“Incoming!” screamed someone in the hooch. It was night, and I was asleep and dead to the world.
“Dan, wake up. We got incoming!” Someone was shaking me. We had no bunkers as we had when we’d lived in tents. Our hooches were lined on the outside with a sandbag wall about four feet high, so there was really no place to run to. You could lie on the floor, but that was about it, and what good would that do? If a hooch took a direct hit, then your time had come. A hit on the outside next to the hooch would be stopped by the sandbags outside, as the beds were only about two feet off the ground.
“Leave me alone. I’m staying here and sleeping,” I said and rolled over.
As we rolled into early March, the shortage of pilots was taking its toll. The assistant maintenance officer found himself on the board to fly a mission. It was a log mission and he gladly jumped on it. Maintenance officers seldom got a chance to fly combat missions, stuck most of the time working on aircraft, supervising the maintenance or conducting test flights. He was flying with an inexperienced copilot, and they went into the Song Be to fly resupply for an infantry battalion.
“Mayday, mayday! Chicken-man Two-Seven is taking fire,” came over the radio on our company air-to-air frequency. It was the copilot speaking.
“Chicken-man Two-Seven, Chicken-man One-Niner, what is your location?” I asked as I, along with most of our crews, was working the Song Be area.
“One-Niner, I’m ten klicks north of Song Be and heading for the airfield. I need medics standing by,” he responded.
“Two-Seven, so you’re not going down? What’s your damage?” I asked.
“One-Niner, Dee was hit coming out of a PZ and is bleeding bad from his wrist and leg. The crew chief pulled him out of his seat and is stuffing the leg with bandages.”
“Roger. What’s the condition of your aircraft?” I asked again.
“One-Niner, all the gauges are normal. Over.”
“Roger, contact Tower at Song Be and request medics meet you. The medic pad is in front of the tower.”
“Chicken-man Two-Seven, Chicken-man Six, over.” The CO was monitoring the net.
“Chicken-man Six, Two-Seven, over.”
“Two-Seven, I’ll meet you at the pad. How’s he doing?”
“Chicken-man Six, he’s sitting up. Looks pale, but he’s breathing okay and talking.”
“Roger, then let’s clear the net. See you on the pad. Chicken-man Six out.”
The bullet hole in Dee’s wrist was small. The hole in his leg was large due to the fact that his watch was in his leg, carried there by the bullet. Dee came back to the unit after a month in the hospital in Japan. His wounds were sufficient to have him rotated back to the States, but it seemed that while on a pass one night from the hospital at Kishine Barracks, Dee got into a bar fight. He was arrested by the MP
s and taken back to the hospital, and it was decided that if he could hold his own in a bar fight, he could go back to Vietnam. I had first met Dee on our first day in Preflight. He was a staff sergeant and had applied for flight school. A very quiet man, but someone always willing to help a fellow cadet. He wasn’t married. Off duty, he stayed to himself.
Our maintenance operation was pretty good, but mistakes should be expected. After all, these were helicopters that really didn’t want to fly and only did so by man’s manipulation of controls. Things would break once the aircraft left the flight line, and that was why a good preflight was necessary before the first flight of the day and any other time the aircraft was shut down. With Dee missing now, we noticed a slowdown in maintenance operations as the remaining maintenance officer, Captain Kempf, and one remaining assistant maintenance officer, WO Bob Young, could only do so much. In addition to aircraft breaking down, pilots were as well.
We needed pilots. The long hours were starting to take their toll on us. For days we were flying twelve to fifteen hours. Leaving the aircraft, our butts were actually sore, and we would wake up in the morning with them still sore and know we had another twelve-hour day ahead of us. The rule of a three-day rest after a hundred and forty hours in the past thirty days was being extended to a hundred and fifty hours, and then a hundred and sixty hours in the last thirty days. Doc was getting involved as pilots reported to sick call and it was apparent that sleep was the remedy. It got to the point that pilots were going to sleep in shifts while flying. Crew chiefs and gunners could sleep while we were flying, waking up just when needed prior to landings, but normally the pilots remained awake. If we were on a long flight, one pilot would catch a few minutes’ sleep while the other flew.
It was a beautiful moonlit night with a full moon. We were flying back from Tay Ninh to Lai Khe, and I told my copilot I was going to catch a few minutes of sleep. This was the same lieutenant who’d shot the aircraft.
“Okay, I have the aircraft,” he said.
“You have the aircraft.” I locked my shoulder harness back so I wouldn’t fall forward into the cyclic and closed my eyes. I was asleep in less than a minute. A feeling was invading my sleep. Something wasn’t right. I opened my eyes but didn’t move. All appeared normal. Slowly I turned my head and looked over at my copilot. His hands were on the controls but his head was tilted forward. Was he looking down at something? Oh shit, his eyes were closed! He was asleep. The crew was asleep in the back. This aircraft was flying with a sleeping crew. I didn’t move but watched him to see what would happen. At first, nothing did. I slowly moved my right hand close to the cyclic in case he might jerk it in his sleep or overreact when he did wake up. We continued to fly straight and level for another fifteen or thirty seconds, and then a slight nose-low attitude began. He must have released some pressure on the cyclic to cause that. As the low nose attitude continued, we began to lose altitude and increase our airspeed. The sounds began to change with each increase in airspeed and decrease in altitude. And with each second, things picked up. Finally he woke with a startled look and began recovering the aircraft, looking over to see if I had noticed.
“Have a good nap there?” I asked.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, Dan. I don’t know what happened,” he said nervously.
“I got the aircraft,” I said.
“No, I can take it in. I’m really sorry.”
“Hey, I got it. And don’t beat yourself up. We’ve all been flying too much,” I said as I took control of the aircraft.
Tuning the radio to our Flight Operations, I called, “Chicken-man Six, Chicken-man One-Niner, over.”