Pacific Stars and Stripes information
for 192 AHC
For date 680204
192 AHC was a US Army unit
Primary service involved, US Army
South Vietnam
Description: The following is an edited version of an article titled "A Bird Was Burning As All Hope Fled - Bullets riddled the chopper that was to land Luke Roach in the middle of the war," a feature story by Bob Cutts.
He knew his bird was hit. It started to fall right away. There was nothing he could do but take her in, trying to get out of the way of the ships behind him. Thoughts shot through his mind like the armor-piercing machine-gun bullets that had just performated his helicopter - "Too low. No Power. Gotta land." Flames whipped from his engine cowling, he wrestled the last few yards out of the dying controls and the ship plopped into a dry rice paddy, never to fly again. And Luke Roach set right in the middle of the war. Radio jargon tumbled into his ears through the helmet headphones, and it was seconds before he could sort the messages out. "You're on fire! Get out!" As he checked off the control systems on the panels before him, Capt. Roach wondered dully whose bird was burning. Firing in the landing zone around him sounded "like rain on a tin roof."
The voice of 192nd AHC CO Maj. Ron Baker, his boss, he recognized: "Roach, you're on fire. Get out of the airplane." As his rotor blades ground to a halt above him, Roach finally realized he was here to stay. He looked up. Bullets ploughed through the wispy grass around the ship. The 173d Airborne troopers he had brought in were rapidly dissappearing behind nearby paddy dykes. Smoke was pressing in through the open doors. "Get out! Get out!" he yelled to his men. Behind him, door gunner "Knives" Neives and crew chief Keith Johnson scrambled outside. Co-pilot Lenny Tajer dived back over the radio console and disappeared. Roach wondered what he was waiting for. He slid the armor door plate back to get out. It jammed. He swore, forcing it back further, and it grudgingly yielded a few inches of clear space. Roach wiggled out of his seat and did "a beautiful swan dive" into space. In one of those micro-seconds of razor vision men get in battle, he looked down and saw a bullet shredding grass staight under him - the place where he ended his dive a heartbeat later. He rolled over and saw six-foot flames engulfing the top of the Huey above him. Infantrymen nearby were screaming over the din of the battle: "Move back! Move back! It might blow!"
Firing was so thick he didn't dare stand up - he crawled as fast as he could. "I left a lot of skin in that forty meters of grass." He heard bullets thudding into the earth all around him. He didn't stop until he reached the safety of a clump of bushes 50 feet away. As he caught his breath, Tajer and Neives joined him. "Where's Johnson?" Roach rasped. The two looked at each other. Someone yelled in the background that a crewman was hit near the chopper. Roach staggered to his feet and began running back in a crouch. From a cloud of smoke emerged two soldiers, dragging Johnson from the blazing wreckage. The three men carried him back to the bushes. He was shot in the back, but still alive. Two choppers from Roach's flight (the last one in the landing zone) were looking for the crewmen of the downed bird but couldn't see anything in the smoke. Another bird in the flight had take a hit in the rotor hub and now they had to worry about that. They finally gave up and flew out of the still-intensifying ground fire. They were the last helicopters to get in the battle.
"A platoon sergeant stopped near us. We could hear chatter on his radio. Guys were yellin' to the medevac choppers upstairs 'you better get in here fast - these guys are dyin.' But none of the copters could get in. One guy tried to land, but he took a few rounds in the pilot's seat and got out fast. I knew we'd all been dropped into a real hornet's nest. And the worst thing was, nobody knew what was going on. We had no idea whether we were winning or losing, where the NVAs were or how many there were of them, and how many of us were left." Roach clutched his .45 cal. sidearm, and it never left his hand - except when he gave water to Johnson or tried to shelter him from the blazing afternoon sun. The crewman was steadily getting worse - he cried in pain whenever he was moved. But finally the trio had to move the wounded man into an old bomb crater nearby - it was too dangerous to stay exposed. It was a wise move. The company commander in the LZ was beginning to organize his resistance and the first support called in was F-100 fighters. They pounded enemy bunkers and tranches with 250-pound bombs not 300 yards from Roach. The earth pitched like a rolling ship. Next came the rocket helicopters. They shredded tree lines a scant 100 yards off. Roach really began to realize how close the fighting was when artillery began tracking in, in giant, booming steps, to within 25 yards of the four men. They huddled over Johnson, nearly helpless in the grip of the frightening destruction man was unleashing on himself all around them. He thought of his wife and three young daughters, and the home they were buying in Columbus, Ga. He thought about his 14 years in the Army, and he decided he wasn't going to die at age 33. He was right.
As the third hour ground past over a battle field that looked like it had seen three days of intense fighting, the superior firepower of the Americans began to tell. The tide of gunfire was flowing the other way, and then, almost suddenly, it was over. The North Vietnamese backed out and fled. A lone helicopter flapped in, like a Valkyrie over the battlefield. As it settled in, Johnson was dragged forward and was one of the first wounded out on the medevac ship. Sniper fire from the distance applauded the efforts of its crew. And, a few minutes later, after the wounded were gone Roach saw the faces of pilots Chuck Tidey and Scott Omer peering at him from the cockpit of another landing chopper. Running like a boy, he dived in through the open door - and cut himself again on the ammo boxes piled on the floor. When the supplies were unloaded, the helicopter lifted off the paddy floor with the three aboard, and it seemed like the first time Roach had flown in years. The bird wheeled up into the sun, and in minutes Roach was gone, like a spectator leaving a theater. Behind him, still spread out through the grass and brush, remained the actors that Roach and his crew had been the very select audience of - the living and the dead.
Comments: MAJ Baker, Ron; 192nd AHC CO; ;
CPT Roach, Luke; 192nd AHC pilot; ;
??? Tajer, Lenny; 192nd AHC pilot; ;
??? Johnson, Keith; 192nd AHC CE; ;
??? Tidey, Chuck; 192nd AHC pilot; ;
??? Omer, Scott; 192nd AHC pilot; ;
The source for this information was 6801pss.avn & paper source documents supplied by Les Hines
Additional information is available on CD-ROM.
Please send additions or corrections to: Gary Roush Email address: webmaster@vhpa.org
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Last updated
02/21/2000
Date posted on this site:
05/13/2023