Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (8 page)

Picture a WWII movie: the B-17s and B-24s are on a thousand-plane raid on some German target. As they approach the coast of France, they see the flak boxes start to appear in front of them, puffs of black smoke marking each shell burst. The Germans are not aiming at individual aircraft, instead they are shooting within a defined space that the bombers must fly through. The shells are set to explode at a given altitude and send their shrapnel out to shred the bomber’s aluminum skin and take it out of the sky. The aircrews see the flak, but fly on anyway because the mission must be done. If they are hit, they have multiple engines, and if they are too badly damaged, they have parachutes.

Now picture Laos in 1971. Your helicopter is so slow: it is for all intents and purposes stopped in the sky, at least to the NVA gunner. There is no need for a flak box, they have all the time they need to aim at individual aircraft. Besides, their logistics system is no match for the one the German’s had. Every round of ammunition must be carried down the Ho Chi minh trail, under attack from our aircraft the entire time so they must not waste them. The NVA do not have the capability the German’s had to determine the altitude their targets are flying, so they guess when they set the shells, if they don’t have proximity fuses. When the gunners fire, the helicopter crews see the flak, just as their fathers and uncles did over France and Germany, but their helicopters are a frail collection of single-point failures, anyone of which can bring it down out of control or tear it apart in flight. The helicopter crews don’t have parachutes …

We continued to climb until we reached 6,000 feet, about 4,000 feet above the valley floor where QL9 ran. An AK-47’s 7.62mm round could not hit us at this altitude, nor could a 12.7mm machine gun round. Well, 4,000 feet is past the tracer burnout range of a 12.7 but the bullet keeps coming for a while after that. Of course if they weren’t shooting from the valley floor, but from the hills on each side, we would be well within range. If they had a 14.7mm heavy machine gun, we would be within range wherever they were shooting from, likewise from the 37mm and 60mm.

Lam Son 719 was a surreal time for helicopter aircrews. Back at Fort Wolters and Fort Rucker when we were learning to fly, we occasionally would see a massed flight of helicopters, but here the crewmen were constantly calling, “Flight of 12 Hueys at 3 o’clock crossing right to left,” “Flight of four Cobras 8 o’clock and passing on the left,” “Flight of six Hueys at 11 o’clock,” “Chinook with an external Huey at 2 o’clock.” there were more helicopters in the air than any of us had ever seen at one time, with more on the ground waiting for their next mission and still more in the fuel pits or waiting for fuel. Today was no exception, with helicopters streaming to and from Laos, to and from the lowlands, headed out to mountaintops to drop off observers, bring food or ammo—helicopters everywhere.

March 4, 1971, was not a calm day on the radios. On the guard (emergency) channel someone’s aircraft was being shot down and the pilot was screaming “mayday, mayday, mayday.” Also on guard, a flight of B-52’s was calling “Arc light, arc light, arc light,” followed by the lat/long where they were dropping their 500 pounders. Everyone had to know where the bombs were going to come down because the shock wave alone would take your helicopter out of the sky if you were too close. On regular radio channel, someone was talking to a flight of helicopters, giving directions and not getting a reply because they were on Playtex’s frequency, not their own. On the fox mike, the Pathfinders on the firebase with the ARVN artillery unit were calling out instructions to helicopters as they brought the loads in. At least my crew was quiet on the intercom.

Just after we crossed the border, we could see the tracers coming up at the two aircraft in front of us, green and soft in the morning sky. They were coming from the valley floor, but we had no Cobras or Huey gunships with us to provide fire suppression, so all we could do was fly on at 90 knots with our howitzers and ammo swinging below us. My crew could see that the tracers were coming at us too, but in the cockpit we couldn’t see anything except the glowing, growing green dots coming up at the leading helicopters, a string of green beads coming up from the darker green forest. We said not a word—nothing to say.

The ADF started “buzz, buzz, buzzzz.”

The aircraft shuddered, a huge hole appeared in my windshield right in front of me, and I was hit by something in the face, on my neck, on my right upper arm and I slammed back into the seat.

Then the ICS added to the noise of the radios.

“SIR, SIR, Are you alright SIR, SIR,” my right door gunner screamed over the ICS. He had been looking up through the cockpit when the 12.7mm round came through. He saw the hole appear and saw me jerk backwards in my seat. He was sure that it hit me squarely in the face.

I knew that something had hit me, but there was no pain, not yet anyway. I did an involuntary “full and free” check, like we did with the flight controls before starting the engines to make sure all my parts were still working—arms, hands, feet—all there, all still working. The aircraft was still under control too, cyclic, thrust, and rudders all functioning normally, but then there was hot red fluid hitting the top of my helmet and running down my back. Red fluid is hydraulic fluid. Without hydraulics, the flight boost systems, the flight controls lock and you sit helpless until the aircraft impacts the ground or comes apart in flight.

After I wiped the broken Plexiglas off my helmet visor, I realized that if I had not had the visor down, the sharp fragments of glass and steel would have blinded me. Both my pilot and I were staring hard at the master caution panel, the big square panel of small lights on the dash, one light for every critical system, with caution lights that tell you a system is failing or is out of limits—but none were lit. Chinooks have two flight boost systems. Though the pressure gauges that sat side by side are within normal limits, the red fluid was hitting me on the head and back. Then the master caution light, the big one on the top of the dash, came on along with the smaller capsule light marked “Hyd #1,” and the number 1 flight boost gauge dropped to zero, and the red fluid kept coming out on top of my helmet. Is boost #2 also hit and bleeding the last of its fluid too? How long until the flight controls lock?

As I saw the gauge go to zero pressure, and squeezing with my right index finger on the trigger switch, I yelled into the ICS, “I’m going to pickle, I’m going to pickle” (slang for jettison the load), but I was squeezing the ICS switch so hard I was transmitting over the radio, adding to all the other voices on the radios. I was trying to tell my flight engineer to get away from the cargo hook so it would not swing up and hit him in the face when the load fell away, but he could not hear me. He saw the tracers coming through the hellhole and at the same time, saw a flak burst just below our aircraft, very near the load of ammo. When the aircraft rocked as I flinched from the bullet through the windshield, he knew we were being hit. He immediately jumped up from the stretcher he had been laying on to work the load and ran to the rear of the aircraft to check the aft transmission area for damage. As he jumped up, he inadvertently unplugged his helmet long cord and could no longer hear the ICS. But then it would not have mattered even if he had been plugged in, because I was transmitting, not talking over the ICS and he never listened to the radios.

When the flight engineer did not reply immediately, I pushed the pickle button anyway. We could not get down quickly with the load under us. The hook opened and the howitzer and ammunition fell away from 4,000 feet above the ground. As the hook opened, I could feel the helicopter shudder and begin to climb rapidly as 8,000 pounds of weight on the aircraft was removed. To get on the ground as soon as possible, I pushed the thrust all the way down to enter autorotation and shoved the nose over so far that the trees below filled the windshield. If the controls locked, it wouldn’t matter if we were in a dive, it would just shorten the time we had to think about it before we died.

In our dive, the speed built quickly to the point where the aircraft was shaking and vibrating so hard I couldn’t read the airspeed indicator or any of the other instruments any more. Velocity Never exceed (VNE), was 170 knots on a Chinook and I was quite probably exceeding it, but we had to get her on the ground before the controls quit working. Now all that mattered was to save my crew, if I could.

Then time stopped.

The old cliché that your life passes before your eyes did not happen. It just seemed like everything just stopped. My mind was clear, no regrets, no “if only.” It just held the question, stated quite clearly and calmly, “Is this what it’s like right before you die?” I never got the answer because

Time started up again.

The trees began to get very big in the windshield, so I started a pullout, trying to hold the “G” force down as much as possible. When I looked at the airspeed indicator, it was passing through 160 knots on the way back to a more normal approach speed, but it would still be a very fast approach and an approach to the ground instead of a hover.

On the ground, on the ground, get it on the ground! I had to get it on the ground before all the hydraulic fluid was gone and the controls froze.

Without conscious thought, all the training at Fort Wolters came back to me. All those times the instructor had cut the throttle on the OH-23, leaving me frantically looking for a spot to autorotate to, had paid off, as the Army knew it would. Even though there was a sea of jungle below us, as I entered the dive, I had automatically set the Chinook up for a landing in a clear area not too far from an ARVN base. The LZ looked raw, as if it had been prepared recently, but it was too far from the ARVN’s perimeter to be their primary helo pad. As I flared the Chinook to lose speed for touchdown, I saw that the LZ I had picked held the crashed remains of a Huey in the northern third of the cleared area. This LZ had been hot once, but we were committed to the landing. The Huey was totaled but it was upright so maybe the crew got out. I hoped they did.

I picked a touch-down point as far away from the broken Huey as I could so that we could avoid blowing up loose parts that might go into our rotor blades. Seconds later, I slammed the Chinook onto the ground, aft wheels first, hard but upright with the flight controls still working.

Within seconds of the wheels touching down, the flight engineer had the ramp down and all three crewmen were running from the aircraft, each carrying an M-60D machine gun. Normally, the Chinook had two door guns, but today, the flight engineer, for some reason he didn’t really understand, sent the crew chief and gunner back to the armory to pick up two more M-60s and a case of ammunition. As I shut the aircraft down, I could see one of the crewmen establishing a fighting position out in front of us, placing his M-60 where he could cover the most ground. The NVA had certainly seen us going down and could well be headed toward us right now, provided, of course, that they weren’t here already. My copilot jumped out of his seat and as he left the aircraft, grabbed the remaining M-60s lying on the cabin deck and joined the perimeter defense while I finished shutting the aircraft down.

Shutting down my Chinook on March 4, 1971 was very simple—I just pulled the condition levers to “Stop” and turned the fuel and battery switches to off, not bothering to start the APU, completely ignoring the shutdown checklist. We made it to the ground without the controls locking, why push it now? I unstrapped and climbed out of the cockpit quickly while the rotor blades spun down to a stop. Before I left the cockpit, I stopped for a few seconds to stare straight ahead. The bullet hole in the windshield was directly in front of where my face had been. If I had been leaning forward, or the gunner had fired a second sooner or later, it would have hit me in the forehead. I couldn’t see a hole where the bullet had continued into the forward pylon, but it must have done so to take out one of the flight boosts. I ran out the open ramp and quickly surveyed the area to see where my crewmen were.

We were maybe a quarter to a half mile from the ARVN base but it was unlikely they would come over to provide security. They were quite probably too worried about their own security to consider us. My four crewmen had gone to more or less the corners of the LZ, loaded their weapons and were ready to fire. I quickly grabbed two ammo cans of 200 rounds each from the case and carried them to the closest fighting position. The door gunner had just taken the single belt he had in his weapon when he ran out of the Chinook. He also had his M-16 over his shoulder and a .38 on his belt. I got another two cans to the other gunner and two more to my copilot. A quick weapons count showed we had four M-60D machine guns, three M-16s, four .38 pistols, one .45 m1911A1 automatic pistol, and one M-3 grease gun with a silencer, my personal weapon. We had somewhere over 5,000 rounds of ammo.

I bought the grease gun off one of our company dopers. As I was walking through the company area one day, I saw puffs of dirt coming up in front of me and froze in place. Someone was shooting but I was not hearing the shots. Looking at the puffs, I saw they were following a rat running hard for cover under one of the hootches. Looking for the source of the puffs, I saw a soldier with the grease gun holding the trigger down as he tracked the rat. When he emptied the magazine, I walked over to him and said, “How would you like to sell me that weapon?” He replied, “Sure, man, $20.” I gave him the $20 and the grease gun was mine. I did not ask him where he got it. my thought was that I would only use a weapon if I had been shot down and was doing escape and evasion (E&E) to get back to friendly lines. If I had to shoot someone, I would only do it if they were close and would prefer no one else hear me doing it. Besides, the M-3 uses the .45 round and I was already carrying an M-1911A1 pistol, also .45 and 100 rounds of .45 ammo in two boxes in the pockets of my survival vest.

Standing outside the aircraft, it occurred to me that I had not made an emergency radio call. I had not made a “mayday” call because of the oldest order of precedence when flying: Aviate, fly the aircraft; Navigate, take it to where you are going; and, last, if you have time, Communicate. I controlled the aircraft and found a landing zone big enough to handle it, taking care of the first two in the correct order. There was really no need to make any radio calls since we had been briefed on what to do when we went down. Besides, many aircraft had seen me go down and we knew that no one would come for us until the mission was complete anyway.