Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond

by Robert F. Curtis

  No one ever told us that there was such a thing as “mission categories,” i.e., routine, urgent, and mandatory, and that you could refuse missions. There were just missions and you had to try them, no matter the weather, enemy situation, or anything else. You had to try because the grunts and the gunners knew you would come and so you always did, hovering along in the rain and fog if you had to. Sometimes you might not make it, but you had to try.

  This morning over the green coastal low lands, the clouds had lifted into a high overcast. It felt odd to be so high after weeks of monsoon rain, flying to the PZ instead of more or less hovering slowly forward over the trees. In the right seat of the CH-47C Chinook, the 21-year-old WO1 copilot that was me shivered slightly from the cool, damp air that came in around the sliding window on my side. It was supposed to be hot in Vietnam, but with November monsoon rain at 800 feet, it was probably in the 50’s and I had not brought my flight jacket.

  To the north, ahead of us, was the base at Quang Tri and PZ that held the loads for this mission. If the visibility had been better, you could have seen up into North from here: scary when you first see it, but like most things, once you got past the novelty of looking into your enemy’s homeland, it was just normal, a fact that just was, not something you needed to talk about. The South China Sea out to the right was invisible in the mist.

  The AC in the left seat, a CW2, called the PZ Control to let them know we were on our way in and got a “Line 1, mission 293” in response. The AC checked the mission sheet the duty clerk had given him before he left and said, “Shit.”

  “What is the load?” I asked, curious about his comment since copilots did not get to see the mission sheet.

  “It’s a generator. Goddamn thing weighs 6,500, maybe 7,000 pounds.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “We can handle that no sweat.” Generators are nice loads, heavy without too much surface area to make them swing.

  The AC looked over at me and said, “It’s not how much the damn thing weighs. It’s where it is going—check the LZ” and handed me the clipboard.

  “Shit,” was all I could say after looking at the board.

  The generator was going to a mountain top firebase right up on the demilitarized zone (DMZ.). The firebase was under easy observation from the jungle around the river that ran through the middle of the DMZ and therefore, it was easy to direct mortar fire onto the top of the hill. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) gunners would wait to drop the mortar rounds down the tube until the aircraft was on short final (just about to touch down for landing), the most critical stage of flight for the helicopter. The pilots, concentrating on getting heavy loads to an exact spot, were always surprised when the booms that marked the explosions from the mortars came faintly through the aircraft noise, even though when you worked this base you halfway knew they were coming.

  But today with the bad visibility, they would not see us before we were in and out. They might hear us, but timing the mortars was that much harder with only sound to work with.

  That was the theory anyway …

  “Kilo Alpha 1, Bravo Hotel 12, inbound on mission 1134, line 1,” the AC called over the fox mike so that LZ control team would know which load to have ready for us.

  The hookup man was ready as the Chinook began its final approach to the pick up pad at Dong Ha, just north of Quang Tri. When the load came in sight, we could see that the sling was fouled, caught under the load, so that he had to lay on his back on top the load, but he had the donut (the reinforced nylon ring that joins the legs of the sling together) up as high as he could get it and was ready as our Chinook moved forward over him. The steel hook and belly of the aircraft would be inches above him during the hookup. One twitch by the pilot or any malfunction of the aircraft during the hookup would crush him between the load and the belly of the aircraft instantly.

  To make sure we understood the danger of externals, we had to stand on top of loads and hook them up back at Fort Rucker while we were learning to fly Chinooks. To doubly reinforce the danger, after hookup, the student pilot at the controls would bring the helicopter even lower so that the student pilot doing the hookup could climb up from the top of the load and then climb through the hellhole into the aircraft’s cabin.

  “Load coming under. Forward 30,” meaning bring the helicopter forward 30 feet, the Chief said over the intercom from the back of the aircraft. Lying on his belly on a stretcher looking down through the hellhole, the chief could see the load as the aircraft moved forward. The hellhole is the square or rectangular hatch-covered hole in the center of the helicopter’s cabin floor, that, when opened, allows the crew to see the cargo hook and the external load, as well as the ground below the aircraft.

  “Forward 20, down 10.” The numbers were approximations but were good enough to allow the pilot an idea of how high he was above the load.

  “Forward 10, down 5.”

  “Hold down, forward 5. Steady”

  “Load hooked. Up slow. Steady. Tension coming on the sling. Up slow, hookup man clear, tension.”

  As the weight of the load was taken by the aircraft, I could feel the aircraft stop in its climb. I slowly applied more power by moving the thrust lever upward.

  “Load’s off. Up 10,” the Chief called.

  “Lots of power, gauges look good, clear to go,” called the AC from the left seat.

  “Loads clear,” called the Chief.

  Increasing power a little more, I thought “light thoughts” to make the load easier to carry, and applied forward stick. The Chinook began to move forward. Passing around 20 knots forward speed, the big helicopter shuddered as translational lift was achieved and we climbed above the perimeter barbed wire. The aircraft accelerated and climbed slowly into the mist as we moved off north toward the firebase on the DMZ.

  Normally we would climb to at least 1500 feet above the ground so that we would be above the range of small arms fire, but today, the best we could do was about 800 feet. Above that we began to go into the clouds. Since there was no instrument approach to the firebase and further, neither of us was exactly what you would call “well trained” in instrument flight, I leveled the aircraft off below the clouds and hoped that there was no one with a rifle or machine gun waiting along our flight path. The load was riding well; it was not swinging back and forth since it was heavy and dense. The 6,000-pound generator had a small surface area for its weight and stayed in place below us as we flew toward the firebase.

  At three miles from where the firebase should be, the mountain it sat on came into view. That is, the rising terrain that marked the base of the mountain was visible. Starting about half way up, clouds ran into the jungle that covered the sides.

  Without comment, I began a right hand turn to take the generator back to the PZ. If the clouds were covering the firebase, we obviously could not see to deliver it.

  “Turn back toward the hill,” the AC said over the intercom.

  Rolling wings level, I looked over at the AC in the left seat. Then, seeing no reaction from him, after a moment I reversed course back toward the cloud-covered firebase.

  “We can’t get in there,” I said, stating what I thought was readily apparent, given that the base was invisible in the clouds.

  “Sure we can. All we have to do is shoot an approach to the hill just below the base of the clouds. Once we are stabilized in a hover, we will just hover up the side of the hill in the goo. You’ll be able to see the trees through the chin bubble. Just don’t look out the windshield,” the AC replied.

  I was still fairly new to Vietnam. My aviation experience was a little more than usual for a first tour pilot, due to a year stateside flying OH-13E’s before coming to I Corps, but this little bit of experience did not prepare me for anything like this. Clouds look soft but sometimes they are very hard, like when they hold mountains inside their white mask. Like fog, clouds stop you from seeing forward and all pilots live by visibility when they are not taking off and landing on instrumented run
ways. If you can’t see, you don’t know where you are and there may be one of those “hard clouds” in front of you. And besides, clouds scared me after all the horror stories about vertigo and pilots coming out of clouds upside down, not healthy in a helicopter.

  Being new to flying in Vietnam, I gave a mental shrug and continued on toward the firebase. The AC was like an instructor; you knew that he knew things you did not. The AC called the Pathfinder (the ground controller who directed helicopter traffic on every firebase) on the hill on the fox mike and asked him if they were ready for the load. When the Pathfinder replied they were, I noticed his voice sounded slightly surprised that we would even try to land a load on his hill in the fog. He told us that the visibility on the top was at or near zero. The AC “rogered” the Pathfinder, completed the landing check, and the crew reported ready. To my surprise, he left me at the controls instead of taking over himself. I began the approach to the green hillside halfway up the mountain.

  I completed a more or less normal approach. Shuddering and shaking, the Chinook came to a hover over the trees at what I estimated to be about three quarters of the way up the mountain. Above us the trees all went white as they disappeared into the ragged clouds covering the upper portion of the hill.

  I added more power and began to move the aircraft up the slope into the clouds. Just like the AC said, I could see the top of the trees well enough to hover the aircraft as we moved forward and up the hill. Sneaking a peek up through the windshield only showed a solid whiteness with no breaks. Quickly I returned my eyes down to the tops of the trees where there was some reference to right side up.

  Coming onto the top of the hill, the trees were gone and I could see the rows of barbed wire passing under the nose of the aircraft. We had made it. When the hill flattened out on the top I could see forward well enough to see a ground guide to the right motioning the Chinook forward. Another man, apparently unaware of the first, was standing to the far left of the nose, also motioning us to him. Picking the man on the left, because I could see him more clearly, I hovered the Chinook forward toward him.

  I saw the ground guide reach into the patch pocket of his jungle fatigues and pull out a smoke grenade. He must have remembered his training, i.e., you pop a smoke grenade for helicopters. He did not remember the part about only doing that when the helicopter is in flight, not when they are in a hover. Then he threw the smoke grenade under the front of the aircraft, on my side.

  Fascinated, almost like watching a movie, I watched the green smoke completely blot out the little visibility I had. Now, except for being green, the view through the chin window matched the view through the windshield, zero.

  “I can’t see anything at all. Nothing! You’ve got it!” I yelled over the intercom, my façade of calm gone.

  “I can still see. I can still see! I’ve got the controls!” the AC yelled back, excited but not yet panicked.

  He took the controls as I released them and tried to hold the aircraft steady. I still could not see enough to fly but I felt we were moving. We were, in fact, moving. The aircraft was sliding backwards across the top of the firebase, dragging the generator across the ground under us. It did not feel real somehow. I was back in the movie I was watching as the smoke grenade rolled under the aircraft.

  When the AC took the controls, the Chinook had settled low enough that the 6,000-pound generator touched down as we started aft. As we moved backwards, we were dragging the generator across the top of the hill, with the same effect a bulldozer blade would have, i.e. clearing everything in its path. Our flight engineer was talking to us over the internal communication system (ICS), saying things like, “Bring it up, bring it up NOW”!!! but the AC was too occupied with trying to control the aircraft to hear or to respond. When the generator was approaching a bunker full of men trying desperately to stay out of its way, the Chief punched it off (hit the release that disconnects the sling from the cargo hook).

  Remove 6,000 pounds from a helicopter without reducing a high power setting and the aircraft will climb. Climb fast, and in this case, since we were already moving backwards, climbing fast and backwards. That’s one nice characteristic of tandem rotor helicopters, like the CH-47 and its smaller brother, the CH-46. They fly just as well backwards as they do forwards, since they don’t have tail rotors to get in the way.

  To us in the cockpit, time stopped. The AC and I looked at each other, opened-mouthed with surprise, shock, I don’t know what, but at the moment, neither of us was flying the Chinook. We were, in effect, passengers.

  Then, time began again when I saw trees out the windshield where trees should not have been. Nor were the trees level like they should be, but instead they seem to be planted at a 45-degree angle. Instinctively, as had been drilled into us over and over, I remembered flight school instrument training from Fort Rucker, “When all else fails, level the wings, pull power and climb. Get away from the ground,” so taking the controls away from the AC, I did just that.

  Moving my eyes to the attitude indicator, the gauge that shows whether or not your wings are banked, I rolled the aircraft level and pulled an armload of thrust. I sagged under as much “G” as the aircraft could produce, the rotor speed drooping (slowing down) a little under the load. The trees disappeared back into the whiteness, the airspeed stabilized on the positive side showing that we were moving forward instead of backward, and the vertical speed indicator showed 3,000 feet per minute of climb. Finally, passing through 6,000 feet, 4,000 feet above the top of the mountain we’d started from, we broke through the clouds into clear air. With the white blanket below us and blue sky above, I turned the Chinook to the southeast, so that we would be headed toward water, not mountains, and South Vietnam, not North Vietnam.

  It was ten minutes before either of us could speak. I flew and the AC just sat there, looking straight ahead. In the back, the crew chattered as usual. All they had seen was white the entire time and had no idea what had happened in the cockpit.

  In a few minutes, we found a hole down through the clouds where green was visible, and we descended through it into normal altitudes where helicopters flew. Then, we returned to the PZ and continued our missions in the drizzle and fog: fuel, food and ammo to the firebases: fuel, food and ammo to the firebases, all day long. The missions must be done. It was still raining when we shut the helicopter down ten hours later in the dark at Liftmaster Pad.

  We never spoke of what happened.

  Good training with luck and superstition thrown in …

  8

  TRACERS

  LAOS ■ MARCH 1971

  According to one calculation from the Vietnam Helicopter Pilot’s Association, of the 11,827 helicopters deployed to Vietnam, 5,086 or nearly 43% of them were destroyed. Of the 58,272 names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall, 4,914 are helicopter pilots and crewmen.

  They start out so small and soft-looking, tracers do. Tiny little glowing green lights, they drift slowly up from the ground, almost lazy as they rise. then suddenly, they speed up as they get close to you. they speed up and get bigger and bigger. You try not to look at them—you must concentrate on your flying—but you cannot help it, you look. And, as you look, you know that there are four or five bullets between each of the tracers coming for you. When the NVA fired mortars at you while you were dropping off a load on a firebase, it never seemed personal. The mortar crew was just doing their job, dropping the rounds down the tube and both you and they knew that there was very little chance that they would actually hit you. Tracers are different. The gunners are trying to kill YOU personally.

  The numbers of aircraft involved in Operation Lam Son 719, the incursion into Laos in February and March, 1971, reminded all of us involved of what it must have been like in England during WWII. Literally hundreds of helicopters flying in every direction, C-130s streaming into the runway at Khe Sanh, attack jets passing over on their way to bomb NVA positions along the Ho Chi minh trail. There were more aircraft visible at any given moment than any of us had ever see
n at one time.

  While many of the helicopters involved in Lam Son 719 were based 15 miles to the east of Laos at Khe Sanh, after the first day of the incursion, we Chinook pilots commuted from Phu Bai, about an hour away, every morning because there just wasn’t room for five Chinook companies there. We would takeoff before sunrise and be at the PZs in time to pick up our pre-assigned missions. Some missions were single ship, others required flights of aircraft bringing in external loads of ammo or water or fuel or food quickly, one after another.

  On the evening before the first South Vietnamese troops crossed the border into Laos, every inch of turf at Khe Sanh was covered with helicopters, mostly UH-1H Hueys, AH-1G Cobra gunships, and OH-6A LOACHs (popular name for the Light Observation Helicopter). Because our Chinooks just took up too much room, the plan was for us remain overnight (RON) at Firebase Vandergrift in the valley east of Khe Sanh, about ten miles away.

  I had been an AC for several months now. Since I was the only trained flight instructor in the company at the time, the Ops O wanted to move me into the IP position soon. He wanted me to have more total flight time before I stepped up, so I usually had the longest missions. Not necessarily the most dangerous ones, but usually the longest ones. Because my missions ran long that day, I was late getting up to Vandergrift, in fact mine was the last aircraft to arrive before it got dark.

  To reduce the possibility of mid-air collisions, we were instructed to follow the only road from Vietnam to Laos, QL9, west from the low lands into the mountains. Once past the Rockpile, an almost vertical rock formation and scene of major combat for the marines a few years earlier, we would turn south for a straight shot into the PSP ramp at Vandergrift. As I made the turn at the Rockpile, I saw a flash from the hillside next to us and as I turned my head toward it, I saw a streak of smoke.