Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (5 page)

The lights were always on in the Club. that is, they were always on unless the generator that provided power to the entire company ran out of fuel or broke down or was shut down for maintenance. And the light they provided reflected off the black lacquer plaques and the already fading Polaroid’s of their owners, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year during 1971.

5

FIRST TAKEOFF OF THE DAY

PHU BAI, VIETNAM ■ DECEMBER 1970

“Liftmaster Tower, Playtex One Two, three miles east for landing. I’ve got six turnin’ and two burnin’, my gear is down and bolted, my pistol is cold” (typical call for landing at Playtex’s home airfield, circa 1971. Translation: I am Chinook with all six rotor blades going around, both engines running, my landing gear is not retractable, and I am not shooting my pistol.)

Y
ou are the aircraft commander (AC) for your helicopter today. The duty clerk woke you up to give you the mission sheet at around 0430, an hour and a half before daylight and takeoff time. The mission sheet lists all the missions Playtex has for today. The mission sheet lists them in the order that they are to be flown and highlights the ones that you will fly. You get the complete listing of all missions because if someone else’s aircraft goes down for maintenance or battle damage, you will have to pick up their missions. All the missions must be completed before the last aircraft is shut down for the day. No matter what, the missions must be done.

Because there are no windows in your Southeast Asia (SEA) hut hootch, you had to turn on the lamp on the homemade desk next to your bed to find your clothes, survival vest, pistol, and boots even though you had laid them out the night before. Your roommates and you sealed all the windows with plywood to better insulate the hootch, hoping the Sears air conditioner built into the wall would have a better chance against the heat. You put the mission sheet on your clipboard so that it stays unwrinkled through the coming long humid day. Your roommates do not wake up or move when your light comes on since we go through this every morning when at least one of the three of you is flying.

Walking through the plywood door to the back room that served as kitchen and bath, you run water in the sink. Shaving using water warmed by your room’s personal electric hot water, the only hot water heater in the company at this time of day, quickly completed the wake up process. Back through the door and into the main room, you finished dressing quickly: white T-shirt, green issue wool and cotton socks, green trousers made of flame-proof nomex with lots of pockets, matching nomex shirt with your company patch sown over the left breast pocket and 101st patch on the left shoulder, tail tucked in, strap on the .38 pistol in a black leather cowboy holster from the gook shop, and lastly pull on the olive drab (OD) green baseball hat with your wings and a CW2 bar sown on the front. You made the bed by pulling the camouflage-patterned nylon poncho liner over the sheets. Last thing before you were out the door was to turn off the fan oscillating over the bed—it kept you cool and the mosquitoes off in the night—and turn off the lamp.

A fast piss into the tube stuck in the ground on the other side of the tin fence on the far side of the officer’s area next to the plywood shitters and then to breakfast across the peniprime (black material like thick oil that almost, but not quite, turned the dirt into blacktop) street to the mess hall, greasy eggs, limp, coarsely baked bread, semi-raw bacon cooked in an oven and hot, bitter black coffee. No conversation with other pilots sitting around the table in the officer’s dining room, the food is just fuel for your body and then it’s back out the door into the dark. Back to the hootch and pick up your flight gear. Carrying your helmet bag, wearing your 15-pound ceramic and steel bullet bouncer—at least the front plate of the bullet bouncer since wearing the back was just too uncomfortable for 10 hours of flying—and your survival vest, you walked in the darkness down the company street to the operations bunker on the right, next to the company headquarters. Your copilot joins you and walks beside you, but you don’t talk to each other—nothing to talk about. A hundred feet down the street, he turns left toward the wire surrounding the flight line to start the pre-flight, while you turn right into the operations bunker.

Company operations, the S-3 or just “Ops” is in a sandbag-protected SEA hut, but the sandbags are starting to leak from all the exposure to sunlight they get every day. Weeds have started growing up through the spaces between them. Every day, every time you walk past Ops you wonder if they would stop the shrapnel from a mortar round or are they just psychological protection, like the plastic windows on your helicopter.

In the Ops bunker, you sign for the KY28 encryption box for the fox mike (Fm) radio. The KY28s are square, gray, armored, heavy things that scramble your radio signal so you can speak to other users of KY28s, each other, and controllers without the enemy understanding you. You sign for the Signal Operating Instructions (SOI, a classified small rectangular notebook with all the frequencies and call signs listed for all of I Corps) for the northern-most part of Vietnam where you are based. You pick up your blood chits, the pieces of paper printed in several languages telling of a gold reward for the return of the bearer should you get shot down and have to E&E (escape and evade) back to friendly lines.

Blood chits always remind you of the Flying tigers from WWII, but you don’t know why—old movies you saw when you were a kid, maybe. You also know that the enemy usually executes helicopter crews because they are captured in the thick of battle by regulars, not farmers with pitchforks. Trying to get the helicopter crews back to enemy rear areas puts their soldiers to unnecessary risk, so they don’t usually do it.

There are several other pieces of survival gear too, all in an OD green steel 7.62MM machine gun ammo can, but you know if you crash you will not drag the ammo can out of the wreckage of the aircraft, so you don’t even look inside.

After five minutes in the Ops bunker, you are outside again and walking to the helicopter across the steel PSP (pierced steel planking) mat to the two-sided steel revetment where today’s bird is parked, carrying all the things you just signed for as well as your flight gear. The wire around the mat is supposed to keep infiltrators out, and the high steel walls of the revetments protect the aircraft from in-coming mortars. You walk through the gap in the barbed wire by the little two-story control tower and across the slick, damp PSP to your Chinook.

The crew is already there—the flight engineer, the crew chief, and the door gunner. They probably have been there for hours, sometimes they sleep in the aircraft. It’s easier to go that way, just sleep out there most nights on stretchers stolen from who knows where and eat C-rations stolen out of the pallets for the grunts. Keep the machine ready, but even more, have a place to yourself, a place where you are king. No roommates or sergeants to give you hassle or to keep you awake with drugs or drink. Just the night sounds a quarter mile from the wire around the base. Sometimes mortar fire and a burst of machine-gun fire in the distance, but most nights just flares drifting down on their parachutes over the raw red dirt of Phu Bai.

The flight engineer, called “Chief” in this company, owns the aircraft. The pilots change every day but this Chinook is his. He supervises the other crewmen, the crew chief—a flight engineer in training and a gunner—often a grunt who got tired of walking and now owns the two door guns. The Chief owns everything aft of the cockpit when you fly. You know that he can kill you by his actions or inactions. He knows you can kill him and the rest of the crew in a second if you don’t do your job right. But you trust each other because you must, because you will all die together if one of you fails. The missions must get done.

Your copilot climbs to the top of the aircraft to begin his preflight. It’s slick up there from spilled oil and hydraulic fluid and dew in the morning dark; better he falls than you. Besides, you already did your climbing up there while you were a copilot, while you were a “newbie” like he is. Now you are the AC, and as is your right, you preflight the inside and the bottom of the Chinook. Nothing unusual to see, and in ten minutes you are telling the flight engineer about what’s up for the day, or at least as much of it as you can tell by the mission sheet. Not much is required in the way of crew briefing when you fly together for eight or ten or twelve hours every day. The Chief wants to know seats up for internal cargo or seats down for PAX or sling loads starting off, but today, as most days, it’s sling loads all day. The seats are fine in the down position for now.

No missions on the sheet call for Cobra escort, so Ops didn’t know for sure you’d be shot at today. You wouldn’t know either until it happens, maybe not even then. Lots of times in a Chinook, you don’t hear small arms rounds hitting over the whine of the transmissions and the roar of the two turbine engines, so unless someone sees holes starting to appear or the bullets hit something that shows up on the gauges or the master caution panel, you just don’t know.

Now both pilots are in their seats, AC on the left and pilot on the right. You like the left seat because it somehow seems as if you can see better over here on the left. You command from the left seat, the pilot flies from the right. Seats on the Chinook adjust not only up/down and forward/back, but also in tilt. It always seems you start the day out bolt upright and somehow finish it ten hours later in a slump, seat tilted all the way back. Your “chicken plate,” aka “bullet bouncer”—a ceramic-over-steel plate that covers your chest—is not hurting you yet but you know it will before the day is over. It’s heavy and rests on the top of your legs. Around your neck on a dog tag chain is the SOI with all the current radio frequencies and call signs listed. It fits neatly into a pocket on the front of the armor.

Before things get too far along in your start up, you pull your grease pencil out of the pocket on your left upper sleeve and get out the SOI. You write the frequencies and call signs you will need first thing on the lower left portion of the windshield. You copy them from the SOI because they change all the time and it is too hard to remember what your call sign is today—once it was “Rancid Killer,” someone’s idea of a joke no doubt. Looking at the clipboard all ACs carry, you scan the first of today’s missions. The fox mike frequency of the pickup zone (PZ) and their call sign, the call sign of the firebase where you will take the first loads of the day, the artillery clearance frequency, all these things go on the windshield, making it classified at least “Secret,” but you will erase it before you leave the cockpit at the end of the day. When you are finished you put the clipboard down to the right of your seat, next to the center console where you can get it easily. Underneath the mission sheets are pictures of your wife and son covered in acetate to remind you to live through the day. If you crash, you hope the clipboard is destroyed so that the enemy does not get to see your family.

You are in your seat and ready for the start checklist. Four-point seat belt and shoulder harness on over the chicken plate, .38 pistol in its cowboy holster moved from your right side to between your legs for a little extra protection, even if it is just psychological. The copilot calls the items on the checklist and you do them and the checklist goes quickly by. The small turbine engine, auxiliary power unit (APU), which drives the flight boosts and powers the electronics when the engines are not running, comes on line and then you are starting the engines. Since there is no rotor brake on a Chinook to hold the rotors still, as you start the engines the noise increases and the aircraft starts rocking unevenly as the big blades, three on the front and three on the back, start to turn slowly. It’s a rhythmic rocking until the blades get into phase (90 degrees apart), and then it smoothes to a steady vibration. Then the blades turn faster and faster. Using the condition levers in the center of the console, you take the engines from the ground position to the fly position and with the increasing whine of the turbines, the individual blades become a solid disk to the eye. As the blades achieve sync, the rocking goes away and the motion becomes a smooth vibration, almost a hum.

Checklist complete, you are ready to taxi and your flight engineer sees you are the first ready out of all the aircraft flying this morning. He stands in front of the aircraft and motions you forward out onto the main taxiway. Before you move, you call Liftmaster tower for taxi clearance and you are cleared into position and hold. Because you were parked in the front row, you get first place in line on the short runway facing east, waiting for takeoff clearance.

There are eight aircraft turning now, though only six are required for missions today. If one of the six breaks on run-up, the AC will unstrap and go to one of the two backups while the original copilot completes the shutdown of the broken bird.

Ground taxiing a Chinook using all four sets of wheels is a two-man operation. The copilot works the thrust and cyclic, while holding the rudders neutral. The AC works the brakes and steers using the power steering knob on the center console. Only the right wheel is power driven, the left just trails along. When you are ready to move, the copilot adds a little thrust and moves the cyclic to two inches aft. The AC releases the brakes and uses the power steering to move the aircraft in the direction he wants to go. With familiar teamwork, the two of you smoothly move the Chinook into takeoff position on the runway.

The Chinook’s familiar roar through your helmet ear pads and vibrations through the seat, floor, and flight controls feel good, feel strong. You are fully awake now and are ready to go, ready to go fly. You are 21 years old and your body is whole and none of your joints hurt and your eyes are clear with 20/10 vision and you command this machine and this crew. The sky is lighter in front of you now and as you wait for takeoff clearance, you get a sense of power that wasn’t there when you were half asleep going through the routine motions of those things that you must do before you fly, satisfying the religious flying rituals. As the sun starts to move above the horizon, takeoff clearance comes from the control tower.

As AC, you always make the first takeoff of the day. An inexperienced copilot might not feel something wrong with the aircraft before it’s too late. You pull the cyclic back two inches with your right hand and add power with your left as you smoothly pull the thrust lever up.