Thursday, June 1, 1972
Guards Protect Helo Space For Flights From Kontum
KONTUM, Vietnam (AP) --Four guards -two American, two Vietnamese -stand at the yawing rear ramp of the helicopter, their rifles at the ready. They make threatening gestures at the crowd outside, an anxious mob of women with children slung under their arms, soldiers waving official papers, old men with the lines of worry and age in their faces.Despite the searing exhaust and gale-force winds of the rotor downdraft, the mob presses closer. The ramp is raised to prevent them from leaping aboard.The guards' job is not pleasant, but necessary. Only wounded soldiers and Americans are allowed.The helicopter taxis a few yards to get away from the crowd, and before the people can catch up an Army ambulance swings in behind and back to the ramp which descends again.The wounded come aboard, first two men on stretchers carried on and shoved to the front of the cabin.Then the others: a young man in the arms of a boy, a plasma bottle dangling near his weary brown face; a Montagnard woman with a baby wrapped entirely in black cloth and tied to her back; four soldiers with bandages on their heads, throats, chests; a girl with red-stained gauze holding her hand and arm together.Ramp up.Two American soldiers swing up and clamber aboard. They lived in Kontum once but now go there only in the daylight to guide in helicopters.The engines accelerate, and a cloud of dust and debris envelops the machine, driving the crowd back as the big craft lumbers into the air and turns south for Pleiku.Each day is the same now. A couple of hundred wait in the half finished downtown soccer stadium, hoping one of the diminishing number of helicopters will somehow open to them."No," the American sergeant explains to all who come begging. "Only Americans and wounded ARVN. Those are my orders."He speaks to them in English. They don't understand. But they must know by now."Guards Protect Helo Space For Flights From Kontum", by (AP), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Thursday, June 1, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.