DAVID C. COLLINS USAF
During my time on Nui Ba Den, I had the privilege of collaborating with some outstanding men from the various signal units. They came from all social classes, and each of them had special qualities. David Collins was one of those men. Instead of an Army career, he’d chosen the Air Force and wound up a generator mechanic stationed in Thailand.
As signal officer on the mountain, my job was simple: keep every unit up there mission-capable. One of those units was a U.S. Air Force sensor relay team, retransmitting signals off the Ho Chi Minh Trail to a CIA site in Thailand.
On the morning of June 16, 1969, their main generator quit. Nothing brought it back. Calls for a replacement went nowhere. So I gave them another option: find me an Air Force generator mechanic, and I’d get him up the mountain myself.
They found one in Saigon. David Collins — a man who’d once served with that same team, now waiting on a flight home the next morning. When he heard his old teammates were in trouble, he volunteered on the spot and pushed his flight back.
I told him what he was walking into. Told him the weather could turn and strand him up there. He wanted to try anyway. I requisitioned a Chinook from 1st Brigade and got him and his tools to the top.
He had the relay site back online in two hours.
Then the wind shifted. Clouds swallowed the mountain whole. David was stuck with us for the night.
The sappers hit around 2:00 a.m. In the chaos of those first minutes, David left the safety of his bunker. A sapper killed him.
I found his body on my way to the bunker line. Above me, the sky looked like the Fourth of July. All eighteen bunkers were firing. Our three mortar teams walked high-explosive rounds along the entire perimeter. Spooky worked the treeline with steady machine-gun fire. Three artillery bases pounded the mountain’s flanks with 105s and 155s.
The concussions hit before the sound did. Each round landed like a fist to the sternum, a wall of pressure that punched the wind out of your lungs and buckled your knees before your brain knew why. My eardrums stopped drawing a line between one explosion and the next — just one long, flat roar underneath everything. Every round that hit in front of me landed like an open-hand slap across the face. The ground never stopped moving under my boots. Light hit the boulders and threw shadows that moved with it, and every shadow looked like a man.
David was slumped backward over one of those boulders. Four bullet holes in his chest. He never knew what hit him.
Fifty years later, David’s death still haunts me. I played a role in it, and I know it. If I hadn’t been so gung-ho about the mission on that mountain, he’d have caught that Freedom Bird home the next morning instead.
David Collins put his country ahead of his own life. I’ve never forgotten him, or what he did for us that night.