with leaflets and went out over an area and dropped them out all over the
place, hopefully on the bad guys. The leaflet was a "give up" invitation
for the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong to surrender and be treated as a
long lost brother. If you turned in your weapon as well you got some
money to boot I believe. No beatings, no prisoner of war camp, just
good times all around.
I had to fly this mission on more than one occasion and sometimes we did it with hugh speakers on the sides of the chopper that blared out music. Around Christmas time I had to fly the mission and I remember having the chopper loaded up with about a million of the leaflets and off we went to a very specific area. There was a man in charge and he gave me a map that had a specific hill top he wanted targeted for the drop. It was a single ship mission and required us to get a little lower than usual but what
the
heck. With speakers blaring out Vietnamese Christmas music we flew
over the hill for quite some time while the leaflets were being kicked
out. Every once in a while the Vietnamese soldier that was with the
other guy got on the horn and started speaking.
When we were finished something strange happened. The guy in charge had us circle a little ways away from the area by a small artillary base that was in the area. For about 15 minutes we just circled then he got on a little Army radio he had. Turns out he was talking to the artillery base below and had
just
ordered a barrage of shells to be sent to the hill top. Apparently
the base had already zeroed the hill in because there were no rounds needed
for adjustment. In seconds they blasted that hill away. I though
that was rather ironic, doing all that work then blowing away anyone that
decided to pick up those leaflets.
One side note on all of this is that the hill top was rather close to the artillery base, say about 1/2 to 3/4 mile. In order to hit the hill all around it's top the artillery pieces had to be pointing almost straight up. That meant those shells were going up in big airplane space the coming almost straight down. I wondered to myself how they handled that aircraft wise. I also wondered what they did when they had a short round.