19 Minutes to Live - Helicopter Combat in Vietnam

by Lew Jennings

  “On the 4th of February, I was loaded onto a huge Air Force C-141 Starlifter Cargo Jet, loaded with stretchers, for the trip from Japan to Scott AFB near St, Louis, Missouri. I was ambulatory by this time which made the flight better. There were probably 250 patients on this flight.”

  “A day after arriving at Scott, I was transferred via a DC-9 Nightingale Jet to the Eisenhower Medical Center at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. I remained there until late April for treatment and physical therapy.”

  “My doctor came in on a Friday morning and gave me orders to report to Fort Wolters, Texas. I left the next morning to fly to Love Field in Dallas. I was greeted there at the airport by none other than the Mad Bomber, Eddy Joiner, where we enjoyed one or maybe 20 cocktails until Sunday, when he delivered me to Fort Wolters.”

  “I must say that the Air Force personnel throughout the journey could not have been more caring.” Al concluded.

  Twenty years later in July of 1990, several of the buds that I (Lew Jennings) had remained in contact with agreed to meet at a reunion of the recently formed Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association (VHPA) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

  Don Ericksen and Eddy Joiner met me at the airport in a huge limousine for the trip to the hotel downtown. Don was now the president of Summit Aviation in New York, providing jet helicopter tours and service to downtown Manhattan and business jet services to the rich and famous. He also operated a limousine service and was quite the entrepreneur.

  When we arrived at the hotel, Don had me wait in the lobby with Eddy near the elevators and disappeared. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened and out walked Al Goodspeed and his wife Johnny. He still had that big, stupid grin on his face as he gave me a huge bear hug. We all cried elephant tears. It was one of the most memorable moments of my life!

  By rare coincidence, Eddy, Al and Don had been assigned together to Fort Wolters, Texas after Vietnam and somehow became roommates at a house they rented off base. They had stayed in touch over the years and had planned this huge surprise for me for months.

  We shuttled the limousine back and forth to the airport the rest of the day picking up more of the buds and their wives; Mike and Lydia Talton from Iowa, Dick and Judy Dato from Oregon, Mark and Cathy Stevens from Maine, Mike and Darlene Ryan from Texas and Tom Michel from California. It was the reunion of a lifetime as we partied hard for a week. And we continue getting together from time to time to this day.

  Captain Al “Speed” Goodspeed, Assault 16

  Assault 27 Mike Talton, left, with Ross Edlin and crew.

  Bob Larsen, Mike Talton, Roger Courtney

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

  The year 1970 arrived with sirens wailing in the middle of the night at Camp Eagle for A Troop, 2/17th Air Cavalry. I was now officially a short timer with less than 30 days to go in country. This was the first time I had ever heard all the sirens going off in the middle of the night. Geezzz. What’s happening now?

  My crazy roommate, wild man Mike “Warhead” Talton, Assault 27, relates the story of our move north to Quang Tri and his encounter with Great Balls of Fire, or what he refers to as “GBOFs” for short.

  “Runners from Flight Ops sprinted from hooch to hooch, throwing open the screened doors, flipping on the lights and calling for all Pilots to report immediately to the Operations Bunker,” Mike begins.

  “At the Ops Bunker, our Operations Officer, Dick Melick, directed all Pilots to their helicopters with a command to launch immediately.”

  “No real explanation was offered and we all sensed that we needed to be in the air ASAP. We assumed that our base there at Camp Eagle was in danger of being attacked and maybe over run.”

  “Pilots and Crewmembers ran up the hill to the flight line. Some were only partially dressed but most of us were wearing combat boots and carrying our flight helmets, flight gloves and the personal gear we always had hanging by our bunks for times like this.”

  “I swung the blades on the Cobra I had been assigned, climbed in, hit the power and fuel, set the throttle, yelled clear and did a visual check in the dark before hitting the starter. The Cobra spooled up as if it had been hoping some idiot would come take it for a ride in the cooler night air.”

  “After completing my run up checks and confirming my Copilot was strapped in up front, I made a call to advise that I was departing my revetment for an easterly departure. Then I scrambled out of the revetment and into the air, climbing for altitude and watching for other helicopters, hoping that everyone was running some kind of external lights; rotating beacons or nav lights. I was also trying to find out from Flight Ops who was in charge and what we were supposed to do now that we were in the night skies over Hue and Camp Eagle.”

  “Somebody told us to fly north to Quang Tri,” someone transmitted.

  “Follow QL1 north and look for the city on the river,” someone else directed.

  “Almost none of us had ever flown that far north before, but a few had. One of those few assumed flight lead, a Scout Pilot, but I don’t remember who he was. The rest of us sorted our way into a trail ‘formation’ of sorts. Scouts, Lift birds, Guns, all mushed together, heading north.”

  “Finally got there. Sort of. Lots of ground lights. A city. Quang Tri?”

  “The Scout, our flight lead, decided he had the runway in sight and reported to Quang Tri tower that he was turning final with a flight of ... a lot. Everyone moved into a loose trail and began to follow the guy in front.”

  “On short final, the Scout discovered that he was actually making an approach to the middle of the main street in whatever city we were over and not the runway at the Military Base. It was Quang Tri but it was not the Quang Tri Airbase. That was north of us on the other side of the Song Thach Han River (didn’t know that then, but learned later).”

  “Finally got it straightened out, with the help of the Quang Tri Tower folks. All landed safely and thus began several months of life at the former Marine Airbase of Quang Tri.”

  “Just to the northwest of the town of Quang Tri in I Corps South Vietnam, on a strip of land between highway QL1 to the west and the Song Thach Han River to the east, the Seabees had constructed an Airbase for the US Marines in September 1967. The Marines staged their operations out of the Airbase, known as the Quang Tri Combat Base, for two years until withdrawing completely in October 1969, moving south to the Phu Bai Combat Base.”

  “Following the Marines’ departure, elements of the US Army replaced them at Quang Tri Air base in late 1969, positioning the 1st Brigade 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, the 18th Surgical Hospital, and the ARVN 1st Division in the Marines’ abandoned Quonset huts and Base facilities surrounding the airfield.”

  “Then, in the middle of a January 1970 night, the 101st Airborne Division (Air Mobile) scrambled A Troop 2/17th Cavalry out of Camp Eagle with subsequent orders delivered by radio to the scrambled Pilots flying in a gaggle of circling helicopters, to deploy to Quang Tri Airbase. Get there. Land. Await further instructions.”

  “Later information revealed that Intelligence reports had indicated that enemy forces were going to come down from the north in tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs). Although we had evidence of increased activity north of the DMZ and here and there inside of the Demilitarized Zone and at various spots along our side of the “Red Line”, the anticipated hoard of tanks and APCs failed to materialize. Regardless, the 101st Division kept A Troop at Quang Tri through the early months of 1970, just in case.”

  “At one point, due to the expectation of tanks and such, we even received all of I Corps’ 2.75 inch rockets mounted with six-pound High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) warheads with point detonating fuzes, a total of only 126 or so. Less than what two Cobras configured as ‘Heavy Hogs’ could carry in their combined 152-rocket tubes.”

  “Although we kept a single Cobra on ‘ready alert’ sitting in a revetment loaded with some of the HEAT rockets, so that we could react quickly if the armored threat showed up unexpe
ctedly some night (and that would have been a serious issue since we had no night vision equipment for either flying or fighting helicopters back in those days), none of us had ever fired the HEAT warhead rockets, and it would literally be a crap shoot to see if we could hit a tank in a spot soft enough to yield to the small shaped charge of a six pound warhead, assuming of course that we could even see them if they came in the night, as we knew they would.”

  “Regardless of the lightweight warhead or our lack of experience and night vision/sighting equipment, every ‘Swinging Richard’ in the Snake Platoon was eager to give it a try. Bring ’em on! We’d stick those rockets in the back end of whatever armor they wanted to send into the fight (FYI: the back end of a tank was where the engine was and the least armor and the front end was where the heaviest armor was).”

  “Yes, that was us. Young and immortal!”

  “We set up housekeeping at Quang Tri and from that night on, we started running all of our missions out of there.”

  “One thing was certain, the Seabees certainly knew how to build an airfield, and revetments, and Quonset huts, and refuel/rearm points and other such necessary stuff.”

  “No tanks crossed the border, at least none that made themselves known to us. The armored threat faded from memory. Life settled back into the familiar ‘same-o, same-o’.”

  “So, it came to pass that early on a sunny Southeast Asia morning in January 1970, a heavy Pink Team, made up of one UH-1H as the C&C, one OH-6A as the Scout and two AH-1Gs as the muscle, departed A Troop’s northernmost ‘encampment’ at Quang Tri Airfield and then turned west toward a distant karst known to the Americans as the Rock Pile, and to the Vietnamese as Thon Khe Tri.”

  “The Rock Pile was a prominent terrain feature that was used by US military forces as a reference point for navigation and directional orientation. It stood essentially by itself, out in the open, on a small plain but surrounded by ridges and mountains in all directions. At about 885 feet above sea level at its peak, it was not the tallest ‘little mountain’ in the region, but it was readily recognizable by aviators passing through the airspace nearby. It was located just to the northwest of a southerly bend in the highway known as QL 9, approximately 33 kilometers northwest of Quang Tri and approximately 16.2 kilometers northeast of the abandoned Special Forces and Marine Combat Base/Airfield at Khe Sanh.”

  “So, on the morning we left Quang Tri for points west, the Rock Pile was our intended initial reference point. From there, we would swing to the north toward North Vietnam and start our recon mission. We weren’t going after tanks specifically, but if they were there, we wanted to find them. Then we’d find out about those six-pound HEAT warheads, if anyone remembered where we had stored them.”

  “I was the Aircraft Commander of one of the two Cobras in our flight. My call sign was Assault 27. The other members of our Hunter-Killer team included our new commanding officer, Major Perry Smith, Assault 6, in the C&C Huey, Captain Bob Karney, Assault 16, in the Scout bird and Captain Seth Hudgens, Assault 26, in the other Cobra, my wingman. Each of the four helicopters carried additional crewmembers: some aviators; others enlisted crewmen serving as crew chiefs, door gunners, and Observers. All together, we numbered eight Army soldiers, Americans all, doing our best to keep the Communists out of South Vietnam. Riiiiiight! Actually, that was right.”

  “We reached the Rock Pile after an uneventful journey from Quang Tri playing follow the leader with the Scout in front, the two Snakes weaving back and forth behind him and the C & C Huey riding in trail at a higher altitude. While the Scout and the two Snakes concentrated on preparing to conduct the recon and on providing gun cover for the Team, the C&C bird focused on communicating our position reports and spot reports, and monitoring other radios for the Artillery, TAC air and other A Troop aircraft flying missions elsewhere in the AO or sitting back at Quang Tri on stand-by in case someone got into more trouble than they could handle by themselves.”

  “The Scout started a right hand turn to lead us northward toward the DMZ, dropping down a bit in altitude but still staying well above the terrain and the jungle below. The rest of us followed, with me maintaining a position and altitude from which I could deliver covering fires for the Scout’s protection, and Assault 26 taking up a position to cover me in a similar way for the same reason. The C&C meandered along with us at an altitude selected to keep him out of the range of ‘normal’ ground fire, 1500 feet or so above ground level (AGL) or higher, if he needed better communications line of sight.”

  “Interestingly, the Rock Pile stood about 13.5 kilometers south of the ‘Provisional Military Demarcation Line’ or DMZ (Demilitarized Zone aka ‘no military allowed’) and about 10 klicks south of the southern boundary of the DMZ. For those who don’t know, but might be interested, the DMZ was established in 1954 as an internationally recognized boundary that theoretically separated Vietnam into the North and South components that existed that morning in 1970.”

  “The ‘Red Line’, as we called it, stretched from the mouth of the Song Ben Hai river at the Gulf of Tonkin on Vietnam’s eastern shoreline for approximately 38 straight-line kilometers to the West, following the windings of the Song Ben Hai river, to a point where it stopped following the river and ran in a straight line further westward for 22.5 klicks, at last intercepting the Laotian border and ceasing to exist.”

  “Our mission that morning was to conduct a reconnaissance of the area along, but south of the southern boundary of the DMZ, including terrain that ran east-west along the north side of a major ridgeline known to us as the Razorback. Someone in our higher headquarters wanted to know what was going on in the area, so we intended to find out if the bad guys were moving through the area from the Laotian portion of the Ho Chi Minh trail and/or out of north Vietnam through the DMZ into I Corps.”

  “Aviators flying in a war zone learn things called ‘Combat Lessons Learned’, either directly from other aviators or indirectly from training materials written by other aviators. Combat Lessons Learned tells us ‘to do’ or ‘to NOT do’ certain things. One of those ‘to NOT do’ things is to fly on constant headings for prolonged periods of time, kind of like flashing a neon sign over our heads saying to any bad guy in the area ‘HEY, I’m going to fly over that terrain dead ahead so get ready for me. Here I come!’ Another one of those ‘to NOT do’ things is to fly at the same altitude consistently.”

  “Well, that January morning, our Scout was not thinking about those particular two Combat Lessons Learned. He was flying the same heading, about due North, and the same altitude for kilometer after kilometer, or nautical mile after nautical mile, if you prefer. He might have been thinking that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and that our mission didn’t really start until we got to the actual area of interest, where he would dive down to treetop level and kick the speed up a notch, until he slowed it down again, just to make his flight path unpredictable and hard to track from a ground based gunner’s point of view.”

  “Assault 26 in his Cobra and I in mine were snaking back and forth behind the Scout for a while, varying route of flight and altitude here and there, but somewhere between that turn over the Rock Pile and eight or nine klicks north of it, I fell into trail on the Scout and was flying his heading and altitude as if I had become hypnotized for the moment. Actually, I was offset just a little in terms of horizontal position, a little to his right, but not much, not enough to matter really. My altitude was a smidgen higher than his, but again, not enough to matter, really.”

  “Regardless of the reasons, for the moment we were straight and level and making our intentions pretty obvious to anyone observing us and, as it turns out, we were being observed.”

  “I remember looking through the front canopy, past the head of my front seat Copilot, at a long, high ridgeline that stretched east-west across our projected route of flight. Lots of trees and shrubs, and terrain ‘fingers’ running down from the sharply defined backbone of the ridgeline toward us and into
the valley floor to our left and right. The top of the ridge was only a few hundred feet below our current altitude, although it was still sitting almost two klicks away, directly in front of us. Actually, it occurred to me that the southern boundary of the DMZ ran along the back of that ridgeline. It was the terrain feature that someone back in 1954 had chosen to delineate the boundary line, so guys like us would know where it was, so that we could avoid overflying it. Except we looked like we had every intention to do exactly that, and maybe even keep on northbound all the way to Hanoi. In other words, the ridge marked the beginning of the ‘No Fly Zone’. We were not allowed to penetrate that airspace, and the bad guys were not allowed to step into that “ground space” on foot, or by wheeled or tracked vehicle either.”

  “Of course, those were rules made by men back in 1954, and none of them were present at the moment, and, of course, this was war!”

  “Suddenly, my hypnotic wool gathering was interrupted by a large, probably the size of a basketball, green ball of fire sailing past the left side of my cockpit. Talk about surprise! Then another green ball of fire zoomed past the right side of the cockpit. This must have been what Jerry Lee Lewis was singing about back in 1964! Certainly, these flying pyrotechnics qualified as ‘Great Balls of Fire’ or what I call ‘GBOFs for short.”

  “Faster than I can tell it, I visually searched for the source of the GBOFs, brought all weapon systems to the ARMED state, confirmed that I was set to fire single pairs of rockets carrying 17-pound warheads from my two inboard M159 19-tube rocket pods, spotted a rapid series of flashes on the ridgeline to our 12 o’clock (dead ahead), advised my Copilot to acquire the flashes with his turreted weapons sight (even though at the moment, we were out of effective range for the mini-gun and the grenade launcher). I visually checked to ensure that my Signal Distribution Panel (SDP) radio select switch was set to the numeral 3 (our VHF air-to-air radio), and pushed forward the ‘Chinese Hat’ switch on the top of my cyclic control, so that I could direct the Scout to get out of my line of fire (and for those who might wonder, it was going to be easier for Assault 16 to move out of my way than it was going to be for me to fly out from behind him, so that I had a clear shot at whoever was throwing those GBOFs at us. Besides, I was already lined up to shoot just as soon as he was no longer sitting on my gun-target line. I heard the XM-28 chin turret slew and knew that my front seat was ready to rock. We both realized that we could do nothing as long as our Scout was the target that weapons would hit first!)”