Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting

3. “The World’s First Helicopter War

57 3 “The World’s First Helicopter War” Cavalry, and I don’t mean horses! Gen. James Gavin, 1954 No sound or image is as evocative of Vietnam as the helicopter. British historian Alasdair Spark, 1989 The first American helicopter unit started moving into the Mekong Delta on April 9, 1962, and I went to visit it soon afterward. I was eager to cover the first contact between these newcomers and the delta’s population. To arrange the visit, I met with the commander of Marine Squadron 362, Col. John Franklin Carey, a forty-six-year-old Minnesota-born, cigarchomping veteran of World War II and Korea. Carey entered the stuffy public information office of the U.S. military advisor’s command in Vietnam, limping slightly, a reminder of the Battle of Midway. “This is no place for a woman,” he warned me. “Well, I adjust quickly,” I responded. Then he kindly suggested that I exchange my blue sports dress for a pair of fatigues. “Marines don’t allow women with legs down there,” he told me. I borrowed oversized fatigues from an information officer until I could buy my own. 58 “the world’s first helicopter war” U.S. generals thought helicopters were the wingless airborne wonders that were key to defeating their elusive enemy by being able to ascend vertically, fly upward or backward, hover, and skim the rice fields or treetops. Helicopters would thus provide more mobility for ferrying Vietnamese soldiers into remote battle zones or for rapidly reinforcing isolated forts and villages under attack. One U.S. captain ending his eighteen-month tour in Vietnam was so exuberant about the mobility provided by helicopters that he exclaimed: “The Viet Cong are everywhere and nowhere, and so are we, everywhere and nowhere.”1 My trip to the marine squadron provided my first glimpse of what I would later describe as the “world’s first helicopter war.”2 The American military had used helicopters for medical evacuations in the Korean War but, fearing their vulnerabilities, resisted developing them for combat —until 1961, when President Kennedy fast-tracked them to Vietnam to launch his New Frontier counterinsurgency initiatives. Kennedy learned from the ideas of Gen. James Gavin, who touted helicopters after the Korean War in a magazine article headlined, “Cavalry, and I Don’t Mean Horses.”3 Helicopters became instant symbols of the United States’ technological approach to fighting a people’s war. This approach was epitomized by Robert McNamara’s reliance on statistics and computers. But North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap warned, the Americans “don’t reckon on the spirit of a people fighting for what they know is right, to save their country from invaders.”4 “First World Suburbia and Third World Death” I traveled south by chopper with Colonel Carey to the Mekong Delta, where our destination was Soc Trang, a province capital of thirty thousand population, eighty-five air miles south of Saigon.5 The first of the fourhundred -man marine unit arriving there on April 9 started to develop a self-contained enclave encased in barbed wire, and a week later the full unit moved in. The marines had transformed swampland, weeds, debris, and six structures into a city of tents, wooden frame toilets (“You don’t have to flush them; they’re the latest kind”), a flimsy canvas shower hall “the world’s first helicopter war” 59 (“You have hot water if the sun’s still shining”), their own water purifying system, a fuel field, a seventy-five-kilowatt electric plant, and a thousandfoot , all-weather runway, equipped with portable lights. “This is just a typical marine operation,” Carey said offhandedly. “It’s our business to come into a new site.” Yet this spartan site illustrated the time-consuming and expensive logistics of moving entire U.S. support units to Vietnam, where, in contrast, the Communist-led guerrillas relied on living-offthe -land operations or backpacking their own supplies. This base camp was the home for the twenty-four helicopters, fifty-six plane commanders, forty-eight crew chiefs, plus maintenance mechanics, and support personnel of the squadron of hus, shorthand for Helicopter Utility Sikorsky, the manufacturer. Army soldiers joked that hus was shorthand for Hussies. Upon landing inside the enclave, I was shown my private “room,” ordinarily reserved for generals. It was a small tent containing a mosquitonetted bed, a five-gallon water can, a wooden plank desk, two tin...