Master Chief by Alan Maki

and beer to commemorate the birth of his son. The refreshments were shared as thanksgiving for the divine gifts that his wife and son were in good health. It was a night filled with goodwill, merriment, and fraternal brotherhood.
    After breakfast on the morning of July twenty-seventh, we were again very busy preparing our gear for that afternoon’s helo op. Dai Uy had had to delay the op for an additional day until the ARVN 7th unit departed from the edge of our AO and Sea Lord slicks from HAL-3 became available. Later, at 1000, Fletcher gave the warning order followed by the patrol leader’s order at 1530. Our targets were several Communist Mang political indoctrination committee members. They were a newly created North Vietnamese administrative level of political control that was established between the district and village levels of government in contested areas. One source of information reported that replacement units of the NVA’s 111th Infantry Regiment, which supported the local VC company-sized units, was in the area of the Mang committee cadre’s hootches.
    After we had driven to the helo pad at 1700, we rehearsed assault formations, hootch search and seizure, prisoner handling, squad formations, and other SOPs.
    We lifted off at 1745, flew aboard three UH-1 Sea Lord slicks to Cai Be, and picked up Chief Muoi and his four men. From there we flew to the Plain of Reeds, where we rendezvoused with the UH-1 Seawolf gunships and OV-10 Black Ponies. Once our Navy, Aussie, and Vietnamese team was complete, we headed south toward ourtargets. Not counting our Navy HAL-3 and VAL-4 buddies, there were fourteen SEALs, three Kit Carson scouts, five SAS mates, and five PSB operatives headed for the targets and looking for trouble. We had carefully studied our 1:4,000 scale split vertical photographic mosaic of the VC/NVA targets, rehearsed the assault, and were ready to engage our enemy face-to-face.
    The three Sea Lord slicks came in so low that the slicks’ skids couldn’t have missed the rice paddy dikes by more than a foot or two, with the target at twelve o’clock. Before the slicks began to flare, we were standing on our helo’s landing skids, grasping the sides of the doors and totally psyched to assault the enemy hootches. As the helo started flaring, we jumped from about six feet, screaming “Yaaaaaaoooooooohhhhhhhh!” As soon as our boots plunged into the flooded rice paddy, we began our assault with all weapons a-blazin’.
    Dai Uy, Senior Chief Bassett, and the rest of the 1st Squad took the left hootch and promptly killed two VC. Trung Uy, the 2nd Squad, and I took the right hootch and bunker, hoping to shed a little blood ourselves. Our communist adversaries had wisely turned chicken and were heading toward the tree line on the opposite side of our hootch, with a blaze of our tracers hot on their tails. One of the Seawolf pilots, who had seen our small group of VC running toward the tree line, requested permission to make a firing run on them.
    Mr. Kleehammer yelled, “Get your heads down. The Seawolves are going to make a minigun run over our position.”
    There really wasn’t much cover to be had, so I continued clearing the hootch’s mats and palm fronds from its framework with 40mm HE rounds and I placed a couple rounds in the mouth of the large bunker to take care of any remaining VC who might be in there. I later tossed a mini-CS grenade into the bunker for good measure. We werereceiving some .51-caliber and a lot of small arms fire from the tree line, which was approximately three to four hundred meters at ten to two o’clock from our positions.
    “There must be a fairly large VC/NVA unit in there somewhere,” I told Trung Uy as the Seawolves swooped over our heads and started returning the stubborn VC fire with their miniguns spitting out six thousand rounds per minute and a half-dozen 2.75-inch rockets. It seemed that bullets and rockets were whizzing, ricocheting, and popping all around