Helicopter Is Preferred as Means of Transportation to Battle Sites
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
Morning around Camp Holloway comes on in a cloud of dust. Capt. Russ Bronson and I had slept down by the airstrip, rolled up in ponchos, and a heavy dew had fallen.
The dust arose as soon as
the helicopter blades of the Hueys from Lt. Col. Jack Cranford’s 228th
Assault
Helicopter Battalion cranked up, dew or not, and it settled on us and
turned to
a fine film of mud.
Big CH47 Chinooks were
getting ready to load out the First Brigade headquarters and take it
out to a
location about six miles south of Pleiku where it would set up shop for
the
rest of its operations in the Plei Me campaign.
Plei Me itself, the Special
Forces camp where all of this had started with a violent attack by
regular army
units from North Viet Nam on Oct 19, is about 20 miles southwest of
Pleiku. The road there was open since the
original Vietnamese relief column had forged through, although south of
there
the wreckage of six trucks hit in an ambush of the same relief was mute
evidence that the thoroughfare was not fully guaranteed to be safe.
Sp4 Jay Brette, Capt.
Bronson’s driver and radioman, showed up and we got the jeep and
trailer
loaded. I noted that there was material
for a small tent lashed on the trailer and put in a request for a
permanent dry
spot when I got back to brigade.
“I’ve even got a spare air
mattress. You can really live it up if
you stick to Bronson,” my host told me.
While Sp4 Brette backed the
jeep and trailer into the back of a Chinook, I renewed acquaintances
with Sp5
Pat Calhoun, the crew chief, who was my neighbor 11,000 miles away. Pat said he was about “flown out of energy.
“These big birds have really
come through for us. We’ve put hours on
them I wouldn’t have believed possible.
We’ve hauled everything in the book and they have really been
handy on
helicopter recovery missions when we weren’t moving artillery or
carrying
troops and supplies,” Calhoun said.
His helicopter hadn’t picked
up a scratch and I got the impression he was a little downcast about
this. He implied that some of the crew
chiefs
whose choppers were sporting a little square patch marking a bullet
hole just
might be using the memento as a kind of status symbol.
“So far as I’m concerned,
I’d just as soon I never had to put a patch on old 133,” he said,
rather sourly
as if he was tired of the subject. “I
can find other things to brag about.”
The subject of hits brought
up some more shouted discussion of something which is absolutely
undebatable so
far as these big choppers and the reliable Hueys are concerned - they
are not
easy to hit, they aren’t easy to knock down when they are hit.
There are a lot of dreary
statistics which have been compiled for years on that matter, and the
day-in
and day-out experience of the 1st Cavalry under the very toughest kind
of
combat, weather and terrain conditions has firmly convinced me that I
would rather
ride to a fight in Viet Nam in a chopper than in any other form of
transportation. It’s safer, it’s
easier, it’s faster and it’s proved.
(I’ve heard my own opinion reinforced by Maj. Gen. Harry W. O.
Kinnard
in a statement to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the
durability of
helicopters “far exceeded expectations.”)
This particular trip was
fast and uneventful and ended at one of the most startling sights I’ve
seen in
South Viet Nam - the country’s largest tea plantation.
This huge plantation is
owned by French interests and is a world of its own, a tranquil park in
the
middle of a war. The tea bushes look
like small hedge plants, carefully tended and picked over so that the
tops are
all of a height - about 4 feet tall - and flat. The
rows extend over thousands of acres. Trees
are set among the bushes to shade the
tea from the scorching sun which beats down during the dry season.
A narrow, straight, asphalt
- topped road runs from the main route through the tea plantation. It is one of the few Vietnamese roads I have
seen unscarred by the ubiquitous road cuts.
Plantation trucks run all over the area in apparent perfect
security.
There are several beautiful
houses set back behind high barbed wire, guarded by soldiers. The main house is a mansion, in fact. It has its own water and power system and
the landscaping around it would be the envy of any botanical garden
exhibit.
Workers - hundreds of men,
women and children - move through the tea bushes, picking tea leaves. I never got a chance to walk through any of
the processing or even the harvesting process, but a four story
processing
plant seemed to be operating at full capacity and big trucks filled
with cases
of packaged tea rolled down the road daily.
The headquarters picked by
Lt. Col. Harlowe Clark for his First Brigade was right on the edge of
the rows
of tea plants and there was considerable amateur tea leaf drying work
carried
on. There also was quite a bit of
discussion among the Sky Soldiers concerning the apparently peaceful
operation
of what is one of South Viet Nam’s major agricultural industries
without Viet
Cong sabotage or interference.
Some of this was explained,
I found out later, by the French manager of the plantation, who
confided that
he had been “kidnapped” by the Viet Cong on a recent trip from Pleiku
to Kontum
and has paid a “ransom” of one million piatres for safe release.
An occasional “ransom” of
$80,000 or so probably would lead the “kidnappers” to the obvious
decision
concerning geese and golden eggs, some very cynical soldiers finally
decided.
The thought never crossed my
mind for a minute, of course! Thoughts
like that would lead to suspicions of various petroleum dealers whose
trucks
ramble blithely across the country and of other oddly untouched
commercial
ventures in Viet Nam.
Actually, whatever the
reason for the plantation’s unharried operation, it is beneficial to
South Viet
Nam. A USOM representative I queried
about it said it was a major provider of foreign exchange and “it is
more important
for it to continue operation, I guess, than it is for either side to
extend the
war to cover it.”
At any rate, it had an
airstrip and a handy building and it was one of the most pleasant spots
I’ve
seen for a headquarters.