A Dust-Off Kind of Day-Revised

                                                                A Dust-Off Kind of Day   
         
         April 1972 was a particularly bloody month in the big green weenie; aka-U.S. Army-Vietnam; Republic of. Ho Chi Minh’s NVA had begun what some called “The Easter Offensive” and the brass named “The Spring Incursion”. Dust-Off crews just called it “Hell”; we were closer to right than the brass.
      Hell, what did they know of hell? They were either cloistered in H.Q. Saigon or toasting each other’s bravery while pinning medals on fellow Generals at fancy Pentagon dinner and cocktail parties in D.C. The old men playing war with plastic toys on topographical maps of a country continents and oceans away; killing a generation of young Americans with each move of their miniature action figures.
      We were Dust-Off; the military precursor to emergency air-ambulance medevac back in the world. Our job wasn’t to fight and kill, although we did both when we had to, our job started after the maiming and killing had already begun. Our duty was to recover the wounded; get them back to a field hospital as fast as possible, and begin treating their wounds on the way.
      During the spring of ’72 that job was non-stop; it didn’t end after an eight hour shift. The day wasn’t over after delivering a load of bloody, crying little boys missing arms and legs, intestines bulging from gaping abdomens, to the weeping nurses at the field hospital; their tears carving rivulets through the brownish-red, coagulated blood and gore coating their young/ old faces; the rims of their haunted eyes beginning to match the color of the red splatters on their faces. When your bird was hit and the pilot nursed it that last mile to the hospital pad marked by a large red cross, so he could auto-rotate it down a to controlled crash landing; no one clocked out and went home. Unload, find another bird; take one from maintenance if necessary, and go back for more.
      There were rest breaks. They were called “re-fueling” and lasted long enough for the exhausted pilots to peel themselves from the seats they had been plastered to for the last eternity and piss off of one of the skids; while the medic grabbed supplies to re-stock his aide bag and the crew chief re-filled the turbo-jet engine with avgas and tried to wash some of the blood and bits of destroyed bodies off of the helicopter’s deck with five gallon buckets of the brownish-gray rainwater from barrels used to catch it during the monsoons . The water ran red and pulpy out of the opposite door.
      On the limbs of the bleak, denuded trees near the landing pad, were flocks of raucous, black and white Magpies; cawing and jostling each other impatiently as they waited to pluck up the bits of crimson flesh that had been flushed out the door; to take back to their young for breakfast. Huge black rats battled over, and quickly ate, any left-over pieces of the soldiers that once were whole men; as ancient tribes of cannibals once did. When nothing solid was left, the rats would hunker around the pools and lap up the red water; like Hyenas at an African water-hole after a grisly kill. They, at least, got breakfast.
      “The Call” usually came before our pissers were tucked back into our flight suits from finally being able to release the pressure from our bloated bladders; breakfast, and usually lunch, would have to wait until later; most times, much later. Often the crew had to leap for the bird as the pilot took off in answer to “The Call”.
      “Dust-Off 39, Dust-Off 39- this is 2-7 actual. We have nine more WIA and three KIA at the same LZ. ETA?” “2-7 Actual; this is Dust-Off 39. ETA one-five mikes”. Fifteen minutes to prep for nine more wounded boys. The KIA would have to wait.  They weren’t in a hurry; they weren’t going anywhere. For them, the war was over. While we were taking off another ship would be landing with more of the same kind of carnage; to repeat our actions.
      We flew nap of the earth. Flying at 110 miles per hour at tree top level to pop up at the last moment and slam into an LZ that had been hurriedly hacked out of the thick surrounding jungle, and was hardly big enough for the rotors. That way we may be able to get in; loaded and out again before the NVA mortars and B-40 rockets found us; we hoped.
      The UH-1H Bell “Huey” helicopter dropped like a fly into the web of crisscrossing red (ours) and green (theirs) tracers lighting the small clearing. The crew, any atheistic doubts cast aside, prayed that neither color found us. The knowledge that between each of those little green or red lights were four more steel-jacketed lead slugs seeking a target, any target, offered little reassurance that our prayers would be answered. The only assurance that the big Red Cross painted on the sides and bottom of the chopper provided was that it made a handy target for any NVA soldier and his AK-47 rifle seeking a kill.
      Plink, plink, plink; the sound of rounds hitting the chopper’s skin indicated that one of Uncle Ho’s diminutive fighters had sighted in on the cross and was using it as an aiming point: the thin green aluminum skin of the bird didn’t do much to slow the 7.62 caliber rounds searching for us.
    “Taking fire! Taking fire!” From the crew chief’s mike. “ Get ‘em on, get em on, dammit!”, the pilot yells into his own microphone; while holding the bird at a steady hover one foot off the ground, and the rotor wash churned the air into a wind-storm of blood mist, red clay dust and debris from the floor of the clearing and the jungle lurking around us. “All on? Yes- no! One more, wait!” “Go get ‘em dammit and let’s get the hell out of here”. One more, the last one; for this load. “All on Mr. Warren!  Go-go-go!”  The medic has to scream in his microphone to be heard over the roar of the rotors and stereo surround sound of gunfire. He didn’t have to repeat it.
      A quick pull up on the cyclic and the bird leaped fifty feet straight up into the oppressively hot, lead filled air. Push the stick forward, press on the aileron pedal and the ship jumps forward and into a sharp right turn over the whipping fronds of the jungle palms, skids tearing through the tree tops, and out of LZ Hell; leaving the combatants behind to carry on their battle for the meaningless opening in endless jungle. The crew chief checks for damage while the medic begins to work to stop bleeding; patch sucking chest wounds; stabilize abdomens gaping open; tying off stumps that were, thirty minutes prior, arms and legs of the now dying boys, crying for their mommies.
      “Lost the chest wound, gonna lose these two amputees if we don’t get to the surg in ten minutes!” Yells the medic calmly urgent; eight minutes later the chopper was settling down right in front of the canvas field hospital tent. Crying nurses, orderlies and medics, faces and uniforms streaked red and brown from the body fluids of previous passenger/ patients, waited there to rush the latest casualties of the old men’s war to the blood splattered, exhausted doctors who will work until they drop to try to save the lives of these broken bodies that, until recently, were American and ARVN (South Vietnamese) and even NVA soldiers. Dust-off mercy knew no boundaries; if they were injured and near us, they flew. Let God and Military Intelligence sort them out.
         For Dust-Off; it’s back to the fueling point. Re-fuel; piss, slam down a soda; maybe a sandwich one of the nurses, with their haunted eyes staring bleakly from the depths of their face, brought to us; then answer “The Call” once again. Repeat. Endlessly. Eternally. For the rest of our lives and maybe beyond. We were young boys in December of 1971; by April of ’72 we were very old eight-teen, nine-teen and twenty years old men. We would never be young again; or entirely sane.