Once in a while we would get a target area that appeared to be completely devoid of enemy activity. Before an area could be designated a free fire zone by the Air Force, the civilians had to be evacuated and the friendly forces withdrawn, so any VC in the area had ample warning that something was going to happen soon, they just didn't know when. If we had worked nearby areas before, they probably knew we would be coming at night and that we had ways to find them. If they remained camouflaged and didn't use their engines or start any cook fires, we might fly around all night and never see them.

This was very frustrating to us because (1) we had a limited time in the area before we would be forced to refuel on the way home, prolonging the mission, and (2) we were not going to dump ammo or jettison it into the ocean. Instead we would start trolling. First we would turn on the bottom rotator, a flashing red anti-collision beacon. If that didn't work, the pilot would squirt the gattlings a few times, shooting a stream of bright red tracers towards the ground. That was usually enough to tempt some VC into taking a shot at us, and when we saw his muzzle flash we had a target. He and his buddies would get the full 4000 pounds of bullets and bombs.

It is impossible to know what the VC understood about our tactics, but we do know that after we had been operating for a while they developed a few tricks of there own. A gunship would enter a free-fire zone at night and commence a search, finding nothing but a lone sampan sitting in the middle of a canal. Finding nothing else interesting, the gunship would set-up for a pass on the sampan, and as they passed overhead heavy groundfire would open-up from all quadrants. The VC had set a trap and we had walked into it. They probably couldn't see us coming, but they could hear us pass overhead and all of the pre-aimed guns fired into the skies overhead on the command of their leader. Our worst threat in these situations was the ZSU-23, a quad-mounted .50 that could put a lot of lead in the air and do a lot of damage to an aircraft. We learned to approach such obvious targets with a great deal of caution. - Story submitted by Capt. Ron Whittiker.