Walking through the door at the Slick Platoon

I will never forget the instant I entered the Slick Barracks. My first impression, with the incense burning a familiar smell from the States and a great stereo system with super nice speakers, led me to wonder where Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were. After seeing a guitar leaning against a wall in the corner, I knew I was going to have fun during after duty hours as I could play a little bit and liked doing it. When I saw the blue light and the posters hanging around, I almost wanted ask if Jimmy Hendrix was in.

I didn't meet the platoon commander, Captain Bill Sheehan, at that time but Bill took me around and made the introductions to some of the pilots that were hanging around the hootch.  Gary Justice, Curt Lambert, Glenn White, Mike Coker, Charles Harrington and then, a guy named John Finnerty that I would end up flying with during the best mission of my entire career.

Finnerty was a pilot that I call a "sleeper". At first glance you might think that he was a mild mannered, soft spoken kid who was simply there as a function of having graduated from flight school. Little did I know that ten weeks later I would watch his reactions to incoming fire on short final to a hot landing zone surrounded by NVA, and do that, almost without batting an eye. In my opinion, Finnerty was the kind of pilot that you only hear about and never get a chance to meet.

There were several pilots missing at that time as they were involved with duty elsewhere. Bill Sheehan the CO, Jim Jelsomin, who was affectionately referred to as "Jelly", Leslie Earnst who was also from Louisiana and Wayne Morvant, who I would later suffer a turbine compressor stall with as we were coming out of a LZ not too far north of our home base.

Having come from the 199th, a unit that was later described by the US Army as compiling more hours per pilot than any unit in Vietnam, I began to wonder how over worked we might be with the 11th Cav. As you might recall from the previous posts, I had an 11 hour day flying Major Lewis to Tuy Hoa and a 9 hour Nighthawk mission with Wollman while I was there and that is a ton of flight time to log in a two day period. 

Bill took me around the rest of the Troop area to meet other pilots in the unit. There were 3 barracks assigned for housing the 36 pilots of the Air Cav Troop. Compared to the single barracks building we had at the 199th where we only had twelve pilots, the Air Cav Troop was huge. The Huey pilots were referred to as the Blue Team, where I became Blue 28 with Cobras being Red and Scouts being the White Team where I eventually became White 8 when I transferred to the Hunter Killer Teams.

As if I hadn't already been pleasantly surprised enough, Bill took me to a small building that was close to the pilot's barracks. We used it as a "ready room" during duty hours where we were on "stand by" to react immediately to any call to scramble the helicopters. When I went to the Scout platoon to fly OH 6s instead of Hueys, I would eventually spent many hours there playing cards while waiting to fly.

There was some degree of separation between the pilot's platoons. Some of the Scout pilots stayed to themselves as did some of the Cobra pilots. Since the 199th housed guns, slicks and scout pilots in one barrack only, it seemed unusual to me. I later concluded that the Scouts suffered more losses than anyone and much in the same sense that many of the men from World War II were advised not to get too close to the other men in the unit, I understood where all that came from.

In any event, at that time, I had yet to meet my new boss or a couple of the other Huey pilots but despite that, I was greatly impressed with the Air Cav Troop accommodations. In a sense, when compared to sleeping in a bunker at Xuan Loc, I felt like the accommodations had gone from the out house to the penthouse. I didn't know at that time that I would eventually be sleeping in a tent near the Cambodian border but that again is another story.

Those are my first impressions of the day I became Blue 28 in the Slick Platoon. Day two is coming up and let me say that "it ain't over yet". Stand by. Gotta go to the hospital but I will be back and keep on with the story.