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