They did not yet know whether - or when - the aircraft would blow up and burn. At first they could not even be certain who would reach them first, the enemy or the grunts, and when armed men approached in the darkness with rifles firing, they had a bad moment until they recognized the characteristic shape of the American helmet. It was Lieutenant Copen and his black cats.

The most pressing necessity was to free Harris from his trap beneath the helicopter. Despite his head wound, Senkar re-entered the chopper through a window and worked his way aft toward his imprisoned crew chief. ["I was the Aircraft Commander," he said the next day. "If that aircraft had exploded and we hadn't gotten him out, my life wouldn't have been worth beans to me."]

The tail of the helicopter was being supported above the ground by the barrel of Harris' M-60 machine gun, leaving a space underneath about 10 inches high, and into this space Copen wriggled to help free the crew chief.

They found him there alive, his left ankle broken and pinned by the same gun that supported the aircraft, his ammo box on his stomach, and more boxes from the payload on his chest. Together - Senkar inside the aircraft and Copen underneath - they began to work the boxes loose, not knowing at what moment they might all be engulfed in fire. Fuel was dripping out of the tank and onto Harris.

Copen was hindered in his work by the fact that Harris wanted to hold his hand. "You're not going to leave me here, are you?" Harris asked. "Please don't leave me here." Copen held his hand with one hand and worked at the boxes with the other. And in time they got him out.

No more choppers would fly into the LZ that night. They took Senkar and his crew inside the perimeter for the night, and the next morning a medevac ship came in and got them. When Senkar walked into operation a few minutes after his rescue, his head bound in a bloody bandage, he said,"I want to recommend my two gunners for the silver star."

Aloft at 4,000 feet in the flare ship, we knew only that 921 had crashed. Not until later did we learn that all the crew had survived, the two gunners with broken legs, Senkar with a head wound, and Braun physically unharmed. But we did know that retribution was swift and terrible. If we had been pounding the enemy hard, we hit him now with greater fury. Rocket and artillery fire poured into the area. Spooky, the C-47 armed with Gatling guns, came in to hose down the trees with streams of tracer bullets. They kept it up for hours while we drooped first one cargo of flares and then another.

But even the fiercest battle must have an end, and presently the firing died away. We dropped the last of our flares and turned toward Quan Loi with fuel running low, shivering from the cold. We stopped for a few minutes at the POL dump to fill the tanks so the bird would be ready to fly again. Then, half an hour past midnight, after 14 hours of combat flying, we settled for the last time in our revetment. Molstad's hands moved over the panels shutting off switches. The engine died away, and the rotors finally came to rest with a weary sight.