An Assault Helicopter Unit in Vietnam (Undaunted Valor 1)

“Okay, we’ll look at it when we get in,” I said as we continued to the Chicken Coop. I let the newbie take the aircraft into parking while I called Flight Ops.

“Chicken-man Three, this is Chicken-man One-Niner.”

“Go ahead, One-Niner.”

“Yeah, One-Niner here. I’m coming in with battle damage. Can you have maintenance meet me?”

“Roger, maintenance is on the way.” Battle damage! Those words always got maintenance excited.

As we were shutting the aircraft down, Captain Kempf, the maintenance officer, came over and I pointed to the nose of the aircraft on the right side. Captain Kempf walked over and studied it for a minute. From looking at the metal, it was obvious that the round had come from above the aircraft. He climbed up on the skid next to my copilot, who had opened his door, so the two of them were about two feet apart.

Speaking to me, the maintenance office said, “Sniper?”

“No,” I responded with a snicker. He looked at the hole again, which was about three inches long entering the aircraft and the size of a dime exiting the plexiglass chin bubble.

“Cobra fired too close,” he guessed, now looking at the rotor blades for damage.

“No.” My snickering hadn’t changed.

He looked back at me with a deadpan face, then at my copilot. “Your damn copilot shot the aircraft!”

“Yeeees.” And with that, I couldn’t stop my laughing. We hadn’t had one of our own shot by one of our own since I’d been in the unit. Newbie would be buying the crew a case of beer and spending the night learning how to replace a chin bubble and do sheet metal work to cover the hole. To say the least, he was the brunt of the jokes as well. Until another newbie managed to outdo him, which would not take long.

Bill Hess burst into my room, madder than a wet hen. “Do you know what that damn newbie Eckerd just did?” he asked.

“No telling, Bill. He is a newbie. What?” I asked.

Ralph and Bob Eckerd, both recent arrivals, were sitting across from each other with a desk between them. Bob was Bill’s new roommate.

“I’ll tell you what dip-shit just did. Bob was about to clean his .45-caliber automatic pistol. When he pulled the slide back, it slipped and slammed forward with his finger on the trigger. The gun went off. The bullet just missed Ralph’s head, put a hole in the screen right above my bed, traveled into the mess hall and hit a sugar bowl that was sitting next to a colonel as he was eating lunch. To say the least, the colonel was not happy when he reached my hooch and wanted to know who fired the shot. My room smells of gunpowder and he’s checking my weapon with the CO to see if it’s been fired or cleaned recently.”

“Well, has it?” I asked.

“No, and the major’s biting me in the ass because it’s dirty.” Bob stayed out of sight for the day, and Ralph was absent as well. But not all casualties were to aircraft, buildings or sugar bowls; some were creatures.

A newbie had been in the village and purchased a monkey. We had a rooster and a snake, but a monkey we did not have. The major wasn’t keen on this new addition but didn’t say no, so the monkey stayed, temporarily. The copilot showed up one morning for the mission with the monkey. The monkey sat on the back of his chair and ran from one first aid kit mounted on the bulkheads behind the pilots to the other. Cute. The first mission of the day was a combat assault.

With the troops loaded, the flight took off and the typical sequence of events began. At H minus one, the door gunners opened up with machine-gun fire, and so did the monkey. His bowels opened up all

over the copilot and the aircraft commander. That monkey was going nuts with the machine-gun fire! Jumping between the seats, he was shitting his brains out and pissing on everything. That was when the aircraft commander reached up, grabbed the monkey by the neck and threw him out the window. I didn’t know if that monkey could fly, but at about two hundred feet and ninety knots airspeed, I was sure he made a rapid descent into the jungle. For the rest of the day, no one would go near that aircraft or those pilots. Even their own crew chief wanted nothing to do with them, as he was the one stuck with cleaning the mess up in the aircraft. But as funny as some of these incidents were, others were tragic.

A very popular crew chief from our sisters, the El Lobos, was pulling maintenance on an aircraft that was at full rpm. The crew chief was running walnut shells through the intake to clean the compressor blades on the engine. He must have had something on his mind, as he walked right into the tail rotor blade and was killed instantly. Crew chiefs were just as important to the unit as pilots. They maintained the aircraft that kept us in the air. A good crew chief was worth his weight in gold, and ACs fought over the better ones. Much to the first sergeant’s displeasure, we protected our crew chiefs, and more than once, the CO or XO had to get involved.

To clean the engines, especially in dusty conditions, water would be poured into the intake while the engine was running. Really dirty engines would receive a gallon pail of crushed walnut shells that would get the dirt off the turbine blades in the engine. One of our crew chiefs found out the hard way not to run JP-4 through the engine intake. He was up top and asked the gunner to get some water. Somewhere the transmission got garbled and instead of water the gunner passed up a pail of JP-4 jet fuel. As soon as the crew chief poured it into the intake, the engine blew up, removing the crew chief’s mustache, eyebrows, eyelashes and most of his hair. The engine had to be replaced, and the gunner was transferred out of the unit.

Another crew chief from our unit was jumping off the stinger when his wedding ring caught on a bolt and stripped all the flesh and meat off his ring finger. He lost the finger and was sent back to the States.

Talking on the company phone system could be equally dangerous in a thunderstorm. The company phone system was TA-1 field phones connected by steel wire covered in plastic. It was strung throughout the company area from hooch roof to hooch roof. One evening one of the pilots was talking on the phone to Flight Ops during a thunderstorm when a bolt of lightning struck. The electric shock ran down the wire to the phone. In an instant, the pilot was picked up and tossed across the four-foot-wide hall. He recovered, but phone calls during thunderstorms were curtailed.

Flying one rotor blade apart was normally comfortable, but mishaps did occur, and some could be deadly. On May 4, 1969, two aircraft from our sister company, Company B, joined a formation with the second aircraft in a right echelon to the first. The second aircraft attempted to pass the first aircraft on his right side. There was a miscommunication between the two aircraft, resulting in a midair collision. All crew members on both aircraft were killed.

Again, in August 1969, a Chicken-man aircraft and a Cobra gunship from Delta Company had a midair collision, but fortunately no one was killed, with only one of the Cobra pilots being hurt. Accidents happened, and only through diligent observation by all crew members, clear communications between aircraft, and adherence to standard operating procedures could they be avoided.

Chapter 27

Almost Home

I got through the first week after Thanksgiving flying Night Hunter Killer again and checking some of the newer copilots out on the mission. Bob Hope was going to be in Lai Khe for a show, but I was too tired to walk over and see it. I needed some sleep before going back out for the next mission that night. We were working in the Song Be region almost exclusively now, supporting the Third Brigade. The first week of December, I got pulled off Night Hunter Killer and was back to flying days. I drew a sniffer mission.