THE DAY WE CAPTURED THIS GUY

I had come back to Holloway from CCC in mid-August under less than happy circumstances. I can only guess that Arlie Deaton, CO of the 219th, decided that we were having too much fun in Kontum so he assigned The Worst Person in the World as our platoon leader. I’m not going to give you his name because there is an outside chance that he might read this. But You Know Who You Are!!!!

I took a Bird-Dog out to the east of Holloway to a place we called VC Valley. It was a free-fire zone and all was fair game, including us. WO2 Bob Jackson was in another Bird-Dog and I thought he might have had someone in his back seat. I asked him about this, and he didn’t recall who it might have been. It was a beautiful afternoon. A bright, sunny day with little clear-air turbulence and almost no wind, which made flying these great airplanes such a joy. I was down around 300 feet AGL and Bob was not too much higher. We passed over an abandoned hooch, overgrown row-crop, and a paddy that still held water. In the middle of the paddy was a brown lump. Paddies didn’t have lumps, or humps, or islands either. So I banked the L-19 around in a left turn to circle the paddy. The lump-hump-island then stood up, looked at me, and started to back up toward the dike. I pulled out my .38, held it in my left hand, and aimed it at the guy. He kept moving backward so I fired off to one side of him. The reality is that I am the worst shot in the history of mankind and couldn’t have hit this guy if I were standing next to him. The gun was in my left hand and I’m a righty, so our VC was completely safe. Anyway, the round I fired splashed about 30 feet to one side, which caused him to momentarily stand still. But then this guy started backwards again. I fired a second time, missing him by even more this time; our VC moved back to the center of the paddy, raised his hands in the air, and surrendered. Now what?

We didn’t have any way of picking our prisoner up. Bob was on the radio to Holloway and I think somebody suggested that we call in a fire mission. On one guy! Let’s expend several thousand dollars of ordinance to blow up a solitary soldier who would and should run like hell as soon as we started climbing to get out of the way of incoming artillery. As luck would have it two Slicks were getting cleared to set up for an approach into Holloway. Bob talked to them on guard and asked them to pick up our prisoner. The Slicks reluctantly agreed to come over, and as they circled the paddy the Slick AC wanted an iron-clad guarantee that he wasn’t going to take any ground fire. I told him that we’d been orbiting this guy for half the afternoon and nobody had shot at us. In spite of our assurances the door gunners in the two Hueys hosed down the foliage around the paddy, and then one of the Slicks dropped down and grabbed our VC. They beat us back to Holloway. Arlie met us on the flight line and told Bob and me that our prisoner was turned over to the ARVN. I never ran into the Slick drivers; I wasn’t exactly seeking them out because I figured they were nothing if not annoyed with the two of us. Nonetheless, I do believe that we were the only guys in the history of the war to capture a guy from a fixed-wing aircraft.