Gunship Vs. Shark – and the winner is…..

Being stationed along the coast of the South China Sea, we inevitably had to make contact with the Navy.  I didn’t get to land on a ship as another of our pilots has reported, but I did get to work with our salty comrades in arms for one mission.

The Navy used ocean-going barges to transport equipment from ship to shore, and to various places along the Vietnam coastline.  Apparently one had untied itself and was attempting to make a getaway, but only managed to make it to one of the offshore islands near Cam Ranh Bay.  The Navy wanted it back, but not knowing what kind of enemy force they might find occupying this worthless bump of sand, with no water or food on it, they didn’t want to try to recover it unless they had some kind of back up.  Since the U.S.S. New Jersey was busy firing Volkswagen-sized rounds into the interior of the country up North, and all the Navy carriers and aircraft were occupied otherwise, they had to sink to the bottom of the combat barrel and request help from the scumbag Army.

I was never able to figure out Navy rank so for all I knew the briefing was conducted by some smartly dressed chap who could have been an Ensign or an Admiral.  Chances are he outranked a W2, so I gave him all the proper “Sirs”, and even wore my official Army headgear instead of the Gun Platoon baseball caps we normally sported.  It was the briefing of the century compared to what we normally got.  It had takeoff times, holding points, and code words to let us know when to go in with guns blazing.  If it had been an Army briefing, lead would have put a greasy mark on his plastic map and said, “That’s the LZ.  Slicks will be up 42.1 FM.  Flight leader will call us three minutes out.  Any questions?”

Jake Sheeler was my roommate.  He was also the supply officer, so I went to see if he had any life preservers.  They aren’t part of the TO&E for an Assault Helicopter Company as it turns out.  He offered some Styrofoam packing material that we could stuff into our flight suits, but I graciously declined.  If I was going to crash, I at least wanted to die looking good.  The idea of bobbing to the surface ass-first, buoyed-up by Styrofoam just didn’t seem dignified.

We took off from Dong Ba Thin with a light team and headed out over the bay.  It was a beautiful morning and we took a few minutes to circle the beach and wave at the nurses.  Although it wasn’t our official holding point as briefed, it worked OK for us.  Next, we flew out and found the island.  We could see the barge beached in a cove area on the southwest side.  There was nothing else around except for the Navy launch that was going to go in and retrieve it.  The island looked pretty deserted.

We finally got the word to begin the attack so we came in over the bay and launched a few rockets toward areas that might have provided cover for anyone who was stupid enough to be on the island.  From the air we could look down into the clear water and we saw a bunch of sharks circling around.  Well that was something new, so we decided to drop down a little lower on the next pass to take a better look.  The Navy was still a few minutes out and there wasn’t anything going on at the island.

On the next pass, we could see they were definitely sharks, and it occurred to us that they actually represented a threat to the Navy personnel who would shortly be storming the island, so why not shoot them.  Hell, we had to kill something while we were here, so as we came in on the next pass we opened-up with the miniguns and let them have a full burst.

Almost immediately the sky was full of tracers, all coming our way.  Jeeez! Does everything over here carry a gun, including the fish?  It quickly became apparent that the bullets we were seeing were our own rounds ricocheting off the water back at us.  We managed not to shoot ourselves down, but I do believe that as we flew over the sharks on the next pass, I saw one of them looking up and laughing at us.  He had a helicopter painted on his dorsal fin.

They must have really hard water over there.

Fred Harms

Sidekick 3

11/67 - 10/68