"Wrong Clearing"

Many, if not most days, we would get up well before dawn with hangovers after a long night at the EM (enlisted mens) Club and be on the flight line with helmet, flak jacket, and M-60 machine gun to take off into the dark sky and then watch a sunrise from the air as we flew to some distant outpost. This time we landed at a Special Forces Camp somewhere towards where Laos and Cambodia met the border of Vietnam, somewhere near Bam Me Thout. (Homer ... Probably Ben Het)

As soon as we had the ship secured, we headed into the crew's lounge area which consisted of a few chairs, a desk and to our surprise, an actual real live Coke machine that was plugged in and was just waiting for the correct change to dispense as many wonderful Coca Colas as we could want.

Before we could get some money in the machine, the crew chief and I heard a voice on a radio in the next room where our pilot and copilot had disappeared.

The radio voice said, "We are out of food and we haven't eaten for a while. Why can't somebody get some C's (C- Rations) to us? C-Rations came before MREs (Meals Ready to Eat).

The next thing we heard was our pilot, saying, "We'll take them some C-Rations." So we put our change back in our pockets and headed out to the ship, to get ready to transport about 100 cases of C's to the guys out in the field. We loaded them on board and away we went.

That part of the Central Highlands had what was probably a triple-canopy rain forest and we flew for quite some time until we spotted a hole in the canopy. Hovering above it, we could see some artillery pieces and some dugouts and sandbags way below, at least 150 feet. We started down and there was slightly less room than necessary for our rotor to fit. We were continually chopping tips off branches on the way down. It was an agonizingly slow process as the crew chief and I, sometimes standing on the skids, were directing the pilot: "Five feet forward and then down slowly. Three feet back. Six feet to the right." And it continued this kind of zig zag all the way down 'till we were a few feet off the ground. I had thought it was kind of unusual that we didn't see anyone below all this time but figured it was because they were back away from the clearing in case we crashed on the way down. We threw the 100 cases off as quickly as we could and then did the same zig zag that seemed to take an eternity until we were on top and free to haul ass back to the base we had come from.

We landed, shut down the chopper and the crew chief and I headed straight for that Coke machine. Just as we were starting to put money in it, we heard that same tinny radio voice saying, "Where the hell are those C's you were supposed to bring us?"

I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. We had unloaded our precious cargo in the wrong hole in the rain forest. We soon learned that was all the food available. We couldn't just get more and take it to the right place. We had to go back into that vertical zig-zagging tunnel and load up 100 cases of Cs and then take them to the hungry troops that were waiting for them.

Our pilot, while accepting that we had to go back, stood his ground on one aspect. He said we are not going back in there by ourselves-we needed some support. The best we could get was a couple of grunts (infantrymen) with M-60 machine guns who would sit on each side of the cargo floor and provide some additional firepower.

Back we went, over the top of that canopy until we came to the same hole in the trees. We could see some brown cardboard boxes, still scattered on the ground, way below. Down we went, this time the two grunts and the crew chief and me, all of us blazing away with our M-60s to scare away any VC or NVA who might have been in the area. We made it down and tried to get the grunts to jump out and load the boxes on the chopper. They absolutely refused, not being dummies, so, with the grunts covering us, the crew chief and I started throwing boxes into the chopper. It only took a quick minute to get them all loaded and back up we went. On the way, we continued raking the trees with our tracer bullets. I'm not sure when exactly one of us noticed the pile of boxes was mighty small, much smaller than the neatly stacked 100 boxes that took up most of the cargo area on our way in with them. We counted the boxes and there were around 40. The enemy had helped himself to more than half of what we had mistakenly carried to the wrong place.

We found the correct place, a little artillery base, and went in and unloaded the chow to some hungry and grateful troops. We didn't tarry to tell them what we and those cardboard boxes had been through in the past few hours. Back we flew to our original destination and the crew chief and I headed straight for the lounge. Those Coca Colas tasted mighty fine.

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