As the helicopter spooled up along the treetops, Tiffany, the pilot, looked for an escape route. He aimed the chopper up the nearby ridge, hoping to survive by putting some terrain between his helicopter and the nest of ambushers.

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Meanwhile, as the penetrator cable whipped through the jungle below them, Wagoner tried to get into his specially rigged scout seat armor, which he had installed near the right door. When he found that he could not move the armor, he gave up and concentrated on recovering the cable, hoping to keep the steel rope from snagging on something and pulling the chopper into the ground. ‘The pilot or I could have blown the cable,’ Wagoner later recalled of that tense moment. ‘There was one charge and a button for each of us. That would have been the last resort. I had no intention of doing that. In truth, I didn’t tell anybody the penetrator was near the ground. Another thing was, against regs, we ran the cable down and up at max full speed! Sometimes I would have the basket or penetrator on the ground before we came to a complete stop; we would work it down through the trees. We had to hurry up the people on the ground. It was a life or death situation for all of us because Charlie could hit you at any time with anything from small arms to heavy AAA and even missiles.’

Wagoner gasped over the intercom that he had been hit just as small-arms fire sawed into the left side of the ship. At that same instant, Doc Burdo screamed that he, too, had been shot. Rounds popped through the deck around Wagoner’s feet. He was amazed to see AK-47 slugs cutting through the flooring, then twisting around to lodge, rear ends protruding, out of the deck. The crew chief could have picked them out by hand. Plexiglas splinters cascaded across the instrument panel and caught Bill Tiffany in the face and eyes. Somehow the penetrator slipped up and out of the trees as Wagoner reeled it in.

The Huey crested the ridge and dived over, and the firing stopped. FSB Whip was three miles away, baking in the midday sun. On the way there, Wagoner and Bryant worked on Burdo, who had been seriously wounded in the knee, forehead and groin.

‘If there were any missions that I would like to forget, this one would be on the top of my list,’ Tiffany later recalled. ‘It was a disaster. On leaving the pickup site, one round hit the bundle of commo wire for my side of the aircraft, so I never heard anything. I did not know that we were hit in the fuel cell.’ Tiffany also did not know that jet fuel had sprayed out of the main gas lines.

Wagoner was scared and shaking but still able to help Burdo. He was thankful a second medic was aboard. Fortunately, the flight to the support base did not take long. Five minutes after the chopper was first hit, the skids of Dustoff 99 plowed down the LZ at FSB Whip–just as the fuel pumps spat the last of the JP-4 out of the holed fuel lines and sucked the cells dry.

Dustoff 93, a backup Eagle Dustoff sister ship flown by Irv Reid, touched down alongside the chopper within minutes of 99’s arrival. Meanwhile, Burdo’s crew gently rolled the medic over and slid him out the door. For a second Burdo was snagged on his twisted ‘monkey strap’ umbilical cord, which was still attached to the chopper, and Wagoner had to jerk the harness clear by unsnapping the end clamp from the cargo ring on the deck. There was just enough time to remove the medic’s hel-met before he was loaded onto Dustoff 93 for the flight to the hospital. Dustoff 93 then headed for the coast. That crew had completed the hoist mission and recovered all the wounded and dead Americans at the LZ.

Wagoner trotted around his pilot’s door and, with shaking hands, fumbled for the fire extinguisher. As he worked, he noticed an odd tear in his ‘chicken skin’ armored vest, which was lying on the cargo floor. A white piece of material peeked out from a hole two inches from the bottom end. Wagoner set the extinguisher down and began probing inside the guts of the vest. With an index finger he plucked out a copper-colored, beat-up AK-47 slug. The vest had clearly saved Wagoner’s life, but fragments and splinters of the bullet’s jacket had bitten into the young crew chief’s rear.

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