Mindoro Island, 1977

           Sweat was forming puddles on my arm. My head was tilted forward inside my helmet so I could look down at myself lying in the tall grass, and as I watched, sweat percolated up to the surface of the skin, formed little drops around the hairs to make a puddle, and rolled off to the elbow. There was nothing else to do but lie in the shade and sleep, and nothing I could do to keep away the boredom. It was so humidly hot that it can’t even begun to be described. It was like laying in a sauna while wearing all my clothes and a field jacket, all the while being toasted by fifty cigarette lighters.

          Laying there in the half-shade of my poncho, watching myself sweat, and dozing off helped me pass the time until my next radio watch. We were short-handed on this operation, so the watch was four hours on and four off, and I had a couple of hours to kill until I was on again. As tired as I was from having been awake most of the night, running up and down the mountains repairing radios and copying messages, the incredible heat made it hard to sleep. The flies didn’t help either. Lying there, dozing off, a fly would land on my face or arm and bite off a chunk, so I had to swat at the thing, repeating the process a few minutes later.

          The poncho that was half-shading me didn’t help either- The thing was made of a nylon sheet with metal grommets around the perimeter and had a hood in the center with a shoestring to tie around your collar when it rained, and it was coated with some kind of rubber stuff that made it stink, especially when it got hot. The smell is one of those things I’ll always remember- Whenever I’m around military gear, especially canvas and material that has been waterproofed, the smell grabs my mind and drags it back twenty five years to the feelings I felt when I first smelled it. After a while I tuned out the smell, but then there was the noise from across the path where my little pretend-tent was.

          All the radios for the battalion Command Post were situated there, on the bank of a creek, and the hiss and distorted voices coming across the grass made me think I was still on radio watch, even though I was dozing. It was kind of funny- usually the radios were located in the same big tent where the communication platoon slept, and you could wake up to go on watch and not miss a thing since you had been hearing what was going on in your sleep.

          This operation was different though- instead of being trucked in with all our equipment, tents, generators, cots, and the other trash of a grunt headquarters company, we were helicoptered in and dropped in the middle of a tropical forest where, if we wanted to get anyplace, we walked. No trucks or tents, no sleeping bags, no field jackets- it was too hot for any of that, and we carried the minimum amount of everything except water. Everything we had we carried about on our backs or had it flown in and dumped off by helo. It made for tough going. The elevation was high, the humidity was way higher, the mountains steep, and the occasional rain made the ground sticky and slick, so you had to watch your footing carefully when going up or downhill.

          One night, about zero dark thirty, we were humping up a hill on a narrow and winding path, and a guy slipped off, tumbling over and over into the ravine with his pack and weapon, crashing through bushes and into trees, and broke his leg. We had to go down and get him, splint his leg, and carry him back up the hill with all his gear, and then find a clearing for a medevac to land and take him back to the ship for treatment.

          But there was no place for miles where the helicopter could land, and we couldn’t just drag the guy up and down the hills with bones sticking out of his leg while looking for an LZ. It was really dark. There was just a bit of moon, and we were way down under two layers of forest where it was as black as it could get. We finally found a place where there were fewer trees over our heads, and Captain Ferguson called in a medivac to get the man out. He also called in two AH-1J gunships to circle around and drop white phosphorous illumination flares so we could see what we were doing instead of stumbling over tree roots and bumbling around and bumping into one another.

          All this shouting and organizing took an hour, and then we could hear them coming in the distance, their big blades flopping and grinding away at the still air. Meanwhile, the Captain fished around in his jacket pocket and pulled out a gadget that looked like a fat felt marker, screwed something into the top of it, held it over his head and gave it a flick. Instantly the sky blasted apart with a green signal flare so the pilots could find us in all this blackness. (pilots were always carrying around slick contraptions to wow the average Jarhead) He had to do the flare thing two or three times until the pilots finally located us milling about under all that foliage with his landing lights.

          The big CH-46 came in low and hovered, lowering a stokes on the winch cable through the trees that were being pushed about from the wind made by the rotor blades. We strapped the man in and they hauled him up, the crew chief standing with one foot out the side door with his hand on the wire, trying to prevent the stretcher from swinging back and forth from the prop wash and bashing into tree branches on the way up. Meanwhile the other two helos were dropping illume every few minutes- the phosphorous flares swinging and smoking on their little parachutes, leaving white trails in the sky, making the night stark white with long black shadows. I wished it was me getting to go back. It would have been almost OK if I had broken my leg, just to get back aboard the ship and have a shower and a clean rack to crawl into, without the bugs and the heat and the stink.

          Back on the path by my poncho tent, people were coming and going; the battalion commander (the CO) and his executive officer, (the XO) the captain in command of Lima company which was providing perimeter security for us, other radio operators and messengers, and general foot traffic on the path across a hilltop where three hundred guys with weapons were sitting around in holes they had dug in the ground. There was a lot of movement and noise, and I was scrunched in the middle, trying to snooze so as not to fall asleep on the next radio watch.

          While I was laying there unconsciously waving down the flies, a drift set in, like a blurry picture of water flowing over smooth stones, and some kind of sleep finally came, but so did strange images; an image where I saw a helicopter fly into a hill and smash, tumbling over and over with men and weapons flying out everywhere; smoke and fire and shouting; fear and death and burning heat. I had dreams like that all the time. I flew on helicopters a lot, and at first, until I got used to being jerked off the ground and set down dozens of klicks away, I was afraid of the monstrously deafening things. The other, more experienced guys would brag and tell stories of helicopter crashes they had been in and survived, and of crashes they had seen where no-one survived, and I was really nervous about flying in the things, even afraid of them.

          The first time I had to go up on one, a big CH-53, I was shaking all over from the adrenaline of being afraid- I could barely sit still and was anxious the other guys would notice I was sweating and shaking from fear. They were incredibly noisy, too, like a continuous sonic boom that lasts as long as you will your unwilling self to be inside the thing. Oh yeah. Hot hydraulic fluid sometimes dripped on you from the overhead; It was red like blood, but thin like olive oil, and it got all over the seats and the floor, so you had to watch for puddles of it on the aluminum deck plates, or you’d slip and look like a fool. That’s why we always had to point the muzzles of our weapons at the deck- it looked kind of funny; all these mean looking Marines dressed in their camouflage utility uniforms, camo paint on their faces, with all their packs and weapons and ammunition and other deadly stuff, but with the muzzles of their M-16’s resting on the deck with the stocks in the air. It was because all the hydraulic controls and pipes and cables that made the helicopter go were in the overhead, and if your weapon accidentally discharged while pointing up, it would put a hole in something vital, usually flammable too, and we would all crash and burn.

          One of the types of helicopters I flew in was made by the Boeing Company, that also makes the 747 airliner. The helicopter was big and had twin blades on top that turned in opposite directions, and was called the CH-46. It had a nickname: “The flying Boeing body bag.” “When I crash, just wrap me up in it and bury it all.”

          I used to have silly dreams where the helicopter went high in the air and then the blades flew off into the stratosphere while the rest of us crashed into the sea, turning into a submarine, where we landed on the deck of the Titanic and blew up the iceberg- or the helicopter landed on the pointy end of a mountain top, and it was so steep that you couldn’t get out because you would slide down the side- or the helicopter would land on top of me and thousands of guys would run off the back ramp one by one, and everyone would step on my butt like a doorstep.

          This time though, everything got really quiet, and I woke up. No one was paying any attention to me; they were all looking at one of the radios across the path, and then everyone started shouting all at once. The CO and XO were looking at a map, kneeling on the grass and running their fingers over it like they were trying to find something; the air liaison officer, Captain Ferguson, was a couple of feet away shouting at someone, one of the radio operators probably, who was down on his knees fiddling with his radio’s frequency knobs, sweating and cringing from having a captain shouting in his ear. He grabbed a map from a staff sergeant who had just walked up, and snatching the radio handset away from the operator still kneeling in the mud twiddling knobs, began to shout now at someone on the radio- probably the SAR people at Clark. Everyone else just stood around looking at the radio and thinking hideous thoughts. We were too far away. There was nothing we could do. It was a done deal.

          All the visions of fire and smoke, and the pictures we had seen, and the people we once knew, and the scenes we had attended came out of the backs of our minds and performed another scene for each of us. Dread and frustration and futility settled in on everybody in range of the radios. The shouting stopped after a few minutes, while a few guys came up to see what was happening.

          I was still half asleep, sitting up in the grass and the mud like a wet and stinking dog, when Capt. Ferguson yelled at me – “Corporal Petito! Getchyer radio and get saddled up!” That was really strange, because the captain never yelled. (at least I had never heard him yell before) He was really old, at least thirty five, and had a bit of a stomach, which was strange for being a Marine- Marines don’t have stomachs- they just have a lot of muscle where stomachs are supposed to be. He was quiet and kind of soft-spoken, and gave orders like he was ordering stir-fry at a Chinese noodle house. But everyone did exactly as he said when he said it. If he said jump, we asked “how high” while we were in the air. He was the best officer I thought there ever was, because he would listen, and ask you how you were doing, and find a way to make a difficult job seem interesting and important. He was actually not a ground-pounder- he was a pilot who flew F-4’s. The F-4 Phantom is a supersonic jet that was designed back in the fifties, and is still in service today, forty years later. For it’s time, it was advanced and innovative, and every few years, someone thinks up a new job for the aircraft, which is why it is still in service all over the world. Why he would want to slog up and down the hills with us I couldn’t figure. It was probably a career thing.

          Since I was his communicator, I had to carry all my usual stuff, like food, water, blank ammunition, my weapon, and all my other personal stuff like the other guys, but I had to carry a twenty pound radio too, and with extra batteries. The batteries themselves weighed about four or five pounds, and we had to carry at least two extra. On top of all that, for this training exercise, I had to carry a KY-38, a secret piece of radio gear that made voice radio conversations sound like static, so the enemy couldn’t listen in on sensitive orders and messages.

Capt. Ferguson had a weird sense of humor too. One time, we were slogging down a path on Okinawa; me with my radio and rifle and all my other gear, and he with his map case and sidearm, all covered with sweat and the stinking orange dust that the helicopters kicked up when they came in to land. The dust stank because it had in it all the disintegrated bodies from all the people who died there during the World War II battle, and since we had been out in the field for three or four days, we looked and smelled pretty rotten. It wasn’t just the smell of a good work out or locker room sweat either- it was sweet with an acrid edge that sat in your nose and only went away after three or four showering and clothes-washings.

          As we slogged along, to pass the time, he started telling me about the climate controls in the F-4, and how you could adjust a few levers so that it wouldn’t get too cold in the aircraft. It was infuriating. Here he was, talking about how to adjust the air-conditioning so your feet wouldn’t get a chill, inside an aircraft that flew thousands of feet above us in the clear, clean blue sky, sitting all cologned in a seat wearing a clean uniform, while we were down here stumbling from exhaustion and covered with sweat and the stinking dust. But I would have done anything for him.

          I started fumbling around with my ALICE pack, dumping out my socks and C-rats and other stuff, and putting in the radio, both antennas, an extra battery, and my canteens and first-aid kit. Not knowing what to do with the KY-38, I left it and its cable in the grass under the poncho; it was big and bulky and weighed a ton. One of the guys in the communication platoon must have picked it up after I left and secured it for me, because I could have gotten in big trouble for abandoning it there, even court-marshaled, but because of what happened that day, nobody even mentioned it to me later.

          Stuffing the frequency lists and call signs into a side trouser pocket, along with my plastic DRYAD encryption pad, I looked over at the Captain, who was talking to the CO, and they seemed to agree on something, and then he looked at me. “Come on!” he said, and pointing at a sergeant who was standing around, said “You too! Come with us!” He ran up the path toward the top of the hill. The two of us ran up the path after him, over roots and around trees, and through bushes and stuff that grabbed at our utility uniforms. I especially had a hard time, because the branches seemed to reach out and grab my radio antenna, sticking up through the pack and above my head, and the others would have to stop and help me get untangled. After ten minutes of this stupidity, I stopped, panting and sweating and swearing, and throwing the pack to the ground, fished around inside, and unscrewed the three foot tape antenna (I couldn’t listen to the thing since I was running anyway!). Folding it up, I pushed it to the bottom of the pack, lashed it all back together, put the pack back on, and began running again to catch up with the others, the pack and radio banging against the raw spots on my shoulders.

          At the top of the hill we stopped on some bare ground with a tree off to one side, almost crying, trying to catch our breath, and looking ahead, we could see in the distance a column of black, greasy smoke coming up from beyond another hill. There was no wind at that time in the morning, and the smoke came up straight, like it was boiling out the top of a volcano. I was leaning on the tree with my mouth hanging open, sweat coming out of every pore, and trying to get enough air to breath. On top of our hill, it was several thousand feet above sea level, and the altitude, combined with the heat and humidity made for exhausting climbing.

But we weren’t there yet. We were on top of a small hill attached to another taller hill with a saddle between, and we had to go across the saddle and up to the top and back side of the larger hill, where the smoke was coming from. It was about a klick away, and another three hundred feet of elevation.

          We let go of the tree and started running again. We ran, we walked, we stopped to breathe, we looked up at the smoke and looked at one another and started running again until we felt like dying. Whenever we stopped to rest, bending over with our hands on our knees, panting like dogs and with sweat dripping off our noses, we looked up at the smoke that never seemed to come closer, and then at one another with guilt in our eyes and ran on again. We ran, we walked, we rested, we did it over and over until our uniforms were black with sweat and we were white from heat exhaustion. At the age of twenty, I was in the best physical condition I had ever been in my life, but I was humiliated by how weak from fatigue I felt. Finally we climbed out on top of the second hill.

          On the top was a grassy clearing, with patches of orange dirt here and there, and throwing myself on all fours in the dust, gasped and heaved for breath while looking around. Captain Ferguson was doing the same, and sergeant Cunningham had turned over on his back in the grass, staring at the sky and trying to suck in some air. On one side of the hill was a stand of trees, and on the other side a cliff, dropping off into a ravine. Here at the edge the grass and dirt were all churned up, as if a tank had run back and forth over it and left a bunch of ruts, and a water buffalo was stuck in an eroded gully next to the cliff with one wheel and the hitch up in the air, leaking water into the orange dirt. Attached to the tank trailer was a heavy nylon sling with a big D ring, the kind that we used to attach an external load to the underside of a helicopter.

          Sometimes the supplies or equipment that needed to be carried by helicopter were too big and bulky to fit inside, or they had to be unloaded really fast, so we would sling them, attaching the D ring to a big hook on the underside of the bird while it was hovering just overhead. The helo would then fly away with the load hanging below in the sling. It was obvious what had happened: The helo had picked up the water buffalo, got into some kind of trouble, dumped the buffalo, and then hit the dirt and tipped over and into the ravine, tumbling over and over with all it’s crew and passengers.

          There were a bunch of Marines standing around, some looking over the cliff, some talking to one another, and a few smoking cigarettes. Nobody looked at us. Most of them were looking down at the grass. One guy was sitting on an ammo can, smoking, and looking at the water buffalo.

          I recovered slightly, threw off my pack, and pulled out the radio. Quickly assembling the ten foot whip antenna, I screwed the flexible rubber base into the threaded socket on the top, licked the connector on the handset, pressing it onto it’s socket and giving it a slight twist, and turned it on. I unbuttoned my side trouser pocket and got the frequency list and call signs out, slightly soggy with sweat, and after looking up the numbers, clicked through the channels to dial up the ship operations frequency, the one we used for administrative stuff. We were at the outer range of my larger antenna, and even though I could see the ocean from the top of the mountain, the haze prevented me from seeing the ship, the U.S.S. New Orleans. The New Orleans looks like an aircraft carrier, only much smaller, and was designed to carry helicopters instead of jet aircraft. It also had been used to recover the astronauts who returned from the Skylab space missions four or five years previously.

          I called the ship, gave my call sign, and sent my traffic: SEND WATER, STOKES STRETCHERS, ROPE, AND AXES: OVER! They called back, faintly: SAY AGAIN; OVER! They were so far away they could barely hear me, so I spelled out the words phonetically- I SPELL SIERRA ECHO NOVEMBER DELTA BREAK  WHISKY ALPHA TANGO ECHO ROMEO BREAK…… I spelled it all out for them, letter after letter, transliterating in my head, which was incredibly frustrating, because I was still recovering from the run up the hill and totally out of breath, shaking and sweating bullets, mentally fogged from lack of sleep, and trying to think ahead and anticipate what we needed down there to rescue the people in the smoke at the bottom of the ravine. Making things worse, I knew the guy on the ship whose voice I was talking to- I also knew that his bottom was firmly planted in a nice cushioned swivel seat behind a nice clean desk in a nice air conditioned compartment aboard the ship, and was looking forward to nice Navy chow for dinner. And a nice Navy shower after he came off his radio watch with a nice clean rack with clean sheets to crawl between that night. In another air-conditioned compartment.

          The smoke was horrible. It kept coming up and coming up, like a bad dinner, black and ugly and oily, smelling of jet fuel and rubber and nylon and flesh. Looking up through the smoke I saw another helicopter circling around to land, and someone popped a yellow smoke grenade for the pilot to observe which direction the wind was blowing, throwing it out into the center of the grassy clearing where it could be seen.

          That didn’t make any sense to me; wasn’t there enough smoke to see which way the wind was blowing? The helo, a UH-1N, settled in next to us, whipping us with the rotor wash, knocking over the radio, and blowing the yellow and black smoke all together, with the orange dust, into a gray swirl, imbedding itself in our hair and uniforms and turning our sweat to orange mud. The crew chief, who was kneeling on the floor in the back with a safety lanyard latched around his waist, started throwing stuff out the open door like he was insane, throwing boxes and bundles and bottles down onto the ground like it was a big pile of trash going into a dumpster, while the rotors beat the air and the dust blasted and the co-pilot calmly swiveled his head and stared out at us through the dark visor of his flight helmet.

The beating noise from the blades and the screaming from the twin turbines was deafening. Two people jumped out the other side, a Navy hospital corpsman and a doctor, a Navy captain. Avoiding the rear rotor, like two machetes spinning around at about eye level, they came to where we were hunched over, shading our eyes from the dust next to the knocked over radio.

          The UH-1 had never really landed; the pilot had just hovered with the skids barely touching the grass while the crew chief did his business, and so he took off quickly, nose down and flying directly over the ravine and it’s inferno and it’s black smoke, which must have gone inside the open door where they all could smell it. There is nothing like the smell of burning JP-5 that will make a pilot hurry- it was their friends down there in that smoke and these people would fly like tortured men to get supplies in and casualties out.

          As they were flying off, I righted the radio, kicking some dirt clods around it to keep it upright, and once I could hear again, sent a few more messages that I thought would be useful, and then had nothing to do.

          The view from the top of the mountain was spectacular- The lush green of the trees and rolling hilltops, the canyons with white water roiling at the bottom, the blue ocean in the distance, and the limitless brilliant blue of the sky with fluffy white cumulus clouds here and there made the moment a memorable tropical vision for a perfect vacation advertising picture. In my peripheral vision was the black, boiling smoke that destroyed it all, with it’s evil smell and evil premonitions.

          I gave the handset and the damp frequency lists to Captain Ferguson, and he dialed up a close air support channel to coordinate all the aircraft which were coming on station to help with the rescue. Way, way up high, I could see an OV-10, a twin engine, twin seat spotter aircraft, making slow, one mile circles in the sky, and the Capt. was talking to the observer so the two of them could coordinate flight patterns with us and keep the various airplanes (we called helicopters airplanes sometimes) from bumping into one another.

          With nothing else to do, I emptied my pack again, putting in some medical supplies and IV bags from the big pile on the ground, with my two canteens, and prepared to follow the two Navy guys down into the ravine. My utility jacket was stinking and soaked black with sweat by then, so I unbuttoned it and threw it down on the grass with the extra battery in it’s plastic baggie, going shirtless the rest of the afternoon.

          Captain Ferguson was in his element. He knew every pilot he ever talked to on the radio (or seemed to), and could always get us a ride somewhere when we really needed it. It was he who taught me there were always six ways to do anything- Just because you couldn’t get what you wanted by going in one direction didn’t mean you couldn’t get what you wanted. There were always other avenues of approach and back channels to accomplish the task at hand. On this day he was flipping channels and pulling levers and cajoling and wheedling to get what he needed for the people at the bottom of the hill. He did a pretty good job that day.

          The Navy captain was a pretty old guy, and as we slid down the hill, I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop, and go over the edge and into the fire. We slid down the steep side of the ravine, working ourselves sideways so we wouldn’t slip, holding onto the grass and small bushes with one hand while the dirt slid out from under our feet. The ground was all torn up and littered with junk- packs and ammo cans and broken weapons, and then the rotor head and the helicopter blades, all broken and crushed and twisted into weird shapes. Each of the seven blades weighed several hundred pounds, but they were bent like pretzels and torn open from the impact of hitting the ground while spinning at hundreds of miles an hour. The rotor head, a thousand pounds of precise mechanical beauty and hydraulic engineering brilliance, was crushed and mashed, leaking hydraulic fluid and resting upside down on the sloping grass.

          The first guy we came upon was sitting in the dirt holding onto a little tree, straddling it actually, and his nose was all bloody from having hit the ground face first, plastering his hair and his teeth with the orange dirt. He must have jumped off the back ramp or got thrown out when things went bad. The doctor checked him out and found that he seemed to have a couple of broken ribs, so we decided to get him up to the top of the hill where he could be treated. We had no stretcher, but it wasn’t very far, so the three of us, by pulling and dragging, worked at getting him to the top. He was hurting so much however, and crying out so often, the doctor changed his mind and decided to get him to the bottom where the main rescue effort was taking place.

          A helicopter came past and started to hover below us in a small clearing, so we held the injured man under the arms, by his belt and by grabbing fistfuls of his utility jacket and trousers, and as gently as we could, by digging in our heels, slid him down the hill. He was in a lot of pain because the shock had probably worn off, and I was starting to get irritated with him because we couldn’t touch him without making him cry out. I felt guilty about being frustrated with the guy- after all, he was the one who was injured. Finally, we got him down to where the others were, and the doctor organized a place where he could do triage near the crash site.

          The injured were being treated about a hundred feet away and downhill from where the helo had actually gone in and was still burning, and on the other side of the place was a small clearing where helos were landing and dumping off supplies; the stuff I had radioed for while at the top of the hill.

          The problem was that there was no level place for a good LZ. The one clear place near the crash site was actually the crest of a small hill, bare on one slope and the other covered with tall trees; big tropical hardwoods that rose forty or fifty feet. Another corporal and I grabbed a couple of the axes that were lying around, and fell at one of the smaller trees at the edge of the clearing. After fifteen minutes of intense chopping and sweating, we cut through the tree, but it wouldn’t fall down; we were Marines, not lumberjacks, and our ignorance had made it fall against several other trees and just stand upright, leaning crazily, ready to topple over any second. We gave up, soaked and with trembling arms and shoulders. Tree cutting with axes is hard work, and we had only cut the smallest of about thirty trees at the edge of the little clearing.

          While we were chopping, a UH-1 came in, slowly, and the pilot eased in and gently pressed the front of his skids into the top of the hill and hovered there with his rotors turning and the rear of the airplane suspended in the air, not landing really, but with the front end planted steadily enough to throw out supplies and take on one or two casualties strapped into stokes.

          It was frightening- people were all around with hardly any level place to stand upright, and in order to take off, the pilot had to lift off slightly, back up twenty feet or so, and then lift straight up and over the trees before going forward again. The trees were just a few feet away from the helicopter’s turning blades- I was afraid we would lose another because of the trees and the steep hillsides. This maneuver was tricky and really dangerous, because there were a lot of people from the rescue party moving close about with nowhere else to go, and guys on ponchos and stokes and stretchers wherever there was a sort of level space. The whole event demonstrated the several pilot's mastery of their aircraft- knowing what it could and could not do and taking calculated risks to accomplish an unplanned mission.

          The rest of the afternoon was a blur of action. Moving people from one place to another. Dragging a Marine with two broken legs up a hill in a stokes, panting and shoving and dragging him over tree roots and around trees, tripping and sweating and cursing the heat. Another Marine, with red hair, not looking injured at all except for some bloody bubbles around his mouth and nose, being zippered into a rubber bag. A black Marine with a small burn on his side, dead, but with no other obvious injuries, being zippered away. Carrying another Marine in a stokes, his trousers and underwear all torn to shreds, shot full of morphine for the several compound fractures he had. I was embarrassed for him and for me because of his nakedness, but he was in no pain and didn’t seem to care at all. He was conscious, but relaxed from the drug and curiously watched the goings on around him.

          In the small clearing after our tree-chopping mess, a CH-46 attempted to land, but the front blades started whacking off the tops of the trees next to the clearing, scattering everyone standing by, and the pilot had to back off and use the rescue winch to take on casualties.

          One Marine, strapped into a stokes, was being raised on the winch rigged over the rear ramp of the big CH-46. The crew chief was laying on the ramp with his helmeted head and his shoulders hanging over the edge, forty or fifty feet above the ground, guiding the stokes wire with a gloved hand and with the other giving signals to another crewman at the winch controls up by the front door. Just as the stokes reached the ramp, it caught on the edge and tipped over vertically, hanging there with the man in it in an upright position. Had we not strapped him in, he would have fallen out. After a hellish minute of watching the man bang against the aluminum ramp several times, the crew chief cleared the snag and muscled him over the edge of the ramp. It was excruciating to watch.

          I noticed, next to a tree, two cameras; a Nikon thirty-five millimeter still camera and a Bolex 16mm movie camera. The photographer must have been sent out to record the scene, but he ditched the cameras next to a tree in order to help out.

          I noticed Captain Falasco, the CO of Company K of 3/4, down there with a radio strapped to his back and the three foot tape antenna looped over the strap on his shoulder and tucked under his arm, talking to someone, probably Captain Ferguson, at the top of the hill. I had never seen an officer with a radio on his back before- that was something for enlisted men like me to carry, but there he was, coordinating things in the ravine, calmly talking and relaying information while the activity came and went around him.

          After a couple of hours, I sat down on a tree root to rest and drink some water from a five gallon can, tipping it over and splashing it on my head and face and rinsing off some of the muddy sweat. Even though the water was hot, it felt good; the clean, distilled water from the New Orleans sloshing on my face and short hair and soaking my trousers. It felt immoral, wasting so much water when the air was to hot.

          Captain Falasco or someone, I don’t remember who, saw me sitting and came over and told me to leave, because there was nothing left for me to do. There were enough people there anyway, and the injured had been gotten out, so I refilled my canteens and started climbing to the top of the hill with my almost empty ALICE pack.

          It was a long and slow climb, and I was tired. I got to the top where Capt. Ferguson and Sergeant Cunningham were, and when I climbed over the edge, pulling on the grass to get over a ledge of dirt and onto the clearing, they looked at me kind of funny, and asked if I was ok. I had a pretty bad headache, but I said “yeah.” Later, I realized I must have looked pretty pale from heat exhaustion- not having drunk enough water to replace what I had sweated out that afternoon.

          It was becoming dusk by then, with the sun going into the sea, and none of us looked forward to the long hump back to where we had started that morning. Capt. Ferguson somehow got hold of a helo pilot, flying back to the ship, and convinced him to land and give us a lift back to our unit. It was a UH-1N, with seats on the sides above the skids, and after stowing my radio gear and buttoning up my damp and crusty utility jacket, the three of us swung on and strapped in.

          The pilot looked back to see we were in place, pulled up on the collective, the rotors bit the air, and with another swirl of dust, we took off toward the sea, flying low and slow. Capt. Ferguson squatted down between and behind the pilots and put on a flight helmet in order to talk to the crew above the noise, and to direct them to our starting point. I sat on the starboard side, in the nylon and aluminum seat, with my seatbelt pulled tight and my pack and radio strapped into the seat next to me, letting my feet dangle over the edge of the open door, waving in the wind, and the wind from our travel felt good, drying the sweat on my face and arms and back, chilling my wet trousers, while I looked down and around at the trees rushing past just a few feet under us.

          It was a scene of incredible beauty- the setting sun over the misty ocean, giving a red cast to the light on the trees and hills; the hills themselves rolling up and up in the opposite direction into the clouds, and the individual trees rushing past; the prop wash disturbing the branches and the birds as we flew just a few feet above.

          The contrast between the incredible beauty all around while I was enmeshed in a great war machine was an ever-present fixture and conundrum in my mind. The spectacular sunset and purple sky and the exhilaration of speed and wind in the face immediately after the raw death and destruction I had seen created separate compartments in my brain- each had it’s own time and place and separate feelings and images, and each demanded that I open the door and visit occasionally to let the emotions and images wash over me.

          So many times I marveled at the natural beauty so near while practicing the arts of death and ruin and waste, but there was no one with which to share the experience- who could understand the dichotomy and appreciate what I was feeling? Who there and then was ready to look deep inside and pull out the depths for examination? At least that’s what I thought at the time.

          Flying back, I felt pretty numb. All the images I had seen were replaying in my mind, and looking down at the path we had run over that morning, I realized that despite all the mind pictures that were running in front of my eyes, I felt nothing. Not sad, not mad, not emotional in any way; just nothing; just empty and bored out like a cave in a hillside; like the emotional side of me was switched off and put in a closet for storage until I had the time and the guts to pull it out again and look at it. It was like a big blank spot in my head that had been wiped clear of emotions and feelings for the time being. All I could do at that moment was to put my head back, drink some warm ship water from my canteen, and soak in the feeling of the harsh, warm wind blasting past, drying my face, and enjoy the rush of flying low over the treetops.

          The Capt. pointed out a landing spot, and the pilot flared his bird and landed in our first clearing, the one with the tree, and we slid out, waving and mouthing “thanks!” against the whirlwind. The pilots nodded back at us, hauled up on the collective again, pushing the cyclic forward, and took off for the last time toward the ocean where the ship waited to take it in for the night.

          It was good and dark by the time we arrived back at the CP, bumbling and stumbling and cursing ourselves for not thinking to bring flashlights. I found my place in the grass by the path and lay down under my stinking poncho in my stinking utilities to sleep on the ground hugging my KY-38: no radio watch for me that night; they made someone else cover it and let me sleep till morning.

          After an aircraft accident of any kind, the military convenes a board of inquiry; officers and enlisted people expert in flying and aircraft to review the situation and events that led up to the accident, as well as interview observers and survivors, and review the aircraft maintenance records. They try to piece together why the incident took place, and find ways to prevent it from happening in the future. They also sometimes place blame on anyone who was negligent.

          They found, in this case, that the pilots had unknowingly miscalculated the lifting power of the helicopter due to engine upgrades and equipment modifications beyond their control. At sea level, with lower temperatures and humidity, with one-third the fuel capacity, there would have been no problem with hauling a load of troops while carrying a half-full water tank trailer on a sling. But at several thousand feet, with high temperatures and high humidity, full fuel tanks, the lifting power of the aircraft was diminished by several percentage points, and this was just enough to push it out of control and into instability. While trying to lift off, the back end of the aircraft started to spin in the direction of the turning rotor blades, and due to the higher power of the new engine modifications, without modifying the rear rotor pitch ability, the spinning force threw it out of control and into the ground. That by itself probably would not have been so lethal if the ground was level and flat- there may only have been some dented sheetmetal, banged heads, and broken landing gear. In this case it went over the edge of the hill and down the canyon, tumbling over several times and catching fire from the crushed fuel tanks and full load of spilled JP5.

          I can visualize the pilots, sitting there in the sweltering cockpit, flight helmets on, transferring troops from the hilltop to the ship, over and over and over again, sweating rivers under the Plexiglas canopy, where the sun beats down remorselessly and there is nothing that can be done but sit there and endure it and sweat until they were sitting in a puddle in the uncomfortable nylon seat. All that and maybe having to pee too, and “what the heck! This machine is built to handle it- we’ll take it all back on one trip,” instead of splitting it into an additional trip.

          A few days after our return to the New Orleans, there was a memorial ceremony on the flight deck where all the Marines and Navy Corpsmen attended. All except me. I couldn't bear to stand with everyone else and listen and watch, and though I was unaccounted for, I never heard about it later.

          I think now of the men who died that day, from Company K of Third Battalion Nineth Marines, and helicopter squadron HMH 462, late in the night as I sit in front of the computer screen and write, while it is dark and still. I imagine the lives they could have lived, like the life I still have, with my wife and children sleeping in the other rooms, with the glass of water here by the computer screen and iTunes in the headphones. They could have had this life, full of family and friends and experiences, but they don’t, and the repercussions of their deaths continue to resound within their families and within the rest of us who were on-scene, from that day to this day.

          A few weeks after our return to Camp Hanson from the Philippines, Captain Falasco and I and some Navy corpsmen and a doctor, were each awarded a medal for extraordinary achievement for our actions. There was a parade with the regimental band and color guard, and a colonel pinned the medals on us. I was embarrassed about the whole thing, that I had done nothing more than all the others who were down there too.

          I pull out the medal once every few years now and look at it, turning the tarnished yellow metal and green fabric over in my hands, and see the scenes again and smell the smells, opening the compartments and turning on the lights, and feel grateful for the life God has allowed me to hold for awhile, the life I still live.

Glossary

ALICE pack               ALICE is an acronym for a type of backpack

Ammo                         Ammunition or sometimes flares or explosives

Camp Hanson             A Marine base in northern Okinawa

C-Rats                         Short for “C” Rations- Canned food to be eaten while out in the field

Chow                           Food or a meal

Clark                       At the time, a very large American Air Force base in the Philippines

CO                                           Commanding Officer

Communicator           Usually a radio operator or someone who carries and operates communication equipment.

Compartment             A room aboard a ship or boat

CP                                           Command Post

Deck                           Navy or Marine word for the floor

D-ring                         A large and heavy steel ring shaped like a “D” and used for connecting heavy loads with nylon straps

Field Jacket             A padded and heavy military coat for cold weather

“Get saddled up”    To get all your gear together and get ready to march

Ground Pounder         Someone in a military organization who has to walk wherever he goes

Hump                     To march or walk fast carrying a lot of equipment

JP5                                         Jet fuel- a very pure form of kerosene

Jarhead                   An insulting or endearing term for a Marine (depending on who says it)

Klick                       One kilometer- one thousand meters

LZ                                           Landing Zone

Muzzle                       The front end of a weapon

Operation                               An organized action or task carried out my many people

Overhead                               Navy or Marine word for the ceiling

Phonetic Alphabet     Using words to take the place of letters so as to be better understood over the radio

Rack                           A Navy or Marine word for a bed

Saddle                         A low ridge between two taller hills- a kind of depression or low spot between two hilltops

Sidearm                       A pistol

SAR                             Search and Rescue

Sensitive                     Secret

Starboard                     Right side or the right hand

Stock                           The back end of a rifle

Stokes                         A type of stretcher in the shape of a person, made of hollow wire rods and steel mesh that allows the injured person to be completely strapped in and immobilized

Triage                         Quick medical evaluation of an injury to determine who gets treated first

Traffic                         A message over the radio or telephone

Unit                             A military organization, or group of people

Watch                         A period of time to be on duty or required to be at a place

Water buffalo             A 500 gallon fiberglass or steel water tank on a two wheeled trailer, usually towed behind a truck

XO                                         Executive Officer (the second in command)

Zero dark thirty           Anytime between midnight and sunrise