A Requiem for Crows: A Novel of Vietnam Read online

Pascoe crawled up into his seat on the right side of the cockpit, buckled up his waist and shoulder harnesses just as Minh looked outside the chopper at a Vietnamese soldiers standing behind the chopper giving Minh a thumbs-up to take off.

  Tucking his ears into the built-in headset cups of his helmet, Pascoe watch the temperature gauges and RPM indicator. What if Minh needed him in the event of a hot start? A fire was second only to a crash landing in the litany of pilot’s nightmares. He tried to catch up with the flight startup procedure by quickly memorizing the indicators on the myriad of dials and gauges arrayed in front of him. He needed to have something to compare the readings to in the event of some in-flight problem.

  Minh’s voice over the intercom startled Pascoe. “We go now.” He slowly raised the collective, pushed the left peddle to keep the tail of the chopper where it belonged and eased forward on the cyclic stick between his knees. Immediately the chopper got light on its skids.

  Almost out of reflex, Pascoe looked out his side of the chopper for anything which might cause them to abort the takeoff. “Clear right.”

  The chopper raised slightly off the pad, subtly shuddered then hesitated as Minh changed its direction from up to forward in the most critical transition in any chopper’s flight.

  Pascoe held his breath as Minh crossed the rolls of barbed concertina wire on top of the walls surrounding the compound allowing only inches of clearance. Pascoe forced himself to relax. Minh was in control of the chopper. He considered offering some suggestions to improve Minh’s flying techniques but decided the risk of offending Minh was the more likely outcome than Minh actually taking his suggestions. How could he ease Minh into a conversation about flight safety to discover how much Minh knew about the subject or how important it was to him? Maybe after they had flown together a few more times. Maybe after they got more familiar with one another. Maybe then.

  Quickly the chopper reached a more comfortable altitude for Pascoe and leveled out. At least, if the engine failed at fifteen hundred feet and Minh wasn’t prepared for it, Pascoe could wrestle the aircraft to the ground in a controlled autorotation.

  Cooler air filled the cockpit and Pascoe wiggled around to free his uniform where it had glued itself to his skin from the humidity. “I didn’t go through any flight orientation training for Vietnam,” he said still hoping to draw Minh out. “I had no idea I’d end up with a counterpart who not only had his own chopper but was a qualified aviator.”

  Minh laughed. “We have Vietnamese way of flying here. Not like America. Here we try not to get shot down.”

  Pascoe laughed uneasily. “Any special evasion technique you use? I mean do you set a minimum altitude or fly different routes so you won’t set up a pattern or avoid certain situations?”

  “Oh, yes. We fly that way.” He smiled and glanced at Pascoe. “Sometimes we not fly that way.”

  Pascoe gave up on trying to get Minh to explain his flying. He’d have to watch him if he wanted to find out just how competent a pilot he was.

  They flew west for less than two miles when Minh released the cyclic long enough to point out over the instrument panel. “Everything you see is our area of operations.”

  Pascoe scanned the vast flat flood plain interrupted by tufts of Nipa palms sheltering mostly abandoned thatched roofed houses. Streams and small rivers coiled and gently flowed toward the Mekong Delta before merging and spilling into the sea. Again, the closer they flew toward the Cambodian border the fewer the signs of civilization.

  Pascoe covertly stole a glance at the duplicate set of instruments arrayed in front of him, not wanting Minh to think he was watching his flying too closely, but he was unsuccessful.

  “Would you like to fly, my friend?”

  Pascoe was surprised at the offer. “Sure.” He lightly placed his feet on the co-pilot’s pedals and his hands on his duplicate collective and cyclic controls clearly announcing the traditional trade-off command, “I’ve got it.”

  Minh released the controls on his side of the cockpit and raised his hands in an exaggerated gesture for Pascoe to see out of the corner of his eye Minh had relinquished command of the aircraft and it was now up to Pascoe to control the chopper’s every move.

  The chopper made a slight wobble as the tail rotor shimmied first right then left while Pascoe searched for a sense of feel to the pedals. He hadn’t flown in almost a year and each chopper was different. Like the unique feel of a clutch or the brakes on an older car. Pascoe felt the moisture gathering again under his arms. “Where we headed, Colonel?”

  Minh checked the spinning compass and then pointed off to the northwest. “Stay above fifteen hundred feet, heading two-eight-five.”

  “Roger that,” Pascoe said, gingerly leaning the chopper over into a gently arcing turn and bank to his right, holding it until the compass spun to the desired heading before leveling off again.

  “Look to your right. Three o’clock.”

  Pascoe looked at a black smudge on the ground—burned out remains of some small buildings in the center of a tiny hamlet surrounded by many new pockmarks from friendly bombs and enemy mortar rounds.

  “That was one of our command posts. The Viet Cong attacked two weeks ago. They kill everyone and tied the battalion commander to the flag pole in front of the building.”

  Pascoe picked out the flag pole almost perfectly centered on concentric circles of barbed wire and neatly laid out though destroyed sandbagged bunkers.

  “Before they kill him they cut him open and his insides fall to the ground.” He paused and then added, “His wife and children watched this before they were killed.”

  Pascoe tightened his jaw as he eased the chopper over into a tight right turn and took a long look at the bomb craters and burned thatched houses below. On top of the carnage, Pascoe recognized he would have to understand a war where soldiers took their families with them since nowhere in Vietnam was there any escape from the battlefield.

  “Come. I show you Duc Hue. Over there.” Minh pointed off at a small geometric feature on the horizon. The construction was French and elaborately engineered as a defensive compound prepared to sustain long sieges. “It is a Special Forces camp. Every night the VC they come.”

  Leveling up the chopper, Pascoe quickly scanned his instruments to check on the performance of the lumbering chopper. He was surprised to find the rotor and turbine RPMs were okay as were the critical temperature gauges. “Are they trying to overrun the camp?”

  Minh laughed. “Oh, no. They think we are very worried about Duc Hue. We know they do not want to take Due Hue. They attack so they can move people through here at night.” He swept his hand to indicate the vast expanse of the swamps and marshland south of the camp. “Every night they come. Go down.”

  “What?”

  “I show you. I’ve got it,” Minh said, quickly snatching control of the chopper from Pascoe.

  He slammed his cyclic stick over to its limit forcing the chopper to heel over abruptly into a tight descending left spiral and bled off altitude so quickly Pascoe soon felt the warmer air. In flight school the maneuver was called a yank and bank and was grounds to fail a check ride with a flight instructor.

  Minh pulled out of the spin with the same lack of finesse and maneuvered the chopper off into a flat orbit at two hundred feet.

  Pascoe suddenly became conscious of his dangerous proximity to the small clusters of trees which could easily conceal enemy gunners. Gunners who might be trying to get their chopper in their gun sights. He had never felt so vulnerable. He wondered if his year would be like this every day.

  “There. Out your door,” Minh said.

  Minh jerked the chopper over into a right turn to allow Pascoe to look straight down. There Pascoe saw a newly made trail cut into the marshy ground. The path headed east, away from the Cambodian border and deeper into South Vietnam. Reeds were bent over and footprints were easy to pick out in the mud, each filled with water. One person had made the tracks during the night.

  “They
come.”

  A few hundred meters from the trail Pascoe saw other trails, all solitary ones, all heading in the same direction. It appeared to him a small squad of eight or fewer Viet Cong soldiers had spread out over and area several football fields in width to infiltrate.

  He nodded at the small hamlets and villages behind them. “And they end up back there?”

  “They hide in every hamlet in Vietnam. Then they mass to attack.”

  In the distance a single and dominant terrain feature stood out of place in the flatness of the immense Mekong River delta which formed the bottom third of Vietnam for thousands of years. Pascoe pointed at the solo and nearly cone shaped mountain ahead of the chopper. “What’s that?”

  “Ah, this is a special place for us. I will show you. We go there. It is a good place for you to see much,” Minh said. He flew the chopper directly to the mountain.

  As they got closer, Pascoe glanced at the altimeter in the aircraft to compare it with the summit of the mountain. His guess was somewhere in the neighborhood of three-thousand feet high and it looked to him to cover about fifteen square miles—standing out from the hundreds of miles of pool table flat countryside surrounding it.

  Even closer, Pascoe could see that it was more rock than earth—large granite boulders seemed to have been piled up by nature. Near the base large stands of bamboo and banana palms separated it from the flat land.

  “I must practice pinnacle landing,” Minh said. He raised his glove hand and waved it around the flat land. “You can see I don’t get many chances to do that.”

  Pascoe remembered learning pinnacle landings in flight school. It put the fear in the hearts of all flight students. Just the thought of landing on the top of a mountain or a rooftop was fraught with the possibilities of over or undershooting the landing and tumbling down the side of a pinnacle. The instructors took delight in making Pascoe do it again and again. Still, he didn’t ever get completely comfortable with the technique. He felt his legs stiffen as if putting on the brakes in a car as Minh shot his landing approach to a very small flat spot on the top of the mountain.

  “Hold on, my friend. I not good at this.”

  In spite of his words, Pascoe was pleased to find that Minh did a fairly skilled job of putting the chopper down on top of the mountain—on a spot less than half the size of the Huey chopper’s length.

  Minh reached up to the bank of switches in the overhead console and began to shut down the chopper’s turbine engine. “Come. We get out.”

  Pascoe wasn’t comfortable with getting out of the chopper in an unsecured area. He reached down and checked his pistol.

  Minh didn’t miss it. “Do not worry. The Viet Cong do not occupy this mountain. They only come here when we sometimes put radio relay teams here. When we are not here, they not here too.”

  The two soldiers got out of the chopper and looked out and down over the green and brown flatland below. Pascoe was surprised to find evidence of one encampment after another everywhere on the top of the mountain. “I can see why you would want to use this to support operations near here.”

  Minh kicked a wooden box rotting in the sun marked with French writing on its side. “You see? Many soldiers have been here.”

  “I can see how you would easily adjust artillery fire from here. How much help is it as radio relay?” Pascoe asked.

  “It is good if you have good radios with the soldiers. If you do not have someone here or in an airplane you cannot reach radios near the border from,” he turned and pointed in the direction of the Sugar Mill, “our headquarters.”

  “This is so strange. No mountains for miles and then this one alone,” Pascoe said.

  “It is said in Vietnam legend there was a young girl named Ba Den was to marry a brave young soldier. On the day of their wedding her fiancé was called away to battle and he never returned. Ba Den waited and waited. She cried herself to death right here. To us this is a holy place.”

  Chapter 9

  NEWLY MINTED SERGEANT SCOTTY HAYES walked up the front steps of the Fort Benning Non-Commissioned Officers’ Club for the very first time. His stride was steady, his carriage erect. He had taken on a bit of a swagger he had not brought with him when he left Belton, Florida. In the year he had spent in Advanced Infantry Training, Ranger and Airborne School and NCO training he had shrugged off much of his boyish uncertainty, ambivalence and self-consciousness. Training NCOs had taught him to stand proud, be proud and move with a purpose. Others had hammered decisiveness into him. And still others had made him aware of the necessity to look sure, sound sure and be sure. He had learned his lessons well.

  As he stepped through the large glass double doors of the club he pulled off his overseas cap, the large red, white and blue glider patch sewn to front of the hat known to all paratroopers as a piss cutter. Just inside the club his highly shined paratrooper boots suddenly went silent on the carpeting. As a graduate of NCO school he was proud to be a new sergeant, making him eligible for admission to the club reserved for non-commissioned officers only.

  Scotty crossed the lobby and braced himself for what he would find on entering the main room. He stopped at the doorway to allow his eyes to adjust to the room and immediately enjoyed the air conditioned relief from the mid-summer Georgia heat and humidity.

  Buck Owens’ voice filled the main barroom with Together Again and laughter punctuated it all. A single row of sergeants stood at the bar along the wall nursing drinks. Others clustered at small tables marked by solitary candle flames struggling against the air conditioner’s draft at the bottoms of colored containers.

  “Hayes!”

  Scotty searched the room for the voice.

  “Over here.”

  On the far side of the parquet dance floor an arm waved to Scotty. He quickly recognized Sergeant Russell but was surprised to see him in civilian clothes. He had never seen Russell out of uniform. Everything was always in place, always pressed, always polished and always perfect. To see him in slacks, loafers and a crisp and perfectly ironed cotton, buttoned-down collar shirt was different, but it was still very Asa Russell.

  Scotty threaded his way through the crowd, conscious of the heads turning his way—some mumbling, others nodding with a there goes one of them expression. He was completely aware most other soldiers were in their late twenties before qualifying for promotion to sergeant. His rapid advancement was the result of a program designed to fill the thinning ranks of mid-level NCOs. NCOs who were leaving in large numbers having been through World War II, the Korean War and unwilling to get on the ride Vietnam promised.

  “Well, well, well,” Russell said as he stood to meet Scotty. He held out his hand to shake Scotty’s and put the his other on Scotty’s shoulder to keep him from sitting right away. “Let me look at you. Son of a bitch! You really did it.”

  Feeling uncomfortable with Russell’s praise Scotty tried to play it down. “It really wasn’t as hard as being in your platoon in Basic. If I could live through eight weeks of Ace Russell, I could live through anything.”

  Russell laughed and gestured for Scotty to grab a chair. “Seems to me we only lost about five out of forty who couldn’t hack it in your trainee platoon. What would you say, about forty-five percent of your NCO class washed out? And more than half of your Ranger class?”

  Scotty sat, careful not to bend his knees under the chair in order to avoid spoiling the sharp creases he’d spent time pressing into his trousers. “How’d you know —?”

  “You don’t think I was keeping tabs on you?” He smiled. Something rare for Russell. “I had a lot a’ time invested in you. I wasn’t going to send you off to become an NCO and have your ass flake out and embarrass me. If you had a I would a come over to your training battalion and kicked your ass the rest of the way to graduation.”

  Scotty laughed. “You mean like you did when I went through Basic?”

  Russell took a sip of his beer and then tipped his glass to Scotty as if a question. “Something to drink?” Not wa
iting for Scotty’s reply he raised the beer over his head, got the bartender’s attention and mouthed the words, “Two more.”

  The beers came and Scotty reached for his wallet.

  “Nope. On me,” Russell insisted. He looked to the waitress. “I’ve got a tab running. The name’s Russell.”

  Pulling the beer and coaster closer, Scotty nodded. “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “Ace. Call me Ace.”

  Since the day Scotty had met Asa Russell it never occurred to him he might actually address him as Ace, like all the other NCOs always did. “Okay. It’s going feel strange though.”

  Russell laughed. “Was I such a big son of a bitch?”

  Not sure how to answer, Scotty sought a middle ground. “If you only knew how many nights I saw your face while I was fighting to ward off the cold down in the Florida swamps last winter, or while I was sure I wasn’t going to make the last quarter mile of an obstacle course or, worse yet, while my mouth was filled with cotton and my palms were sweating when I stood in front of a group of other NCO candidates giving a class for a grade. I kept thinking, that damn Russell put me here.”

  “No Scott. You put you there.”

  Russell had never called him by his first name. “I’d probably be a truck driver in Germany today if it hadn’t been for you,” Scotty said.

  “And now you’re going off to war.”

  Scotty was quiet for moment. He nodded his head breaking the air of self-confidence he had carried with him into the room. “And I don’t mind telling you I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

  Russell laughed again. “Boy, do you think there’s ever been an infantryman who thought he was ready to go to some God-forsaken butt hole of the world to get shot at by someone he’s never met and really doesn’t have a hard-on for?”

  Scotty smiled. “Guess not. But this is worse because nobody here has any idea just what’s going on over there. I only had two Tactical NCOs in school who’d even been to Vietnam and they were there before any real shooting started.”

  “I’m guessing President Johnson isn’t expecting you to go over there and sort out all the complications, fix everything what’s broken and solve all his problems. I’m damn sure he does expect you to go over there and teach those little fuckers how to fight.”