Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (30 page)

I called the ship for landing. We were cleared for a starboard approach, coming in on the right side for a smooth, routine landing. Just before the captain disembarked, he came to the cockpit again to shake my hand. He said, “this may be routine to you, but it’s amazing to me.”

An hour later we were back on the ground in Gibraltar and I thought to myself, the captain was right that it was routine to us and that’s what made it amazing. It was a perfect flight and yet I remember it. Cheated death again …

31

FINAL FLIGHT WITH THE ROYAL NAVY

CORNWALL, UNITED KINGDOM ■ JUNE 1985

After two years as an exchange officer, I was ready to go home. The Royal Navy Commandos could not have made me feel more welcome, could not have given me more responsibility, more adventures—Norway, ships, Gibraltar, Scotland, Egypt, Cyprus—but I was ready to go home. As with most tours, as the end came near, I was assigned missions of less and less importance; in a way I went from being the male lead to being a supporting character actor, you might say.

T
he last flight was to be an easy one, number three on a flight of three going from Yeovilton to “Coldnose,” and then out into the Channel to work with a submarine on practice personnel hoists. As with the hoist of the admiral and his aide off Gibraltar, it would require some precision hovering because if you are in position to pick up a person, you sometimes cannot see much of the actual submarine. As noted earlier, water looks like water, making it very difficult to hold a steady position, but all in all it would not be too taxing on a fine day like this one. In fact, in the end it required nothing at all from my aircraft. The other two Sea Kings took care of all the work and I was released to go home early.

I refueled at Culdrose and headed back east across Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor back to Somerset. It was a nice day, flying single ship at 500 feet above the ground, enjoying the view of Jamaica Inn country, Daphne du Maurier country, knowing full well that this quite probably would be the last time I’d see it this way. The next time, I thought, I won’t have a multimillion British pound helicopter at my command: I’ll be just driving a car like everyone else.

I am flying by myself today, no copilot in the cockpit and only my crewman in the back. No load, no worries, a nice way to end two years as an exchange officer from the US Marine Corps to the British Royal Navy.

Thirty minutes into the one-hour flight, my aircrewman calls calmly, “Fixed wing rolling in at 4 o’clock.” His voice sounds a little too calm.

Since he did not say “jet” I automatically assume it’s a Chipmunk, a small two-seat prop training aircraft, from one of the local air stations, out to have a little fun with the passing Sea King. Normally I would not play but it’s my last flight and a beautiful day over the moor, so why not?

How you fight a fixed-wing when you are flying a helicopter depends mostly on what the fixed-wing does and what kind of fixed wing he is. If he is a high-speed fighter, like an F-4, you are in good shape because he cannot turn with you. If he comes down to helicopter altitudes, he is in every anti-air system in the world’s range, so he must keep his speed up, which means that you can always out turn him. If he is an attack aircraft, like an A-4, he can turn but still not as rapidly as you can. But whatever he is, you must see him immediately so that you will know what he intends to do, how he is going to attack. In either case he cannot stay down with you too long because fighters rapidly burn up all their fuel at low altitudes.

Your first move is to fly directly toward him, gaining as much speed as you can. You put him right on your nose so that you increase the closure rate and thereby decrease the time he has to lock you up in his sights. While you are turning, you climb to 200 or 300 feet above the ground so that you have a little bit of maneuvering area below you, but not so much that he can get below you and skylight your aircraft. If you survive his first pass, you try to disappear. He cannot stay down low for long because as I said, he is burning a lot of fuel there and is still vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.

If he is diving on you, wait until he is just about in gun range, and turn hard away from him. You must actually displace the aircraft over the ground, not just change heading. As you turn, watch his wings. When he turns to line you up in his sights, you turn hard the other direction and slip toward the ground. He may not be able to follow and will pass you by. As he starts his turn to come back, you hide behind a terrain feature, if you can find one, and you hope he gives it up and goes away. He probably won’t though. A kill is a kill and five makes him an ace.

If he comes down to your altitude of 200 or 300 feet instead of diving on you, you immediately descend to 100 feet holding at as much speed as you can get out of the helicopter, and just before he gets into gun range, you pull up your nose and start a cyclic climb. He will be watching you and will pull his nose up to keep you locked up. When you see his nose start up, you immediately push yours back down. If he follows you and pushes his nose down too, he will fly into the ground before he realizes what just happened. I almost got an A-4 that way back at Yuma in the WTI course. I could see his wings wobble as he wanted to follow me but realized what I was doing just as he started to move his nose.

If you are being attacked by an armed helicopter and you are flying a transport helicopter, there is a 100 percent chance he will kill you within 90 seconds of getting in range. If you are flying an armed helicopter there is a 90 percent chance that you will both get off shots and will kill each other in about the same time frame. No helicopter can out turn another.

But this is not a helicopter attacking, it’s a fixed wing. In all cases, you must always keep him in sight. Lose sight and die. So I turned my Sea King hard to starboard, adding power and adding rudder to get the nose around quicker. Looking up through the greenhouse I saw my “attacker.”

Spitfire

It was a real Spitfire, painted in Battle of Britain colors, and could only have been a private aircraft. The pilot came down to see if this Royal Navy helicopter wanted to play for a few minutes.

I could not believe that I was looking at a Spitfire, already leveling his wings in a dive and closing in on my helicopter to within gun range. If this was real, I would quite probably be dead in a few moments. A literal chill went up my spine and I felt 40 years melt away. WWII had returned and now I was in it.

I went through the motions of fighting a fixed-wing, but we had not trained to engage World War II fighters. I had flown T-28’s, a single engine low-wing aircraft like a Spitfire, though with nowhere near the performance of a Spitfire, and I knew how quickly that aircraft could turn. I found out immediately that even a helicopter couldn’t turn with a Spitfire. We did three passes, two more after the first surprise one, and there is no doubt in my mind that he “killed” me on every pass. None of the “got you,” “no, you didn’t,” “did too”—no, he had me on every pass. We both knew it. In my mind, I could see the six machine guns on his wings firing and see the tracers growing bigger and bigger as they hit my Sea King.

After the third pass, I rolled wings level at 500 feet and 110 knots. The Spitfire came alongside, slowing to match my speed like only a WWII fighter can. Modern fighters stall out at speeds higher than the max speed of a Sea King. The pilot held position at three o’clock while my crewman took pictures of him against the backdrop of the moor, and then with a waggle of his wings, he added power and climbed up to the right and was gone. Both the Spitfire pilot and I were smiling the entire time.

My crewman and I said nothing as we continued on back to Yeovilton—nothing to say. We had an experience that few people get to see now, had taken a small trip back in time, a warrior from Vietnam and a warrior from WWII greeting each other. For a few minutes, that river of time stopped and the 40 years were gone. Then they came back and we were alone in the sky over the brown moor.

Forty minutes later, I landed at Yeovilton and taxied back to the 846 Squadron ramp. I shut down Sea King VH bureau number ZA-293 after 2.7 hours of flight time. My exchange tour with the Junglies was over.

Cheated death one final time with the Royal Navy. Luck and superstition, that’s all it is.

EPILOGUE

THE WALL, 20 YEARS AFTER

SEPTEMBER 1989

I think we humans imagine we get over things, but then something always happens that shows us that we really do not. The best we can do is to suppress …

O
n a warm, sunny, late-summer’s day, I stopped off to see some old friends, friends I had not seen in 17 years. You see, I was learning to be a bureaucrat at a government “college”—the Defense Systems Management College (DSMC), at Ft. Belvoir just south of Washington, D.C. After 20 years of flying helicopters around the world for the Army, National Guard, the Royal Navy, and Marine Corps, I had to face the inevitable for career officers: a tour in an office, in an office building, in DC …

At our college they were worried about us. The course was very intense, with a lot of pressure on all the students, so they were worried about our physical health, as well as our mental health. They gave us blood tests to check our cholesterol levels and classes on how to relax while we learn about buying weapons of mass destruction, office supplies, and everything in between. Some of their students had had heart attacks while attending and one committed suicide before even graduating. I feel the pressure too. I don’t know what it is, but somehow, using the weapons of war never bothered me as much as the act of buying them. maybe the idea that you personally may have to pay the ultimate price for defending your country
right now
is more what I always imagined military life would be. Instead, I am to become another tiny cog in the bureaucracy in the endless government offices of the Washington metro area.

If I stay long enough, maybe I will be like the others in the office, praying that I will not die of a heart attack or stroke in the traffic and monotony of office life, instead of praying that I can get through one more dark night boat launch in an old, tired helicopter and my friends won’t have to scrape up what is left of me from the wreckage and take it home to a closed coffin funeral.

But my friends, my old friends, I visited them again on that warm, sunny, late-summer’s day. Our college class took a two-day trip to Capitol Hill for briefings by the Congressional Military Liaison Staffs. After the morning in-briefs we watched hearings in the conference rooms, the House and Senate in action, and talked to our own state representatives and senators if they were in town. On the second day I was bored with bored politicians reading scripts to an empty chamber and bored with bored witnesses reading scripts to a nearly empty committee table.

So, on the second day, I left at the first opportunity. I walked out of the Capitol Building with no plan in mind, except to enjoy the clear, warm late-summer’s day. Because Labor Day had passed, most of the tourists were gone, except for retirees and foreigners, both groups posing self-consciously in front of the monuments. The rest of the people on the mall, mainly men, seemed to be connected to the government: bureaucrats, staffers, contractors, lobbyists, mostly in the uniform of dark suit and tie. Some were military in uniform or running shorts. All were walking quickly.

But, there were women on the Mall, too, perhaps bureaucrats or contractors or staffers. Perhaps secretaries or students, still pretty in their light-weight summer clothes against the heat of the day. They seemed to be walking slower, enjoying the warm, sunny day.

The day itself seemed nearly perfect—less than 80 degrees, no clouds, no haze, and the buildings gleamed white. I had the strange thought that the whiteness of the buildings could mean either purity or sterility, as one of my college literature teachers explained how colors are used to invoke feelings, and wondered why I was even thinking such things. Colors and feelings had not crossed my mind in years. You must avoid feelings when you are flying, lest you be distracted.

As I walked down the hill toward the Smithsonian, I felt my tie begin to choke me and my seldom-used sport coat (blue, all Marine officers own a blue blazer, which is always worn with gray or tan trousers, always) becoming too hot, so I removed both. I stuffed the tie in the jacket pocket and slung the jacket over my shoulder. As I walked down the Mall, I stopped at the Aerospace Museum to touch the moon rock as I always do when passing by, for both luck and to remember the summer of ‘69 when my then wife and I watched the moon landing with friends in their trailer just outside Fort Rucker, Alabama. It was a few weeks before I got my wings as an Army helicopter pilot and a very significant time in my pre-war, pre-son, pre-college education life. We all cheered as we watched Arm-strong step down from the ladder on the little black and white television.

The Washington monument stood straight against the sky in front of me, with the flags around its base snapping in the afternoon wind. As I walked toward it, I decided to keep on walking and visit my old friends. I knew roughly where I would find them, but my first and only visit had been several years ago, so now I would have to search a little before I found them.

On that trip, five or six years before, I took my 12-year-old son with me to visit them. I think he saw them, but only in the way I saw WWII monuments or even Civil War statues when I was his age—history, remote, not real and certainly not connected to his father in the 1970’s or to him in the early 1980’s. I showed him their names on the wall and although he did not know it, the place where mine would have been if the North Vietnamese gunner had fired a half second sooner.

I had forgotten where my friends were on the wall, so I had to ask one of the volunteers to look them up in his book for me. Their section is near the central V, deep down in the wall. There are six of my friends there. Other friends are scattered along the wall, but these six are together, one name after another. They died together when their CH-47C Chinook blew up, five or six thousand feet above Laos in the spring of 1971. Their names are low so I squatted to read them and to touch them, one by one on the black wall.

The first one was an old man, at least by 1971 Army helicopter pilot standards, of 35, a Navy veteran before he enlisted in the Army to fly. This was his second trip to the war. The first tour he had flown scouts, LOACHs, undoubtedly, some of the most dangerous helicopter missions in the war, and he survived those aircraft with many Air Medals, a Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and his life. But in 1970 he had a wife and three kids, so for his second tour, he chose what he thought would be a safer aircraft, a transport, not a hunter-killer. On his last flight he was the copilot, learning to be a cargo pilot and providing seasoning to a new, first tour AC.

His name, the AC’s name that is, is there too. It was his first tour and maybe as a brand new aircraft commander (AC) he was a little less ready to lead combat missions as dangerous as the one that killed him, but that happens in war. The missions must be done and he was the AC, ready or not. At 25 he was still single and, as a Mormon, he kept to his faith’s tenants of no drinking or smoking. This kept the rest of us from knowing him very well, since drinking and swearing and what might be considered ill behavior were usually involved in all the non-work activities back then.

This crew had a third pilot and his name is there, too. He is there because he did something stupid. He might have gotten his name there in his own right, had he lasted longer, but instead he is there with the crew of that Chinook, even though his name was not on the flight schedule that day.

During Operation Lam Son 719, the invasion of Laos, so many helicopters were going down—107 destroyed and NHH damaged in six weeks—that orders from Division Headquarters directed that only aircrews on an assigned mission were to cross the border. Like I said, he wasn’t supposed to fly that day. He was one of the few pilots who did not share his hootch with anyone, so he did not have a roommate to report him missing. For that matter, no one even knew he died or was missing from the company area until the day after the helicopter was shot down and he did not show up for a scheduled morning launch. We started looking for him and finally, one of the maintenance crew remembered seeing him board the downed aircraft, camera in hand, as it taxied out for that day’s missions. He must have gone to take pictures, as pilots sometimes do. He probably wanted some shots of the Ho Chi Min trail. Hard to take them when you are flying and besides, you get better camera angles from the back than from the cockpit.

I remember being 19, like he was when the Chinook blew up, and I remember knowing for a fact that death only happened to other people. He had no wife and was a “Newbie” so no one really knew him well or knew anything about his family. Do they still keep a picture of him on the wall or mantle, his new silver wings bright against the green of his dress uniform?

The flight engineer, the senior enlisted man on board, had shared many flights with me. He was a dark haired young man, good natured, always covered in grease, and apparently not afraid of anything. Well, he never admitted or showed signs of being afraid, anyway. I don’t remember whether or not he was married. After 17 years, the details have dimmed considerably and the pictures he had taped to the armor inside his aircraft are vague now. What had not faded was the pride he took in his aircraft, something that made the pilots always glad to fly his Chinook.

The other two were also young, caught up in the war like the rest of us. the crew chief was blond and friendly, as he looked at the world through thick glasses. He was really looking forward to the day when he would be flight engineer of his own Chinook and could paint the pictures he wanted on the side of the aircraft up by the crew door on the starboard side. The door gunner wasn’t a grunt that got tired of walking and volunteered to fly, like many of the door gunners were. He was a crew chief, too. He just volunteered to be door gunner when his aircraft was in for maintenance or not on the flight schedule. He too wanted his own Chinook, had one picked out in fact, but until then he enjoyed the view from over the M-60D’s barrel as we flew along.

As I touched the third pilot’s name, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “You dumb-ass.” The others died doing their jobs but this one died because he was 19 and invulnerable. Then I nearly cried.

You see, it was a beautiful, warm, late-summer day. The young girls in their summer dresses and shorts were walking on the Mall, many of them, the age that our wives and girlfriends were then and the age our daughters are now—my son’s age now.

Women my age were at the Wall, too, but I tried not to look at them, afraid of what I might see. My wife might have been one of them, if the North Vietnamese gunner that hit me and took my Chinook out of the sky had pulled the trigger a half-second sooner.

My throat was dry and my eyes were blurry as I started to leave. As I turned from the Wall to go, I saw two of those lovely young girls standing behind me. Standing near together, they might have been sisters, tan with blond streaky hair. Both of them stared at me, looking half way between shock and pity, or maybe just in surprise that men really did get the way I was when they visited the Wall on a late-summer’s day. Were they children of the wall, daughters of names on the polished black stone or only tourists, looking at dusty history? Maybe either or both, I don’t know.

By the time I passed the Washington Monument on my way back up the hill, I was under control again. Pilots, aviators, especially Marine aviators, must always be under control—death before uncool.

When I visited the Wall that day, I was nearly 40, and learning to be a military bureaucrat in Washington. My friends on the wall are still in their late teens and twenties. They still live in my mind, just like they were in 1971.

The day they died, we packed all their things, took down their plaques from the wall of the Playtex Officer’s Club, erased their names from the aircrew boards in the Club and in Operations, and then we went back to flying. The day after they died, a stranger entering the company area and walking around would never have known they had ever been there.

But their names are there on the Wall. For those of us still here, one by one, our flying days have ended, and our war is history, like Korea and WWII were to us back in 1971. Maybe someday I’ll go visit my friends again, but not too soon. Not on a warm, sunny, late-summer’s day when the young girls walk the Mall in their summer clothes.

REEFING

There comes a time when you cannot do it anymore. That is, you cannot do it at the level that is required to be fully successful as an aviator. Anything less than full concentration is simply death for you, and perhaps for your passengers, too. Perhaps the closest way to explain it is by asking the question, “when do you reef a sailboat’s sails,” i.e. make them smaller, reducing speed but keeping the boat from being over-powered, capsized or smashed by the wind? The wind is rising, what to do? Reef now or wait, thinking things will get better and the wind will drop? Answer—the first time reefing crosses your mind, do it, do it right then. If you wait until after that moment, it may be too late to reef and the boat may go down under too much sail, the mast shattered and the sails shredded. And when you start thinking of dead guys instead of closing the door when you enter the mental room marked “flying,” it is time to reef.

I thought about it again as I sat at my desk. Well, not really a desk, since only the senior officers and senior civil servants at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) have a real desk in a room with a door, but more of a shelf in a cubical. While I was going through my training to become a bureaucrat, another friend and his entire crew died in a helicopter crash. That was three years ago but I sat there in my cube and counted to myself all the men I knew who had died when their aircraft crashed. I started after Vietnam. Why count those who died in war when there are so many more out there to start with?

I quit counting at 43. that is not forty-three men killed in a single crash, but one here, two there, a crew of four there, over the seventeen years that had passed after I left Phu Bai. Five, when a Chinook loaded with 29 passengers flew into a mountain in Vietnam’s I Corps. An OH-58 crashes somewhere in Germany and one of my former roommates from Vietnam dies in it. One when his Chinook comes apart after a single-point failure at Fort Carson. Three, when their Frog came apart in flight over the Joshua Tree National Monument. One, when his 46 rolled over on the deck of an LPH and sank into the Pacific taking him with it. One, when his t-28 left a smoking black hole in the Florida sand before he even finished flight school. Two, when their Cobra hit a power line in Greece at 150 knots. One, when his Cobra went into the Intercostal Waterway for no reason anyone could fathom. Another when his 53 did not return from a mission and they found the wreckage in too many pieces to determine why it went in. On and on and on. And each time, we would go to the chapel and sing the hymn about God watching over those who fly, but it seems He often doesn’t….