Continuing this reposting of a feature I wrote for Air&Space, published last December. It illustrates the risk and potential of battlefield helicopter rescue.
My previous post (Part 1) narrated how a seemingly routine catch-and-kill operation in the Mekong Delta turned into a protracted gun battle between ARVN troops, American aircraft, and a Vietcong main force battalion equipped with heavy weapons, in particular the formidable .50-caliber machine gun. Head-to-head battles of this size, out in the open and lasting all day, were rare during the Vietnam War.
At this point, three Huey helicopters have crashed, and the commander of the American forces has died during an attempted rescue. Dozens of American and South Vietnamese troops are unable to move to safety, and one, pilot Jon Myhre, has gone missing. Plans for a rescue haven't yet firmed up, but in the meantime, aircraft have the job of keeping the Vietcong from overrunning the survivors.
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Aircraft arrived, lots of them, from airfields all across the Delta and as far away as the base at Cam Ranh Bay, 700 miles to the north. Bombers and Skyraiders took turns pummeling the tree lines on the north and east. Dozens of Huey gunships formed a “daisy chain,” like stock cars along an aerial racetrack. One leg of this pattern passed over the Vietcong-held tree lines. As each gunship exhausted its rocket pods, grenades, and ammunition cases, it left the formation and headed to base for more ammunition.
At the Vinh Long airfield, the time to re-arm a gunship dropped from the normal 30 minutes to 10, says Terry McDowell, who managed the reloading. “Most of the personnel on the base showed up at the flight line, so we put them to work.” Pilots refused to give way to others who were off-duty for the day. Gunships were so overloaded that gunners ran alongside as the B-model Hueys scraped along the runway, gaining enough translational lift to claw into the air.
Still the Vietcong gunners were firing—from slits in log bunkers concealed among the dike lines. Snipers were picking off men who showed their heads above the vegetation. Mindful of the opposition, slicks dropped ARVN reinforcements out of rifle range, on the opposite side of a tree line lying a half-mile northwest. Adviser Rex Latham went in search of his senior officer, Tom Mitchell, not knowing his fate. Latham found that he could make his way into the combat zone by staying low and timing his movements with the aircraft attacks, when the Vietcong ducked for cover. Finding Mitchell dead, Latham took his radio and began organizing the remnants of the first lift, grouping the wounded for rescue.
Awaiting the arrival of more troops to take up flanking positions on the east, the new ARVN forces held their advance, still facing heavy fire. Vietcong spotters were using whistle signals effectively: calling the men to take cover when gunships were in sight, then summoning them into action once the airplanes had passed.
As it appeared that the ARVN airlift would not be able to handle the situation, word came that the tracked vehicles in the ARVN’s armored column were stuck in soft ground near the Mang Thit Canal; they wouldn’t arrive before nightfall.
Commanders turned to the third option: a large-scale helicopter rescue. There were too many wounded Americans and ARVNs to fit on a single Dustoff, so three additional crews volunteered to follow it down. One was a slick commanded by Warrant Officer Dave Eastman. Eastman had spent the morning flying commanders back and forth and was eager to help. A second was the unit’s repair helicopter, the Road Runner. Mike Hershey, pilot of the smoke ship that was knocked out of action early in the battle, jumped on as Road Runner copilot. The fourth was commanded by Jüri Toomepuu, a fervently anti-communist immigrant from Estonia who had fought in Korea as an enlisted man.
A fifth helo would be critical to the plan: Viking Surprise, a D-model Huey out of Soc Trang and the only other smoke ship available for combat that day. That ship’s commander was a spectacle-wearing pilot named Jerry Daly.
“I was eating breakfast at Soc Trang, in the Officers’ Club, when the call came,” recalls Daly, today a Catholic priest. He was unable to attend the weekend reunion and shares his memories by phone. “Viking Surprise was the only other smoke ship available in all the Delta,” he says. His crew brought along something that would be good for morale, if not enough for survival: a .50-caliber Browning heavy machine gun, which they aimed out a side door. The Huey’s light frame couldn’t handle the recoil from such a gun if hard-mounted, so Viking’s crew dragged in a mattress and laid it on that.
Given the toll so far in men and machines, Daly’s assignment had the look of a suicide mission. Smoke ships have to fly low and slow, directly in front of enemy positions. If the wind speed was low, Viking Surprise might have to make only two death-defying passes in front of the enemy’s massed fire. Instead, the breeze that morning was too strong for the smoke to hang in place, so Viking Surprise passed again and again, rebuilding the screen.
“After we made six, seven or eight passes we ran out of juice, so we kept going around, shooting the .50,” Daly says. “That was until all the ships got out. That took longer than you might think.”
“I can assure you I’ve never seen anybody fly a helicopter like that before,” Myhre says today.
On the ground, the rescuers were finding it hard to round up their fellow Americans. Pilots Eastman and Toomepuu jumped out to speed the loading.
Joe Watson had been sheltering behind the paddy dike. “I was so stuck in the mud I couldn’t get myself free,” says Watson. “It took two men to pull me out.” No one saw or heard Myhre on the far side of the combat zone, lying wounded in the grass.
The first three ships lifted off with their loads, but the fourth ship, the Dustoff, was too heavy with passengers, which included some ARVN troops. Twice the helicopter failed to gain enough altitude to get over the knee-high dikes. Once the pilot perched his ship on a dike, balanced on one skid. Finally enough men got out to lighten the ship, enabling a getaway.
The most surprising event in the third rescue attempt was, appropriately, the return to base of Viking Surprise. The Vietcong had many opportunities to shoot it down, yet the smoke ship made it back to the airstrip at Vinh Long—barely. Immediately declared unflyable, Viking Surprise was shipped back to the States to be rebuilt. The smoke ship’s five-man crew escaped with only one injury between them, a flesh wound sustained by copilot Larry McDonald from a stray bullet fragment. I ask Jerry Daly how many new bullet holes his ship sported upon landing. He doubts that the count was as high as legend has it—130—“but it was certainly over 50.”
In the noise and confusion of the four-ship rescue mission, and given that many of the survivors were covered in gray paddy mud, nobody knew the results until a headcount at the Vinh Long airfield. One American remained unaccounted for: Jon Myhre. Outlaws knew he had been gravely wounded during and after the crash of Outlaw 17, and nobody had seen him since the Dustoff crash. His wife Ginny got the call: Jon was missing in action and likely dead.
While Dempsey’s death on Delta Six was shocking, the loss of Myhre hit the Outlaw crews particularly hard. Dempsey lived and worked out of headquarters in Can Tho, so the men of the Outlaw platoons rarely saw him in person, but Myhre and his guitar were familiar to all the men at Vinh Long.
Front gate at the airfield:
Back at the battlefield, the guitarist was still alive and learning about “danger close” bombing. Friendly airplanes were flinging bombs as large as 500 pounds over his head to support the eventual advance of ARVN troops on Hoa Binh. When the warheads exploded among the palms, the blasts heaved the soft ground “like a swell in the ocean,” he says, and rained hot shrapnel on his back. The explosions left him deaf for a half an hour at a time, and as his hearing returned, more explosions restored the ringing in his ears.
Myhre’s fate rested entirely on whether the ARVN ground troops led by Lieutenant Rex Latham, reached him before the Vietcong. Latham worked directly with company commanders at the landing zone after his ARVN counterpart deserted the battlefield. “Most of the day was an intense blur that I do not remember clearly,” he says. “I was running on adrenaline, was scared, hungry, thirsty, tired, and filled with a cold anger.”
At the reunion, Latham stands out. While many of the attendees might have to struggle to don their uniforms from 1967, Latham, trim with a military bearing, would have no trouble. One of his contributions to the evening program is narrating a slideshow about a return to the battlefield at the 40-year anniversary. On that trip, he says, he talked with a former Vietcong officer. “In 1967, we would have shot each other without a second thought,” Latham tells his fellow veterans and their families, “but in 2007 we talked as old soldiers, just on opposite sides.”
Remembering 1967, Latham says that he didn’t know going in what he and the ARVNs he was advising were up against: elements of two veteran Vietcong battalions, dug in and well-equipped.
The men I spoke to at the reunion were proud that though outnumbered by enemy forces, they had acquitted themselves with honor.
Late that afternoon, as ARVN troops began creeping up on the Vietcong positions, Myhre saw a form approaching and figured it was a Vietcong soldier coming to check bodies for booty. Unarmed, Myhre played dead and prepared to attack. As the stranger picked up Myhre’s arm to pull off his wristwatch, Myhre grabbed the man’s shirt collar, intending to drag him down and kill him with a bite to the jugular until he recognized the ARVN uniform. As Myhre released his grip and reached out to shake his hand, the soldier fell dead from a sniper bullet and tumbled onto his weapon, an M-1 .30-caliber carbine. Myhre guessed the same sniper who had been hounding him all day had killed his rescuer.
Myhre, knowing that the Vietcong would turn more aggressive as night fell, coveted the M-1 rifle. He tugged it from under the soldier’s body and readied it for action.
Before midnight, Latham heard from an ARVN scout that someone who could be American was moving in front of them. Calling out in Vietnamese, Latham approached, found Myhre, and inspected his wounds by flashlight.
Latham passed the news by radio to his commander, Major Andrew Palenchar, and they discussed whether Myhre could live until a daytime rescue. Another voice broke into the frequency: It came from the cockpit of a Spooky gunship orbiting above, which by coincidence had a doctor on board. The doctor’s assessment: Myhre would be dead by morning. A command helicopter passing nearby, on the way to headquarters at Can Tho, overheard the transmissions and agreed to try a risky nighttime landing but aborted after receiving Vietcong fire.
The commander’s gunship escort, Lancer Two of the 114th Assault Helicopter Company, volunteered to make the next attempt. Following Latham’s flashlight signals, copilot Captain Frank Sasaki guided the ship to a low hover touching the paddy’s muddy water. Using a stretcher improvised from rifles and ponchos, Latham and enlisted men lugged Myhre 100 feet to Lancer Two and heaved him in. Myhre rode to Vinh Long atop a lumpy layer of ammo cases.
The word spread through the hooches of Outlaws and Mavericks: Fittingly, it was predawn after Easter Sunday and Jon Myhre was back from the dead.
As the reunion was winding down on Saturday night, Joe Watson, a door gunner on Myhre’s Huey, shared thoughts of their long, uncelebrated journey back from Vietnam. Myhre recalled that his welcome was little more than being trundled out of an ambulance onto the loading dock at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
During the slideshow of the pilgrimage to the battlefield that some of the veterans had made on the 40th anniversary of the battle, Latham showed a photograph of a large monument the Vietnamese government had erected. On one side of the monument, artwork depicts three helicopters going down in flames. At the base of monument, six Americans are smiling at the camera, happy, we can assume, that so many men made it out of that hellish place alive.
After a stay at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Myhre worked as a military courier until cleared to resume flying. He declined a return to helicopters in favor of fixed-wing aircraft. He retired from the Army in 1981. Myhre lived another 51 years after the Battle of Easter Sunday and passed away on October 6, 2018.
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