________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
In May 1962 Company B of the 201st
Engineer Battalion was rebuilding the
In May 1962 Company C of the 201st
French airfield at An Khe.
Engineer Battalion was constructing a
road north from An Khe to Kannack.
We took off in the helicopters. Later we came into a hot landing zone. A firefight was just
finishing. There were a lot of bodies on the ground, a lot of smoke in the air, and a lot of
jabbering in Vietnamese. A bunch of folks hopped out. I was aboard with my Vietnamese
battalion commander, Captain Le Viet Tri, that I met just before we took off. He didn't take
to flying, had been sick at his stomach the entire flight, and we hadn't communicated. As I
found out later, we wouldn't have anyway because he didn't speak any English and I didn't
speak any Vietnamese. We later got along on my broken French--after my finishing 100 out
of 101 at the Military Academy in French.
Then we started flying back, and I thought, "Routine, mission over." Then we started circling
in the air and the other helicopter flew down and entered another landing zone. We kept
circling and circling, and then our pilot was looking back to us and hollering at me--I mean,
this is an American pilot. With all the noise and everything else, and two or three bodies
they'd thrown on the floor of the H21 to take back from the landing zone, we really weren't
communicating.
Meanwhile, the other helicopter had lifted off and we flew back to the airfield. Our pilot
jumped out of the helicopter and ran to the other helicopter. There began a huge argument
between some Vietnamese officers and the Americans. Well, it turned out my pilot had been
the commander of the unit, so the other helicopter was his. Piecing it together when it was all
over with, there had been a grand misunderstanding. My Vietnamese battalion, that I just met
that morning, had sent about seven people aboard the two helicopters, five in the other
helicopter and way too many for what was needed. They were basically going up to resupply
their survey team and maybe get some papers back and deliver some supplies. The American
pilots thought they were delivering the officers to join the survey party in the field.
When they settled down into this landing zone, there was a Vietcong prisoner who was
wounded and they wanted to extricate him. When they put him aboard, it overloaded the
aircraft and they couldn't take off. As long as the Vietnamese got off that was fine, but these
Vietnamese weren't getting out. So, there followed a standoff in that helicopter in which the
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