Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (10 page)

“Down 10, 5, load’s on the ground, load’s released. Cleared to go,” your flight engineer calls, and the landing light goes off as you pull up the thrust lever, adding lots of power and climb out, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Attitude wings level with a little nose down to gain speed, attitude increasing rapidly to get your aircraft back above 6,000 feet and those invisible mountains, airspeed increasing toward 120 knots for the trip home. Green, red, and white back on, Anti-collision lights back on as you climb back to where the jets are.

It takes about 15 minutes after you reach cruising altitude and the Air Force is directing you home for the pucker factor to decrease enough to let the seat cushion start coming out from between the cheeks of your ass, just like the joke says. It’s only a thirty-minute flight back to Lift master Pad, but you have to refuel at Camp eagle on the way so that the aircraft will be ready to fly in the morning.

Finished, you lift off and in a few minutes you are on the ground back at your base. After shutting down in the revetment at Liftmaster, you find you are so tired you can barely climb out of the seat. You sit there for a few minutes gathering your stuff and trying to show nothing but cool. After that few minutes, you climb out of the cockpit and go through the companion way back into the main cabin. Everyone is too tired to give a shit about cool and besides, you can barely see each other in the dark.

The night is nearly over for you but not for the enlisted crew. They start the process of turning the aircraft around, doing the maintenance checks, getting it ready for its next missions in the morning. You are supposed to post-flight but you are too tired, so you walk back across the PSP to the gate out onto the company street without stopping. The crew will catch any problems. Once you clear the wire around Liftmaster Pad, you stop at the barrel buried in the ground at a 60-degree angle. You pull out your .45, drop the magazine, and pull back the slide to clear it. Then you dry fire it into the drum just to make sure it really is empty before you pick up the ammo can with the survival gear and the KY28 and walk on to Ops to turn it all in and to find out what’s next for you. No missions tomorrow, or at least not tomorrow morning. Sleep would be good now.

10

FLARES

I CORPS, VIETNAM ■ JUNE 1971

The preferred method of delivering flares was artillery, and with the coverage of I Corps in $‘&$ nearly everything was within reach. After artillery, the Air Force C-$%#s flying out of Da Nang were called. They had a lot of fuel and a lot of flares so they could provide coverage for quite a while. Sometimes neither the artillery nor the C-$%#s were available and the Chinooks took up the mission.

Y
ou see your name on the mission sheet as “night flare ship standby” and know two things—you can’t drink that day and you will spend the day and night hoping that nothing will happen that would cause you to have to fly. You hope it so much that you almost begin to pray that it will be a quiet night and that nothing will happen until tomorrow in the daylight. But each time you get night flare ship standby, somehow you feel that that night will not be quiet, and as you preflight your aircraft in the late afternoon, you try and do an extra careful job, not that it matters much. Your aircraft isn’t the problem—the dark is the problem.

Flare ship standby flew out of Camp Evans, 40 miles north of Phu Bai. Before dark you would take your bird up there, and after refueling at Evan’s “crash pad” (so called because of its slope which made your front wheels touch down first instead of the back ones, resulting in a less than graceful touch down) to max fuel instead of the usual 4,800 pounds, you would shut down on the helicopter pad over by the Tactical Operations Center (TOC).

Before you came to Camp Evans, the crew would have already removed the beam that the cargo hook hangs from in the center of the hellhole and replaced it with a square cover that fit the opening exactly. A two-foot long tube a little bigger around than a flare is fitted to the center of the cover. Directly over the tube the crew has installed a wire with a six-inch metal ring on its bottom end. The crew will attach the flare’s arming wire, which acts like the pin on a hand grenade, only after the flare has been manually placed in the tube. When the crewman releases the flare, it falls through the tube and away from the aircraft. the arming wire remains attached to the ring, thus as with a hand grenade, the pin is pulled and after the preset time has passed the flare’s parachute will open and the flare will ignite. the crew then loaded the pallet of flares that would be used to provide the illumination for the night, usually around 48 three-foot long aluminum cylinders.

The AC always goes into the TOC and waits. the crew had the aircraft “cocked”—the checklist done up to APU start, so that no time would be wasted when the call for illumination came from the grunts. When they need flares they need them NOW. then you waited. most nights that’s all you did, wait. Sleep if you could. Look at the maps and the friendly troop positions and the positions where Intel thought the NVA were. Look at the pile of Soviet bloc weapons in the corner, captured somewhere and now just sitting there in the TOC. They would never be souvenirs to bring home because some of them were automatics. On some of the AK-47’s you could see the holes where pellets from a Clamor mine had hit them. One AK had its stock mostly rotted away by the jungle damp, but if you looked down the barrel and worked the action it was apparent that the weapon would still fire if asked to.

But mostly you waited—and waited—and waited: hoping that the call would not come and yet, at the same time, bored to the point where you wanted something, anything, to happen.

Then a radio call from Division Ops, a grunt patrol could hear Vietnamese voices and movement, but they couldn’t see where they came from. Flares. Flares would let them fix the enemy for destruction by the artillery or machine guns. No artillery or C-130s available tonight. Here are the coordinates, takeoff now!

You run to the aircraft down the dark path, yelling as you go and by the time you climb in the back over the slick ramp, the APU is running and the red lights are glowing and oh, shit is it dark out there beyond the wire …

By the time you are strapped in and have your helmet on, the copilot has the engines running and the blades turning and you take the controls, and as the flight engineer says “Ready in the back, clear to lift” you are pulling up on the thrust lever and climbing into the dark, dark, dark. As you clear the wire around Camp evans, all you see are the red instruments on your dash as you climb toward the invisible mountains to the west and north.

The Air Force radar is up tonight and over the UHF radio, you give them the grid coordinates where you are headed, where the grunts need the flares NOW. they vector you in that direction as you continue to climb until you hit 10,000 feet, the standard operating procedure (SOP), drop altitude, 4,000 feet above the highest mountain in I Corps. Leveling off at 10,000 there is still no horizon except along the coast where there are city and town lights—clouds above you and darkness everywhere—cold up there too and you close your window against the wind blowing in. Then you are in further darkness as your aircraft enters the clouds and only the red glow of your flight instruments keeps you oriented to know up from down, right from left. The copilot turns off the upper red anti-collision lights so the red glare does not distract you. the words and directions of the Air Force controller keep you moving toward the coordinates of the grunts that need your flares.

At this stage of your flying career, you don’t have much instrument flight time since Army flight school concentrated on getting the pilots to the war as quickly as possible, so you concentrate hard on the instruments, scanning back and forth across the red gauges, attitude, altitude, airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Attitude means your wings are level, you are climbing, not diving in the blackness below. There is no autopilot in this Chinook so you must concentrate attitude, altitude, airspeed because a few seconds loss of concentration and you could be out of control and that cannot happen because the men in the back trust you to bring them back from this mission; you are the aircraft commander, the AC.

Your copilot calls the grunts on the fox mike, asking for the situation on the ground and they whisper back. The NVA are near and they cannot talk much or very loudly without giving themselves away. In response to their whisper, your copilot whispers back, but they cannot hear him so he switches back to normal volume. His voice is cool, always cool, knowing that you are listening to him, the crew is listening to him, the grunts are listening and he cannot be anything but cool least it upset the crew, the grunts, and diminishes him in their eyes. In his eyes too …

For once the flight engineer, the Chief, is listening to the radios too and when he knows the aircraft is close to tonight’s destination, he gets the crew up and ready to start dropping the flares. Behind you, on the cabin side of the companionway, he pulls the black curtain they have hung over the opening closed so that they can use the bright white cabin lights without blinding the pilots. You cannot see what they are doing, but you know that they have removed the plastic covers from the tops of the first group of flares. The flares will not be, must not be, cannot be, armed until they are in the tube, ready for drop. One man will lift the flare and another will guide it into the tube and together they will hold it there while the timing settings are adjusted on the top. During the process, should anything go wrong, they just let go of it and the flare falls harmlessly away from the aircraft. God help us all if one ever goes off inside the cabin. The burning magnesium will eat a hole right through the cabin deck and set everything close to it on fire as it goes through the flooring.

You have the grunts’ position in grid coordinates as close as they can give it to you, and the Air Force radar controller begins to vector you in a race track pattern over it. The controller has the winds aloft forecast and moves you a little north so that the flares will move south on their parachutes over the grunts’ position for as long as possible instead of drifting uselessly away. You tell the Chief to drop two so that the grunts can see if you are in position to give them the light they need. As he calls “two away,” you brace for the flash of light that comes when they go off in the clouds. The flash never comes. The flares did not light.

“Check your settings and drop three more,” you tell the Chief, and moments later he calls them gone. Still no flash, but the grunts below report loud crashes and thuds around them. the flares are falling straight to the ground without their parachutes opening.

The grunts are calling for flares more urgently now. The impact of the unlit flares has the NVA excited. Something is going on but they don’t know what. You tell the Chief to just start throwing flares out, hoping you will run out of the bad batch of flares and into a batch that is not defective.

He has ten more out the chute before you tell him to hold. You know you are into a good lot by the dim flashes below you in the clouds. The grunts report it looks like full daylight around them. the NVA have gone, their voices faded as the flares turn the darkness into temporary light. No more flares are required for this mission. Just as the NVA have gone, now so have the clouds and when you look up from attitude, altitude, and airspeed, you see you are in open skies, stars and a faint, faint moon above.

You call back to battalion to tell them you are on your way home, but they tell you to hold, another mission is coming and if you still have flares they want you to take it. There are still 25 or more flares back there so you maintain your altitude at 10,000 feet, comfortable now in the clear air, and you ask the Air Force to keep you in your present position until you are directed to where you are needed next. Passing control of the aircraft to the copilot, you light a cigarette and look out the window toward the faint, dark ground below. Up to the north you can see the lights of the coastal villages in North Vietnam. It seems odd—they should be dark against our bombers, like in WWII, you think as you look at what must be the lights of a small town in the far distance. But then we don’t bomb coastal villages and towns, just jungle and military positions. Do we?

On the ground there is a flash, then another and another. Artillery impacting. How odd that it should be hitting there in the lowlands so close to what your map shows as friendly positions. You switch the fox mike to the arty clearance agency and ask who’s firing and where it’s going. No one is shooting, they tell you, so you give them the location of the impacting rounds as close as you can figure it. Still they insist no one is shooting, yet you see more flashes below you. Arty clearance again tells you it isn’t us shooting.

Looking to the north across the DMZ, you see a faint flash and you count until you see the flash on the ground below you. North Vietnamese artillery is shooting into the south. You’ve waited a long time for this. Digging through the papers in your helmet bag, you find the one you need and then pull the signal operating instructions (SOI) from the pocket in your bullet bouncer and find the frequency for the long range 175’s howitzers at their firebase near Dong Ha.

“Oscar Kilo One, Playtex One two, fire mission over.”

A moment of silence from the artillery, they’ve never had a Chinook call in a fire mission before. They ask you to authenticate who you are by using the code letters in the SOI, and when they are satisfied that you are who you say you are, they give you the artilleryman’s reply, “Playtex One two, Oscar Kilo One, fire mission out.”

Your heart starts beating faster as you prepare to adjust the long-range guns against the enemy positions. With each radio, you call in the sequence you must go through to adjust artillery fire and hope no one stops you. When you talk to artillery, headquarters at each level is always listening and can abort the mission with a word. But also when you talk to artillery, silence is consent, and silence remains except for you and the gunners calling back and forth.

“Counter-battery fire,” you tell them, and you can almost hear the passion in the artilleryman’s voice as he answers you. Cannon against cannon, maybe for the first time in this war. Their 175’s will rip the old Soviet guns the NVA are firing into twisted hot metal bits as soon as the rounds arrive on target.

As you near the end of the call for fire checklist, maybe 30 seconds from the first rounds headed down range, things change. Out of the black sky, over the enemy gun position in North Vietnam, comes a bright red stream of tracers, like a fire hose spraying red water. An AC-130 Specter gunship has found the enemy and is playing their 20mm Gatling guns over them, maybe their onboard 105mm gun too. On the ground below the invisible Air Force aircraft, you can see little flashes in the blackness. The big flashes to the north have stopped. You tell the artillery what happened and they “roger.” You go off their frequency and return to standing by, waiting in orbit at 10,000 feet. To the north, where the flashes came from, there is only blackness now. The lights of the small city still twinkle.

You are down to only an hour of fuel remaining when battalion tells you the other mission is canceled and you can come on back to Phu Bai. You are getting tired now and welcome the call. As you fly south, the clouds return and you are inside them again. You take the controls back from the copilot, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Only blackness outside the red glow of your cockpit now and you want badly for this to be over. You are so tired, tired from concentrating on keeping your aircraft in the air, tired from trying to get light to the grunts, tired …

The Air Force radar turns you over to Phu Bai radar for a ground controlled approach (GCA) “Playtex, descend to 1000 on heading 180,” they call as they line you up for the runway. The calls come, left, right, on course, above glide path, below glide path, left, right, on glide path, on course, approaching decision height and then you are out of the clouds and the runway is in front of you where it should be. “Switch to tower frequency,” the GCA controller calls, wishing you good night. Then, as your copilot finishes switching, bright white flashes stream in front of you between you and the runway
. 5o cal machine gun
and blood pumping, you pull in an armload of thrust and shoot back into the now sheltering clouds, climbing as hard as the aircraft can climb.