Chu-Lai, Vietnam – 1971: I have always thought it was the kind of thing for which we should have gotten in real trouble. But I was a helicopter crew chief, which is an enlisted position, and not responsible for the crew or the mission. I don’t remember who our pilot was that day but he would have been the aircraft commander and either an officer or a warrant officer. If he got in any trouble I never heard anything about it. Then there was the captain of the Navy ship (which I honestly believe was a destroyer, but don’t really know, and I would have no idea which one it would have been if it was). So I’m telling a vague 45-year-old story with the few facts the way I remember them and I sure hope that the statute of limitations has run out if what we did that day was too irresponsible for military regulations.
We were flying a resupply mission that day. That means that we were assigned to the field units that ran the fire bases, hopping from one barbed-wire-topped hill to another out in the A.O. (area of operations), bringing deliveries of ammunition, food, and supplies to the troops that were stationed there. That day we were released earlier than normal, finishing our resupply work mid-morning and weren’t slated to be anywhere else except to return to base.
On the way back up to our base at Chu-Lai, our pilot decided to have some fun and did some low-leveling through some unpopulated areas inland. Low-leveling is flying close enough to the ground that you have to “pop up” to get over bushes and trees that are in your path. Some people called it hedge-hopping. Normally, we would fly well above tree-top level for better visibility and control (up where there are no surprises), with nothing in our flight path as far as we could see. The pilot was obviously testing his reflexes and showing off a little, which sometimes can get a pilot labeled as a “cowboy”. Later, flying out near the coastal highway, we came upon a bridge over a river that looked plenty high enough to fly under. Flying under a bridge is not a standard practice and is in fact frowned upon. We flew under it with plenty of room to spare. The door gunner and I, along for the ride at this point, were ecstatic. This was an unusual return-to-base trip and the feeling for us was not unlike a group of teenagers out joy-riding in someone’s dad’s car. Most of the pilots that I flew with in Vietnam were not much older than I was. It seemed like they were fresh out of school themselves for the most part.
Getting closer to Chu-Lai, we stayed along the coast and the beaches and eventually saw a Navy ship sitting about three miles off-shore. The pilot commented that we should probably go out and take a look at it, well, just because. He turned the bird in that direction and started flying out toward the ship, which he thought was probably a destroyer. At some point, he tried to raise the ship on guard, which means to try to communicate with it using a reserved (guarded) radio frequency that is not used generally, but monitored for transmissions of aircraft in trouble. He was unable to get a response from them, and as we got closer we noticed that they were raising and lowering their big guns. As we got adjacent, we noticed a PSP (pierced steel planking) landing pad that from the air looked to be the size of a postage stamp nestled between two steel structures. A flagman was on that pad waving us in, and our pilot decided to land.
Landing was very different on a ship than anything I had ever experienced before. First, we came in from the side of the ship, which was “rolling” back and forth from side to side. This put the front of the skids closer to the deck as we hovered down, then the rear of the skids closer, then the front of the skids again, making it very difficult to set the helicopter down firmly for fear that when we did, it would slide off the pad into the water or into one of the steel structures. Second, the blades seemed like they were very near each of the structures that hemmed in the landing pad. The pilot can’t see behind or very far toward the rear while landing and relies on the back seats (crew chief on the left side and door gunner on the right) to “clear” the aircraft, continually reminding him that the blades are “clear down left” and “clear down right”. I was so preoccupied with the process of clearing the aircraft (in addition to the left side of the main rotor, the crew chief is also watching the tail rotor as well) that I did not see the four sailors crouching next to the landing pad that jumped up to chain the skids to the pad as soon as the pilot settled the weight of the bird fully on the deck. And then we were down and rolling with the ship and the helicopter was not going anywhere.
The pilot shut it down and I secured the blades (tied one of the main rotor blades to the tail boom to keep it from flopping around) and we all disembarked and were greeted by the captain and invited inside. While we were securing the aircraft, the ship’s big guns started to fire. The captain explained to us that the ship was on a fire mission. They were supporting troops that were 11 miles inland. That means that those guns were firing shells at targets 14 miles away, and all the while the ship was rolling from side to side. I was amazed.
The captain took the pilot and copilot on a tour which included the wardroom or officer’s dining room for lunch. A couple of the sailors that had met us on the landing pad took the door gunner and I on a tour that included the enlisted mess hall for lunch. One of the sights that I haven’t forgotten was that of an off-duty sailor jogging around the perimeter of the ship nonchalantly as though it were a day in the park, not a ship on a fire mission. I didn’t see enough room to walk in some places, but he acted as though he had all the room he needed to run around that perimeter. And how he kept from falling off the ship with its continual rolling motion is beyond me.
Sitting down to chow in the mess hall I could see that the Navy ate better than we did. This was the life. We certainly enjoyed lunch that day! Later, with our ship’s tour and their fire mission over, we rejoined the officers and prepared to leave the Navy’s excellent hospitality and head back to our Army Aviation life style.
The ship’s captain told our pilot that his men had one request of us, they would like to see us “go hot” as we left the ship. That meant that the Door Gunner and I would fire our M-60 machine guns out the two sides of the helicopter as we took off. Every fifth M-60 round is a red tracer which has the effect when firing of a lazy stream of red streaks reaching out toward a target and they just wanted to see that sight. No problem for us! With nothing for miles around but water, we gave our new Navy friends the best show we could. As the pilot brought the bird up over the railing, he dove down toward the water for effect and to gain a little air speed, racing away from the ship as we in the back seats started shooting up the water ahead of us as though we were trying to keep some imaginary enemy’s heads down.
When we landed back at the base, I finished the post flight inspection where we had parked out on the flight line and headed in to the hangar and checked in the weapons and unused ammunition. Walking back to the plywood-and-tin-roof huts that we lived in, I remember thinking this end-of-flight routine was all very anti-climactic after the once-in-a-lifetime morning we had. Needless to say, I have never been on a return-to-base trip like that since!
