Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (17 page)

Sea King MC IV over northern Norway, 1985.

846 Squadron Sea King MK IVs over Somerset, UK, 1983.

HMS
Illustrious,
Lisbon, Portugal, 1984.

HMS
Fearless
in Balsfjord, Norway, 1985.

846 Squadron Sea King MK IVs off the coast of Cornwall, Captain Bob Curtis’ last flight with the Royal Navy Junglies, 1985.

Major Robert Curtis, onboard the USS
Nassau
, 1987.

15

TORNADOS

FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY ■ APRIL 1974

A
t home in my townhouse in Lexington, the tornadoes that destroyed homes across all those states, including a big swath of Kentucky and Ohio, were terrifying. It turned dark as the power went off, except for the lightning flashes and the roar of the wind. The three of us, my wife, my son and I, huddled in the downstairs bathroom against the possibility of flying glass, but we were spared any damage at all. The path of the tornados was west of Lexington and well away from us. A short time after the storms passed, while the power was still off, the phone rang; I was called up again by the National Guard, this time not as a pilot but as an officer to support the disaster relief effort.

The situation was still tense at home. My son was four and had never seen anything like this, and he was terrified, but since the storms were past, real worry was no longer necessary. I put on my fatigue uniform instead of my flight suit and packed three days’ worth of clothes, including a flight suit and the rest of my flight gear, just in case they needed some flying done. Within 15 minutes of the phone call, I was headed toward Frankfort. The trip was only about 30 miles by the Interstate and should have only taken about 40 minutes tops, but it took over an hour this time. I dodged all kinds of debris in the road, including at least one dead cow, before I pulled into the Boone National Guard Center parking lot. This time it was the armory building, not the aviation facility.

There was a crowd inside the building around the armory door, men in uniform smoking and waiting for orders. As I walked up, one of the sergeants was ordering them into formation, making order out of chaos like NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) always do. “First platoon, FALL IN. Dress right, DRESS.” I almost felt the pull to fall in myself, but remembered I was here to lead this time, not follow.

As I walked, I saw a colonel I knew slightly, not an aviator, in the center of a group of officers. He seemed to be in charge, so I reported in, coming to attention in front of him and saluting. “Sir, Mr. Curtis reporting for duty.”

“Mr. Curtis, here’s what I want you to do. Take that platoon of men and report to the Civil Defense Director in the basement of the State Capitol Building. Do whatever he wants you to. I will send rations and relief personnel tomorrow morning but it is important that you get there quickly. Call me at this number if you need anything, such as more resources than you have. And, Curtis, stop by the arms room and pick up your pistol before you go. Remember your rules of engagement before you shoot anyone.”

Pistol? Shoot someone? Ah, this is real, not another National Guard exercise. What are the rules of engagement, exactly?

The military issue .38 caliber Smith & Wesson came with a holster and a box of ammunition. I loaded it because I believe if you are a soldier and have a weapon, it should always be loaded. Then I found my NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) and asked if he knew the rules of engagement and if he’d briefed our soldiers on them. As I expected he had. The rules were simple, shoot only to preserve life, period. No one was to shoot to protect property from looting, only to protect life—theirs or someone else’s.

The NCOIC, a staff sergeant, was not from my company, confirming to me that I was in charge—not because I was a well-known infantry leader, but because they knew I was a student and would be readily available for call up. No, I was just a helicopter pilot who was easy to get into position. Well, that and apparently I was one of the few officers that had a working telephone after the storm.

The staff sergeant called the men to attention. “Sir, the platoon is ready to move,” he reported while saluting me. Very smartly done for a National Guard unit, so I knew he had done active service, a fact confirmed by the yellow and black 1st Cavalry patch on his right shoulder. Like me, he was another Vietnam vet picking up some spare money by serving in the Guard.

He had a jeep for the two of us and a duce and a half (two and a half ton truck) for the men waiting for us before I even arrived, so I returned his salute and said, “Very well, Staff Sergeant. Let’s get started.”

He ordered the men into the duce and a half and he and I climbed into the jeep, me riding shotgun. The last time I was in the lead vehicle of a convoy we were returning from the annual rifle range qualification at Fort Knox. That time it was cold in the open jeep, so I got in my sleeping bag in the front seat and stayed there until we got back to Frankfort. Not very military perhaps, but warm nonetheless. The jeep driver jerked the vehicle a little as we started off, probably because he, like me, was excited at the prospect of leading a real, albeit small, convoy of troops through Frankfort in the midst of the storm’s wreckage.

When our small convoy left the Boone National Guard Center compound, I felt a real sense of military reasonability, something I had not felt since I left the active duty Army. Real troops, live ammunition, in the middle of Frankfort, Kentucky, the state Capitol, led by a helicopter pilot who had never commanded troops before, armed or not.

The feeling of excitement continued when we pulled up in front of the Capitol Building fifteen minutes later. I remembered coming here with my parents and grandparents when I was little. my grandfather was absolutely fascinated with the Floral Clock, but it was not visible from our parking area. We left a lower ranking sergeant in charge while the staff sergeant and I hurried down the ornate stairs to the basement of the building where the Civil Defense Office was located.

Recognizing the Civil Defense Director from his picture on the office wall, I positioned myself in front of him, came to attention, saluted and said, “Mr. Curtis reporting for duty, sir. I have a platoon of 20 men with me. What are your orders, sir?”

The Director looked harried and very tired already. He replied, “Great to see you, Curtis. Look, there are lots of people wandering around in here that are not supposed to be here. They are interfering with my staff’s ability to get things done. What I want you to do is simple: keep everyone that does not have a badge that looks like this out of this end of the basement.”

I saluted again and got to work. The platoon sergeant and I pulled the fire evacuation diagram from the basement wall and used it to determine where to deploy our men in the hallways leading to the Civil Defense Office. He would work out a rotation of time on duty and brief me on it after he had the first men positioned. I would take the position closest to the front door of the Civil Defense Office and he would relieve me after two hours. The men would rotate once an hour because they would be standing, like sentries always do. I was the officer, so of course I would be sitting.

There was an empty office, or at least one with no one in it right now, just down the hall from the Civil Defense Office. Seeing a small table there, I pulled it into the hall and rolled out a chair to make myself comfortable. I took off my helmet and replaced it with a soft cover, a military version of a baseball hat with my wings and a CW2 bar sown on the front. A soldier always wears some kind of cover when armed, and after all, my .38 was not only on my hip, but was also loaded, the first time I had been armed since I left Vietnam. As I started my first hour of duty, the sun was up and office workers were arriving.

I had not been sitting there at my post for ten minutes when a dignified woman of middle years started to walk past me. She had no badge around her neck.

“Halt,” I cried, trying to sound official. “I am sorry, ma’am, but I am afraid you can’t go in there right now. The Civil Defense Director has ordered that we keep all Non-Civil Defense personnel out of there this morning, so I’m afraid I can’t let you into this corridor unless you have a Civil Defense badge.”

She stopped in her tracks, incredulous that someone would interrupt her purposeful, and obviously important, walk. By the way she looked at me, I could see that this lady got her way more often than she did not.

“Young man,” she replied, “I work for (name redacted—forgotten, actually, apparently a powerful state politician).”

I was unimpressed. “ma’am, I don’t care who you work for. I am a weekend warrior and not political person at all. My orders are to keep anyone who does not have the proper badge out of this corridor and I intend to do just that.”

“You don’t understand,” she said more forcefully this time. “The lady’s room is just down there around the corner on this corridor. The next one is up three flights of stairs.”

“No, ma’am, I’m afraid that you do not understand.” I said. “the Civil Defense Director has ordered that we keep everyone except properly identified people out of this corridor so that his folks can handle the tornado situation. Since you are not part of Civil Defense, you cannot enter.”

Red faced, she turned without another word and headed the other direction. She may have been the first, but she was certainly not the last, to try to bluster past my sentry post. encounters of this type grew ever more heated and continued all morning as more and more people arrived for work. By mid-morning I was ready to request a machine gun and some claymore mines to fight them off.

“Get back, Get BACK!!! I will fire if you do not retreat!!!!!”

It seems that my fate as a former combat helicopter pilot, honorably wounded in battle during the Vietnam War, was to go down fighting in the basement of the Kentucky State Capitol Building while fending off women intent on getting to the bathroom.

After two days, the need to keep all but emergency workers out was over and we were relieved. Our little convoy went back to the armory where I turned the pistol and ammunition back in to the arms room. I went back to being a student and the route to the lady’s room was opened again.

Just like in Vietnam, we withdrew and in the end they won.

A week later, I was called up again, this time for only one day as a pilot, not a security officer. I reported to Frankfort, this time without the rush and drama. One of our Hueys had been fitted out with a VIP kit: leather seat covers, fancy headsets, etc., and had been washed sparkling clean, or at least as sparkling as flat green aircraft paint gets. Our mission was to fly to Somerset, Kentucky, about 40 minutes away, where we would pick up the state governor and the adjutant general, an Air Force major general who was in charge of the Kentucky’s Army and Air National Guard, and fly them on a tour of the path of one of the tornados so that they could observe the damage.

The damage throughout Kentucky and some of the neighboring states had been severe. even our facility in Frankfort had been badly damaged. One of our helicopters had its greenhouse windows above the cockpit smashed and several others had dents in their fuselage tops from the hail. As soon as the storm had passed by the Aviation Facility, one of the full time technician pilots had fired up an undamaged Huey and took off following the storm to try to give additional warning as to where the tornado was headed.

Our flight down to Somerset was uneventful. It was a lovely, sunny day, but even on takeoff you could see widespread damage, starting right there in Frankfort. As we flew south, the paths of the storms were only too clear: trees, houses and barns smashed where the funnels had skipped along the ground. An hour after takeoff, we were on the ground in Somerset and, as the first order of business, had the Huey refueled so that we could give them 90 minutes of flight time, should the VIPs want it.

I walked over to the small terminal building to report we were ready to go. It was easy to spot the governor. He was the one amid the crowd of tobacco chewing farmers, laughing about something I could not hear. Upon seeing the general I stopped, came to attention, saluted, and reported we were ready to go.

The general laughed, probably at the fact that I had still retained some of my regular Army habits and had not yet truly become a guardsman, and then he returned my salute. The general and I knew each other from the three times I flew him from Frankfort back to his home town in western Kentucky. He was an Air Guard F-101 pilot, not a helo pilot like me. I, of course, let him fly the Jet Ranger we were traveling in and, of course, the closer we got to the ground the faster he wanted to go until at last, I had to take the controls, least he over torque the aircraft and damage the transmission. Hard to convince a jet guy that the helicopter is not going to stall and fall from the sky if you get it below 100 knots.

Beyond flying together, he remembered me because being not only a National Guard general, but also a former leader of both the Kentucky House and Senate, he had the successful politician’s gift for names. Perhaps he also remembered the time when a group of Kentucky National Guard pilots retired to a bar owned by one of us there in Frankfort after night flying. We were all in flight suits, completely against the rules, but instead of reprimanding us he smiled and said, “have a drink on me, boys.” He was in a flight suit too and I don’t think he was supposed to be there either.

Being a politician was a real asset if you were to make high rank in the Guard. As we heard it, the general, in addition to being a former leader of both legislative bodies, was also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Guard when the governor jumped him three ranks from 0-5 (lieutenant colonel) to 0-8 (major general), by appointing him adjutant general of the state. As we understood it then, the US Air Force didn’t recognize his new rank outside the state, but promoted him one rank a year, until at last his federal rank equaled his state rank.