Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (9 page)

Since the NVA had not immediately attacked, I called the flight engineer over. He was not hurt from either the explosion below our aircraft or the cargo hook swinging up when I pickled the load. He and I went to the Chinook to see how badly it had been damaged. Leaving his machine gun in place on our defense perimeter, he came over to me. The wounds to my face and arm were obviously not serious. Though I was still bleeding ten minutes after the hit, I was still functioning. The hydraulic fluid was still burning through my soaked shirt and the holes in my face, neck and arm, so I took off the shirt and t-shirt and threw them back inside the cabin. Leaving my bullet bouncer on the ground I put my survival vest back on. The blood had stopped coming from my upper right arm, leaving just a caked area of blood and hydraulic fluid. My face was still bleeding but not to the point where it interfered with what I wanted to do. I was still numb from the impact of the shrapnel, so there was no pain—in fact, instead of feeling pain I just felt angry, very angry. The flight engineer wanted to put bandages from the aircraft’s first aid kit over the wounds but I told him no, just check out the aircraft to see if we can takeoff and get the hell out of there.

The flight engineer clambered onto the top of Playtex 820 and opened up the forward panels to see how much damage had been done. As he was doing that, I walked around the aircraft to see what other damage we had. I counted four bullet holes and more damage to the belly, probably from an S-60 round. One of the bullet holes was through the spar of one of the forward rotor blades.

The flight engineer called me to the top of the aircraft so that I could look into the forward pylon. The Chinook has an upper dual flight boost hydraulic actuator, the system that actually moves the rotor head and controls the aircraft. The “dual boost” part means that the two sides are independent of each other; lose one and the controls still function perfectly, but by necessity, the dual boost is one unit with the actuators side-by-side. The upper dual boost actuator is a major single-point failure, so the Army had Boeing put a piece of armor plate in front of it to protect it. Sticking in the number one boost side of the actuator was a 12.7mm armor piecing machine gun round. It had gone between the armor and the actuator and hit the number one side squarely on. Fortunately for us we had been above tracer burnout range, so the bullet had little energy left when it hit the air-craft. Had we been lower, instead of poking a hole in the actuator, the bullet might have taken it completely off, leaving us to fall out of control until the Chinook came apart or hit the ground. But it didn’t take the actuator off. The flight engineer pulled the bullet out and handed me part of the jacket. He kept the core for himself: after all, it was his aircraft.

Between the shot out actuator and the holes in the blades, I decided that 820 was not flyable, at least until maintenance looked at it and changed the damaged parts out for new ones. Besides the shot out number one flight boost, the hole in the blade spar could well result in blade failure, another fatal single-point failure. We would either be picked up by helicopter, as per the brief, or, if that didn’t happen soon, we would make our way to the ARNV base and wait for rescue. If all else failed, we would escape and evade (E&E) our way back to Vietnam on foot. I took my survival radio out of my vest and turned it on. The survival radio could handle “guard” and any other UHF frequency you dialed up, so I turned it to guard to listen in on what was happening beyond our LZ. Looking at the sky while I worked on the radio, I saw a Huey headed in our direction, apparently on approach to our location.

“Huey coming for downed Chinook, LZ is cold” I called over the survival radio.

“Roger, get your crew together for pickup,” the Huey pilot replied.

As the Huey got closer I recognized the emblem painted on its nose, it was the 101st Aviation group commander’s aircraft. The colonel commanded all 600 of the 101st’s aircraft. He must have been up flying over the battlefield, watching the fight, and must have seen us go down. When he was satisfied that the mission was going to be completed with the remaining aircraft, he came back to get us. I called my crew back together. the excess ammo we put back inside 820 so that it could either be rescued when the aircraft was recovered or destroyed along with the Chinook, if that should be the command decision. We stacked the machine guns, the KY 28, survival ammo can, and our flight gear close to where the Huey had set up to land, while we waited.

Before he came into the LZ, the colonel did a wide circle over the zone, looking for NVA. Satisfied that the LZ was indeed cold, he landed with the Huey blowing up dust in a reassuring cloud. We waited outside the rotor disk until the Huey crew chief waved us over. I sent my crew in first. I would be the last one onboard. As my crew climbed into the aircraft, I looked up at the Huey’s cockpit. I could see the colonel looking back at me—me, shirtless, with a survival vest on, with blood all down my arm and face and red hydraulic fluid all over me and the grease gun with the silencer slung over my shoulder. His visor was down so I couldn’t see his face, but he shook his head and gave me what looked like a rueful smile.

After a final look at 820, I climbed in the back of the Huey and parked myself on the right side, next to the door gunner. I was getting madder by the second. Mad that the NVA shot my Chinook, mad that I was hit, just mad. I wanted to shoot something, someone, shoot the man who shot me. I hoped that the 105 howitzer and the 4,000 pounds of ammo we dropped at least hit the NVA who shot me. I leaned out the door of the Huey, grease gun locked and loaded, but there was nothing except green jungle and the scars from bombing and artillery fire and the red line dirt marking highway QL9 heading back to Khe Sanh from Laos. After a while, I sat back in the red webbing of the troop seat and watched the world go by as the Huey took us back to Khe Sanh. We had been on the ground for about 15 minutes. It had been 20 minutes since we were hit.

The numbness from my wounds began to wear off as the adrenaline came down. By the time we got to Khe Sanh, 20 minutes later, I was extremely tired and hurting in several places. My anger was gone too, replaced by thoughts of how I was going to explain the wounds to my wife in a few days when I returned to Fort Campbell for two weeks of leave in the middle of the war.

After we landed at the medevac pad just off the main runway at Khe Sanh, an ambulance was there to pick me up, but the Huey crew chief motioned for me to wait while they shut down. I waited just outside the rotor disk until the colonel unstrapped and, climbing out the right door, walked up to me. He looked at the blood and hydraulic fluid covering me, placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You did good, son. Now go get that looked at.” As he walked away he looked back at me again, shirtless, blood stained with the grease gun hanging from my shoulder, shook his head and gave a small laugh.

I walked into the hospital tent at a slow time for them. Very few wounded were there, so they had plenty of time to deal with me. Because I was walking and talking without any problem they had me fill out my own toe tag, the marker the military uses to identify the wounded and the dead. After cleaning me up, I sat on a table for an hour or two while they picked pieces of glass and metal out of me. The doctor told me that the ones he couldn’t remove would work their way out in time. There were no big holes, just a lot of little ones and bruises on my arm, neck, and face. The doctor told me that he was putting big bandages on me because Khe Sanh was a very dusty place. When I got back to my base I could remove them, take a shower, put on some cream he gave me and replace the bandages with band-aids. Since my shirt was gone, someone gave me a T-shirt to put on for the trip back to my company.

My crew was waiting for me outside when the doctor finished about an hour later. We all smiled at each other, glad to be alive, as we waited for one of our company aircraft to pick us up and take us back to Phu Bai. The colonel had called Playtex Ops on the radio to tell them we were OK and where to pick us up. An hour later, one of our Chinooks landed and we boarded for the trip back. Four hours after we were hit, we were back at Liftmaster Pad, being greeted by a crowd of our relieved friends waiting on the ramp.

The Ops O met me as I climbed down from the crew door on the Chinook. The blood and hydraulic fluid were gone but the bandages covered most of my arm and shoulder, with more on my face and neck. He turned pale and said, “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know this would happen.”

I said, “I know. I’ll be alright, but I just want to be alone right now, OK?”

He nodded as I walked slowly toward my hootch. Once inside, I pulled all the bandages off and after running the wringer washing machine full of hot water, I put it on drain cycle so that it would pump the water to the shower. After stepping into the bathtub, I stood under the water and enjoyed the nice long, hot shower. I dried off and put on band-aides where the bandages had been. After putting on a clean flight suit I walked over to the Club. The Ops O was sitting at the bar as I came in.

“Hi, guys,” I said as the Ops O looked around. He went from being glum to being mad in a second. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled, but the anger became happiness as it occurred to him that while I was wounded, I was not hurt as bad as it looked when I stepped off the aircraft.

The next day I went on leave, traveling to Fort Campbell, Kentucky via Saigon, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Three days later I was explaining the bruises and holes in my face, neck, and arm to my wife. Two weeks after that, I was back at Khe Shahn helping to pull the last of the ARVNs out of Laos as Lam Son 719 came to an inglorious end.

My final memory of that battle is of an NVA mortar round hitting a 5,000 gallon gasoline tanker truck parked less than 100 yards in front of me as I was landing just outside Khe Sanh on that last day. As the fireball rose in front of me, I jerked the Chinook back into a full-power climb. It missed us entirely.

Luck and superstition again …

9

ARMY NIGHT FLIGHT

I CORPS, VIETNAM ■ APRIL 1971

When there was no moon, or if an overcast hid the moon and stars, Vietnam’s I Corps got very dark—very, very dark. There are no city lights in the jungle, no stream of cars with headlights marking a road, no lights from farmhouses here and there like back home, there is just darkness. Coastal lowland, rolling country leading to the jungle mountains, it was all the same, just darkness. One crew was always on standby at night, just in case something unanticipated arose; they could look forward to flying into that darkness if the call came.

W
hen the word came to launch the standby, we aircrew, pilots and enlisted men alike, projected what we thought was an air of calm, like all who fly do. We tried to be cool in the face of whatever came, like all men, from those just out of their teens to those in their late 70’s; I never heard anyone admit to fear, but it was there when we went out at night. I never heard it but I saw it, in them and in me, too.

Action had been heavy in the A Shau Valley for the last several days. The artillery, 105mm’s and 155mm’s (“dime nickel” and “penny nickel nickel” in Army aviator-speak) in their positions in the mountaintop firebases had been firing nearly continuously. All three companies from my aviation battalion, Playtex, my company, and our sister Chinook companies, Varsity and the Pachyderms, had been hauling fuel, food, and water, but mostly 8,000 pound pallets of artillery shells to them constantly as they fired their guns west and north against the North Vietnamese forces there. But now one base, Fire Support Base (FSB) Rifle, call sign for tonight “Alpha Kilo One,” located on a ridgeline overlooking the A Shau, had used nearly all its ammo in the non-stop fire missions and was calling for more. They had not called for resupply earlier when it was still daylight because it looked like things were settling down and they would have enough ammo to last the night.

They were wrong. Things had not settled down, but instead, steadily intensified, leaving the gunners sleepless, exhausted, and nearly deaf as they served their weapons, shell after shell going down range into the valley. The men on the firebases did not like resupply at night any more than we did, because, in addition to the work of stacking the shells and breaking down the pallets, they had to have light to position the ammo and store it. Lights gave the NVA something to shoot at, i.e., us bringing the ammo in and the grunts moving it. As noted by many soldiers, it is one thing to shoot and quite another to be shot at.

We had preflighted the aircraft before it got dark and were ready when the call came at 0100 hours. The three crewmen—the flight engineer, crew chief and door gunner—were already aboard the aircraft, since they always slept onboard the Boeing Hilton when their helicopter was on standby. The sky was pitch black; even after our eyes adapted to the dark, we could not see the outline of Gia Li mountain less than one mile away from the end of Liftmaster Pad’s short runway. The red glow of the cockpit lights did not reduce the feeling of helplessness that you get sometimes when you are about to do something you really do not want to do but that you know you must do anyway.

That feeling was always one of detachment for me. A feeling that it was not real and would pass because something would happen that would keep you from having to do it. maybe the aircraft would break or they would change their mind and not need the ammo after all. Funny how over the years, in situations like this, that feeling never changed, it always came back. And the mission was never canceled, so no matter how you felt about the dark, you went out into it. The missions must be done.

On climb out, I finally could see Gia Li mountain, but only because of the lights from Camp eagle behind it. To the west and north of eagle where the big mountains were, and where FSB Rifle was, I could only see blackness. Our position lights, the red and green sidelights and white taillight that make us visible to other aircraft, were on, as was our top rotating beacon. We never used the bottom red rotating beacon, figuring it made us too visible to the NVA and would not keep other aircraft from flying into us anyway. Although the lights, red on the right, green on the left, and white in the back, gave the enemy something to shoot at, we presented no better target than we did in the daylight. Since we were flying a Chinook, we were a big, slow target day or night. But, at night, without lights (particularly the red rotating beacon), you were invisible to other aircraft, making the possibility of a mid-air collision very real and guaranteed fatal to all concerned.

I made the takeoff as the AC nearly always did—the AC has to make sure everything is working OK, as a copilot might miss something—and turned the aircraft north. We climbed out following along the lights of QL1, the main north-south highway in Vietnam, to about 3,000 feet above ground level (AGL), well above the effective range of small arms and light machine-gun fire. The bullets could get that high but had little energy left and were no longer accurate, so we did not particularly fear them. We could see the lights of Hue City, the old imperial Vietnamese capital, then moved toward the mountains. Rural electric co-ops had yet to come to I Corps, nor were they likely to until the war was over, if ever. In the dark, there was nothing visible to navigate to, except the radio beacon at Camp evans. Our ADF was working and we found evans without any trouble. Under the glare of our landing lights, hook-up of the load was routine and 20 minutes after we had lifted off from Phu Bai, we were climbing out toward the blackness of the mountains to the west.

I had briefed the copilot and crew what to do many times and all of us had flown this mission at least a few times, so we should not have been scared, but we were; at least I was. The mountains ahead of us went up to around 6,000 feet above sea level, so I continued to climb until I reached 10,000 feet. That altitude alone was enough to be scary for helicopter pilots. We almost never flew this high above the ground because of the problems with getting on the ground should your aircraft catch fire or one of the transmissions begin to fail. Helicopters do not carry parachutes and can be made to descend only so fast. What is the time between failure onset and catastrophic failure? Between the time something goes wrong, and the time you ride the out-of-control helicopter all the way down, thinking whatever thoughts come to you in your last moments.

As I’ve said before, it’s not the death part that worries many pilots, it’s having time to think about death while falling. The books do not say how fast you can make a helicopter descend without losing control. Putting the aircraft into a dive that exceeds VNE, like I did in Laos, is not recommended. Typically the fastest way to lose altitude quickly is to put the aircraft into a slip by cross controlling the rudders and the stick, but how fast does it fall that way? maybe it’s minutes, maybe it’s seconds until you reach the ground, but either way, it’s a long time to think about it.

I listened while my copilot called the artillery (“arty”) clearance frequency so that we would not inadvertently fly through “friendly” fire. Although they laid out a route for us that was supposed to keep us clear, we had little faith in it. This lack of confidence was not from any feeling that the “arty” guys had it in for us, but came from the fact that, try as they might, the clearance agency was always wrong. We didn’t believe them because every day we would get routes and fly them only to arrive at the LZ to find guns blazing away, though pointing in a different direction from that which we were given. Eventually we became philosophical about it. Even an artillery shell is a little bullet in a big sky, so the odds of being hit inadvertently by a “friendly” shell were so small that it was not worth the worry. There were too many other things that could kill you …

Still, like putting your pistol between your legs and the door guns on our aircraft, arty clearance served a little psychological protection. You believed that the .45 added some armor. You believed the M-60D machine gun on each side of your aircraft would suppress enemy fire. You believed the clearance would keep you from flying down a gun-target line. You knew in your heart that none of these did much, but you believe anyway. The arty clearance was no help tonight, though, because they said everyone was quiet with no fire missions currently in effect. Except, of course, for the H&I (harassment and interdiction) missions. That was where the arty guys on the firebases pointed their guns—in the general direction of the bad guys, firing blind, all just to keep Charlie on his toes. You never knew where those rounds went, but, again, it is a big sky and in that context, even artillery rounds are little bullets.

Our aircraft had no navigation system except for the ADF we had used to find Camp evans, but the ADF was of no use in finding a firebase in the mountains in the dark, since the firebase did not have one of the portable radio beacons that transmit the signal that the ADF receives. Even if it did, the ADF was way too inaccurate to use in the mountains where a few feet’s distance could put you into the trees or cliff face. Our highly developed map reading skills were of no use either, since we could not see to navigate, nor did our memory of how the terrain looked around FSB Rifle help since it too was not exact enough to trust your life and the lives of your crew in the darkness. Blackness below us was the same blackness wherever we looked, left, right, up, down, as we flew toward the area of the firebase.

To find the firebase on its mountaintop, we called the Air Force radar unit that covered all of I Corps and into the southern part North Vietnam and gave them its name and our location. After they picked our Chinook up on radar, they gave us a vector to the firebase. While I flew and talked to the Air Force air traffic controller, my copilot called the grunts on FSB Rifle to tell them we were on our way.

After 15 minutes, the Air Force controller said simply, “Playtex One two, you’re over them now.”

Below us, the earth was the same black as the sky, nothing to differentiate one from the other. Time to talk to the grunts and get their exact location.

“Alpha Kilo One, this is Playtex One two. We’ve got a load for you. Turn on a light,” I called.

“Playtex, Kilo One, we hear you above us, but negative on the light. Wind is light from the north.”

I understood. If they turn on a light, the NVA will shoot at it, and by definition, at them. Now they must understand.

“Alpha Kilo One, Playtex. You want this load, turn on a light. We cannot find you otherwise. No light, we take it back.”

Silence from the ground. Then, in the sea of black below us, my right gunner calls over the intercom, “Green light, two o’clock low!”

Swapping my vision from the flight instruments to the outside, I catch a glimpse of the light below and call over the Fm, “Green.” From the ground comes, “Confirm green.”

I try to remember where the mountains are from the map and from the many hours I have flown here, but I can’t. It’s just black below us, above us, to the sides of us. I put the Chinook into a box pattern on a course that I think will keep us clear of the mountains. As I start the descent, I hear the Air Force radar operator saying the same words the FAA controller said when the U-8 started down into the Smoky mountains two years before, “Losing you in the ground clutter. Give a call out-bound and we’ll vector you home.” Like the FAA controller, the Air Force controller didn’t say good luck or anything like that, not because he was superstitious, but just because it was not cool for him or for us. Better death than uncoolness.

I planned a steep approach angle instead of the normal shallower one, coming down at a 15-degree angle instead of the usual 5-degrees. We were light on fuel so the weight wouldn’t be a problem and it would keep us higher and out of the NVA’s range longer; might also keep us from hitting a mountain too. Without being told, my copilot turned off our red, green, and white position lights and our top rotating beacon as we started down from 10,000 feet. No jets down among these mountains in the dark to fly into you, so why give the NVA a target?

It’s called pucker factor. It’s the involuntary tightening of your rectum when the tension gets high, like when you know you may be headed directly into a rock wall, invisible in the darkness, and knowing that you do it anyway because that is what has to be done if the mission is to be done. The mission must be done. Your rectum gets so small and puckered that we said you couldn’t drive a broom straw up it with a sledgehammer. The standard joke was that it took half an hour to get the seat cushion out of your ass you were so puckered. At the same time, your right hand grips the cyclic stick so hard, we said it was like you were trying to squeeze the black out of the plastic. Sometimes afterwards, your forearm would hurt, your legs would go stiff on the rudders, and your teeth would clinch.

Concentration is also there with the pucker factor. The noise of the helicopter disappears. The radios go silent. All that happens is that your eyes go back and forth over the instruments on the Chinook’s dash—from the flight instruments, attitude indicator, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed—to an outside green light on the ground, back inside to attitude, altitude, airspeed. Wings level, altitude decreasing toward the height of the firebase, no radar altimeter in C model Chinooks so you hope your barometric altimeter is close to being set right, airspeed coming back toward zero, but you keep it above 20 so you won’t lose translational lift and get caught behind the power curve trying to hover out of ground effect in the mountains with 8,000 pounds of ammo swinging below you. In the background you might hear some mumbling over the ICS as the copilot calls airspeed for you and landing check complete, but your world is attitude, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed until at last you can stand it no more because the landing zone must be coming up fast, so you call for the landing light and then the world is lit in blinding white light and you see the barbed wire around the firebase and the man with the flashlight waving you forward. You also hear the yells over the radio as the pathfinder calls for you to kill the light before the mortars start, but you don’t because mortars may not come, and if you lose the light a crash right in the middle of all these men will not come out well for anyone.