Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (2 page)

INTRODUCTION
Helicopters

T
o understand helicopter-flying war stories we, the storyteller and the listener, must have a common ground. the storyteller must remember that things, such as acronyms and common aviation terms, are a foreign language to non-aviation folk. He must also remember to explain why some things are more important than others. the reader must understand the basic principles of helicopter flight to have a better understanding of the nature of the machines that figure in all these war stories and why the storyteller considers some events more important than others.

First, “helicopter,” “aircraft,” “helo,” “bird,” even in rare cases “copter” are all names for a helicopter used by the aircrews that fly them, the controllers that handle them, and the maintainers who keep them in the air. Notice that “chopper” is not listed among the names of these machines. Few, if any, of the pilots and crewmen I know or have known ever use that term and cringe when they hear others use it, perhaps because they do not like the image of rotor blades doing anything except lifting the aircraft.

According to an old saying, helicopters really don’t want to fly. Unlike most fixed-wing aircraft, the best helicopter design in the world is inherently unstable. A trimmed up airplane in flight will hold its flight path in-definitely. most of the older helicopters will hold their trimmed-up flight path for a very short while, after which they veer off in a random direction. Without the computer-controlled stability systems installed into modern helos, the pilot must manually fly them all the time or they fall from the sky in the aforementioned random directions.

Stability system or no, a helicopter pilot must learn first thing to anticipate what is going to happen next and correct it
before it happens
, a point that becomes all too clear the first time you try to hover a helicopter that does not have the stability systems. You chase the aircraft movements all around the sky, always a step behind until you learn to anticipate.

Even a pilot trained to anticipate what is going to happen is subject to mechanical failures, the worst of which is a “single-point” failure. A single-point failure is quite simply something that, if it happens, the entire machine comes crashing down. A single-point failure in a helicopter is the equivalent of a wing falling off an airplane. A common, and very true, saying is that helicopters are “a collection of thousands of parts flying in close formation.” Among this vast collection of parts there are many, many single-point failures waiting to happen, meaning that if one thing fails, the aircraft will stop flying or at least stop controlled flight: things like failure of the control system that lets the pilot move the rotor heads, things like a rotor blade coming off, tail rotors stopping turning, drive shafts breaking, transmissions failing, and on and on.

Fire is another good one that can lead to myriad single failure points and is one of the reasons helicopters rarely fly very high. If the aircraft is burning, how long will it take the pilot to get it on the ground? Will he make it before a control rod burns through and the aircraft goes out of control, and with no parachute to save them, the crew falls screaming with the aircraft until they lose consciousness or the aircraft hits the ground?

That’s the hardest thing, I think, the possibility of falling out of the sky with no control and having time to think about it—falling and screaming and wondering what comes next, instead of a quick explosion, a flash and then nothing. even a few seconds can be a very, very long time when you are beyond hope and falling with the world spinning around you. A fellow pilot told me about it when it happened to him yet instead of dying, somehow he lived.

I
T happened this way: his CH-46 came apart in flight with no warning, a single-point failure of the worse kind. One second he is flying—everything is nor-mal, blue sky above and earth below. Then he is in a violent spin—out of control, the world flashing by too quickly to take it in. He is conscious and so has time to think about what is happening and in that second decides he does not want to die in the aircraft. He jettisons his emergency door, releases his seat belt and tries to jump. But he can’t—centrifugal force holds him in the seat. He does not know that a single-point failure in the aft rotor system has allowed the aft rotor blades to chop the aircraft in half. He is falling in the cockpit with stumps of the forward blades spinning free, the aft cabin section gone and dis integrating as it falls. Somehow, randomly really, the cockpit hits the ground, relatively softly and upright. By now he is unconscious, probably from the impact, but he does not die.

Several years later the exact same single-point failure in the aft rotor system happened to another CH-46 flown by another two friends with a third friend acting as crew chief. We had been a flight of six CH-46s hauling Marines in simulated combat assaults at Marine Corps Base JQ Palms, California. I had just released them and a second aircraft to return to the base at Yuma, Arizona, NH miles away, while I led the other four helicopters to the refueling pits prior to completing the last mission of the day. We had only four loads of Marines remaining to be brought back to base, so the other two helicopters were not needed. As my CH-46 was taking on fuel, I heard, “Mayday, Mayday, May-day” over the UHF radio Guard channel. Looking off to the south, toward the direction the two aircraft had gone, I could see a column of smoking rising up from the desert.

The second aircraft was in a loose trial formation, maybe six or eight rotor diameters behind the lead when right before the crew’s eyes, the first aircraft just came apart. As the lead LN broke up in flight immediately after the single-point failure, the wingman made the Mayday call and started an approach down to where the wreckage now lay, the pieces burning. The wingman told me later that he thinks they all three died instantly because the aircraft just disintegrated in front of him, cockpit included, instead of coming down with the cockpit more or less whole as my other friend’s did. I hope they did die immediately. I hope they didn’t have time to think about it.

Beyond the mere possibility of death from any number of failures in the spinning parts, helicopters are different from airplanes just by their nature. Airplanes are aerodynamic and sleek, sealed against the force of the wind as they hurtle through the air. their wheels move and their wings do not. most helicopters are aerodynamic drag monsters that are fat and slow, at least by fixed-wing standards. Helicopter’s wings move and on most of them, their wheels don’t.

Helicopters, at least cargo helicopters, have windows that open so that you can stick your hand out in flight, like you did in Dad’s car when you were a kid, although this is not recommended when flying at over 100 MPH. Once, when bored after yet another eight hours of flying sling loads in Vietnam, I was looking out the side window at the fields and forest below us while my copilot flew the aircraft. Without thinking, I stuck my arm out the window of the Chinook to move my hand like an airfoil, like I had done as a child in the back seat of my Dad’s Chevy. the 140-knot wind nearly jerked me out of the seat, trying to pull my left arm and the rest of me out through the narrow window opening. my copilot never said a word as I extracted my arm, but it was clear from his look that he considered me insane.

Helicopters are not sealed like airplanes. Helicopters have windshields that leak water in the rain and leak air in the cold. Some military helicopters have armored seats to protect you from small arms fire from below, but the seats also sometimes fill up with water when the aircraft has been sitting outside in the rain, leaving your backside wet and cold until your body heat dries them. If your crew chief likes you, he might remove them the night before so they will be dry, or he might not.

Sometimes the seats collapse from the optimum upright position to their lowest setting at just the wrong time, leaving the pilot just barely able to see over the glare shield above the dash as he tries to put the aircraft down in a tight landing zone or hover over a ship’s deck.

It is not all bad, though. Sometimes you will get a helo that has just the right frequency vibration. I’ve never asked a female helicopter pilot, but for males, a bird with the right vibration can give you a strong sexual reaction, that is, a very strong erection, at least when you are a young male pilot. Don’t know about old pilots because I quit flying before I got that old. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “getting a buzz out of flying.” that’s something you rarely ever mention to the other pilot at the time, though. except you might say, “Good one” and get just get a smile in return.

All helicopters are slow by airplane standards. A very fast helicopter would be a very slow military airplane. In fact, most helicopters are slower than the speed at which a fighter stalls and falls from the sky. this means that the enemy has a long time, relatively speaking, to get you in his sights and shoot at the cockpit to take out the crew, if their weapon is a gun—or at the hot parts of the helicopter, like the engine exhausts, if their weapon is a missile. And sometimes, sometimes, you can even see the man who is trying to kill you. It gets very personal, down low and slow where the helos fly.

Even so, all in all, for me, helicopters are better to fly than airplanes of any type, even jets, simply because they can land anywhere there is a relatively flat, open spot slightly larger than the aircraft. You fly low and slow enough to see what the world looks like, what mountain peaks and valleys look like up close. though helicopter pilots cannot land the entire aircraft if the zone is on a mountaintop or a building roof that is too small, they can land one skid or two wheels and hover the rest of the aircraft while cargo or people off-load. Or they can do a “one wheeler,” hovering with just one wheel or skid touching, just so the crew can enjoy the view from the top of a mountain. Helicopters can land on a beach between missions and let the crew cool off with a swim.

Poor limited airplanes, even Vertical/Short takeoff and Landing (V/ STOL) aircraft like AV-8 Harriers and very short takeoff landing aircraft like the Helio Courier, they are mostly restricted to airport runways or ship decks; no beaches or mountain peaks for them. then too, airplanes mostly fly high above the clouds and the top of one cloud looks pretty much the same as another. Helicopters fly below the clouds and the crews get to see the ever-changing face of the earth. And occasionally, somewhere where you know that there is no one else flying but you, you can do magic things with your helicopter.

In the middle of the ocean, when you know there are no other aircraft or mountains below you, and there is lots of room between the bottom of the clouds and the surface of the sea, on a day with puffy cumulus clouds, you can pretend that the clouds are solid and “land” your helicopter on top of them. You slow your aircraft as you descend toward the cloud’s top, coming to a stop and putting your power all the way down, down as you would if you were landing on a solid surface. then, with the power completely off, you hold the aircraft level and fall straight down through the cloud toward the sea below. the cloud’s surface churns as your rotor wash hits it and the white mist disappears in a swirl around you as you fall. the world goes white until you come out the bottom and the blue sea is below you again and the illusion must end, so you lower the nose to regain air-speed and start flying again. Or, is “normal” flight the illusion, and the act of falling straight down through clouds to the sea the reality?

FLYING LIFE ONE

THE ARMY

1968–1972

1

THE ACCIDENTAL AVIATOR

COVINGTON, KENTUCKY ■ FEBRUARY 1968

The posters showed a young man of the classical All-American type, clean cut, moderate length dark hair, brown V-neck sweater, sitting on the steps of what appeared to be a high school. His hand was resting on his chin and he looked upward, off upward toward a clear blue sky. Below him, printed in large letters were the words, “1, days between you and the sky.” In smaller type below that, the poster announced the US Army would take a young man with a high school diploma or a general educational development (GED) certificate, 20–20 vision (or correctable to 20–20), and who would be at least-1 years old upon completing the program and make him into a helicopter pilot. If you could meet these minimal requirements, pass a flight physical, and complete the training, you could become an Army Aviator and find the freedom of the sky. And, although the ad did not say it, in -1/0 you would also find the Vietnam War.

I
received the notice from my local draft board to take the draft physical in early March, 1968. I would turn 19 in May and had been relatively certain that this letter would be forthcoming. In March, 1968 there were no draft numbers, only the near certainty of being drafted if you did not have a ready deferment, like college. The physical itself was a long boring day of lines and forms and being herded from one room to another for tests of one sort or another in the big downtown Cincinnati Federal Building. As I walked into the building that morning, an anti-war protester about my age standing just outside the door handed me a flyer. I glanced at the words just long enough to see what it was, and then I wadded it up and bounced it off his forehead as I continued inside. At the end of the day, I was certified mentally and physically qualified for military service. After passing the physical, I knew the “Greetings” letter would soon come to the two-room apartment I shared with my wife of six months. We rented it from one of her cousins and, both of us being 18, kept their kids entertained through the walls, or must have since they always giggled for some reason whenever they saw us.

In ‘68, being a high school dropout with a GED certificate, 18, married with no children, not a student or an objector or a sole-surviving son, completely settled the issue. A week after I got the letter confirming I had passed the physical, I called the draft board. “Yes, you will be drafted, probably in July; unless, of course, you want to volunteer to be drafted, in which case you could leave next month.”

There were other choices: objector, Canada, immediate entry into school (if I could find one that would take me and that I could afford, both doubtful) but I really did not see any other choices except one. Instead of waiting for the draft I could enlist and gain some small measure of control over my fate. The other alternatives, if I thought of them at all, which I didn’t, were unacceptable, not because I was a burning anti-Communist, or believed “my country, right or wrong,” or because I pretended to understand the war one way or another. My people were from the mountains of Kentucky and there were some things the men always did. Going into the military was one of them.

All my life I played among the dusty uniforms hanging in the closets and looked at the fading photographs of my dad and my uncles from their military times, war and peace. I played in their old “Ike” jackets from the 40’s and 50’s and treasured the spent cartridge cases and old unit patches they had given me. I had my “science cabinet” (an old china cabinet) full of these things and others, patches from various Army units, a Nazi party pin one of my uncles brought back from the war, a WWI Victory medal given to me by an old veteran neighbor, an empty ammo clip from an m-1 rifle, all displayed next to the buffalo skull I brought back from a visit to relatives in Oklahoma, plus the dead tarantula sent me in a match box by my Uncle Bill, a veteran of the war in the Pacific who lived in Texas.

All my life, too, I saw the well-oiled and cleaned rifles and shotguns hanging on the walls of the houses in the Kentucky hollers (mountain valleys) of my childhood. No matter how poor the family, the weapons were always there along with pictures of the men in uniform. Few men were drafted out of the hollers because most enlisted when their war came. In fact, in Breathitt County during one of our wars, no one was drafted because all the men enlisted. Again, not from burning patriotism, although patriotic they were and still are—it was just what the men in their families had always done. The hardships of military service were often a rest from the reality of the true hardships of mountain life, coal mines and small farms. After all, in the military you always had clothes and food and a paycheck, small perhaps, but more than welfare.

My then wife’s people were of the same mountain stock as mine; in fact, we were distant cousins. But for her, it was not so simple. At 18 her life as a woman had just begun. She was only now becoming adjusted to our life together and she saw clearly that it could end all too soon. One of our high school teachers even told us, as we sat in the cafeteria before I quit high school for the second and final time, that we would get married; I would then get drafted and would be killed in Vietnam. But running away never occurred to her either.

The next day I drove our first new car, a blue ‘68 Mustang that my factory laborer’s job allowed us to buy, across the bridge from Newport over the Licking River to Covington, to the nearest recruiter’s office. The street the recruiting office was on had been the center of town—you could still see the streetcar tracks in between the cobbles laid down by the German immigrants—but in ‘68, Covington was fading fast. Empty storefronts displayed “for lease or sale” signs in the windows and the streets were not swept as often as they once had been. The litter of city trash sat in the curb and on the sidewalks and made everything feel even more rundown than it was.

The recruiting office had once been a restaurant, but as the businesses that provided the customers for the lunch trade folded, the restaurant joined them. Where the tables and chairs of the diner had been, were the desks of the three service’s recruiters, Navy, Marines, and Army, all in a row. The tiles on the floor still spelled out the restaurant’s name. During the race riots of the year before, I had worked at a very similar restaurant, just down the street from the recruiter’s office. The restaurant’s owner hid guns throughout the place—a rifle and a shotgun in the kitchen and a pistol under the counter, and told me, “If they start breaking in, just grab the first gun you are close to and open up.” my plan was simpler—“they” break in the front, I am out the back and gone. It’s all “theirs.”

When I walked in, the Army recruiter was talking to two other young men, which was fine—I didn’t want to talk to him anyway. One of my uncles was a marine gunnery sergeant, a “Gunny.” Because of him, I had wanted to be a marine since I was a little boy. The marine recruiter was sitting alone reading a western novel when I walked to the front of his desk and stood there, waiting for him to look up. When he did, the marine smiled.

Motioning me into a chair by the desk, the marine introduced himself as the Gunny, non-commissioned officer in charge, NCOIC, of the Marine Corps portion of the recruiting station. What could he tell me that was not already common knowledge? “The greatest fighting outfit the world had ever seen and after boot camp, you become one of us, you become a Marine. A two-year enlistment in the infantry would be the perfect start on life and an experience that you could tell your grandchildren about.” Still with a smile the Gunny said, “Boy, we’ll put you in the rice paddies and you can kill all the Cong you can find.”

As the Marine talked about his own infantry experiences in “the Nam” I looked at the three rows of ribbons on his chest and the hardness of his smile. My Marine uncle’s experiences from boot camp, Korea, and Vietnam came back to me, and the Gunny lost his recruit. Rifles and rice paddies would be only a last resort. I would not voluntarily sign on for what the draft promised anyway. After listening politely for a decent interval, I thanked the marine and told him I would think about what he said. As I turned to go I saw the Army recruiter was now free.

As I walked toward the Army recruiter he turned his head slightly and gave the marine a little grin. After a few questions about my background the recruiter asked, “How would you like to be a helicopter pilot?” Leafing through the pamphlets on his desk, he selected one, and laid it in front of me. The leaflet began, “90 Days Between You And The Sky.” As I read, the thought came to me that if I were to die, it would be better to fly to the spot rather than walk to it. Six months later I reported to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Nearly all warrant officer candidates (WOCs) went through Fort Polk and it was exactly what you would think it would be with the Vietnam War in full swing. Everyone smart enough to get out of military service had, leaving mostly National Guard and reserve enlistees, draftees and those of us who enlisted to “beat the draft.”

Twelve weeks later, a couple hundred candidates-to-be boarded Greyhound buses immediately after graduation from basic training and traveled to Fort Wolters, Texas, for a month of pre-flight training and then primary flight training. The demand for pilots was so strong that the Army had ten companies of WOCs under training at once for many years. I joined 9th WOC, the Tan Hats.