Eagle Station Part 5

Wolf thumbed his own chest and said, "Is Wolf." The two men shook hands.

The crew chief signaled the airplane was ready, and they all walked to the metal steps hanging from slots at the cargo door in the left fuselage. Wolf put his two bags down and unzipped the parachute bag, then pulled out his TIO backpack parachute and a set of rumpled jungle fatigues. He put the fatigues on over his civilian clothes, filled the cargo pockets with survival equipment, strapped the two RT-10 radios into the leg pockets, then threw the T- IO parachute to his back and shrugged into the harness. Then he pulled the AK from the parachute bag and strapped it to his leg. The pilot watched with some amus.e.m.e.nt as Wolf squatted and tightened the leg straps for the parachute.

"You always fly like that, buddy?" he asked.

"Always," Wolf growled. Except for combat a.s.saults from helicopters, Wolf Lochert wore a parachute anytime he was in an airplane in a combat zone. If pressed, he would say it had been years before he was comfortable as a chuteless pa.s.senger on a civilian airliner. Wolf Lochert had logged 1,247 jumps since he began jumping twenty years earlier.

"Some guys," the pilot muttered, shaking his head as he climbed the small ladder and disappeared inside the ship.

"See you in a couple days," Polter said, shaking Wolf's hand.

"Keep in touch on the HF net. Let me know if there is anything really gross that needs immediate attention. I don't think there is, but you never know what you'll find out there."

Thirty minutes later the C-46 was level at 8,000 feet and beginning its first run. The airplane was cargo-figged; there were no seats, neither airliner-type nor canvas pulldowns. Even the big cargo door had been removed. Tewa had hooked a net over the opening. Wolf sat on a pallet of rice strapped down just behind the pilot's compartment. In his ears were rubber plugs he had inserted just before takeoff. He had taken them from a small tube he always carried. Special Forces men, as with any men who spent their lives in the bush, valued their hearing as much as their weapons to keep them alive. He studied the map, a 1:250,000 Aerial Navigation Chart he had pulled from his bag to keep track of the approximate position of the C-46. He felt the pilot set the throttles and slow the airplane to drop speed.

He climbed down when he saw Tewa the bundle-kicker start pulling bags of rice toward the cargo door. Because they were going into range of ground fire and Wolf wanted all his senses alert, he stowed his earplugs, then stuffed the map under his harness. Due to the tightness of his parachute straps, he had to walk slightly crouched. Tewa grinned as Wolf helped drag rice bags to the door. The Lao wore neither a parachute nor a harness and safety belt binding him to the aircraft.

Earlier, Wolf had noticed four parachutes stacked haphazardly in a cargo bin on the left side behind the pilot's compartment.

The pilot made a steep left descending turn toward the tiny encampment.

Out the gaping door Wolf could see the steep green hills and tall trees that made up the Laotian countryside.

The pilot leveled at what Wolf estimated was two hundred feet above the terrain and began his run. In the doorway Tewa watched three small light bulbs next to the door. When the red went off and the green lit up, he began flinging sacks of rice out the door as fast as he could.

The rice was double-bagged to handle any loose rice in case the inner bag burst upon impact, which it usually did. Wolf helped pitch them out. Tewa held up his hand after seven bags. They were past the short drop zone.

"Is all," Tewa mouthed. Wolf nodded and put his plugs back in his ears.

The drop zone was the village itself, situated in the only clear s.p.a.ce along the top of a small row of green hills. The pilot had tried to align the left door with the edge of the clearing so the bags wouldn't crash through the roofs of the thatched huts surrounding the longhouse of the chief.

After the pilot had pulled away to the north and climbed, the door to the pilot's compartment opened and a man wearing the three stripes of a copilot on his epaulets came back to Wolf "That was X-ray Kilo," he said, shouting above the noise of the engines and the wind pa.s.sing by the open cargo door. Wolf reached to his right ear and pulled out a rubber plug.

"Say again," he said to the copilot.

"That was Meng Khoung. The Company just called on HF. We have a divert.

We have to go to a camp near Ban Ban and drop some hard rice. Be there in about twenty minutes, then we'll get you to Lima 85."

Wolf pulled his map out and had the copilot show him where they were going. It was a spot in the northeast corner of the PDJ.

After the copilot told Tewa what he wanted and went back up front, Wolf replaced the earplug and climbed back on the rice pallet. He watched Tewa rig parachutes to the straps and hooks on three heavy wooden crates. Within minutes Wolf felt the pilot lower the nose and throttle back for the next run. Again, he carefully stowed both earplugs. As before, the pilot leveled a few hundred feet above the ground. Wolf made his way, hand over hand in the now swaying fuselage, to help Tewa.

Wind swirled through the fuselage, fluttering loose corners of canvas covers.

Wolf heard the antiaircraft fire before he saw or felt anything. Above the wind and engine noise, he heard the sharp Pam-pam-pam-pam of what he recognized as a 12.7mm (.51 caliber) Russian antiaircraft gun.

Immediately, the engines roared as the pilot slammed the throttles forward and the big plane tilted left in a sharp turn away, Wolf hoped, from the sudden ground fire. In the abrupt turn, Tewa started to slide toward the yawning door, eyes wide with alarm. Wolf quickly grabbed a crate strap with one hand and the tiny Lao with the other and hauled him back to safety.

Then Wolf gave him a mighty shove toward the parachute bin.

Before the startled Lao could protest, Wolf had a chute strapped on him, and had him started back to the cargo door.

As they reached the door, a spray of bullets drummed through the underside of the aircraft, slamming into cargo pallets and zinging through the skin of the curved top of the cargo compartment. Every fifth round was a tracer that left smoke in its path.

A cargo box started to smolder. Wolf pulled Tewa down to the floor behind one of the crates. Another bullet spray hammered the aircraft closer to the front of the ship as the gunner took more lead on his target. Wolf thought he heard a shout from the c.o.c.kpit as the aircraft abruptly nosed down. At the same time he saw a trail of white smoke and red flame issue from the left engine, The flames were long and hot and almost reached the open cargo door. Wolf could smell burning oil. The plane started to turn and fall into that side as the engine's propeller began to unwind. The bailout alarm, a huge bell mounted above the door, started a strident ringing that galvanized Wolf into instinctive action.

Without a glance forward, he slammed Tema's hand onto the ripcord of his chute and threw him out the door and tumbled out immediately after him.

Wolf had never gone out the door in such an awkward position, much less at such a low alt.i.tude without a static line to open his parachute automatically. He did the best he could to roll to a spread-eagle facedown position and pulled the ripcord. For an instant he was struck by the incredible silence, then he heard and felt his parachute pop open. He looked up, checked his canopy was fully deployed, and saw the stricken C-46 crash into a hillside with a muted roar. He realized there were bare seconds remaining before he would hit the ground.

He took a quick glance around to orient himself to the terrain, saw Tewa with a full canopy go into the trees south of his position, saw furtive movements heading toward where the Lao would land, then looked down to prepare for his own landing.

He had instinctively grabbed the two risers that allowed him to steer his parachute and had just as instinctively turned into the wind. He saw a small clearing below and pulled a riser to steer toward it. When he saw he had it made, he a.s.sumed the landing position and slammed into the ground.

Lochert hit, feet together, knees slightly bent, arms straight up with hands on the risers, eyes on the horizon. It was to be a cla.s.sic PLF-Parachute Landing Fall. As soon as his feet touched, he pulled the risers to his chest as hard and as fast as he could, tucked, and rolled down on one shoulder. But at the end of the maneuver, as the landing energy was dissipated, his head struck a rock and he knew nothing more.

"Sor, sor, is dead? Is sor dead?" The tiny Lao spoke in liquid syllables. He was crouched over Lochert's inert form, shaking his torso. "Sor, if sor not dead, sor must move. Bad f.u.c.ker come, bad f.u.c.ker come." He had gathered up Wolf's parachute and piled the silk near his body. The late afternoon was steamy hot and there was no breeze. The jungle, still quiet after the hammering of guns and the crash of the C-46, seemed to be waiting for the next crescendo.

Wolf opened an eye. "Sir not dead," he said softly. "What compa.s.s bad f.u.c.ker?"

Years before, during White Star, Wolf had helped develop the 100-word vocabulary taught to the Lao tribesman to make the rudiments of combat conversation. A few nouns, some basic single-tense verbs, names of weapons and directions made up the pidgin English. Like spice, flavor was added by whichever additional words the Special Forces teacher felt appropriate. The basic word denoting the reproductive act, and its many wondrous and colorful variations, was by far the most popular and common.

Tewa pointed south, down the hill from the small clearing.

"What kilometer?" Wolf asked, still lying flat, head throbbing.

"Maybe one, maybe two kilometer."

"Where Tewa parachute?"

The Lao pointed down the hill. "f.u.c.king tree. Bad f.u.c.ker see sure."

Wolf sat up and felt the back of his head. He fingered a lump, but brought forth no blood when he looked at his fingers.

Scheiss, he said to himself, if I'd worn a pot, that wouldn't have happened. He felt a dull throb and a momentary dizziness but nothing else.

"Okay," he said, "make weapons check." Still seated, Wolf unbuckled his parachute harness, then unstrapped the AK-47, checked it for damage, pulled a magazine from a thigh pocket and inserted it into the weapon, then jacked a round into the chamber. He checked his stiletto and Mauser secure in their holsters. He inventoried the rest of his gear and put one of the RT-10 radios in a chest pocket. He pulled two 5-grain aspirins from a waterproof pack, punctured a pint tin of water, and swallowed the pills along with half the water. He gave the tin to Tewa, who took it with a wide grin and emptied the tin with thirsty gulps.

"Okay," Wolf said to Tewa, "let's move over there." He pointed to the north edge of the clearing away from the direction Tewa said the "bad f.u.c.kers" were. Once away from the open s.p.a.ce, Wolf buried the water tin, then pointed up a tall tree and said to Tewa, "Go up, look, find bad f.u.c.kers." The Lao seemed savvy enough to Wolf to be able to give a dependable report.

As Tewa started shinnying up the tree, Wolf knelt down, quickly cut cloth from his camouflaged parachute, buried the rest, and smoothed out the disturbed brush. Then he eased to the ground next to a fallen log and concealed himself behind branches and leaves, yet leaving enough s.p.a.ce so he could see across the clearing.

From a pocket, he took out his map and fixed what he was fairly certain was their position. He pulled the RT- IO radio from his chest pocket and extended the antenna, debating whether to use the international distress call of Mayday. Mayday, from the French M'aidez (help me), was a powerful attention-getter in that it meant an airplane was in imminent danger of crashing or had already crashed. The call was usually heard on what was called Guard Channel, which was 243.0 megacycles on UHF (Ultra High Frequency) radio, and 121.5 on VHF (Very High Frequency).

All aircraft had a spare receiver permanently tuned to Guard Channel, so that regardless of what frequency the pilot was using on his main receiver, he would also hear it. Sometimes Guard became too crowded with frantic voices in uncontrolled chatter planes were going SAR or combat situations when a lo down. When that happened, the pilot would temporarily turn his Guard receiver to Standby so as to better concentrate on whatever he was doing on his own tactical frequency.

Since the RT- IO transmitted and received only on Guard, and an airplane had crashed, Mayday seemed the obvious way to go. Yet Wolf felt reluctant to use the distress call. I'm not in any distress, he reasoned, only temporarily inconvenienced. He decided not to use the call and instead pushed the b.u.t.ton on the small radio and began to transmit.

"Any aircraft reading Wolf on Guard Channel, give me a call." He repeated the transmission twice more and received no reply. Tewa sprang down from the tree.

"Bad f.u.c.ker is half kilometer," he said in a rushed voice.

"How many?"

"Many. mak-mak," Tewa said, using Thai slang for very many, which, Wolf realized, could be anywhere from four or five to twenty or who knows.

"This many?" Wolf asked, opening and closing his right hand twice to count ten fingers.

"Mak-mak," Tewa repeated, and opened and closed both hands three times.

-Maybe thirty?" Wolf said.

"Bad f.u.c.ker look us. Halb Tewa parachute."

Wolf pulled out his map. "You know map?" he asked.

"Is know," Tewa said, and patted a back pocket as if that were where his knowledge was stored. Wolf showed him- where he thought they were on his big 1:250,000 Aerial Navigation Chart.

Tewa made a big grin and reached into his rear pocket for a worn Army 1:50,000 map of the region. "Is know," he repeated, and pointed to a spot on the map. Happily surprised at this man's ability to plan ahead, Wolf looked where he pointed and agreed that Tewa had accurately found their position. The surrounding countryside was shown in much greater detail on the Lao's map. Wolf had a moment in which he had trouble focusing and had to blink several times to clear his vision.

"Tewa is good man," Wolf said in a low voice. He took out his Air field Site List, Laos, and checked the coordinates in the local area for the closest Lima site in the opposite direction from the approaching Pathet Lao "bad f.u.c.kers." To the north, twenty-one miles away, he found Lima Site 36 at Na Khang.

The route to the site would take them up and down several ridgelines of karst that pushed up in rows like the Appalachian Mountains in the United States. The karst punched up in bizarre forms and shapes caused by wind working on the limestone for millions of years. Wolf took out his lensatic compa.s.s, checked bearings, sliced his hand toward Na Khang, and said quietly to Tewa, "We go now." He put a finger to his lips to emphasize silence and Tewa nodded.

The direction Wolf had chosen was uphill through scrub brush and karst outcroppings. They started to climb. At first the going was easy. The single-canopy jungle was formed of broad leaves which kept the late-afternoon sun from their backs.

The slope was not too steep and the jungle floor was soft from rotted foliage but not slippery. The humidity was high. Several times Wolf stopped Tewa with a motion of his hand and they listened for pursuers.

So far they had heard nothing. Once Wolf stopped and cut a plug from the base of a banana tree for the pure water it contained and they both drank their fill. Wolf pulled two prophylactics from his pocket, gave one to Tewa, then they filled the thin membranes with water and carefully put them in their front cargo pockets. Wolf put the plug back in the tree, then painstakingly concealed the spot with branches.

Soon they were working their way up through karst, the rocky limestone outcropping so common in northeastern Laos.

There was no canopy over the karst; the soil would not support big trees. Some of the slope was covered with a mixture of tall elephant gra.s.s and low scrub vegetation.

it was close to darkness when Wolf signaled to stop and conceal themselves for the night. He pointed to one of many small cave openings in the porous rock. It was easily defensible and gave a good view down the slope, but was difficult to reach.

They climbed the steep rock face as high as they could, then switched to a narrow vertical fissure that rose up a dozen feet and pa.s.sed next to the cave opening. They ascended by bracing their feet and backs against opposite walls. Wolf used parachute cloth to make a sling for his AK to dangle under him. Halfway up, Wolf saw where his right boot had sc.r.a.ped a white streak in the rock. Balancing himself with both legs, he spit onto his fingers, slowly stretched his hand forward, and made mud from the surrounding wall dirt to cover the offending scratch. Below him, Tewa stayed wedged in watchful silence.

Wolf climbed the remaining five feet and levered himself onto the narrow ledge at the top of the chimney, pulled his gun after himself, and reached down to help Tewa out of the fissure. Upon Wolf's instructions, Tewa backed into the cave.

Wolf had to lie flat, then inch his way backwards through the cave opening, which was a jagged slice two feet high by four feet wide. He pulled in his AK, then, still on his stomach, looked out over the surrounding terrain from his vantage point.

The rough karst, slate-colored and crumbling through the green growth, fell away steeply to the single-canopy jungle twenty feet below. He could see down onto the strip of elephant gra.s.s that lay between the jungle and the base of the karst.

He saw no movement in the gra.s.s and none through the dense jungle canopy. He watched silently for several long minutes and finally noted birds take sudden flight along a line pointing fairly close to their position in the karst. He figured their panic was caused by approaching Pathet Lao troops less than a kilometer from the bottom of the karst. He inched back into the cave to where it was wider and he could sit up.

What little light there was came from the darkening sky outside. His eyes soon became accustomed to the vague outline of Tewa in the cave.

"I doubt if they found our trail," he said in a near-whisper to Tewa, forgetting for the moment the Lao's abbreviated English vocabulary.

"They probably figured we would climb to the closest high point in the region. We will bivouac here. Rest.

Sleep."

"Yes, yes," Tewa said in the dimness, obviously not comprehending exactly what Wolf had said but aware enough of the situation to get the general idea. The Lao drank some of his water and busied himself laying out his meager equipment.

Wolf pa.s.sed him some parachute cloth and used his own to fashion a pillow, then began to pull survival items from his pocket. He drank half of the water, then positioned the thin bladder where he could get at it, put one RT-10 radio next to the water and left the second in his pocket along with a day-night smoke flare. He didn't want to take anything else from his pockets in case they had to make a hurried departure from the cave in the middle of the night. He crawled forward to position the AK near the cave opening and looked out over the jungle below. Daylight was ending and the sky was a thick violet laced with golden rays from the setting sun. He began to feel nauseated and had trouble seeing clearly in the dim light that seemed to grow more dim then become bright again. He rested on his elbows and felt himself sway.

"is sor okay?" Tewa asked from behind.

Wolf pushed back. He knew what was happening. "Going into shock," he said. "Delayed reaction to the bash on the head. Need water, aspirin, warmth, feet up." He knew the Lao didn't understand. He fought against the increasing nausea and dizziness to drink water and take four aspirin. Finally he wrapped himself in the parachute cloth and lay back with his feet propped up on a ledge higher than his head.

"Sir is sick," he whispered to Tewa.

1845 Hours LOCAL, THURSDAY 10 OCTOBER 1968 AIRBORNE IN AN HH-53B HELICOPTER.

NORTHEASTERN PLAINF DES JARRES.

ROYALTY OF LAOS.

"Did you hear that?" Captain Joe Kelly asked the pilot sitting to his right in the c.o.c.kpit of the HH-53B helicopter.

"Did I hear what?" the pilot, an older lieutenant colonel, responded.

The big camouflaged HH-53B helicopter thrashed its way northeast to Lima Site 36 at Na Khang from their home base of Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base (RTAFB) in Thailand.

The noise from the six blades of its ma.s.sive rotor system and the howl of the two T-64 turbo engines would have sounded to someone on the ground like a cross between the whine of a giant sewing machine and the thrum of whirling scimitars.

Only the ubiquitous Hueys made the whop-whop, blat-blat blade sounds.

The ship weighed over seventeen tons and was cruising at 9,000 feet, with a true airspeed of 155 knots. The autopilot was engaged, freeing the pilots from the exacting job of keeping the helicopter on course.

They were deploying to Lima Site 36, a secret advanced base in Laos, to spend the night. Very early the following morning they were to take off and set up an orbit by the North Vietnamese border in support of a large fighter strike in North Vietnam.

Kelly turned the volume up on the UHF radio and pressed the sides of his olive drab helmet close to his ears. Head c.o.c.ked, he listened intently.

"Mere. Hear that?"

"No, dammit," the pilot, Paul Shifleto, replied with some disgust, "I didn't." He was a forty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel with eleven years in grade and hearing that had deteriorated badly due to twenty years of flying C-124s (between helicopter tours) and noisy helicopters.

He sat with his hands in his lap and had been watching the countryside slip by underneath. He was at the end of his tour and didn't really want this overnight deployment ... particularly with Joe Kelly, the squad ron's youngest instructor pilot and rescue crew commander. Joe Kelly was known as a wild man. Kelly had not endeared himself to the rescue community when he had added the phrase We Die to the rescue motto, That Others May Live. Kelly, a 1962 Air Force Academy graduate, was known as a pre-Rucker pilot.

That meant he had graduated from the complete fixed-wing USAF pilot training and received his wings. Then he had gone to helicopter training. Later on, USAF helicopter pilots went only to the Army's Fort Rucker for helicopter training.

I've got it now," Kelly said. He was a man of broad shoulders made even bulkier by the survival vest he wore. Shifleto listened. Together they heard the faint voice.

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo. Is Tewa. Is Tewa. Sor is sick. Sor is sick. You come please. Come now." The voice stopped with a static hiss as the talker released the transmit b.u.t.ton. It hissed on for a second, then back off as if the talker kept pressing the b.u.t.ton but didn't know what to say.