Night Mission - Aftermath

 When we arrived by at Cu Chi, and had refueled, we had been told to stand by in the Hornet’s Nest, our revetment area on the airfield. That meant sitting around the aircraft, in the dark, waiting for ordered. It wasn’t long before we were told to stand by in the company area, which was across the road. I think the reason was that we could respond from the company area just as fast as we could to orders passed from aircraft to aircraft in the Nest.

The dark area at right center is The Hornet's Nest. Across the road in the center is the
Hornet's Company area. The hootchs to the left at the enlisted soldiers and the NCO quarters. 
In the center right, beyond the wooden fence and open area are the officer quarters. The dark
material is called petaprime and was sprayed over the roads and in the Nest to hold down the
dust during the dry season. More about petaprime later.

We hadn’t been in the company very long when the order came to stand down. We were through for the night. The obvious reason was that we’d been so badly shot up that we couldn’t come up with enough helicopters to fill out the flight with a gun team. True, some of the damage was little more than bullets through the rotor blades, but the aircraft couldn’t fly until the blades had been replaced. We had operationally ceased to exist.

In the company area, there wasn’t a lot of talking. Most just sat staring, though I was a little bit elated having survived the night. Had the club been open, I might have had a drink or two, though it was something like three or four in the morning. Somehow, I ended up in one of the rooms occupied by one of the Stingers. The Stingers were the Hornet gun teams. They even had cards printed that said, “Have Gunship. Will Travel. Wire Stingers, Cu Chi.”

Almost as if to get the conversation started, one of the slick pilots said, “Hell, I can’t believe we were ordered to go around. We would have been better off to land. We were nearly on the ground and then Six said, ‘Go around.’”

“Maybe that was the most brilliant thing said in this war. Maybe we would have been really chopped up.”

This triggered a discussion like those I would participate in college a couple of years later. The gunship pilot, who was older than me, and might have been older than most the pilots, who was, at most 23, said, “You have to look at the overall picture.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He took a pull at his cigarette and said, “I just mean that we came out ahead. If I got killed, I would be ahead. I’ve killed the VC and the NVA but they can only kill me once so that I win, in the long run. There is no way they can catch up.”

“That’s messed up, man.”

“You guys are missing the point. Don’t you see? In this war, hell, in all wars, the point is to kill more of them than they kill of you. It’s all about attrition, and in that game, I win.”

I’m not sure where this discussion would have gone from there, but the company commander entered the hootch. He didn’t look as if he’d just had the company shot out from under him. He looked as if he was fresh from the shower in a clean and pressed uniform. We all looked as if we’d been through the wringer, which, from one point of view we had.

He stood looking at us for a moment and then said, “We’re down tomorrow. We need to repair the damaged aircraft. Need everyone out in the Nest by, say, ten.” He turned and left without another word.

That seemed rather anticlimactic, but what the hell, it meant we didn’t have to get up early. That was about the only benefit that I could see.