Million Dollar Carnival Ride

My last three months in Vietnam were spent as the Assistant 1st Brigade Signal Officer. One of my duties was to assess the brigade commander’s radios in his helicopter before each flight. I would have the pilot fly me around the base perimeter while I used the radios, and at the same time the two door gunners would check their machine guns. One day, I got word that the radios were acting erratically around Nui Ba Den Mountain, so I got the pilot to head that way. During the war, the communists owned about 95% of the mountain, while we controlled only the very peak for our signal relay functions. Everybody in III Corps knew this, so when the pilot said that he was heading down the valley between the two mountains, I became a little apprehensive, as the Viet Cong owned that piece of real estate. We flew fast and low with both door gunners blasting the rocks, which looked awfully close to me. On my side of the helicopter, I saw about twenty green tracers pass in front of us. The pilot at once tried to dodge the bullets by doing a rapid 360-degree turn in the narrow valley. The erratic turn almost threw me out of the helicopter, but another fast turn threw me into the radios and saved me from certain death. We exited the valley with both guns blazing and our hearts ready to explode from the adrenaline rush. I must admit that I found that ride breathtaking and dangerous, but it was a stupid maneuver on the pilot’s part—and he got his ass reamed for that little stunt. We counted three bullet holes in the tail assembly when we returned to our base camp. The US Army and their Vietnamese counterparts lost a sizable number of men in that valley over the years; if our helicopter had been shot down that day, we almost certainly would have been killed or taken prisoner by the Viet Cong.