Promises

By Guadalupe Vargas

A Huey helicopter escorted by two assault Charlie-model gunship helicopters are flying somewhere over the South Vietnam jungles in search of a sniper and his spotter. Not able to locate or make contact with them and with enemy fire increasing, they have to cancel their mission and hopefully come back later.

As they begin to fly away, the door gunner from the second gunship sees the sniper and spotter running through the jungle. Realizing there is not enough time for the Huey to turn back, his pilot breaks toward an area where they can pick up the sniper and spotter. Enemy fire picks up as the sniper and spotter run toward the gunship while the door gunner keeps them covered with his M60 machine gun. As the two soldiers jump into the cabin, the crew chief is mortally wounded with an enemy round. As they fly away, the sniper and spotter fight desperately to save his life.

Arriving back to a MASH unit, the pilot, copilot, gunner, sniper, and spotter all stand close to the dying crew chief. As the crew chief slowly dies, his last request is for them to promise to look after his wife should she ever need help. All five make the promise. About forty-five years later, the gunner receives a telephone call from the crew chief's wife regarding their promise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887316239

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1: December 1970, Dong Ha, Vietnam

Chapter 2: Normal Morning Gone Bad

Chapter 3: A Promise to Keep

Chapter 4: Hunting the Hunters

Chapter 5: Brothers of War Reunited

Chapter 6: Crime and Karma

Chapter 7: Preparing the Kill

Chapter 8: Don't Mess with Military Wives

Chapter 9: Sticking to the Plan

Chapter 10: To the Old Days

Chapter 11: A Promise Kept

About the Author

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Promises

Guadalupe Vargas

Copyright © 2024 Guadalupe Vargas

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2024

ISBN 979-8-88731-622-2 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-623-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

December 1970, Dong Ha, Vietnam

It was cold, raining, and muddy. I had just turned twenty, and here I was stuck in Vietnam with eight months plus some days to do and I had received a Dear John letter. One of my best friends had just bought the farm (killed in action). We had lost a helicopter in the jungle somewhere close to the Laos border two days before, and all four of the crew were still missing.

Feeling lost in a world I didn't belong in, and to top it off, I had missed supper. As much as I hated to, I had to go back to my hooch and stare at the walls and my two Playboy pinups.

I was walking as slow as I could, and just as I walked between buildings, I ran into a new recruit who was reading the bulletin board. I took a second and closer look at the new recruit and realized that he was an old high school buddy from my hometown.

I couldn't believe my eyes and just stared at him for a while. At first he didn't recognize me either, for I had lost about thirty pounds from my original 169 pounds I weighed before coming to Vietnam. Here I was at five feet and ten inches, weighing 135 pounds, dirty, and wearing a four-month-old, faded set of fatigues and badly worn-out boots, and needing a haircut and a shave.

He was first to talk and said, My god. Is that you, Greg? Greg Garza?

I said, Of course, it's me. What? Did you think I'd bought the farm by now?

I remember repeating his name several times until finally I just asked, What the hell are you doing here, Tony?

This was my school buddy Antonio Tony Lopez from San Antonio, Texas, whom I hadn't seen since graduation day on May of l969.

Tony was born in Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico, but his parents had immigrated to the United States when he was about fourteen years old, and then he was drafted into the US Army after graduation. His ties and customs to his country of birth were very strong, and his Spanish accent was dominant when he spoke English.

He was also a man of his word, and since we were kids he had never backed out of a fight. As a matter of fact, he saved me from a beating once and took on three guys who had beaten me up and kicked their butts. And now here I was face-to-face with my best high school buddy, at a time when I thought I had nothing to live for.

I felt like a little boy when he is lost at the supermarket and then runs into his parents. I wasn't lost anymore. I hugged him and said, "Tony, I think God sent you here to keep me from going crazy. And as of this day, I baptize you as my padrino, meaning my godfather. And I will always be your aijado, meaning godson."

He just smiled and said, You're crazy, you know that? You're crazy.

I was assigned to an assault-helicopter company with the 238th aerial-weapons company. My helicopter carried two seven-barreled miniguns, two rocket pods (seven rockets to each pod), and two M60 machine guns. We also carried two M-16 machine guns and an M-79 grenade launcher.

The Pilot was a twenty-three-year-old Cajun guy from Louisiana. His name was Jack Greer. Jack was a hippie-type guy and was always smoking thin, dark cigars and preferred not to cut his hair and favored a heavy mustache. Some of the guys said he was the best pilot ever to have arrived in Vietnam; others said he was just plain nuts. To me, Jack was someone I respected and trusted with my own life. He was just a plain, down-to-earth type of guy.

My copilot was Federico Son. Half Italian, half Chinese and born in Chicago, Illinois. Federico considered himself a ladies' man and was about six foot one and about 175 pounds and all muscle. He was always clean-cut, shaved and always carried a 9 mm handgun.

Federico had eyes of ice when he was mad and never lost his nerve when going into combat, and in less than a blink, he could forget about killings or even hate and romance a woman with his blue eyes and smile.

Some of the other guys used to say that it was a toss-up between who flew better between Federico and Jack. To me I couldn't tell the difference, and I'd been with them for the last five months of my life.

When Federico talked, people listened, and normally they always believed what he said—he was just that type of person. We always used to say that he had perfected bullshit to love, and he would smile. He would smile, but nobody rode him too far, except for us, the helicopter crew members. We were like one person, and we all knew what the other was thinking. It was a way of survival in Vietnam, and we survived.

Me, I was the door gunner. I'd been in-country four months and had shot more enemies then Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wyatt Earp put together and I wasn't counting. It was either a kill-or-be-killed situation here, and I was still alive. I was the joker of the crowd, and back at the hooch I had an ice chest, and I had my own beer-and-soda business. The hooch maid watched over the business when I went on flight missions. On my spare time, I practiced Korean Tae Kwon Do, which I picked up from the Korean ROK soldiers and also practiced every day throwing knives and stilettos.

Tony and I went on to have a few drinks that night and got drunk. We talked about good old school days and about our families. Tony told me that he married a girl from Del Rio, Texas, and she was living with her parents because she got pregnant about two months before Tony was sent to Vietnam.

The next day, Tony volunteered to be my crew chief, and since our crew chief had just finished his tour a day before Tony arrived, Jack, the pilot, welcomed him aboard.

We flew quite a few missions during the next five months, in which Tony proved to be an expert shot with an M60 and saved our hides on more than one occasion.

On July 4, l971, we were called out on a scramble mission, which meant that it was an extreme emergency, and we rushed out of the mess hall throwing food and drink all over the floors and ran to our helicopter. The crew of our sister ship followed, and we were off. There was no jealousy, envy, or hate among us; we were always ready to help. We knew that in order for any of us to make it back to the world, we had to fight for our own freedom. Here in Vietnam, we fought for ourselves first; the politicians would take care of the pretty stuff later. So today we were going to help some other guys who were stranded somewhere out in the jungle. This were always hard missions to fly because whenever the ground troops called us, it was because they were normally surrounded by enemy fire, and it was like going into hell each time, and you had to. I guess we