Charles Black Reports from Vietnam,
September 26, 1968

Pilot Wages One-Cobra War

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, is on his fifth reporting assignment in Vietnam, and en route to the war zone has visited various military hot spots in the world. This is another of his daily articles about combat missions on which he accompanied U.S. troops.)

DI AN, Vietnam - After nine rocket and machine-gun attacks into the face of enemy fire, attacks which left 25 enemy dead and pulled a hard hit South Vietnamese company out of trouble, CWO Clyde Shy killed one last Viet Cong by landing his Cobra on top of him and grinding him into the paddy mud.

Shy was out of ammunition. The enemy was lying in wait, watching six of the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers a few yards away.

Shy dived over the man to alert the ARVN. He flew back and hovered when they missed the point he was trying to make. The enemy rolled over and fired an AK-47 into the Cobra, hitting it five times.

Shy had one weapon left, his helicopter. He swung the 8,000 pound gunship over the man and dropped the right skid, finishing the contest.

Maj. Wilbur Bowles, advisor to the Vietnamese task force fighting on the ground, saw Shy's Cobra smashing the last enemy soldier as he flew nearby in a command and control helicopter with Col. A.H. Hislop, senior advisor to the 25th Vietnamese Division.

"The colonel was on the other side of the chopper and couldn't see too well. I saw that Cobra landing on the VC, taking fire from the man as it went for him. I hollered to the colonel, 'Look at that, he's landing on top of him! It was heroic. It was very heroic," Bowles said.

Bowles said Lt. Thomas D. Arthur, adviser to the 3rd Battalion, 49th Infantry of the ARVN 25th Division, "is the man who could really tell you what those men in that Cobra did out there. He was on the ground when they came in to do the shooting."

Arthur was still out with the Vietnamese forces clearing an area east of the highway town of Go Dau Ha, which sits on the main supply route to Tay Ninh at the junctions of Highway 1 and Highway 26,

"I just decided that if I pulled pitch and got out of there he's hit us worse. He was hitting us hard then. I could see the skid was close to him. Somebody was hollering in the radio, there was a lot going on. I chopped throttle and turned the helicopter onto him and squashed him," Shy said.

Then he couldn't see the man. He was under the helicopter.

"I didn't know if I had him. I sat on him a minute or two. Then I got to thinking about having him under there with an AK-47 in his hands. The ARVN ran over and aimed an M-16 down under the ship, then he didn't fire, he turned and ran back. I decided it was time to take off and I got us out of there," Shy said.

He was worried. He had five holes in the chopper and "it flew a little peculiar" and the right skid was "bent out of shape."

When he landed, he headed the bird directly into the maintenance area at his base a Di An.

The maintenance officer, Capt. James Carr, gave him no comfort.

"They opened my turret hatch and there was a little fish about this long (2 inches) form out of the water I landed in. He told me he had seen everything but he hadn't seen any fish caught by a Cobra before. I went over to debrief. I thought the Operations Officer, Capt. Dennis Rayfield, was hacked off at me, too. He was kind of sharp and ignored me. Then Maj. Leidebrand called me in and told me to quit worrying. The ground troops had reported I'd gotten 25 in the treeline, they had half a dozen prisoners and some weapons, plus that guy I squashed, or maybe drowned with my skid. That made me feel better," Shy said.

The pilot, whose parents live in Davis, Idaho, where his father is a rancher, lived up to his name throughout the account he gave of it all, even to the point where he was worried about bending the skid in his unorthodox use of a helicopter gunship.

He isn't the mind's eye prototype of a hell-for-leather gun pilot, either. Married with a son, Scott, five, he went into the Army in 1960 after three years of college where he studied "speech and dramatics with the idea of becoming a teacher, I guess."

He went to optical school and was a Sp5 in Germany when he applied for Army helicopter training in 1963.

Shy and his copilot, Lt. John Bradberry, were in the air on another mission for the U.S. 25th Infantry Division which C Troop supports when he got a call from Maj. Leidebrand to go help the Vietnamese task force.

He related this story:

"I got a briefing in the air when I switched to the advisers' frequency. I came in from south to north about 2,000 feet. At first I didn't see anything, then off to my left I saw a ring of Armored Personnel Carriers.

"They had one Charlie (Viet Cong) walking towards them with his hands up, he was giving himself up. Then I started picking up people, getting the situation. They were advancing on a small hamlet, generally on line, when they got automatic weapons fire from the southeast corner of the village. They were down. I think the man on the ground said there were five of his men killed right around his area. I didn't know what we were getting into.

"The LOH (a scout helicopter flown by WO Walter Shandrowski which completed the air cavalry style gun-team) came down to sweep the west end of the village to see if these Charlies were leaving and I started making my passes.

"I don't remember getting any fire, everything seemed real fine, I was getting good, pinpoint targets in that treeline. (Bowles, watching the gunship, said ' . . . he was being fired upon by automatic weapons on every pass'. Shy said he was 'too busy to notice.'

"I made nine passes and expended everything I had to shoot. I must have run out of rockets and ammunition about 2:50 p.m., we got the call about 2:15 p.m. The five or six of the Charlies broke and ran out of the treeline into the open paddies. The ARVN's were shooting them down, chasing after them.

"There were two troops who had one spotted, but there was another one they didn't see. Six ARVN's were moving in on that one but I could see they didn't see the other. He was 10 yards from one of them. He had them dead, I could feel that he was going to come up shooting at any second and I knew he had them dead to rights if he did.

"I was letting down then. I went in over him low to show them where he was. they didn't see him so I went back and hovered.

"He was lying on his stomach but as soon as I brought it to a hover he rolled over. It was point blank range. He had an AK-47 and he was shooting. I could look right into his eyes as he shot. My observer said, 'My God, Clyde, he's shooting us!"

"I missed part of it but when I saw the Cobra, the pilot had it sitting down in the paddy in the water. He sat right there for what seemed to be a minute, then lifted and flew off," Col. Hislop said.

"We have gotten outstanding support, wonderful help, from these aviators. They have been great," Bowles said.

The help he was talking about has come from Maj. Jerry Liedebrand's Troop C, 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. John Phillips of Columbus, Ga.

Shy, 28, of Rupert, Idaho, has been flying a Cobra gunship with the air cavalry unit since he took Cobra training at Bien Hoa in April, 1967. He estimated he has made 350 gun runs; has collected a Distinguished Flying Cross, 18 Air Medals and an Army Commendation Medal, and has "been shot at? Sure . . . countless times . . . but this was the first time I'd ever been hit!"

He got hit under spectacular circumstances. He avenged the holes in his unscarred Cobra as spectacularly.

Bowles said the Vietnamese task force commanded by Col. Chuyen, commander of the 49th Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, consisted of the third battalion from that regiment, the 34th Ranger Battalion, and the 2nd Battalion, 10th Armored Cavalry Regiment.

The Task Force moved out to sweep a village two miles east of Go Dau Ha called Ca Gia. No trouble was expected there, but the ARVN's were looking for a fight with the Viet Cong Main Force "Hoc Mon Battalion" and expected to find it in an area past Ca Gia.

They got their fight suddenly and savagely as the 2nd Company of the 3rd Battalion 49th Regiment crossed a paddy toward a line of brush on the southeast corner of Ca Gia, just 500 yards from where the sweep started on Highway 1.

"That battalion had 14 killed and 14 wounded. The Viet Cong opened up with heavy automatic weapons fire from 30 meters. They waited until they were at pointblank range and opened up on the 2nd Company. They killed the company commander, a platoon leader, the radio operator. that was a fine company commander. Lt. Arthur had been with him just two nights ago on an ambush where they had killed six Viet Cong. It was a hard loss," Bowles said.

Shy probably doesn't look like the picture which half a dozen wounded Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers held prisoner in a dispensary at the Task Force headquarters in Go Dau Ha had of him either. To them he was a sudden burst of hell from the sky as his Cobra dived in again and again and then pursued them across the paddies.

Capt. Do Dinh Ky, the 49th Regiment's intelligence officer, questioned them and translated their answers. They were heavily bandaged, they all had frightful wounds. One was obviously close to death. The regimental surgeon was working over them, giving them good treatment, as they lay on litters in the hall of a dispensary there.

Hi Mi Nung, shot down by the pursuing infantry, was the man Shy had seen the ARVN's pursuing while the victim of his skid lay in wait. He was shot in both legs, the chest, foot, and one arm and the doctor said he was dying. He talked in gasps, his voice weak and low, as Capt. Ky leaned over the litter.

He had come from North Vietnam in January. He had rested in a base near where he lay now a Cambodian sanctuary. then he was picked out with others from his 600 man infiltration battalion and sent off to reinforce the Hoc Mon battalion, which had taken heavy losses in both the Tet and May offensives. he arrived there in July. He lasted four weeks before Shy's attacks drove him into the guns of the ARVN's.

By him another youth from North Vietnam, Nguyen Van Khanh, lay shot in his left leg. He had been captured as he broke and ran with Nung and the four other prisoners, all South Vietnamese guerrillas whom he barely knew, and the dead man, another North Vietnamese he called "Pham".

Khanh was wearing a radioman's earphones and carrying a radio sending key in his hand when he fell to the rifles of the assaulting ARVN's. He told how Shy had evened the score between the attacking company which had lost its commander and lieutenant and radioman in the first burst of fire.

Shy's last rocket and machinegun runs killed the Hoc Mon Company's commander. Then the assistant commander-political officer was killed. Khanh said he became terrified at the thought of another Cobra attack, he jerked the cord to his headset and key from the radio, threw it into the canal behind him, and ran with the half dozen survivors in his area of the line.

"The damage to the Cobra was evened out by the damage to the enemy's equipment, too," Shy said.

Capt. Ky and Maj. Bowles studied the results of the sweep after Shy's exploits had battered down the opposition. Ky said the Viet Cong could not accomplish their mission of cutting the road to Tay Ninh because of the attack on Con Gia.

The ARVN's captured 140 mines, 50 blocks of TNT, and 20 detonators, as well as 11 individual weapons, six machineguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, mortar rounds and anti-tank rockets.

He was especially delighted over the six prisoners Shy had flushed into the hands of the ARVN riflemen.

He had solid information now. He knew where the enemy was going, he said.

"They have to run, they can't do their mission anymore. They went here (pointing to the map). We are going to go there and finish them."

Shy's one-Cobra war had even accomplished the basic mission of his cavalry unit, to gain intelligence and find the enemy.