A FUN HELICOPTER COMBAT ASSAULT

The *peter pilot watched the gunner's red tracers curve into the target, brass tumbling into the slipstream. He could barely hear the sounds of the two machine guns, over the whopping of the rotor blades and the voices in his helmet. He could, however, feel the steady, regular vibrations as each gun fired.

The red tracers, every 5th round, walked their way across and into the tree line, leaves falling as the bullets ripped their angry way thru the branches. He mused to himself what it would be like to sit back in the gunners' well and fire the M-60 himself; seemed like fun. The gunners, leaning out in the hot wind, were having a great time.

Tracers, like angry bees, flushed a deer out of the tree line. The peter pilot called out to the gunner, "Get the deer! get the deer!" Amused and intent, he watched the curve of the tracers shift their walking pattern along the trees to follow the deer. Watching tracers kick up dirt and dust all around the deer, the pilot's heart beat faster.

The gunner, walking the tracers ever so gently, like a lover's caress, slightly adjusted his aim. He could see the tracers hitting just over the deer's back and under his belly, but the deer continued to run with long graceful leaps over clumps of weeds and grasses. The deer ran into another tree line, without falling. "That's impossible," thought both the pilot and the gunner.

Amid friendly catcalls, the gunner shifted his tracers back to the business at hand, suppressing fire for the incoming lifts. Time: somewhere south of Qui Nhon, 1971.

©Copyright January 16, 2006 by Fred Alvis