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.

Holloway

Camp Holloway was not only an airfield, it was the major base in the Central Highlands. It was the end of the logistics "pipeline" through which most of the ammunition, fuel, food, medical supplies and creature comforts (liquor, beer, toilet paper and other supplies) necessary to prosecute the war flowed. The material came by truck convoys from the ports on the coast through the mountains over highways (see the picture of Highway 19 through Mang Yang Pass below) and was stored at Holloway and re-distributed to combat and support units in the region, by road and air.

The runway at Holloway was about 2500 feet long with a concrete surface. Some facilities remained from the French colonial period but most on the base were built by the US Army. Within a few miles was New Pleiku Air Force Base with a new concrete runway and facilities built by the US Air Force.  All Air Force aircraft could use this 6000-foot runway.

Near the Air Force base was the 71st Evacuation Hospital, a major medical facility which treated all levels of wounds and prepared soldiers to be evacuated to larger hospitals in Japan and finally, if necessary, to the States. The 71st Evac was an important lifesaving facility for US forces.

Besides our Bird Dogs, three assault helicopter companies flying UH-1 Hueys were based at Holloway and there were medium-lift CH-47 (Chinook) and heavy-lift (CH-54 Sky Crane) units there as well. At an airfield elevation just under 3000 feet above sea level and with high heat and humidity, helicopters needed a great deal of power to hover and take off. The larger helicopters put out a great deal of rotor downwash,.and we normally requested the tower to ask the helicopters to reduce power so out light airplanes would not be blown off the runway.

Headhunter ramp at Holloway. Notice the white painted  markings on the tops
of the wings so the aircraft would be visible from above against the green
jungle below. Dragon Mountain is visible just above the horizon.

The aircraft were parked in revetments constructed of 55-gallon steel drums filled with dirt. The revetments were to protect the aircraft from shrapnel from exploding mortar and rocket rounds fired at the airfield.  In the right background of the picture above are the company's administrative buildings and living quarters. Aircraft maintenance took place in the sheds adjacent to the revetments.

"Hooches" - where we lived. Notice the sand bags around the outside walls to
 prevent shrapnel or bullets from entering the building. Some of us used the
 lawn chairs to work on our tans when we weren't flying.

Our living quarters were rooms within the wooden hooches, with sandbags stacked about four feet high around the exteriors of the walls. Each bunk was a mattress on a sheet of plywood supported by two-by-fours. Many of us realized there might not be adequate warning of an attack (and often the first indication was the explosion of a mortar or rocket round), so we lined the plywood under our mattresses with steel if we could get it. Known as PSP (pierced steel planking) or SSP (solid steel planking), these were sheets of steel six feet long by two feet wide that were interlocked on the ground to form runway surfaces where permanent pavement was not available. We scrounged what we could from Air Force or Army engineers.

The space between the mattress frames and the floor were built up with sandbags, leaving a small entrance hole that we could (and sometimes did) scurry into for protection in case we could not make it to the underground bunkers in time.

In-country Checkout

All new pilots were required to fly 10 hours with an instructor pilot, getting indoctrinated into the 219th's operational area and procedures. This included becoming familiar with the geography of Pleiku and Kontum provinces which are located in the heart of the mountainous Central Highlands; identification of international borders (Cambodia and Laos); flying into and out of all airfields, especially short dirt strips at Special Forces camps; and learning techniques to keep us alive and as safe as possible.

The instructor, Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Joe Gray, had hundreds of hours flying in Vietnam among his thousands of hours of flight time, and was responsible for turning each aviator, usually fresh out of flight school, into something resembling a combat pilot. Competency would come only after many hours in the air. We all knew how to fly but this was a new flight school.

These 10 hours with Bobby were spent flying to and navigating by map between all airfields, some of which were as short as 800 feet. We flew over mountains and into valleys, low enough to see through the trees, usually two or three hundred feet above them, to minimize our exposure time so that the chances of our being seen, shot at and hit by someone firing from the ground was low. If we flew between airfields or were adjusting artillery fire or directing helicopter gunships or Air Force fighter-bombers against ground targets we flew higher than 1500 feet above the ground. The prevailing wisdom was that even if we were shot at the chances of the aircraft being hit at these altitudes were small.

Since our job was to look out the windows of the airplane down and to the sides and rear, we had to divide our attention between flying and looking. The cardinal rule for the area in which we flew was, "never VR up a valley", because the possibility of the terrain rising faster than the airplane could climb was a very real problem and the results of doing that was never in favor of the pilot.

Monsoon clouds over  Mang Yang Pass, with the packed dirt National Highway 19 
 leading from An Khe (to the right rear) to the higher Pleiku plateau. Enemy
ambushes of truck convoys on this and other supply routes were not uncommon.

This picture is an example of the terrain over which we sometimes flew. The accepted "rules of the road" when flying through passes like this was to fly well to the right side of the road (not over the road itself) while keeping a safe distance from the mountain side, and to fly with the aircraft's landing light on (located on the front edge of the wing). I and other pilots have experienced lights on opposite direction aircraft appearing out of the low visibility conditions, and some were much larger than the Bird Dog.

The first 50 hours of flight time after the initial checkout were required to be dual ship missions, flying with a more experienced Headhunter in another aircraft in the same vicinity and in constant visual and radio contact with each other. This was to get the "new guys" like me used to conducting VR and adjusting artillery fire over the varying terrain in the highlands, from flat rice paddies and open fields, to deep jungle, to steep and rugged mountains. After all this we were considered to be fully qualified to fly single-ship missions. Certain areas were always flown dual-ship because of mountainous terrain, distance from airfields, or enemy activity. It was certainly safer having two aircraft flying together in these situations.

The night before my first mission I got my maps together, cleaned the weapons I would carry in the airplane (rifle and pistol), checked my survival radio and other equipment and tried to relax. The next day I would be flying into combat! I spent a lot of time thinking about the events that had led me to this particular spot, some ten thousand miles from home.

My First Mission

"Headhunter One-Four, cleared for takeoff.". The radio call from the control tower at Camp Holloway airfield was the authorization for my first combat mission as an Army Aviator that morning in mid-November 1967. Camp Holloway was the US Army airfield located two miles southeast of Pleiku, the capital city of Pleiku Province in the Republic of Vietnam. The 219th Reconnaissance Airplane Company, the "Headhunters", had been flying in the Central Highlands of Vietnam for almost two years. I, however, had been "in country" just a little more than a month and had just completed my 10 hours of operational check out flying with an instructor pilot.

I was assigned to one of the four flight platoons, the First, and was given my radio call sign "Headhunter One-Four". The first number in the call sign indicated the platoon but the second was of no special significance. Exceptions were the platoon commanders, each of whose call sign ended in "Six" ("One-Six", "Two-Six", etc.), following traditional Army radio procedures. The call sign of the company commander was "Headhunter Six". He didn't fly very often but when he did he almost killed himself. But that's another story.

Each platoon typically consisted of six O-1 "Bird Dog" airplanes, Korean War-vintage, two-seat, high-wing Cessnas used primarily for visual reconnaissance, or "VR". That means the pilot, in the front seat and the observer, seated behind him, looked out the windows at the ground and reported by radio or later by written intelligence reports what they saw. Or they could drop smoke or high explosive hand grenades, shoot out the windows, or fire marking rockets from under the wings..Observers consisted of US and Vietnamese Army personnel and could be artillery officers, Special Forces team sergeants, or Military Intelligence officers. Sometimes our crew chiefs and other enlisted personnel from the company flew with us.

The Bird Dog had racks under each wing which usually
carried rockets that were used to mark targets on the ground. 

The Headhunters were assigned to support US and Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands. The First Platoon had the responsibility for providing VR for three Special Forces camps and for US-advised Vietnamese Army units operating in Pleiku Province. Pleiku's western border joins Cambodia.

The Second Platoon supported the same types of camps and units in Kontum Province which borders Pleiku on the north and which shares its western border with Cambodia and Laos. The region where the three countries join is known as the Tri-Border area and it is the general area where Special Forces often operated. The Second based its airplanes at Kontum Army Airfield.

The Third Platoon, flying out of Holloway, directly supported US artillery units positioned on hilltop and mountaintop fire support bases throughout Pleiku and Kontum provinces by providing aerial adjustment of artillery fire, either with artillery aerial observers assigned to the firebases or by Headhunter pilots alone.

The Fourth Platoon, also based at Holloway, flew for the Fourth Infantry Division and conducted VR and artillery adjustment in support of their units in the field, either in Pleiku or other adjacent provinces. The division was headquartered some five miles south of Holloway at their base camp  located at the foot of Dragon Mountain, a prominent, extinct volcano.

Dragon Mountain, with a rocket tube under the right wing of a
 Bird Dog. This photo was taken in the dry season showing
the red clay that was prevalent outside the jungle areas or
rice paddies..

While adjusting artillery fire was primarily the mission of the Third Platoon, firebases throughout the region were were always ready to shoot at any targets any Headhunter could identify. This, along with directing helicopter gunships and Air Force tactical aircraft dropping bombs and napalm, was the fun and action part of what we did.

My mission that day was to fly with another Headhunter to Plei Me Special Forces camp, about 20 miles south of Holloway and pick up two sergeants who wanted to VR an area their team was to operate in beginning the next day.

Plei Me Special Forces camp was cleared out of the jungle.
It was attacked and almost overrun in September 1965. Some
bomb craters can be seen outside the cleared area.

The technique was to fly adjacent to the area and not to overfly it, thus possibly alerting enemy on the ground. The team sergeants used binoculars to scout for potential landing zones and marked them on their maps. Since the operational area was close to Cambodia this was a dual ship mission, and also since it was my first mission, new pilots like me had to fly with an experienced Headhunter in another aircraft. We landed back on that tiny dirt strip (along the top edge of the camp in the photo) , the sergeants got out, and we returned to Holloway. Their operational mission the next day was a success.

Introduction to this Blog

Some time ago my wife, Linda, and I were watching one of a series of programs on The History Channel called "Suicide Missions". The particular episode focused on pilots of light airplanes, especially O-1 Bird Dogs, and their missions flown in Vietnam and adjoining countries. During the program, watching with wide eyes and open mouth, Linda kept saying things like, "I didn't know that happened" and, "Did you do that?" I admitted that it did and I had.

Her comments made me realize that she never knew the details of what I had done in Vietnam, since I never really talked about it with her or anyone in the family. So I thought that it was about time to explain what it had been like, before I forgot the "hours and hours of boredom interjected with moments of sheer terror". But it obviously wasn't suicide.

What I wrote and gave to everyone in the family was a collection of memories I called "Headhunter: Life In and Out of the Cockpit", remembrances of a special time in my life. Periodically I will post parts of the collection in this blog, but I want to add this caveat: Unless someone who was there shows up and convinces me that something I wrote is in error, this is my story and I'm sticking to it!