A Day in the Life: Malcolm W. Browne in Vietnam

The small-caliber bullet ripped through the thin, aluminum skin of the Piasecki H21 troop-carrying helicopter just two feet from where Malcolm W. Browne, the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated Press, sat near the chopper’s rear door. 

The Viet Cong insurgent who fired the bullet at the helicopter, nicknamed Geisha Girl by its American crew from the 121st Aviation Company, had remarkable luck, as his projectile “tore through a pressure line and four engine control cables,” Browne recalled, as well as bouncing against other parts of the aircraft before exiting out the other side. The helicopter’s engine stopped and the correspondent could hear someone shout, “We’re going in! Hang on!” 

It had been a busy day in early January 1964 for the Geisha Girl. The helicopter was involved in what Browne described as “a particularly dangerous kind of field operation” known as an “eagle flight.” Such missions involved more than five helicopters packed with seasoned troops, often South Vietnamese Rangers or Marines, seeking out VC strongpoints that had been pinpointed by intelligence reports. 

Browne, who had been reporting about the conflict since his arrival in Saigon in 1961, noted that the helicopters flew at low-enough altitudes to draw enemy fire, at which point the troops disembarked and engaged in sharp, bloody exchanges with the VC. “Often, the eagle troops racked up excellent successes against enemy units,” he wrote, “and brought back weapons and severed heads as trophies.”

The Geisha Girl’s pilot and co-pilot had prepared for their dangerous duty by donning bulky, bullet-resistant flak vests before slogging down a muddy path to the flight line at the airstrip near Ca Mau, South Vietnam. “Pilots climbed up into their plexiglass-surrounded cockpits and slipped on heavy, white flight helmets,” Browne remembered. “Switches were flicked, and red instrument lights glowed from dashboards.”

Outside the chopper, its two gunners waited for the starting signal from the pilots. Nearby, Vietnamese soldiers stood up to adjust their field packs, which included cooking utensils, while, here and there, Browne saw, there “was a live duck hung by its feet from a soldier’s pistol belt. The Vietnamese army, perhaps more than other armies, travels on its stomach.”

Finally, the reporter heard the order to depart. “Pilots adjusted themselves in their seats, changed their engine mixtures, and tuned up radios for communications checks,” he reported. “Forward gunners took their positions at the open doors on the right side of the H21s, just behind the cockpit. They fed belts of ammunition into their guns and swung the gun mounts around into firing positions. Rear gunners gestured from their positions at open doors on the left side near the tail for the troops to come aboard.” 

Those inside the helicopter had to sit or squat on the floor, as there were no seats. Browne could see the glow from cigarettes piercing the gloomy morning light as the chopper cruised down the runway, “much like conventional airplanes taking off. Hovering or taking off vertically puts too much load on the engine of a loaded H21.”

In addition to participating in the “eagle flights,” the Geisha Girl had delivered supplies to Nam Cam, a town that had been attacked and damaged by the VC the previous night, leaving behind seven dead, sixteen wounded, and seven missing South Vietnamese soldiers. The helicopter also made stops at “other dangerous places” in the area, including Cai Nuoc, Dam Doi, and Cha La, all of which had recently been overrun by the Communists, Browne wrote. With its day almost over, Geisha Girl was only two miles away from its home base. “Helicopters had been making the same approach to the air strip all day long without incident,” he noted, “and the crew was almost ready to relax when the slug hit.”

As the gunners kept the enemy busy by blazing away at the ground below, Captain Joseph Campbell of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, threw the two rotors overhead into “auto rotation,” a technique used by chopper pilots that kept their crafts “from dropping like rocks when their engines quit,” Browne said. If the helicopter had enough forward speed, the rotors continued to whirl, keeping the aircraft aloft enough so it could glide in for a safe landing. If a helicopter did not have enough speed, its pilot had to dive to make it happen. “He cannot do this if he is too near the ground,” the newsman pointed out. “For this reason, slow-speed flight at an altitude lower than two hundred feet can be fatal in the event of engine failure.”

Luckily for Browne and the Geisha Girl crew, Campbell had just enough speed to survive. “The ground came up fast,” Browne remembered. “Campbell skimmed the banana-shaped craft over a high dike, and then pulled the nose up sharply to flair the ship out on soft ground. It bumped down into a bramble patch, and everything was suddenly very silent.” 

Both gunners, Private First Class Edward Weglarz of Haddonfield, New Jersey, and Private First Class David M. Sands of Gassaway, West Virginia, scrambled out the doors in just a few seconds. With their guns at the ready, the two men sought cover in the brambles, establishing a defensive perimeter against an expected enemy attack. “The Viet Cong has never shown mercy to downed helicopter men,” Browne noted, “and has never taken one alive.”

According to established evacuation procedures for such incidents, the crew had to make sure to remove the chopper’s guns and as much ammunition as they could carry. “If it looks as though the Viet Cong is certain to capture the aircraft,” Browne wrote, “it must be destroyed. The guerrillas love to capture guns and radios from downed helicopters.”

The evacuation from the Geisha Girl went “smoothly, quickly and silently,” he said, but no enemy appeared. “Apparently the guerrilla who shot us down was content with his one lucky shot,” Browne concluded. Within a short time, a second H21 had landed near the crash site. The correspondent and crew hastily scrambled through the brambles to climb aboard the rescue craft. Safe at the base, the survivors smoked cigarettes while a company of Vietnamese troops moved out to provide security at the downed Geisha Girl. “This sort of thing happens often in South Viet Nam,” Brown informed his readers, “but even the most seasoned helicopter crew never gets accustomed to it. Sometimes everyone comes out without a scratch. Sometimes a few people are hurt. Sometimes everyone aboard is killed.”

Trying to relax after the ordeal, an impressed Weglarz told Browne that the VC gunner must have been pleased with the result of his day’s work. Weglarz pointed out that for the cost of only about seven cents, how much it cost to produce the bullet, the insurgent had been able to shoot down a U.S. helicopter costing thousands of dollars.

Using such “cost-effective weaponry,” Browne noted, had become a hallmark of the way the VC operated in its fight against the government of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem. During an operation in the An Xuyen region, Browne and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers he accompanied came upon a hidden weapons factory that manufactured mortars and shotguns. “They made the shotgun ammunition from short lengths of brass tubing, to which they soldered old French ten-centime coins, the kind with a hole in the middle,” Browne recalled. “The workers crimped percussion caps into these holes and loaded the finished cases with powder and shot.”

The crash sobered Geisha Girl’s crew. One of the men told Browne that he and the other Americans engaged in such operations knew their jobs were not safe; as Browne reported, of the first hundred combat deaths in South Vietnam, forty-three had been in helicopters. “We just keep hoping from one day to the next that our luck won’t run out,” the crewman commented to the reporter. “But the job has to be done, and you can’t keep worrying about it.”

Browne’s day was far from over. Returning to Saigon, he went to the AP office on Rue Pasteur Street, rolled a sheet of paper into an old Underwood typewriter, and began writing an article to send over the wires about his perilous adventure. Still aching from the crash, however, Browne discovered that nothing he put on paper seemed to fully capture what he experienced. “It’s astonishing how often war correspondents face writer’s block after witnessing dangerous battles,” he observed, “often falling back on stupid clichés just to finish some kind of dispatch.”

As he finished his piece, Browne received a telephone call from a diplomat he had always assumed also worked as an intelligence agent. The man had called to invite the newsman to a black-tie cabaret show at the Caravelle Hotel that evening for which the other guests would include senior Vietnamese officials Browne had been trying to interview; he accepted the invitation. 

Years later, Browne could not remember the conversation he had with the officials that night, but knew that the featured performer was Juliette Greco, a well-known French singer and actress. “Her sultry songs were balm to her footsore listeners, and it crossed my mind, not for the first time, that Saigon was a city of astonishing contrasts,” he recalled.

Enraptured by Greco’s voice, Browne glanced out the window overlooking the Saigon River and could see streams of red tracers “arching through the darkness beyond the river, and occasional yellow flashes marked the impacts of shells.”

Feeling restored, Browne returned to his apartment, located over his office, only to find, stuck under his door, three blue-and-white envelopes containing messages from his superiors at AP reading: “Unipress [United Press International] has three choppers down but your crash has only one stop if correct need matcher sapest foreign.”

Translating the cable language, Browne knew he had to confirm if UPI’s account was correct and, if so, produce a comparable story as quickly as he could. “I wearily picked up the phone and began trying to raise a U.S. military spokesman,” Browne said.