Flights from Phu Loi

From the time we arrived in the First Division, it had been stressed that we should always fly at an altitude of at least 1500 feet or, if necessary, right down on the trees (on the deck). The altitudes in between were called the “dead zone.” The reason was fairly simple. At 1500 feet or more the VC had considerable difficulty hitting an aircraft. Aircraft “on the deck” are shielded by trees to either side so unless you fly directly over the enemy, they have difficulty getting a shot. Altitudes between “the deck” and 1500 feet give the enemy advantage of a wide field of vision and a close target. Early one October morning on the way up Highway 13 to Quan Loi, I saw just how helpful altitude could be. It was still pretty dark. I was passing Bau Bang at 1700 feet when I was quite startled by three separate areas of tracers appearing in front of me, none seemingly very close. I suffered no ill effects other than jangled nerves and continued on my way. Depth perception involving tracers is extremely difficult when you are on the receiving end. Dave Livingston had an experience that shows this very clearly. He was cruising blissfully along one late afternoon at 1500 feet skirting the edge of a rain shower. Ahead of him he could see a stream of tracers, and he thought to himself, “Ha, some poor bastard up there is getting the shit shot out of him.” The next burst came so close that Dave realized that he was the target. The first burst, the tracers he had seen, must have been considerably closer than they appeared, but to Dave they had seemed miles away. My advice to future combat pilots is to assume that any tracers visible are being shot at you. Tracers aren’t seen too commonly. However, at night they show right up, and in Dave’s case he could see them against the cloudy rainy overcast. Invariably helicopter pilots in Viet Nam wondered how often they were shot at. There was really no way of telling. The noise of the helicopter will usually drown out the sound of enemy rifles, and unless a pilot sees a tracer or takes a hit he often has no way of knowing that he was fired upon. In mid-October, during Operation Shenandoah, I had an interesting experience which shed a little light on this recurring question. This particular morning, I was sublet to First Brigade to do odd jobs for them. Soon my passenger, a lieutenant colonel, and I were at 1500-2000 feet checking the progress of an infantry unit in the jungle below. We were almost directly above them and could plot their progress by the smoke grenades they popped periodically to show us their position in the sea of trees. We were in radio contact with the infantry unit and had been circling over them for a short time when we heard the infantry commander on the ground make a call on the radio to get some artillery put in ahead of them. He said that he could hear VC snipers several hundred yards to his front shooting at “the helicopter traffic overhead.” The lieutenant colonel and I craned our necks and ascertained that we were “the helicopter traffic.” “Why that’s downright un-neighborly of them,” spoke up the lieutenant colonel as we moved off to the side to make way for the artillery. The point of the story is that we had had no idea we were being shot at, and we never would have known except for the fact that we had been on that frequency with the ground troops. In all likelihood, helicopters were many times shot at unnoticed for the one occasion that was noticed.