"Ranger", a Fox Tale
Stuart Jamison pic - second from left Jim Mckee, WO Burns, Mike Roberts, far right Rick Bozeman
NOTE TO SWAMPFOX READERS: On January 31, 1968, I was the Senior Advisor to 1st Battalion,15th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, stationed at the nowhere village of Xa Xiem, located 20-odd kilometers southeast of Rach Gia in Kien Giang Province. My advisory team consisted of 1LT George Heatherington, SSG Joseph Church and SSG Joe Pinkham. The battalion was commanded by Major Nguyen Van Hunyhl (pronounced “Win”).
January 31 was the start of the annual lunar New Year celebration, Tet. The Communists initiated the celebration in the northern half of the country on 30 January. Our turn came the next day.
On the 31st, the enemy attacked Rach Gia with two battalions – sort of. The city was invaded by the local two-company battalion, Chau Tanh B, while the heavy hitters, U Minh 10, were held in reserve. The enemy believed their own propaganda and genuinely thought the local boys would precipitate the long-awaited Popular Uprising. They didn’t. Chau Tanh B was butchered in the streets, and by the time my battalion got to the city, hundreds of enemy corpses were laying on the lawn of the Province capitol building and the local soldiers were sitting around cleaning weapons. We got a mop-up assignment which cost us five wounded, but, by and large, we got an easy start.
We had been allowed to have 50% of our men on leave for Tet. The early launching of the offensive in the north allowed us an extra day to recall troops, so we started our campaign with about 350. We were to need all we could get.
We hunted for U Minh 10 for the next 3 days, and found someone to scrap with every one of them. But the serious bad guys kept slipping away. Then, on 4 February, we found them. The ensuing battle led to the destruction of U Minh 10 and the end of significant enemy action around Rach Gia. The following is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript chronicling our adventures during the Tet Offensive. The chapter from which it is lifted, “Day 5 – 4 February” runs 32 pages in the manuscript. I’ve cut it down to about a page to focus on the roll played by Swampfox CPT Jim McKee , the Little Ranger. McKee won the fight. The rest of the chapter is blow-by-blow, blood & guts infantry stuff, of no particular interest to aviators.
The second excerpt recounts my one and only flight with McKee. It’s the adventure that got Doc to name me an honorary Fox, which I consider an honor indeed.
Sunday, 4 February, 1968
* * * * * * *
Ranger had been up since before we had first crossed the canal, and his fuel was getting low. We heard on the radio that we had a FAC inbound, Bart 96, due in fifteen minutes, and that Bart had jets fifteen minutes behind him. All Ranger had to do was stay on station until Bart arrived, mark the VC position, and then go home for gas.
Except no one now knew exactly where the VC position was. We had been out of contact for over an hour and a half, and the PRU had been even longer. The Charlies were somewhere in the two kilometers between the two friendly units, probably in the woods, but we didn’t know where. It went without saying that, if we had to go into the woods for them with rifles and bayonets, it would be a blood bath. It also went without saying that the airstrike we had coming would be the only one we were going to get, so we had to make it good.
“Bourbon Bucket Three-One, this is Swamp Fox Three-Two. I’m going off station a few minutes. Be right back. Got an idea, over.”
“Three-One, roger.”
McKee turned east and flew away. Three minutes later, I was startled when my radio erupted:
“Yaaaa Hoo! Got the bastards!”
Little Ranger had flown out of sight, turned around, and cut his engine. He had silently glided back to the battlefield and was less than 300 feet up when he came over and caught an entire company of U Minh 10 out of their holes rearranging their camouflage.
Ranger flipped his switch, the engine caught, and he climbed out before the VC had time to react and open fire. Then, with his jury-rigged machine gun, he strafed the Chucks to hold them in their holes until Bart 96 (A.F. FAC) arrived. McKee gave his fellow flier as fine a hand-off briefing as has ever been conducted, marking the limits of the enemy position precisely with his rockets.
* * * * * * * * *
Tuesday, 6 February, 1968
We slept with the battalion in its position on the northern edge of the city. The night passed quietly. In the morning, with nothing else to do, we went over to the club to take advantage of the showers. It was there I ran into Ranger McKee.
Yes, Virginia, soldiers do have heroes, and Ranger was mine. His participation on the 4th had been decisive. I adored him.
McKee was a caricature of Black Irish. He was short, about 5’7” (hence, the “Little” in Little Ranger), slender, with black hair and flashing dark eyes, mercurial of mood, with frenetic energy. The boy was hyper. He was 25. He had won my appreciation early in my tour with his quick and enthusiastic reaction to all my requests for aerial reconnaissance and support, day or night.
McKee came bouncing over to me.
“Wanta go flying?”
“Where? Why?”
“I’m going up to Long Xuyen. Got a bunch of VC weapons up there I need to pick up. Got a deal cooking with the Navy for a Honeywell.”
My Instant Air Force was, apparently, unsatisfied with mere rockets and machine guns. Ranger was negotiating a trade for an automatic weapon to fire 40mm grenades.
“Look, Ranger, this is my day off. I don’t need any trouble.”
“Hey, no trouble, man. I’m just going straight up there and straight back. It’ll be a milk run.”
There was a certain appeal to the idea. An airplane ride might be fun. Then I had an inspiration: Long Xuyen was the site of our regimental headquarters. There was also an airstrip there with a couple of resident helicopters; maybe I could arrange for one to come to Rach Gia for Laan’s body. Huynhl wanted to send Laan* home to his family but had no way of getting him there.
*(Laan (pronounced “Lun”) was Lt. Laan, my friend and the commander of 1st Company. We had lunch together on the 4th. He was killed (along with our cook) in the final charge two hours later.. - SJ)
“Yeah, I’ll go. When?”
“Why not now?”
“Tell you what: why don’t I meet you at the Short Strip in about half an hour? I gotta run back to my battalion and tell them where I’ll be.”
“See you in 30.”
I hopped in the jeep and got over to Huynhl’s headquarters as fast as I could. When I told him what I had in mind, he was almost pathetically grateful.
Within minutes, Pinkham dropped me at the Short Strip and I joined McKee at his plane. He handed me a flight helmet, I climbed into the back seat, and he showed me where to plug into the intercom. Then he started the engine, we taxied out, and were off.
The flight was as advertised. Ranger took it up to 3,000, took a northerly heading, and Long Xuyen hove into view in less than half an hour. On the trip up, we passed the time with small talk.
On the ground, we went to Ranger’s -— what? -- hooch? Warehouse? The place where he kept his booty. It was a bloody arsenal of captured weaponry. The souvenir weapons (those it was legal to take home) were separate from the working weapons -— those you could carry in the field, but which were illegal for export. He selected four or five AK47s (“The swabbies love ‘em”) and stuffed them into a duffel bag.
There was a helicopter in, and I found the crew. It took some arm-twisting. No one was enthusiastic about going out of his way to pick up a stiff, especially a Vietnamese stiff. But they had to take something down to Schick at Rach Soi anyway, so it wouldn’t be any big deal to make a short side trip. We settled on an ETA, exchanged call signs and agreed on the frequency, then parted company. Although it was now only about noon, they wouldn’t be there until around six, having other missions ahead of mine.
As I climbed back aboard Ranger’s Bird Dog, he handed me the duffel bag of weapons to hold on my lap. In the cramped back seat of the L-19, I no longer had any freedom of movement. By holding my elbows close to my chest, I could barely move my hands in front of my face, and McKee handed me a pair of binoculars. I’m claustrophobic, and said so.
“Hey, that’s O.K. We’ll be home if a few minutes.”
We took off and headed south. We had been up less than five minutes when he spoke the four most dreaded words known to man:
“Ever been to Cambodia?”
“No! And we’re not going! You said this was gonna be a milkrun!” I was degenerating into whining. “This is my day off! Goddamnit, I can get shot at on Company time!”
Ranger, caught up in his idea, was becoming almost breathless with anticipation.
“Look, with this thing going on all over the country, I’ll bet no one’s even been over there to look in a week. I bet we can catch ‘em coming across in broad daylight.”
Wonderful.
We banked to the right, heading west. We picked up the Basaac, one of the branches of the Mekong, and flew it to the border.
And Ranger was right. They were coming across in broad daylight.
It was a convoy of huge sampans, half a dozen of them, each a good 75 feet long. They were covered with camouflage netting, hugging the south side of the river. I suppose they intended to pull into the bank and be invisible in case aircraft approached. They either hadn’t heard us coming, or didn’t think us a threat, for they kept moving.
They had pedestal-mounted 1.27 cm guns on their sterns. Anti-aircraft guns.
Ranger attacked.
We were only carrying two rockets on the port wing today, both HE. McKee fired them both on the first pass and missed. It got their attention. They pulled into the bank, becoming stationary targets.
The strafing passes were a hoot. McKee would climb to about 3,000 feet to begin the run and then turn his engine off. He fired the M-60 by pulling a wire attached to its trigger. With one hand on the wire and the other on the stick, he glided down on the enemy transports, adjusting the attitude of the aircraft to move the strike of the bullets. The little Bird Dog shuddered with the recoil of the gun.
When he reached 500 feet, he would stop firing, restart the engine, and climb out for another pass. In the few seconds between when we ceased firing and the motor caught, we could hear the crack of the fat 51s coming up. And in those seconds, after the nose had come up, but we had not yet made our getaway, I felt as if we were in some fat blimp, just hanging there begging to be shot down. A line from the old Cockney World War I song “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier” kept running through my mind: “I don’t want a bullet up me arse ’ole/I don’t want me bollocks shot away...”
Including the rocket run, we made four firing passes. Being immobilized by the duffel bag, I was on the verge of shrieking insanity. Finally, thank God, we exhausted the machine gun ammunition and headed southeast for Rach Gia.
Ranger had sunk one sampan and left two burning.
I vowed never to fly with him again. Two days later, the battalion was sent to Vinh Long, where it would eventually be destroyed. I never saw McKee again. But he remained one of my heroes.
-- Stuart Jamison