FINAL SALUTE

Intelligence gathered from the scene, and from the enemy bodies found in the killing zone after that free‑ for‑ all on the tank bust trail, told us several remarkable things. Among them was an explanation of the explosion under Willis’s ship, which had started the whole fracas in the first place.

As One Seven suspected, it wasn’t a glancing RPG round that had been fired at his aircraft. It was, rather, clever use of a CHICOM mine, the enemy’s answer to our Claymore antipersonnel mine. These mines looked like big black metal frying pans and were filled with military plastic explosive and metal fragments. The enemy soldiers had jury‑ rigged one of them in the top branches of a tree, right in the center of their newly constructed, heavily fortified, and well‑ concealed base camp area. Their idea was that when an aeroscout hovered over the tree trying to look down through the jungle to find an enemy base camp, they’d blow the mine by remote control and get themselves a U. S. chopper.

They almost did. They did succeed in giving Rod’s aircraft a hell of a jolt, plus wounding Joe Cook in the hand with one of the mine fragments.

Papers found on enemy bodies told us something else–something that, even in light of all the casualties taken by the ARPs, was damned happy news for the 1st Division. The newly established enemy base camp belonged to none other than the infamous Dong Nai Regiment–the tough, elusive, hard‑ core NVA regulars we had been trying to pin down for months.

It was determined to be an enemy force of between one hundred fifty and two hundred troops. On that particular day, they had run up against twenty‑ eight men of the aerorifle platoon, and had gotten their noses bloodied in the process.

The ARPs had been outnumbered ten to one, and had it not been for the tenacity they exhibited that day, like so many other times before in the field, the Dong Nai would have gone through them “like crap through a goose, ” as General Patton supposedly said during World War II. The ARP casualties were extremely heavy, and came right on the heels of their terrible losses in the Huey LZ mine incident just days before. But these twenty‑ eight men, with an effective fighting force of only about twenty, prevailed against the toughest regular North Vietnamese Army outfit we knew about.

The 1st Division was anxious to deliver the coup de grace. We had hurt the Dong Nai badly up on the tank bust trail, but they were still a viable force. We wanted to put them out of commission for good.

Hoping to catch the rest of the regiment at home in their bunkers, division set up an Arc Light to hit a suspected jungle base area just south of the Michelin. The target for the B‑ 52 strike was a grid “box” on the ground, two kilometers wide by five and a half kilometers long. We knew that this area contained a number of bunkers, connecting trenches, antiaircraft machine guns, and–we hoped–the remnants of the Dong Nai.

The “Big Belly” B‑ 52 Stratofortresses were equipped with multiple ejector racks capable of carrying up to forty‑ two iron bombs, each weighing 750 pounds. The airplanes were to fly in from their base in Guam, unload their explosives into our designated box of eleven square kilometers, then head back home.

We had a hunter‑ killer team waiting at FSB Kien to do a BDA of the area just as soon as the B‑ 52s finished their business. I was the designated scout, Parker was my Charlie Echo, and Bruce Foster was my gun.

At the precise stipulated moment, the Arc Light rained down. The three B‑ 52s, so high that they were invisible from the ground, had been guided into our little grid box by radar. The explosions, even from our distance at Kien, were tremendous, almost as if we were standing right next to a rapid‑ firing 105. I thought about what it must have been like to be in that box, then put the idea quickly out of my mind.

With word that the last bomb was down, we headed out to take a look. I dropped low and looked down at the smoldering ruins through the gray dust that still hung heavily in the air. I was quickly convinced that absolutely nothing could have lived through that holocaust.

We saw nothing but huge bomb craters, stripped and shredded trees, and the remains of enemy bunkers that had either been blown sky‑ high or collapsed inward by the blasts. Any form of life surely had been pulverized.

I concluded that an Arc Light strike was the most terrifying sight a man could observe in war. Grimacing from the sight, I was ready to pull the plug and get out of there, leaving that awful grisliness behind. Then, suddenly… almost inconceivably… we began taking AK‑ 47 fire.

I jerked my head left and right, looking for the source. My God, I thought, I don’t believe this. There they were–muzzle flashes coming from a partially caved‑ in bunker that had incredibly missed being totally destroyed by the bombs. Whoever was on the other end of that assault rifle was mad as hell, and determined to take me down. His fire was sustained and accurate.

As I swung around to meet his challenge, the man broke from the bunker ruins and dove into one of the B‑ 52 bomb craters, with Parker’s rounds hot on his tail. He was bare chested except for his ammo pouch and was carrying his AK‑ 47.

I keyed Foster. “Believe it or not, I’ve got one live enemy soldier down here. He was in one of the blasted‑ out bunkers and has now ducked into a crater. We’re going to take him out and then I’ll be right back with you. ”

Foster rogered, figuring that I couldn’t expect much trouble from one bomb‑ blasted enemy soldier hiding in an open B‑ 52 crater.

I swung around over the caved‑ in bunker, which was at the edge of the crater. As I came in over the lip of the crater, the soldier started shooting again. He was putting out more fire on me than I was giving him back. This guy was going to put up a fight.

Every time I hovered over the crater to get him, he’d fire a long, point‑ blank burst, then disappear back into the crater. I couldn’t tell where he was going.

I backed off again, and decided to make a fast pass over the crater so I could look for his hiding place. He managed to let me have another burst, and some of his rounds hit the aircraft. But I was able to spot a hole in the side of the crater, right underneath the rim. After the soldier ripped off shots at me, he was jumping back into that little hole where I couldn’t see him.

“Damn it, Jimbo, ” I said to Parker, “get him. When he sticks his head out, get him, before he gets us with one of those bursts. ”

I made three more passes. Again, we exchanged rounds with the little fighter. He hit us with a couple of shots and we missed him completely.

In desperation, I keyed Parker again. “Goddamnit, give me a gas grenade. We’ll gas his ass out of there! ”

Parker pulled the pin on a CS grenade and let it fly, right into the center of the crater.

I backed off long enough for the crater to fill with fumes, then eased the Loach in for what I thought would be my last pass. As I gently nosed over the lip, I was once again greeted by a sustained burst of AK fire. The guy now had me frustrated beyond belief.

The next time I came around on the crater, the enemy soldier was out of his hole. He obviously had a snoot full of CS and was having trouble breathing. But that didn’t deter him. As I passed by, he raised his weapon and got off two rounds at me.

Then, nothing. He had either run out of ammo or had a jam. Now I had him. The source of my frustrating little hide‑ and‑ seek game… I finally had him cold! He was standing in the base of the crater, and I had no reason in the world not to take him out.

With a little bit of left and aft cyclic, I stopped my right‑ hand slide and came to a hover. I was fifteen feet over him, and we were looking at each other face‑ to‑ face. I dropped my nose a fraction. My finger tightened on the minigun trigger. But I didn’t fire.

In the back of my mind was a clear picture of an enemy soldier in a trench, with his weapon aimed squarely at my head as I hovered over Bob Harris’s ARPs in a similar crater. That guy didn’t shoot… and he had me cold.

I snapped back to reality and looked at the enemy soldier in this crater. Still holding his weapon, he was looking at me with a question in his eyes–why don’t you shoot?

This soldier had endured all that we could throw at him, and he had survived and persevered. His determination and stamina, and that of his countrymen, had sustained him so long, against so many adversaries. To kill this man would have meant nothing, and to kill an unarmed man would have been unforgivable. I said to myself, Let it go, let it go. This bastard deserves to walk out of here.

I hovered in again and looked him in the face. There was no expression. We were eyeball to eyeball for one last moment. Then I nodded my head at him in a salute of respect, dumped the nose, and pulled away.

We would both go home that day. It was my last mission of my first tour in Vietnam.