February 10, 2005

One of the more shocking ones is from about the middle of my tour.  LtCol. Brady was serving as our commanding officer.  A plan had been devised by some “VERY” commanding officers for a large insertion in the wilderness of Laos.  They intended to insert a full company (about sixteen birds; it took us thirty minutes back at Marble just to get in formation).  I was the crew chief of the lead bird with Brady at the stick.  We were flying WNW, looking at territory none of us had ever seen before. It was beautiful and looked as if it would go on forever.

As we crossed the Laotian border, an Asian voice greeted us from the ground.  “Good morning, Col. Brady.  We hope you have enjoyed your long flight today.”  We couldn't believe it.  How bad was our intelligence, and our internal security at
Headquarters?  Well, we weren't scared or anything; we just turned around and headed for home.  Nothing was ever said to me or any of the other crew chiefs about how this incident was reconciled.  As far as we could see, there were traitors in our midst.  We wanted these scum sucked out of the system and put in Portsmouth, where they belonged.

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Here's a short one:  On Halloween that year, I thought of the best trick of them all.  My idea was to get the tire covers off the commanding officers’ Jeeps and have them tacked to our squadron's roof  for a nice “shining send-off” for all squadrons to fly over as they passed the hangers from the east.  I didn't actually do the job myself , but I was involved in organizing the group that did the deed.  I was eventually discovered to be involved in the scandal, and sentenced to ride through the open roads in DaNang, on garbage detail.  I saw beautiful temples and wealthy mansions, many of which had steel gates surrounding them.  Hanging off the back of that truck, I could smell the open markets as we passed these endless streets of commerce.  Our way was sometimes blocked by lines of many Buddhist monks.  (At least in Da Nang, the monks are given the same pedestrian right of way as is practiced in California!)  Anyway, it was one of the greatest days of my life.  There is also
the fact that among our stops was the MASH center right next to the runway, our usual place for medevac drop-offs.  We collected their trash and I got to go inside and take a look.  Do you remember the big entrance and the huge red cross on top of the building?  That opening through which they carried all the wounded led to a huge open square of concrete 50’ x 50’ with a slope all around leading to a drain in the center.  Across this slab lay about 40 stretcher stands.  They rose out of the concrete on one pole and had a welded rack on the top to hold the stretchers.  There was a hook on each station to hold plasma and blood.  I was looking at the triage area.  The place “they all went “ when they were carried from the planes!  It was a chilling sight and thank God, empty at the time.  The view made a lasting impression on me.

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There is another story about flying with “Blades.”  We took of as the lead in a flight of two, Col. Brady at the controls and myself as crew chief.  Our objective was an Army listening post way back in the mountains, some place I had never been before.  We flew high over the valleys and came in on our target like a homing pigeon.  All of a sudden I could see it!  There was a large hole in the canopy right at the very top of the mountain.  I asked what we were going to do and the Col. told me I was going to earn my pay today by guiding him down through the triple canopy and safely to the ground.  “Don't worry,” he said “it's big enough for us, custom made in fact. All you have to do is get us down there.”  So we made a slow pass until we were right over it and I cleared him to descend.  I couldn't believe how scary this was, especially with a known tree trimmer for a pilot!

We were like a huge chicken snuggling down on her nest until I saw the tops of the trees disappear and it became immediately dark.  I kept talking to the Col. and we kept descending without assistance from the ground because we were laying her down perfectly.  When we got to the bottom and I opened the passenger steps and got out to look up, I was dumbfounded.  We had made it down to the bottom of this ocean of trees and there was a hole in the green above just our size.  We stayed about 40 min. and hit the AP for the trip up.  This scared me even more than the trip down.  It was going to be very difficult to look up through those whirling blades going up into the light.  But we did it, and we flew home safely after another wild experience one would never forget.

What my wife Jean's searching of the site has revealed is that I do not remember 4 crashes during my time there, as well as 20 fatalities.  This fact has me alarmed: how could I block from my memories the lives and faces of people I once knew and served with?  I flew 760 missions is Viet Nam, mostly emergency medevacs and recon inserts and extracts.  We got shot at a lot . But there is one thing that I am so proud of: if a Marine came onboard my bird alive then he made it back to DaNang alive.  I used to hoard blankets and have them ready for the wounded men when they came on board.  As you will recall, we usually had the luxury of a Corpsman aboard only on the overnight medevac shift.  Lacking the support of a Corpsman on many daytime missions, I kept the boys awake and alert, constantly reminding them that they were on their way home and forcing them to talk about anything but the war.  I tended the bandages administered on the ground, poured every bit of life I could come up with into helping keep these men out of shock and I did it.  No one ever died on my plane.  This is the single thing I am most proud of.  All the fancy cowboy stuff of the Crew Chief role ended when we got wounded aboard.  Then I had plenty of work, doing my best impersonation of a Corpsman, triage and all.

God it was terrible though.  I remember sitting in line at the hospital just off to the west of the runway with as many a 8 planes behind me and three in front of me.  I hated flying into that Vietnamese hospital downtown in DaNang.  They had no other place for us to land than right in the middle of their courtyard and we would just kick up torrents of dust while the windows of the hospital were all open because of the heat.  I have many memories but not enough to fill 760 missions, and 20 of my own squadron mates dying.

I talk about the war only rarely, and that is with my wife.  I feel like I'm out of the closet now!  I've actually felt ashamed of the war which included me, but I was never ashamed about my actions while “in country.”  Somehow this thing has become skewed in my head, maybe at the time I started to get a bad attitude (Aug. 69’).  I could see that things were not going well on the ground and you have to remember that we loaded these guys in the field.  We knew where they started from and where they ended up, calling for medevacs and more ammo.  It didn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that the general plan for the I Corps Marines was not being effectively directed.  Not any better than the Army in the south.

We had a smaller territory to cover than the Army and naturally fewer men to do the job with, but we were still fighting the same guys in the daytime that we were in the night.  The two rivers that ran through the valley west and just south of the Mountain were nothing but rivers of blood.  I don't doubt the delta was in fact enriched in the years following.  Having reached this very depressing overview of the war, it really made flying every day more difficult.  Not, you understand, because I wasn't a good Marine, or because I was disloyal, but rather because I just felt there was something wrong with the overall approach.  When your job is hauling around wounded kids and dead bodies, this becomes oppressive.  Where, in this Hell of confusion and pain, do you find anything rational to which you can anchor yourself?   I always did my job – I even got better at it.  It was just that beginning in that fall, I realized that we were all involved in an exercise undertaken for some entirely incomprehensible reason.  I'm sorry I'm rambling, but this is very emotional for me.  This is really more than I can think about right now, and perhaps more than you need to read, so I’d better sign off.