HOT SPRINGS — A Hot Springs native and highly decorated U.S. Army veteran who served three tours in Vietnam is the subject of a planned documentary about his 2015 return visit to Vietnam, where he spent more than two weeks with 17 of the enemy soldiers he fought against.
Retired Lt. Col. Hugh Mills, who now serves as under-sheriff of the Jackson County sheriff’s office in Kansas City, Mo., said the documentary is “being maneuvered through Hollywood right now” and hasn’t been completed, but he was able to show a trailer for the film to members of the John Percifull Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution at a recent meeting in Hot Springs.
“This had never been done. No one had ever met and talked directly to members of a specific unit with which they fought in a specific battle,” he said. “These 17 guys had never met an American soldier. They had seen them from a distance during the war, but had never met one.”
A 1966 graduate of Hot Springs High School, Mills enlisted in the Army in February 1967. He completed officer candidate school and rotary wing flight school before he began serving as a first lieutenant and scout platoon leader in the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam in March 1969.
Mills is the author of Low Level Hell, a Scout Pilot in the Big Red One, chronicling his experiences during his first tour of duty.
“At the age of 20, I was in command of a platoon of combat pilots and 10 aircraft. To me, at that age, I didn’t know any better and thought it was a heck of a lot of fun,” he said, noting that he flew scout aircraft for all of 1969 until December.
He said the helicopters the pilots flew were “very small, geared for two people,” and their mission was to fly “extremely low, like 4 to 6 feet off the ground,” to track enemy soldiers.
“We tracked them by their footprints, by discarded cigarette butts, their body odor. That’s how close we were to these guys,” he said. As a result, his group had “arguably the highest mortality rate. About 80 percent of the guys I flew with during that time were killed in combat.”
After the success of his book in 1992, Mills said he set about working on a sequel to cover his second and third tours in Vietnam, when he flew Cobra gunships, continuing his service until September 1972 when hostilities ceased.
He said he wanted to focus on one particularly dramatic 30-day period between Dec. 31, 1971, and Jan. 30, 1972, when he was a 23-year-old troop commander of aerial weapons for the 5th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, stationed at Quang Tri Army Airfield directly below the Demilitarized Zone between north and south Vietnam.
On Dec. 31, 1971, one of their UH-1 troop-carrying aircraft was shot down while en route to Khe Sanh to do reconnaissance and crashed with eight men on board. Mills said all 10 Cobra gunships were launched to set up a defensive pattern over the crashed aircraft. A scout ship was sent in to rescue the crew, but it was shot down, too.
They eventually managed to rescue the survivors, but two crew members were shot and killed by a North Vietnamese soldier who attacked their position.
On Jan. 20, another aircraft was shot down at 5,000 feet in the same area. While they rescued most of the crew, they lost two men who were never recovered.
On Jan. 30, Mills was sent out to engage an enemy anti-aircraft position in that same area that was targeting jets.
“It didn’t occur to me that if they were shooting down jets I might be an easier target,” he said. In the middle of the engagement he was hit, lost his plane’s rotors and crashed on the side of a mountain.
He said he had been shot, had a broken leg and a fractured collarbone. His fellow crew member, John Bryant, was “terribly injured” and was trapped so Mills couldn’t move him.
“We could hear the North Vietnamese moving around us and knew they were using us as bait to get a rescue craft to come in. We could hear them talking,” he said.
After being on the ground for about one day, they were rescued. In preparing to work on the sequel to his earlier book, Mills said he became interested in trying to identify the North Vietnamese unit and particularly the one young soldier responsible for shooting down him and the others.
He contacted Merle Pribbenow, a retired CIA operations officer and Vietnamese linguist who served in Vietnam from 1970-75, to see if he could help.
“Within three days, he called me back and said it was the 10th Company, 8th Battalion, 241st North Vietnamese anti-aircraft regiment, and the guy who shot me down was Pham Ngoc Anh,” Mills said.
Teaming up with a movie producer friend, Mark Eberle, Mills along with Mills’ wife, Sharyn, and a film crew journeyed to Hanoi in 2015 to meet with the unit at a cafe.
“They all lived in a small village near the Chinese border. I spent 17 days with them,” he said, noting they took a 12-hour bus trip back to the site where Mills had crashed.
“We walked the ground where all these events had occurred,” he said.
He was even able to salvage a piece of his helicopter and sneak it into his luggage to bring back to the U.S. He said the first question the soldiers asked upon meeting him was his age.
After learning he was two years older than most of them, “they called me uncle,” he said. “They revere age. I became Uncle Hugh, and they immediately began calling Sharyn madame, and anytime we walked anywhere they would come up on a scooter and offer her a ride.”
He said they were “treated famously” with “never an ounce of discord.” He noted that the men would approach and want to hold his hand, and all wanted to share a drink.
“Mind you, there were 17 of them and one of me, so I would get 17 shots and one each for them,” he said, laughing.
“Soldiers on both sides are identical. They were doing what they were doing for their country, and I was doing what I did for my country,” he said.