I think I need to put a few things straight about this whole shooting down an rpg in flight thing. First off, it definitely comes under do not try this at home even if you ARE an expert. Expert is defined as anyone who has tried it once and is still breathing. You see, there aren’t many reasons to try such a thing. But when looking right shows certain death coming hotfoot, and looking left shows a crack in the wall that you couldn’t scrape though one time in a million…one in ten million…you instinctively make a dive for the crack. Now I was very lucky. Very lucky. I just happened to be laying down suppression not very far from Mr. NVA when he took his shot, so I only has a small arc to cover. Just a quick shift of the wrist. Still, a lot of luck involved. When the pilot asked what happened, I just said an rpg went off prematurely. I figured he wouldn’t believe what happened. Even some guys who saw it all from other choppers didn’t believe. I heard a lot of “You know, it almost looked like you shot that thing out of the air” and “You were really lucky that thing went off prematurely. I never heard of that happening before.”
Now there’s the matter of actually seeing the rpg in flight. That came from being in the Zone. An RPG is a rocket propelled grenade, and it is fast, fast, fast. I’ve heard a lot of athletes and sportscasters talk about being in the Zone, but I think most of them simply mean they played their A-game. But they weren’t in the Zone, because in the Zone, you don’t make mistakes. None. I discovered this playing baseball and basketball and later football. You can’t always get there, certainly not at will, but when you do…. What happens is that while you are moving at normal speed, everybody else, everything else, is moving in slow motion. Passes float like they were drifting through honey. You have all the time in the world to position yourself. And your vision improves, sharpens. The quarterback has carried out a perfect bootleg. Everybody thinks that fullback coming up the middle has the ball. But even if you didn’t catch the motion when the QB tucked the ball behind his leg, you spot that tiny sliver of ball that just barely shows, and you’re right there to meet him when he reaches the line. Maybe you drop him for a loss before he can get his pass off. In the Zone. That’s the only reason I could make this play.
On another note, I was riding an M-60 on a pintle mount, not a .50 cal. We only had a limited number of Ma-deuces, and we had to be careful not to let any IG inspectors see them because we weren’t authorized to have any at all. Don’t know whether I could have done it with a .50, frankly. A matter of just that much more weight to swing, that much more inertia to overcome. It was damned close even with a 60.
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