This was in 1969.
I’d flown as a door gunner doing orientation
and training with the War Wagons for a couple days prior to this, but on
my very first day as an actual scout pilot I flew as wingman or “trail”
behind scout lead, Loren Bliss. We were flying Hughes OH6As. The helicopters
were called Loaches and we were working right across the river from our
military home base at Dong Tam, maybe a mile or so south down the river.
Crusaders, Ace Cozalio and Marty Taggart
were above and covering us in their AH1G Cobra attack helicopters.
Ace tells Loren to turn and vectors
us to an area that he thinks looks like there might some stuff worth checking
out. Just about the time we got to where Ace was indicating.... I
was just sitting there watching...and I literally froze. I was watching
Loren. Little puffs of smoke and shit starts coming off his aircraft! My
doorgunner opens up. I open up with the mini gun. Everybody’s yelling,
”Taking fire! Taking fire”! Loren comes up on the radio and yells
“I’m gonna put this thing down”! There was this little area in front of
him. He was on short final to it and I was flying formation right behind
him. He got to about three feet off the ground and a control rod or something
must have snapped. His Loach just nosed over, hit the ground and flipped
end over end... boom!... and caught on fire. His doorgunner climbed out
of the wreckage first.
Ace came down there in his Cobra. He was hovering around, then right over the top of the crashed aircraft.... the crazy son of a bitch.... trying to help.
The LOH was burning and we still hadn’t seen Loren. I landed and my doorgunner got out. (To this day I don’t remember who he was.) But he got to the burning ship at about the same time Loren came crawling out.
Now, I had landed just a couple of yards away, right beside his helicopter, but Loren jumped up and headed the other way. My doorgunner chased and grabbed him. He yanked his ass down and dragged him back to our ship. We loaded him and his gunner and we all got the hell out of there. We didn’t know we had just started a major battle.
I took Loren and his gunner to the little hospital at Dong Tam then headed back to the airfield.
We were checking for damage to my aircraft when Captain Breed, the Scout platoon leader comes up and says, ”What the hell’s going on over there”? I say, “ I really don’t know, but there are loads of fuckin bunkers, hootches and equipment. Tons of stuff and its just laying around all over the place. It’s fuckin unbelievable”! (I never saw anything like that again either. Just piles of nipa palm covering shit laying everywhere.)
So Breed says, ”Well, come on Duncan”. He rounds up a doorgunner and says, “Let’s go over there. You can fly my trail”. I said, “You gotta be shiting me! That’s a bad fuckin place! Man, I wouldn’t be slowing down when we get there, we’ll get the shit shot out of us”.
By this time very gunship within a twenty miles of Dong Tam was rolling in hot on the battle scene. Hell they were forming fuckin daisy chains! Even guys coming back from other missions were unloading their left over rockets and shit. Everybody was just dumping their shit into the area. They even started inserting a Brigade from the 9th Infantry Division.
So Breed says, “Come on Duncan”! So I’m reluctantly flying behind the son of a bitch and he’s going about 90 knots. We were ten feet off the trees just screaming across this battle area. The ground and trees are just a blur and I’m thinking, “This is about the most insane fuckin thing I’ve ever had to do”. But at any rate, we made about two fast passes, drawing fire the whole fuckin time. Finally somebody yells on the radio, “You Scouts just get the fuck out of there and let us shoot”! We went back across the river to Dong Tam.
Later we sat up on the roofs of our hootches, got drunk and watched the shit fly. It went on for the next three days and we had good seats for the show. It just went on and on. Twenty four hours a day. There were Cobras and Charlie model gunships. Hell, the Air Force was even over there dropping bombs. There was so much stuff going on they wouldn’t let the scouts go in. We just enjoyed having a couple of days off.
Later we were told that we had found the biggest fuckin group of enemy Vietnamese troops ever discovered up to that time.
Joe Duncan