Learning to fly Hueys and Combat Tactics

I don't have any trouble at all remembering my instructor pilot in the Huey. He was a CW2 and was just back from a tour in Vietnam. He was a lot like Diable but that was only in the intellectual department. I never saw him out of a flight suit and his boots weren't exactly ready for a Diable inspection.

Despite that, he was like a walking encyclopedia when it came to the numbers and procedures surrounding the Huey. In view of that and some of the influences I had received from Diable, I would spend time on the week ends trying to memorize the preflight check list and the entire starting procedure for the Huey. We even invented a nick name for the list because it was so extensive. Added together, all of it contained 144 separate items. We called it the "Gross Checklist" to help with remembering the 144 items we needed to perform.

Many of the things we had to learn were very close to those things we'd learned at Wolters. Autorotations, emergency procedures, pinnacle approaches, confined areas and precision hovering were just a few. I was glad when that phase of training was over with because I had been paired with another student who didn't have the best eyesight. We barely escaped a midair collision one day at sunset. On another occasion, during a night pinnacle approach, he hit the landing spot so hard, I thought the rotors were going to come off. I was scared to death, told Hofius about it and luckily, I was given another student to fly with. I'm sure that Hofius cut me some slack because he knew I had memorized the check list.

Not long after that, we entered the final phase of training. It was titled "tactics" and covered every thing from high overhead combat approaches to troop insertions in the jungle. That was to be one of the most incredible memories I had. We flew to Eglin AFB in Florida and were ordered to pick up a group of Rangers and insert them into the swamp near the base which was their training ground.

After that, we had a couple of days of additional training and were then ordered to fly back to Eglin and extract the Rangers from a landing zone. We were told that it was a tradition to take a candy bar along with us and give each of the Rangers one as they had been in the swamp for several days with nothing more than a knife, a canteen of water, a compass and a good attitude. When we picked up the Rangers, it was no longer my time to fly and the student that was flying with me, took over the flight duties.

When we got everybody on the ship, I turned around and passed the candy bars out. One of the guys took off his helmet and introduced himself as he thanked me for the Baby Ruth I'd been hiding in my helmet bag.

There's a huge coincidence regarding that candy bar because, just after graduation and during my drive back to Shreveport, we stopped to eat at the Holiday Inn that was located in Ruston, Louisiana. As I was sitting in the booth waiting on lunch, a guy on a motorcycle rode up and parked right outside my window. When the guy got off the bike and took off his helmet, I noticed it was the Ranger I'd given the candy bar to.

We immediately made eye contact and I knew he recognized me. He came in the restaurant and we high fived for a second, wished each other luck and when we finished eating, I said my good byes.

As an incredible coincidence, roughly 8 months later, I was standing next to the active runway at Tay Ninh and heard the screaming sound of a motorcycle engine as it was going back and forth along the runway between aircraft arrivals. I went out to the runway, waved my hand at the rider and he pulled over. You guessed it, the rider was the Ranger from Eglin and the restaurant.

We laughed our asses off and talked a moment about the coincidence of seeing each other again. We talked briefly about our tour of duty and then he was back on the bike and out of sight in no time. I never saw him again but I'm sure he remembered the experiences of running into each other at all 3 places.

One of the last things I had to master during tactics was artillery adjustment. At this point in time I had a really good rating in the class and had even been in discussions about the possibility of obtaining additional aircraft qualifications for the higher placed candidates. When I failed the artillery test, those thoughts went away and a candidate named Orsi was given the opportunity of going to Ft. Hunter Stewart to learn how to fly the twin rotor Chinook. With a little tutoring, I passed the test and went on to graduate well placed in the Company but not at the top.

The only story I remember about a weird run in with a highly placed General Officer, was the day Bob Bandusky went to the hospital for a visit with the doctor. While he was there General Westmorland made an inspection. He found Bob right after he had blown his nose into a white hanky. The coal dust that was everywhere on the base, made his hanky turn black and explained some of the reasons Bandusky was in the hospital.

It wasn't all work and no play. Bruce Marshall, Paul Grubbs and a couple of other students bought cars and we would have rallies on the week end. A couple of times we went to Panama Beach in Florida and let it all hang out. One night we went to a beach bar to listen to some live music. I was amazed to discover that the bad for the night was "Rare Earth" who went on to have a top of the chart song. They were really cool and we had a ball.

Our graduation ceremony was really neat as we had our wings awarded to us and pinned on our chest right after we were awarded the Warrant Officer bars that we would wear for the next year. It was so cool. I went down the usual list to find a date but this time the first one I called said she could come. It was Camille Grigsby who was a top pick. She could dance, drink with the best of them, tell jokes and laugh at the jokes everybody else was telling. She's gone now but her memory is not. Melissa and I talk about her to this day. What a fun high school friend she was.

In any event, that's pretty much the memories I have from Ft. Rucker. They may not seem to be as acute as the ones I had from the Diable Days at Ft. Wolters but those days were filled with "firsts". Even though Rucker was the first time we flew instruments and turbine powered Hueys, it was just different than the first time you ever flew a helicopter by yourself. Rucker is generally referred to as the Cradle of Army Aviation but in my mind, Ft. Wolters is where we were hatched.

Needless to say, my next stop is Vietnam but I have a 30 day leave period before I was to ship out and after I hit on that, I'll get down to the business of fighting the war as Fireball 28, the 199th Light Infantry Brigade's newest pilot. Stand by.