Bill Hanegmon and I were relieving War Wagon One Zero, Morris Clark, and his team that had been working a bunker complex near Rach Gia in IV Corps in early 1971.

    C&C put us on a big bunker that hadn't been worked yet. As we eased up to the fortification we saw two very young children on top of it. The kids, maybe 3 & 5 years old, had been killed and then apparently posed, lying on their backs and holding hands. We could see through our own tears of rage that each baby had been shot at least once.

    My first thoughts were to find the miserable little bastards who had done this. It didn't take long. The VC left deep footprints in the mud that must have been 7 feet apart. The guy was hauling ass; his footprints were just starting to fill with water. It took us about 3 minutes to find this sorry excuse for a soldier. He was hiding under a clump of banana and nipa palm shrubs and he was waiting for us with his AK47.

    I damned near overflew the guy and he opened up on us as I threw out the anchor. I was hovering with a strong left crosswind as Bill started in with his M60 machine gun. I have only a few eerie remembrances but one of them is sitting there in the right seat looking over my gunner's right shoulder, down along the barrel of that M60 at the guy we were fucking up and seeing the "sparklies" in the muzzle of his AK as the insurgent held it steady and fired back at us and our gun. I also saw the blur of the rotor blades between us. The distance between the muzzles was less than 20 feet.

    The engagement was over almost as soon as it started.

    My favorite OH6, "Pig Pen", had some serious rotor blade damage and he started to shake really badly. I already had a 100 lb. of torque hiked in just to stay on the target but the ship just acted like it just didn't want to fly anymore. I broke away and started yelling on the radio,"One four's going down", just as Bill was stirring that S.O.B’s guts with the '60 one more time just for good measure.

    Pig Pen was still airborne! I was amazed. We had severe lateral and vertical vibrations. I think we even had "diagonal" vibrations too. It shook the visor down out of my  helmet. Bill kicked the frag-bag from between his feet out the door because it was bouncing around the cockpit too much. I was over-torquing the hell out of the aircraft but past experience had proven that Pig Pen could take it.

    I headed West for the beach looking for a "secure" area to land in. I started an approach to a farmyard. As I hovered over the hooch, a bunch of guys in tan uniforms started tumbling out. They looked like Keystone Cops. "Nope! I ain't gonna land here! I'll just hop a couple more treelines". I could hear the rockets hitting behind us as Jim Burch, Crusader 33, with the Cobras jumped on the guys coming out of the hooch.

    I've got us up to about 30 or 40 knots of airspeed now. I’m pulling tons of collective pitch. We can hear the blades whistling and making other strange noises. I'm looking for a place to land but ironically we were in the "heavily built-up and fortified" area that we had originally been sent out to find but hadn't discovered yet. There wasn't anything for Hanegmon to do so he'd just pop his M60 off at targets of opportunity while I seemed to just drive around looking for a place to land and frequently letting the other guys know, "One Four's going down"! Every time Bill squeezed the 60’s trigger I'd just about jump out of my seat thinking Pig Pen was coming un-glued. It was a good relationship. I flew, he fired, I jumped and jerked in another 20 pounds of torque, the ship would shake some more. I’d loosen up a little. He'd shoot again.

    Well, I made approaches to two other places and each time I had aborted and somehow Pig Pen would find enough power to struggle and drag us past another treeline. One area on the beach was a solid mud flat with what looked like hundreds of footprints leading from the water's edge into the nearby jungle. NOT a good place to land! The other clearing I attempted to land in had 3 or 4 active looking bunkers along two sides of it.

    Finally! I found the "PERFECT LZ". A rice paddy dike line that was also a little road. The skids just fit. As soon as I landed and we got out of the helicopter some jerk started to shoot at us from a bunker about 50 yards away. Nothing serious, just annoying pot shots (But enough to keep many ARVN Battalions pinned down for days).

    Bill and I were busy taking off the blades when the sniper’s rounds started getting closer. My trail, Ed Gallagher, was buzzing around us like a loach pilot possessed. He had a new, in-experienced (read useless) gunner and Ed was blazing away with his minigun to try to cover us because the new guy wouldn't shoot his M60. I kept pointing toward the dude in the bunker trying to get Ed to go over there and screw him up. Ed was flying fast and so low that his windshield became completely covered in mud that was thrown up by his aggressive minigun passes.

    John Sorensen, the C&C AMC finally landed his UH1H and we got Pig Pen rigged, hooked up and lifted out. Bill and I rode out with Gallagher and his gunner.

    The Cobras got 11 KBAs from the "farmyard" hooch.

    That was the only time I ever "Fired a shot in anger".

    Bill and the VC had shot the hell out of our rotor blades.

    I loved screwing with the Viet Cong and the NVA and when the conditions permitted I tried to create new and unusual ways to kill him. But the guy that killed those kids may have brought out the monsters, if only momentarily, in me and Bill.

    Apparently the motive for the kids' deaths was for the ARVN ground commander to see them and perhaps order us out of the area after assuming we were killing kids.

    That guy had made it personal. I hope his bones are still rotting where we dropped him