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

by Robert F. Curtis

  In the Royal Navy Commando Sea King squadrons, aircrewmen are not mechanics. If you are away and your helicopter needs oil, the pilot had better know where to put it. The aircrewmen are instead trained radio operators, photographers, loadmasters, and navigators. My aircrewman had done all the calculations on wind drift, magnetic variation, etc., and would be giving me constant course directions as were flew. We knew that if the ship was where it was supposed to be, our aircrewman would navigate us to it in short order. We also knew that if it wasn’t, we would get a night in tangier.

  After we started up the aircraft, our passenger came onboard. Our aircrewman fitted him with a floatation vest and a helmet and we were set to go. I taxied the Sea King to Gibraltar’s single runway for a takeoff to the east, and after tower clearance, we departed. As soon as we cleared the runway, Tower directed us to change radio frequencies to departure control. Departure directed me to turn right to a course that would take us out through the middle of the Strait, keeping us clear of Spanish and Moroccan airspace. As I cleared the Rock of Gibraltar, the lights on shore disappeared; it was another black night over the sea, nothing to look at except when we passed directly over a ship headed in or out of the Straits. We could see its lights below us for a few seconds as we passed overhead.

  I had the altitude hold set to 500 feet so that we would stay out of the clouds somewhere above us, not that it made any difference. Looking forward, it was only black. The air was smooth and the stability system was working fine, so I just had my hands resting lightly on the controls as the aircraft flew itself through the night. My copilot had his penny whistle out again and was practicing some Scottish tune. My aircrewman had the red cabin lights on and his maps and charts spread out on the cabin deck. Every now and then he muttered things like, “I wonder where we are?” while pouring over the charts. This was strictly for our passenger’s benefit, since my navigator knew exactly where we were, but he never missed a chance to mildly mind-mess senior officers. Every few minutes he would give me a minor course correction and an estimated time of arrival at our target ship.

  The captain passenger unstrapped from his seat and came up to stand between the pilot’s seats. He wasn’t nervous, exactly, when we started the flight, but was less than fully comfortable. Now, seeing us so calm as we flew through the darkness, he relaxed too. He introduced himself and told us he was a submariner by trade, but had finished his command and now had nothing to look forward to but desks and paperwork. I laughed, knowing full well that if you are an RLO (Real-Live Officer, as opposed to a technician like a warrant officer) and stay in long enough, it happens to everyone, no matter what your job was, pilot, submariner, or commando.

  The night seemed to clear a little. The overcast and blackness was still there but we were seeing ship’s lights at greater distances. When my crewman told me we were 20 minutes out, I gave the ship a call and got a prompt reply. They were ready for us and would have favorable wind across the deck when we arrived. In another ten minutes, I could see a ship’s light directly on the helicopter’s nose. My crewman had called it exactly right and the ship was exactly where they said they would be.

  I called the ship for landing. We were cleared for a starboard approach, coming in on the right side for a smooth, routine landing. Just before the captain disembarked, he came to the cockpit again to shake my hand. He said, “this may be routine to you, but it’s amazing to me.”

  An hour later we were back on the ground in Gibraltar and I thought to myself, the captain was right that it was routine to us and that’s what made it amazing. It was a perfect flight and yet I remember it. Cheated death again …

  31

  FINAL FLIGHT WITH THE ROYAL NAVY

  CORNWALL, UNITED KINGDOM ■ JUNE 1985

  After two years as an exchange officer, I was ready to go home. The Royal Navy Commandos could not have made me feel more welcome, could not have given me more responsibility, more adventures—Norway, ships, Gibraltar, Scotland, Egypt, Cyprus—but I was ready to go home. As with most tours, as the end came near, I was assigned missions of less and less importance; in a way I went from being the male lead to being a supporting character actor, you might say.

  The last flight was to be an easy one, number three on a flight of three going from Yeovilton to “Coldnose,” and then out into the Channel to work with a submarine on practice personnel hoists. As with the hoist of the admiral and his aide off Gibraltar, it would require some precision hovering because if you are in position to pick up a person, you sometimes cannot see much of the actual submarine. As noted earlier, water looks like water, making it very difficult to hold a steady position, but all in all it would not be too taxing on a fine day like this one. In fact, in the end it required nothing at all from my aircraft. The other two Sea Kings took care of all the work and I was released to go home early.

  I refueled at Culdrose and headed back east across Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor back to Somerset. It was a nice day, flying single ship at 500 feet above the ground, enjoying the view of Jamaica Inn country, Daphne du Maurier country, knowing full well that this quite probably would be the last time I’d see it this way. The next time, I thought, I won’t have a multimillion British pound helicopter at my command: I’ll be just driving a car like everyone else.

  I am flying by myself today, no copilot in the cockpit and only my crewman in the back. No load, no worries, a nice way to end two years as an exchange officer from the US Marine Corps to the British Royal Navy.

  Thirty minutes into the one-hour flight, my aircrewman calls calmly, “Fixed wing rolling in at 4 o’clock.” His voice sounds a little too calm.

  Since he did not say “jet” I automatically assume it’s a Chipmunk, a small two-seat prop training aircraft, from one of the local air stations, out to have a little fun with the passing Sea King. Normally I would not play but it’s my last flight and a beautiful day over the moor, so why not?

  How you fight a fixed-wing when you are flying a helicopter depends mostly on what the fixed-wing does and what kind of fixed wing he is. If he is a high-speed fighter, like an F-4, you are in good shape because he cannot turn with you. If he comes down to helicopter altitudes, he is in every anti-air system in the world’s range, so he must keep his speed up, which means that you can always out turn him. If he is an attack aircraft, like an A-4, he can turn but still not as rapidly as you can. But whatever he is, you must see him immediately so that you will know what he intends to do, how he is going to attack. In either case he cannot stay down with you too long because fighters rapidly burn up all their fuel at low altitudes.

  Your first move is to fly directly toward him, gaining as much speed as you can. You put him right on your nose so that you increase the closure rate and thereby decrease the time he has to lock you up in his sights. While you are turning, you climb to 200 or 300 feet above the ground so that you have a little bit of maneuvering area below you, but not so much that he can get below you and skylight your aircraft. If you survive his first pass, you try to disappear. He cannot stay down low for long because as I said, he is burning a lot of fuel there and is still vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.

  If he is diving on you, wait until he is just about in gun range, and turn hard away from him. You must actually displace the aircraft over the ground, not just change heading. As you turn, watch his wings. When he turns to line you up in his sights, you turn hard the other direction and slip toward the ground. He may not be able to follow and will pass you by. As he starts his turn to come back, you hide behind a terrain feature, if you can find one, and you hope he gives it up and goes away. He probably won’t though. A kill is a kill and five makes him an ace.

  If he comes down to your altitude of 200 or 300 feet instead of diving on you, you immediately descend to 100 feet holding at as much speed as you can get out of the helicopter, and just before he gets into gun range, you pull up your nose and start a cyclic climb. He will be watching you and will pull his nose up to keep you locked up. When you see h
is nose start up, you immediately push yours back down. If he follows you and pushes his nose down too, he will fly into the ground before he realizes what just happened. I almost got an A-4 that way back at Yuma in the WTI course. I could see his wings wobble as he wanted to follow me but realized what I was doing just as he started to move his nose.

  If you are being attacked by an armed helicopter and you are flying a transport helicopter, there is a 100 percent chance he will kill you within 90 seconds of getting in range. If you are flying an armed helicopter there is a 90 percent chance that you will both get off shots and will kill each other in about the same time frame. No helicopter can out turn another.

  But this is not a helicopter attacking, it’s a fixed wing. In all cases, you must always keep him in sight. Lose sight and die. So I turned my Sea King hard to starboard, adding power and adding rudder to get the nose around quicker. Looking up through the greenhouse I saw my “attacker.”

  Spitfire

  It was a real Spitfire, painted in Battle of Britain colors, and could only have been a private aircraft. The pilot came down to see if this Royal Navy helicopter wanted to play for a few minutes.

  I could not believe that I was looking at a Spitfire, already leveling his wings in a dive and closing in on my helicopter to within gun range. If this was real, I would quite probably be dead in a few moments. A literal chill went up my spine and I felt 40 years melt away. WWII had returned and now I was in it.

  I went through the motions of fighting a fixed-wing, but we had not trained to engage World War II fighters. I had flown T-28’s, a single engine low-wing aircraft like a Spitfire, though with nowhere near the performance of a Spitfire, and I knew how quickly that aircraft could turn. I found out immediately that even a helicopter couldn’t turn with a Spitfire. We did three passes, two more after the first surprise one, and there is no doubt in my mind that he “killed” me on every pass. None of the “got you,” “no, you didn’t,” “did too”—no, he had me on every pass. We both knew it. In my mind, I could see the six machine guns on his wings firing and see the tracers growing bigger and bigger as they hit my Sea King.

  After the third pass, I rolled wings level at 500 feet and 110 knots. The Spitfire came alongside, slowing to match my speed like only a WWII fighter can. Modern fighters stall out at speeds higher than the max speed of a Sea King. The pilot held position at three o’clock while my crewman took pictures of him against the backdrop of the moor, and then with a waggle of his wings, he added power and climbed up to the right and was gone. Both the Spitfire pilot and I were smiling the entire time.

  My crewman and I said nothing as we continued on back to Yeovilton—nothing to say. We had an experience that few people get to see now, had taken a small trip back in time, a warrior from Vietnam and a warrior from WWII greeting each other. For a few minutes, that river of time stopped and the 40 years were gone. Then they came back and we were alone in the sky over the brown moor.

  Forty minutes later, I landed at Yeovilton and taxied back to the 846 Squadron ramp. I shut down Sea King VH bureau number ZA-293 after 2.7 hours of flight time. My exchange tour with the Junglies was over.

  Cheated death one final time with the Royal Navy. Luck and superstition, that’s all it is.

  EPILOGUE

  THE WALL, 20 YEARS AFTER

  SEPTEMBER 1989

  I think we humans imagine we get over things, but then something always happens that shows us that we really do not. The best we can do is to suppress …

  On a warm, sunny, late-summer’s day, I stopped off to see some old friends, friends I had not seen in 17 years. You see, I was learning to be a bureaucrat at a government “college”—the Defense Systems Management College (DSMC), at Ft. Belvoir just south of Washington, D.C. After 20 years of flying helicopters around the world for the Army, National Guard, the Royal Navy, and Marine Corps, I had to face the inevitable for career officers: a tour in an office, in an office building, in DC …

  At our college they were worried about us. The course was very intense, with a lot of pressure on all the students, so they were worried about our physical health, as well as our mental health. They gave us blood tests to check our cholesterol levels and classes on how to relax while we learn about buying weapons of mass destruction, office supplies, and everything in between. Some of their students had had heart attacks while attending and one committed suicide before even graduating. I feel the pressure too. I don’t know what it is, but somehow, using the weapons of war never bothered me as much as the act of buying them. maybe the idea that you personally may have to pay the ultimate price for defending your country right now is more what I always imagined military life would be. Instead, I am to become another tiny cog in the bureaucracy in the endless government offices of the Washington metro area.

  If I stay long enough, maybe I will be like the others in the office, praying that I will not die of a heart attack or stroke in the traffic and monotony of office life, instead of praying that I can get through one more dark night boat launch in an old, tired helicopter and my friends won’t have to scrape up what is left of me from the wreckage and take it home to a closed coffin funeral.

  But my friends, my old friends, I visited them again on that warm, sunny, late-summer’s day. Our college class took a two-day trip to Capitol Hill for briefings by the Congressional Military Liaison Staffs. After the morning in-briefs we watched hearings in the conference rooms, the House and Senate in action, and talked to our own state representatives and senators if they were in town. On the second day I was bored with bored politicians reading scripts to an empty chamber and bored with bored witnesses reading scripts to a nearly empty committee table.

  So, on the second day, I left at the first opportunity. I walked out of the Capitol Building with no plan in mind, except to enjoy the clear, warm late-summer’s day. Because Labor Day had passed, most of the tourists were gone, except for retirees and foreigners, both groups posing self-consciously in front of the monuments. The rest of the people on the mall, mainly men, seemed to be connected to the government: bureaucrats, staffers, contractors, lobbyists, mostly in the uniform of dark suit and tie. Some were military in uniform or running shorts. All were walking quickly.

  But, there were women on the Mall, too, perhaps bureaucrats or contractors or staffers. Perhaps secretaries or students, still pretty in their light-weight summer clothes against the heat of the day. They seemed to be walking slower, enjoying the warm, sunny day.

  The day itself seemed nearly perfect—less than 80 degrees, no clouds, no haze, and the buildings gleamed white. I had the strange thought that the whiteness of the buildings could mean either purity or sterility, as one of my college literature teachers explained how colors are used to invoke feelings, and wondered why I was even thinking such things. Colors and feelings had not crossed my mind in years. You must avoid feelings when you are flying, lest you be distracted.

  As I walked down the hill toward the Smithsonian, I felt my tie begin to choke me and my seldom-used sport coat (blue, all Marine officers own a blue blazer, which is always worn with gray or tan trousers, always) becoming too hot, so I removed both. I stuffed the tie in the jacket pocket and slung the jacket over my shoulder. As I walked down the Mall, I stopped at the Aerospace Museum to touch the moon rock as I always do when passing by, for both luck and to remember the summer of ‘69 when my then wife and I watched the moon landing with friends in their trailer just outside Fort Rucker, Alabama. It was a few weeks before I got my wings as an Army helicopter pilot and a very significant time in my pre-war, pre-son, pre-college education life. We all cheered as we watched Arm-strong step down from the ladder on the little black and white television.

  The Washington monument stood straight against the sky in front of me, with the flags around its base snapping in the afternoon wind. As I walked toward it, I decided to keep on walking and visit my old friends. I knew roughly where I would find them, but my first and only visit had been several years ago,
so now I would have to search a little before I found them.

  On that trip, five or six years before, I took my 12-year-old son with me to visit them. I think he saw them, but only in the way I saw WWII monuments or even Civil War statues when I was his age—history, remote, not real and certainly not connected to his father in the 1970’s or to him in the early 1980’s. I showed him their names on the wall and although he did not know it, the place where mine would have been if the North Vietnamese gunner had fired a half second sooner.

  I had forgotten where my friends were on the wall, so I had to ask one of the volunteers to look them up in his book for me. Their section is near the central V, deep down in the wall. There are six of my friends there. Other friends are scattered along the wall, but these six are together, one name after another. They died together when their CH-47C Chinook blew up, five or six thousand feet above Laos in the spring of 1971. Their names are low so I squatted to read them and to touch them, one by one on the black wall.

  The first one was an old man, at least by 1971 Army helicopter pilot standards, of 35, a Navy veteran before he enlisted in the Army to fly. This was his second trip to the war. The first tour he had flown scouts, LOACHs, undoubtedly, some of the most dangerous helicopter missions in the war, and he survived those aircraft with many Air Medals, a Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and his life. But in 1970 he had a wife and three kids, so for his second tour, he chose what he thought would be a safer aircraft, a transport, not a hunter-killer. On his last flight he was the copilot, learning to be a cargo pilot and providing seasoning to a new, first tour AC.

  His name, the AC’s name that is, is there too. It was his first tour and maybe as a brand new aircraft commander (AC) he was a little less ready to lead combat missions as dangerous as the one that killed him, but that happens in war. The missions must be done and he was the AC, ready or not. At 25 he was still single and, as a Mormon, he kept to his faith’s tenants of no drinking or smoking. This kept the rest of us from knowing him very well, since drinking and swearing and what might be considered ill behavior were usually involved in all the non-work activities back then.