Stan Cherrie's Huey, Mother Goose, was loaded for bear for his duel with a Viet Cong .50-caliber gunner on the second day of Tet.

All around were thousands of Viet Cong Flags–in the fields, in trees, on fence poles–they were everywhere!

By February 1968, the 2l4th Combat Aviation Battalion had been in combat for nine months. We didn’t realize exactly what had started in Vietnam, but as we awoke on the morning of February 2 at Bearcat, our base camp at Long Thanh 17 miles east of Saigon, we knew that something was different from other mornings. As I shook off the mantle of sleep and made my way to the shaving troughs, I couldn’t help but notice a hell of a lot of aerial activity, both helicopter and fast mover, for that early in the morning.

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Someone at the shaving trough told me that there had been attacks by the Viet Cong all over the country at precisely the same time. We knew that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army troops were good soldiers who fought exceptionally well, but most of us didn’t believe the actions of the VC were coordinated at a very high level—certainly not at the national level.

I decided to skip breakfast and go straight to the operations tent to file my flight plan for the day. Walking in, I learned that my platoon leader, Major Bob Stack, who had the Navy support mission at Nha Bay for the day, had been diverted on the way there and sent to Bien Hoa airbase, where he had been shot down. His helo was damaged but no one was hurt. He was being flown back to Long Thanh to get another helicopter.

My mission for the day, as Bounty Hunter 21, was to take my light fire team south to the Australian base camp at Nui Dat and work special air service (SAS) patrol insertions.

As we lifted off and cleared the perimeter berm on a 270-degree heading, I could not believe my eyes. All around there were thousands of Viet Cong flags of all sizes—in the fields, in trees on fence poles—and, as intended, they served notice to us that the peoples’ support for the VC was a hell of a lot stronger than we had ever imagined.

Breaking right and turning south, we were stunned by the many fires burning below. Usually in the early morning a thermal inversion trapped the cooking fires’ charcoal smell at about 1,000 feet and we’d get a good whiff as we climbed through it to our in-transit altitude of 1,500 feet. This morning, however, dozens of large fires raged all over the countryside along our route. To our right rear, it looked as if the whole city of Saigon was aflame.

The radios were alive with traffic. Normally there were two or more pairs of gun drivers on each of the five VHF channels at any given time. Even on a quiet day there was plenty of chatter on the nets, but on this day they were busier than I had ever heard in my nine months of combat flying. I knew something big was up when I heard that helicopters attempting to resupply the U.S. Embassy with additional small-arms ammunition had taken fire and were driven off after repeated attempts to land on the roof.

We proceeded to Nui Dat, landed and received our mission brief, which was to insert an SAS patrol. We accomplished the mission in the rural hinterlands, but it was agonizing to know that the locus of the fight that day seemed to be around the cities of Saigon, Bien Hoa, Da Nang and Hue, and not where we were operating.

Upon returning home we were met on the flight line by several of the crews that had been in the fight for most of the day. They all were dripping wet and extremely fatigued. I learned that Major Stack had been shot down twice that day and had just flown his third helo home.

That night we had a company meeting to assess what had happened and what we could expect to happen in the near future. There were several assessments and counter-assessments, but all we really knew was that on that day, at least, Charlie stood up at the bar and said, “OK sumbitches, let’s fight!” Armed Forces Vietnam Network television reported that all over Vietnam large-scale attacks had been launched in tandem with the commencement of the celebration of the lunar New Year—Tet. It confirmed that there had been heavy fighting, especially in and around the larger cities, with extremely high loss of life on both sides.

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