Low Level Hell starts out with a bang... here is an exert from Chapter
One titled 'Thunder Road'. Hugh is describing a mission where he was
Scouting and providing air cover for a convoy.
As I got about six hundred yards out ahead of the column, I picked up
heavy foot trails again. There wasn't any good reason for people to have
been out in the Rome-plowed area next to the highway, so I decided to
follow one of the trails to see where it took me. It led to a drainage
ditch that stretched for nearly a mile-- right along the side of the
highway! But, again, not a single person in sight.
Circling over the area, I keyed the intercom to my crew chief.
"Parker, do you see anything? Something's damned screwy about this.
What do you make of it?"
"Don't see anything but footprints, Lieutenant. Not a soul, sir!"
About that time I made a sharp turn over a thick clump of tall grass on
the west side of the road near the drainage ditch, about ten feet from the
side of the highway. Not more than four to five feet below me, I glimpsed
a slight movement and something dark lying on the ground.
"Son of a bitch, Jim! Did you see that?" I hollered into the
intercom.
I hauled the Loach around to hover right above the spot. Then Parker
and I saw the two dark brown eyes staring up at us from a hole dug into
the ground under an area of pushed-up dirt created by the Rome plow months
before.
Without me saying a word, Jim Parker opened up. I winced at the
explosion of the M-60 right behind my head. The enemy soldier jerked
violently and slumped over in his hole.
I got on the radio to Sinor. "Three One, One Six. We got a dink. The
gunner shot a dink dug into the grass up under a Rome plow mound, not
more than ten feet off the west side of the highway. I think they're all
over the place-- up close, not in the jungle! They've dug in spider holes
right on top of the convoy!" The head of the convoy was just seconds
away at this point, heading right into an ambush. Sinor immediately
called the convoy commander on FM.
The minute the convoy commander got the word that the enemy was close
to him, I knew he would order all convoy weapons to open up on both sides
of the highway, and woe be to the Loach pilot who was out there when all
that ordnance started to go off. Three One knew it too. "Get the hell
out of there, One Six." he yelled. "Get up to altitude, NOW!"
But which way can I go? I thought. No time to get any altitude. And I
can't go parallel to the convoy, or I'll make myself a tailor-made flank
shot for every gun-- ours and theirs. So I pulled the hardest right turn
I could, and a 180-degree arc, and headed back south again-- right on top
of the northbound convoy. I figured the safest place for a Loach at that
moment was five feet off the tops of those trucks, where hot rounds would
least likely be crisscrossing.
I barely made it on top of the convoy when all hell broke loose. The
enemy, now fully alerted by Parker's shooting of the soldier in the spider
hole, sprung its ambush. They pushed aside the overhead camouflage and
rose up out of their holes, guns blazing. At point-blank range, they
opened up into the convoy with everything they had: AK-47's, RPG's,
grenades, SGMs. The column simultaneously let go with their machine
guns, 90mm cannon firing canister rounds, and every other weapon carried
on the vehicles in the convoy. It was like one giant, sustained
explosion. Bullets flew everywhere. Deafening noise erupted. Smoke and
flying debris engulfed the entire convoy. And there, in the midst of that
sudden hell, were Parker and me flying at antenna level, straight down the
back of the convoy, trying our best to stay out of the way of both enemy
and friendly fire.
As the convoy charged north, we flew south, blistering along at well
over one hundred knots, Parker working with his M-60 from the right side
of the aircraft. His tracers were impacting on the spider holes as we
ripped past, his targets not more than ten to twenty yards from his
muzzle. We were so low that if someone had reached up out of a truck or
tank turret, the probably could have caught our skid.
Suddenly, not more than a hundred yards to my front, a
five-thousand-gallon tanker truck took a direct RPG hit, and the diesel
fuel it was carrying exploded like a nuclear bomb. Sheets of flame, parts
of the truck, smoke, and dust shot up, momentarily blinding me. The
little OH-6 lurched violently with the shock of the explosion, as though a
giant unseen fist had landed a smashing blow to the nose of the aircraft.
I jerked aft as hard as I could on the cyclic and yanked in a load of
collective. The resulting g's nearly sent my buttocks through the armor
plate in the bottom of my seat. I don't know how Parker was able to hang
on.
