Shoot Him Harry

Company A

227th Assault Helicopter Battalion

1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)

Shoot Him Harry!
by UH-1D AC/IP, WO-1 John L. Keller, 1st Flt Plt, A/227

If it's January, it must be Bong Son in the rain, or some such nonsense! Well, January, 1967 was really nothing unusual, other than A Company was going back to the Bong Son Plain. This trip was the fourth time since I arrived "in-country" in mid-April, 1966. Jeez! We would even get to use the same old LZ's, but now, they were probably heavily booby-trapped with fields of fire set up? Two weeks into my assignment to A Company I had used this same graveyard LZ for another combat assault. This was the place where I found out from Warrant Officer Classmate George Keppel (B Company), that another classmate Chuck Lawhon (1/9th) had been killed a short distance away from this gravestone, pocked landscape after setting troops down in a rice paddy.
Today, January 7, 1967, I was flying good, old #740 again with Dan "Harry" Harrison as my Crew Chief and R. Thom Jefferson as my Door Gunner. We had left the Company area at LZ Hammond and picked up troops at Uplift for an early morning combat assault in that damn graveyard! Seems that this time, the artillery was a little too far away, so the "fast movers" (F-4 Phantoms from Phan Rang) were going to "soften-up" the area. What a dastardly deed to do to a cemetery! Our ship was #4 in the first flight inbound and we placed ourselves on the left side for the duration of the assaults. The F-4's had finished their work when we were on a descending, one mile final approach. Our ship landed on the left side of the graveyard and fairly close to the tree line. The troops jumped out and set up a defensive perimeter to our left and just about the time we were ready to lift, Jefferson informed me a guy was running up to the helicopter from behind a gravestone and getting ready to jump onboard. What the hell was going on? Where did this guy come from and what was he doing now? He was dressed in "tiger fatigues" with matching "booney hat" and had an Air Force radio pack on his back. About the time he jumped onboard, we were lifting off to head for a second pickup.
I looked left when we about thirty feet in the air and I saw a VC nonchalantly walking away from the tree line with an AK-47 in his hands. He was just walking down a large, tree covered paddy dike as if he was strolling to town for some family get-together. I yelled at Harrison, "Harry, see that VC out there to the left, SHOOT HIM!" Of course, Harry, with his thick, "Coke-bottle" glasses and his head on a 90 mile-an-hour swivel said, "Where, where, I don't see him!" I was getting a little excited about this time, so I answered, angrily, "G.D. Harry, he's right out there walking directly away from us in the trees along that rice paddy." Harry, replied, "I still don't see him!" I was about ready to shoot at him with my S&W .38 Special, when Jefferson said, "G.D. Let me at the S.O.B. and I'll kill him myself!!" Thom was REALLY excited; so much so that he was out of his seat on the right side and almost came across the Air Force guy setting in the middle of the bench seat. Thom was so frustrated with Harry, that he was ready to kill him just to get at the VC! The result was NO ONE SHOT HIM! He would get away to shoot at our Hueys another day.
Since we missed our man, it was time to find out what the hell a tiger-suited Air Force guy was doing in the LZ that just had F-4's dropping bombs and spraying the area with 20 mm cannon. We discovered that the Air Force guy was a bona fide Forward Air Controller who PARACHUTED into the LZ at night. With his radio, he guided the "fast movers" in for their pre-combat assault strikes. He hid behind the tombstone closest to our ship so he decided to jump on the closest bird before we lifted off. Jefferson said the Forward Air Controller had the biggest smile he had ever seen as he jumped onboard our Huey! I guess I would have, too? Calling an air strike in on yourself, now, that takes a lot of BALLS!