“As best as anyone could tell, while supposedly flying from Quan Loi to Bu Dop, the engineer colonel had again gone on a recon and convinced Dave to land in a clearing. A scout team happened to find the aircraft sitting there. It was obvious that someone had landed the aircraft before the enemy opened fire with some heavy weapons, as the only damage to the aircraft was in the cockpit and transmission and none in the engine or belly. The skids indicated a normal landing. Dave and YA were still strapped in their seats, and Sergeant Alford, the door gunner was in his as well. The crew chief, however, was found about a hundred yards from the downed aircraft. It appeared that Specialist Collins fought, as empty 5.56 shell casings were around him but not a weapon. The aircraft was booby-trapped. The colonel and his staff were dead in the back of it. There had been no friendly soldiers at that location,” the CO explained as he opened the door to his hooch and motioned me inside.
“Damn! That son of a bitch has gotten more aircraft shot up than anyone. Damn his sorry ass. And now he’s gotten people killed. At least his sorry ass was one of them. Bastard,” I exploded. Major Saunders just let me rant as he opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. Filling two glasses, he handed one to me and raised his own.
“To absent comrades. To Dave, YA, Alford and Collins.”
And we chugged it down, then sat in silence. Finally he suggested that he and I go to the club and have a drink, bringing his bottle with us. In the club, everyone was initially looking someplace other than at me and the CO. Finally, some of the old-timers came over and offered condolences.
As word spread that the crew had been lost, other pilots came over to my room and offered condolences as well as something stronger than beer. We didn’t have formal ceremonies for lost comrades at this time, but we drank to their memories. This crew would be the first of our losses, but not the last.
A few days later, I was sitting in my room writing a letter when my new roommate, Owen Richie, came in from flying. He looked troubled as he grabbed a beer and tossed his flight gear on the bed.
“What’s up, Richie?” I asked.
Owen was a bit older than most pilots. He had been a cop in Las Cruces, New Mexico, from the time he got out of high school until he joined the Army. He didn’t have gray hair but we would accuse him at times of dyeing it, which he flat denied.
“Just a bad day. Saw my first crash and it was not pretty,” he said, finishing off the first beer and opening the second.
“Hey, what happened? Was it one of ours?” I asked.
“No, it was a Charlie Company bird, and one of the pilots was in my flight class. I’d just been talking to him before we launched, and now him and his crew are dead. Hit a tree.”
“Damn. Were you under fire?”
“No, we were coming out of an LZ, which we’d been in four times already, and the blade on the right side hit a tree about seventy-five feet up. Rotor blade just came apart and they crashed and burned. No one got out.”
“Damn, sorry, Owen. Who were the pilots?”
“Let’s see, WO1 Thomas Brown was in flight school with me. A WO1 Dennis Varney was the AC. Specialist Marcene Shelby was door gunner, and the crew chief was Specialist Robert Lazarus. I had just met them, not an hour before, when I went over to talk to Tom.”
Opening another beer for myself, I raised it and tapped Richie’s beer in a toast. “To absent comrades.”
A few nights later, our platoon leader came walking down the hall. “The CO wants to see everyone in the club,” he said. We all started heading that way. The CO did not look happy.
“Gentlemen, take a seat, after you get a beer.” He didn’t have to say it twice. After everyone was seated and holding a cold one, the major raised his beer. “To absent comrades!” The look of shock and dread was on everyone’s face.
We all stood and raised our drinks. “To absent comrades,” we all repeated and chugged our beers, still wondering who we’d lost.
Motioning us to sit down, the major looked over everyone before he started to speak.
“Charlie Company lost a crew last night. They were on a night mission out of LZ Buttons and ran into bad weather. At about zero two hundred hours, they attempted to take off in fog. The grunts on the perimeter said they had all their lights on so they could see them in the soup. The aircraft got about two hundred feet up, and as it crossed the perimeter wire, it appeared to roll
ninety degrees and crashed into the trees on the perimeter. The whole crew was lost.
“Guys”—he paused—“make sure you’re practicing instrument takeoffs and instrument landings, and don’t attempt it if your aircraft isn’t one hundred percent on its instruments. Spend the night or however long on the firebase. It’s just not worth it. The weather is going to continue to get shitty, and I do not want to lose a crew to it,” he went on to say. “I expect you all to practice one instrument approach and one instrument takeoff every day. Get some hood time while moving from here to Song Be or wherever you’re going. Practice some partial instrument failure flying as well, especially with no artificial horizon flying as that’s the most likely instrument to fail.
“Hey, sir, do you know who the crew was?” asked Roy Moore, a new pilot to the unit.
“It was WO1 Ralph Tadevic, the AC; 1LT James Spencer, copilot; Specialist FW Smith, crew chief; Specialist George Avala, door gunner; and a Corporal Terrence Connoll, an observer, for what I don’t know. You know any of them?” the major asked.
“No, sir, I don’t think they were in my flight class. The lieutenant might have been, but I don’t know,” Roy explained.
“Just let’s be careful, guys. That’s all I’ve got,” he added as he walked to the door.
The next month would start off no better.
On November 5, two months after Dave went down, we lost another crew, not to enemy action but to maintenance. I had been high-time pilot for this month. The company policy brought in by Major Saunders was, if you were high-time pilot, you would be the standby aircraft. You had no assigned mission but would wait in your aircraft, and if another aircraft couldn’t start its mission because of maintenance issues, the standby bird would take the mission. If all the birds got off, you got a day off. My aircraft had been in maintenance, getting a new rotor head installed. The assistant maintenance officer had taken the aircraft out the night before on a test flight once the work was complete. He had come back, conducted a post flight and signed it off.
The next morning, my crew and I arrived at the aircraft and conducted our preflight.