Missions with Green Berets

One of our main missions, and the one which gave me the most satisfaction, was supporting the men in the Special Forces camps. I respect them and what they did and to this day I am proud that I was able to be a small part of helping them to accomplish their missions.

 While some of the following incidents are less than serious, the missions these Green Berets accomplished were important and in many cases incredible.

Rocket Ridge

Steve Butler and I had flown to the Dak To Special Forces camp, located in the region known as the Tri-Border Area where Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos meet. My engine had been running rough on the flight north from Pleiku so I performed a common but probably unauthorized maintenance procedure after landing. Each airplane carried a spark plug wrench, a steel brush and a grease pencil in a small pouch. Bird Dogs have a dual set of spark plugs, two in each of the six cylinders of the engine, for safety purposes. In case one set of plugs and its electrical system ceases to function, the other will continue to keep the engine running.

If a spark plug happens to become fouled by gunk in the gasoline (a not uncommon problem), the engine will run rough. The procedure was to open the cowling on both sides of the engine, mark each cylinder with a grease pencil (actually composed of colored wax), and briefly run up the power. The problem cylinder with the bad plug, having run at a lower temperature than the others, would not melt the grease pencil mark. The fouled plug would then be removed, cleaned with the steel brush, replaced, and the engine run up and checked for adequate performance.

Steve and I were to pick up two Special Forces sergeants to fly a dual-ship mission along the borders where the Ho Chi Minh trail entered Vietnam. A ridge line just to the west of Dak To was known as Rocket Ridge because of the frequency of Soviet 122-millimeter rockets that were fired onto the airfield and camp from the jungle between the ridge and the Cambodian border.

Just as I replaced the cleaned spark plug and before the sergeants could get to the airplanes, rockets began to impact on the far side of the airfield. It was either jump into the ditch along the runway or get into our airplanes and get out of there. Steve started up first and hit the runway from the ramp under full power with me in hot pursuit. As we flew west over Rocket Ridge, climbing for altitude, Steve immediately located the rocket position that was firing. He rolled in and fired four high explosive rockets at once from under the wings, and they all hit in the middle of the position, stopping the attack and causing secondary explosions from stored rockets.

That was one of the finest examples of doing what Bird Dog pilots did when confronted with a critical situation. However, he never got the award he should have gotten for probably saving lives and property in Dak To.

Beer Bombing

Supporting Special Forces was always interesting. These guys would go out into the jungle with a group of Vietnamese troops, patrol through the area during the day and set up ambushes at night. Critical to their survival on these missions was good radio communications to their base camp. One afternoon I was flying in support of a team when I got a call from the leader that they were setting up for the night and needed more radio batteries and a replacement radio transmitter/receiver handset. I flew back to their camp and put the batteries and handset into a heavy fiber tube in which artillery rounds were shipped. It was about three feet long and since there was quite a bit of space remaining, I put six cans of cold beer into the tube and taped it closed. I found that the patrol had set up their tents along a small ridge line, so I made a low, slow pass (at about 100 feet and 70 miles per hour), and had the guy in the back seat toss the container out the window at the appropriate time.

As I looked back I saw the tube cartwheeling through the line of tents, with Vietnamese soldiers running off into the bushes to get away from the “bomb”. The team leader told me no one had gotten hurt but the handset was broken, the beer cans had exploded, and the batteries were soaked in beer and wouldn’t work. However, he said the beer was good even though they had to drink it out of the tube and it tasted only a little like battery acid. I returned to the camp, loaded another tube with a handset, batteries, and beer, packed it so the contents would not move and made a drop again, this time successfully away from the tents. Mission accomplished!

My First Bullet Hole

The commanders at all the firebases we supported made it clear that if any Headhunter received ground fire, they would immediately expend however many rounds we called for on the shooter's position. I was able to take advantage of that agreement one day, flying with a Special Forces sergeant in the back seat. We were covering an operation of a unit from his camp at Duc Co along the Cambodian border. As I made a low pass along a tree line so we could see below the trees, I heard a loud, metallic “pop” and knew immediately that a bullet had hit the airplane. There was no indication that the engine or either of us had been hit, so as I was climbing away I called in an artillery fire mission and obliterated that line of trees and probably the guy who had shot my airplane.

When I returned the sergeant to Duc Co and we realized by lining up the holes in the lower and upper skins of the wing that the bullet had passed below the engine, just in front of my feet, and just outboard of the two rockets hanging on the wing, he was shaking. This extremely courageous soldier who regularly and willingly went into the jungle to find, attack, and get shot at by the enemy told me he wanted nothing to do with getting shot at in the air. I, of course, wanted nothing to do with what he did. I guess it was all in your view of things, that the grass sometimes looks browner on the other side of the fence.

Besides missing the engine, me and the sergeant, the bullet traveled
up from the lower left in the photo and missed the two rockets under the
wing. The two white dots in  the photo are the tips of the high explosive
 warheads on the rockets

I Killed the Monkey!

The airstrip associated with the Special Forces camp at Plei Djereng was about a half mile away and downhill from the camp. Someone in a Jeep would meet us at the airstrip and drive us to the camp for the mission briefing. The camp happened to have a pet monkey they kept chained to a large, open barrel in which it slept and ate. As I followed the Special Forces sergeant to the operations bunker for the briefing, I stopped to admire this cute little creature. It apparently didn’t think much of me because it jumped on my right arm and began to bite me. I instinctively reacted by smacking the monkey on the head with my left hand. I wore my wedding ring in Vietnam and evidently the ring hit the monkey behind the ear, and it dropped to the ground on the end of the chain.

All I could think of was that I had killed the Special Forces team’s pet! What had I gotten myself into? Somehow no one had seen what had happened, so I quickly decided to get rid of the evidence. I picked up the chain with the monkey dangling on the end and dropped it into the barrel, hoping to get back to the Jeep some other way.

After the briefing I looked out and saw the monkey sitting on the edge of the barrel, swaying slightly and rubbing its head. Fortunately I had only knocked it unconscious. With a huge sigh of relief I walked out and went off to fly the mission.

A Special Forces sergeant, holding the monkey that I almost killed. The
hole surrounded by sandbags in the background is the entrance to one of the
underground living quarters typical in these camps. They are built to be
a final defensive position in case the camp is overrun.

What We Did

Local Area and People

Pleiku City is the administrative capital of Pleiku Province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The province is a plateau ringed by mountains to the east (the Mang Yang Pass connects Pleiku with lower elevation An Khe Province) and to the west and northwest by mountains along the border and extending into Cambodia. The plateau region consisting of flat and undulating terrain extends northward into Kontum Province.

Main drag, downtown Pleiku City. In the foreground is a Vietnamese
policeman, known as a "White Mouse" because of their uniforms.

The predominant ethnic group in the highlands were the Montagnards, a French term meaning mountain people. We referred to them as Yards. They consisted of a number of tribes loosely allied in their dislike of the Vietnamese government, and since the Viet Cong were Vietnamese, the Yards didn’t like them either.  The Yards were oppressed by the government and were basically looked down upon as uncultured minorities. But they had the reputation that even if they wore loin cloths, they were good fighters when led by Americans.

The relatively flat areas were farmed for rice and tea. Catecka was one notable tea plantation, an undisturbed oasis in a war zone. This allegedly resulted because of agreements, financial and otherwise, between the French plantation owners and both the Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong. It was essentially a no fire zone, and as far as I know there was no enemy activity on the plantation.

Catecka tea plantation. Burned areas and artillery and bomb craters
can be seen beyond the borders of the well-tended plantation but none
are visible on the property.

The Ins and Outs of Missions

While we were supposed to fly in a strictly visual role, there were times when some type of offensive action on our part was needed until helicopter gunships or Air Force tactical aircraft could reach the scene. So when we could we modified the aircraft to take care of these occasions or just used what we had on hand. OK, here’s the truth: we were always looking for situations in which we could actually shoot and fight, because it was very frustrating to be flying around with only radios when the guys on the ground needed help.

There were two “hard points” under each wing on which rocket tubes were normally attached, one or two tubes on each hard point (four or eight rockets total). The rockets had solid fuel motors tipped with warheads, either smoke (to mark targets) or high explosive used in a more offensive role. These five-foot-long rockets were fired electrically from the cockpit by a trigger on the control stick.

The rockets were usually fired in a steep dive and a more effective method of aiming than just by eyeball was needed. This was a ¼-inch steel rod that was bolted to the top of the engine cowling in front of the windscreen and was cut off at a length of twelve or fourteen inches, about the same height that a pilot’s eyes were above the cowling. Theoretically, the pilot’s eyes, the top of the rod and the axes of the rocket tubes were all aligned. Of course, this varied by the stature of each pilot, so each pilot put a grease pencil mark on the inside of the windscreen in line with the top of the rod when he was sitting straight up in the seat. He would then go out, fire a few rockets, and adjust the mark so that it and the top of the rod were aligned with the impact of the rockets.

One airplane was set up as close to a gunship as we could make it, and everyone wanted to fly it. On the left wing’s hard points an M-60 machine gun and 750 rounds of full tracer ammunition were attached. On the right wing was a seven-rocket pod we had scrounged from one of the helicopter companies. The machine gun was bore sighted with the rocket tubes so they would hit the same spot at about 1,000 feet from the airplane. That let us roll in, fire the machine gun until the stream of red tracers hit the target, then fire the rockets. It was unconventional but accurate and effective.

We also carried hand grenades, hung from wires stretched across the back of the pilot’s seat and in easy reach of the observer who sat directly behind the pilot. We could carry about two dozen that way. They were mainly smoke grenades used for marking targets. About the size of a beer can, they emitted dense, colored smoke (red, yellow, green, violet or white). For a while I also carried high explosive grenades until one of my Special Forces friends told me that these grenades would explode if hit by a bullet. From that time on, those grenades and I were not in the airplane at the same time.

Artillery Adjustment

The most common mission beside visual reconnaissance was adjusting artillery fire on known or suspected enemy positions. We would establish radio contact with the nearest firebase (in some cases, for long range guns, at distances up to 20 miles) and request a fire mission by giving map coordinates of where we wanted the rounds to hit. The first rounds fired were two-piece smoke shells. These contained a small bursting charge that was initiated by a time fuse over the target and broke the shell into two smoking pieces. The alignment of the smoke from these pieces accurately indicated the gun-target line. Knowing this line was critical to our adjustment (left or right, add or drop so many meters) of the high explosive rounds onto the target, not to mention critical to our safety while flying near the target.

Since we needed to be in a position to observe the impacts of the rounds and to accurately call in adjustments, we would fly horseshoe-shaped or racetrack-shaped patterns around the target and at least at least 1,500 feet above it. If we timed our patterns properly, we would be on the side of the target when the rounds impacted. A problem might occur if we found ourselves between the guns and the target or just beyond the target and a round fell short or long. One of our pilots (not me) came close to disaster. He was inadvertently flying where he shouldn’t have been, along the gun-target line, when the rounds arrived. A shell passed through the aircraft’s tail without exploding (!) and caused him to crash land. He was successfully picked up by helicopter. Way too close for comfort! 

On the Way

California, Here We Come

Our airplanes had to be flown to the Army Depot in Stockton, California, where they would be prepared for loading on a cargo ship for a month long sea voyage. Each airplane would have the wings removed and then the wings stacked next to the fuselage would be sealed in a plastic cocoon to prevent sea air and water from corroding the metal skin and structure.

Twenty-four Bird Dogs took off from Ft. Sill’s Post Army Airfield just after daylight one Monday in August 1967. We flew in a very loose group southwest out of Oklahoma into Texas and made our first refueling stop in Hobbs, New Mexico. Then it was on to El Paso, Texas where we would RON (remain overnight). On the way I diverted slightly to overfly Carlsbad, New Mexico and the mines to the east where I worked on an underground surveying crew in the summer following my third (and last) year at Colorado School of Mines. Vertical shafts at the mines were developed to a depth of 900 feet below the surface where potash (potassium chloride) was extracted, hauled up to the plant at the surface and processed into fertilizer. The vast deposit under western Texas and southern New Mexico was once the bottom of an ancient extension of what is now the Gulf of Mexico.

After flying over the mountains of southern New Mexico and west Texas, I dropped down to about fifty feet  above the ground and flew the last hundred miles or so to El Paso chasing coyotes and jack rabbits across the flat, arid plains. El Paso, on the US side of the border, is opposite Juarez, Mexico and of course we had to visit the other country.

The next day we flew on to Palm Springs, California after a refueling stop in Tucson, Arizona. We stayed at a motel in that oasis in the desert and the next day we all split up, with orders to get the aircraft the next day to Stockton, California. I flew into San Jose, California and spent the night with an Army buddy and his wife. The next day I dropped off the airplane at the Stockton Army Depot then joined up with the other guys to fly commercially back to Ft. Sill.

Bird Dogs on the refueling ramp at Tucson International Airport

Once all the airplanes were gone, all we had to do was help the enlisted men pack up the rest of the company equipment and supplies into large, steel CONEX containers that would accompany us on the troop ship that would get us to Vietnam. After that was done and the CONEXes were loaded on trucks enroute to Stockton, all company personnel were allowed to take leave before we shipped out. I took Linda on a trip through the West in our Mustang, visiting (in Colorado) the Royal Gorge, Pikes Peak, and the Coors Brewery and School of Mines in Golden . We then drove south through the beautiful mountains to Durango where we rode the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad through the Animas River Canyon over the route that gold and silver ore was brought from the mines in Silverton to the smelters in Durango in the late 19^th century.

We then went to the Four Corners and the Painted Desert on the way to a two-day stay at the Grand Canyon. The final stage of the two-week vacation was down to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, then back to Ft. Sill. Linda and I really enjoyed the time we spent with each other, with the unknown future not far from our minds.

The day finally came when we soldiers had to leave the ones we loved for the war. My mom and dad drove up from their home in Irving, Texas (having escaped New Jersey in 1961) and Linda’s mom and dad drove out from Columbia, South Carolina. After a few days of both families enjoying being together, tearful goodbyes were said, not knowing if or when we would be together again. Then back to Texas for my mom and dad and Linda to Columbia with her mom and dad and her third year at Columbia College.

Getting There

On the trip to Vietnam we used every mode of transportation available:  bus to Oklahoma City, train to Stockton, ship to Cam Ranh Bay (Vietnam), Air Force airplane to Qui Nhon, and truck, jeep and finally foot to our airfield at Phu Hiep on the South China Sea.

Our ship, the “General William Wiegle”, was a Liberty ship built in World War II to carry cargo, and recently reconfigured to carry troops as well as cargo. There were about 1500 troops on board, most of which were two airborne battalions, one from the 82^nd and one from the 101^st Airborne divisions. The ship left the pier at Stockton  and passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on October 3, 1967. Three weeks later it docked at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.

Another troop ship passing us in the middle of the Pacific

During the voyage the ship put in for a 24-hour maintenance stop at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. About six or eight airborne troops felt that their chances of surviving the shark-infested  waters of Subic Bay were better than surviving a year in Vietnam, so they jumped overboard and started to swim away, The Navy picked them up and threw them in jail, only to be returned to their units later in Vietnam.

It so happened that the night we got into Subic was nickel beer night at the Navy Officers Club. While the details of the incident are fuzzy in my mind, I was told that I played a mean set of drums and that one of my friends was dancing with an Admiral’s wife when we were not so politely asked to leave.

One of our sergeants had acquired a Doberman Pinscher in Oklahoma and brought him along with us. We called him “Sarge” and he wore a coat on which was stitched our unit patch, his name, and his “rank” of sergeant. He lived in a doghouse on the upper deck and enlisted men were detailed to walk and feed him daily. Sarge was used to us and liked us but he didn’t care for the airborne guys. When one came along and tried to pet him, Sarge bit him. The next day we held a ceremony and promoted him to Sergeant Major, the highest enlisted rank in the Army.

On board ship we were indoctrinated into what would be the ritual everyone would follow in Vietnam  - malaria pills on every Wednesday. The large, brown pills were to be taken weekly, and to some that was the way to keep track of what day it was.

The policy of the Army was that each man was sent to Vietnam for 12 months, and the tour of duty started the day one physically departed the United States, whether by airplane or ship.  Everyone had a DEROS date, the “day of expected return from overseas”, and everyone counted down to that day. Those of us on the ship had been on “duty” for three weeks when we first reached Vietnam. Therefore, everyone who went over with a unit had the same DEROS, so they all would leave on the same day 12 months later (if they survived, of course). This caused a policy of “infusion”, which meant that individuals were assigned to other units so there would be men with different DEROS dates and everyone did not leave the unit at once. This is how, after about a week at Phu Hiep, I came to be reassigned to the 219^th Aviation Company, the Headhunters, based at Camp Holloway Army Airfield near Pleiku in the Central Highlands.

Home for the next 11 months - Holloway Army Airfield

During a large going away party for me and others at the Phu Hiep Officers Club, Viet Cong sappers sneaked onto the airfield and blew up a helicopter. The explosion caused the entire base to go on alert for a possible attack. I ran back to my hooch, grabbed my steel helmet and M-16, loaded the one cartridge I could find, and crawled between the sandbags and wall of the building. I was prepared to defend myself with one round. Welcome to the war!

How I Got There (II)

Mother Rucker

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

Since we were all assigned as students and would only be there for about four months, once again none of us was allowed to get on-post housing. Therefore we had to find a place to live in the local area. Some of the bachelors got rooms in motels but Linda and I found a twelve-by-fifty foot trailer to rent – and it was brand new. We were trailer people, and proud of it! We were really in good shape compared to our next door neighbors who lived in an old, eight-by-thirty foot trailer that they owned. It was like a closet on wheels. I don’t know what they did when he graduated from flight school. It may still be there.

That part of Alabama is very deep in the Bible Belt and the county, like all the others around, was dry – alcohol was prohibited. Ft. Rucker was the exception.  The rumor was that the police would check the trash for empty bottles or cans, so we took our empties back on post and dumped them there.

The advanced training at Rucker was also in two phases: instrument and tactical. The instrument phase taught us how to fly solely by reference to instruments in the cockpit and not by looking at the ground. It also required that we become qualified to fly the Army’s instrument trainer, the twin-engine Beech Baron, designated the T-42. When the weather was cloudy and visibility was low, we flew. When the sun shone, we also flew – but then wearing a hood, a device that fit on our heads and restricted our vision to the instruments within the cockpit. Of course, we looked outside when taking off or landing but soon thereafter it was back under the hood or into the clouds.

At the time the Army also trained pilots from many allied nations, one of which was Germany. One day we were in the cafeteria at Cairns Army Airfield, the main airfield at Rucker, getting a cup of coffee before the morning flight. A  loud noise outside got our attention as a large transport bearing the black Iron Cross insignia of the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) pulled up and offloaded a group of German student pilots. My instrument instructor was a former Air Force fighter pilot (remember, this was just a little more than twenty years after the end of World War II). He was startled as he looked out the window and said, “The last time I saw an aircraft with those markings it was shooting at me”.

The tactical phase was back in Bird Dogs and dealt with living in the field and planning and executing day and night flights into and out of short grass strips throughout Lower Alabama. The purpose was to learn to conduct tactical flight operations – visual reconnaissance, aerial delivery (dropping of supplies and illumination flares at night), and firing rockets from under the wings to mark targets on the ground - safely and effectively through simulated enemy territory. I was to use all these skills in Vietnam.

Each of us in the class received our silver Army Aviator Wings on June 25, 1967, having flown 220 hours during the past nine months. After the graduation ceremony almost all the others and I took the FAA written examination to be certified as commercial pilots.

Linda pinning on my wings with my mom watching

Ft. Sill – Again

Along with the wings came orders, this time assigning me to a new aviation unit being formed at Ft. Sill, the 203^rd Reconnaissance Airplane Company (“Hawkeyes”). It was to be deployed to Vietnam but we first had to get organized and trained to fly our expected missions. Just eight new pilots in my flight school class were assigned to the 203^rd, to join some that had graduated previously. Others in the class went directly to units already in Vietnam.

The airplanes assigned to the company were Bird Dogs, the type in which I had learned to fly. They were not there when I arrived but were in the process of being completely renovated by the Cessna Airplane Company in Wichita, Kansas. Newer style radios and navigation equipment, hard points under the wings (on which rockets and other ordnance could be attached), and self-sealing fuel tanks that would not leak if punctured (they worked!) were some of the upgrades to these Korean War-vintage airplanes, all manufactured between 1950 and 1953. We were flown to the Cessna plant in an Air Force C-47 (DC-3) where we picked up the Bird Dogs and flew them back to Sill.

Once we got our airplanes we had to hone our flying skills in simulated tactical environments. One of our primary missions was to adjust artillery fire from the air and there was no better place to learn than at Ft. Sill, the Army’s Artillery School. We would fly to grass strips on post, pick up Army and Marine artillery officer students, and take them up to observe the artillery rounds impacting on the ground. They (and we) would adjust the impact of the shells onto the target by radioing corrections (add or drop, left or right so many meters) to the fire direction control center at the guns in the firing battery.

My experience adjusting fire from the ground during my classes at Artillery OCS was definitely beneficial  but it took some getting used to seeing the situation from a bird’s eye view. Some of the pilots from different branches (Infantry, Armor, Transportation, Signal, etc.) had a more challenging time of it but they all learned well.

We also practiced field conditions, living and conducting flight operations from tents along dirt airstrips, both at Sill and at Ft. Hood, Texas. These are known as “FTEs” or field training exercises. My most memorable was the one held in August 1967 in the woods at Sill. We set up our tents in the trees and bushes next to the airstrip. It was to be a three-day exercise and by the end of the second day, with no showers available, I just had to get clean. There was a small creek a hundred yards or so from the tents, so I stripped to my shorts and walked through the bushes to bathe in the creek. It felt wonderful to be clean again in the hot Oklahoma summer! That good feeling lasted until I got back to our apartment, when I noticed a rash had formed over much of my body. The bushes I had walked through were poison ivy. I spent the next week covered (actually painted) in pink calamine lotion, suffering in the hot Oklahoma summer wearing full-length, sweaty flight suits.