Jungle Landing Zone

Here we are approaching a landing zone in the jungle.  The military term for this kind of action was a Combat Assault.  Anxiety would normally be cranked up but not this time because we were second-in.  That is why I risked having my camera out.

The door gunner on my right has his M60 machine gun up and ready to use.  You never know what will happen when landing in the jungle.  Ammunition for the M60 was feed from the metal box you can see just below the gun.  See that red ring on the front of the box?  That is the top of a smoke grenade.  We used smoke grenades in colors like red, yellow, blue and green to mark landing areas in the jungle.

In the snapshot below you can see an officer and a sergeant having a discussion on the jungle floor.  They were on the first-in helicopter.    They are deciding how to set up the perimeter.  We always set up a perimeter around the landing zone to protect the helicopters that were still landing.    That is my knee in the lower right corner of the picture.

Approaching a landing zone in the jungle by helicopter was about the most dangerous thing we did.  We were like sitting ducks.  For the enemy, we were a clear and open shot.  We would fly slower and slower as we dropped in so we were an easy target to hit.  If they started firing at us, we couldn't accelerate out of there very quickly.  The reaction time of a Huey helicopter is slow.  If the pilot was hit, the helicopter could easily lose control and spin into the ground.  So with all of those possibilities, it was a tremendous relief when you jumped off, ran to the perimeter, got down on your knees, faced your M16 toward the jungle and waited for the remaining helicopters to land.

If the whole company was landing, there would be about three waves of five helicopters coming in one after another.  I can't imagine what the enemy thought if they were within a kilometer of a landing site.  All that noise disrupting their quiet space.  If I was them I would have have been tempted to run in another direction.