No one shot at us that afternoon. No bamboo stumps endangered our helicopters. The worst hazard arose from pickpockets. Yellow flight had been ordered out for an extraction, the removal of an element from a combat area. Extractions can prove hazardous because Charlie sometimes closes in as you reduce strength on the ground, but this afternoon we got away with it and never a shot fired.

Our passengers were Vietnamese troops - "little people" to the chopper pilots, and, indeed, they are little in comparison to American soldiers. Fully equipped, the American grunt is reckoned to weigh 240 pounds. A Huey chopper can haul only seven of him at a time, but it can haul 10 Vietnamese. As we landed on the Papa Zulu, they scrambled toward us, looking like Boy Scouts with their small, slender bodies, jungle suits, and red neckerchiefs. They brought with them an assortment of military equipment, straw hats, and green bananas. One had tied to his pack a 12-by-18inch framed color photograph of Pope Paul, hand upraised in benediction.

"Better check your pockets," Molstad advised me. "These guys will steal anything that isn't nailed down."

I glanced around suspiciously and tried to pull away from the crowd of bodies that pressed on me from all directions. Nervously I wedged my wallet down further in my hip pocket and sat on it.

We took off and flew toward a mountain that rose, green and beautiful, from the plain. The "little people" were returning to their base, which lay atop a hill at the foot of this mountain.

Molstad turned in his seat, then came on the intercom. "If you've got anything valuable in your pockets, you'd better hang on to it. There's a couple of guys looking you over."

I planted myself more firmly on my wallet, clenched my hands on my notebook and pencil, and prayed for the danger to pass. And pass it finally did. We deposited our little people at their base, and before we picked up any more, I transferred my wallet to a breast pocket inside my flak jacket where Houdini himself could not have reached it.

"You notice these guys in the red helmet liners?" asked Molstad on our next sortie. "They're RVN deserters who have been recaptured. They don't have any weapons, and they have to move out in front of the troops. If they get shot at, that's their tough luck." The Vietnamese play a rough brand of ball in this war.

And now it was night, and we had returned with our cargo of 40 flares to light the terrain for the troops of the Arizona element, who were heavily engaged with the enemy. As we came in at 4,000 feet, you could see the muzzle flashes down below and the explosions from the rockets and artillery shells that were being laid down in a protective curtain around them. They had moved four kilometers south from the bamboo saucer where we had landed them that morning and carved out a new LZ.

On this LZ, in the darkness, waited a chopper from Bravo Company, No. 921, commanded by Warrant Officer Gary P. Senkar, of Brunswick, Ohio, with Warrant Officer Timothy B. Braun of Norwalk, Conn., as pilot. Braun had already had more than his share of misfortune in his three months in Viet Nam. He had been shot down once, and only a few days ago a bullet had penetrated his aircraft, ricocheted off the cyclic control, and shot of the heel of his boot, the impact numbing his foot and knocking it off the pedal. He is a slight, tousle-hair youth with a fringe of a mustache. [A remarkable number of chopper pilots cultivate mustaches, some of them fine, fierce growths, waxed and twisted into handlebar spikes.]

Senkar had been flying re-supply sorties for the grunts since afternoon. It could be argued - and was at the time - that it was entirely to dangerous to send a re-supply chopper into that LZ, especially at night, but the grunts had made their initial assault with a minimum of equipment. They had no heavy weapons, and after a day of bitter combat, they were running out of food and ammunition. By the time we arrived at about 9:30, Senkar had gone in four times with C rations, 81-mm mortars, demolitions, and ammo. He had drawn fire every trip. He had one more trip to make - to bring in water for the grunts. Now he waited on the LZ until we could light his way out. We dropped our first flare.

Senkar began his take-off. "Nine-two-one coming out," he said over the radio. It was his last transmission.

As he rose, the enemy opened up with automatic weapons from at least three positions, the tracers converging over him, and into this murderous fire 921 hovered at a slow 10 knots. They had risen scarcely 30 feet when the bullets caught them. The aircraft plunged tail first, its rotor blades slashing off the trees as it fell and the gunners firing almost all the way to the ground.

One of the bullets pierced Senkar's helmet and circled inside where it smashed both earphones and creased his scalp. He knew at once that he had been hit in the head. The impact nearly caused him to lose consciousness, but he clung to the controls. Before they hit the ground, Braun had turned off the main switch, the fuel switch, and the electrical switches, an action that probably prevented the chopper from blowing up. "I don't know how the hell he did it," Senkar said later.

The aircraft crashed on its left side. Senkar's first thought was that he hoped it hadn't landed on top of any grunts. In this respect he need not have worried. They had fallen just outside the perimeter. They scrambled out of their wrecked bird, and Senkar counted to make sure they were all present. One, two, three. The crew chief, Pfc. Frank Harris, was still inside the aircraft, pinned in the left gunners position, a place about as big as a telephone booth but not as high. With the aircraft resting on its left side, Harris was trapped underneath.