In our dive, the speed built quickly to the point where the aircraft was shaking and vibrating so hard I couldn’t read the airspeed indicator or any of the other instruments any more. Velocity Never exceed (VNE), was 170 knots on a Chinook and I was quite probably exceeding it, but we had to get her on the ground before the controls quit working. Now all that mattered was to save my crew, if I could.
Then time stopped.
The old cliché that your life passes before your eyes did not happen. It just seemed like everything just stopped. My mind was clear, no regrets, no “if only.” It just held the question, stated quite clearly and calmly, “Is this what it’s like right before you die?” I never got the answer because
Time started up again.
The trees began to get very big in the windshield, so I started a pullout, trying to hold the “G” force down as much as possible. When I looked at the airspeed indicator, it was passing through 160 knots on the way back to a more normal approach speed, but it would still be a very fast approach and an approach to the ground instead of a hover.
On the ground, on the ground, get it on the ground! I had to get it on the ground before all the hydraulic fluid was gone and the controls froze.
Without conscious thought, all the training at Fort Wolters came back to me. All those times the instructor had cut the throttle on the OH-23, leaving me frantically looking for a spot to autorotate to, had paid off, as the Army knew it would. Even though there was a sea of jungle below us, as I entered the dive, I had automatically set the Chinook up for a landing in a clear area not too far from an ARVN base. The LZ looked raw, as if it had been prepared recently, but it was too far from the ARVN’s perimeter to be their primary helo pad. As I flared the Chinook to lose speed for touchdown, I saw that the LZ I had picked held the crashed remains of a Huey in the northern third of the cleared area. This LZ had been hot once, but we were committed to the landing. The Huey was totaled but it was upright so maybe the crew got out. I hoped they did.
I picked a touch-down point as far away from the broken Huey as I could so that we could avoid blowing up loose parts that might go into our rotor blades. Seconds later, I slammed the Chinook onto the ground, aft wheels first, hard but upright with the flight controls still working.
Within seconds of the wheels touching down, the flight engineer had the ramp down and all three crewmen were running from the aircraft, each carrying an M-60D machine gun. Normally, the Chinook had two door guns, but today, the flight engineer, for some reason he didn’t really understand, sent the crew chief and gunner back to the armory to pick up two more M-60s and a case of ammunition. As I shut the aircraft down, I could see one of the crewmen establishing a fighting position out in front of us, placing his M-60 where he could cover the most ground. The NVA had certainly seen us going down and could well be headed toward us right now, provided, of course, that they weren’t here already. My copilot jumped out of his seat and as he left the aircraft, grabbed the remaining M-60s lying on the cabin deck and joined the perimeter defense while I finished shutting the aircraft down.
Shutting down my Chinook on March 4, 1971 was very simple—I just pulled the condition levers to “Stop” and turned the fuel and battery switches to off, not bothering to start the APU, completely ignoring the shutdown checklist. We made it to the ground without the controls locking, why push it now? I unstrapped and climbed out of the cockpit quickly while the rotor blades spun down to a stop. Before I left the cockpit, I stopped for a few seconds to stare straight ahead. The bullet hole in the windshield was directly in front of where my face had been. If I had been leaning forward, or the gunner had fired a second sooner or later, it would have hit me in the forehead. I couldn’t see a hole where the bullet had continued into the forward pylon, but it must have done so to take out one of the flight boosts. I ran out the open ramp and quickly surveyed the area to see where my crewmen were.
We were maybe a quarter to a half mile from the ARVN base but it was unlikely they would come over to provide security. They were quite probably too worried about their own security to consider us. My four crewmen had gone to more or less the corners of the LZ, loaded their weapons and were ready to fire. I quickly grabbed two ammo cans of 200 rounds each from the case and carried them to the closest fighting position. The door gunner had just taken the single belt he had in his weapon when he ran out of the Chinook. He also had his M-16 over his shoulder and a .38 on his belt. I got another two cans to the other gunner and two more to my copilot. A quick weapons count showed we had four M-60D machine guns, three M-16s, four .38 pistols, one .45 m1911A1 automatic pistol, and one M-3 grease gun with a silencer, my personal weapon. We had somewhere over 5,000 rounds of ammo.
I bought the grease gun off one of our company dopers. As I was walking through the company area one day, I saw puffs of dirt coming up in front of me and froze in place. Someone was shooting but I was not hearing the shots. Looking at the puffs, I saw they were following a rat running hard for cover under one of the hootches. Looking for the source of the puffs, I saw a soldier with the grease gun holding the trigger down as he tracked the rat. When he emptied the magazine, I walked over to him and said, “How would you like to sell me that weapon?” He replied, “Sure, man, $20.” I gave him the $20 and the grease gun was mine. I did not ask him where he got it. my thought was that I would only use a weapon if I had been shot down and was doing escape and evasion (E&E) to get back to friendly lines. If I had to shoot someone, I would only do it if they were close and would prefer no one else hear me doing it. Besides, the M-3 uses the .45 round and I was already carrying an M-1911A1 pistol, also .45 and 100 rounds of .45 ammo in two boxes in the pockets of my survival vest.
Standing outside the aircraft, it occurred to me that I had not made an emergency radio call. I had not made a “mayday” call because of the oldest order of precedence when flying: Aviate, fly the aircraft; Navigate, take it to where you are going; and, last, if you have time, Communicate. I controlled the aircraft and found a landing zone big enough to handle it, taking care of the first two in the correct order. There was really no need to make any radio calls since we had been briefed on what to do when we went down. Besides, many aircraft had seen me go down and we knew that no one would come for us until the mission was complete anyway.
Since the NVA had not immediately attacked, I called the flight engineer over. He was not hurt from either the explosion below our aircraft or the cargo hook swinging up when I pickled the load. He and I went to the Chinook to see how badly it had been damaged. Leaving his machine gun in place on our defense perimeter, he came over to me. The wounds to my face and arm were obviously not serious. Though I was still bleeding ten minutes after the hit, I was still functioning. The hydraulic fluid was still burning through my soaked shirt and the holes in my face, neck and arm, so I took off the shirt and t-shirt and threw them back inside the cabin. Leaving my bullet bouncer on the ground I put my survival vest back on. The blood had stopped coming from my upper right arm, leaving just a caked area of blood and hydraulic fluid. My face was still bleeding but not to the point where it interfered with what I wanted to do. I was still numb from the impact of the shrapnel, so there was no pain—in fact, instead of feeling pain I just felt angry, very angry. The flight engineer wanted to put bandages from the aircraft’s first aid kit over the wounds but I told him no, just check out the aircraft to see if we can takeoff and get the hell out of there.
The flight engineer clambered onto the top of Playtex 820 and opened up the forward panels to see how much damage had been done. As he was doing that, I walked around the aircraft to see what other damage we had. I counted four bullet holes and more damage to the belly, probably from an S-60 round. One of the bullet holes was through the spar of one of the forward rotor blades.
The flight engineer called me to the top of the aircraft so that I could look into the forward pylon. The Chinook has an upper dual flight boost hydraulic actuator, the system that actually moves the rotor he
ad and controls the aircraft. The “dual boost” part means that the two sides are independent of each other; lose one and the controls still function perfectly, but by necessity, the dual boost is one unit with the actuators side-by-side. The upper dual boost actuator is a major single-point failure, so the Army had Boeing put a piece of armor plate in front of it to protect it. Sticking in the number one boost side of the actuator was a 12.7mm armor piecing machine gun round. It had gone between the armor and the actuator and hit the number one side squarely on. Fortunately for us we had been above tracer burnout range, so the bullet had little energy left when it hit the air-craft. Had we been lower, instead of poking a hole in the actuator, the bullet might have taken it completely off, leaving us to fall out of control until the Chinook came apart or hit the ground. But it didn’t take the actuator off. The flight engineer pulled the bullet out and handed me part of the jacket. He kept the core for himself: after all, it was his aircraft.
Between the shot out actuator and the holes in the blades, I decided that 820 was not flyable, at least until maintenance looked at it and changed the damaged parts out for new ones. Besides the shot out number one flight boost, the hole in the blade spar could well result in blade failure, another fatal single-point failure. We would either be picked up by helicopter, as per the brief, or, if that didn’t happen soon, we would make our way to the ARNV base and wait for rescue. If all else failed, we would escape and evade (E&E) our way back to Vietnam on foot. I took my survival radio out of my vest and turned it on. The survival radio could handle “guard” and any other UHF frequency you dialed up, so I turned it to guard to listen in on what was happening beyond our LZ. Looking at the sky while I worked on the radio, I saw a Huey headed in our direction, apparently on approach to our location.
“Huey coming for downed Chinook, LZ is cold” I called over the survival radio.
“Roger, get your crew together for pickup,” the Huey pilot replied.
As the Huey got closer I recognized the emblem painted on its nose, it was the 101st Aviation group commander’s aircraft. The colonel commanded all 600 of the 101st’s aircraft. He must have been up flying over the battlefield, watching the fight, and must have seen us go down. When he was satisfied that the mission was going to be completed with the remaining aircraft, he came back to get us. I called my crew back together. the excess ammo we put back inside 820 so that it could either be rescued when the aircraft was recovered or destroyed along with the Chinook, if that should be the command decision. We stacked the machine guns, the KY 28, survival ammo can, and our flight gear close to where the Huey had set up to land, while we waited.
Before he came into the LZ, the colonel did a wide circle over the zone, looking for NVA. Satisfied that the LZ was indeed cold, he landed with the Huey blowing up dust in a reassuring cloud. We waited outside the rotor disk until the Huey crew chief waved us over. I sent my crew in first. I would be the last one onboard. As my crew climbed into the aircraft, I looked up at the Huey’s cockpit. I could see the colonel looking back at me—me, shirtless, with a survival vest on, with blood all down my arm and face and red hydraulic fluid all over me and the grease gun with the silencer slung over my shoulder. His visor was down so I couldn’t see his face, but he shook his head and gave me what looked like a rueful smile.
After a final look at 820, I climbed in the back of the Huey and parked myself on the right side, next to the door gunner. I was getting madder by the second. Mad that the NVA shot my Chinook, mad that I was hit, just mad. I wanted to shoot something, someone, shoot the man who shot me. I hoped that the 105 howitzer and the 4,000 pounds of ammo we dropped at least hit the NVA who shot me. I leaned out the door of the Huey, grease gun locked and loaded, but there was nothing except green jungle and the scars from bombing and artillery fire and the red line dirt marking highway QL9 heading back to Khe Sanh from Laos. After a while, I sat back in the red webbing of the troop seat and watched the world go by as the Huey took us back to Khe Sanh. We had been on the ground for about 15 minutes. It had been 20 minutes since we were hit.
The numbness from my wounds began to wear off as the adrenaline came down. By the time we got to Khe Sanh, 20 minutes later, I was extremely tired and hurting in several places. My anger was gone too, replaced by thoughts of how I was going to explain the wounds to my wife in a few days when I returned to Fort Campbell for two weeks of leave in the middle of the war.
After we landed at the medevac pad just off the main runway at Khe Sanh, an ambulance was there to pick me up, but the Huey crew chief motioned for me to wait while they shut down. I waited just outside the rotor disk until the colonel unstrapped and, climbing out the right door, walked up to me. He looked at the blood and hydraulic fluid covering me, placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You did good, son. Now go get that looked at.” As he walked away he looked back at me again, shirtless, blood stained with the grease gun hanging from my shoulder, shook his head and gave a small laugh.
I walked into the hospital tent at a slow time for them. Very few wounded were there, so they had plenty of time to deal with me. Because I was walking and talking without any problem they had me fill out my own toe tag, the marker the military uses to identify the wounded and the dead. After cleaning me up, I sat on a table for an hour or two while they picked pieces of glass and metal out of me. The doctor told me that the ones he couldn’t remove would work their way out in time. There were no big holes, just a lot of little ones and bruises on my arm, neck, and face. The doctor told me that he was putting big bandages on me because Khe Sanh was a very dusty place. When I got back to my base I could remove them, take a shower, put on some cream he gave me and replace the bandages with band-aids. Since my shirt was gone, someone gave me a T-shirt to put on for the trip back to my company.
My crew was waiting for me outside when the doctor finished about an hour later. We all smiled at each other, glad to be alive, as we waited for one of our company aircraft to pick us up and take us back to Phu Bai. The colonel had called Playtex Ops on the radio to tell them we were OK and where to pick us up. An hour later, one of our Chinooks landed and we boarded for the trip back. Four hours after we were hit, we were back at Liftmaster Pad, being greeted by a crowd of our relieved friends waiting on the ramp.
The Ops O met me as I climbed down from the crew door on the Chinook. The blood and hydraulic fluid were gone but the bandages covered most of my arm and shoulder, with more on my face and neck. He turned pale and said, “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know this would happen.”
I said, “I know. I’ll be alright, but I just want to be alone right now, OK?”
He nodded as I walked slowly toward my hootch. Once inside, I pulled all the bandages off and after running the wringer washing machine full of hot water, I put it on drain cycle so that it would pump the water to the shower. After stepping into the bathtub, I stood under the water and enjoyed the nice long, hot shower. I dried off and put on band-aides where the bandages had been. After putting on a clean flight suit I walked over to the Club. The Ops O was sitting at the bar as I came in.
“Hi, guys,” I said as the Ops O looked around. He went from being glum to being mad in a second. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled, but the anger became happiness as it occurred to him that while I was wounded, I was not hurt as bad as it looked when I stepped off the aircraft.
The next day I went on leave, traveling to Fort Campbell, Kentucky via Saigon, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Three days later I was explaining the bruises and holes in my face, neck, and arm to my wife. Two weeks after that, I was back at Khe Shahn helping to pull the last of the ARVNs out of Laos as Lam Son 719 came to an inglorious end.
My final memory of that battle is of an NVA mortar round hitting a 5,000 gallon gasoline tanker truck parked less than 100 yards in front of me as I was landing just outside Khe Sanh on that last day. As the fireball rose in front of me, I jerked the Chinook back into a full-power climb. It missed us entirely.
Luck and superstition again
…
9
ARMY NIGHT FLIGHT
I CORPS, VIETNAM ■ APRIL 1971
When there was no moon, or if an overcast hid the moon and stars, Vietnam’s I Corps got very dark—very, very dark. There are no city lights in the jungle, no stream of cars with headlights marking a road, no lights from farmhouses here and there like back home, there is just darkness. Coastal lowland, rolling country leading to the jungle mountains, it was all the same, just darkness. One crew was always on standby at night, just in case something unanticipated arose; they could look forward to flying into that darkness if the call came.
When the word came to launch the standby, we aircrew, pilots and enlisted men alike, projected what we thought was an air of calm, like all who fly do. We tried to be cool in the face of whatever came, like all men, from those just out of their teens to those in their late 70’s; I never heard anyone admit to fear, but it was there when we went out at night. I never heard it but I saw it, in them and in me, too.
Action had been heavy in the A Shau Valley for the last several days. The artillery, 105mm’s and 155mm’s (“dime nickel” and “penny nickel nickel” in Army aviator-speak) in their positions in the mountaintop firebases had been firing nearly continuously. All three companies from my aviation battalion, Playtex, my company, and our sister Chinook companies, Varsity and the Pachyderms, had been hauling fuel, food, and water, but mostly 8,000 pound pallets of artillery shells to them constantly as they fired their guns west and north against the North Vietnamese forces there. But now one base, Fire Support Base (FSB) Rifle, call sign for tonight “Alpha Kilo One,” located on a ridgeline overlooking the A Shau, had used nearly all its ammo in the non-stop fire missions and was calling for more. They had not called for resupply earlier when it was still daylight because it looked like things were settling down and they would have enough ammo to last the night.
Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Page 9