Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (4 page)

Turns, the rotation speed of the rotor, are life in a helicopter. Without the correct speed of rotation the rotor blades do not produce lift and the aircraft, with no flight capability, just falls and your life ends. I immediately checked to see that the rotor speed was high enough, “in the green,” and simultaneously made sure the airspeed stayed at the specified 70 knots and kept the H-13 lined up for the spot in the green field the captain had already picked out.

As I had practiced a thousand times, at an estimated 75 feet above the ground I pulled the nose back, flaring the helicopter to reduce the airspeed and break the high rate of descent. At about 20 feet above the ground I pushed the cyclic stick forward to level the aircraft. As I did the rate of descent immediately started to build again, so at 10 feet I jerked the collective pitch lever about halfway up to trade rotor speed for lift, to break the final rate of descent.

As the helicopter slowed its rate of descent, I smoothly used the remaining collective to touch down so gently that neither of us felt the actual touch. the remaining forward speed stopped as I lowered the collective after we touched, allowing the OH-13e to slide the two skid lengths the operator’s manual, the “-10,” called for. From the time the engine stopped, until the aircraft was motionless on the ground, was less than 20 seconds.

In the post landing silence I realized that the captain was still holding the lit cigarette as we watched the rotor blades slowly spin to a stop. the helicopter was very, very quiet.

“You stay with the bird, Sir, and I’ll go find a phone.” I said to the captain, who opened the Plexiglas door and threw out the un-smoked, but still burning, cigarette.

Before I left the helicopter to walk the 100 yards to the road, I got the rotor blade tie down out of its storage, slid the padded metal loop over the rear blade and tied the ribbon ends to the tail boom, securing the blades so that they did not flap around in the wind. Satisfied the bird was OK, or at least certain there was no damage beyond a dead engine, I began to walk across the grass over to the road. From the first day of flight school, the instructors had prepared us for this by making us do countless simulated engine failures, and now it had happened. And I had made it without further damage to the aircraft. But as I walked toward the road on the other side of the field, my knees went weak, a little wobbly.

Flagging down a car on the road between the fields, I asked the driver to take me to the Rod and Gun Club about a mile away, the closest place with a phone. the enlisted man that answered back at the airfield passed me to the maintenance officer, an old, very experienced chief warrant officer 4 (CW4).

“No, I didn’t do any damage landing it,” I said in answer to his first question. He didn’t ask if I was OK, since if I was making the call, that much was obvious.

“No, I have no idea why it quit,” I said in answer to his second question.

“See you in a few minutes,” he said as he hung the phone up.

I was in total awe of the maintenance officer. He had been in one of the very first helicopter training classes that the Army ever held in the early ‘50s, and was later one of the pilots in the Army’s equivalent of the Blue Angels, the helicopter demonstration team. He could make a helicopter sing. Once he took me up on a maintenance check flight and instead of doing a normal takeoff, he took the OH-13E off backwards. We slowly flew around the traffic pattern, turned final, and then came to a hover, all facing 180 degrees from the normal heading. Another time, after an ice storm, he said, “Let’s go flying,” but instead of having the helicopter towed out onto the ice-covered ramp he had it moved to the edge of the hanger and then had the hanger doors opened wide. He started it up and ground taxied, moved it forward with the skids dragging on the concrete instead of coming to a hover, until we were clear enough to lift up without blowing things around inside the hanger. The entire airfield was covered in a coat of glaze ice, so we had it to ourselves. Flying out to the main runway he climbed to 1000 feet and then entered autorotation. He flared at 75 feet like we were supposed to, leveled, “popped” up the collective to break our rate of descent, but instead of stopping after touch-down, the helicopter slid down the runway without even slowing down. After a hundred yards he rolled the throttle back on and back up we went again. He did two more before he hovered back over to the ramp. When he rolled the throttle off to shut down, the torque caused the helicopter to spin slowly on the ice until all momentum was lost.

Thirty minutes later the CW4 pulled up in his personal pickup truck accompanied by one of the sergeants who worked for him. He parked on the side of the road between the two green fields and looked out at the helicopter sitting in the middle of the spot the captain had picked. It was so near the center, it looked like it had been towed out there. Leaving the captain with the aircraft, I walked over to him. He didn’t say anything until I was about 20 feet away from him.

“The least you could have done was land the Goddamn thing closer to the road, you dumb shit! I’m going to get my boots muddy just walking out there,” he shouted, loud enough for the captain and the sergeant to hear.

I was surprised and slightly hurt by the comment. Somehow I expected praise, thank-God-you-are-OK, or some other expression of relief, but not that comment. the best I could manage in reply was a weak, embarrassed smile, until it dawned on me slowly that this was praise. Praise, because he implied that I had enough skill to put the helicopter anywhere, even with a dead engine.

The CW4 quizzed me on what happened. When I got to the simulated engine failure part, he held up his hand to stop me and walked to the cockpit of the helicopter. Looking inside, the CW4 pointed to the carburetor heat. the lever with the round black knob marked with an “H” was in the up position. It was off.

In cold weather, the fuel flowing through the carb needs heat to keep moisture in the air from forming ice and stopping the fuel flow when you reduce power. the heat from the engine exhaust is ducted to the carb to make this happen. If the outside air temperature is near or below freezing, carb heat must be used, particularly when making rapid power changes. I had forgotten to pull the heat on when I cut the throttle; ice formed, the engine quit, all as advertised in the most basic helicopter flying classes.

Quickly examining the aircraft, the CW4 found no damage. the ice in the carb went away as soon as the fuel flow stopped.

“Get in and fly it home,” the CW4 snapped.

Again, I was surprised and even more, apprehensive. After all, I had just survived my first engine failure, but the CW4 was adamant. the captain and I got back onboard and started the H-13 up. When I looked, the maintenance officer was already gone. He did not even wait to see if we got off alright.

The flight home was without incident, but the ragging I got from the other instructors hurt, at first. then I realized that they all had done similar, stupid things, things like cutting down a flag pole with the rotors or chopping down bushes from landing too close, and they all had survived them and learned from them. Now I had joined the club with my first real emergency, even if it was self-induced.

I never did that particular stupid evolution again. But, I managed a variation on a theme and caused another engine on another OH-13E to shut down in flight again a few months later. I survived that one, too, with no damage to helicopter, pilot, or passenger, but the maintenance officer was mad at me again. that too is another story.

4

THE PLAYTEX CLUB

PHU BAI, VIETNAM ■ SEPTEMBER 1970

T
he black lacquer plaques with the enameled squadron patch in the center and the flags of the Allies participating in the war across the top were hung around the walls of the bar in the Playtex Officer’s Club. They were just about at eye level, and below each plaque was a Polaroid of the pilot who owned the plaque, the man who would have it presented to him when he left country. The plaques were hung in order of “shortness.” that is, the newest man had his hung at the far end of the room, next to the door out onto the patio. Around the wall back toward the bar itself, they were ordered until, over the bar, there were only five left.

In the center of the bar, over the chrome and red vinyl barstools, stolen from who knows where, was the plaque of the next man to leave. When that man received his plaque from the commanding officer, the CO, and took the jeep ride over to the Phu Bai airfield to catch the C-130 south to Cam Rahn and back to the states, the next man in line would move all the plaques up until his was in the center.

If you were killed, the executive officer, the XO, would go to the Club that same day, usually as soon as he received the word, and remove your plaque. It would be placed in the boxes containing the personal effects of the man and mailed to his family with the date not filled in. The photo was never mailed. It was just discarded or put with the other small things that were the un-official company history. By the time the pilots came back from that day’s missions, no sign would remain that the man or his plaque had ever been there.

Most units gave out plaques when you left, but not “C” Company, 159th Aviation Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in 1970. The radio call sign of “C” Co was Playtex (unofficial motto, “We give living support”) and the day you checked in, you were presented with your plaque and had your picture taken with the safety officer’s Polaroid. As soon as the gook shop (casual, racist slang, common then, for the concession shop run by Vietnamese that sold hats and cowboy holsters for our .38s, made unit patches, did sewing, etc.) down the mud street from the officer’s area got the steel plate engraved with your name and in-country date, the plaque was put up at the end of the line.

The officer’s area in Playtex consisted of SEA (South East Asia) Huts. They were plywood, gray painted, single story buildings with tin roofs, built quickly by combat engineers. The Club was a rectangular room that occupied the southern half of the eastern-most shack. It had been built two years before when Playtex moved into the compound. The walls were varnished plywood, an attempt to make it seem more like some of the real world Officer’s Clubs the older pilots had seen in their travels. The floor was covered with those one-foot squares of linoleum that everyone that ever served in the Army spent so many hours pushing a buffer over. The northern half of the Club building contained two rooms, the one next door was a single room occupied by the company XO and the one on the far end was home to two of the company warrant officers.

In front of the wall of the Club that adjoined the XO’s room was the bar. The builders had done a good job on the woodwork, very professional looking carpentry amid the squatter’s-camp look of the rest of the company area. The mirror behind the bar reflected bottles of liquors, mostly unfamiliar to the pilots since nearly all were too young to drink stateside. Displayed over the top of the mirror was a bra and various bits of female underwear, souvenirs of R&R exploits. Under the counter, were the cabinets where the hard liquor was supposed to be locked up, but these shelves stayed empty because the Club never closed and no one ever bothered to lock the booze up. To the right of the mirror was a door that led to the storeroom where the extra beer and soft drinks were kept.

To the right of the storeroom door were the two refrigerators that held the beer and soft drinks ready for consumption. The freezer compartments of both held long stainless steel trays from the mess hall that were used to make ice. An ice pick was usually handy on top of the refrigerator so that the pilot who wanted ice could break some off. The water used to make the ice was potable but only just. When frozen, the water had swirls of dirt, like marbling in praline ice cream. The pilots just broke the ice around the swirls and left most of the grit in the tray until someone got disgusted enough to throw it out and start over again.

Because the Club was an “unofficial” one, it received no support from the official system of alcohol distribution. To buy the hard liquor, the pilots pooled their ration cards and gave them to the Club Officer. This system ensured plentiful booze because each officer was authorized two quarts of hard liquor each month and the non-drinker’s cards provided for the heavy drinkers. The Club Officer would check out a helicopter and take the ration cards to the Class 6 (liquor store in military language) store in Da Nang once a month or so and buy the booze. The beer and soft drinks mostly came from the small post exchange (PX) over by the runway at Phu Bai, a mile or so away. Both soft drinks and beer were in steel, not aluminum, cans and were often flat from the long shipment from the states and the months in storage.

On the wall near the ceiling, to the right of the two bar refrigerators, was an exhaust fan with bend blades and a motor that made a labored sound as it turned. The wall around the fan was scared and stained from being a target. Once a month or so, the company would order and receive a shipment of bar glasses and just as regularly break them all that night. The game was to see who could get a glass, or at least most of the glass, through the fan without stopping it. If there were no glasses, beer cans were tried, but since they were steel cans, the fan usually stopped when the first one made it into the blades.

Below and to the right of the fan, among the stained and drooping Playboy Playmates of the month, hung two rocket propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, one a Russian RPG-7 and the other a Chinese RPG-2. Scrounged from the grunts, they were operational weapons, but only served as decorations since no one could get any of the grenades to fire from them. The Chinese one was more like a piece of pipe with a crude trigger hanging on the bottom than a weapon. The Russian version was more advanced and even had the telescopic sight still attached. The bell-shaped exhaust of the Russian RPG looked like one of the blunder-busses in the old drawings of the Pilgrims.

Around the walls, below the plaques were bookshelves, two and sometimes three high, full of paperbacks of all kinds. textbooks, sex books, westerns, science fiction, novels, non-fiction, all types of books, mostly supplied by Special Services, these books generally represented more sophisticated taste than that held by the members of C Co. Westerns, pornography, and science fiction were the favorites, easy to spot by their worn covers and falling-out pages. Among the bookcases were stereo speakers in varying stages of disrepair from the hand-pumped fire extinguisher water fights that were a semi-regular feature of company life. The stereo itself had disappeared, probably thrown away after being soaked and shorted out by the water.

Below the plaques and books was a bench that went around half the Club. Like the varnished walls and well-built bar, someone had put a lot of time into building it. Even the upholstery of red vinyl from the paraloft was of a high enough quality to be mistaken for a professional, but cheap, upholstery job.

Opposite the bar, at the far end of the rectangular room, were two Plexiglas picture windows, made from sheets of the plastic intended to cover someone’s desktop. Scratched and dirty, the windows looked out on the wooden deck and the yard of the officer’s area; no grass, just all sand. The tin roofing that made up the privacy fence around the officers compound prevented anyone inside the Club from seeing the two-hole out-house or the pipe stuck in the ground to serve as the piss-tube (urinal) just beyond the fence.

From inside the Club, the sand volleyball court, horseshoe pit, and the barbecue grill, made from real stone like those grills in the better national parks, were invisible. Even the few sickly banana trees planted to give the yard a green look could not be seen. The smoke from the diesel fuel used to burn the shit from the outhouse could be seen when the weekly cleaning was done by the hired Vietnamese cleaning crew. Even when you couldn’t see it, you could smell the shit burning.

To the right of the windows were more bookshelves and the poker table. Boxes of chips and the dirty packs of cards used by the casual players were stacked haphazardly on the shelves among the special service books. The hard-core players used new decks for every game. Used decks of cards and $500 or $600 poker hands mixed no better here than anywhere else such games are played. Unlike the mythical old west of the movies, everyone here really did carry a gun.

The windows along the wall by the poker table were screened but contained no glass or even Plexiglas, only a sheet of plywood over each that could be lowered to keep the winter wind, such as it was, out. The covers were almost always down since no one was ever in the Club during the day to need the ventilation they were supposed to provide.

The door was a sheet of plywood cut to the size of a normal screen door. The spring that was to hold the door closed nearly always dangled loose, since the wood where the screw attached the spring to the wall had been pulled out so many times that no wood was left and the door stood open or closed, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

Between the door and the bar was another sheet of plywood, painted white and covered with Plexiglas. A grease pencil on a string hung on the left side of the board. The board listed the rules under which the Playtex Club operated:

Rule 1—There are no rules.

Admission free, Exit $50

Broken Cherries, $50

Drink Prices—Mixed drinks $.30, Beer $.25, soft drinks $.20

Operating Hours—24 Hours per day, 365 days a year.

Some Clubs operated with rules that mimicked the rules of the “real world” Officers Clubs: enter with your hat on and buy everyone at the bar a round; entered armed and buy the bar; throw six aces when playing one of the dice games and buy the bar; hat on the bar and buy the bar, step on the mascot painted in the tile floor and buy the bar. But Playtex held no such pretensions. Because you had to pass the bar to get to the showers, it was not uncommon to see a naked pilot with a towel over his shoulder having a beer with a pilot just back from flying, still wearing his hat embroidered with his wings and rank insignia and his .38 pistol in the customary cowboy holster from the gook shop. Leave your hat in the bar and someone would wet it thoroughly, ball it up, and put it in the freezer, leaving you a ball of ice with your hat in the center.

The “Admission free, Exit $50” reflected a local custom. On their first night in the company, new pilots drank free, were expected to drink a lot, and were expected to still be able to show up for work in the morning. They would be hung over badly at the least and more likely, still drunk when they reported to the XO for their job assignments. On their last night in the squadron, before they took the ride to Cam Rahn and on to home, they were expected to put $50 on the bar for those whose time was not up yet to drink on.

“Broken cherries, $50,” meant that the first time a pilot had bullet holes in his aircraft, he had to put $50 on the bar. It was to celebrate a passage, from “Newbie,” new boy, to real company member. After the first hits, no one owed anything. Unless of course they were promoted or made aircraft commander or had a birthday or a child born back in the world, or just felt like it.

Below the rules were the names of all the pilots and a line for grease pencil marks. The bar ran on the honor system, so each time a drink was taken a mark would be made under the appropriate column, soft drink, beer, or hard stuff. Once a month, the Club Officer would total up the marks and bill each pilot. Even with those prices, some would have a large bill. Some of the high bills reflected events, promotion, birthday, etc., but most just reflected an early tendency toward alcoholism produced by stress or whatever causes alcoholism anywhere.

Next to the rules was another Plexiglas-covered plywood board. This one had a two-column list of names. On the left was the aircraft commander, on the right the copilot for the next day’s missions. Next to each name was a number which marked what priority you were for the next day’s missions. The lower the number, the more missions you would have.

Playtex was a Chinook company, flying the CH-47C, the big, twin-rotor, twin-engine helicopters made by Boeing in their plant just south of Philadelphia. The number of aircraft Playtex operations had determined were required for the next days’ missions could be seen by the number of crews listed, with those on standby at the bottom. Being number one through number four always meant you would be flying from between eight to ten hours the next day, but from there on down, you might or might not have a mission. Usually there were two standby crews. Standby crews were listed at the bottom and were required to at least preflight and start their aircraft so that when one of the primary birds broke, as they always did, the aircraft commander could jump in and make takeoff on time. Those crews drawing missions such as aircraft recovery standby, or flare drop standby, were noted on the very bottom of the board.

In the evening, the assistant operations officer (Ops O) would walk up from the Ops bunker down the street from the officer’s area and grease pencil in the names. Sometimes he would tape a stenciled sheet of paper with names on it over the board but this didn’t work too well, since it was likely to be covered in thrown drinks and be totally unreadable before the evening was over. In theory, the pilots looked at the board before they turned in, but since the crews were formed on the basis of flight time (the man with the least in the last 30 days would fly the longest missions and the man with the most would not fly) the pilots usually already knew whether or not they would be flying. In any case, the duty clerk would wake them in time to get ready for launch if they were flying.