To the Limit: An Air Cav Huey Pilot in Vietnam

11 The LZ Tom Incident

1 6 3 The LZ Tom Incident 11 December 1967 Nearly a month before my R&R, I inherited a very special mission, called a lightning bug. Lieutenant Runyan, who had originally been the A/229th representative for this mission, somehow convinced me that I needed to take his place just before he DEROS’d. The customs and practices of war in Vietnam can sometimes seem strange. During daylight hours, when helicopter crews find VC or NVA out in the open, they have to get permission from headquarters to fire on the targets. This is not an unreasonable order since South Vietnamese troops in uniform look identical to North Vietnamese regulars. Before any engagement, Black Horse must be sure that the people you are about to kill are not the “friendlies.” These rules change at night. Leaflets have been dropped and distributed throughout the coastal fishing villages and inner Bong Son plain hamlets clearly stating that any person or boat found on any waterway at night will be considered an enemy. At night anything on the water is subject to destruction. Lightning bug is a night mission. It consists of four Hueys and other support. One Huey, outfitted externally with seven C-130 landing lights in a cluster, flies the waterways and coastline looking for targets. Two gunships, whose assignment is to destroy the targets illuminated by the “lightning bug” ship, follow 500 yards behind the lightning bug Huey. The fourth ship is the “target ship”—an innovation developed prior to my arrival on the scene. 1 6 4 TO THE LIMIT The gunships generally used to go “lights out” to prevent Charlie from seeing them, but this greatly increased the risk of midair collisions between gunships in the dark. So one gunship would turn on its rotating beacon (Grimes light) so that the other could see him. This helped a lot in avoiding midair collisions, but it created a new problem : rarely did the VC shoot at the lightning bug Huey; instead, they fired on the target indicated by the rotating beacon of a following gunship Huey. Two weeks before my taking on the responsibility of Lightning Bug, the powers that be got a really good idea. They added a Huey to run right behind the lightning bug. Now both gunships would go lights out. The ploy works very well—ol’ Charlie falls into the trap. He fires on the target bird, thinking it is a gunship, but to his surprise, the actual gunships are following the target ship by 500 yards. They are obviously in the perfect position to see muzzle flashes and then roll in hot right on the target. Once contact is established, the lightning bug Huey screams for altitude and punches out two million candlepower flares. These flares illuminate a one square mile area in a sundown amber-colored daylight. The gunships destroy the target, while the “target ship” stays out of the way. The entire Lightning Bug mission is an especially dangerous one because you’re still more likely to be killed by your friends or yourself than you are to be killed by Charlie. The target ship is flown only by a volunteer crew. Four Hueys take off from LZ English and fly up and down the waterways at an altitude of 50 feet. Depth perception over water during daytime is nearly impossible; it is absolutely impossible at night. The aircraft commander concentrates on flying the Huey in a certain direction. The peter pilot takes total control of the collective pitch and glues himself on the barometric altimeter. No matter what the A/C does, it is the responsibility of the other guy to maintain 50 feet by adjusting the collective as necessary. Fifty feet above water, at night, at 120 miles per hour, is only a breath from disaster. We run these missions three times a night at varying times. Sometimes we change areas and sometimes we repeat an area. The whole idea is to keep Charlie wondering where we’ll hit next and catch him unprepared. Avariation of the mission involvesArmy snipers who ride aboard the aircraft armed with high-powered rifles with top secret Starlight 1 6 5 THE LZ TOM INCIDENT rifle scopes. Starlight scopes magnify by many times any available light source; in this case it’s starlight, hence the name. What appears to the naked eye to be the blackest Vietnam night becomes daylight with a green tint...