How I Got There

As far back as I can remember, I have always been interested in airplanes and wanted to learn to fly. I did what a lot of kids my age did: I rode my bike to the local airport and watched airplanes take off and land. Flying was expensive then as it is now and I didn’t know how to get to do it. The method eventually turned out to be the Army.

I attended Colorado School of Mines from 1960 to 1963 with the idea of becoming a mining engineer. Because of less than spectacular grades, when my mom and dad moved to Irving, Texas from New Jersey, I moved to my new Texas home and took some engineering classes at a local college for a semester. While there the local draft office “invited” me to serve my country in the US Army. In March 1964 the Vietnam War was just heating up but I wanted to have some input about my future so I enlisted and applied for Officer Candidate School.

While my paperwork was being processed in the typical ponderous Army fashion, I completed basic training then advanced individual training as a tank crewman before being assigned to the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed at Ft. Meade, Maryland. This famous unit that had fought in World Wars I and II and Korea had just returned stateside from its deployment along the Czech border in Germany.  I missed its eventual deployment to Vietnam because I received orders to attend the US Army Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School at Ft. Sill Oklahoma.

Six months later I received my gold bars as a second lieutenant and received my assignment to the Infantry Training Center at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina to serve as a training officer in a basic training company. A very fortunate set of circumstances led me and my roommate to Columbia College, a Methodist girls’ school, in search of dates for an upcoming function at the Ft. Jackson Officers Club. As she has always said, Linda Childers was curious about the Officers’ Club and I was the means by which she could satisfy that curiosity. We went to the Club and as such things go, we dated for eight months and were married on July 10, 1966.

During the time that Linda and I were dating, I applied to attend Army flight school and reach the goal I had had since I was a young bike-riding kid. I took and passed mental and physical exams, including the eye exam. My vision was the required twenty/twenty uncorrected (no glasses) but many aspiring aviators were eliminated because of this. (Later in the war, because of the need for pilots, the vision requirements were relaxed). There was also the specter to be considered of the inherent dangers in flying in general and in combat specifically, and the possible effects on my soon-to-be wife if something happened to me. We agreed that if this was what I wanted to do I would have her full support.

Orders again, and this time a very pleasant surprise. Not only had I passed all the tests, I was accepted into Army flight school to be trained as a fixed-wing aviator. I had really hoped to fly airplanes instead of helicopters. The differences between the two types of aircraft were significant.  I had not dreamed of flying an aircraft having a large collection of parts flinging, flailing, beating the air into submission and converting fuel into noise, nor had I ridden my bike to see or made models of anything like that. It was airplanes I wanted and it was airplanes I got!

The orders specified I was to report in September 1966 to Ft. Stewart, Georgia, known as “Camp Swampy”. Located in the relatively unpopulated lowlands of coastal Georgia about 40 miles from Savannah, the Army Aviation School established primary fixed wing training there in 1966.

Since 1942, all aviator training, fixed and rotary wing (helicopter), had been conducted at the Army Aviation Center at Ft. Rucker, Alabama (known as “Mother Rucker”). Because of the buildup for the Vietnam War and the large number of aviators to be trained, initial fixed wing training took place at Ft. Stewart and initial rotary wing training occurred at Ft. Wolters, near Ft. Worth, Texas. Advanced training for both types of aircraft took place at Rucker.

The airplanes used in the initial flight training at Stewart were O-1 Bird Dogs, the same type I was to fly in Vietnam. Students flew from the front seat and the instructors flew from the back. As I was to learn in about two years when I returned to Stewart from Vietnam as an instructor, flying, including taking off and landing, from the back seat without being able to see directly forward or to see all the instruments was really “flying by the seat of your pants”.  

The training took place in two parts: the solo phase up to 15 hours with an instructor (it took me 12 hours until I was turned loose to fly on my own); and the intermediate phase, which entailed additional flight time with an instructor and quite a bit more solo time to allow us to become more familiar with the airplane. Conducting proper upper airwork maneuvers, including stalls, slow flight, and spins, night flying, and planning and executing cross country flights (up to 300 miles distance) during both day and night constituted much of this phase.

The other important training was learning to fly the airplane into and out of grass strips as short as 600 feet over barriers (trees) at the ends of the strips, as well as navigating between the strips at low level – less than 200 feet above the ground. This part of flight school would be critical to what many of us would deal with in Vietnam.

There was no on-post housing for students, so Linda and I and the other officers in the class checked out the surrounding communities for decent and affordable housing. We found affordable accommodations, the decency of which was debatable, in Hinesville, just outside the main gate of the post. We lived in a furnished wood frame, asbestos-sided duplex apartment, one of three similar hovels owned and rented by a man whose main occupation, beside slumlord, was junk yard operator. Our neighbors on the other side of the thin plywood wall separating the apartments was the son of the owner and his wife. We saw them a few times but heard them almost nightly, arguing and throwing things (often each other) against the plywood wall. A lovely couple indeed.

We finished our initial training in February 1967 and were ordered to the advanced phases of training at Rucker. Linda and I loaded everything we owned, including canned foods, into the trunk and back seat of our 1966 Mustang and headed for Daleville, the town closest to Rucker.