"Baby Sitting Butler And The End Of Nighthawk Missions"

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.