An Assault Helicopter Unit in Vietnam (Undaunted Valor 1)

have one hundred days left in-country, send me a letter and tell me what you intend to do. If you decide that you’re staying in, I’ll work with you to get to college or whatever you want to do, wherever you want to get stationed. Fair enough?”

I thanked him and told him he had certainly given me something to think about. As I walked out, I was pretty sure I had decided that I was going to be making the Army a career. Doing what, I didn’t know, but getting them to send me to college was the first goal and then we would see from there.

After another day of sitting around the house with nothing to do, I thought I would see the sights in D.C. Wonder if Mary Simmons would want to come up for the weekend and tour D.C. with me? Couldn’t hurt to ask. So I called her. It was Wednesday morning, and I figured she could come up on Friday night. I would get her a plane ticket.

“Hey, Mary, it’s Dan. How would you like to come up and tour D.C. with me?”

“Yeah, I could come up on Friday for the weekend,” she indicated.

“Great, I’ll have a plane ticket at the counter waiting for you.”

“It would be easier and cheaper for me to catch a bus. I’ll call you before I leave and tell you our arrival time. This will be fun. Thanks.”

She arrived on Friday, and a weekend turned into five days in the city taking in the sights. Mary stayed at my mother’s apartment. Mom was suffering with a horrible cold that kept her up all night coughing and sneezing with frequent trips to the one bathroom down the hall. I loved my mother, but she could be the most conniving, interfering, snooping Italian mother you had ever met. When Mary left, her departure at the airport was more than a kiss on the cheek. She promised to write, and she did, almost every day for the next six months. After a couple of more days, it was time to head back to Seattle for the flight.

Chapter 30

Back in the Saddle Again, February 1970

The flight back to Nam was a repeat of my first trip, almost. I stopped at Mom and Pop Michel’s house and spent a day dropping off uniforms and getting my jungle fatigues and boots out. Pop drove me down to Fort Lewis as he had done a year ago to send Bill and me off the first time. They were excited because Bill had extended as well and was coming home in a few days. Checking in at the terminal, I was placed on a flight that was leaving in a couple of hours, so I got comfortable. Two brand-new pilots came up and started picking my brain. They ended up picking my brain for the next fourteen hours, all the way to Nam. Upon landing, the first thing we did was brush our teeth. Some things don’t change. The next morning I was back at the airport and started hitching rides that eventually got me back to Lai Khe. Walking into the club in the early afternoon, I got a beer and joined some of the pilots that were there, some old guys and a couple of newbies that had arrived while I was gone.

“Hey, I read in a paper back in D.C. that an aircraft went down. Was it one of ours?” No one said anything, but everyone looked uncomfortable. Finally one spoke up.

“Yeah, it was one of us.” That was all he would say.

“Well, who was it? Did the crew get out? Everyone okay?”

“It was your aircraft, One-Nine. No one got out.”

“What the…! What happened?” I asked, in total shock.

“They were on a resupply over a hover hole. The gooks opened fire on them on their third pass, and they crashed into the trees. Grunts said they made each of their three approaches over the same ground. They had five new replacements on board. The grunts got to the aircraft and were shooting gooks in the cabin and cockpit.”

“Who was the crew?”

“It was Ash as AC, and a newbie, Taylor. Your crew chief, Linam, and Dietrich were on board too. Sorry,” they told me. I didn’t know the copilot, who had arrived the day after I’d left to go home. The AC, like all our guys, was a good man. He had just received a Dear John letter from his wife, telling him she was getting a divorce. I guessed she didn’t need to now. I raised my glass, and they joined me. “To absent comrades.”

“Hey, while you were gone, word came down that we’re being awarded the Valorous Unit Award,” Mike stated.

“No shit. What for?” I asked, pulling on my beer.

“Well, it was for that lift back in March that got all shot up. Evidently the Lobo Company commander put us in for it.”

“Great, something else to hang on a uniform,” I said.

The next day, I was back on the board for missions with a new aircraft—well, new to me—and a new crew. My crew chief was Specialist Lovelace from Louisville, Kentucky. He had curly blond hair and an accent that said “speak Southern,” leaving no doubt about where this boy was from. He was a quiet kid with a dry sense of humor. Kid—he was nineteen and I was twenty-three, an old man. My new door gunner was Specialist Peters. Peters had a temper that I had to get in check more than once as he would flare up at the maintenance people if something wasn’t right on the aircraft. It cost him a summary court-martial once, when I couldn’t intervene quick enough as he went after the maintenance officer, CWO Dee. I was able to get his sentence for the reduction in rank suspended. The three of us quickly gelled, but the first month back was a bit rough.

Quickly, I began to realize that my touch wasn’t what it used to be. The very first day, flying contour over a bamboo field, I hit the lone sprout that was standing ten feet above everyone else. Bam, and the chin bubble was busted out on my side. I was buying beer again. Not a couple of days later, setting down in an LZ, one skid was on a log and I bent the skid. Another case of beer. A week later it was a tail rotor strike. I started to realize that being gone over a month took the fine edge off one’s ability to fly in these conditions. I had a talk with the CO.

“Sir, I’ve been back less than a month and I have to admit I don’t have my touch back. I lost it.”

“Hey, you’ll get it back soon enough. I’ve seen this before. Hell, I was gone for a year and didn’t have the touch I had when I left the first time.”

“Well, sir, can I recommend that when an AC comes back from an extended leave, we put them up with another couple of hours before we put them back to full duty?”

“You can recommend it, but I’ll have to think about it. Right now I need all the ACs we have.”

The unit was continuing to support the brigade operating in the Song Be region and moving slowly towards the abandoned SF camps at Bu Gia Map and Bu Dop. The NVA were getting more active in the area and sliding eastward, resulting in longer flights just to get to the firebases to begin resupply missions. No new pilots had joined the unit, so everyone was flying every day, racking up a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty hours a month. And pilots were leaving as their tours came to an end after twelve months. Bill Hess, Mike George and Ralph put in for extensions but were on their extension leaves in February and March. If the unit had to move all its aircraft, some would have to be flown with just one pilot. Some ACs began training crew chiefs how to fly, at least well enough to make a running landing if necessary. Everyone was tired.