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.