First Room Mate and Flyin' with Fireball Pilots

After day 1 in the Area of Operations, we flew back to Long Binh where I was to officially check in with Headquarters of the 199th. Once the paper work was properly attended to, I was assigned to the officer's barracks where I met Ed Wolfe. Ed was obviously a well educated guy and, by the looks of his area, he was really squared away. He was so squared away I thought that he would be a perfect officer to replace Diable once Ed was finished with his tour and headed back to the States. He was REALLY squared away.

Everything was in it's proper place including Ed's uniform, flight suit, flight helmet, flak jacket, firearm and personal items. As I reflect on that day, I recall that Ed looked something like an actor that had played a part in a World War II movie as a pilot flying during the Battle of the Bulge. He even looked the part of a combat aviator.

As luck would have it, I was chosen immediately to go back to FSB Mace. As I recall the next morning I went to the revetment area and went through the pre flight checks of the aircraft. I don't remember who I was to fly with that day but I remember getting the map so it must have been Dudley Young. Dudley had a really large map that was laminated and folded in a fashion that regardless of which magnetic heading you were flying, you could just flip the map and continue to fly using the VFR charts (Visual Flight Rules).

I didn't know how the pilot rotations went but it seems that immediately after my first orientation flight around the AO, I was assigned another one, a real combat mission and not just an indoctrination flight.

I flew that one with Terry Femmer as I vividly remember that once we took off from Mace, we headed north north east over the jungle and that it was so dark, part of the flight had me totally focusing on the instruments just as if we were in a cloud and couldn't see the ground.

I remember writing the name of the firebase and the magnetic heading from FSB Mace on my map with a grease pencil that all pilots kept with them in a slot on the arm of their flight suits. I think it was Dudley that told me that he had references written down on his maps that would allow him to make references to that if he lost an engine or was shot down from high altitude. It sounded like more of the "Diable Maneuver" as Dudley, like Diable, seemed to memorize everything.

He could recite the magnetic heading from Mace and the flying time to help the search teams find the downed crew and aircraft. "Mayday, mayday, mayday, Fireball 337 going down 7 minutes north east of Mace on 065 degrees magnetic". I realized how important that was and talked to Dudley at length about it. Dudley gave me another example that included writing down the six digit grid co-ordinates of certain land marks to add to the information about magnetic headings and flight times. To this day, I recall the six digit grid co-ordinate of Mace to be Yankee Tango 106601.

Luckily for me, during my first Nighthawk mission, Femmer and I didn't have any contact that night but we did fly a few gun patterns around the Fire Base just to let the VC or NVA know that if they wanted to show their asses, we would show up and cover the entire area with a 4,000 round per minute minigun that was located on one side of the ship and a 50 caliber machine gun that was located on the other.

Just for good measure, we also had an M 60 machine gun located behind each of those weapons just in case all of the action was on one side of the ship. We could put out 4,650 rounds per minute of suppressing fire and do so with a great degree of effectiveness because we had real good gunners who hated the enemy and wanted, in their language, "to bust that ass". That phrase came from O'Chadluss who we referred to as Little O. His big brother served with the 199th as well and that's the nick name he had and it stuck. To this day, we still refer to him as Little O.

Even though I had only been "In Country" for less than a week, I was going to take my 3rd flight, the first one that was in broad daylight. It's real easy to remember that because I was under the impression that newbie pilots were to be slowly but surely indoctrinated into unit operations before an Aircraft Commander wanted to have them as a copilot. Didn't happen that way for me. They wanted the new guys to get some combat time right off the bat so they could determine who could take it and who could not.

In any event, the Colonel wanted to take a daylight tour of the AO and he chose one of 3 of his favorite pilots to be the Aircraft Commander. I recall that to be Craig Wollman. Almost immediately, I learned a valuable lesson from Craig that I used throughout my entire combat tour.

It was hot as hell that day and to compound the problems of high density altitudes, the Colonel's ship was always heavy. It had a huge radio set in the back and more often that not, he wasn't the only one on board when his inspection tours took place. Often times he brought Sgt Major Hamm with him as well as our two gunners, me and whoever was Aircraft Commander that day. With full fuel and all the ammunition we had to carry, it was a heavy load.

Wollman picked up to a hover and told me to write down the OAT, outside air temperature, the EGT, exhaust gas temperature of the turbine engine and the torque meter reading. He briefly explained that he did that repeatedly and logged the readings as it would, over time, give you an indication that the turbine engine might be getting weaker and weaker as engine times rose. We were okay to proceed with the flight and off we went.

I didn't know it at the time but this was going to be the first daylight combat mission I would fly and that I would learn that the guys who had been flying combat missions in Vietnam were writing a different kind of tactics book than the one I had studied and practiced so hard at Ft. Rucker. Wollman was a master at current combat tactics and I was still stuck on page 12 from Ft. Rucker. You have to remember that I had only been in Vietnam for two or three weeks when this battle occurred and effectively, I didn't know how much the current tactics had changed those that were taught in flight school.

I'll have to close this now as Wollman's aircraft commander skills that day would teach me another lesson far more valuable that checking the OAT, EGT and torque readings. This account will not be one of those stories that start off with "Once upon a time" and will more likely be classified as "This is no shit". Stand by. the story of Craig Wollman begins next.