I awoke at first light on the morning of January 31, 1968, at Landing Zone Evans. I was tired and dirty from a night spent in a shallow foxhole with my friend and wingman Lynn Freeman. I was sitting in the dirt eating a scrounged C-ration breakfast when Bill Woods came over and told me that my fire team was first up that morning and that I was to report to flight operations for a briefing.

My mission was to fly to Phu Bai as soon as the fog lifted and rendezvous with a CH-54 Flying Crane. The Sky Crane was to pick up a bulldozer and sling-load it back to LZ Evans, where it would be put into service cutting an airstrip. CH-54s usually flew high and unescorted, but the operations officer said the day’s poor visibility meant the Crane would have to fly low and slow, making it a tempting target for enemy gunners. “Speaking of enemy gunners,” he added, “there were reports of gunfire around Hue City last night. Probably only ARVN soldiers celebrating Tet, but you never know.” I made a mental note of this; our flight route would take us right over the Imperial City.

I briefed the other three pilots who would accompany me on the mission, and within the hour we had a three-hundred-foot ceiling and a little better than a mile of visibility. Not great conditions but enough to go, so I gave the order to launch. Our fire team consisted of two UH-1C helicopter gunships with crews of two pilots, a crew chief, and a door gunner in each aircraft. Each gunship carried fourteen 2.75-inch folding-fin aerial rockets fired by either of the pilots and two .30-caliber “mini guns” operated through a remote-sighting device by the pilot in the left seat. The crew chief and door gunner each manned a hand-held M-60 machine gun through the open cargobay doors on either side of the ships. We were the first two helicopters to take off that morning.

LZ Evans was located on the coastal plain surrounded by flat terrain, so we swept out low down Highway 1, our skids skimming the tops of the palm trees. The trip was uneventful. We avoided flying directly over the highway; even though it was little more than an improved dirt road, following its course would give the bad guys a reference point from which to track us with their fire. If anyone in our crew noticed the lack of the usual civilian activity on the road that morning, he didn’t comment on it.

After about fifteen minutes of flight time the tree line on the outskirts of Hue City began to take shape through the dissipating fog. We crossed a large rice paddy and dike complex at about one hundred feet above the ground going less than one hundred miles per hour. As we passed the tree line the ground erupted