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.