about 1,500 feet above ground level (AGL), ready to put suppressive fire on anything the OH-6As turned up. Finally, a UH-H with a squad of our infantry platoon would be at 2,000 feet AGL to land and pick up the crew of the OH-6s when the enemy’s marksmanship was too good.

However, the lift platoon did a lot more than that. We were the workhorses of the Army in Vietnam. For most of the time I was in Vietnam, we were supporting the 1^st Squadron, 1^st Cavalry Regiment, and armored cavalry squadron attached the AMERICAL Division, while their organic air cavalry troop was assigned farther north in the Ashau Valley. In that role, we helped resupply units out in the field, did medical evacuations when Dustoff was unavailable, flew American Red Cross “Donut Dollies” out to the field. You name it, we did it.

I had been in the unit about two weeks, flying as copilot while learning our area of operations, the missions, and how to fly all over again, preparing for that time when the senior “aircraft commanders” would transfer back home, and I would move from the right into the left seat.  I would write home, telling them what we did that day.

This particular morning, however, our mission was fairly mundane: fly a mail clerk and several bags of mail from our heliport at Chu Lai to the 1/1’s fire base at Hawk Hill, north of the provincial capital of Tam Ky. The usual route was to fly low-level straight up Highway One to the firebase.

Somewhere south of Tam Ky, however, someone decided to plant an unexploded 500 pound bomb in the road right before a bridge crossing a small stream, hoping to destroy a US armored personnel carrier or tank.

Instead, it caught a Lambretta, a three-wheeled conveyance used by the Vietnamese to transport literally everything to everywhere. The attached photo shows a capacity of ten, but the Vietnamese were never limited by capacity.

The first US personnel to arrive at the scene did what they could; they threw out a red smoke grenade when they saw the first US helicopter flying by. Red smoke was the magic word, “Help.”

My aircraft commander did a quick circle of the area, and then landed as close as he could to what was left of the Lambretta. The troopers on the scene quickly tossed the mailbags out of the aircraft and began piling the bodies in.
 

How many were there in the Lambretta? I never knew. Maybe if we laid them outside and tried to join the pieces together we could have said, but the idea was speed, not accuracy. As soon as they were all onboard we rose up and turned back south to Chu Lai, leaving the mail clerk beside the road, sitting on top of his mail bags.

Our heliport at Chu Lai was next to a field hospital, which also had a graves registration unit. What they did with unidentified Vietnamese bodies I never knew, but that was our destination.

Remember, I was the copilot. The aircraft commander was doing all the flying. My job was watch and learn. I learned.

The top body on the pile in the back was a young man, who was stacked on diagonally so his head was wedged between the radio console and the collective pitch lever at my left hand. His eyes were wide open, staring up into mine. His torso was ripped opened from his throat to his groin. His internal organs were displayed like a dissected frog in a high school biology lab. All the way back to Chu Lai, the only thing I had to do was look down and stare into those vacant eyes and try not to smell the odor of human waste.

How did you feel about that? That’s the question I learned much later to ask of people who had been through a traumatic event. What did I feel? I felt guilty. I was 19 years old. I had been out of high school for a bit over a year. I had been in country for two weeks, and I felt responsible for those eyes staring back at me, for all those in the Lambretta, who had just been trying to get to where? For the entire war. It was the first time the reality of war was driven into my consciousness, but it wasn’t the last.

We landed at the hospital pad at Chu Lai, offloaded the bodies, and hovered the aircraft over to the wash station to hose out the back of the aircraft.

From then on my letters home were about what I was looking forward to, where I wanted to go on R and R, etc. I never wrote home about what I was doing again.