Since I started this particular Nighthawk series, I've been receiving some comments from a number of guys that flew Night Hawk missions with me during my time with the 199th and the 11th Cav. On the 199th side of things, Wolman checked in and commented on his memories of the time he flew with Fireball Aviation and, on the Cav side, Curt Lambert talked about the adrenaline rush that came with making contact with the bad guys and feeling the concussion from the 50 caliber when the shooting started. Prior to that time, Curt had spent almost all of his time as a Huey pilot delivering troops to and from the various Landing Zones in our Area of Operations. I think those were his first missions flying guns.
Everybody that flew in the Night Hawk program has their own memories and some of them have already lasted a lifetime. One of mine came from thinking that I was doing a great job. The way I was seeing it, I was messing up the resupply base that the VC had at the Leper Colony as well as screwing with the NVA near the spot where Jernigan and Stearns were lost and therefore, marking enemy locations to be passed along to the ground troops. Somebody else apparently saw it as a situation that needed a bit of supervision. Can you imagine that!
Not long after the "American you die tonight" mission, somebody decided that I needed baby sitting. A decision was made to add "chase ships" to the mission and, much to my surprise, it turned out to be Cobra gunships, two of them. Initially, I didn't like the idea as it would result in making a lot more noise and alerting the enemy that there were a bunch of helicopters messing around in "their" area and therefore, it would put them on guard.
I never recalled a single mission where Wolman and I had another Huey go with us. Never! In any event, we took off one night to run a Nighthawk mission west of the Leper Colony. Two Cobras went with us. It went sour, right off the bat. I only flew a Cobra one time and that was during the day time. Thinking back, I never saw a Cobra fly a night time mission until that night. I don't know if they considered it an exercise or not but it seemed that way when they started practicing rocket runs. I remember thinking: "What in the hell is that all about"?
I concluded that they had little to no night time experience and wanted to get a feel for what it was like to roll over and make a simulated dive toward an imaginary target at night. There was a lot of radio chatter between the Cobras and I knew that this mission wasn't even going to get started much less end up as a success.
Over the course of two more missions, there were complaints made by the pilots during the mission and the entire Nighthawk program appeared to be on the chopping block. It seems that there was a lot of hell raising going on about it and the next thing I knew, there were no more Nighthawk missions scheduled. I think that was sometime around the beginning of November 1970.
I didn't know it at the time but that put my back in the Huey in a position that only allowed daytime missions that were typically hauling ARPs to and from LZs where they would go on patrols or chase the bad guys that had been reported in a particular area.
I resolved myself to the realities of no more night flying and in a sense, I was glad to see what the rest of Vietnam looked like in the daylight. Little did I know that it was going to lead to the best combat mission I flew during the entire war. That's another story so I will leave you with this and sign off for now. I'll get on with the details of my last flight with the Slick platoon later.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
"American, You Die Tonight", Ninh, the NVA Captain and Sexual Warfare.
I think that my idea of a successful raid was completely different than the Army's idea of a successful raid. Despite the hell raising about the tear gas drop, I got away with it and began planning another Night Hawk mission further to the east near Xuan Loc.
I had no idea that we were going to experience some of that Psychological Warfare bidness but as soon as I began my northward turn to begin hunting for the enemy near Xuan Loc where Wolman and I saw the Jernigan and Stearns shoot down, the radio crackled in my head set and I heard an Asian voice saying: "American, you die tonight".
Nothing ever came from that mission and we never fired a shot. After we returned to Dian, I hit the bed and waited till morning when Sheehan would be awake and on duty. When it came, I approached him with the story above and he was shocked that the VC or NVA was actually on the radio long enough to say that but not long enough for me to get any kind of a track on him.
When I told the guys about it, someone told me that I needed to go see "Budda", an NVA Captain that had been captured after a bombing run by a B 52. He was staying in the compound next door and was serving as an interpreter for the Republic of Korea troops that were billeted there. We referred to them as ROKs and they were some of the toughest troops I'd ever seen.
Ninh had been educated in the USA and spoke perfect English. When I told him what had happened, I asked him to teach me some Vietnamese that I could use as a response in case it happened again. Budda laughed out loud and told me to repeat the phrase: "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook Whahm Dee Do". I asked him what it meant and he told me that once I could say it properly, he would let me know. That's when I began to practice. I must have said it a hundred times and when I finished he told me that he would let me know later.
Later that night, I took off and headed back to the area with the hopes that the bad boys would still be listening for the whop whop whop of the Huey rotor blades. As soon as I entered our search area, the radio crackled again with "American, you die tonight". I didn't waste a second of time and immediately responded with "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook whahm Dee Do". Without any hesitation at all, even though they couldn't see me, the green tracers started coming up from the jungle below. With that, I told the gunners to "light em up".
We put some rounds in the general area that the tracers were coming from, made a couple of circuits over the target area but nothing else happened that night. I was really anxious to find out what my response meant because it had clearly pissed off the bad boys on the ground. We flew back to base and called it a night.
The next morning, after a good night's sleep, I went to the fence that separated the ROK compound from ours and asked for Ninh. They retrieved him and I could tell by the look on his face that he was ready to translate his message to the NVA. When I asked him to translate, he began laughing out loud and asked ME to tell HIM what had happened. As I explained their reaction and the green tracers, his face lit up like a Christmas tree and he laughed harder and harder with each passing second. After a minute of that he explained what I had said in Vietnamese.
"I know your sister, she is very pretty, I've had her from the back side", was his answer and we all began to laugh. He explained that it was the worst kind of offense to say about a man's sister, wife or mother.
Many years later, as I told this story to my friends, I coined the term :Sexual Warfare". As Sean Connery would say: "Thus endeth the lesson".
I had no idea that we were going to experience some of that Psychological Warfare bidness but as soon as I began my northward turn to begin hunting for the enemy near Xuan Loc where Wolman and I saw the Jernigan and Stearns shoot down, the radio crackled in my head set and I heard an Asian voice saying: "American, you die tonight".
Nothing ever came from that mission and we never fired a shot. After we returned to Dian, I hit the bed and waited till morning when Sheehan would be awake and on duty. When it came, I approached him with the story above and he was shocked that the VC or NVA was actually on the radio long enough to say that but not long enough for me to get any kind of a track on him.
When I told the guys about it, someone told me that I needed to go see "Budda", an NVA Captain that had been captured after a bombing run by a B 52. He was staying in the compound next door and was serving as an interpreter for the Republic of Korea troops that were billeted there. We referred to them as ROKs and they were some of the toughest troops I'd ever seen.
Ninh had been educated in the USA and spoke perfect English. When I told him what had happened, I asked him to teach me some Vietnamese that I could use as a response in case it happened again. Budda laughed out loud and told me to repeat the phrase: "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook Whahm Dee Do". I asked him what it meant and he told me that once I could say it properly, he would let me know. That's when I began to practice. I must have said it a hundred times and when I finished he told me that he would let me know later.
Later that night, I took off and headed back to the area with the hopes that the bad boys would still be listening for the whop whop whop of the Huey rotor blades. As soon as I entered our search area, the radio crackled again with "American, you die tonight". I didn't waste a second of time and immediately responded with "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook whahm Dee Do". Without any hesitation at all, even though they couldn't see me, the green tracers started coming up from the jungle below. With that, I told the gunners to "light em up".
We put some rounds in the general area that the tracers were coming from, made a couple of circuits over the target area but nothing else happened that night. I was really anxious to find out what my response meant because it had clearly pissed off the bad boys on the ground. We flew back to base and called it a night.
The next morning, after a good night's sleep, I went to the fence that separated the ROK compound from ours and asked for Ninh. They retrieved him and I could tell by the look on his face that he was ready to translate his message to the NVA. When I asked him to translate, he began laughing out loud and asked ME to tell HIM what had happened. As I explained their reaction and the green tracers, his face lit up like a Christmas tree and he laughed harder and harder with each passing second. After a minute of that he explained what I had said in Vietnamese.
"I know your sister, she is very pretty, I've had her from the back side", was his answer and we all began to laugh. He explained that it was the worst kind of offense to say about a man's sister, wife or mother.
Many years later, as I told this story to my friends, I coined the term :Sexual Warfare". As Sean Connery would say: "Thus endeth the lesson".
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
First Night Hawk Mission with the 11th Cav.
My first Night Hawk mission with the Air Cav Troop was the most unusual mission of that type that I'd flown. We didn't see any combat, there weren't any Viet Cong floating down river in sampans and no firebases were under attack any where. We didn't shoot anybody or anything.
On the other side of things, Captain Sheehan brought aerial photographs of several places throughout our Area of Operations and one by one, we went to each area. That took two individual missions, flown on two or three different nights, to accomplish.
One of the missions focused on an area that was a "no fly zone" for us. It was called "The Leper Colony". I didn't know then but I found out later, that the Leper Colony was, in reality, a farce. It was serving as a night time resupply point for the Viet Cong. That was the reason Sheehan had it on his list of places to visit and he had the night time aerial photographs to prove it. It showed VC coming out of the jungle, walking into the Leper Colony and leaving with all kinds of things that they carried on their backs. He suspicioned that it was rice and resupply of ammunition.
Not long after those first few missions and a check ride with CW2 Jim "Jelly" Gelsomin, the senior Huey pilot in the unit, I was given orders to begin the training of other pilots from the Slick Platoon.
As I began my part of the preflight and mission planning, I kept going over the aerial photographs and decided that Sheehan was right. I don't know if he "baited me" with the photographs or if he knew that I would go after them without regard to the "no fly zone" rule, but that was exactly what happened. To me, it appeared to be easy pickins' and I knew not to take Sheehan's suspicions lightly. All I knew was he had a case of the red ass about the place and an even worse case of the ass about not being able to fly over it at anytime, day or night.
I'm not sure, but I think it was Curt Lambert who flew as my co pilot that night. I called him to ask about this post but I didn't get in touch with him so if it wasn't him, I don't remember who it was. In any event, whoever it was, soon learned that the new Night Hawk pilot from the 199th didn't give a tinkers damn about rules, politics or anything else that we weren't supposed to do.
I say that because I had already ordered the crew chief and gunner to get some special equipment to take with us that night and to do so without letting the word out OR putting it on our T.O. and E sheet that listed the armaments on board when we took off. T.O. and E. is the "Table of Organization and Equipment" and the liberals wanted to know everything about everything because of God only knows what.
The Mi Lai Massacre had already taken place and from that point on, it seemed that more and more scrutiny was made on everything the troops did. It didn't necessarily focus on the pilots but it damn sure did effect the men on the ground.
I even remember one discussion where it wasn't fair that we had 50 caliber machine guns on some of the Hueys and that it was frowned upon. I never did figure that one out. I guess it was okay for guys like Ed, flying Cobra Gunships with the 25th Infantry Divison, to shoot 2.75" high explosive rockets at the enemy or shoot a 20 mm cannon at their asses, but it wasn't okay for us to use the 50 from a Huey. Go figure!
Despite all the skull doggery behind the scenes, we took off late that evening on my first unsupervised Night Hawk mission. I picked up a course toward Phu Loi, which wasn't far from my home base, made a slight course correction just before I passed the church steeple that had a 51 caliber NVA gun hidden in it, and flew directly toward the Leper Colony.
When we arrived, I told everybody what was up and considered that to be my inflight briefing. I then instructed the crew to start throwing CS grenades out of the helicopter directly inside the Leper Colony. CS grenades are Army versions of tear gas so don't think we were killing any civilians or poor lepers. There weren't any there to my knowledge and even if there were, I knew that Sheehan could have cared less and I probably wasn't going to get into any trouble even if we were caught.
As I recall, from the time we took off until we started dropping the gas, only took 20 minutes or so. For the rest of the flight, we just flew around to the other areas Sheehan had pointed out and, since everybody was familiar with the area of operations, it ended up being more of a sight seeing tour than a big time combat mission. I do remember that it was a "light em if you got em" kind of night and when the fuel started getting low, we flew back to Dian and called it a night.
Unfortunately, even though we had been up all night on flying duty, our rest period was interrupted long before we were supposed to be awake. As it turned out, a village chieftain had already arrived at Regimental headquarters and was raising hell about an American helicopter that gassed the Leper Colony. I pled fatigue and claimed that I didnt' know what they were talking about and "in any event, we don't carry gas on our ship". That was right before the diarrhea set in. As things turned out, we got clean away with it and I never went back there again. I'm positive that Sheehan knew that we'd done it but he was experienced enough to know not to say anything to anybody about the aerial photographs or our discussions about the Leper Colony.
I think I'll stop here as I have an errand to run but I will continue tomorrow with the rest of the story. Thanks for listening. Tim
On the other side of things, Captain Sheehan brought aerial photographs of several places throughout our Area of Operations and one by one, we went to each area. That took two individual missions, flown on two or three different nights, to accomplish.
One of the missions focused on an area that was a "no fly zone" for us. It was called "The Leper Colony". I didn't know then but I found out later, that the Leper Colony was, in reality, a farce. It was serving as a night time resupply point for the Viet Cong. That was the reason Sheehan had it on his list of places to visit and he had the night time aerial photographs to prove it. It showed VC coming out of the jungle, walking into the Leper Colony and leaving with all kinds of things that they carried on their backs. He suspicioned that it was rice and resupply of ammunition.
Not long after those first few missions and a check ride with CW2 Jim "Jelly" Gelsomin, the senior Huey pilot in the unit, I was given orders to begin the training of other pilots from the Slick Platoon.
As I began my part of the preflight and mission planning, I kept going over the aerial photographs and decided that Sheehan was right. I don't know if he "baited me" with the photographs or if he knew that I would go after them without regard to the "no fly zone" rule, but that was exactly what happened. To me, it appeared to be easy pickins' and I knew not to take Sheehan's suspicions lightly. All I knew was he had a case of the red ass about the place and an even worse case of the ass about not being able to fly over it at anytime, day or night.
I'm not sure, but I think it was Curt Lambert who flew as my co pilot that night. I called him to ask about this post but I didn't get in touch with him so if it wasn't him, I don't remember who it was. In any event, whoever it was, soon learned that the new Night Hawk pilot from the 199th didn't give a tinkers damn about rules, politics or anything else that we weren't supposed to do.
I say that because I had already ordered the crew chief and gunner to get some special equipment to take with us that night and to do so without letting the word out OR putting it on our T.O. and E sheet that listed the armaments on board when we took off. T.O. and E. is the "Table of Organization and Equipment" and the liberals wanted to know everything about everything because of God only knows what.
The Mi Lai Massacre had already taken place and from that point on, it seemed that more and more scrutiny was made on everything the troops did. It didn't necessarily focus on the pilots but it damn sure did effect the men on the ground.
I even remember one discussion where it wasn't fair that we had 50 caliber machine guns on some of the Hueys and that it was frowned upon. I never did figure that one out. I guess it was okay for guys like Ed, flying Cobra Gunships with the 25th Infantry Divison, to shoot 2.75" high explosive rockets at the enemy or shoot a 20 mm cannon at their asses, but it wasn't okay for us to use the 50 from a Huey. Go figure!
Despite all the skull doggery behind the scenes, we took off late that evening on my first unsupervised Night Hawk mission. I picked up a course toward Phu Loi, which wasn't far from my home base, made a slight course correction just before I passed the church steeple that had a 51 caliber NVA gun hidden in it, and flew directly toward the Leper Colony.
When we arrived, I told everybody what was up and considered that to be my inflight briefing. I then instructed the crew to start throwing CS grenades out of the helicopter directly inside the Leper Colony. CS grenades are Army versions of tear gas so don't think we were killing any civilians or poor lepers. There weren't any there to my knowledge and even if there were, I knew that Sheehan could have cared less and I probably wasn't going to get into any trouble even if we were caught.
As I recall, from the time we took off until we started dropping the gas, only took 20 minutes or so. For the rest of the flight, we just flew around to the other areas Sheehan had pointed out and, since everybody was familiar with the area of operations, it ended up being more of a sight seeing tour than a big time combat mission. I do remember that it was a "light em if you got em" kind of night and when the fuel started getting low, we flew back to Dian and called it a night.
Unfortunately, even though we had been up all night on flying duty, our rest period was interrupted long before we were supposed to be awake. As it turned out, a village chieftain had already arrived at Regimental headquarters and was raising hell about an American helicopter that gassed the Leper Colony. I pled fatigue and claimed that I didnt' know what they were talking about and "in any event, we don't carry gas on our ship". That was right before the diarrhea set in. As things turned out, we got clean away with it and I never went back there again. I'm positive that Sheehan knew that we'd done it but he was experienced enough to know not to say anything to anybody about the aerial photographs or our discussions about the Leper Colony.
I think I'll stop here as I have an errand to run but I will continue tomorrow with the rest of the story. Thanks for listening. Tim
Leaving The 199th And Flying For the 11th Cav At Dian.
I was a little surprised to hear that the 199th was being deactivated for return to the United States. With General Bond being killed in action, just before my arrival, I thought that was one of the reasons. Whatever it was, I had only been in Country for 4 months and that was 8 months shy of a full combat tour. That's when Major Tommy Stiner came to see me.
He told me that he had a friend who was about to take command of the Air Cav Troop at the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and that he was looking for someone to serve as the standardization pilot for Night Hawk missions, something that didn't exist in their unit at that time.
He also told me that his buddy, Major Roy Wulff, wanted to interview one of our guys and, since I still had 8 months left, I was the best candidate for the job. I accepted the offer, grabbed a Huey, flew to Saigon and landed at a huge helipad named "Hotel 3". It wasn't a hotel and I don't know why it was named Hotel 3 but it was located close to MACV headquarters which was our version of the Pentagon in South Vietnam. Within minutes of my landing at Hotel 3, I ran into a guy named Knoblock that was a student at St. Gregory's when I was.
In a short period of time, I located Major Wulff's office and announced myself. He was one of those types that you liked the minute you laid eyes on him. That first impression proved to be right on target and Major Wulff became one of two commanders that I had in Vietnam that I considered to be the best of the best.
After a few days back at Fireball Aviation, we had a Stand Down party and then, I departed for duty with the 11th Cav. I don't know where the other guys ended up but eventually found out that Ed Wolfe was my next door neighbor at Cu Chi.
Talk about a dangerous deal! Cu Chi became famous as one of the largest tunnel complexes in South Vietnam. They were everywhere under the 25th Infantry Division's base and became one of the great stories from General Colin Powell when he elaborated on his experiences in Vietnam. I used to fly over it when we were working that part of the area but I didn't know Ed was there at that time.
In any event, I remember landing at the heliport at Dian, pronounced Zeeon, where the Air Cav Troop was located. As I exited the helicopter and began making my way toward the TOC, I was greeted by Bill Reinhart, my buddy from flight school. I was never so glad to see anybody and I immediately felt at home. I had the feeling that everything was going to be just fine because Reinhardt said it would.
Billy took me to report in for duty and introduced me again to Major Wulff. After a fine welcoming, Billy took me to the "Slick Hootch" where all of the Huey pilots lived. It made Hawkeye's Swamp, from Mash, look like a slum. It was decorated in "Late 60s" deco and had everything from guitars, stereo systems to Jimi Hendrix posters.
My first impression of the hootch was great but my first impression of the men was a bit unsettling. They were suffering from boredom as the combat hours flown had dropped significantly and sitting on one's ass in a combat zone is never a good thing for the hard chargers that the Slick Platoon proved to be comprised of.
When I asked what the problem was they told me that "Sheehan" had nothing for them to do. As it turned out, Captain Sheehan, C.O. of the Slick Platoon, had nothing to do with the flight schedules and, taking his orders from higher up, the inactivity had him just as frustrated as the rest of the pilots.
Luckily for me, I wasn't there to fly troops in and out of landing zones and almost immediately we started planning for Night Hawk operations. That's when I discovered that Sheehan was probably one of the best planners for Night Hawk missions I would ever fly with. He was the only officer that provided me with aerial photographs from the Air Force that gave me a birds eye view of all the trails in the area I was hunting the NVA and VC in. Many were taken at night and it gave me a clear indication of what the Viet Cong were doing after we went to bed at night.
We started our working relationship with a speech where he told me he would not allow his men to fly a mission until after he had learned to fly it himself. I found it a bit unusual because he was a two tour Huey pilot that spent time between tours as an instructor pilot at Ft. Rucker. He had many times more hours than I did and it seemed a bit odd that he was going to be my co pilot when we started night time combat ops. I found out later that Major Wulff had given him the story that Major Stiner told him about me and Wolman and that was all he needed to justify his decision to sit in the co pilot's seat and watch what I was going to do as the First Pilot or Pilot in Command (PIC).
Oddly enough, after a brief orientation flight in a Huey with the outgoing Major, a flight that took us to the border of Cambodia and back, we received notice that we were going to fly the Arps to an LZ to drop them off for a recon mission.
I was already familiar with the area and initially, I didn't think much about the mission. I was told that I would be flying with Billy Reinhardt and that made me even more comfortable as Billy had already established himself as having a good PT or Pilot Technique. Unfortunately for both of us, the mission went to hell in a hand basket before we even got started.
Reinhardt cranked the Huey and, with all the confidence in the world, he began to lift off and leave the revetment area so the troops could get on board. It was hot as hell that day and as things would have it, the asphalt between the revetment walls had become soft and the weight of the Huey, that allowed the skids to sink into the black asphalt cement where it became stuck and unable to lift off.
Bill attempted to rock the Huey back and forth, hoping that the repeating rocking motion would help break loose the grip that the asphalt had on the skids. While he was doing that, he was also inputting left and right pedal to make the skids move from side to side hoping that would help release it.
All of a sudden, as those motions finally allowed the Huey to break loose from the grip of the hot, soft, sticky asphalt, we became airborne. The instant the skids broke free of the grip the asphalt had on them, at a time when Billy was still on the anti torque pedals, the left rear of the Huey and, most specifically, the vertical stabilizer on the left side of the tail boom, crashed into the revetment wall.
It was horrible and we immediately had to shut down and have the crew chief look at the damage to see if we could continue the mission. I remember thinking to myself" Jesus, Mary and Joseph, my first mission with the Cav resulted in a crash before we even took off".
I hoped it wasn't an omen of things to come and fortunately for us, everything was okay and after a short period of time, we loaded the troops and took off for the LZ. Realizing that it was no one's fault other than the contractor, we shrugged it off and hoped like hell there wouldn't be any fall out over the incident.
The rest of the day was uneventful and eventually, Billy and I laughed our asses off and wondered what our tac officers at Wolters would have said about that day. It seemed that Diable was always somewhere in the background saying: "Remember what I told you about paying attention to detail?"
I had never done a full platoon insertion of troops where 12 helicopters were flying in formation with sixty or seventy men on board. All of my experiences with the 199th were a bit more clandestine and never involved more than a single Huey hauling Long Range Patrol troopers into a small LZ east of Xuan Loc.
Doing that with the Cav was a big production. We had OH6 Loaches flying around the LZ at tree top level, checking for the bad guys and Cobras flying cover over them in case a rocket attack was needed to suppress any enemy fire at the Loaches. With the 199th, it was always a single ship mission.
As an example of that, during one occasion with Fireball Aviation, we had to extract a five man recon team from a small clearing east of Mace. We took off and headed to the approximate location of the troops and made a call to see if we could get a signal and a heading to their location. When we called them, they answered but did so with a whisper. I wondered, what in the HELL is this guy doing telling us that it's All Clear but doing that with a whisper?
Despite my paranoia, we made contact with them, they told us the could hear us and then they said they could see us and they would pop smoke (throw a smoke grenade to locate their pick up point) and we made the extraction without any enemy fire at all.
I don't like switching from an 11th Cav combat assault story to a 199th troop extraction but such was the difference in the size and scale of the missions that the Cav flew compared to that kind of mission that I was accustomed to. Even though it was really cool for one ship to sneak in and pick up the guys who had just completed a 5 day mission in the jungle, so too was it cool to fly formation with a dozen Hueys loaded to the max with the Arps of the 11th Cav. It's just like you see on tv except for the pucker factor that goes with seeing big green tracers coming up toward your helicopter.
In view of that, I may throw in a comparative analysis, as these stories unfold, and use them as a tool to demonstrate how different units handled the same kind of combat missions. It's seven minutes to brain swelling time so I'll cut this off here and add another one later. Thanks for listening. Hello to Duane Kloster, a grunt from another unit and thanks to Ed Wolfe for correcting a previous post indicating that we weren't flying D models and in fact were flying H model Hueys. I have a doctor's excuse for missing that detail.
He told me that he had a friend who was about to take command of the Air Cav Troop at the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and that he was looking for someone to serve as the standardization pilot for Night Hawk missions, something that didn't exist in their unit at that time.
He also told me that his buddy, Major Roy Wulff, wanted to interview one of our guys and, since I still had 8 months left, I was the best candidate for the job. I accepted the offer, grabbed a Huey, flew to Saigon and landed at a huge helipad named "Hotel 3". It wasn't a hotel and I don't know why it was named Hotel 3 but it was located close to MACV headquarters which was our version of the Pentagon in South Vietnam. Within minutes of my landing at Hotel 3, I ran into a guy named Knoblock that was a student at St. Gregory's when I was.
In a short period of time, I located Major Wulff's office and announced myself. He was one of those types that you liked the minute you laid eyes on him. That first impression proved to be right on target and Major Wulff became one of two commanders that I had in Vietnam that I considered to be the best of the best.
After a few days back at Fireball Aviation, we had a Stand Down party and then, I departed for duty with the 11th Cav. I don't know where the other guys ended up but eventually found out that Ed Wolfe was my next door neighbor at Cu Chi.
Talk about a dangerous deal! Cu Chi became famous as one of the largest tunnel complexes in South Vietnam. They were everywhere under the 25th Infantry Division's base and became one of the great stories from General Colin Powell when he elaborated on his experiences in Vietnam. I used to fly over it when we were working that part of the area but I didn't know Ed was there at that time.
In any event, I remember landing at the heliport at Dian, pronounced Zeeon, where the Air Cav Troop was located. As I exited the helicopter and began making my way toward the TOC, I was greeted by Bill Reinhart, my buddy from flight school. I was never so glad to see anybody and I immediately felt at home. I had the feeling that everything was going to be just fine because Reinhardt said it would.
Billy took me to report in for duty and introduced me again to Major Wulff. After a fine welcoming, Billy took me to the "Slick Hootch" where all of the Huey pilots lived. It made Hawkeye's Swamp, from Mash, look like a slum. It was decorated in "Late 60s" deco and had everything from guitars, stereo systems to Jimi Hendrix posters.
My first impression of the hootch was great but my first impression of the men was a bit unsettling. They were suffering from boredom as the combat hours flown had dropped significantly and sitting on one's ass in a combat zone is never a good thing for the hard chargers that the Slick Platoon proved to be comprised of.
When I asked what the problem was they told me that "Sheehan" had nothing for them to do. As it turned out, Captain Sheehan, C.O. of the Slick Platoon, had nothing to do with the flight schedules and, taking his orders from higher up, the inactivity had him just as frustrated as the rest of the pilots.
Luckily for me, I wasn't there to fly troops in and out of landing zones and almost immediately we started planning for Night Hawk operations. That's when I discovered that Sheehan was probably one of the best planners for Night Hawk missions I would ever fly with. He was the only officer that provided me with aerial photographs from the Air Force that gave me a birds eye view of all the trails in the area I was hunting the NVA and VC in. Many were taken at night and it gave me a clear indication of what the Viet Cong were doing after we went to bed at night.
We started our working relationship with a speech where he told me he would not allow his men to fly a mission until after he had learned to fly it himself. I found it a bit unusual because he was a two tour Huey pilot that spent time between tours as an instructor pilot at Ft. Rucker. He had many times more hours than I did and it seemed a bit odd that he was going to be my co pilot when we started night time combat ops. I found out later that Major Wulff had given him the story that Major Stiner told him about me and Wolman and that was all he needed to justify his decision to sit in the co pilot's seat and watch what I was going to do as the First Pilot or Pilot in Command (PIC).
Oddly enough, after a brief orientation flight in a Huey with the outgoing Major, a flight that took us to the border of Cambodia and back, we received notice that we were going to fly the Arps to an LZ to drop them off for a recon mission.
I was already familiar with the area and initially, I didn't think much about the mission. I was told that I would be flying with Billy Reinhardt and that made me even more comfortable as Billy had already established himself as having a good PT or Pilot Technique. Unfortunately for both of us, the mission went to hell in a hand basket before we even got started.
Reinhardt cranked the Huey and, with all the confidence in the world, he began to lift off and leave the revetment area so the troops could get on board. It was hot as hell that day and as things would have it, the asphalt between the revetment walls had become soft and the weight of the Huey, that allowed the skids to sink into the black asphalt cement where it became stuck and unable to lift off.
Bill attempted to rock the Huey back and forth, hoping that the repeating rocking motion would help break loose the grip that the asphalt had on the skids. While he was doing that, he was also inputting left and right pedal to make the skids move from side to side hoping that would help release it.
All of a sudden, as those motions finally allowed the Huey to break loose from the grip of the hot, soft, sticky asphalt, we became airborne. The instant the skids broke free of the grip the asphalt had on them, at a time when Billy was still on the anti torque pedals, the left rear of the Huey and, most specifically, the vertical stabilizer on the left side of the tail boom, crashed into the revetment wall.
It was horrible and we immediately had to shut down and have the crew chief look at the damage to see if we could continue the mission. I remember thinking to myself" Jesus, Mary and Joseph, my first mission with the Cav resulted in a crash before we even took off".
I hoped it wasn't an omen of things to come and fortunately for us, everything was okay and after a short period of time, we loaded the troops and took off for the LZ. Realizing that it was no one's fault other than the contractor, we shrugged it off and hoped like hell there wouldn't be any fall out over the incident.
The rest of the day was uneventful and eventually, Billy and I laughed our asses off and wondered what our tac officers at Wolters would have said about that day. It seemed that Diable was always somewhere in the background saying: "Remember what I told you about paying attention to detail?"
I had never done a full platoon insertion of troops where 12 helicopters were flying in formation with sixty or seventy men on board. All of my experiences with the 199th were a bit more clandestine and never involved more than a single Huey hauling Long Range Patrol troopers into a small LZ east of Xuan Loc.
Doing that with the Cav was a big production. We had OH6 Loaches flying around the LZ at tree top level, checking for the bad guys and Cobras flying cover over them in case a rocket attack was needed to suppress any enemy fire at the Loaches. With the 199th, it was always a single ship mission.
As an example of that, during one occasion with Fireball Aviation, we had to extract a five man recon team from a small clearing east of Mace. We took off and headed to the approximate location of the troops and made a call to see if we could get a signal and a heading to their location. When we called them, they answered but did so with a whisper. I wondered, what in the HELL is this guy doing telling us that it's All Clear but doing that with a whisper?
Despite my paranoia, we made contact with them, they told us the could hear us and then they said they could see us and they would pop smoke (throw a smoke grenade to locate their pick up point) and we made the extraction without any enemy fire at all.
I don't like switching from an 11th Cav combat assault story to a 199th troop extraction but such was the difference in the size and scale of the missions that the Cav flew compared to that kind of mission that I was accustomed to. Even though it was really cool for one ship to sneak in and pick up the guys who had just completed a 5 day mission in the jungle, so too was it cool to fly formation with a dozen Hueys loaded to the max with the Arps of the 11th Cav. It's just like you see on tv except for the pucker factor that goes with seeing big green tracers coming up toward your helicopter.
In view of that, I may throw in a comparative analysis, as these stories unfold, and use them as a tool to demonstrate how different units handled the same kind of combat missions. It's seven minutes to brain swelling time so I'll cut this off here and add another one later. Thanks for listening. Hello to Duane Kloster, a grunt from another unit and thanks to Ed Wolfe for correcting a previous post indicating that we weren't flying D models and in fact were flying H model Hueys. I have a doctor's excuse for missing that detail.
Monday, August 25, 2014
A summary of the last days with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade.
I had a number of highlights during my time with the 199th. I experienced a rocket attack at Mace in broad daylight, some kind of night time attack at our rear area that caused me to put on a flak jacket, go to the flight line and hide behind a revetment wall with an M 16 in case the dinks made it through the wire.
Ed, do you remember that night and us shooting a starlight shell at the ARVN guards to wake their asses up?
I don't know why we weren't scared to death but I will admit that we were shocked. Maybe it was the training, maybe it was due to the fact that so many of the pilots were seasoned veterans and always ready to fight. In any event, I recall being scared a time or two when I was watching Wolman doing some of the things he did but I eventually wrote that off as being new to the job and not really knowing why he did things that seemed to me to be crazy.
One daylight mission, as a Command and Control co pilot, the Colonel had us fly him to a hell of a fire fight on the extreme eastern end of our area, not far from Phan Thiet. There was a mountain there that we called "Budda Mountain" even though it wasn't the original Budda Mountain that is most commonly referred to. I was watching Charlie Model gunships making gun run after gun run on the target area and was amazed at their bravery even though they were watching the green tracers arc upward in an attempt to shoot them down.
The Colonel told Wolman to get into another holding pattern west of the target area and make north to south passes. After a couple of passes, he asked Wolman to slow it down a little. That's when I nearly jumped out of my seat. Wolman put the nose of the Huey into the wind and, for the most part, began to hover. I recall my course in tactics and could remember Hofius telling us not to never, never, never give the enemy a slow moving target if we could help it. As it turned out, Wolman knew exactly what he was doing and the Colonel made whatever decisions he made regarding artillery strikes and the battle was over soon after that.
On another occasion, Wolman was really pissed over the fact that we had to fly a Colonel (Underwood)? in from Saigon to have a meeting with our C.O. at Mace. It was during the monsoon season and the weather was the worst. When the meeting was over, we were assigned to fly him back to his base. Once we left Mace, it was pitch black and the monsoon winds were very strong. Wolman must have thought that was the perfect set of circumstances to check my IFR abilities and he told me to contact Center for a vector to Bear Cat. There was no way we could make it back to Long Binh or Saigon as both were closed due to the monsoon.
I looked up the frequency, contacted Center and asked for a vector to Bear Cat. They gave me instructions to squalk 1200 and ident on the transponder, found us on the radar screen and gave us the heading. I changed course and began to fly toward the Locator Outer Marker. We were already low on fuel and the headwinds became a concern but we continue to fly as we had no other choices.
I contacted Approach Control and was immediately asked to make a 360 degree turn "for separation". As it turned out, every aircraft in that part of Vietnam was being diverted to Bear Cat as everything else was closed. It seemed that every radio call was followed by Bear Cat ordering us to make a 360 degree turn for separation. Soon after that, they asked us to state our final approach speed and when they did, I told them we were flying a UH 1 and could adjust our final approach speed to anything they wanted.
With the lights of Bear Cat seen in the distance, our 20 minute fuel warning light came on. Approach asked us to make another 360 degree turn for separation and to slow our approach speed. I returned that call and said: "Sir, our 20 minute low fuel light is on, if you will let me make the Locator Outer Marker, I'll hover over it and make my approach from there".
As I recall it, Wolman laughed at my response, gave me a "Good Job", took control of the Huey, dove for the Marker and continued the approach to a full stop landing for refueling. I don't remember if we ended up spending the night or were able to proceed later but I clearly remember the OH SHIT feeling that came when the 20 minute fuel warning light lit up. I also remember Wolman being really pissed off that the entire crew had been put in danger by some Colonel's desire to have a social event at our forward area.
In any event, we had the best pilots one could ever hope to have as mentors, the best leaders in Major Lewis and then Major Stiner. We also had a great rear area that had showers and an officers club not far from our quarters where we could buy a steak and watch tv. It was a wonderful outfit and all of my experiences there as a member were positive. Some were heart breaking, like July 4th but all of them resulted in me becoming the Night Hawk pilot I became.
I have another post to make before I move on to the 11th Cav but it's 8 minutes to brain swelling time so I have to go for now.
Ed, do you remember that night and us shooting a starlight shell at the ARVN guards to wake their asses up?
I don't know why we weren't scared to death but I will admit that we were shocked. Maybe it was the training, maybe it was due to the fact that so many of the pilots were seasoned veterans and always ready to fight. In any event, I recall being scared a time or two when I was watching Wolman doing some of the things he did but I eventually wrote that off as being new to the job and not really knowing why he did things that seemed to me to be crazy.
One daylight mission, as a Command and Control co pilot, the Colonel had us fly him to a hell of a fire fight on the extreme eastern end of our area, not far from Phan Thiet. There was a mountain there that we called "Budda Mountain" even though it wasn't the original Budda Mountain that is most commonly referred to. I was watching Charlie Model gunships making gun run after gun run on the target area and was amazed at their bravery even though they were watching the green tracers arc upward in an attempt to shoot them down.
The Colonel told Wolman to get into another holding pattern west of the target area and make north to south passes. After a couple of passes, he asked Wolman to slow it down a little. That's when I nearly jumped out of my seat. Wolman put the nose of the Huey into the wind and, for the most part, began to hover. I recall my course in tactics and could remember Hofius telling us not to never, never, never give the enemy a slow moving target if we could help it. As it turned out, Wolman knew exactly what he was doing and the Colonel made whatever decisions he made regarding artillery strikes and the battle was over soon after that.
On another occasion, Wolman was really pissed over the fact that we had to fly a Colonel (Underwood)? in from Saigon to have a meeting with our C.O. at Mace. It was during the monsoon season and the weather was the worst. When the meeting was over, we were assigned to fly him back to his base. Once we left Mace, it was pitch black and the monsoon winds were very strong. Wolman must have thought that was the perfect set of circumstances to check my IFR abilities and he told me to contact Center for a vector to Bear Cat. There was no way we could make it back to Long Binh or Saigon as both were closed due to the monsoon.
I looked up the frequency, contacted Center and asked for a vector to Bear Cat. They gave me instructions to squalk 1200 and ident on the transponder, found us on the radar screen and gave us the heading. I changed course and began to fly toward the Locator Outer Marker. We were already low on fuel and the headwinds became a concern but we continue to fly as we had no other choices.
I contacted Approach Control and was immediately asked to make a 360 degree turn "for separation". As it turned out, every aircraft in that part of Vietnam was being diverted to Bear Cat as everything else was closed. It seemed that every radio call was followed by Bear Cat ordering us to make a 360 degree turn for separation. Soon after that, they asked us to state our final approach speed and when they did, I told them we were flying a UH 1 and could adjust our final approach speed to anything they wanted.
With the lights of Bear Cat seen in the distance, our 20 minute fuel warning light came on. Approach asked us to make another 360 degree turn for separation and to slow our approach speed. I returned that call and said: "Sir, our 20 minute low fuel light is on, if you will let me make the Locator Outer Marker, I'll hover over it and make my approach from there".
As I recall it, Wolman laughed at my response, gave me a "Good Job", took control of the Huey, dove for the Marker and continued the approach to a full stop landing for refueling. I don't remember if we ended up spending the night or were able to proceed later but I clearly remember the OH SHIT feeling that came when the 20 minute fuel warning light lit up. I also remember Wolman being really pissed off that the entire crew had been put in danger by some Colonel's desire to have a social event at our forward area.
In any event, we had the best pilots one could ever hope to have as mentors, the best leaders in Major Lewis and then Major Stiner. We also had a great rear area that had showers and an officers club not far from our quarters where we could buy a steak and watch tv. It was a wonderful outfit and all of my experiences there as a member were positive. Some were heart breaking, like July 4th but all of them resulted in me becoming the Night Hawk pilot I became.
I have another post to make before I move on to the 11th Cav but it's 8 minutes to brain swelling time so I have to go for now.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Another Nighthawk Lesson Learned.
Curt, please share this with Finnerty and Ed. Even though I was still flying with the Fireball Aviation guys, this LZ would eventually be visited by us in November of 1970 when we were flying Slicks with the 11th Cav.
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As it relates to the point of all these posts, please remember this:
Sometimes that which looks like a duck, flies like a duck and sounds like a duck, isn't a duck at all. That's been a saying for as long as I can remember and in most cases, it still applies. Let's use profiling as an example. More often than not, a rag head is a rag head and it really pisses them off when you stare at them like they're a rag head. Having said that, here's an example that should be viewed in a manner that indicates our thoughts about certain things are sometimes wrong.
One night, just west of Xuan Loc, I had another Nighthawk mission that required me to fly over the rubber plantation between our rear area near Long Binh and Xuan Loc. I don't remember the name of the LZ but I do remember a briefing that changed our mission from one where we responded to a call for help to one that put us in the role of Hunter Killer. I think it was sometime around August of 1970.
Intelligence reports and sensors indicated movement in the area and local eyewitnesses said the NVA were very active in the area and were bringing in large amounts of weapons and ammo. I can't remember if I had Wolman as the Aircraft Commander (AC) or not but I think that I was sitting in the left seat of the Huey and that was normally reserved for the AC.
When we arrived over the area, we noticed an 18 wheeler log truck parked on a dirt road that ran east and west through the LZ. We called the Tactical Operations Center and were given permission to fire on the truck as it was in a zone where that was forbidden.
We began our gun run from North to South, decided to use the 50 caliber as the weapon of choice and gave the gunner permission to fire. As soon as he opened up, I noticed that the VSI or Vertical Speed Indicator began to vary a great deal. The needle, instead of showing straight and level, began fluctuating between a 500 foot per minute climb and a 500 foot per minute dive and it did that with every round coming out of the 50. The VSI was a pressure instrument and if you think a 44 magnum is loud, believe me when I say that the 50 caliber, among all machine guns I was familiar with, sets the standard for loud. The concussion, even though I was wearing a flight helmet, took it's toll on me and I was eventually grounded because of ear problems that came from that flight.
In any event, as the rounds began to penetrate the truck, the gunner began moving his shots to the rear where the logs were located. At that point in time, the largest secondary explosion you could imagine, erupted from the logs. That's when we knew it wasn't a duck or a log truck. They had hollowed up one of the trees and packed it full of God only knows what. Mortars, RPGs, rockets, hand grenades, you name it. The explosion was so big, it completely eliminated our view of the truck.
After that, we orbited the site for a brief period of time and after reporting that to the TOC, we were given permission to leave the area and RTB, return to base.
Curt, if you and Ed will recall the day that Finnerty and I pulled the 4 arps out of the LZ that they were left behind in, you will remember that dirt road and Ed will certainly remember the log he was hiding behind when the NVA were trying to shoot his ass off. It certainly wasn't the log that was hollowed out and containing the ammo but I'm sure it was one of the logs from that truck because it was way too short for the normal "tree length log" that typically went to sawmills.
That was another lesson learned for me and even though I had only been in Vietnam less than 4 months at that time, I had already logged a lot of combat hours flying Nighthawks and it gave me another example of the thoughts that Aircraft Commanders had to have when flying missions like that. "Don't trust anything". What you see, sometimes isn't what you see at all.
I probably only have one or two more posts to make about my experience with the 199th because they were sent home in September of 1970 and my total time there was only 4 months before I went to Saigon to interview for the job as the Nighthawk Standardization Pilot for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Air Cav Troop.
********************************************************************************
As it relates to the point of all these posts, please remember this:
Sometimes that which looks like a duck, flies like a duck and sounds like a duck, isn't a duck at all. That's been a saying for as long as I can remember and in most cases, it still applies. Let's use profiling as an example. More often than not, a rag head is a rag head and it really pisses them off when you stare at them like they're a rag head. Having said that, here's an example that should be viewed in a manner that indicates our thoughts about certain things are sometimes wrong.
One night, just west of Xuan Loc, I had another Nighthawk mission that required me to fly over the rubber plantation between our rear area near Long Binh and Xuan Loc. I don't remember the name of the LZ but I do remember a briefing that changed our mission from one where we responded to a call for help to one that put us in the role of Hunter Killer. I think it was sometime around August of 1970.
Intelligence reports and sensors indicated movement in the area and local eyewitnesses said the NVA were very active in the area and were bringing in large amounts of weapons and ammo. I can't remember if I had Wolman as the Aircraft Commander (AC) or not but I think that I was sitting in the left seat of the Huey and that was normally reserved for the AC.
When we arrived over the area, we noticed an 18 wheeler log truck parked on a dirt road that ran east and west through the LZ. We called the Tactical Operations Center and were given permission to fire on the truck as it was in a zone where that was forbidden.
We began our gun run from North to South, decided to use the 50 caliber as the weapon of choice and gave the gunner permission to fire. As soon as he opened up, I noticed that the VSI or Vertical Speed Indicator began to vary a great deal. The needle, instead of showing straight and level, began fluctuating between a 500 foot per minute climb and a 500 foot per minute dive and it did that with every round coming out of the 50. The VSI was a pressure instrument and if you think a 44 magnum is loud, believe me when I say that the 50 caliber, among all machine guns I was familiar with, sets the standard for loud. The concussion, even though I was wearing a flight helmet, took it's toll on me and I was eventually grounded because of ear problems that came from that flight.
In any event, as the rounds began to penetrate the truck, the gunner began moving his shots to the rear where the logs were located. At that point in time, the largest secondary explosion you could imagine, erupted from the logs. That's when we knew it wasn't a duck or a log truck. They had hollowed up one of the trees and packed it full of God only knows what. Mortars, RPGs, rockets, hand grenades, you name it. The explosion was so big, it completely eliminated our view of the truck.
After that, we orbited the site for a brief period of time and after reporting that to the TOC, we were given permission to leave the area and RTB, return to base.
Curt, if you and Ed will recall the day that Finnerty and I pulled the 4 arps out of the LZ that they were left behind in, you will remember that dirt road and Ed will certainly remember the log he was hiding behind when the NVA were trying to shoot his ass off. It certainly wasn't the log that was hollowed out and containing the ammo but I'm sure it was one of the logs from that truck because it was way too short for the normal "tree length log" that typically went to sawmills.
That was another lesson learned for me and even though I had only been in Vietnam less than 4 months at that time, I had already logged a lot of combat hours flying Nighthawks and it gave me another example of the thoughts that Aircraft Commanders had to have when flying missions like that. "Don't trust anything". What you see, sometimes isn't what you see at all.
I probably only have one or two more posts to make about my experience with the 199th because they were sent home in September of 1970 and my total time there was only 4 months before I went to Saigon to interview for the job as the Nighthawk Standardization Pilot for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Air Cav Troop.
Saturday, August 23, 2014
July 4th, 1970. A post dedicated to the families of Chief Warrant Officers Stearns and Jernigan, Killed in Action On That Day.
This post comes as a special request from Greg Stearns. His father was one of two Cobra pilots I watched die on July 4th, 1970 during a fierce battle with the Dong Nghai Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army. Unfortunately, Greg was a little kid when the Army came to tell his family that his father had been shot down and killed "during a routine patrol", and throughout all those years, he lived that lie not knowing anything about the heroics exhibited by his father and Jernigan on that day.
We connected as a result of a memorial that I wrote for his dad and Jernigan on The Virtual Wall where I outlined the details of that fight. From that, Greg connected with me via my email address that I left on the post and I was able to give him the eyewitness reports of that day and dispel the notion that it was anything but "routine". Since then, I've connected with many members of his family and, for me, it has been a most rewarding experience to give them the closure that none of them had from that horrible day.
Dateline: July 4th, 1970.
Location: Just north of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, approximately 40 miles northeast of Saigon.
Base of Operations: 'Fire Support Base Mace, 199th Light Infantry Brigade. U.S. Army.
Subject: The combat loss of Chief Warrant Officers Stearns and Jernigan, AH 1 G Cobra gunship.
On that day, I was assigned to fly as co pilot for CW2 Craig Wolman, the aircraft commander of a UH 1 D model Huey that was designated as the Command and Control aircraft for the Brigade Commander, Colonel Collins. Memory robs me of some details and it may be that Colonel Shelton was on board that day but I'm not sure.
In any event, we received a call that a large convoy of ours was under attack by a larger force of enemy troops belonging to the Dong Nghai Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army. We were ordered to take off immediately and fly the Colonel to the site of the ambush and provide Command and Control. I clearly remember running to the Huey and performing the prestart duties of a copilot as Wolman and the Colonel were strapping in and preparing for God only knows what.
We departed FSB Mace and within minutes we could see helicopters flying above the battle field and lots of smoke in the air. Despite the fact that I had only been in Vietnam for six weeks, I could tell that there was one hell of a fight going on because of the smoke that came from mortars and RPGs. The Colonel knew it and told Wolman to enter a holding pattern west of the road where our men were pinned down and to make north and south runs from that holding pattern.
Wolman was doing all of the flying and I was running cross checks of the instrument panel and scanning the outside of the aircraft to insure that there would be no mid air collisions with other helicopters in the area. That was the first moment that I saw the details of the men on the ground as they took cover behind the vehicles in the convoy, the tracers arcing back and forth from their position and ours, as well as the aircraft circling over the fight.
I recall an OH 6 Loach to the north and the Cobra being flown by Stearns and Jernigan flying toward us but on the other side of the road from where we were. They were right outside the copilots cockpit window and very close to where I was seated.
When we reached the northern end of the ambush, the Colonel told us to turn south and continue with the holding pattern west of the road. I didn't know it at the time but the NVA knew that there would be air support from Mace and they had set up a 51 caliber anti aircraft position at the southern most end of the jungle.
Stearns and Jernigan had seen it and as we reached the southern limit of our holding pattern, Wolman made his turn to begin the second pass of the northern track back to the ambush site. That's when I noticed that Stearns and Jernigan began their turn back toward the ambush site. They were right outside my window and separated from us by roughly 200 yards or so. I almost wish that I hadn't been making instrument cross checks because, before I knew what was really going on, they began their rocket run.
The radio chatter between the Colonel and the ground commander got my attention and I immediately went back to the instrument cross checks. Before I knew it, there was a huge fireball on the ground and no Cobra. One minute I was watching them begin their dive and the next minute they were gone.
With the fireball still in the air, the Colonel expressed his regret that we had to witness the loss of our brothers and ordered us to back off of that area. Not knowing much of anything about combat, my initial thoughts were to shoot the place up but, as it turned out, the Colonel knew exactly what to do as it was his job to command the ground forces and getting killed would have put everybody in further danger.
Wolman backed out of the holding pattern and the gunner who saw the entire thing told us that the Cobra, as he dove toward the 51 caliber position, had taken a direct hit in the cockpit. At 190 knots dive speed, it only took an instant for them to hit the 51 caliber position which killed everybody on the ground and totally eliminated the air threat to the other helicopters in the area. Later on, I had a discussion with some of the ground troops who went in to retrieve the bodies and they told me that there were many NVA bodies all over the place and apparently, Stearns and Jernigan had hit their main staging area.
With the NVA wiped out, it was no time at all before our boys were tearing up the jungle on the east side of the road and the ambush was over. From the very beginning of our arrival until the battle was over, there couldn't have been more than five or ten minutes time consumed. With that, we returned to base and shut down for the day.
Watching that action with Stearns and Jernigan effectively killing everybody that was assigned to shoot us down, changed my life. I began flying differently and never flew in a straight line any more. I was almost always weaving back and forth and changing altitude to make it hard for them to get a good shot at us. Ed Wolfe, my room mate at the time, told me that he adopted that strategy as well. I don't think Ed was there that day but he and I discussed it as we were both new guys and the word spread like wildfire throughout the unit.
In addition to those changes, every July 4th from that day until this, has not been about the Declaration of Independence. It's been about Stearns and Jernigan and the real price we have to pay when fighting those who want to kill us. I see that sight many more times than just the 4th of July and have spoken of it often during sessions at the VA when "flashbacks" are discussed.
In any event, Greg Stearns, Frank's son, asked me to please put this account here so that he and his family could read the details of his hero father instead of a pilot that was shot down and killed on a routine mission.
To Buck, Rene, Uncle George and all the members of the Stearns family, let me say that I have never seen bravery like that throughout the rest of the war and, for whatever it is worth, I saw incredible acts of bravery from Xuan Loc all the way to the Chup Rubber Plantation in Cambodia. God Bless you guys and your entire family and thank you for asking me to set things right for all of you and clear up any misgivings about the manner in which these two heroes died.
Tim Butler, Former Chief Warrant Officer, U.S. Army, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, July 4th, 1970.
We connected as a result of a memorial that I wrote for his dad and Jernigan on The Virtual Wall where I outlined the details of that fight. From that, Greg connected with me via my email address that I left on the post and I was able to give him the eyewitness reports of that day and dispel the notion that it was anything but "routine". Since then, I've connected with many members of his family and, for me, it has been a most rewarding experience to give them the closure that none of them had from that horrible day.
Dateline: July 4th, 1970.
Location: Just north of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, approximately 40 miles northeast of Saigon.
Base of Operations: 'Fire Support Base Mace, 199th Light Infantry Brigade. U.S. Army.
Subject: The combat loss of Chief Warrant Officers Stearns and Jernigan, AH 1 G Cobra gunship.
On that day, I was assigned to fly as co pilot for CW2 Craig Wolman, the aircraft commander of a UH 1 D model Huey that was designated as the Command and Control aircraft for the Brigade Commander, Colonel Collins. Memory robs me of some details and it may be that Colonel Shelton was on board that day but I'm not sure.
In any event, we received a call that a large convoy of ours was under attack by a larger force of enemy troops belonging to the Dong Nghai Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army. We were ordered to take off immediately and fly the Colonel to the site of the ambush and provide Command and Control. I clearly remember running to the Huey and performing the prestart duties of a copilot as Wolman and the Colonel were strapping in and preparing for God only knows what.
We departed FSB Mace and within minutes we could see helicopters flying above the battle field and lots of smoke in the air. Despite the fact that I had only been in Vietnam for six weeks, I could tell that there was one hell of a fight going on because of the smoke that came from mortars and RPGs. The Colonel knew it and told Wolman to enter a holding pattern west of the road where our men were pinned down and to make north and south runs from that holding pattern.
Wolman was doing all of the flying and I was running cross checks of the instrument panel and scanning the outside of the aircraft to insure that there would be no mid air collisions with other helicopters in the area. That was the first moment that I saw the details of the men on the ground as they took cover behind the vehicles in the convoy, the tracers arcing back and forth from their position and ours, as well as the aircraft circling over the fight.
I recall an OH 6 Loach to the north and the Cobra being flown by Stearns and Jernigan flying toward us but on the other side of the road from where we were. They were right outside the copilots cockpit window and very close to where I was seated.
When we reached the northern end of the ambush, the Colonel told us to turn south and continue with the holding pattern west of the road. I didn't know it at the time but the NVA knew that there would be air support from Mace and they had set up a 51 caliber anti aircraft position at the southern most end of the jungle.
Stearns and Jernigan had seen it and as we reached the southern limit of our holding pattern, Wolman made his turn to begin the second pass of the northern track back to the ambush site. That's when I noticed that Stearns and Jernigan began their turn back toward the ambush site. They were right outside my window and separated from us by roughly 200 yards or so. I almost wish that I hadn't been making instrument cross checks because, before I knew what was really going on, they began their rocket run.
The radio chatter between the Colonel and the ground commander got my attention and I immediately went back to the instrument cross checks. Before I knew it, there was a huge fireball on the ground and no Cobra. One minute I was watching them begin their dive and the next minute they were gone.
With the fireball still in the air, the Colonel expressed his regret that we had to witness the loss of our brothers and ordered us to back off of that area. Not knowing much of anything about combat, my initial thoughts were to shoot the place up but, as it turned out, the Colonel knew exactly what to do as it was his job to command the ground forces and getting killed would have put everybody in further danger.
Wolman backed out of the holding pattern and the gunner who saw the entire thing told us that the Cobra, as he dove toward the 51 caliber position, had taken a direct hit in the cockpit. At 190 knots dive speed, it only took an instant for them to hit the 51 caliber position which killed everybody on the ground and totally eliminated the air threat to the other helicopters in the area. Later on, I had a discussion with some of the ground troops who went in to retrieve the bodies and they told me that there were many NVA bodies all over the place and apparently, Stearns and Jernigan had hit their main staging area.
With the NVA wiped out, it was no time at all before our boys were tearing up the jungle on the east side of the road and the ambush was over. From the very beginning of our arrival until the battle was over, there couldn't have been more than five or ten minutes time consumed. With that, we returned to base and shut down for the day.
Watching that action with Stearns and Jernigan effectively killing everybody that was assigned to shoot us down, changed my life. I began flying differently and never flew in a straight line any more. I was almost always weaving back and forth and changing altitude to make it hard for them to get a good shot at us. Ed Wolfe, my room mate at the time, told me that he adopted that strategy as well. I don't think Ed was there that day but he and I discussed it as we were both new guys and the word spread like wildfire throughout the unit.
In addition to those changes, every July 4th from that day until this, has not been about the Declaration of Independence. It's been about Stearns and Jernigan and the real price we have to pay when fighting those who want to kill us. I see that sight many more times than just the 4th of July and have spoken of it often during sessions at the VA when "flashbacks" are discussed.
In any event, Greg Stearns, Frank's son, asked me to please put this account here so that he and his family could read the details of his hero father instead of a pilot that was shot down and killed on a routine mission.
To Buck, Rene, Uncle George and all the members of the Stearns family, let me say that I have never seen bravery like that throughout the rest of the war and, for whatever it is worth, I saw incredible acts of bravery from Xuan Loc all the way to the Chup Rubber Plantation in Cambodia. God Bless you guys and your entire family and thank you for asking me to set things right for all of you and clear up any misgivings about the manner in which these two heroes died.
Tim Butler, Former Chief Warrant Officer, U.S. Army, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, July 4th, 1970.
Friday, August 22, 2014
The Toughest Nighthawk Mission I Ever Flew.
After Blame it on Bob posted "Tree Top Flyer" on my face book page, I decided to put in additional details from flying Night Hawk missions and switching roles to being a Scout pilot on Hunter Killer missions.
I chalked up a lot of night time flying with Craig and learned a great many things from his mentoring. I considered him to be the most prolific night combat operations pilot that I ever flew with and despite the great experiences I had with the other pilots I flew Night Hawks with, Wolman and I seemed to have the magnet asses that always attracted ground fire from the NVA and VC and racked up more combat time at night than the other guys. Because of that, I will start with him.
One night, we received a call for help from ground forces that were fighting for their lives in the mountains just above Phan Thiet. That was on the extreme eastern edge of our Area of Operations. As it turned out, one of our patrols had run into an enemy concentration at one of the worst possible areas.
They had a mountain at their back, a stream on their eastern flank, another mountain on their western flank and the bad guys covering their only way out. In short, they were trapped and made the call for us to bring in air support sometime around 9 or 10 o'clock that evening. We scrambled to the Night Hawk Huey and immediately headed to some unknown location that we could only identify by radio beam when we arrived in the general area. It couldn't have been a worse spot.
As we arrived on station but before we began our attack, Puff the Magic Dragon showed up. Some of you may remember that name from a song but from an equipment standpoint, it was an old DC 3 or C 47 airplane, the kind that was used to haul the paratroopers to Normandy on D Day. This particular plane was loaded with miniguns and was perfect for night combat operations in most circumstances.
Wolman gave them priority for the attack but unfortunately, with the mountains so close together, they were not able to get down to the treetop levels because they didn't have enough room to maneuver without hitting the canyon walls. Craig called them and told them not to worry because we were in a Huey and could fly right down the stream, directly to the enemy forces. I was still pretty new to the game and, with all the tracers flying around and the ground commander screaming for help, I remember thinking "Oh, shit. We're all gonna die". Thankfully, Wolman had no such thoughts and called the ground commander asking him to give us a target area to shoot at.
That night, as opposed to others, we had a clear sky and no cloud cover so we had a perfect view of the area where all the fighting was going on. The ground commander told us to take a "marking shot" in an area north of the wall that was behind him and west of a part of the stream that had a turn in it that we could clearly see. He called Puff, told them to enter a holding pattern and stand by.
In less time than it takes to tell it, he lowered the collective and we dropped like a rock to tree top level with a mountain on each side of us and the stream just below us. I was still relatively new at this game and can remember having some knots in my stomach as I knew if we were hit, we had no place to go but in the trees where the bad guys were or in the stream where they would have a clear shot at us from the bank. Despite that, I stood close by the controls in case Wolman was hit and we began the run into the target area that was filled with tracers going back and forth between our guys and theirs.
He told the gunner on the right side of the Huey to point his M 60 or his 50 caliber in the forward firing position ( I forget which gun). He told them to do that and fire a "Marking Round Only". On his command: "Open Fire", the gunner opened fire and the rounds hit exactly where Wolman was pointing the Huey. With that shot, Wolman had the gunner cease fire and he called the ground commander who told us to open up and rake the entire area being careful not to shoot any further south than the area where the marking rounds landed.
Unfortunately for us, the proximity of the mountain, filling our windshield, didn't allow us to make that run and we had to turn around, re-enter the canyon and make another run down the canyon.
We continued to do that time and time again and before long, we were getting low on ammo and fuel and had to announce that to the ground commander. He confirmed the radio call and asked us to bring him some ammo for the M 16s and M 60s when we returned and NOT to take too long.
Craig made a very rapid cyclic climb and handed the controls to me. While he was on the radio, I flew over the top of the mountain and headed to Phan Thiet which was a very short distance away. I'd been there before and had seen some Air America C 46s parked on the ramp and was quite comfortable that I could handle anything that might happen from that moment on.
We landed, never shut down the engine, began refueling and the guy at the ammo dump delivered the wooden crates filled with ammo that Wolman had ordered. We took off and went back to the contact area and made readio contact with the ground commander. When the ground commander asked us to come to a full stop over the trees and drop the ammo out of the Huey to the troops below, I could have easily dropped a load in my shorts but we were too busy trying to figure out where to make the drop without stopping on top of the NVA. They were that close to our guys and the solid rock mountain wall that they were trapped against.
When I realized that where ever Wolman stopped, I would be the closest one to the enemy on the ground and the easiest one to shoot. Luckily for me, Wolman put the Huey exactly where the ground people needed it and, as I heard them say: "Hover right, hover right, a little more, a little more, OKAY, drop it, drop it"..............I began to believe that I was going to survive.
I had my head out the cockpit window and watched the wooden crates of ammo drop away and disappear in the trees. I was really glad when that part of the mission was over with because the fire fight was still going on below us. It didn't occur to me that the bad guys couldn't see us because of the trees but even if I had, it wouldn't have made much difference because seeing big, green NVA tracers didn't necessarily mean that they were aiming at me. They were shooting everywhere and a bullet has no eyes.
With the drop made, Wolman got us out of there in a heart beat but before I knew what was going on, he lined up for his next gun run. Remember, I was still new at this and I didn't know that the night was still young and we were going to fight through the second tank of fuel and many more gun runs. Eventually, we had to return to Phan Thiet to refuel and rearm and run through a third tank of fuel before they released us. It definitely was an all night long mission for us and the longest Night Hawk Mission I ever flew.
I'll close this by saying that we eventually made it back to our rear area and were given the results of our actions that were followed by a "Well Done" from our C.O.
I chalked up a lot of night time flying with Craig and learned a great many things from his mentoring. I considered him to be the most prolific night combat operations pilot that I ever flew with and despite the great experiences I had with the other pilots I flew Night Hawks with, Wolman and I seemed to have the magnet asses that always attracted ground fire from the NVA and VC and racked up more combat time at night than the other guys. Because of that, I will start with him.
One night, we received a call for help from ground forces that were fighting for their lives in the mountains just above Phan Thiet. That was on the extreme eastern edge of our Area of Operations. As it turned out, one of our patrols had run into an enemy concentration at one of the worst possible areas.
They had a mountain at their back, a stream on their eastern flank, another mountain on their western flank and the bad guys covering their only way out. In short, they were trapped and made the call for us to bring in air support sometime around 9 or 10 o'clock that evening. We scrambled to the Night Hawk Huey and immediately headed to some unknown location that we could only identify by radio beam when we arrived in the general area. It couldn't have been a worse spot.
As we arrived on station but before we began our attack, Puff the Magic Dragon showed up. Some of you may remember that name from a song but from an equipment standpoint, it was an old DC 3 or C 47 airplane, the kind that was used to haul the paratroopers to Normandy on D Day. This particular plane was loaded with miniguns and was perfect for night combat operations in most circumstances.
Wolman gave them priority for the attack but unfortunately, with the mountains so close together, they were not able to get down to the treetop levels because they didn't have enough room to maneuver without hitting the canyon walls. Craig called them and told them not to worry because we were in a Huey and could fly right down the stream, directly to the enemy forces. I was still pretty new to the game and, with all the tracers flying around and the ground commander screaming for help, I remember thinking "Oh, shit. We're all gonna die". Thankfully, Wolman had no such thoughts and called the ground commander asking him to give us a target area to shoot at.
That night, as opposed to others, we had a clear sky and no cloud cover so we had a perfect view of the area where all the fighting was going on. The ground commander told us to take a "marking shot" in an area north of the wall that was behind him and west of a part of the stream that had a turn in it that we could clearly see. He called Puff, told them to enter a holding pattern and stand by.
In less time than it takes to tell it, he lowered the collective and we dropped like a rock to tree top level with a mountain on each side of us and the stream just below us. I was still relatively new at this game and can remember having some knots in my stomach as I knew if we were hit, we had no place to go but in the trees where the bad guys were or in the stream where they would have a clear shot at us from the bank. Despite that, I stood close by the controls in case Wolman was hit and we began the run into the target area that was filled with tracers going back and forth between our guys and theirs.
He told the gunner on the right side of the Huey to point his M 60 or his 50 caliber in the forward firing position ( I forget which gun). He told them to do that and fire a "Marking Round Only". On his command: "Open Fire", the gunner opened fire and the rounds hit exactly where Wolman was pointing the Huey. With that shot, Wolman had the gunner cease fire and he called the ground commander who told us to open up and rake the entire area being careful not to shoot any further south than the area where the marking rounds landed.
Unfortunately for us, the proximity of the mountain, filling our windshield, didn't allow us to make that run and we had to turn around, re-enter the canyon and make another run down the canyon.
We continued to do that time and time again and before long, we were getting low on ammo and fuel and had to announce that to the ground commander. He confirmed the radio call and asked us to bring him some ammo for the M 16s and M 60s when we returned and NOT to take too long.
Craig made a very rapid cyclic climb and handed the controls to me. While he was on the radio, I flew over the top of the mountain and headed to Phan Thiet which was a very short distance away. I'd been there before and had seen some Air America C 46s parked on the ramp and was quite comfortable that I could handle anything that might happen from that moment on.
We landed, never shut down the engine, began refueling and the guy at the ammo dump delivered the wooden crates filled with ammo that Wolman had ordered. We took off and went back to the contact area and made readio contact with the ground commander. When the ground commander asked us to come to a full stop over the trees and drop the ammo out of the Huey to the troops below, I could have easily dropped a load in my shorts but we were too busy trying to figure out where to make the drop without stopping on top of the NVA. They were that close to our guys and the solid rock mountain wall that they were trapped against.
When I realized that where ever Wolman stopped, I would be the closest one to the enemy on the ground and the easiest one to shoot. Luckily for me, Wolman put the Huey exactly where the ground people needed it and, as I heard them say: "Hover right, hover right, a little more, a little more, OKAY, drop it, drop it"..............I began to believe that I was going to survive.
I had my head out the cockpit window and watched the wooden crates of ammo drop away and disappear in the trees. I was really glad when that part of the mission was over with because the fire fight was still going on below us. It didn't occur to me that the bad guys couldn't see us because of the trees but even if I had, it wouldn't have made much difference because seeing big, green NVA tracers didn't necessarily mean that they were aiming at me. They were shooting everywhere and a bullet has no eyes.
With the drop made, Wolman got us out of there in a heart beat but before I knew what was going on, he lined up for his next gun run. Remember, I was still new at this and I didn't know that the night was still young and we were going to fight through the second tank of fuel and many more gun runs. Eventually, we had to return to Phan Thiet to refuel and rearm and run through a third tank of fuel before they released us. It definitely was an all night long mission for us and the longest Night Hawk Mission I ever flew.
I'll close this by saying that we eventually made it back to our rear area and were given the results of our actions that were followed by a "Well Done" from our C.O.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
More combat time with the 199th and more lessons learned?
Initially, I thought that outlining several of the combat missions I experienced during my time in Vietnam and Cambodia, might help you understand the parallels between then and now.
That thought process came from taking part in the killing machine that eventually resulted in the Paris Peace Accords being signed by the North Vietnamese and "A cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of troops", being the end result. That came after 1.1 million were killed and 600,000 wounded.
Moving forward from then to today, as I see it, the boys that pulled off the Boston Marathon bombing were, at one time, immigrants who slipped across the border, participated in food stamps, welfare and education at YOUR expense, but even a free ride didn't change the really that they had on their minds. The radicalization, while they were in Chechnya, or however you spell it, led them across the border into our Country, to do one thing. We all know what that ended up being.
If you want me to, I'll throw in a few more stories of what it was like in 1970 and 1971, and hope that you might connect the dots between then and now. That's the point.
That thought process came from taking part in the killing machine that eventually resulted in the Paris Peace Accords being signed by the North Vietnamese and "A cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of troops", being the end result. That came after 1.1 million were killed and 600,000 wounded.
Moving forward from then to today, as I see it, the boys that pulled off the Boston Marathon bombing were, at one time, immigrants who slipped across the border, participated in food stamps, welfare and education at YOUR expense, but even a free ride didn't change the really that they had on their minds. The radicalization, while they were in Chechnya, or however you spell it, led them across the border into our Country, to do one thing. We all know what that ended up being.
If you want me to, I'll throw in a few more stories of what it was like in 1970 and 1971, and hope that you might connect the dots between then and now. That's the point.
Taking the Day off.
Mike Rose, Cobra pilot and friend for decades, is in town and I'm going to spend some time with him and other friends so I may not get anything posted right away. I still have a ton of things to say about my experiences that lead up to my thoughts about the methods that must be used to handle the immigrants that are here to do us harm so stand by. More is coming.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Vietnam and my first lessons in dealing with Illegal Immigration.
Major Lewis had a very unique way of running Fireball Aviation. He not only made sure that the new pilots were introduced to the game plan by the very best pilots in the unit, he made sure that they began flying Nighthawk missions as soon as their orientation flights were complete.
My first mission was flown with Terry Femmer. He was a great pilot. We were on standby duty for Nighthawks and were staying at FSB Mace, playing cards in the bunker and waiting for any call for help that might come in. Things were pretty quiet that night but we received a call from a FSB asking if we could bring some ammo and pick up a soldier that was in need of medical attention. He wasn't wounded, just sick.
We left Mace and began flying north- northeast. It was the darkest night I had ever experienced during my entire tour of duty. It was like flying in a room with no windows. There were no visible land marks to see. Nothing but jungle, no car lights, cities, towns or any visible clues at all. We were actually flying IFR because there was no moon and much overcast cloud cover. Almost immediately, I asked Femmer how in the hell we would find anything in those conditions.
Femmer tuned in one of our radios and made a call to the FSB. When they responded, the ADF needle pointed in the direction of the signal and we simply picked up that course and continued to fly. Before long, we saw the lights of the Firebase and made another call to announce our approach. It was one of the so called "milk runs" that didn't involve any shooting at all.
Despite that, it was one of the best navigation exercises I'd ever had. I watched the clock, kept track of the minutes, remembered Yankee Tango 106601 and was prepared to announce our position at any second should we have an engine failure or get shot down. We returned to Mace, dropped off the sick guy and made it back to the bunker to try and get some sleep. I want to ask Eddie if he remembers that FSB. It wasn't the one just above Phan Thiet. In any event, that was my first experience flying Nighthawks and I'm glad that I had the time to take everything in without being under fire.
Not long after that, we had to return to that Firebase to help repulse an attack they were under. The weather was fine, plenty of moon light and no problems in finding our way. Long before we arrived on site, we could see the tracers coming from the firebase as well as the ones coming from the jungle into the firebase. Femmer was talking to the ground commander, was told where the fire was coming from and was given permission to open fire on the enemy positions by using a magnetic course from the center of the base to the area he wanted suppressed. He asked for a marking round to be shot and Femmer confirmed the request and told "Ochadleus" or Little O, to prepare for a marking round with the mini gun.
When we reached the Firebase, Femmer told Little O where to shoot and ordered a "One Second Burst". Little O made his opening shot and with that, the radio came alive from the ground commander and he told us to "Pour it on".
O'Chadleus raked the minigun all along the area that was designated as the target. We were flying eastward and Little O was shooting west to east and east to west almost as if he was using a water hose back and forth along the line the ground commander wanted covered.
As I recall, we had a 4,000 round per minute rate of fire from the mini and within seconds of opening fire, the bad guys quit shooting. Little O kept firing until Femmer announced a cease fire. We continued to orbit the target area and with no more fire coming from the enemy, we were given clearance to leave a short time later. We returned to Mace, refueled, rearmed, and went back to bed but there would be no sleep for us as the adrenal glands pumped for the rest of that night.
More later. It's brain swelling time and I don't want to be late. Thanks for listening. Just remember, there's a lesson here relating to immigration.
My first mission was flown with Terry Femmer. He was a great pilot. We were on standby duty for Nighthawks and were staying at FSB Mace, playing cards in the bunker and waiting for any call for help that might come in. Things were pretty quiet that night but we received a call from a FSB asking if we could bring some ammo and pick up a soldier that was in need of medical attention. He wasn't wounded, just sick.
We left Mace and began flying north- northeast. It was the darkest night I had ever experienced during my entire tour of duty. It was like flying in a room with no windows. There were no visible land marks to see. Nothing but jungle, no car lights, cities, towns or any visible clues at all. We were actually flying IFR because there was no moon and much overcast cloud cover. Almost immediately, I asked Femmer how in the hell we would find anything in those conditions.
Femmer tuned in one of our radios and made a call to the FSB. When they responded, the ADF needle pointed in the direction of the signal and we simply picked up that course and continued to fly. Before long, we saw the lights of the Firebase and made another call to announce our approach. It was one of the so called "milk runs" that didn't involve any shooting at all.
Despite that, it was one of the best navigation exercises I'd ever had. I watched the clock, kept track of the minutes, remembered Yankee Tango 106601 and was prepared to announce our position at any second should we have an engine failure or get shot down. We returned to Mace, dropped off the sick guy and made it back to the bunker to try and get some sleep. I want to ask Eddie if he remembers that FSB. It wasn't the one just above Phan Thiet. In any event, that was my first experience flying Nighthawks and I'm glad that I had the time to take everything in without being under fire.
Not long after that, we had to return to that Firebase to help repulse an attack they were under. The weather was fine, plenty of moon light and no problems in finding our way. Long before we arrived on site, we could see the tracers coming from the firebase as well as the ones coming from the jungle into the firebase. Femmer was talking to the ground commander, was told where the fire was coming from and was given permission to open fire on the enemy positions by using a magnetic course from the center of the base to the area he wanted suppressed. He asked for a marking round to be shot and Femmer confirmed the request and told "Ochadleus" or Little O, to prepare for a marking round with the mini gun.
When we reached the Firebase, Femmer told Little O where to shoot and ordered a "One Second Burst". Little O made his opening shot and with that, the radio came alive from the ground commander and he told us to "Pour it on".
O'Chadleus raked the minigun all along the area that was designated as the target. We were flying eastward and Little O was shooting west to east and east to west almost as if he was using a water hose back and forth along the line the ground commander wanted covered.
As I recall, we had a 4,000 round per minute rate of fire from the mini and within seconds of opening fire, the bad guys quit shooting. Little O kept firing until Femmer announced a cease fire. We continued to orbit the target area and with no more fire coming from the enemy, we were given clearance to leave a short time later. We returned to Mace, refueled, rearmed, and went back to bed but there would be no sleep for us as the adrenal glands pumped for the rest of that night.
More later. It's brain swelling time and I don't want to be late. Thanks for listening. Just remember, there's a lesson here relating to immigration.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Reporting for duty in VIetnam Part 1.
Once we arrived in Vietnam, I was taken to the Replacement Battalion near Bien Hoa. The bus ride from the base to our new quarters was a shock as the bus had wire mesh over the windows to prevent the Viet Cong from throwing hand grenades through the windows and killing all of us. You should have heard the explanations for that when we boarded the bus. The entire bus load was now on high alert as most of us were first timers in a combat zone. Despite that, I knew many of the guys at the Reception Station and that made things much more comfortable for all of us.
After we received some In Country gear, we settled into the barracks and waited for the briefing that would allow us to select any particular unit we might want to fly for. I didn't have a clue so I threw caution to the wind, left the decision to them, and was selected to fly for the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. Their Headquarters building was located a short jeep drive from the barracks and before I knew it, I said my good byes to all the guys and took the short ride to my new duty station.
My first impression of the unit was not a good one. Nobody was there. The jeep driver dropped me off at the maintenance section and took off without a word spoken other than 'Good Luck". As I looked around, I saw a D Model Huey on the ramp and heard the sound of a jeep approaching. Specialist West was the driver and as he came to a stop next to me, he said: "Are you the new pilot, sir"?. When I told him I was, he said: "Sir, can you get in that Huey and fly it to Xuan Loc, they need it right now".
I can remember thinking to myself: "Fly it to Xuan Loc? Hell, I don't even know how to start it much less where the hell Xuan Loc is". I'd never flown a D Model and I knew that I was supposed to check in at Headquarters before I did anything so I told West that he needed to take me there first. Before any of that transpired, a pilot from the unit showed up and even before I was assigned quarters, we climbed on board the Huey and headed east to Xuan Loc, our forward area.
The next minute found me standing at attention with the normal, Sir, Warrant Officer Butler, reporting for duty". Major Lewis stood up, returned my salute and extended his hand. That's when I saw the college ring on his finger and noticed the KA on the top of his ring. I said: "Sir, is that Kappa Alpha" and he said "The very same". That was a standard question and answer between two KA brothers meeting for the first time.
He told me he was glad to see a "Southern Gentleman" show up for duty with the 199th and he began to explain who the 199th was and what they did. After a brief conversation about our college experiences and our time as KA brothers from different chapters, he told me not to worry and that he would assign me to fly with some of the best pilots in Vietnam. I was immediately comforted with that and the bugs in my stomach went away. I was told to fly back to the rear area and get my gear and quarters squared away. That's when I met my first room mate, Ed Wolfe, a friend to this day.
I managed to get everything squared away and later in the day, the pilots who had been in the field returned and I met all of them except whoever had to stay at Fire Support Base Mace in case they were needed to fly a Night Hawk mission. They made me feel at home as most of them seemed somewhat crazy to me. Femmer, Young, Wolman, Nelson "Kat" Ballew, all made the list of crazy people except for Ed Wolfe, the one pilot who seemed to be the only sane guy there. I was glad he was my room mate because I surely needed some sanity at that time.
The next day, my first full day on duty in Vietnam, I was flown to Mace and was given a bunk to sleep in. It was in a bunker and it was clearly a combat zone barrack that was surrounded by sand bags and had a slit in the side wall that was very long but not too tall. When I asked what that was all about, I was told: "So you can shoot out of the opening". I thought: "Oh shit".
In any event, those were the beginning days of my experiences flying Nighthawks for the 199th. In the beginning I flew daylight missions doing everything from taking mail and ammo to a couple of Firebases throughout the area as well as some really nice looking Donut Dollies from the Red Cross. With that, I thought that this was going to a great, easy tour. I was wrong on that one. I didn't find out the truth until after my tour was over but the Army statistics stated that the 199th accumulated more hours per pilot than any other unit in Vietnam.
Dudley Young was given the job of flying me around our Area of Operations for my AO familiarization flight. As it turned out, he was an excellent navigator and had his VFR charts laminated and folded in a way that he could simply fold it over and continue flying as he "flew off the map". The greatest thing I learned from him came right out of the Diable "Pay Attention to Detail" book. He had six digit grid coordinates written all over the map. Whether it was a mountain, a road intersection, a Firebase, village or river, he had a penciled in grid coordinate for it. He explained that we would be able to radio our exact location instantly if we knew where we were all the time and had to make a Mayday call. "I'm 5 klicks east of Yankee Tango 106601".
I don't want this to become too information intensive so I'll stop here before I tell a few other stories. Eddie, is Yankee Tango 106601 Gia Ray or the mountain above FSB Mace? How's that for a little homework for you?.
After we received some In Country gear, we settled into the barracks and waited for the briefing that would allow us to select any particular unit we might want to fly for. I didn't have a clue so I threw caution to the wind, left the decision to them, and was selected to fly for the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. Their Headquarters building was located a short jeep drive from the barracks and before I knew it, I said my good byes to all the guys and took the short ride to my new duty station.
My first impression of the unit was not a good one. Nobody was there. The jeep driver dropped me off at the maintenance section and took off without a word spoken other than 'Good Luck". As I looked around, I saw a D Model Huey on the ramp and heard the sound of a jeep approaching. Specialist West was the driver and as he came to a stop next to me, he said: "Are you the new pilot, sir"?. When I told him I was, he said: "Sir, can you get in that Huey and fly it to Xuan Loc, they need it right now".
I can remember thinking to myself: "Fly it to Xuan Loc? Hell, I don't even know how to start it much less where the hell Xuan Loc is". I'd never flown a D Model and I knew that I was supposed to check in at Headquarters before I did anything so I told West that he needed to take me there first. Before any of that transpired, a pilot from the unit showed up and even before I was assigned quarters, we climbed on board the Huey and headed east to Xuan Loc, our forward area.
The next minute found me standing at attention with the normal, Sir, Warrant Officer Butler, reporting for duty". Major Lewis stood up, returned my salute and extended his hand. That's when I saw the college ring on his finger and noticed the KA on the top of his ring. I said: "Sir, is that Kappa Alpha" and he said "The very same". That was a standard question and answer between two KA brothers meeting for the first time.
He told me he was glad to see a "Southern Gentleman" show up for duty with the 199th and he began to explain who the 199th was and what they did. After a brief conversation about our college experiences and our time as KA brothers from different chapters, he told me not to worry and that he would assign me to fly with some of the best pilots in Vietnam. I was immediately comforted with that and the bugs in my stomach went away. I was told to fly back to the rear area and get my gear and quarters squared away. That's when I met my first room mate, Ed Wolfe, a friend to this day.
I managed to get everything squared away and later in the day, the pilots who had been in the field returned and I met all of them except whoever had to stay at Fire Support Base Mace in case they were needed to fly a Night Hawk mission. They made me feel at home as most of them seemed somewhat crazy to me. Femmer, Young, Wolman, Nelson "Kat" Ballew, all made the list of crazy people except for Ed Wolfe, the one pilot who seemed to be the only sane guy there. I was glad he was my room mate because I surely needed some sanity at that time.
The next day, my first full day on duty in Vietnam, I was flown to Mace and was given a bunk to sleep in. It was in a bunker and it was clearly a combat zone barrack that was surrounded by sand bags and had a slit in the side wall that was very long but not too tall. When I asked what that was all about, I was told: "So you can shoot out of the opening". I thought: "Oh shit".
In any event, those were the beginning days of my experiences flying Nighthawks for the 199th. In the beginning I flew daylight missions doing everything from taking mail and ammo to a couple of Firebases throughout the area as well as some really nice looking Donut Dollies from the Red Cross. With that, I thought that this was going to a great, easy tour. I was wrong on that one. I didn't find out the truth until after my tour was over but the Army statistics stated that the 199th accumulated more hours per pilot than any other unit in Vietnam.
Dudley Young was given the job of flying me around our Area of Operations for my AO familiarization flight. As it turned out, he was an excellent navigator and had his VFR charts laminated and folded in a way that he could simply fold it over and continue flying as he "flew off the map". The greatest thing I learned from him came right out of the Diable "Pay Attention to Detail" book. He had six digit grid coordinates written all over the map. Whether it was a mountain, a road intersection, a Firebase, village or river, he had a penciled in grid coordinate for it. He explained that we would be able to radio our exact location instantly if we knew where we were all the time and had to make a Mayday call. "I'm 5 klicks east of Yankee Tango 106601".
I don't want this to become too information intensive so I'll stop here before I tell a few other stories. Eddie, is Yankee Tango 106601 Gia Ray or the mountain above FSB Mace? How's that for a little homework for you?.
Christmas in Shreveport, one more fist fight, then on to Ft. Rucker and Graduation
I drove James Miles' VW to my mothers house and began a short Christmas vacation. Before I knew it, I found myself in a room full of drunk people at the home of Kirk Bramlett, a kid I had known since childhood . If you've been following these stories, Kirk was the place kicker for the Northwestern State football team that kicked the guy in the nuts when we had the bar room brawl.
It was the typical teenage and early 20 year olds Christmas party until Joe Thigpen threw a bottle of wine at Roger Neal. Roger was a good friend of mine and despite my initial thoughts of knocking Joe's brains out, I managed to completely avoid the fight and decided to go home. That turned out to be a good decision and shortly after that, I loaded James' VW and headed south to take the Gulf Coast road along Mississippi to view the damage from a recent hurricane before finishing the trip to Rucker.
I checked into 5th WOC class 70-07 and prepared for the next phase of training which was the instrument course. We flew the Bell 47G just like the Mash helicopter seen during the opening scenes of that tv show. It was an oldie but a goodie. We also flew the Blue Canoe which was a flight simulator that was made from plywood and had a covered cockpit you couldn't see out of. I assumed it was Korean War vintage as it was old and you could tell it. I must have been a natural for it because I did very well at it. Instrument cross country flights, holding patterns and instrument approaches came easy to me. After 50 hours of actual flight time in the 47, we graduated and began the transition to the turbine powered Huey.
I had an instructor pilot named Hofius. He was ugly as sin but was a Vietnam Veteran who had a photographic memory. He told me to memorize the preflight manual as well as the before start up manual and I set about to do exactly that. He told me it would be "Gross" but I didn't realize what he meant until I counted the individual steps taken during preflight and start up. There were 144 things that had to be done before you could get a Huey in the air and somehow or another, I pulled it off. Hofius liked me and treated me as well as Diable did at Ft. Wolters.
The Hueys were old and weak A and B models but we didn't know what that really meant until we started flying D models in Vietnam. One night during pinnacle approach and landing practice, I made a really good landing on top of a man made hill that was used as the platform to teach us how to land on mountain tops.
When it was the other students turn to do that, he totally botched it and we hit the top of the hill so hard the helicopter bounced back into the air and almost rolled over and crashed. I was astounded that the other student apparently had no depth perception at all and marveled over the fact that we weren't killed.
I told Hofius about it and requested to be moved to another student pilot partner. When he told me that was almost impossible, I told him I would rather quit the program and be a ground pounder than risk my life on another flight with Mr. Can't See Anything". Hofius pulled it off and I never had another bad experience with a student pilot flying in the other seat of the Huey.
Tactics became more focused and one day I found myself in the Artillery Adjustment Course. For some reason, even though I was great at math, adjusting artillery from a moving helicopter that was constantly changing it's direction of flight while the artillery base stayed put, was very difficult for me. I had to be tutored and eventually passed the course. I'd never made a bad grade in anything but this one whipped my butt the first go around. That's another example of great instructors and Rucker was full of them.
Toward the end of the course, we were told to prepare a flight plan to fly from Ft. Rucker Alabama to Eglin Air Force Base Florida where we would pick up some Army Rangers, do an LZ insertion and return to base while we waited for the next group to be extracted. When we were called to make the extraction, my turn to fly was already completed and, as a function of tradition, the pilot that was sitting in the back, carried candy bars for the Rangers who had been in the field with nothing but a canteen of water and a compass.
I met the Rangers and, as I passed the Baby Ruth candy bars to the Ranger closest to me, his face lit up with the widest smile one can imagine. That was a great exercise and later that day, we flew back to Alabama feeling like we had mastered insertions and extractions of combat troops into and out of landing zones. We felt like we were ready.
Graduation came and my mom and Aunt Nell came to the party where we received our Warrant Officer bars and wings. It was great and I still have the picture of me and my mom from that night. We were given orders for "Overseas Movement" and we left for Shreveport and a 30 day leave, the next day. After a long day's drive, 70 miles from Shreveport, we pulled into the restaurant in Ruston, Louisiana to grab a late lunch.
While I was sitting at the booth eating, I noticed a motorcycle pull up to the curb and was shocked to see that it was the Ranger I had given the Baby Ruth to. I got up, went outside and told him that I was the guy who gave him the Baby Ruth. Since I had my helmet on during that exchange he never really got to see me clearly but he remembered the voice and the Baby Ruth. We shook hands had a laugh about our chance meeting, wished each other good luck and went our separate ways. Believe it or not, I would run into him again at Tay Ninh but that's another story.
After a well deserved 30 day leave, I left Shreveport, flew to Los Angeles and stayed with Mike Morris at his home in Northridge. That was the first time I'd been to California and I was amazed at the girls.
Steve Eide, another student pilot from my class, lived in Northridge too. His father was the Chief Pilot of Penny's or Sears and had been given permission to fly us to Oakland where we would depart the US and head to Vietnam. We drew straws and between Mike, me and Steve, we had a chance to fly the departure and climb section of the flight, the cross country section and then the approach. It was magical because the jet was parked in Burbank where Johnny Carson's jet shared the hanger. That was the last flight I made in the USA for a long time.
Today is hospital day so I'll have to close this and continue with the next story later. Remember, there's a point to be made by all this rambling so please stand by and just grit your teeth while you ramble through it.
It was the typical teenage and early 20 year olds Christmas party until Joe Thigpen threw a bottle of wine at Roger Neal. Roger was a good friend of mine and despite my initial thoughts of knocking Joe's brains out, I managed to completely avoid the fight and decided to go home. That turned out to be a good decision and shortly after that, I loaded James' VW and headed south to take the Gulf Coast road along Mississippi to view the damage from a recent hurricane before finishing the trip to Rucker.
I checked into 5th WOC class 70-07 and prepared for the next phase of training which was the instrument course. We flew the Bell 47G just like the Mash helicopter seen during the opening scenes of that tv show. It was an oldie but a goodie. We also flew the Blue Canoe which was a flight simulator that was made from plywood and had a covered cockpit you couldn't see out of. I assumed it was Korean War vintage as it was old and you could tell it. I must have been a natural for it because I did very well at it. Instrument cross country flights, holding patterns and instrument approaches came easy to me. After 50 hours of actual flight time in the 47, we graduated and began the transition to the turbine powered Huey.
I had an instructor pilot named Hofius. He was ugly as sin but was a Vietnam Veteran who had a photographic memory. He told me to memorize the preflight manual as well as the before start up manual and I set about to do exactly that. He told me it would be "Gross" but I didn't realize what he meant until I counted the individual steps taken during preflight and start up. There were 144 things that had to be done before you could get a Huey in the air and somehow or another, I pulled it off. Hofius liked me and treated me as well as Diable did at Ft. Wolters.
The Hueys were old and weak A and B models but we didn't know what that really meant until we started flying D models in Vietnam. One night during pinnacle approach and landing practice, I made a really good landing on top of a man made hill that was used as the platform to teach us how to land on mountain tops.
When it was the other students turn to do that, he totally botched it and we hit the top of the hill so hard the helicopter bounced back into the air and almost rolled over and crashed. I was astounded that the other student apparently had no depth perception at all and marveled over the fact that we weren't killed.
I told Hofius about it and requested to be moved to another student pilot partner. When he told me that was almost impossible, I told him I would rather quit the program and be a ground pounder than risk my life on another flight with Mr. Can't See Anything". Hofius pulled it off and I never had another bad experience with a student pilot flying in the other seat of the Huey.
Tactics became more focused and one day I found myself in the Artillery Adjustment Course. For some reason, even though I was great at math, adjusting artillery from a moving helicopter that was constantly changing it's direction of flight while the artillery base stayed put, was very difficult for me. I had to be tutored and eventually passed the course. I'd never made a bad grade in anything but this one whipped my butt the first go around. That's another example of great instructors and Rucker was full of them.
Toward the end of the course, we were told to prepare a flight plan to fly from Ft. Rucker Alabama to Eglin Air Force Base Florida where we would pick up some Army Rangers, do an LZ insertion and return to base while we waited for the next group to be extracted. When we were called to make the extraction, my turn to fly was already completed and, as a function of tradition, the pilot that was sitting in the back, carried candy bars for the Rangers who had been in the field with nothing but a canteen of water and a compass.
I met the Rangers and, as I passed the Baby Ruth candy bars to the Ranger closest to me, his face lit up with the widest smile one can imagine. That was a great exercise and later that day, we flew back to Alabama feeling like we had mastered insertions and extractions of combat troops into and out of landing zones. We felt like we were ready.
Graduation came and my mom and Aunt Nell came to the party where we received our Warrant Officer bars and wings. It was great and I still have the picture of me and my mom from that night. We were given orders for "Overseas Movement" and we left for Shreveport and a 30 day leave, the next day. After a long day's drive, 70 miles from Shreveport, we pulled into the restaurant in Ruston, Louisiana to grab a late lunch.
While I was sitting at the booth eating, I noticed a motorcycle pull up to the curb and was shocked to see that it was the Ranger I had given the Baby Ruth to. I got up, went outside and told him that I was the guy who gave him the Baby Ruth. Since I had my helmet on during that exchange he never really got to see me clearly but he remembered the voice and the Baby Ruth. We shook hands had a laugh about our chance meeting, wished each other good luck and went our separate ways. Believe it or not, I would run into him again at Tay Ninh but that's another story.
After a well deserved 30 day leave, I left Shreveport, flew to Los Angeles and stayed with Mike Morris at his home in Northridge. That was the first time I'd been to California and I was amazed at the girls.
Steve Eide, another student pilot from my class, lived in Northridge too. His father was the Chief Pilot of Penny's or Sears and had been given permission to fly us to Oakland where we would depart the US and head to Vietnam. We drew straws and between Mike, me and Steve, we had a chance to fly the departure and climb section of the flight, the cross country section and then the approach. It was magical because the jet was parked in Burbank where Johnny Carson's jet shared the hanger. That was the last flight I made in the USA for a long time.
Today is hospital day so I'll have to close this and continue with the next story later. Remember, there's a point to be made by all this rambling so please stand by and just grit your teeth while you ramble through it.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Graduation from Primary and transfer to Ft. Rucker.
By the time graduation came around, we were very pleased with what we had accomplished and what we were about to do at Ft. Rucker. We knew about the instrument course and the transition from piston powered helicopters to the turbine powered Huey and everybody was key to get on with the mission.
I was very lucky to have Diable as a tac officer and Chapman as an instructor pilot. Despite that, we really hadn't experienced much of anything in the killing and being killed department but one day, the old sgt. I had mentioned earlier, decided he would give us a taste of what it was like to be in combat. We had a moment of relaxation available as all of our flying was completed and the opportunity to catch up on some rest wasn't going to be missed by anybody. The entire Flight was in the barracks that afternoon and there wasn't a Candidate there that wasn't asleep on their bunks. That's when the proverbial shit hit the fan.
The old man walked in the barracks, found everyone asleep and started making noises like a machine gun and, as he passed each and every bunk, followed each shot with a very loud version of "You're Dead, You're Dead and You're Dead". As it turned out, he was in a unit that saw the first action from the Chinese when the came into the Korean War. It was a horrible story about the number of men he knew who were killed in their beds but he damn sure made his point. We never had another example of anything like that but I decided to ask Diable about it and heard stories of "Dinks in the Wire" that described what it was like to wake up to the sound of machine gun fire as his guards were shooting the VC that were sneaking into the camp at night. I only hoped that I wouldn't be stationed where ever he had been.
After that, it was time to plan our graduation party. We already had a number of students that were married and they were going to bring their wives to the club where the party was scheduled to be. Since I didn't live far from Ft. Wolters, Diable asked if I intended to get a date to fly over from Shreveport. I thought it was a great idea and agreed to do exactly that. He invited me to spend the night at his house and actually let me borrow his car to drive to Love Field and pick her up.
That was unheard of but Bernie Diable was a different kind of tac officer and I immediately got on the phone and called a girl I'd met during college and asked if she would like to come over for the graduation party. She agreed and I drove to Dallas in Bernie's double bad ass Mustang to pick her up. It was the nuts! I hadn't had a date in 8 months and I was ready to do some serious partying. Thanks again to Bernie for the hospitality and the help in pulling that one off. Thanks to Joyce for a night I'll never forget.
When all that was finished, Bernie asked me to stay over and become a "Super Senior" and take part in a two week program to receive new Candidates and prepare them for the Warrant Officer Candidate Program. Several of us agreed to do it and we moved back down the Hill and awaited the buses as they brought in the new arrivals. When the first bus load arrived, I walked up the stairs of the open door and a hush came over the bus. You could have heard a pin drop. I introduced myself, explained that I had already graduated and was about to ship out to Ft. Rucker. When I finished with that, at the top of my lungs (as instructed) I screamed "Now you got about ten seconds to get your gear and get your ass in formation, so MOVE, MOVE, MOVE'. That wasn't the same as being ordered to make love to a water cooler but I had to improvise.
James Miles, one of my classmates, asked me to drive his car to Ft. Rucker because he was going home to spend a week with his wife before reporting for duty. I agreed and for the first time, I had wheels. Diable helped us get the students ready and one night, one of the new arrivals left his wallet out and we found it during bed check. Talk about the shit hitting the proverbial plan, it hit and we woke up everybody. They probably didn't appreciate Diable's first lesson in "Attention to Detail" but I sure did. It was great and I'm sure that many of them had additional doses of that when they reported to 5th WOC and discovered that "Little Patton" was their tactical officer.
When all of that transpired, I said my good byes to Bernie, thanked him for HIS attention to detail and drove home to Shreveport for a short Christmas vacation before leaving for Ft. Rucker. That's another story altogether but I wanted to make the point about Diable's influences on my life and how it almost certainly made my tour in Vietnam one that put me in the category of "One of the lucky ones". More coming from my Christmas vacation and learning stuff about Vietnam.
I was very lucky to have Diable as a tac officer and Chapman as an instructor pilot. Despite that, we really hadn't experienced much of anything in the killing and being killed department but one day, the old sgt. I had mentioned earlier, decided he would give us a taste of what it was like to be in combat. We had a moment of relaxation available as all of our flying was completed and the opportunity to catch up on some rest wasn't going to be missed by anybody. The entire Flight was in the barracks that afternoon and there wasn't a Candidate there that wasn't asleep on their bunks. That's when the proverbial shit hit the fan.
The old man walked in the barracks, found everyone asleep and started making noises like a machine gun and, as he passed each and every bunk, followed each shot with a very loud version of "You're Dead, You're Dead and You're Dead". As it turned out, he was in a unit that saw the first action from the Chinese when the came into the Korean War. It was a horrible story about the number of men he knew who were killed in their beds but he damn sure made his point. We never had another example of anything like that but I decided to ask Diable about it and heard stories of "Dinks in the Wire" that described what it was like to wake up to the sound of machine gun fire as his guards were shooting the VC that were sneaking into the camp at night. I only hoped that I wouldn't be stationed where ever he had been.
After that, it was time to plan our graduation party. We already had a number of students that were married and they were going to bring their wives to the club where the party was scheduled to be. Since I didn't live far from Ft. Wolters, Diable asked if I intended to get a date to fly over from Shreveport. I thought it was a great idea and agreed to do exactly that. He invited me to spend the night at his house and actually let me borrow his car to drive to Love Field and pick her up.
That was unheard of but Bernie Diable was a different kind of tac officer and I immediately got on the phone and called a girl I'd met during college and asked if she would like to come over for the graduation party. She agreed and I drove to Dallas in Bernie's double bad ass Mustang to pick her up. It was the nuts! I hadn't had a date in 8 months and I was ready to do some serious partying. Thanks again to Bernie for the hospitality and the help in pulling that one off. Thanks to Joyce for a night I'll never forget.
When all that was finished, Bernie asked me to stay over and become a "Super Senior" and take part in a two week program to receive new Candidates and prepare them for the Warrant Officer Candidate Program. Several of us agreed to do it and we moved back down the Hill and awaited the buses as they brought in the new arrivals. When the first bus load arrived, I walked up the stairs of the open door and a hush came over the bus. You could have heard a pin drop. I introduced myself, explained that I had already graduated and was about to ship out to Ft. Rucker. When I finished with that, at the top of my lungs (as instructed) I screamed "Now you got about ten seconds to get your gear and get your ass in formation, so MOVE, MOVE, MOVE'. That wasn't the same as being ordered to make love to a water cooler but I had to improvise.
James Miles, one of my classmates, asked me to drive his car to Ft. Rucker because he was going home to spend a week with his wife before reporting for duty. I agreed and for the first time, I had wheels. Diable helped us get the students ready and one night, one of the new arrivals left his wallet out and we found it during bed check. Talk about the shit hitting the proverbial plan, it hit and we woke up everybody. They probably didn't appreciate Diable's first lesson in "Attention to Detail" but I sure did. It was great and I'm sure that many of them had additional doses of that when they reported to 5th WOC and discovered that "Little Patton" was their tactical officer.
When all of that transpired, I said my good byes to Bernie, thanked him for HIS attention to detail and drove home to Shreveport for a short Christmas vacation before leaving for Ft. Rucker. That's another story altogether but I wanted to make the point about Diable's influences on my life and how it almost certainly made my tour in Vietnam one that put me in the category of "One of the lucky ones". More coming from my Christmas vacation and learning stuff about Vietnam.
Fly to Oklahoma and DON'T screw it up.
It didn't take long for us to make it through primary flight instruction, emergency procedures, hovering, auto rotations and confined area landings before we soloed. Despite that, within 90 days or so, we started to get into some serious navigation exercises.
Some were local flights but even though we hardly ever flew much further than 30 miles away from the base, some of us just HAD to do a little flying our own way. I think it was Bob Bandusky who started the trouble but one of the students flew over a swimming pool that had a boat load of girls that were...........well, you know, it was another one of those bikini things.
One day, news came out about a long distance flight from Ft. Wolters, Texas all the way to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I was diggin' it because my room mate was going to be the other student pilot with me and he was one hell of a navigator. It was still nice weather and winter was no where near so we didn't have to worry about weather, carburetor heat or anything like that.
We did our flight planning and submitted our plans to Mr. Chapman for double checking. With all things in place, they gave us a run down on how our entire, Flight A1, could make a trip like that without trouble. They explained to us that a chase ship would fly with us and a mechanic was on board to address any problems that might cause us to make an emergency landing or a precautionary landing. There's a lot of difference between those two kinds of landings.
It was a fine day and the flight was going very well until we lost our rotor tachometer. Even though the engine tachometer was synchronized with the rotor tachometer and we could effectively know that we were still operating "in the green", one of the rules required us to land if we lost that instrument. I reported the failure to the chase ship and the mechanic told us to fly to a small strip at a town that I recall as Bowie, Texas. It was on our VFR chart and was only a couple of minutes away from our location when the tachometer failed.
I was flying that part of the leg and was in sight of the strip in no time at all. As I announced my intentions to land and began my descent, I noticed an odd sight on the west side of the strip. From our altitude I couldn't tell that it was a huge turkey farm but I was about to discover that they didn't like helicopters. Maybe they had become accustomed to the crop dusters there but helicopters totally freaked them out. I made my approach and landed without incident with the chase ship right behind us. The turkeys went nuts and I was glad that they had a huge fence around the farm that prevented them from getting off their property and attacking us when we landed.
As if the pissed off turkeys weren't enough, the farmer showed up and he was pissed off too. While the mechanic was replacing the tachometer, the farmer was raising hell about the amount of weight his birds would loose this close to Thanksgiving. By that time, other locals showed up to find out what in the hell was going on at their little crop dusting strip. I was real glad to here the mechanic say: 'We're done boys, let's get the hell out of here before they lynch us". With that, we cranked up the OH 23 Hiller and continued our flight to Ft. Sill without further incident.
Mike and I were the last flight to arrive but we landed with the chase ship and were really happy that the first leg of our cross country trip was finished safely. Little did I know then that being forced to make a precautionary landing would serve me well in Vietnam a year later when we had a compressor stall in the turbine powered Huey Wayne Morvent and I were flying with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.
In any event, we were safe and sound on the ground at Ft. Sill and our tour of the artillery base began. We attended a "Live Fire Exercise" of the famous 125 mm howitzers. I had never witnessed anything like that before but a year later, I was really glad that I had. My first night in Xuan Loc with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade began with a 125 going off right outside the bunker where I had just laid down to go to sleep. In any event, we watched the artillery exhibition, were told that we would have to learn how to adjust artillery from the air when we took our tactics course at Ft. Rucker and that ended the lesson.
I'll end this with a note about my previous statement describing flight school as a course that made college look like kindergarten. It was nothing for us to wake up at 4 a.m. and work all day long and long into the night. There were many 16 hour days. That included physical training. We were always tired.
On the return trip from Ft. Sill, Oklahoma to Ft. Wolters, Texas, Mike and I had a hard time staying awake. I was concerned that we might be experiencing a leak in the exhaust system but that turned out to be false. We were just wore out. I fell asleep while Mike was flying and he fell asleep while I was. At one point during the flight I noticed that both of us were "nodding off". Despite that, we had an uneventful return flight and felt really good over the fact that we'd managed to make a flight that long without any instructor pilots telling us what to do and which way to go. To us, a 300 mile round trip was huge and from that day forward, I knew we could fly anywhere using the same skills that it took to make the flight to and from Ft. Sill. More on flight school later.
Some were local flights but even though we hardly ever flew much further than 30 miles away from the base, some of us just HAD to do a little flying our own way. I think it was Bob Bandusky who started the trouble but one of the students flew over a swimming pool that had a boat load of girls that were...........well, you know, it was another one of those bikini things.
One day, news came out about a long distance flight from Ft. Wolters, Texas all the way to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I was diggin' it because my room mate was going to be the other student pilot with me and he was one hell of a navigator. It was still nice weather and winter was no where near so we didn't have to worry about weather, carburetor heat or anything like that.
We did our flight planning and submitted our plans to Mr. Chapman for double checking. With all things in place, they gave us a run down on how our entire, Flight A1, could make a trip like that without trouble. They explained to us that a chase ship would fly with us and a mechanic was on board to address any problems that might cause us to make an emergency landing or a precautionary landing. There's a lot of difference between those two kinds of landings.
It was a fine day and the flight was going very well until we lost our rotor tachometer. Even though the engine tachometer was synchronized with the rotor tachometer and we could effectively know that we were still operating "in the green", one of the rules required us to land if we lost that instrument. I reported the failure to the chase ship and the mechanic told us to fly to a small strip at a town that I recall as Bowie, Texas. It was on our VFR chart and was only a couple of minutes away from our location when the tachometer failed.
I was flying that part of the leg and was in sight of the strip in no time at all. As I announced my intentions to land and began my descent, I noticed an odd sight on the west side of the strip. From our altitude I couldn't tell that it was a huge turkey farm but I was about to discover that they didn't like helicopters. Maybe they had become accustomed to the crop dusters there but helicopters totally freaked them out. I made my approach and landed without incident with the chase ship right behind us. The turkeys went nuts and I was glad that they had a huge fence around the farm that prevented them from getting off their property and attacking us when we landed.
As if the pissed off turkeys weren't enough, the farmer showed up and he was pissed off too. While the mechanic was replacing the tachometer, the farmer was raising hell about the amount of weight his birds would loose this close to Thanksgiving. By that time, other locals showed up to find out what in the hell was going on at their little crop dusting strip. I was real glad to here the mechanic say: 'We're done boys, let's get the hell out of here before they lynch us". With that, we cranked up the OH 23 Hiller and continued our flight to Ft. Sill without further incident.
Mike and I were the last flight to arrive but we landed with the chase ship and were really happy that the first leg of our cross country trip was finished safely. Little did I know then that being forced to make a precautionary landing would serve me well in Vietnam a year later when we had a compressor stall in the turbine powered Huey Wayne Morvent and I were flying with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.
In any event, we were safe and sound on the ground at Ft. Sill and our tour of the artillery base began. We attended a "Live Fire Exercise" of the famous 125 mm howitzers. I had never witnessed anything like that before but a year later, I was really glad that I had. My first night in Xuan Loc with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade began with a 125 going off right outside the bunker where I had just laid down to go to sleep. In any event, we watched the artillery exhibition, were told that we would have to learn how to adjust artillery from the air when we took our tactics course at Ft. Rucker and that ended the lesson.
I'll end this with a note about my previous statement describing flight school as a course that made college look like kindergarten. It was nothing for us to wake up at 4 a.m. and work all day long and long into the night. There were many 16 hour days. That included physical training. We were always tired.
On the return trip from Ft. Sill, Oklahoma to Ft. Wolters, Texas, Mike and I had a hard time staying awake. I was concerned that we might be experiencing a leak in the exhaust system but that turned out to be false. We were just wore out. I fell asleep while Mike was flying and he fell asleep while I was. At one point during the flight I noticed that both of us were "nodding off". Despite that, we had an uneventful return flight and felt really good over the fact that we'd managed to make a flight that long without any instructor pilots telling us what to do and which way to go. To us, a 300 mile round trip was huge and from that day forward, I knew we could fly anywhere using the same skills that it took to make the flight to and from Ft. Sill. More on flight school later.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Going up the Hill.
Going up the Hill is a phrase that was used to describe Day 1 of actual flight school. When the student pilots graduate and the Warrant Officer Candidates leave, they call the reception station and deliver the order to send the next class "Up the Hill".
We left the reception station and proceeded toward the main heliport because the 5th WOC Company area was located near there. Compared to Ft. Polk, where I was housed in World War II barracks, 5th WOC was more like a college dormitory building minus the single rooms. There were 30 Candidates living in a 2 bunk cubical plus 1 Tactical Officer who had a private room at the end of the hall.
As we passed the PX, I noticed a Huey sitting on the helipad. It looked huge to me and even though I didn't know the rotor blades were 48' in diameter, I could see the turbine engine exhaust and thoughts of fixed wing school immediately left me. It was huge and much larger than the "Mash" type helicopter I'd seen at the State Fair. Little did I know that I would end up taking my instrument course in the Bell 47G, a duplicate of the helicopter that we all saw in the opening scenes of Mash, the tv series.
In any event, as we entered the parking lot of 5th WOC, another Drill Sargent showed up. He was a stout black man who had fought in Korea and related everything to the Korean War. Initially, I thought he was suffering from shell shock or combat fatigue but as it turned out, he was well educated in a discipline that I knew nothing about.
As we were standing in formation awaiting further instructions, I noticed a brand new Lincoln Town Car. I wondered how anyone in the Army could afford such a car but I was soon to find out. When my name was called and told to report to Flight A 1, the building in front of me, I grabbed my tote bag and walked through the front door of the barracks and proceeded down the hall way to a cubical that already had my name on it. That's when I met Chief Warrant Officer Machen, the trust fund baby and the owner of the Lincoln.
As things turned out, even though he was a Huey pilot who had finished a tour in Vietnam, he was more interested in reading his recently inherited stock portfolio than he was preparing us for fighting a war with helicopters. He didn't last very long and his new replacement, CW2 Bernard T. Diable, from Parma, Ohio, arrived to take his place. I wasn't sure if he was Audie Murphy or General George Patton's clone but in either event, he ended up being a God send to all of us. That was a good thing as training became a very serious thing that made my previous college courses look like a kindergarten class.
Diable helped me more than anyone had thus far in my Army training. He had already flown a tour of duty in Vietnam and was quite anxious to influence our thought processes in a way that he knew would save our asses. His main scope and focus targeted "Attention to detail". I could write a book about him but in the interest of saving some time, I'll point out two very important lessons he taught us.
After ground school ended and we actually started going to the heliport and began flying the Hiller OH 23, we began learning engine out procedures. They were called "auto rotations" and initially, they were hard as hell to master. We were already accustomed to hearing that, during engine failures, the helicopter had a glide ratio of a rock so we weren't really freaked out when the instructor pilot closed the throttle and effectively shut off the engine. What we weren't ready for was the effect the torque had on the airframe.
It caused the aircraft to yaw excessively and we had to immediately input right pedal to counter the turning of the aircraft. If the engine failed while you were in a hover, if you didn't add right pedal immediately, you would simply auger into the ground and crash in a matter of seconds. Initially, it would really get your attention and we learned what Diable meant when he said: "pay attention to detail".
When we would return from the flight line, Diable would ask us to relate our experiences. When questions arose about mastering the auto rotations, he grabbed a chair that had small steel toes on the bottom of each leg and set it in the middle of the hallway which was concrete. The chair would slide easily there and he made one of us sit in the chair and act as if we were sitting in the pilot seat. He made us go through the motions of moving the collective downward to take all the pitch out of the rotor blades and putting in as much right pedal as we could. When we did that, he would move the chair in the appropriate direction of our control inputs and after a while, we got it. I bet I flew that chair down the hall way 100 times. Nobody in our flight washed out over auto rotations and I was the 2nd student pilot out of 30 to reach that goal of first solo.
My instructor pilot was Mr. A.B. Chapman. He had flown helicopters in Korea but was a civilian by then and decided to end his flying career teaching Warrant Officer Candidates how to fly helicopters. He was either very near or already passed his time to retire but he was a wonderful old guy and a really good instructor. Between him and Diable I had an insight that was rare in situations like that.
In any event, I soled on August 18, 1969 and I'll never forget that experience. Even though Chapman would compliment me on the successful completion of a lesson, on that day, he told me to stop the helicopter on the runway and let him out. He said: "You're too dangerous to fly with so go ahead and fly a pattern by yourself".
We both laughed and when he got out of the Hiller, I brought it up to a hover, took off, made my circuit and landed. There was a custom at that time, and every student pilot that soled was taken by bus to the Holiday Inn located in Mineral Wells where he was escorted through a pair of rotor blades and promptly thrown into the swimming pool by his classmates. It was wonderful because we were allowed to sew a set of wings on our baseball caps to show all that we had flown without an instructor and were actually, real, live helicopter pilots.
I have more to say about my experiences in Primary Flight School, especially an emergency landing I had to make on a cross country flight to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma but I'll have to make that Part 2. Y'all stand by and I'll get on that later this evening. Thanks for reading.
We left the reception station and proceeded toward the main heliport because the 5th WOC Company area was located near there. Compared to Ft. Polk, where I was housed in World War II barracks, 5th WOC was more like a college dormitory building minus the single rooms. There were 30 Candidates living in a 2 bunk cubical plus 1 Tactical Officer who had a private room at the end of the hall.
As we passed the PX, I noticed a Huey sitting on the helipad. It looked huge to me and even though I didn't know the rotor blades were 48' in diameter, I could see the turbine engine exhaust and thoughts of fixed wing school immediately left me. It was huge and much larger than the "Mash" type helicopter I'd seen at the State Fair. Little did I know that I would end up taking my instrument course in the Bell 47G, a duplicate of the helicopter that we all saw in the opening scenes of Mash, the tv series.
In any event, as we entered the parking lot of 5th WOC, another Drill Sargent showed up. He was a stout black man who had fought in Korea and related everything to the Korean War. Initially, I thought he was suffering from shell shock or combat fatigue but as it turned out, he was well educated in a discipline that I knew nothing about.
As we were standing in formation awaiting further instructions, I noticed a brand new Lincoln Town Car. I wondered how anyone in the Army could afford such a car but I was soon to find out. When my name was called and told to report to Flight A 1, the building in front of me, I grabbed my tote bag and walked through the front door of the barracks and proceeded down the hall way to a cubical that already had my name on it. That's when I met Chief Warrant Officer Machen, the trust fund baby and the owner of the Lincoln.
As things turned out, even though he was a Huey pilot who had finished a tour in Vietnam, he was more interested in reading his recently inherited stock portfolio than he was preparing us for fighting a war with helicopters. He didn't last very long and his new replacement, CW2 Bernard T. Diable, from Parma, Ohio, arrived to take his place. I wasn't sure if he was Audie Murphy or General George Patton's clone but in either event, he ended up being a God send to all of us. That was a good thing as training became a very serious thing that made my previous college courses look like a kindergarten class.
Diable helped me more than anyone had thus far in my Army training. He had already flown a tour of duty in Vietnam and was quite anxious to influence our thought processes in a way that he knew would save our asses. His main scope and focus targeted "Attention to detail". I could write a book about him but in the interest of saving some time, I'll point out two very important lessons he taught us.
After ground school ended and we actually started going to the heliport and began flying the Hiller OH 23, we began learning engine out procedures. They were called "auto rotations" and initially, they were hard as hell to master. We were already accustomed to hearing that, during engine failures, the helicopter had a glide ratio of a rock so we weren't really freaked out when the instructor pilot closed the throttle and effectively shut off the engine. What we weren't ready for was the effect the torque had on the airframe.
It caused the aircraft to yaw excessively and we had to immediately input right pedal to counter the turning of the aircraft. If the engine failed while you were in a hover, if you didn't add right pedal immediately, you would simply auger into the ground and crash in a matter of seconds. Initially, it would really get your attention and we learned what Diable meant when he said: "pay attention to detail".
When we would return from the flight line, Diable would ask us to relate our experiences. When questions arose about mastering the auto rotations, he grabbed a chair that had small steel toes on the bottom of each leg and set it in the middle of the hallway which was concrete. The chair would slide easily there and he made one of us sit in the chair and act as if we were sitting in the pilot seat. He made us go through the motions of moving the collective downward to take all the pitch out of the rotor blades and putting in as much right pedal as we could. When we did that, he would move the chair in the appropriate direction of our control inputs and after a while, we got it. I bet I flew that chair down the hall way 100 times. Nobody in our flight washed out over auto rotations and I was the 2nd student pilot out of 30 to reach that goal of first solo.
My instructor pilot was Mr. A.B. Chapman. He had flown helicopters in Korea but was a civilian by then and decided to end his flying career teaching Warrant Officer Candidates how to fly helicopters. He was either very near or already passed his time to retire but he was a wonderful old guy and a really good instructor. Between him and Diable I had an insight that was rare in situations like that.
In any event, I soled on August 18, 1969 and I'll never forget that experience. Even though Chapman would compliment me on the successful completion of a lesson, on that day, he told me to stop the helicopter on the runway and let him out. He said: "You're too dangerous to fly with so go ahead and fly a pattern by yourself".
We both laughed and when he got out of the Hiller, I brought it up to a hover, took off, made my circuit and landed. There was a custom at that time, and every student pilot that soled was taken by bus to the Holiday Inn located in Mineral Wells where he was escorted through a pair of rotor blades and promptly thrown into the swimming pool by his classmates. It was wonderful because we were allowed to sew a set of wings on our baseball caps to show all that we had flown without an instructor and were actually, real, live helicopter pilots.
I have more to say about my experiences in Primary Flight School, especially an emergency landing I had to make on a cross country flight to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma but I'll have to make that Part 2. Y'all stand by and I'll get on that later this evening. Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Basic Training, Expert Marksmanship, Indians, West Point or Flight School.
I was in really good shape when I arrived at Ft. Polk in May of 69 but great shape is a relative thing. I could outrun anybody but push ups and sit ups proved to be another thing altogether. It didn't take long for me to get up to speed on those but I was sore the first week or so.
I could make the long, 4 mile long forced marches with a full pack on and wasn't afraid of the order to "double time march" whenever they came. For the most part, I was the head of the class except in a few areas. I was especially good on the rifle range with the M 14 and earned an "expert" badge. My cousin Aubrey Brooks was the top marksman with the Marine Corp and they even named one of their rifle ranges after him. His step father, my Uncle Louis, taught me how to shoot.
One day, while we were on the firing line, an Indian discharged his rifle during a time when no shooting was allowed. The Drill Instructor went nuts, walked over to the trainee and hit him over the head with a big, hand held paddle that was painted red on one side, which meant "no shooting" and white on the other which meant it was okay to shoot. It knocked his helmet off but the Drill Instructor hit him again. He went out like a light. I think his name was something like "Ringing Bell" but I was clear that he was an American Indian and a pretty good guy except he was over weight and had a hard time with the Drill Instructors.
A couple of days later a long, black Cadillac Limo with Oklahoma plates on it, pulled into the Company Area. A very well dressed Indian, wearing a zillion dollar suit, exited the back of the limo and made his way into the Company Area.
Before he even made it to the front door, a couple of trainees carrying Private Bell's personal belongings, made it to the Limo and, with the chauffer, loaded the baggage in the trunk. No words were spoken but Bell waved goodbye to us as he and his father got in the back of the limo and pulled out of the lot. I never saw him again and we were forbidden to discuss it or what had happened. His dad must have been a chief but in any event, he was certainly a man of great wealth.
Not long after that, as we approached graduation, we had discussions about advanced training. Our aptitude scores were reviewed and I was called into the company office to discuss what my next steps would be.
The Captain had me first on the list to talk to. I was a bit concerned about that because I was so accustomed to being "first" on everybody's shit list but being first on his was a bit nerve wracking for me. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I made the second highest score in our group of over 300 trainees. With that news, he asked me if I would be interested in attending West Point. I told him that I already had a lot of college and I wanted to go to Flight School. That comment was the worst possible answer I could have come up with. A drill instructor came into the room screaming that I would be going to A I T for advanced infantry training and that I would be sent to Vietnam to hump the jungle as a "grunt". That pretty much took the wind out of my sails and I was dismissed to enjoy a week end pass to Shreveport to think about it.
I left the base the next day and took the 2 hour ride by bus to Shreveport. During that time, my Uncle Woodrow called me and asked if I could come by his house for a quick visit. I agreed and came over Saturday morning. He asked what I thought about the Army and I told him that I was still in basic and hadn't been there long enough to make any decisions BUT I did have some concerns about my grades, the offer to West Point and my refusal with the intent of going to flight school. I gave him the A I T story and when I did, he asked me to hold that thought for a moment.
He picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. After a moment he said: "Jewel, this is Woodrow, is the General in"? When she told him no, she said: "Would you ask him to give me a call when he arrives?".
That's all the conversation that I heard but when he hung up he told me not to worry about anything and that he wanted me to give him a call later in the week.
When I returned to base, there were orders there for me to report to the commanding officer. When I walked into his office, he stood up and yelled: "Butler, why in the hell didn't you tell me you were related to a General". Not having a clue what was going on I simply replied with "I didn't want any special treatment, SIR'. Of course, that was a lie and I knew Uncle Woodrow had pulled some mighty powerful strings somewhere.
The next thing I knew, he told me to report to Headquarters the next morning and that I would pick up my orders to report for HELICOPTER flight school. I thought HELICOPTER FLIGHT SCHOOL? ............and wondered what in the hell happened to the fixed wing course.
As it turned out, the Captain was pissed and had my orders set in a way that I would depart one exercise short of the basic training course which was fine with me as it was an overnight field exercise in a tent in the beginning of the month of July, one of the hottest months of the year. It was also 3 days short of graduation.
I wondered how in the hell a guy could graduate from basic without graduating and I figured out that the General was a really fat cat and could make anything happen. As it turned out, they wrote my orders in a way that would insure my arrival time at Ft. Wolters, Texas would be impossible to meet and therefore, I would arrive AWOL or Absent Without Official Leave. Even though I didn't enter the Army until May 8th, I graduated a full week short of the 8 week period and began flight school on July 4, 1969, 4 days ahead of my scheduled graduation date .
Since the Army had made the travel arrangements, the arrival time was of no concern to me at all. However, when I arrived at Headquarters and reported for duty, it was 5 minutes past midnight and it was hot as hell. When I presented my orders and waited as the NCO in charge read them, I was really thirsty and was looking at the water cooler. All of a sudden this guy was screaming at me about "eyeballing that watercooler". When he asked me if I wanted a drink, I said: "I would love a drink of water". With that, he stood up and said: "OH, you would LOVE some water, well then, you get yourself over there you AWOL piece of crap, and make love to that water cooler."
That's when I discovered that I was a few minutes AWOL and that my first official order at Ft. Wolters was to talk the water cooler into having sex with me. You should have seen it. I did one of my "C'mon, baby, whip me, beat me, make me write hot checks", skits and even the prick that checked me in was laughing. More later as I have to get on with my day. Next story is "Going Up The Hill" or reporting to the 5th WOC, Warrant Officer Training Company.
I could make the long, 4 mile long forced marches with a full pack on and wasn't afraid of the order to "double time march" whenever they came. For the most part, I was the head of the class except in a few areas. I was especially good on the rifle range with the M 14 and earned an "expert" badge. My cousin Aubrey Brooks was the top marksman with the Marine Corp and they even named one of their rifle ranges after him. His step father, my Uncle Louis, taught me how to shoot.
One day, while we were on the firing line, an Indian discharged his rifle during a time when no shooting was allowed. The Drill Instructor went nuts, walked over to the trainee and hit him over the head with a big, hand held paddle that was painted red on one side, which meant "no shooting" and white on the other which meant it was okay to shoot. It knocked his helmet off but the Drill Instructor hit him again. He went out like a light. I think his name was something like "Ringing Bell" but I was clear that he was an American Indian and a pretty good guy except he was over weight and had a hard time with the Drill Instructors.
A couple of days later a long, black Cadillac Limo with Oklahoma plates on it, pulled into the Company Area. A very well dressed Indian, wearing a zillion dollar suit, exited the back of the limo and made his way into the Company Area.
Before he even made it to the front door, a couple of trainees carrying Private Bell's personal belongings, made it to the Limo and, with the chauffer, loaded the baggage in the trunk. No words were spoken but Bell waved goodbye to us as he and his father got in the back of the limo and pulled out of the lot. I never saw him again and we were forbidden to discuss it or what had happened. His dad must have been a chief but in any event, he was certainly a man of great wealth.
Not long after that, as we approached graduation, we had discussions about advanced training. Our aptitude scores were reviewed and I was called into the company office to discuss what my next steps would be.
The Captain had me first on the list to talk to. I was a bit concerned about that because I was so accustomed to being "first" on everybody's shit list but being first on his was a bit nerve wracking for me. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I made the second highest score in our group of over 300 trainees. With that news, he asked me if I would be interested in attending West Point. I told him that I already had a lot of college and I wanted to go to Flight School. That comment was the worst possible answer I could have come up with. A drill instructor came into the room screaming that I would be going to A I T for advanced infantry training and that I would be sent to Vietnam to hump the jungle as a "grunt". That pretty much took the wind out of my sails and I was dismissed to enjoy a week end pass to Shreveport to think about it.
I left the base the next day and took the 2 hour ride by bus to Shreveport. During that time, my Uncle Woodrow called me and asked if I could come by his house for a quick visit. I agreed and came over Saturday morning. He asked what I thought about the Army and I told him that I was still in basic and hadn't been there long enough to make any decisions BUT I did have some concerns about my grades, the offer to West Point and my refusal with the intent of going to flight school. I gave him the A I T story and when I did, he asked me to hold that thought for a moment.
He picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. After a moment he said: "Jewel, this is Woodrow, is the General in"? When she told him no, she said: "Would you ask him to give me a call when he arrives?".
That's all the conversation that I heard but when he hung up he told me not to worry about anything and that he wanted me to give him a call later in the week.
When I returned to base, there were orders there for me to report to the commanding officer. When I walked into his office, he stood up and yelled: "Butler, why in the hell didn't you tell me you were related to a General". Not having a clue what was going on I simply replied with "I didn't want any special treatment, SIR'. Of course, that was a lie and I knew Uncle Woodrow had pulled some mighty powerful strings somewhere.
The next thing I knew, he told me to report to Headquarters the next morning and that I would pick up my orders to report for HELICOPTER flight school. I thought HELICOPTER FLIGHT SCHOOL? ............and wondered what in the hell happened to the fixed wing course.
As it turned out, the Captain was pissed and had my orders set in a way that I would depart one exercise short of the basic training course which was fine with me as it was an overnight field exercise in a tent in the beginning of the month of July, one of the hottest months of the year. It was also 3 days short of graduation.
I wondered how in the hell a guy could graduate from basic without graduating and I figured out that the General was a really fat cat and could make anything happen. As it turned out, they wrote my orders in a way that would insure my arrival time at Ft. Wolters, Texas would be impossible to meet and therefore, I would arrive AWOL or Absent Without Official Leave. Even though I didn't enter the Army until May 8th, I graduated a full week short of the 8 week period and began flight school on July 4, 1969, 4 days ahead of my scheduled graduation date .
Since the Army had made the travel arrangements, the arrival time was of no concern to me at all. However, when I arrived at Headquarters and reported for duty, it was 5 minutes past midnight and it was hot as hell. When I presented my orders and waited as the NCO in charge read them, I was really thirsty and was looking at the water cooler. All of a sudden this guy was screaming at me about "eyeballing that watercooler". When he asked me if I wanted a drink, I said: "I would love a drink of water". With that, he stood up and said: "OH, you would LOVE some water, well then, you get yourself over there you AWOL piece of crap, and make love to that water cooler."
That's when I discovered that I was a few minutes AWOL and that my first official order at Ft. Wolters was to talk the water cooler into having sex with me. You should have seen it. I did one of my "C'mon, baby, whip me, beat me, make me write hot checks", skits and even the prick that checked me in was laughing. More later as I have to get on with my day. Next story is "Going Up The Hill" or reporting to the 5th WOC, Warrant Officer Training Company.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
The Bar Room Brawl, surgery during finals, the local Draft Board and reporting to Ft. Polk for Basic Training.
When I went home for the week end, it was time for final exams for the fall semester. It was also time for a birthday party for one of the guys that I had met during my time working in the warehouse of Colossus Midland Belting and Supply Company. That was my family's place and a wonderful place to work.
During that time, I met a lot of guys that had elected not to go to college and instead, found jobs working for various freight companies like Red Ball Motor Freight, East Texas Motor Freight and other National Carriers. These were big boys and were well suited to unloading trucks. They looked more like weight lifters and football players than anything else. One of the guys was so stout, his nick name was "Heavy Duty". In any event, I decided to attend the party and went with other friends of mine to a bar that was located in Downtown Shreveport. I don't remember the name but I will never forget that night.
I went to the bar and asked if they had any cards there. I was really good at doing card tricks and thought I could add some humor to the party by doing one trick that allowed me to have someone pick a card, put it back in the deck, let me shuffle the entire deck and then throw the whole deck on the floor with only the card he picked landing face up. The bar tender told me there was no gambling allowed and when I explained that I was only going to do a card trick for the party, he said it was okay and handed me the deck.
As I was preparing the deck for the trick, another guy came up and said: "There's no gambling here, put the cards away". As I was explaining that I was part of the birthday party and was only going to show them a trick, he cold cocked me, broke my nose and knocked me out.
As I was laying on the floor in a pool of blood, one of the truck drivers came to look for me only to see me laying on the floor in a large pool of blood. He went back to the tables and every one of the truckers came to the front where I was still on the floor. The first one there was carrying one of the huge glass beer mugs that were popular during the 60s. The next one was the place kicker on the Northwestern football team. They were followed by "Heavy Duty" and the rest of the crew, the worst possible group of people to piss off.
Tommy, in a loud voice, asked: "Who did this"? A big guy, the one who broke my nose, said: "I did, what about it"? Right after he said: "I did" and just before he could say: "What about it", the big glass beer mug crashed into his head and it spun him around and put him on the floor. As he was trying to get up and was on all 4s with his back to us, the place kicker lined up and kicked him in the nuts with a shot that would have surely produced a 50 yard field goal. I picked up a bar stool and was about to hit him in the back of the head but Harvey Maybry ( I think) was there and stopped me by grabbing the bar stool and saying: "Don't do it, you'll kill him".
About the time the bar tender yelled at everybody and told us to "Get out of here", Heavy Duty kicked him in the ribs with several other truckers kicking him in the head. With that, they drug him out the front door and literally threw him on the hood of the first car they found. He was bleeding like the proverbial "stuck pig".
They were like a gang of hyenas surrounding their prey and they were beating the shit out of him. My guys grabbed me and said: "We've got to take you to a hospital before you bleed to death" and off I went to the Schumpert Hospital. I was too drunk to operate on but after many hours, I had surgery and ended up with 16' of surgical packing stuck up my nose and the most God Awful looking plate attached to my nose. I found out later that the sucker puncher ended up at Doctor's Hospital and underwent surgery to fix his broken bones and address the blood coming out of his ears from the concussion he received for his assault on me. I never threw a single punch but the bad guy must have taken a hundred plus the kick to his nuts. He deserved every bit of what he got.
In any event, I missed the last part of my final exams that semester, received an "Incomplete" as a grade, dropped my GPA to a level that took away my college deferment with the draft board and before I knew it, I was classified 1A and received orders to report for a physical exam for the Army.
When the draft notice came, I was already back at Northwestern attending class as a student on probation but nothing helped. I was a gonner and showed up for the physical and induction. My semester was done and by May of that year, I departed for Ft. Polk in Leesville to begin basic training. I was laughing my ass off when I discovered one of the passengers on the bus was none other than Harvey Maybry. Long before we finished the two hour bus ride to Ft. Polk, we had put together a buddy system plan and stuck together like glue.
By the time we had experienced the Army's welcoming committee at the bus station, transport to the base and given our shaved head haircuts, we were sent to supply to get uniforms and bedding. I'll never forget the first night in the barracks because some guy who had been drafted was crying like a baby. It was his first time away from home and he was totally out of control with the situation. Maybry and I were astounded by it and made note that some boarding schools were tougher than the things we were seeing before us. Hell, Punkin Junkin at Jesuit was far worse than day 1 in the Army.
I was ordered to report for KP or Kitchen Patrol. What a joke. The staff sgt in control ordered me to take the left over meat from breakfast's dish called SOS or Shit on a Shingle, and pour it into a huge cauldron with holes in the bottom. I was directed to take a garden hose and wash the white gravy off of it because the Meat part of Biscuits and Gravy was to be used as the meat to make spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner. It was putrid but I did it and waited for orders to move out to our basic training company. That didn't take long and as we were marching into the basic training company area of E 3 1 and Bulldog Hall, I was noticing a group of graduates in their starched uniforms, preparing to leave for their next duty assignments.
I saw Tom Mazur, a friend from grade school, and as we passed each other, he said: "Don't worry Butler, you'll do fine". That was the last time I saw Tom but I see his brother John Mazur from time to time and always send him my regards.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming from the Drill Instructors at that time and we were forced into "FORMATION". They made a role call, gave us instructions to report to the barracks that we were assigned to and gave us two minutes to return to FORMATION. You always had to scream when using the word FORMATION.
My Drill Instructor's name was "Lopes". He looked just like George Foreman. There was another one there that looked like PRINCE with short hair. His name was Ratford and everybody called him RAT. The senior drill instructor was a full blooded Indian and his name was Drill Sgt. Kia. I remembered Ray Kipp from St. Gregory's and was really glad that an Indian was in charge of everything. That assumption proved to be right and I gained more respect for him than anyone. He'd already had a tour of duty from Vietnam and he didn't play games. He was totally in to making us bad boys and killers. I liked him a lot.
Before I close this as it's getting a bit winded, I wanted to say that Kia ordered us to head to the practice field where physical training was done. He wanted to find out who was fit and who was not. He did that by timing us as we ran the quarter mile. I blew everybody away and finished first in the company. Little did I know that finishing first would have me assigned as the "Guide On Carrier". That's the guy at the front of the formation that had to carry the Company's Colors which was a flag on a pole that was roughly 6' tall. To me, it was just more stuff to carry when we went on long marches.
Training stories begin next and then my transfer to Primary Helicopter Flight School at Ft. Wolters, Texas. Getting there instead of West Point is a funny story. Thanks for the ear. Tim
During that time, I met a lot of guys that had elected not to go to college and instead, found jobs working for various freight companies like Red Ball Motor Freight, East Texas Motor Freight and other National Carriers. These were big boys and were well suited to unloading trucks. They looked more like weight lifters and football players than anything else. One of the guys was so stout, his nick name was "Heavy Duty". In any event, I decided to attend the party and went with other friends of mine to a bar that was located in Downtown Shreveport. I don't remember the name but I will never forget that night.
I went to the bar and asked if they had any cards there. I was really good at doing card tricks and thought I could add some humor to the party by doing one trick that allowed me to have someone pick a card, put it back in the deck, let me shuffle the entire deck and then throw the whole deck on the floor with only the card he picked landing face up. The bar tender told me there was no gambling allowed and when I explained that I was only going to do a card trick for the party, he said it was okay and handed me the deck.
As I was preparing the deck for the trick, another guy came up and said: "There's no gambling here, put the cards away". As I was explaining that I was part of the birthday party and was only going to show them a trick, he cold cocked me, broke my nose and knocked me out.
As I was laying on the floor in a pool of blood, one of the truck drivers came to look for me only to see me laying on the floor in a large pool of blood. He went back to the tables and every one of the truckers came to the front where I was still on the floor. The first one there was carrying one of the huge glass beer mugs that were popular during the 60s. The next one was the place kicker on the Northwestern football team. They were followed by "Heavy Duty" and the rest of the crew, the worst possible group of people to piss off.
Tommy, in a loud voice, asked: "Who did this"? A big guy, the one who broke my nose, said: "I did, what about it"? Right after he said: "I did" and just before he could say: "What about it", the big glass beer mug crashed into his head and it spun him around and put him on the floor. As he was trying to get up and was on all 4s with his back to us, the place kicker lined up and kicked him in the nuts with a shot that would have surely produced a 50 yard field goal. I picked up a bar stool and was about to hit him in the back of the head but Harvey Maybry ( I think) was there and stopped me by grabbing the bar stool and saying: "Don't do it, you'll kill him".
About the time the bar tender yelled at everybody and told us to "Get out of here", Heavy Duty kicked him in the ribs with several other truckers kicking him in the head. With that, they drug him out the front door and literally threw him on the hood of the first car they found. He was bleeding like the proverbial "stuck pig".
They were like a gang of hyenas surrounding their prey and they were beating the shit out of him. My guys grabbed me and said: "We've got to take you to a hospital before you bleed to death" and off I went to the Schumpert Hospital. I was too drunk to operate on but after many hours, I had surgery and ended up with 16' of surgical packing stuck up my nose and the most God Awful looking plate attached to my nose. I found out later that the sucker puncher ended up at Doctor's Hospital and underwent surgery to fix his broken bones and address the blood coming out of his ears from the concussion he received for his assault on me. I never threw a single punch but the bad guy must have taken a hundred plus the kick to his nuts. He deserved every bit of what he got.
In any event, I missed the last part of my final exams that semester, received an "Incomplete" as a grade, dropped my GPA to a level that took away my college deferment with the draft board and before I knew it, I was classified 1A and received orders to report for a physical exam for the Army.
When the draft notice came, I was already back at Northwestern attending class as a student on probation but nothing helped. I was a gonner and showed up for the physical and induction. My semester was done and by May of that year, I departed for Ft. Polk in Leesville to begin basic training. I was laughing my ass off when I discovered one of the passengers on the bus was none other than Harvey Maybry. Long before we finished the two hour bus ride to Ft. Polk, we had put together a buddy system plan and stuck together like glue.
By the time we had experienced the Army's welcoming committee at the bus station, transport to the base and given our shaved head haircuts, we were sent to supply to get uniforms and bedding. I'll never forget the first night in the barracks because some guy who had been drafted was crying like a baby. It was his first time away from home and he was totally out of control with the situation. Maybry and I were astounded by it and made note that some boarding schools were tougher than the things we were seeing before us. Hell, Punkin Junkin at Jesuit was far worse than day 1 in the Army.
I was ordered to report for KP or Kitchen Patrol. What a joke. The staff sgt in control ordered me to take the left over meat from breakfast's dish called SOS or Shit on a Shingle, and pour it into a huge cauldron with holes in the bottom. I was directed to take a garden hose and wash the white gravy off of it because the Meat part of Biscuits and Gravy was to be used as the meat to make spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner. It was putrid but I did it and waited for orders to move out to our basic training company. That didn't take long and as we were marching into the basic training company area of E 3 1 and Bulldog Hall, I was noticing a group of graduates in their starched uniforms, preparing to leave for their next duty assignments.
I saw Tom Mazur, a friend from grade school, and as we passed each other, he said: "Don't worry Butler, you'll do fine". That was the last time I saw Tom but I see his brother John Mazur from time to time and always send him my regards.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming from the Drill Instructors at that time and we were forced into "FORMATION". They made a role call, gave us instructions to report to the barracks that we were assigned to and gave us two minutes to return to FORMATION. You always had to scream when using the word FORMATION.
My Drill Instructor's name was "Lopes". He looked just like George Foreman. There was another one there that looked like PRINCE with short hair. His name was Ratford and everybody called him RAT. The senior drill instructor was a full blooded Indian and his name was Drill Sgt. Kia. I remembered Ray Kipp from St. Gregory's and was really glad that an Indian was in charge of everything. That assumption proved to be right and I gained more respect for him than anyone. He'd already had a tour of duty from Vietnam and he didn't play games. He was totally in to making us bad boys and killers. I liked him a lot.
Before I close this as it's getting a bit winded, I wanted to say that Kia ordered us to head to the practice field where physical training was done. He wanted to find out who was fit and who was not. He did that by timing us as we ran the quarter mile. I blew everybody away and finished first in the company. Little did I know that finishing first would have me assigned as the "Guide On Carrier". That's the guy at the front of the formation that had to carry the Company's Colors which was a flag on a pole that was roughly 6' tall. To me, it was just more stuff to carry when we went on long marches.
Training stories begin next and then my transfer to Primary Helicopter Flight School at Ft. Wolters, Texas. Getting there instead of West Point is a funny story. Thanks for the ear. Tim
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