The Plei Trap

The Plei Trap is how I think of my year, everything happened either so many days
or months before or after the Plei Trap. We started in there the 1st of March when Polei
Kleng got hit and the ammo went up. The day Shifty died, and everything changed.
Everything flies at me in bits and pieces but I think
our medevac missions (most people don't understand there's a difference between
(D)ustoff and (d)ustoff, so I use medevac to distinguish us from (D)ustoff. They used our
assault ships for dustoffs when the Dustoff guys wouldn't (or couldn't, I guess there was a
higher-higher policy in the 4ID?) go into the hot LZs. We had no real medical training, but
we ended up lugging in guys who'd been shot to pieces and we did whatever we could to
keep them sucking wind until we could get them to the med pad at MaryLou for real help.

Wasn't a medic, but I picked up the nickname "Doc" because, no matter whether I
was in my own seat on the left as crew chief, or flying on the right side as somebody else's
gunner, it seemed as if the bloody end of whatever wounded grunt we picked up was
always on my side of the ship. (Crew chiefs always flew as left side gunners, Gunner
always on the right, but we filled in as right-side Gunners when our ship was in for
maintenance.) The guys in the hooch (Carey?) had a routine they'd go through when I came walking
in bloody again. But if the families of guys who didn't make it could know how hard we
worked to keep them alive, or know how godawful rotten we felt when we lost one, it
might help them feel a little better. Or maybe we would feel better if we thought the
families knew that. (By "we" I mean the grunts' buddies, you guys, who ran them to us;
our pilots and crews, who did everything humanly possible to get in and pick those guys
up; and the people manning the medical pads, who ran like hell to pull them off our ships
and patch them up, sometimes even working on them as they carried them away from our
ship.) But I can still see some of the guys I couldn't help. We unloaded a lot of meat at
MaryLou in Kontum.

I think of the teenaged grunt sitting on the ground in an open field next to a stream
in the bottom of the western Plei Trap valley. Eggy going full-tilt boogie with his '60
on the right side, artillery impacting everywhere, WP rounds,
dusk, almost dark. The grunt, he's crying, hugging his shotup dead buddy, just outside my door, and
aiming his M-16 at me, about to shoot me as we lifted off because I wouldn't load his dead
pal instead of the other wounded guys I was filling the ship with. (This is twilight zone stuff.) I decided to let him shoot... I wasn't going to shoot him, and I was sure he was going
to shoot.

Another guy, in a full load of wounded, on the way to MaryLou, who went into
convulsions and was kicking the shit out of another your WIAs who was also badly hurt,
kicking him in the face, the head. I wrestled with him in the open door of the ship trying to
hold him down, all of a sudden he came within a hair of wrestling me out the door, then
died while I still had him pinned. I vividly remembered wrestling with him, first trying to
protect his buddy, then fighting for my life, trying to stay in the helicopter as the guy
flipped around underneath me, but I had totally blocked him dying. The memory came
back in pieces a few years ago, more than 25 years later...

The piles of dead, wrapped in ponchos, on the ground, in my ship. Brrr.

I think of the CA into a "cold" LZ on a hill in the Plei Trap valley, flying in the first
load of grunts, guns up, ready, scanning the ground, down at the treelines, waiting for the
first muzzle flash, looking up for some reason and here's a dink, NVA, up a bomb-stripped
tree right in front of me, 40-50 feet away, looking right back at me, talking on the freakin'
telephone. Just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

Up in the middle of the night and flying into the Plei Trap at dawn, hovering into a
deep hole and picking up I guess part of a Company whose position had been overrun by
NVA during the night. They had been running down the mountain all night, led by a LOH.
Mike “Shakey” Curran was flying gunner with me that day. We pulled thirteen
into my ship, twice as many as a normal load, but they were, to a man,
almost naked. No uniforms, no equipment, no weapons, nothing. Maybe one or two
M-16s among them. And to a man, absolutely terrified. We heard that others from that
unit were walking into other firebases for almost two weeks afterwards.

One of the Plei Trap firebases, we were loaded out of MaryLou with 1200 pounds
of C-4 in crates, I took the caps and stuck them in my pockets. Soon as one of the pad
guys jumped on and started tossing crates out the door, the mortars started hitting just
outside our rotor disk. Pilot pulled pitch so fast we took your guy with us, I handed him
my M-16 in case we went down. Some day I'll ask somebody who knows how big a hole
1200 pounds of C-4 would have made. Zowwee.