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.