After an early breakfast of corn flakes, eggs sunny-side-up and black coffee, we set out for a 'Sweep, Clear and Destroy' operation.

An enthusiastic American officer had already told me: 'When you get out with our Colonel, you really get a look at what our air-power can do. Yes sir! The Colonel's a beautiful man!'

The Colonel was reputed to have brought this kind of operation to a fine art: the use of helicopters for lightning trooplifts into any combat zone. On the way to the airport he explained,

in a slow toneless voice, that today's operation would take place somewhere at the mouth of the Mekong Delta, in the southern corner of Viet Nam.

The Delta is a far cry from Hue, in mood as well as distance. It is the richest and most populated area in the country, and the one where the war has been fought the longest. It also is the one area that has not been snared up in the Buddhist crisis, where there are still no American combat troops.

OPERATION

The morning was damp and heavy, with a curtain of rain creeping across the flooded rice paddies. The Colonel piloted his own helicopter an HU 2 which can carry six passengers at a top speed of 90 knots.

I strapped myself in between the two gunners, who sat at open doors with .30 calibre carbines across their knees. One was a pimply boy with a Confederate flag painted ostentatiously on the back of his helmet; the other, a thin, spectacled, schoolmasterish man, began to chain-smoke immediately we were airborne.

Just before we reached the coast, the rice gave way to jungle-scrub pitted with double rows of yellow craters, like a carpet that had been well gnawed, by rats.

The Colonel pointed down and spoke through the intercom: 'That's what our B 52's did. When the Friendlies went in afterwards, they found the VC dug in in tunnels forty feet deep.

All stone dead, with blood coming out of their ears and noses. Those B 52's really blast 'em!'

The operation zone was a mangrove swamp behind a strip of grey beach. The only building insight was the shell of a Roman Catholic Church, standing at the far corner of the zone, close to the ruins of a village that had been destroyed three months earlier by an air attack. So far the only apparent sign of life was a tiny spotter-plane circling the area, and the dim shape of a destroyer lying out in the South China Sea. After a few minutes the spotter plane fired a smoke-rocket that burst in a bright orange plume close to the church. 'That's the LZ! (Landing Zone)' the Colonel said, and intoned into the radio: 'Sweet Venus to Bitter Apple your LZ marked. Bring in Cobras over.'

The Cobra, otherwise known as a 'gunship,' is a heavily-armed helicopter with four gunners, twenty-four rockers and a contraption in its nose that spews out grenades like a sausage-machine.

Three of them now came in sight, flying low along the coast like fat black spiders; then, circling the orange smoke, they began pouring gun-fire and rockets into the surrounding scrub.

'That's what we call air-cover, the Colonel called to me. 'When the Friendlies go in, there won't be much to bother em down there. Those Cobras are lethal.'

Next came five more helicopters, known as 'slicks' - because their shape is slicker than the 'gunships'. They came, in gracefully over the smoke, settling on to the field like dragon-flies, each one disgorging six tiny Viet namese soldiers who quickly disappeared into the scrub, which was still smouldering from the Cobras' strike.

The radio crackled: 'Bitter Apple to Sweet, Venus. First wave landed. Contact negative. Over.'

After another ten minutes the spotter-plane fired a second smoke rocket - this time bright green - and back in came the three Cobras, wheeling over the smoke and flaying the jungle and swamp for five full minutes, before the second wave of 'slicks' landed thirty more little men, who disappeared again into the smoking undergrowth.

Ten minutes later three Phantom fighter-bombers came banking through the cloud; each one a darting point of silver, followed by the bursting ball of napalm jelly rolling out across the mangroves, right up to the beach where the flashes had been seen.

Each plane made three bomb runs, then a farewell sweep with rockets, placing them in a neat pattern round the edge of the oval patch of dense black smoke.

A few moments later, when the Phantoms were already out of sight, the mystery of the flashes on the beach was being cleared up. 'Confirm now suspect Charlie mortars as US naval gun-battery. Destroyer now confirms fire corrected.' 

While we were waiting for the next wave of 'slicks' to go in, the Colonel took us down to 1,000 feet so that his gunners could have a chance to spray the mangrove that had not already been blotted out by napalm. The spectacled man stubbed out his cigarette and checked the belt of ammunition hanging down between his thighs, like a coil of gold teeth, every twelfth round tipped blood-red, denoting a tracer.

The helicopter reeled over at a 45 degree angle, and the gunner hung far out on his safety-belt, the gun jumping in his hands, as the tiny flashes of tracer curved away and vanished, like sparks of a lighted cigarette thrown out from a car window.

When his belt of 200 'rounds was exhausted, we tilted the other way and the younger one opened up, stitching a seam of jungle running down the edge of the beach that had just escaped the napalm. When each gunner had emptied his total of 1,000 rounds we returned to a nearby base to refuel.

Here the Colonel was joined by a visiting General - a big genial Texan out from America on at four-day fact-finding tour of Viet Nam. When we took off again, he sat up in front with the Colonel who allowed him to handle the controls on our way back to the operation zone.

'I sure like handlin' these things!' he called through the intercom. 'Don't get much chance back home.'

We stayed over the zone until more than 400 'Friendlies had been landed to 'search, sweep and destroy.' Charred mangrove was smudged with wreathes of multy coloured smoke - crimson, mauve,. orange, green and blue - from the various LZ's. 'Sure makes a pretty picture!' the General cried with enthusiasm.

While we had been away, the operation had made what was, described as 'light contact' - fifteen to twenty rounds of small arms' fire. And by the time we finally turned for our home-base at Can Tho, a total of thirty 'slicks', three Cobras, our own; observation helicopter, a spotter plane, a destroyer at sea, and three Phantom bombers had taken part in an operation that had lasted nearly five hours.