Loading the Dice in the Delta

114^th Assault Helicopter Company 

      Going to Vinh Long on a story wasn’t anything like going to Pleiku or Dalat. In the first place, it was hot and dusty like all the Delta cities south of Saigon. Secondly, and most significantly for me, I was going to a unit that was actively engaged with the enemy on a daily basis and I was going as a combat correspondent.

    This assignment began with what would become my pattern for the next year. Cecil and I hitched a ride on a helicopter going to Vung Tau. He, under the pretense of checking our battalion’s medical records, and me because I could get away with it.  After a day or so at the beach and some time at the Grand Hotel, he returned to HHC Long Binh and I set off to get my story.

I arrived at the 114^th Assault Helicopter Company (AHC), checked in with the commander, and was told I’d be flying the next few days with SP5 Mantanoma—“Montana” to his crewmates. The first thing I learned was that a crew chief’s job is two-fold. The many hours spent in the air as a gunner was only half the job and was usually followed with another three or four hours on the ground in the evening doing general maintenance and plugging bullet holes.

On my first day, we flew Command and Control (C&C), meaning we’d be actively involved in every phase of the mission. I don’t think in the two or three months I’d been in-country that I had ever really given much thought to just what the helicopter war was all about. The day began with a fueling stop at the Phi Troung Vi Thanh Airfield, where the crew picked up fresh supplies of ammo and mounted their M-60s.

There are no words to describe the helicopter war other than to say it is anything and everything. We were in the air from dawn to dusk, moving both troops—sometimes a lone lieutenant or captain and sometimes three or four soldiers, and supplies—anything from ammunition to food and even mail. We also performed occasional medivacs and provided air cover when requested, which was all day long.

We’d set down in little villages that were really nothing more than a few shacks, a dozen people and a couple of cows with a road running down the middle and other times we’d visit a large base or town.

In the course of performing all these details, what I learned was that there was always someone waiting to take pot shots at the ship when we were on the ground or close to it. For this reason, we didn’t stay on the ground long and we didn’t waste time getting some elevation when we left a place. A helicopter is the epitome of easy on/easy off travel.

When there was nothing else to do, we’d hover around at cloud level above a LOH to see if anyone was stupid enough to take a shot at it. If they did, our ship would drop down and zero in on their little patch of cover and blow them to kingdom come.

By the end of my first day, I realized that there wasn’t a notepad big enough to log all the varied activities the crew of this huey gunship had performed that single day. Before I even began putting my notes in order, I did have the working title for my story.

Watching the crew react to countless attempts to shoot it out of the sky, as it flew above the flat green countryside, and performed one task after another with the cool precision of a Las Vegas gambler, I decided to call my story, Rolling the Dice in the Delta. Later, I reconsidered. With the great advantage in firepower that these ships possessed, a more appropriate title for the story was, Loading the Dice, so that is what it became.

At their day jobs as pilots, crew chiefs and gunners they were almost robot-like, every action seemingly performed in accordance to an internal checklist continually running through their minds. They put great effort into demonstrating how qualified they were at their work and took great pride in their performance. During this flight time, I got the pictures and quotes that would comprise the bulk of my story.  

At night they could and would relax and become themselves again—the persons that they were back home before they learned how to fight a war. Here, I got the anecdotes that turned them into real people and not just warriors.

Every night that I stayed with the boys of the 114^th and they were boys—most were younger than me and I was only 23—I kept busy making sense out of my notes until they returned from the airfield. This was when I really got to know them, which was a good thing because no one’s first impression of someone should be when they’re manning an M-60 machine gun.

There were poker games; home cooked meals cooked a thousand miles from home, and a lot of ribbing going on every night, once these guys could finally call it a day. Frank Akana, Montana’s roommate was fixing a dish from his native Hawaii, while Montana complained that he was too short to be on the receiving end of so much enemy fire.

In the choppers, they were simply gunners and crew chiefs, but listening to the music playing in the background—whether it be country, rock, or western—enabled them to regain their true identities as Texans or Samoans or New Yorkers, city slickers or country boys, book worms or jokers.

The small reward I could give them in return for the hospitality they showed me was to get a few names into the magazine and accurately tell their story, the whole story. About the fighting men with the weight of the war riding on their shoulders during the day and the good time boys, trying to shed some of that burden, if only for a few hours, at night. I wanted to give them something to send home to their friends and family that was different from everything else they were hearing on the news.

Dressed in everything from jeans and T-shirts to fatigue pants mix-matched with brightly colored Hawaiian shirts they would spend the last few hours of the day telling stories, laughing and guzzling beer as they tried to put the first fourteen hours out of their minds.

     They were more a family than a unit in that they didn’t really have to explain themselves to each other. They knew everything there was to know about each other or at least everything that mattered. They rarely discussed the war. They knew enough about the war to not waste time discussing it the way we did back in Long Binh.

     Back at Headquarters Company, we knew nothing about the war, but that didn’t stop us from obsessing over it and analyzing it to death. In reality, we had the time to talk about the war because we weren’t busy fighting it. We found each other interesting the way you found a classmate back in college interesting; but we didn’t really know each other.

     After four or five days with the 114^th AHC, I returned to Long Binh to finish writing Loading the Dice, with a much greater understanding of what the helicopter war was all about; and for that matter what the Vietnam War was all about. It wasn’t so much about capturing a hill or clearing a rice paddy as it was doing anything and everything that might need to be done.

I was back but a few weeks, getting ready for Thanksgiving and working on my Forging Across the Muddy River story, when our information officer approached my desk and told me Frank Akana had died.

“How,” I asked.

“I dunno. His name just turned up on a report.”

And ain’t that a gambler’s life in a nutshell—especially a gambler rolling the dice in the Delta? If you’re lucky, your name turns up in a magazine and if you’re unlucky, it turns up in a report.

 

Postscript: This is a story about a story. I didn’t know Frank Akana as well as I knew his roommate. I didn’t even know his roommate that well. Our job as journalists was to bring a little recognition to the units and get as many names in so they could tell their families back home. He was mentioned in only one paragraph of the magazine article. To get a better picture of who he was, go to the Vietnam War Virtual Wall at, http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/433/FRANKLIN-R-AKANA?page=1#remembrances.