Expressing the sentiments of them all, the copilot, Capt. He talked it over with his crew and they all wanted to stay.
The Rescue Center agreed and told Jolly Green 26 to return to Da Nang although there were more survivors left on the ground. The ground fire on the mountainside was intense, and the enemy guns were too numerous for the Hueys to suppress. The pilot of Jolly Green 29 advised the second helicopter, Jolly Green 26, to pull out. However, enemy fire from a nearby ridge took its toll and Jolly Green 29 pulled away leaking fuel and hydraulic fluid and headed for an emergency landing at Khe Sanh, the closest airstrip. The first HH-3E, call sign Jolly Green 29, maneuvered into position on the slope and picked up two American soldiers and three South Vietnamese. There were two Air Force HH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters from Da Nang, an Air Force C-130 flare ship, and three Army helicopter gunships.įlares from the C-130 lit up the whole area and the Hueys pounded the enemy positions with their rockets and guns. The second rescue force got there around midnight. The NVA battalion could have made short work of the beleaguered patrol, but chose instead to wait for more aircraft to be drawn into the flak trap, which was still baited. The Huey pilot decided to try the rescue himself, and his helicopter was promptly shot down as well. The Huey attacked again, and again the ground fire stopped. The enemy guns were silent until the H-34 pulled into position above the hillside and a sudden fusillade blew him out of the sky. The Huey went in first and hosed down the surrounding area with rockets and guns. The North Vietnamese held their fire as the two helicopters approached. The first effort to pick up the SOG team was by a South Vietnamese Air Force H-34, escorted by a US Army UH-1B “Huey” gunship. Helicopters and other aircraft would be coming soon and the aircraft would make fat targets as they moved in for the rescue. They often held back from finishing off the survivors of a crash or an attack, preferring to use the Americans as bait. The North Vietnamese knew it, too, and took advantage of it. In the Vietnam War, the United States made an unprecedented effort to rescue those shot down or in trouble in hostile territory.
They were setting up what was known as a “flak trap.” The team leader, a US Army Special Forces sergeant, called for help-just as the North Vietnamese expected him to do. It was not far from the US Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh, which lay to the northeast on the other side of the border.Īt first, the soldiers thought they had run into a reinforced company, but it turned out to be the main body of an enemy battalion. Some contemporary reports give the location of the ambush as Vietnam’s Quang Tri Province, but the actual site was a mountainside, surrounded by dense jungle, a few miles inside Laos. MACV/SOG was an unconventional warfare task force that had been conducting cross-border operations in the Laotian Panhandle-where the United States did not admit it had any military forces-since October 1965. The team was assigned to Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s “Studies and Observation Group.” The name was intentionally vague. 8, 1967, a 12-man team of American and South Vietnamese soldiers returning from a secret road-watch and reconnaissance mission on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was ambushed and mauled by a North Vietnamese Army battalion.