As we approached, I heard the chopper’s engine running, but as we got on, its blades were standing idle. Later, I wondered if this was a well-planned deception to lure the unsuspecting fly into the spider’s web, for when the engine’s RPMs dropped way down and the blades began turning slowly, I started to doubt my eagerness to take this joyride.
The faster its blades turned, the more the giant eggbeater vibrated like a car’s tire that sorely needed balancing. The vehicle shook faster and faster, vibrating and gyrating like a machine gone mad—and it was still sitting on the ground! I realized now that I had probably made a serious mistake. But it was too late. I was committed.
I could feel it trying to leave the ground as it strained, bent on flailing itself to death, as its rpm increased. Was some unseen anchor holding us down? Finally, painfully, slowly, the machine began to win its fight with gravity and to lift itself off the ground at a rate I could have measured in inches per minute.
My immediate thought was that we were seriously overloaded. My eyes darted around the chopper’s interior, looking for the source of the engine’s strain—but Embesi and I were its only cargo. The door gunner looked very nonchalant, not worried in the least. That eased my apprehensions. Years later, I learned that the H-34 was seriously underpowered, especially in high heat, and what we were experiencing was considered its “normal flight characteristics.”
A cacophony of noise consumed us. We climbed slowly. Cupping both hands in front of my mouth, I screamed, “Sergeant Embesi, where do you think the Corps got these things?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But they sure got took, didn’t they?”
We flew over an area that seemed to interest him, although it was beyond me how Embesi could read a map in this flying cocktail shaker. (“Flying” was a gross misuse of the word when used in context with the H-34.) I was only along for the ride, if you called the harmonic rattling of your guts and brain a ride.
Embesi and I wore our pistols, but the thought of our chopper being shot down never crossed my mind. My education about the numerous shortcomings of helicopters would come in just a few days, under the very spot we were passing over.
In my hands was our tank’s submachine gun, an example of American firearm design at its worst. Every Marine tank had an M3 “grease gun.” It cost Uncle Sam only $15 to manufacture, and rumor had it they really were made by Mattel. I could never stop imagining grease guns coming off the same assembly line as Barbies. My guess was, they’d designed the M3 as an accessory for Ken, but he refused to be seen carrying it, so they gave it to us Marines.
Eventually our giant Cuisinart made its way back to the fire base. I managed to snap a couple of pictures, even though I was certain nothing would come out. I didn’t think the fastest shutter speed on my camera could disguise the vibrations of our ride. Embesi reported his observations to the lieutenant. I already knew what his verdict was: We were going in.
No SOONER HAD I STOWED THE M3 back on our tank than Embesi summoned three tank crews. “Get your stuff together and be prepared to mount out in thirty minutes. Pack enough for three days. We’re joining a sweep already in progress, on a place called Goi Noi Island.”
At the announcement that we were going to an island, I thought he’d lost it. Our chopper ride stayed at least ten miles from the nearest coastline. So while everyone was getting busy, I walked over to ask him. “Island? We didn’t fly over any islands!”
He looked surprised. “Didn’t you see the rivers around that huge chunk of real estate?”
“No,” I half-kidded. “I was too busy getting homogenized by that goddamned whirling blender to see much of anything. But do me a favor? Don’t ask me to come on any more helicopter rides.”
Embesi only smiled.
Just as he had described it, Goi Noi Island was bordered by two large rivers and a smaller one. It was a large chunk of uncontested ground that Charlie and his rich uncle, Mr. Charles, had owned for years. “Mr. Charles” was the term of respect we used to differentiate the hardcore North Vietnamese Army regulars from “Charlie,” or the local Viet Cong.
The day before, 2/7—Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment—had set feet on the island and stepped into a whirlwind. Resistance was so fierce that we were part of a reaction force to bolster the Marines’ presence on the island along with 3/7, another Marine battalion. We soon found out that Ben Green, a tank commander from 1st Tank Battalion, had been killed in the engagement.
Embesi told the crews we would be gone for three days, but we were ordered to take several extra five-gallon cans of water. That was more than we usually carried, but with Embesi you didn’t ask why, you just did it. Also, he had us load up five days’ worth of C rats and all the machine gun ammo we could store in our gypsy rack. Did he know something he wasn’t telling us?
The gypsy rack was technically called the bustle rack—the open area on the back of the turret, where we stashed personal gear, extra ammo, and anything else we didn’t want cluttering up the inside. Every tank I ever saw had as much junk stuffed into this external area as possible. No one ever called it the bustle rack, and because it made every tank look like a gypsy wagon the name stuck. It was even more fitting because we operated like gypsies, with no permanent home, never longer than a week or two with any one grunt unit, shuffled continually between one unit and another.
It was mid-morning by the time we packed everything up and exited the fire base. We were to join up with other units of 2/7 and several tanks from 1st Tank Battalion under Lieutenant Scott. They would be waiting for us at Phu Loc 6, near Liberty Bridge. To get there, we had to make a long road march past Hill 55, down past Hill 42, through the Dodge City area, and past Hill 37. Liberty Bridge was a major landmark in the Da Nang area. We had all heard about it, but I had never seen it. None of us realized that it was no longer in service.
We arrived to find what had once been a very high wooden bridge, several stories tall in fact. It was a charred skeleton that extended only halfway into the river. We soon learned that during Tet, two months earlier, the bridge had been set ablaze during an enemy attack—by Marine artillery that had accidentally hit it. Was a Marine lieutenant involved? Someone must have gotten his ass chewed out pretty good over that one.
We were able to ford the Song Thu Bon downstream from the blackened remains and meet up with our infantry and tanks at the little fire base called Phu Loc 6. We would begin our sweep from there onto Goi Noi Island and link up with the Marine unit that had fallen into trouble the day before.
By mid-afternoon our combined relief force departed Phu Loc 6 in search of 2/7. We caught up with it by late afternoon and began a sweep of the western end of the island. We spent two uneventful days trying to locate Charlie, but the only thing we turned up was sporadic sniper fire. It wasn’t effective, but it seemed to dog us wherever we went. It was Charlie’s way of letting us know that he still cared about us.
On the third day we encountered our first enemy activity about two klicks (a klick, or kilometer, equals 1,000 meters) into the island. The grunts had gotten into a brief skirmish and had taken a few casualties, but none of our tanks was involved. A medevac (medical evacuation helicopter) was called in to take out the wounded. Before long, one of the antique eggbeaters came in to pick them up. With it came a foretaste of the kind of situation we were about to find ourselves in for the duration of the sweep.