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

by Robert F. Curtis

  They were wrong. Things had not settled down, but instead, steadily intensified, leaving the gunners sleepless, exhausted, and nearly deaf as they served their weapons, shell after shell going down range into the valley. The men on the firebases did not like resupply at night any more than we did, because, in addition to the work of stacking the shells and breaking down the pallets, they had to have light to position the ammo and store it. Lights gave the NVA something to shoot at, i.e., us bringing the ammo in and the grunts moving it. As noted by many soldiers, it is one thing to shoot and quite another to be shot at.

  We had preflighted the aircraft before it got dark and were ready when the call came at 0100 hours. The three crewmen—the flight engineer, crew chief and door gunner—were already aboard the aircraft, since they always slept onboard the Boeing Hilton when their helicopter was on standby. The sky was pitch black; even after our eyes adapted to the dark, we could not see the outline of Gia Li mountain less than one mile away from the end of Liftmaster Pad’s short runway. The red glow of the cockpit lights did not reduce the feeling of helplessness that you get sometimes when you are about to do something you really do not want to do but that you know you must do anyway.

  That feeling was always one of detachment for me. A feeling that it was not real and would pass because something would happen that would keep you from having to do it. maybe the aircraft would break or they would change their mind and not need the ammo after all. Funny how over the years, in situations like this, that feeling never changed, it always came back. And the mission was never canceled, so no matter how you felt about the dark, you went out into it. The missions must be done.

  On climb out, I finally could see Gia Li mountain, but only because of the lights from Camp eagle behind it. To the west and north of eagle where the big mountains were, and where FSB Rifle was, I could only see blackness. Our position lights, the red and green sidelights and white taillight that make us visible to other aircraft, were on, as was our top rotating beacon. We never used the bottom red rotating beacon, figuring it made us too visible to the NVA and would not keep other aircraft from flying into us anyway. Although the lights, red on the right, green on the left, and white in the back, gave the enemy something to shoot at, we presented no better target than we did in the daylight. Since we were flying a Chinook, we were a big, slow target day or night. But, at night, without lights (particularly the red rotating beacon), you were invisible to other aircraft, making the possibility of a mid-air collision very real and guaranteed fatal to all concerned.

  I made the takeoff as the AC nearly always did—the AC has to make sure everything is working OK, as a copilot might miss something—and turned the aircraft north. We climbed out following along the lights of QL1, the main north-south highway in Vietnam, to about 3,000 feet above ground level (AGL), well above the effective range of small arms and light machine-gun fire. The bullets could get that high but had little energy left and were no longer accurate, so we did not particularly fear them. We could see the lights of Hue City, the old imperial Vietnamese capital, then moved toward the mountains. Rural electric co-ops had yet to come to I Corps, nor were they likely to until the war was over, if ever. In the dark, there was nothing visible to navigate to, except the radio beacon at Camp evans. Our ADF was working and we found evans without any trouble. Under the glare of our landing lights, hook-up of the load was routine and 20 minutes after we had lifted off from Phu Bai, we were climbing out toward the blackness of the mountains to the west.

  I had briefed the copilot and crew what to do many times and all of us had flown this mission at least a few times, so we should not have been scared, but we were; at least I was. The mountains ahead of us went up to around 6,000 feet above sea level, so I continued to climb until I reached 10,000 feet. That altitude alone was enough to be scary for helicopter pilots. We almost never flew this high above the ground because of the problems with getting on the ground should your aircraft catch fire or one of the transmissions begin to fail. Helicopters do not carry parachutes and can be made to descend only so fast. What is the time between failure onset and catastrophic failure? Between the time something goes wrong, and the time you ride the out-of-control helicopter all the way down, thinking whatever thoughts come to you in your last moments.

  As I’ve said before, it’s not the death part that worries many pilots, it’s having time to think about death while falling. The books do not say how fast you can make a helicopter descend without losing control. Putting the aircraft into a dive that exceeds VNE, like I did in Laos, is not recommended. Typically the fastest way to lose altitude quickly is to put the aircraft into a slip by cross controlling the rudders and the stick, but how fast does it fall that way? maybe it’s minutes, maybe it’s seconds until you reach the ground, but either way, it’s a long time to think about it.

  I listened while my copilot called the artillery (“arty”) clearance frequency so that we would not inadvertently fly through “friendly” fire. Although they laid out a route for us that was supposed to keep us clear, we had little faith in it. This lack of confidence was not from any feeling that the “arty” guys had it in for us, but came from the fact that, try as they might, the clearance agency was always wrong. We didn’t believe them because every day we would get routes and fly them only to arrive at the LZ to find guns blazing away, though pointing in a different direction from that which we were given. Eventually we became philosophical about it. Even an artillery shell is a little bullet in a big sky, so the odds of being hit inadvertently by a “friendly” shell were so small that it was not worth the worry. There were too many other things that could kill you …

  Still, like putting your pistol between your legs and the door guns on our aircraft, arty clearance served a little psychological protection. You believed that the .45 added some armor. You believed the M-60D machine gun on each side of your aircraft would suppress enemy fire. You believed the clearance would keep you from flying down a gun-target line. You knew in your heart that none of these did much, but you believe anyway. The arty clearance was no help tonight, though, because they said everyone was quiet with no fire missions currently in effect. Except, of course, for the H&I (harassment and interdiction) missions. That was where the arty guys on the firebases pointed their guns—in the general direction of the bad guys, firing blind, all just to keep Charlie on his toes. You never knew where those rounds went, but, again, it is a big sky and in that context, even artillery rounds are little bullets.

  Our aircraft had no navigation system except for the ADF we had used to find Camp evans, but the ADF was of no use in finding a firebase in the mountains in the dark, since the firebase did not have one of the portable radio beacons that transmit the signal that the ADF receives. Even if it did, the ADF was way too inaccurate to use in the mountains where a few feet’s distance could put you into the trees or cliff face. Our highly developed map reading skills were of no use either, since we could not see to navigate, nor did our memory of how the terrain looked around FSB Rifle help since it too was not exact enough to trust your life and the lives of your crew in the darkness. Blackness below us was the same blackness wherever we looked, left, right, up, down, as we flew toward the area of the firebase.

  To find the firebase on its mountaintop, we called the Air Force radar unit that covered all of I Corps and into the southern part North Vietnam and gave them its name and our location. After they picked our Chinook up on radar, they gave us a vector to the firebase. While I flew and talked to the Air Force air traffic controller, my copilot called the grunts on FSB Rifle to tell them we were on our way.

  After 15 minutes, the Air Force controller said simply, “Playtex One two, you’re over them now.”

  Below us, the earth was the same black as the sky, nothing to differentiate one from the other. Time to talk to the grunts and get their exact location.

  “Alpha Kilo One, this is Playtex One two. We’ve got a load for you. Turn on a light,” I called.

 
; “Playtex, Kilo One, we hear you above us, but negative on the light. Wind is light from the north.”

  I understood. If they turn on a light, the NVA will shoot at it, and by definition, at them. Now they must understand.

  “Alpha Kilo One, Playtex. You want this load, turn on a light. We cannot find you otherwise. No light, we take it back.”

  Silence from the ground. Then, in the sea of black below us, my right gunner calls over the intercom, “Green light, two o’clock low!”

  Swapping my vision from the flight instruments to the outside, I catch a glimpse of the light below and call over the Fm, “Green.” From the ground comes, “Confirm green.”

  I try to remember where the mountains are from the map and from the many hours I have flown here, but I can’t. It’s just black below us, above us, to the sides of us. I put the Chinook into a box pattern on a course that I think will keep us clear of the mountains. As I start the descent, I hear the Air Force radar operator saying the same words the FAA controller said when the U-8 started down into the Smoky mountains two years before, “Losing you in the ground clutter. Give a call out-bound and we’ll vector you home.” Like the FAA controller, the Air Force controller didn’t say good luck or anything like that, not because he was superstitious, but just because it was not cool for him or for us. Better death than uncoolness.

  I planned a steep approach angle instead of the normal shallower one, coming down at a 15-degree angle instead of the usual 5-degrees. We were light on fuel so the weight wouldn’t be a problem and it would keep us higher and out of the NVA’s range longer; might also keep us from hitting a mountain too. Without being told, my copilot turned off our red, green, and white position lights and our top rotating beacon as we started down from 10,000 feet. No jets down among these mountains in the dark to fly into you, so why give the NVA a target?

  It’s called pucker factor. It’s the involuntary tightening of your rectum when the tension gets high, like when you know you may be headed directly into a rock wall, invisible in the darkness, and knowing that you do it anyway because that is what has to be done if the mission is to be done. The mission must be done. Your rectum gets so small and puckered that we said you couldn’t drive a broom straw up it with a sledgehammer. The standard joke was that it took half an hour to get the seat cushion out of your ass you were so puckered. At the same time, your right hand grips the cyclic stick so hard, we said it was like you were trying to squeeze the black out of the plastic. Sometimes afterwards, your forearm would hurt, your legs would go stiff on the rudders, and your teeth would clinch.

  Concentration is also there with the pucker factor. The noise of the helicopter disappears. The radios go silent. All that happens is that your eyes go back and forth over the instruments on the Chinook’s dash—from the flight instruments, attitude indicator, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed—to an outside green light on the ground, back inside to attitude, altitude, airspeed. Wings level, altitude decreasing toward the height of the firebase, no radar altimeter in C model Chinooks so you hope your barometric altimeter is close to being set right, airspeed coming back toward zero, but you keep it above 20 so you won’t lose translational lift and get caught behind the power curve trying to hover out of ground effect in the mountains with 8,000 pounds of ammo swinging below you. In the background you might hear some mumbling over the ICS as the copilot calls airspeed for you and landing check complete, but your world is attitude, altitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude, airspeed until at last you can stand it no more because the landing zone must be coming up fast, so you call for the landing light and then the world is lit in blinding white light and you see the barbed wire around the firebase and the man with the flashlight waving you forward. You also hear the yells over the radio as the pathfinder calls for you to kill the light before the mortars start, but you don’t because mortars may not come, and if you lose the light a crash right in the middle of all these men will not come out well for anyone.

  “Down 10, 5, load’s on the ground, load’s released. Cleared to go,” your flight engineer calls, and the landing light goes off as you pull up the thrust lever, adding lots of power and climb out, attitude, altitude, airspeed. Attitude wings level with a little nose down to gain speed, attitude increasing rapidly to get your aircraft back above 6,000 feet and those invisible mountains, airspeed increasing toward 120 knots for the trip home. Green, red, and white back on, Anti-collision lights back on as you climb back to where the jets are.

  It takes about 15 minutes after you reach cruising altitude and the Air Force is directing you home for the pucker factor to decrease enough to let the seat cushion start coming out from between the cheeks of your ass, just like the joke says. It’s only a thirty-minute flight back to Lift master Pad, but you have to refuel at Camp eagle on the way so that the aircraft will be ready to fly in the morning.

  Finished, you lift off and in a few minutes you are on the ground back at your base. After shutting down in the revetment at Liftmaster, you find you are so tired you can barely climb out of the seat. You sit there for a few minutes gathering your stuff and trying to show nothing but cool. After that few minutes, you climb out of the cockpit and go through the companion way back into the main cabin. Everyone is too tired to give a shit about cool and besides, you can barely see each other in the dark.

  The night is nearly over for you but not for the enlisted crew. They start the process of turning the aircraft around, doing the maintenance checks, getting it ready for its next missions in the morning. You are supposed to post-flight but you are too tired, so you walk back across the PSP to the gate out onto the company street without stopping. The crew will catch any problems. Once you clear the wire around Liftmaster Pad, you stop at the barrel buried in the ground at a 60-degree angle. You pull out your .45, drop the magazine, and pull back the slide to clear it. Then you dry fire it into the drum just to make sure it really is empty before you pick up the ammo can with the survival gear and the KY28 and walk on to Ops to turn it all in and to find out what’s next for you. No missions tomorrow, or at least not tomorrow morning. Sleep would be good now.

  10

  FLARES

  I CORPS, VIETNAM ■ JUNE 1971

  The preferred method of delivering flares was artillery, and with the coverage of I Corps in $‘&$ nearly everything was within reach. After artillery, the Air Force C-$%#s flying out of Da Nang were called. They had a lot of fuel and a lot of flares so they could provide coverage for quite a while. Sometimes neither the artillery nor the C-$%#s were available and the Chinooks took up the mission.

  You see your name on the mission sheet as “night flare ship standby” and know two things—you can’t drink that day and you will spend the day and night hoping that nothing will happen that would cause you to have to fly. You hope it so much that you almost begin to pray that it will be a quiet night and that nothing will happen until tomorrow in the daylight. But each time you get night flare ship standby, somehow you feel that that night will not be quiet, and as you preflight your aircraft in the late afternoon, you try and do an extra careful job, not that it matters much. Your aircraft isn’t the problem—the dark is the problem.

  Flare ship standby flew out of Camp Evans, 40 miles north of Phu Bai. Before dark you would take your bird up there, and after refueling at Evan’s “crash pad” (so called because of its slope which made your front wheels touch down first instead of the back ones, resulting in a less than graceful touch down) to max fuel instead of the usual 4,800 pounds, you would shut down on the helicopter pad over by the Tactical Operations Center (TOC).

  Before you came to Camp Evans, the crew would have already removed the beam that the cargo hook hangs from in the center of the hellhole and replaced it with a square cover that fit the opening exactly. A two-foot long tube a little bigger around than a flare is fitted to the center of the cover. Directly over the tube the crew has installed a wire with a six-inch metal ring on its bottom end. The crew will attach the fla
re’s arming wire, which acts like the pin on a hand grenade, only after the flare has been manually placed in the tube. When the crewman releases the flare, it falls through the tube and away from the aircraft. the arming wire remains attached to the ring, thus as with a hand grenade, the pin is pulled and after the preset time has passed the flare’s parachute will open and the flare will ignite. the crew then loaded the pallet of flares that would be used to provide the illumination for the night, usually around 48 three-foot long aluminum cylinders.

  The AC always goes into the TOC and waits. the crew had the aircraft “cocked”—the checklist done up to APU start, so that no time would be wasted when the call for illumination came from the grunts. When they need flares they need them NOW. then you waited. most nights that’s all you did, wait. Sleep if you could. Look at the maps and the friendly troop positions and the positions where Intel thought the NVA were. Look at the pile of Soviet bloc weapons in the corner, captured somewhere and now just sitting there in the TOC. They would never be souvenirs to bring home because some of them were automatics. On some of the AK-47’s you could see the holes where pellets from a Clamor mine had hit them. One AK had its stock mostly rotted away by the jungle damp, but if you looked down the barrel and worked the action it was apparent that the weapon would still fire if asked to.

  But mostly you waited—and waited—and waited: hoping that the call would not come and yet, at the same time, bored to the point where you wanted something, anything, to happen.