... The bad news was that our fuel warning light had come on with its audio alarm sounding off. The light flashed on the instrument panel as both pilots froze at once. Neither one had any real clue to our present location or where our own troops were below us. We did not have enough fuel to make it out of the fog-shrouded forest. We had no idea which way to turn the aircraft. All directions held a mystery. All the ground below us was hostile and forbidding. There was no right place to go. We were stuck in this twilight zone between certain death and the fog.

We had remaining only about five to 10 minutes of fuel. None of us really knew for sure how much was supposed to be left when the fuel warning light came on. We did not know how much time we had before our aircraft would drop out of the sky into whatever waited for us below. If it were treetops, then our ship would crash and the rotor blades would thrash the trees and twist the body of the helicopter and those inside it. We knew what that would look like because we had seen one of our company ships do that same thing just the week before. That image played over and over inside my head.

The other possibility was that if we could crash land and survive, we would certainly be at a high risk for being captured or killed by enemy troops. It would be a long time before anyone could find and rescue us. The fog would hide our aircraft for hours, and no one would have any idea where we were because we did not even know for sure ourselves.

All these thoughts ran through our minds. Our hearts were pounding like long distance runners in a race we had just lost. I looked around, as I would normally do in this kind of situation, trying to figure out what I might need once we crashed. I grabbed my M-16 rifle and some magazine clips. I wasn't carrying any food or water. We did have lots of colored smoke grenades to use in case we were in need of a rescue attempt. But in this fog, no one would be able to see them. ...