The Generals (3 page)

The Grumman OV-1A “Mohawk” is a two-place aircraft. The pilot and the other crew member (most often, but not always, another pilot) sit side by side. The fuselage tapers from the noticeably bulbous nose, at the tip of which the cockpit sits, to the rear, where there is a triple vertical stabilizer tail structure. Excellent visibility is provided through large Plexiglas windows. The bulbous forward portion of the Mohawk has been likened to the tip of the male member, with eyes.

The aircraft is powered by two turboprop engines, mounted on the upper surface of the wings. Beneath the wings are hard points, from which auxiliary fuel tanks, weapons pods, and the like may be suspended. On some models, long side-looking radar antennae were mounted beneath the fuselage. The fuselage from the trailing end of the wings to the tail structure is equipped with doors. Behind the doors are shelves on which communications and sensory devices of one sort or another are mounted. These are called black boxes, and the Mohawk was designed to accommodate a great number of black boxes.

Army Aerial Observation had moved into the electronics age. The black boxes in a Mohawk, for example, could find by infrared and other sensory techniques, a tank, a truck, a motorcycle, a campfire, twenty soldiers; locate them precisely within a few feet, distinguish the truck from the tank or the motorcycle; and instantaneously transmit this data to equipment on the ground, which would then instantly print out a map of the area under surveillance, with neat symbols indicating the precise location of trucks, tanks, soldiers, campfires, and the like.

There were two pilots in Tail Number 524. They sat on Martin-Baker ejection seats, wearing international distress or ange flight suits and helmets with slide-down, gold-covered face masks that completely concealed their faces.

The only visible difference between the pilot and the copilot of 524 was that the pilot was considerably larger than the copilot, and that his orange rompers bore the insignia of a major and a senior aviator, while the copilot was identified by his insignia as a basic aviator and a chief warrant officer (W-2).

524 was on automatic pilot. Both the pilot and the copilot sat with their feet on the deck (off the rudder pedals) and with their arms folded across their abdomens.

“Watch it a minute, will you?” the pilot said over the intercom. Then he searched through the multiple zippered pockets of his orange flight suit until he found what he was looking for, a folded piece of paper on which was written “Kilimanjaro 115.56.”

He then turned in his seat, pushed his face visor inside the helmet, and leaned to his right toward the communications panel between the seats, next to the trim-tab mechanism. His face could now be seen. It was finely featured and very black. He was, he had often thought, the genetic result of sexual congress sometime in the late eighteenth century between some comely central African tribal maiden and an Arabian slave dealer who had dallied with the merchandise as it was being shipped to the New World.

His name was Philip Sheridan Parker IV. His father was Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, USA Retired, who had commanded a tank destroyer regiment across Africa and Europe in World War II. His late grandfather, Colonel Philip S. Parker, Jr., USA Retired, had commanded a regiment of Infantry assigned to the French Army (as opposed to the AEF) in World War I. His late great-grandfather, Master Sergeant Philip Sheridan Parker, had charged up San Juan and Kettle hills in Cuba with Colonel Teddy Roosevelt. Master Sergeant Parker’s father, First Sergeant Moses Parker, had served with the 10th United States Cavalry (Colored) under Colonel (later Major General) Philip Sheridan, for whom he had named his firstborn. Parkers wearing the crossed sabers of Cavalry (in Major Parker’s case, superimposed on a tank, for he had been commissioned into the Regular Army as a second lieutenant of Armor) had participated in fifty-three campaigns and/or officially recognized battles of the U.S. Army. Major Parker had participated in three campaigns of the Korean War, and was currently engaged in the fifty-fourth Parker campaign.

He dialed 115.56 on the AN/ARC-44 radio, and then put his hand on the Mohawk stick and triggered the radio transmit function.

“Kilimanjaro, Kilimanjaro, Army Five Two Four.”

The copilot, his face still shielded by his face visor, turned to look at him curiously. “Who’s Kilimanjaro?” he asked.

When there was no reply from Kilimanjaro, Major Parker repeated the call twice again. And when that didn’t work, he put his hand on the second AN/ARC-44’s controls, to the rear of the first set.

“A friend of mine has a nephew down there eating snakes,” he said. “He asked me to say hello.”

He repeated his call to Kilimanjaro three times. There was no response.

He folded his arms on his chest for a minute, thoughtfully, and then said, “You don’t suppose we’re up here without a radio, do you?”

The copilot pushed his face mask up inside his helmet and consulted the chart he had on a clipboard on his lap. Then he adjusted the first ARC-44 and pushed the radio transmit button on his stick.

“Grizzly, Grizzly, Army Five Two Four, how do you read? Over.”

“Army Five Two Four, Grizzly reads you five by five.”

“Thank you, Grizzly, Five Two Four reads you loud and clear. Out.”

“Give me the chart,” Major Parker said. The copilot handed it to him.

Major Parker studied the chart. It was an Aerial Navigation Chart, not a map, but Kilimanjaro on Nui Ba Den was listed on it as an auxiliary source of data for radio navigation.

“I’ve got it, Charley,” Major Parker said, and reached up and turned off the autopilot.

“You want me to report what you’re doing?” the copilot asked.

“Let’s take a look first,” Major Parker said. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”

He went back on the air three minutes later.

“Grizzly, Grizzly, Army Five Two Four.”

“Go ahead, Five Two Four.”

“Five Two Four is at coordinates Mike Seven Charley, Baker Three Baker. Kilimanjaro is under heavy ground attack and does not respond to radio calls. I say again, Kilimanjaro is under heavy ground attack and does not, repeat not, respond to my call.”

“Five Two Four, hold your position and stand by.”

Major Parker circled Foo Two for about five minutes at four thousand feet, which was presumed to be outside the range of Charley small arms and machine gun fire.

“Army aircraft in vicinity Mike Seven Charley, Baker Three Baker, this is Navy Two Two Seven.”

“Go ahead Navy Two Two Seven, this is Army Five Two Four.”

“I’m at two zero thousand, five minutes west your position. I’m a flight of four F-4 aircraft. What have you got for us?”

“There’s a Green Beret camp on the top of the mountain under attack by what looks like a regiment. I can’t raise them on the radio.”

“OK, where do you want it?”

“You better make a pass, it’s a pretty small camp.”

“OK, I got you on the tube. Where are they in relation to you?”

“Half a mile north.”

“OK. Making descent at this time. You guys wait for the word.”

The first F-4 appeared not quite three minutes later, moving so fast that Parker didn’t see him until he was almost over the smoke-shrouded camp. He then pulled up in a steep climbing turn.

“Get on my tail, we’re going in on the deck with napalm,” the Navy flight commander ordered.

The next time Parker saw aircraft, they were below him, flying in a V down the valley. They passed over the camp, and then a moment later, the approaches to Dien Bien Phu II erupted in great orange bursts, followed immediately by clouds of dense smoke.

They made four napalm passes before they communicated again.

“Army Five Two Four, we’re out of ordnance, but there’s help on the way. They will contact you on this frequency.”

“Thank you,” Major Parker said politely.

Three minutes after that, the copilot touched his shoulder, and pointed.

A flight of six Douglas A-1 Skyraiders—very large single-engine propeller aircraft with the capacity to carry an awesome amount of ordnance—were approaching from the north.

Parker wondered if the cure wasn’t liable to kill the patient.

“Aircraft approaching Mike Seven Charley, Baker Three Baker, this is Army Five Two Four.”

“We have you in sight, Five Two Four, go ahead.”

“Charley has not, repeat not, overrun the target area,” Parker said. “Avoid the encampment.”

“Roger, Five Two Four. Where is Charley?”

“Everywhere but on the top of the hill.”

“Roger. Understand everywhere but the top of the hill.”

“Affirmative.”

Major Parker then flew in circles to the south of Dien Bien Phu II, privately fuming at the brass assholes who forbade the arming of Mohawks under any but special conditions. The rocket and weapons pods on his Mohawk had been removed. Because his mission today was a medium-altitude electronic surveillance, he was at the controls of an unarmed and useless airplane: The goddamned brass were splitting hairs about which of the armed forces was permitted to shoot who and when.

He flew for about thirty minutes until a flight of helicopters appeared, obviously bound for Kilimanjaro. When they got closer, he was surprised to see that they were Bell HU-1Bs, the new Hueys. That meant the Utility Tactical Transport Helicopter Company, the first of its kind, was operational. This was, he thought, probably their first mission.

And then, because there was nothing left that he could do for Kilimanjaro, he headed toward Da Nang to refuel.

(Four)
Dien Bien Phu II
1620 Zulu, 14 October 1962

There were nine HU-1Bs in the relief flight; and Major Parker had guessed right, this was their first operation. The Huey was the first helicopter designed and built specifically for military operation. The nomenclature stood for Helicopter, Utility, Model 1, Version B. It was powered by a turbine engine, and it was a great improvement—especially in engine life—over the Army’s previous cargo helicopters, the Sikorsky H-19 and H-34, and the Piasecki H-21 Flying Banana, all of which had gasoline piston engines.

The Hueys flew in three V’s of three aircraft, the following V’s a hundred yards behind and two hundred feet above the preceding V. There was only one helipad, a circular area a few feet wider than the helicopter arc, marked with an “H,” but there was room for three Hueys to land within the inner barbed wire of Foo Two, and the first V came in for a landing simultaneously. The first chopper landed far from the H-pad, because it was going to be on the ground for a while, and didn’t want to block other flights any more than it had to.

The first chopper to land carried the commanding officer of the First Special Forces Group, a tall, erect, very handsome bull colonel. Had he been sent over by Central Casting, a producer shooting a military film would have rejected him for being too young, too handsome, and too articulate to be a Green Beret colonel.

Blissfully unaware of the incongruity, he jumped out of the helicopter with a World War I Model 1897 Winchester 12-gauge trench gun in one hand and a leather attaché case in the other. These accoutrements were less strange than they at first appeared. There was paperwork to be accomplished here, and it simply made sense to bring the attaché case holding the paper; the case served as an efficient portable desk. And there had been no improvement since World War I in a shotgun firing 00-buck shot as an up-close people killer.

The first chopper also disgorged two physicians and four medics. The doctors wore the caduceus of the Army Medical Corps on their collar points, but not the Red Cross brassard of the noncombatant. Given the option of wearing the brassard and placing their faith in the willingness of the Vietcong to adhere to the provisions of the Geneva convention, or not wearing it and going armed, they had opted to be armed, one of them with an issue .45-caliber pistol, the other with a Ruger Super Blackhawk single-action .44 Magnum revolver.

The medics immediately started looking for wounded. The other two Hueys unloaded Green Berets, some of whom started moving through the carnage, and others to unload supplies—food, ammunition, stretchers, and a collapsible radio antenna—from the helicopters. When the supplies had been unloaded, two Berets started erecting the antenna, and the others picked up stretchers and went looking for the medics.

Colonel C. David Mennen took a quick professional look around the carnage and quickly concluded Foo Two had taken a clobbering. There was very little left of what had once been the command post, and Staff Sergeant Craig, a bloody bandage covering his mouth, was almost frenziedly digging in its rubble. At least, he thought, he would not that night have to write a letter beginning, “Dear Craig, I thought you would like to know what I have learned about how your cousin died.”

It was tough writing those letters to strangers, infinitely tougher when they had to be written to friends, and soldier friends, who would be unimpressed with the phrases about “inspiring his fellow soldiers” and “in the highest traditions of the service.”

The kid looked shook, and the wound looked nasty, but he was alive, and if he also looked a little hysterical, so what.

Colonel Mennen walked through the rubble and carnage, searching for whoever had taken charge. He found bodies covered with shelter halves and blankets, but no Americans. Then he walked to the Huey in which he had arrived. It had been turned into sort of an emergency aid station, with one of the doctors and two of the medics providing immediate attention to the most seriously wounded, the majority of whom were the dependents of the ARVN troops.

“What about our wounded?” he asked.

“Two,” the doctor replied, looking up from his repair of the ugly compound fracture of a small boy’s leg. “One took some small-caliber fire in the chest; it missed the vitals, or he wouldn’t be alive. The other one took some superficial flesh wounds, but I think there’s internal damage. They’re both on their way out of here.”

“That’s all?”

“Four known dead, and almost certainly the CO died in the CP.”

Colonel Mennen did the arithmetic. Four KIA plus one probable KIA was five, two evacuated was seven. Staff Sergeant Craig was eight.