The Rescue
Hey, Sloan said,
there's a Cobra down in the river.
He ducked into the bunker for binoculars.
I squinted across the valley at the Ba Long.
Olive motion on jungle green,
a gunship wheeled,
hung nodding at a point on the far ridgeline,
circled to clear profile above the horizon,
then dropped toward a blob in the river.
From his field-mount laser-ranging glasses,
The artillery observer
scanned the opposite ridge
for movement at known firing positions.
When the Cobra settled clear,
he called in a few rounds.
One-Five-Five millimeter shells whistled overhead.
Dust rose from the ridge with a belated mutter.
A pair of Hueys
droned in from the coast
and angled down to orbit the wreck --
at that distance,
small and silent as dragonflies.
The advisor on the hill
reported the action,
but his rear base had nothing on the story,
and his radio had no aircraft bands.
The miniature dance
rose and fell over the river.
Sloan thought they were trying to raise the wreck.
Through the binoculars
he could see it lift, drop, and lift again.
One Huey broke off
and landed on a gravel bar
downstream from the wreck.
The other, with the gunship, held orbit
till a Chinook lumbered onto the scene.
The lighter craft climbed away.
The Chinook settled, wagging over the wreck,
typically slow to connect its sling.
Finally, yard by yard,
it lifted the Cobra out of the water.
The Huey on the bar
rose behind the Chinook
and led the others out of sight down the valley.
Weeks later,
a Huey settled in and shut down
on the pad above our bunker.
Sloan took up our mail
and jawed with the door gunners.
They had the story line
for the airborne mime we had seen.
The Cobras were coming back
from rocketing positions near Khe Sanh
when a 51-caliber plugged the lead ship.
The pilot held it upright
as it hit the river,
and climbed free.
His buddy machinegunned the 51-cal position
and called in the Hueys for the rescue.
They dropped a lifeline to the pilot
and lifted to pick him up.
But the slack snagged on the wreck.
The lift on the lifeline
jerked him under --
and the snag held.
About 'The Rescue'
From January into June 1971, I was stationed on Firebase Sarge, about 17 kilometers from the Lao border. The bunker I lived in with two or three other men {as assignments and equipment usability varied) lay just below the helicopter landing pad of the hilltop’s upper knoll. A staircase made of used 105 shells and wood from ammunition cases wound in an arc down to the level of our doorway, and another ten feet of pathway extended to the front wall of the bunker – or rather to the remains of the front wall, as much of the sandbagging had sloughed away during monsoon rains, and left us 3/4” plywood for protection. Still, we were relatively safe from ground assault since a few strings of barbed wire marked the attempts at a minefield planted in the 60% slope that fell away below us.
During the Dewey Canyon II / Lam Son 719 campaign ongoing in February of 1971, I witnessed activity in the Ba Long River valley below Firebase Sarge. A Cobra gunship was downed in the river, very near several gravel banks. Another Cobra gunship orbited the area, fired at a spot on a hill opposite our position, moved off for a while, artillery from Camp Carroll to our rear whistled overhead and raised smoke columns from the hillside before the thudding of the rounds reached our ears. A couple Huey helicopters came in and one seemed to try raising the wrecked Cobra, but eventually pulled away, and finally a big Chinook flew in, got its sling attached, and hauled the wrecked Cobra out of sight. Weeks afterward, we got word on Firebase Sarge about the shoot-down and the rescue efforts.
For timeline of memories, this stands. The event, February 1971. The poem, composed in 1977, and published in 1988. Memorial Day weekend, May 2025, on one of the Vietnam Veteran pages on Facebook, another vet posts the names of former classmates and fellow combatants. While a Cobra had a pilot and a co-pilot/gunner, I do not know which man was alive to get the lifeline on the wreck in the river. But having a name to add to the memory reinforces the impact of Memorial Day which is already sensitive for me, since two of my unit were killed on Sarge during the North Vietnamese sweep across the Demilitarized Zone on March 30, 1972.
