CHAPTER I

The Early Years

The small outpost in the Vietnamese delta stood a vigilant watch. For the past twenty-four hours guerrilla soldiers had harassed its defenders with occasional mortar rounds and small arms fire. A radio call for help had brought fighter-bombers and a spotter plane to try to dislodge the enemy from foxholes and bunkers they had built during the night. But neither the aerial observer nor the men in the outpost could detect the Communist soldiers in their concealed positions. At dawn the outpost commander called off his alert and reduced the number of perimeter guards. Then he led a patrol out to survey the area. No sooner had they left their defenses than the enemy opened fire. Two of the soldiers fell, badly wounded, and the rest scrambled back to the safety of their perimeter, dragging their casualties with them.

While the medical corpsmen treated the wounded, a radio telephone operator called their headquarters to the east at Gia Lam. There, when the request for medical evacuation came in, the duty pilot ran to his waiting helicopter and in minutes was airborne. His operations officer had told him that the pickup zone was insecure and that gunships would cover him. Since there were few helicopter ambulances in the theater, this flight would be a long one: forty-five minutes each way. After taking off, the pilots radioed the gunships and confirmed the time and place of rendezvous. On his map he traced his route, out across the paddied landscape, broken only by an occasional village, hamlet, or barbed wire camp.

Five minutes from the beseiged outpost the flight leader of the gunship team radioed the air ambulance that they had him in sight and were closing on him. While the ambulance pilot planned his approach, the gunships made strafing runs over the outpost to keep the enemy down. The outpost commander marked his pickup zone with a smoke grenade, and the ambulance pilot circled down to it from high overhead. As soon as he landed he shouted at the ground troops to load the wounded before a mortar hit him. Once the patients were secured, the pilot sped out of the area and headed toward Lanessan Hospital, radioing ahead to report his estimated time of arrival. Litter bearers from the hospital waited to rush the casualties into the emergency room as soon as the helicopter touched down.