I have the stories in my head but sometimes I can't remember the people that were in them. You know, like who was my copilot or wingman or who was flying scouts that day. Since it changed from day to day, and that makes recollection tough.

            But I remember Ace and I were flying together that day. We were south of the Mekong River not to far from Dong Tam. Ace had just started to fly Cobras. He had recently finished the transition course and was my copilot. We were orbiting over a small village or hamlet but it was smaller. Almost like just a little community or group of buildings. Not more than two or three hootches in it. Intelligence sources told us that there had been enemy activity reported there last night. We had been sent over there trying to drum up some business. I was flying lead Cobra and my wingman said he was having some problems with his ship. He went back to the base and left me there to cover the two Loaches.

            I believe it was Newkirk flying as lead Scout and they were flying around doing a visual reconnaissance of the whole area. After we had spent some time working over some bunkers they moved in to check out the houses. After a while the Loaches spooked some guy up out of a hole. The guy took off running. He ran around the side of another hootch. He went to a table and pulled a gun out from under a pile of clothing. Just as he aimed the rifle at the Scouts the lead gunner nailed him up against the side of the hootch. Well, we'd been there for nearly two hours trying to find something going on and the very instant that Newkirk’s gunner shot the guy it looked like the whole woods in front of the Loach opened fire on them.

            I must pause here and explain that one of the problems that was developing fast was, as I said, that earlier we had been shooting rockets at bunkers around there and I was getting low on ammo and fuel and I had been trying to get the Scouts to come to altitude and out of there. We really needed to go back to refuel and rearm. We were having this discussion right at about the time the guy popped out of his hole.

         So now just when we run out of rockets and minigun ammo Newkirk’s ship gets hit. He starts trying to peel out backwards. As he did, he clipped a tree. He got more or less out of the line of fire and flew the crippled ship maybe a couple of football field lengths away then crashed kind of sideways into a marsh. He didn't hit the ground too hard or crash to bad. We had followed him until he hit then we circled around to watch what was going on and see if we could help because his trail bird was supposed follow the lead ship to the ground to pick up the downed crew.

         The guys were moving around and crawling out of their ship. At altitude we were receiving fire from what seemed like every tree that was around the little hamlet. While faking some rocket runs at the VC to keep their heads down we tried to get the other Loach to go in for the rescue. But he was scared to death because it seemed that everybody in the world was shooting at both of us.
        Ace and I were trying to figure out how the hell we were going to get that crew out of there. I remember Ace sitting up there in front and saying, “Well, we're just going to have to land down there and try to get them out ourselves”.

        We decided to land between the bad guys and the Loach. As soon as we landed the bad guys really started shooting at us but they were several hundred yards off to our left. The downed War Wagon was less than a hundred feet away on our right side. We finally coaxed the Trail pilot to land between us and Newkirk so we could shield them from some of the fire as they made the pick up.

        So we were just sitting there with several guys sporadically shooting at us and Ace has the minigun up and swung around toward them. He was pointing it at everything but we didn't have one bullet left for it. Then this one guy, about a hundred yards away was hiding behind a tree taking pot shots at us. Ace would aim the minigun at him and he'd duck back behind the tree. He'd stick his head out and Ace would swing the minigun toward him and he'd duck again. It didn't take him too long to figure out that the minigun didn't work. We saw him wave at a bunch of other guys coming up behind him. Then they all started to come at us. We were still sitting on the ground anxiously waiting for those Scouts to get into the Loach and get the hell out of there.

      The bad guys were getting closer on our left side. Ace popped open his canopy and started shooting his .45 at the oncoming VC. I said, “Ace, I think now they're gonna know we're out of bullets”! He calmly replied, ”Awe, it don't matter, we're gonna get these guys out of here in minute anyway”.

      That few minutes seemed like hours but they finally got the guys into the back of the Trail Loach. The Trail pilot started to takeoff but instead of turning around and going back out the safe way they came in, he hovers around in front of us and takes off. He flies right over all the guys that were coming at us. Right over the top of them! We could see the crap coming off their helicopter from the impacting rounds. They were getting shot up pretty bad. After the Loach went by they started picking on me and Ace again because we were still going so slow and trying to pick up speed. They nailed us pretty good. We finally got everybody out of there and got going. We all limped back to the base.

    We no sooner landed at Dong Tam when Ace says to me, “Common, let's go. Let's get another aircraft. We've got to get back out there because those Dinks are going to take all the stuff off of that Loach”. So we jumped in another Cobra, didn't even preflight it, just took off, and headed back to the area.

    We'd been gone for less than half an hour but that was all the time they needed to set up a .51 caliber machine gun near the area of the downed helicopter. We came flying in at about 500 feet expecting to find the bad guys around the ship when all of a sudden the .51 opens up and these baseball sized tracers come flying up at us. I dove for the deck. We started doing low-level, pop-up passes on the gun. We unloaded everything we had. We knocked out the gun and the rest of the guys just seemed to disappear.

    After a about half  an hour we got another team of guns on station. Then three slick loads of Doughboys came in and secured the downed aircraft until it could be hooked out by maintenance crews. The VC didn't get the minigun or radios or any other stuff from it while we were gone.

     Nobody got shot or seriously injured that day but they sure shot the hell out of our aircraft.