TINS! "Hello, Operator?"

It all started a couple of weeks ago when one of the shooters who lives in our hootch was chowing down with an SF-type he served with in northern Af-stan and said, “See those guys over there? They were doing Special Ops when it was just a mission, and not a branch.” He was pointing at J.J. (a pseudonym) and me.

Long story short, now there are a select group of Operators¹ who join us for supper.

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There are a couple of us Olde Tyme Aviators here at the schoolhouse, and one of ‘em is a former SF-type (J.J.) who saw the light after participating in the SouthEast Asian War Games on the ground. He and I didn’t meet over there, but we have -- or had -- a lot of friends and acquaintances in common, and on one particularly boring day a month ago, we were comparing notes on how the different “special” groups performed their particular "specialties. "

Now, in my our war, the Lurps (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols -- aka, Rangers) were primarily deep recon, but they did an occasional ambush or prisoner snatch. SEALs (everybody knows what SEALs are, so I’ll pass on the acronym) were primarily raiders and ambushers. When the Green Beanies went out, they did short-range recons, raids, ambushes, and whatnot. The one thing they all had in common was a helicopter lifeline – we put them where they wanted to be, and went to get them when where they were turned into someplace they really didn’t want to be.

There was a definite art to inserting them into an area and keeping the bad guys either unaware that the good guys had arrived or unsure of exactly where they had arrived, and the good guys depended on us godlike beings humble rotary-wing types to be just as sneaky and innovative getting them into an area as *they* were *after* we’d gotten them in.

They didn’t mind us not being quiet and sneaky getting them out. Quite the opposite, actually...

But, back to getting them *into* an area. One of the tricks we used was the false insertion -- flying single ship into an area low-level and shooting multiple approaches into likely LZs spaced at least 500 meters apart. We never landed, and never stopped the insertion sequence after the lads hopped out. The thinner the enemy commander had to spread his troops to cover all the possible areas, the better for our guys. In II, III and IV Corps, there were usually a plethora of openings -- bomb craters, oxbows on streambeds, abandoned rice paddies -- to allow a pilot to dip down and disappear into the trees long enough to mask what he’d been doing.

I pulled a mission one morning to insert a six-man patrol from the outpost at a place called Cai Cai. See below.



For those of you with dinky screens and want the Vietnam From 500 Feet Experience, Hi-Res here:

That’s looking southwest. Cai Cai was just south of the Cambodian border and well into the Plain of Reeds. The loooooong patch of dirt outside the perimeter wire is the airfield.

Note the distinct *absence* of trees.

Note also the distinct *height* of the reeds.

Okay, about 10 klicks south, there *were* some trees -- a small hummock about a half-acre square stuck up from the swamp high enough to keep the roots from drowning, and that was the area my six passengers were interested in. A foot patrol the previous week -- a training mission for some of the local Ruff-Puffs, actually -- had found a freshly-built bunker complex on the tree-island and my passengers were going to snoop to see who was using it, and basically gain as much intel as they could without actually going inside and taking pictures. The hummock was conveniently located between a couple of old rice paddies, so the good guys could hunker down behind one of the dikes and observe without being seen. My idea was to make several false insertions into the 10-foot high reeds about a klick east of the hummock, make the real one in the reeds close to a dike, then continue the masquerade for about five klicks, moving westward.

On the second false insertion, I popped above the reeds, came abreast of the tree-island and observed six people walking along a dike toward the hummock, which was about 300 meters to their south. All were wearing white shirts and black PJ pants, and three of them were carrying tote sacks. After the next false insertion, I saw they had reversed course and checked my map. The only thing that particular dike led to was Cambodia.

Being the sneaky, innovative type, I pointed them out to the patrol leader and asked if he minded if I made the actual insertion on the dike itself, say, about 50 feet in front of the Sunday strollers -- six good guys to greet six possible bad guys. He actually *liked* the idea.

When I put one skid on the dike, the patrol hopped out and the pedestrians immediately reversed course and began running for the hummock. They stopped when they discovered a Huey can move faster than a human being, and they discovered *that* when I plunked crosswise on the dike in front of them, with my gunner staring down the M-60 barrel at them and my crewchief pointing his M-16 nonchalantly in the general direction of their kneecaps.

Civilians would have stood there, hands out to their sides, or raised slightly to show they were unarmed.

These guys immediately assumed The Position -- squatting on their heels, hands behind the backs of their heads.

Figuring that the mission was well on the way to being successful at this point, the patrol leader decided to see what was in the tote sacks. They were full of Chieu Hoi leaflets², probably the same ones I had spent the previous evening dropping along the border, just to the north.

The patrol leader laughed so hard, he almost rolled off the dike.

We had busted the work detail tasked with prepping the bunkers for an extended occupancy, and they were stocking it with --



-- wait for it --



-- toilet paper³...

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¹An Operator is a guy who does Special Operations. Ask him flat out what he does for a living, and if he doesn't know you, he’ll usually tell you he’s a cook. And if he *does* know you, it's because you already know what he does for a living, so there's no point in asking in the first place. Yeah, it's a vicious circle, ain't it?

²Chieu Hoi means "Open Arms" in Vietnamese. Chieu Hoi leaflet drops were a psyops mission -- we dropped leaflets into known bad guy areas and along known infiltration routes. One side said, basically, "We've got more stuff to kill you with than you can shake an AK at." and the flip side detailed procedures to *avoid* being killed -- basically, rally to the government, and you'll be welcomed with Open Arms.

³The VC used the leaflets to start their cooking fires. The NVA used them for toilet paper. Fortunately for me, the Army didn't realize the significant impact that leaflet drops had in contributing to "the aid and comfort of the enemy."