Garneau was the scout gunner flying with me the day we were working an area that was sparsely wooded with lots of trails and VC sign. Special Forces had placed sound sensors in the area and had detected activity the previous night. Among other stuff we found a large, above ground, one man style bunker. Little effort had been made to camouflage the mud walled fortification and no effort at all went into hiding the huge, forest green colored, Chinese Communist, Claymore style, antipersonnel mine lying in plain sight on top of it. The mine appeared to be aimed straight up with the detonator wires running down the side of the bunker and in the door. It sure looked like a helicopter trap to us so we thought we'd have some fun.

    We told our trail ship (wingman) to orbit around us and stay clear of our ship and the bunker. We decided to fake a grenade run at the doorway. We would usually fly down to five feet or less above the target, moving forward at a quick hover speed. The gunner would hold a hand grenade out the left door and toss it on or into the target as we slowly passed directly over it.

    On this run Garneau fired a couple of rounds into the bunker from his M60 then I broke off the attack just before flying directly over the mine with an abrupt left turn. The feint worked, -- the guy set off the mine!! There was a huge explosion with clouds of debris and crap flying every where.

        Apparently the VC occupying the bunker hadn't read the entire operating instructions or maybe he slept through the antipersonnel mine class but he sure missed the part about the terrific back blast of Claymore type mines.

    We watched as he squirted out of the collapsed bunker in a bloody, mangled heap. It reminded me of stomping on a packet of catsup.

    Enemy troops killed by airstrikes were called KBA. Each time we got a kill we would radio the command and control Huey above us and just say, "one KBA ", or however many there were. This time we weren't sure weather to call him a KBA or a self destruct.

    We were laughing to hard to make big decisions and had more sign to track down. We still had tears of laughter in our eyes when a few minutes later I managed to catch the toe of the left skid in a crooked branch snag formed by an old dead tree. We were moving so slowly through the tops of the trees that the helicopter just pivoted on the skid and rotated ninety degrees to the left without any damage. That really got my attention so we got back to serious work.