Flight by Neil Graham Hansen & Luann Plamann Grosscup

Author:Neil Graham Hansen & Luann Plamann Grosscup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: History Publishing Company LLC
Published: 2019-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

6 DECEMBER, 1972

On the morning of 6 December 1972, the sun had yet to illuminate the far curvature of the earth as we sat down to breakfast. Dick Thomas remarked that he thought that we would be dropping at a couple of camps that had been having some trouble along the road that wanders over the middle of the Plateau des Bolaven.

The house emptied out as the chopper pilots, flight mechanics, and kickers shuttled out to the airport first. Bart and I lingered over a second cup of coffee. Bart was in a talkative mood, probably because of relief over a non-eventful night. The subject he was babbling about was a project he was trying to sell some company to give him half a million dollars as a grant to do a feasibility study on lac beetle farming. He breathlessly relayed the glad tidings that shellac was made from this particular beetle’s excrement. At the present, the only way it was supplied to the paint industry was by villagers going out into the jungle and collecting it from branches where the bug had done its thing. Bart had submitted a paper laying out his hypothesis that the beetles could be farmed by providing the proper kind of food to make them stay in one area. He also proposed to add some kind of laxative to their diet to enable them to produce more.

When he finished telling me about the world-shaking project, he asked what I thought. Never one to pass up a golden opportunity, I replied, “It sounds like a bunch of shit to me.”

Thank God the Rover arrived so we could leave. I had burst his bubble.

At the aerodrome, the driver dropped me off at the customer’s shack, then took Bart out to the airplane to do the preflight. Inside, Gray Fox was standing behind his desk pointing to a map lying on the top of it and briefing two of the chopper pilots. Over in the corner, slouched in a chair was another CIA customer-type called Tall Man.

The chopper pilots left and Gray Fox turned to me. “You will be dropping at the same sites they are going to,” he said, pointing out the sites on the map. I jotted down the map coordinates and call signs of the two sites as he continued the brief.

“Drop at this site first and this one second.” He pointed to a spot on the west side of a small hill on the plateau and another on the south side of the same hill.

“How far is this from the old Japanese fighter strip?” I asked

“About 15 klicks to the southeast.”

“How about the bad guys? Where are they? And as long as we are on the subject, where did 374 take his hits?”

“Ah, 374 was further east of there. Somewhere around PS38, but the enemy is all over the area. There are no reported antiaircraft weapons except for these 37 mm positions here,” he said, his finger jabbing at a notation on the map 30 klicks to the west -northwest of the two

drop zones.

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