An Assault Helicopter Unit in Vietnam (Undaunted Valor 1)

“Hey, Dan,” he responded. Man of few words.

“Okay, once we get to the door at Flight Ops, you are the AC and take the lead. Got it?”

“Got it,” he responded flatly. In Flight Ops, the assistant ops officer began his brief, addressing me. I stopped him.

“Rick is AC today. Need to talk to him.” The look of surprise wa

s obvious, but Rick didn’t see it because Rick was looking at the area of operations map.

“Hey, Rick, you want this brief?” Mr. Stevens asked.

“Yeah, sure.” And Rick rejoined the conversation as I stepped back and made my own notes. Arriving at the aircraft, we began our preflight and Rick was putting his stuff in the right seat.

“Rick, you’re left seat today,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but I like the right seat. I’ll fly it today.” Unusual in our unit, but okay if he wanted to fly right seat. No big thing. We climbed in and got ourselves adjusted, and he started going through his start-up procedure. Before we got out of the revetment, he made a major mistake. He forgot to do the hydraulics check. Pick up the aircraft with no hydraulics and you could have a major accident. I made a note of that.

“Okay, take us out,” he said, turning to me. So he wasn’t going to pick us up to a hover in the revetment, which was a problem for him, as I had seen and others had pointed out. Smart on his part; he was the AC after all.

“I have the aircraft,” I said and commenced with the hydraulics check.

The crew cleared us. I applied power, eased us out of the revetment and turned towards the runway.

“I have the aircraft,” Rick said, taking the controls. “Get us clearance for takeoff.” I did, and we hovered out. Rick applied power down the runway and climbed out. As we cleared the trees, he directed me, “Take the controls and give me a heading to Camp Gorvad at fifteen hundred feet.”

“I have the aircraft,” I responded and took up a heading to our destination. Does he not know the way to Camp Gorvad? Normally an AC would climb out and take up his heading to the destination and even fly for a bit to get the feel of the aircraft.

The flight over was uneventful and quiet, without the normal early-morning banter between the crew, each lost in his own thoughts. That was okay. Oops! Rick didn’t get us arty clearance to Camp Gorvad. Major mistake. Noted.

As we approached Camp Gorvad, Rick asked for the controls and told me to contact the unit and get us our clearances, which I did and relayed it to him. The unit’s instructions were to shut down on the log pad and come in for a briefing. So far Big Rick was doing okay—two major mistakes and a couple of little things. Rick retained control of the aircraft and landed on the unit’s log pad, which was the same log pad that had been used since I’d arrived in-country over a year ago. We headed into the brief, which was conducted by the S-3 air. They had three morning resupply runs for us right away. Good, I thought.

Rick asked, “What’s the call sign and freq of each and where are they?” Reasonable question, I was thinking. The S-3 air handed Rick a piece of paper with the information and we left. So far so good.

Arriving at the aircraft, we saw that it had been loaded with cases of C-rations. I looked around and didn’t see any water cans. Unit must have been resupplied the night before with water. Rick spread his map out and hunkered over it. I looked over his shoulder. Oh shit! He was not only marking the location of each unit on the map, which in itself was okay, but he was writing the call sign and frequency of each unit next to each mark. Major no-no. I said nothing but made a note. We cranked the aircraft, and Rick pulled in the power for the takeoff, with no announcement of coming up, leaving the crew chief standing on the ground. Poor Lovelace was attempting to climb onto the aircraft by grabbing the machine-gun mount and hanging on.

“Stop! Stop! I’m not on board,” Lovelace howled. And Rick did, but he put the collective down so fast that it almost landed on Lovelace’s foot and banged us hard.

“Sir, you have to let us know you’re coming up and give us a chance to respond.” I could tell that Lovelace was pissed.

“I thought you were on board.” Rick’s voice was a bit testy. “Don’t get out of the aircraft unless I tell you to.”

“Sir, we were shut down on the log pad. Do you want us to stay in our seats when we’re shut down?” Now Peters was entering the fray. This was going south real quick.

“I think the ground guide is signaling you, Rick,” I said to get the mission going.

My crew had only so much patience. Rick turned his attention to the ground guide, who was signaling all clear to come up. Again Rick pulled up on the collective without notifying the crew. Okay, that’s how it’s going to be. I knew my crew. They were professional enough that they weren’t going to do anything that would endanger us or damage the aircraft, but they were probably not going to do anything to help out Rick either. Rick flew us out to the first location. Arriving overhead, we could see troops on the ground. He began his approach.

“Rick, don’t you think we should call and ask for smoke?”

“I can see them. I don’t need smoke,” he responded.

“Just because you can see troops on the ground doesn’t mean they’re friendly.” I was trying to coach him to do the right thing without directing him to do the right thing.

“Okay, you call them,” he directed.

“Badger Six, Chicken-man One-Niner, over.”

“Chicken-man One-Niner, I have you in sight, smoke out.”