Valley of Death by Ted Morgan

Author:Ted Morgan [Morgan, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-980-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

I Feel the Situation Can Only Deteriorate Further

The mid-March reverses made Castries short-tempered and depressed. In an uncharacteristic scene, the normally debonair cavalry colonel lashed out at a sergeant, a helicopter pilot named Duhoux. As the Sikorskys began to arrive in Indochina, the French were short of pilots. Duhoux, although only a sergeant, showed an aptitude for flying choppers, and after his training, he was allotted on March 10 a brand-new Sikorsky H-19, with Sergeant Dauce as his copilot and Sergeant Maranger as his mechanic.

On March 13, Duhoux was sent to Dien Bien Phu to evacuate wounded. He arrived on the afternoon of the Vietminh attack. On the next day, the morning of the truce, he was told to pick up wounded from the various strongpoints and bring them to the hospital. But when he examined his helicopter, he found that two of the blades on the main rotor had been hit by shell fire. Unable to take off, he and his crew were stuck in Dien Bien Phu in the midst of battle. All three were astounded when they were given helmets and submachine guns and told to join one of the fighting units. Dauce and Maranger protested vehemently that they were not in the infantry. Duhoux found Castries in his bunker on March 15 and told him: “We’re going to try to reach Muong Sai [the helicopter base in Laos].”

Castries threw a fit, ordered them to stay put, and called them slackers and worse. In the ensuing discussion, Castries offered to let them leave if they took with them six of the gravely wounded, “I’ve got two badly damaged rotor blades,” Duhoux said. “It will be a risky flight. Your six wounded are better off at the hospital.”

“Take it or leave it,” a furious Castries replied.

On March 16, Dauce and Maranger told Duhoux that if he waited any longer, they’d leave without him, before their chopper attracted the attention of Vietminh gunners. Duhoux tried to repair the blades with adhesive plaster used in thoracic wounds. He lowered the pilot’s seat, so that he was barely visible, while Dauce and Maranger climbed onto the tail and applied the plaster to the rotor blades.

When they were ready to leave, instead of loading wounded, they summoned the three-man crew of a chopper that had been destroyed on the ground earlier, who were also stranded, and took them along, without giving notice. As he looked back, Duhoux saw that the airstrip was lined with dozens of corpses, some covered with blankets, some not. This cemetery without tombs was a sight that lingered in his mind’s eye.

Once in the air, the chopper vibrated badly. The damaged blades were out of balance, the weather was bad, and Duhoux wasn’t sure they had enough gas to reach Muong Sai, since he hadn’t been able to fill up. He’d been on reserve fuel for seven minutes when they saw the Muong Sai airstrip.

As he came to terms with the loss of three centers of resistance, Castries’ pessimism heightened.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.