That throbbing thunderclap, unique to a UH-1H helicopter, beat my conscience into hypnotic submission as we waited. An adrenalin induced reaction began to automatically replay our mission's operation order through my mind ... A sharp slap on top of my "steel pot" broke the trance and alerted me to the crew chief yelling instructions at me above the roar of the chopper. "The ceiling has dropped! The jump has been scratched!" In a matter of minutes we were being replaced by seven fellow Rangers to be airlifted into an LZ just over a ridge of low lying mountains. "Why are they flying you guys in if the ceiling has crashed?" I asked a buddy taking my place. "I guess their going to try and beat this weather system that's moving in," he answered with a shrug. As the Huey lifted off in a swirl of dust he gave me thumbs up and then focused his gaze skyward. There was a foreboding feeling in the pit of my stomach as chopper blades sliced through that ghostly mountain mist, swirling in behind the vanishing aircraft to envelope all but that now distant, muffled, pulsating sound. I turned and walked away, ignoring that haunting sensation. Within the hour our patrol would be notified that the chopper had gone down.

Due to weather, the search went a day and a half before air surveillance spotted the wreckage on the north side of a mountain. Our squad was assigned the mission of securing the crash site because it was in our patrol area. We climbed for hours in an anxious silence, broken only rarely by radio transmissions over the PRC-77. We struggled, in the damp cold, up that muddy mountain side with an urgent sense of hope. Nagging questions haunted my thoughts as I tried to prepare myself for what we would find. My mind flashed back to his leering face, poking fun at some rangers wearing pantyhose to keep dry and warm during cold, wet patrols. With his hand on his hip, he mockingly asked me, "what color do you think I'd look good in?" Damn! We laughed till our sides ached ... Damn! Why did he take my place in that chopper? Why did those in command order that flight when they knew the weather was deteriorating?

As we crested the summit of that mountain we could see the path of splintered evidence where the chopper had slammed into the fog enshrouded, defoliated trees along the ridge. The chopper had then somersaulted, coming to rest in a twisted tangle of metal and wire just below the peak on the north face. As I scanned the grisly scene I was drawn to the main bulk of the wreckage. There he was, embedded precariously atop this gnarled mass of metal, legs unnatually pointed skyward, head between his legs, glazed eyes staring right through me ... "Vance, get that body down off the wreckage and then help find the leg to this one here!" My mind instinctively snapped into automatic drive and I reacted as I had been trained, shifting my emotion into neutral and driving on ... only to confront it 15 years later as a brooding, angry specter ... leading point for a ghastly fire team of partially decayed emotions from a hellish past.


A True Story by Mark W. Vance Nov. 1992