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Coming September 17th, 2004

Chapter 18

  by Kathy Hufford

   LUCKY AND SNIPE HINTING

US Military Intelligence Officer and South Vietnamese Intell NCO at III Field Force Headquarters Helipad about 30 miles east of Saigon, about to board Helicopter Gunships for a recon.

On one mission supporting the 25th Division northwest of Saigon we were sweeping in front of the ground troops when 5 VC ran from some trees toward a large mud hut.  I was flying a “frog”, a UH-1C Gunship that carried 14 rockets and a 40mm automatic grenade launcher on the nose. The 40mm was called a “thumper”, because when you fired it, it went thump, thump, thump. We carried about 500 rounds for the thumper. A 40mm round had the explosive power of a hand grenade. But, if you put enough in a small area, it does real damage. So, when the VC started running, I had the aircraft tail to them. The wing man called me on the radio and warned me. I brought the aircraft back around and started firing the thumper. I walked the thumper up the dike line towards the 5, got 2. The other 3 dove into the hut. I came around a turn again, and was told by the ground infantry to fire up the hut. I walked the thumper into the doorway, and kept firing till the roof and walls collapsed. I figured I had got them. The infantry ran towards the hut. They went into what was left of the door/hut and started coming out with lots of women and children. Oh, shit. I knew I was in trouble. I called the commander on the ground with the FM radio. He called back saying there was a big reinforced bunker INSIDE of the hut. The women and children were inside the bunker, all fine. The VC did not make it into the bunker, and the grunts found the VC bodies and their weapons. That was as close than I ever want to be, killing civilians.

For Christmas 1967, Bob Hope and Nancy Sumatra were having a show at Long Bin. I signed up to provide gunship cover for their trip from Chu Chi to Long Bin. Then I figured we could watch the show. We provide the CH47 aircraft the Hope show was in cover. Then we started to land at the Long Bin helipad. The ground security commander called me on the radio and told me to stay airborne throughout the entire USE show. Not my plans. So, we flew one time real close to the stage, got a radio call to back off to the valley and do recons away from the stage. So, we “saw” the 1967 Bob Hope USE show from about 300 feet, 80 knots for about 30 seconds. Others in our unit took a truck to Long Bin and brought back great pictures of Nancy.

Starting in November 1967, a gunship team was assigned to conduct a visual recon to the west and north of the Bien Hoa Air Base, both in the early mornings and the late afternoons. The river near this location was called the Dong Ni. So the missions were called the Dong Ni recon. We soon started calling it the Dong Ni snipe hunt. We normally did not fly with any non crew member observers onboard the gunships due to weight. We were ordered to take a US and Vietnamese Intel person in each aircraft. We put the light Vietnamese in the low ship and the heavy American in the high ship. When we found something, we could get instant approval to shoot. Our experience in the past, we would find lots of VC. By November we found few.  And when we did, they would not fight back, but would try to hide or run. I got to use lots of artillery on bunkers and such during this time. But by Christmas of 1967, our killing of Viet Cong enemy was way down. Something was about to happen. We were told that by late January 1968, intelligence was expecting a large scale attack, and this is why we were doing the Dong Ni Recon missions.