19 Minutes to Live - Helicopter Combat in Vietnam

by Lew Jennings

  “A complete loss of control over the tail rotor is one of those emergencies that Pilots read about, talk about and theorize about, but back then in 1969 there was no practical way to practice and refine these theories. Only those who actually experienced the event, and lived to tell about it, knew for sure what worked and what didn’t.”

  “In the brief course of a few seconds our great September day was becoming a bit cloudy. The good news was that our Cobra was still ‘churning and burning’ and as far as I could tell, nothing was flying off of it.”

  “Knowing that the first rule of flying is to fly the aircraft, I decided to do just that, making a mental note to keep the airspeed above 80 knots in an attempt to keep the fuselage streamlined into the air and pointing more or less in the direction I wanted to travel. I planned to minimize all control inputs as much as possible to keep things stable for as long as possible, meaning no turns, no changes in altitude and no changes in airspeed and for sure, no increases in collective pitch control.”

  “I keyed the microphone switch on the cyclic to call our Scout and C&C to alert them to our problem. Although I initially heard a tone in my earphones as if the radio was keying for transmission, the sound bled off to nothingness, silence, no radio, like it ran out of steam or power. I released the switch and then pressed it forward again and again. Still nothing. I switched to the UHF radio and repeated my attempt to make a call, but it didn’t work either. Neither did our FM radio. All our communications were gone.”

  “I sensed that something really bad must have happened to cause the tail rotor failure and a complete loss of radio communications at the same time.”

  “It was time to advise my Copilot, John Bacic, that the price of poker had just gone up.”

  “I quickly explained about the pedals and the radios and naturally had him check on things from his seat up front. He tried his radio control panel for all three radios and his floor and cyclic microphone switches. Nothing worked for him either. I showed him what happened when I kicked the pedals. He wasn’t impressed, but those pedals swishing back and forth without the aircraft responding did get his undivided attention.”

  “Up ahead our team flew on, blithely unaware that they were leaving us in their proverbial dust and that we might possibly disappear into the jungle below without a trace.”

  “Since we couldn’t communicate with anyone by radio and our current direction of flight was taking us away from friendly forces, I decided to turn around and head back to Rendezvous. My plan was to fly back down the A Shau valley until we got close enough to Rendezvous, then execute an autorotation to the ground. If we could reach a point where we were in sight of the base camp, chances were that friendly forces could give us a hand in case things didn’t go well.”

  “It wasn’t much of a plan, as plans go, but it turns out that it didn’t matter anyway. Our faithful steed had a different idea and was just waiting for the appropriate moment to demonstrate it to John and me.”

  “I decided to make a 180° turn to the right, thinking that a right turn would cause the relative wind to act on the fuselage in such a way as to mitigate any tendency for a right-hand spin. As I started a gentle right bank using cyclic control input only, the helicopter properly rolled to the right and started a turn of sorts. I deliberately did not increase the collective pitch control as the turn began, thinking that I didn’t want to increase the torque since I couldn’t counter it with the tail rotor.”

  “Initially things looked OK. The helicopter was beginning to turn and we were essentially maintaining altitude, but the airspeed was decaying. We had inadvertently slowed from 100 knots to 80.”

  “In the turn, without adding power by way of collective pitch, we were maintaining altitude but sacrificing airspeed to do it. In the few nano-seconds it took for me to realize our predicament, the helicopter reached the point that it no longer wished to be a helicopter and decided to be a spinning top instead.”

  “In the literal blink of an eye, we started to spin to the right. The spin was a surprise but not totally unexpected, after all, we had read about it and talked about it and now we were getting to experience it.”

  “The rate of spin increased quickly due to a variety of forces at work, not the least of which might have been an instinctive and unintentional increase of collective pitch when the spinning helicopter, now no longer our friend, began to lose altitude and airspeed simultaneously. We were heading down to the jungle below, that much was certain, but the spin was now rapid enough that the world outside of our cockpit was a blur, colored in greens, browns and blues, but still a blur without clear visual references as to our height above the trees and ground.”

  “Perhaps my brain was spinning as quickly as our helicopter but for reasons not now remembered, I decided that we might be able to fly ourselves out of the spin if we could gain airspeed. Seems logical, right? Losing airspeed contributed to the spin; regaining airspeed might stop the spin or at least, slow it enough that we could see visual references outside of the cockpit.”

  “Why didn’t I enter autorotation, reducing the collective to full down position and chopping the throttle to slow or stop the spin? That was the recommended response to a total loss of tail rotor control, but that was BEFORE you started to spin. Now that we were well established in a Disney Land E-ticket ride of a spin, would the sudden change in torque and other forces cause the main rotor to fail at the mast or at the transmission or who knows where? At the time, the uncertainties of what might happen persuaded us to try the ‘fly it out of the spin’ idea. John and I even discussed it briefly or maybe I discussed it and he politely listened.”

  “Retrospectively, trying to fly out of a fully developed spin was a mistake. The autorotation now seems to have been the better idea. In fact, it was the only good idea, but at the time I didn’t have the advantage of 20-20 hindsight.”

  “As we spun down to the inevitable crash, John and I tightened our lap belts, locked our shoulder harnesses, tightened our SPH-4 flight helmet chinstraps and lowered our helmet visors.”

  “John keyed his intercom switch and advised me that when we crashed he didn’t want the rotor blades to come through his cockpit and chop his head off, something that we had both heard about happening as the result of Cobras crashing in the jungles of Vietnam. He said he was unlocking his shoulder harness and putting his head down between his knees, or as close to that position as he could manage, given he was wearing his helmet and his chicken plate. He was a slim guy so he had the flexibility to reduce his ‘vertical signature’ in the front seat. He had already stowed the flex sight for the XM-28 turret. He was now ready to crash!”

  “I still had the cyclic and collective in my hands and my feet were resting on the tail rotor pedals, but I was no longer flying other than to keep the fuselage more or less level. A cardinal and possibly mortal sin was for the Aircraft Commander to give up his command while his bird was still in the air, but we were both just passengers now.”

  “Moments later the inevitable impact occurred and it was violent to say the least. We were over the tall-treed jungle on the valley floor and struck the trees first. We didn’t see them at the time of impact but we felt the tremendous jolts and heard the loud sounds of the helicopter chopping wood. We bounced off of the armor-plated sides of our seats as we were slammed around inside of our respective cockpits. Legs and arms flailed and heads whipped back and forth as the crash continued and the Cobra slammed down through the jungle. Along the way our rotation slowed or stopped and I actually saw a snap shot of tree trunks through the right front canopy. Then we flipped upside down and there was nothingness.”

  “John was yelling something. The turbine jet engine was screaming somewhere in the darkness behind me. We were motionless.”

  “Get out! Get out!” John was yelling at me. “It’s going to catch fire! It’s going to blow up! Mike, get out!”

  “I was hanging upside down with my arms dangling. Our crashing had come to a stop. We were complete
ly inverted, presumably resting on what remained of the fuselage, including the vertical fin at the end of the tail boom miraculously still attached to the main fuselage plus the transmission cowling and the cockpit framework.”

  “Apparently we did not hit the ground itself with great force. The effort spent chopping wood had consumed much of our impact energy. As a result, we escaped being crushed flat by the 9000 plus pounds of helicopter, fuel, weapons and unexpended ordnance that had come to rest above, with us hanging upside down underneath.”

  “I had been knocked unconscious sometime during the crash sequence when my head, still in my helmet, had been thrown back until it contacted the right rear armored plate of my seat. The force of the helmet striking the ceramic armor fractured the helmet and a portion of the blow transferred to my skull and I went to sleep, missing the final moments of our crash.”

  “John’s shouting brought me back from wherever I had gone. I realized that he was not in the helicopter. His voice was coming to me from my right, but when I looked, he was not visible. The only thing I could see was a wall of dirt and debris. The Plexiglas of my canopy door was shattered and gone.”

  “The smell of fuel was strong. JP4 was draining out of the tanks somewhere and its familiar aroma filled my nose.”

  “The engine was still doing what it was supposed to do, with the battery and the fuel and the throttle still in their ‘go’ positions. As far as it was concerned, I still wanted it to churn and burn and it was doing its best to perform as requested. In retrospect, it is amazing that it stayed in its mounts and that all of its associated subsystems were still functioning as well as they apparently were.”

  “Sluggishly I struggled with the problem of how to do what John was urgently commanding me to do. I fumbled for my seat belt–shoulder harness buckle, trying to locate by feel the oversized knob at the end of the metal lever that would release my restraints, so that I could exit the aircraft.”

  “I found the seat belt lever, pulled it and fell several feet onto my head and shoulders into a creek bed full of running water and JP4 fuel. We had come to rest upside down in a creek bed that was banked on each side by steeply inclined walls of dirt and jungle growth. Whatever fuel we were losing was floating past the wreckage, past my cockpit, past my now soaked olive drab (OD) Nomex uniform. Fortunately, God kept blowing out the devil’s matches and we had no fire.”

  “I didn’t know if John could see me from wherever he was, presumably up on the bank to my right, but regardless, he was still yelling at me to get out of the Cobra. As I started to respond to him, I remembered the engine and felt the need to shut it down before I crawled out of the shattered cockpit.”

  “I looked up at my cockpit, trying to see and identify the switches that I needed to move in order to cut off the electricity and fuel to the engine’s ignition and fuel control systems. I couldn’t recognize anything by sight as my tinted visor was still down in front of my face and it was dark up in the portion of the cockpit where the switches were.”

  “I fumbled and searched by touch for the battery toggle switch and the fuel switch. I thought I found them and I moved each of them to what I thought was the OFF position. Then I rolled off the throttle at last, telling the engine that I no longer needed it.”

  “I learned days later that I actually hadn’t done any of those things. The rescuers found the battery and fuel were still on, the throttle was not fully closed, and the engine had been left running for a long time.”

  “Finally, I crawled out of the wreckage through what used to be my cockpit door, only this time I didn’t have to open it. Once I had cleared the helicopter and started up the sloping bank, I could see John standing up on the bank urging me on. He appeared unharmed. Somehow, he had escaped being decapitated. Whether or not one or both of the blades swept through his cockpit on the way down, I forgot to ask and to this day, I do not know. He was alive and seemingly full of energy. He wanted me to get my butt up the bank so we could put some distance between us and the Cobra, still fully armed and nearly full of fuel. I scrambled to comply with his wishes.”

  “Once we had moved to the east of our crash site and were taking a breather at the base of a tall tree, we began to assess our predicament.”

  “Nearly everything that I had brought with me when we took off from Rendezvous was still back at the crash site. My M2 fully automatic .30 caliber WWII era carbine that I had cut down so that it was a machine pistol with no butt stock or forearm, my small OD canvas survival bag with its few cans of C-rations and extra M2 carbine magazines and boxes of .38 caliber ammo for my pistol, my 35mm camera, and as I looked down at the empty holster slung around my waist, I noticed my S&W .38 caliber revolver was missing too. Even my combat tactical map and survival knife were gone. Everything was back there in the wreckage.”

  “John’s personal inventory was a little better than mine, mainly because he had successfully traded something to someone for an Air Force issue SRU-21P survival vest.”

  “When the Air Force issued vests to their Pilots, the multitude of zippered and Velcro-closed pockets scattered around the aramid mesh vest were filled to the bursting point with wonderful things a Pilot needs when he is trying to escape and evade after being shot down in a combat zone; a compass and map and first aid kits and matches and a signal mirror and emergency flares and an AN/ARC-90 survival radio, for instance.”

  “Unfortunately, John’s version did not include many of those essential items and instead of bulging, the pockets of his vest were sadly very flat, at least most of them. He had a few miscellaneous items but no survival radio that would have allowed us to communicate on the UHF emergency guard frequency with our C&C bird and our Scout.”

  “John did have two important pieces of survival gear however, a ‘Signal Kit, Foliage Penetrating’ also known as the A/P-25 S-1 Signal Kit, Personal Distress or simply signal flares, and his Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver.”

  “If you are going to war, it’s always a good idea to have a weapon. John had his .38. I had nothing, but I did have John.”

  “After we decided that we were indeed alive and except for a swollen lump on the back of my head, one battered knee and a small cut along my jaw line where the buckle of my helmet’s chin strap had taken a hunk out of my skin, we were in good shape for the shape we were in.”

  “Then John realized that he was beginning to feel some pain in his face, from his lower jaw to be more precise. It was then that we discovered that his jaw was broken. He had kept his head, but had cracked his jawbone. As the shock of the crash progressively wore-off, the effect of the jaw injury progressed as well, but John didn’t complain, he just stopped talking except to mumble through his clenched teeth.”

  “Faintly, we began to hear what seemed to be helicopters. The sound of rotor blades cutting through the air became more distinct, even at our level at the base of the tall trees with their overhead canopy. Our C&C and Scout birds must be flying back down the valley trying to figure out what had happened to us.”

  “We decided that one of us needed to climb a tree to the top of the canopy so that we could see the helicopters and signal them. If our crashed Cobra had caught on fire like we thought it was going to do, the ensuing fire, smoke and explosions would have been a perfect signal beacon for anyone interested in rescuing us, but it had not and I need to thank God more often for that fact.”

  “As I was starting up the tree, I thought to ask John how much .38 caliber ammunition he had in his vest. He looked up at me and shrugged. Opening the cylinder of his revolver he looked at it and then held it up so that I could see it as well. The open cylinder and the look on his face answered my question.”

  “We had six rounds. No more in the vest. Another of those flat pockets in John’s vest where the Air Force jocks carried full boxes of ammo. I don’t remember if I suggested to him that he save two of the rounds for us. At least he didn’t have an empty chamber like the gunslingers of old used to have in their Colt Single Action Army
revolvers. I think I told him to pick his shots if we suddenly came under ground attack. All four of them. He didn’t laugh.”

  “So up the tree I went, leaving John to maintain our perimeter defense with his six rounds. I carried John’s signal flares with me.”

  “For the record, the signal flare kit consisted of one metal, black finished, handheld launcher similar to a large fountain pen with seven red pyrotechnic flares, each of which would screw into one end of the launcher so that the operator, me, could pull back and then release the spring-loaded firing pin. The flare would then launch like a miniature red rocket, flying in the direction selected by the operator, again me, when I pointed the launcher. Certainly, at night, but even during daylight, the flares were supposed to provide a bright signal to anyone paying attention that someone at the opposite end of the rocket’s flight path was in need of help.”

  “Fortunately, my selected tree had many branches growing closely enough together that I could move upward from one to another without any serious risk that I was going to fall out of the tree and leave John to fend for himself with only six cartridges and no flares.”

  “At last I climbed above the dense foliage. I was on top of the world! Not really, but I was on top of my tree. Orienting myself to the visual references surrounding me, I looked off to the north up the A Shau Valley and sure enough, there they were. Two helicopters, one UH-1 and one OH-6, flying in trail with the Scout in the lead and heading almost directly at me. I think I waved. They were too far away to see me. Even if they were closer, I was only a small white face on top of a body wearing an olive drab Nomex uniform, swinging in the top of a very green tree and surrounded by many, many more green trees.”