Final Post

Back at Holloway

One particular mission was my last for FOB-2 for a medical reason. I was flying at about eight thousand feet in mountainous eastern Laos monitoring a team’s AO and had been ordered back to the company headquarters to take care of some administrative stuff. As I descended to land at Holloway (at an elevation of about 2500) feet the cold I had been unsuccessfully nursing caused a severe ear blockage. I refueled and quickly climbed back to eight thousand feet to equalize the pressure in my head with the altitude and began a very slow descent, clearing my stuffed ears as I came down. This alleviated the pain but the flight surgeon grounded me until the cold cleared up. I never went back to FOB-2.

My first mission after recovering from the cold was to fly security for the Bob Hope Show that took place at the Fourth Division base camp at Dragon Mountain. While the show was going on a couple of other pilots and I flew around the area looking for enemy activity, especially for evidence of rocket positions that could have put an end to the festivities. The closest I got to the show was about five miles away. The guys who went said it was great.

My hooch was adjacent to the Officers Club, and my bunk was only eighteen steps from the door of the club. That’s where most officers went almost every night for cheap drinks and sometimes entertainment. Every so often female singing groups were brought in to perform. One memorable group was from Korea, and they always ended their performance by singing a favorite song. However, it came out with their Oriental accents as, “God Bress America, Rand That I Rove”.

American groups, often very talented enlisted men, would also perform. The hands down favorite that we would request was, “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place”, originally recorded by The Animals. Of course everyone shouted out the chorus every time:”We’ve gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do!” - and we really meant it.

 If there wasn’t entertainment provided we made our own. A favorite of mine was to shoot champagne corks at helicopter pilots at their tables. One of us would stand on a chair and direct the “fire” of the others, and this often ended up in a semi-good natured, drink-tossing brawl. A favorite target was Boyd Clines, a good friend and fellow Georgia Army National Guard Mohawk pilot, who lives close to me in the Atlanta area. Boyd flew into very hazardous areas to extract Special Forces soldiers and crashed air crew members. He and other helicopter pilots and crews are real heroes.

On the calmer side there was a group of four guys who often played cards together – another Headhunter pilot Tim deBord, two flight surgeons, and me. The chaplain somehow talked us into being the choir at the chapel. (Alcohol could have been involved). This ecumenical bunch (two Protestants, a Catholic, and a Jew) couldn’t sing very well at all but for a time we did show up regularly on Sundays. Being reminded on Saturday nights by the chaplain that the next day was Sunday and that we needed to practice was really the only way, except taking malaria pills on Wednesdays, that I could keep track of the day of the week. They all ran together otherwise. Days of the week didn’t matter, but the day of the month did, since we all knew how many days we had left to go before we were to go home.

I'm showing Tim deBord how many days I have left before I go home.

My close friends over the years
(plus Steve Butler in a later photo).
L-R Garry Forrest, Tim deBord, and John Elmendorf

One of my habits was to take pictures of sunsets. I figured the more sunsets I saw, the closer I was to going home.

Holloway tower and hooches silhouetted by a monsoon-caused sunset

Some didn’t get to reach that end date though. One day in June, 1968, Don Jacobs violated the basic rule of not flying up a valley. The result was that his airplane rammed into the side of a hill. When word came back that he was missing, a search found his airplane with his body inside. While other Headhunters were killed before and after, Don was the only Headhunter killed while I was there. And the accident could have so easily been avoided. Rest in peace, good friend.

Happier days in the hooch. L-R. Donald Wayne Jacobs (KIA June 1968),
Steve Butler, me, Tim deBord, and Wilson Campbell

Back Home Again

Although I had met Linda in Hawaii for a six-day R&R (rest and relaxation) leave in April 1968, I of course looked forward to returning to the States for good in early October. My orders came through, assigning me to the Army Aviation School at Ft. Stewart again, this time to train helicopter pilots how to fly real airplanes.

I left on the DC-8 “Freedom Bird” to McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington, with refueling stops in Japan and Anchorage, Alaska. I took a commercial flight from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and stopped in Dallas to see my mom and dad on the way to Columbia, SC where I reunited with Linda to resume our lives together. And nowhere along the way did I ever receive any of the negative reaction that many guys did. I’m glad I didn’t because I probably would have taken care of the situation in my own way.

I was, and am, proud of the job I did.

Epilogue

Some time ago during a business trip to Washington, DC, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. It was a very moving experience finding the names of Don Jacobs and others I had known carved into that beautiful and chilling black granite. But a somewhat different and more moving experience came when I casually looked up the last name “Beckwith” on the roster of those whose names are on the Wall. Not being a common name, there are only a few, but the one which jumped out at me was “William A. Beckwith” – my name! He was a Marine from Oregon and was killed in February 1968 when I was there. I can hardly describe the feeling of seeing “me” on the wall.

But what came to me later was the realization of what the effect to the family would have been if my name had actually been on the Wall. No forty-nine years with Linda, no three wonderful sons, no daughters-in-law or granddaughters. No joy or love among us all. Thinking back on the close calls that I know about: a slightly faster swing of the machine gun by the North Vietnamese soldier who fired at my airplane over Laos, the shot fired just a few hundredths of a second sooner at my airplane and just missing me and the engine, or a couple of degrees difference in the settings of the mortars and rockets fired by the Viet Cong into Camp Holloway could easily have put two William A. Beckwiths on the wall.

It’s almost too much to think about.

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To those of you who have hung in there through all the posts, thanks for reading my memories of a defining time in my life.

“Headhunter One-Four. Out.”

Way Too Close

FOB-2 

There were a number areas assigned to Special Forces units in which to operate in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. These missions were highly classified in 1967 and 1968. However, they have since been declassified, and quite a few books have been written about the men and what they did there. I am proud to say that some of the most rewarding times I spent were in support of FOB-2.

Forward Operating Base-2, one of four in Vietnam, was located south of the city of Kontum, which was itself about thirty miles north of Pleiku. FOB-2 was later designated Command and Control Central (CCC), a component of SOG (Studies and Observations Group). Consisting of a fairly large number of Special Forces soldiers, probably a couple of dozen, FOB-2 conducted out-of-country reconnaissance and other missions with Vietnamese Army and other non-Vietnamese mercenary troops. Teams led by Americans would be inserted into the mountains and jungles and would operate there for days, keeping in contact with their headquarters by radio. And that’s where I came in, along with other Bird Dog pilots.

Four Bird Dog pilots and their planes were put under operational control of FOB-2 in December 1967. Garry Forrest and I came from the Headhunters and Chuck Wilson and Jim Strye were assigned from the unit I came over to Vietnam with, the 203^rd Hawkeyes. Our purpose in life was to fly each and every day at such an altitude over the particular team’s AO (area of operation) so as to be able to be able to maintain contact with the team and simultaneously with the headquarters in Kontum. If a team needed assistance or even anything administratively, we were there so that we could forward radio calls over the mountainous terrain since direct radio contact was impossible. And since the ground over which we flew and in which the teams operated was many miles from friendly bases and was extremely hostile territory, all our missions were dual ship.

View of typical terrain we flew over, looking out the left window of my airplane.
The black bar on the right is the strut supporting the left wing.

We were required to provide daylight coverage over the teams so everyone flew daily, two ships at a time, to provide eight hours of coverage. Our airplanes had enough fuel to fly for more than four hours if we managed the amount of fuel the engine burned. To extend our flight time we would normally cut back on the engine power (and airspeed) and retard the mixture, the device that controlled the amount of fuel entering the carburetor, until the engine began to run rough, then advance it until the engine smoothed out.  It took me a couple of times practicing over friendly territory and near an airfield to get comfortable doing that before trying it over the area we had to fly.

While our primary mission was radio relay we sometimes observed other actions. One day while flying over an exposed section of dirt road in southern Laos that was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail network, I saw the road beneath me erupt in a huge explosion, apparently from a bomb dropped by an Air Force fighter-bomber. I was really upset that I had not heard over Air Force control radio about aircraft operating in the area. I later learned that the Air Force would drop bombs with delayed fuses that would detonate up to twenty-four hours later. This would make the roads dangerous to travel since there were no aircraft around when the bombs exploded. I always wondered if the bad guys thought that our little Bird Dogs were responsible.

One time deep into southern Laos, on a day I won’t forget, Chuck Wilson and I were flying in response to an emergency call by a team that had been ambushed by NVA using flamethrowers. Almost all of the team had been killed or wounded. The team leader had said that he and the few survivors were trying to evade capture by the NVA and had set out an emergency identification panel, a four- foot-square of bright orange cloth, but he didn’t know where he was.

In order to receive and transmit calls between the teams and FOB-2, we usually flew about four thousand feet above the ground. I dropped down to a few hundred feet above the ground to try to locate the panel while Chuck remained at altitude to maintain radio contact with Kontum and the emergency extraction helicopters that were on the way. At about the time I saw the panel and called Chuck that I had found it, streams of bright red tracers went by my left wing. Although I had to think back later on what I did and said, I told Chuck that I was taking automatic weapons fire and that I was “wiping out the cockpit” with the controls. This meant that I was making the airplane rock, roll and seem like it is flying ahead but is actually falling off sideways. Whatever I did it worked, because I didn’t take a round.

After I left the immediate area and climbed for altitude we vectored the extraction helicopters to the panel and the accompanying helicopter gunships to the location of the automatic weapons for suppressive fires. As the last helicopter lifted the final survivor up through the trees on a cable that had been lowered to him, something didn’t look right. I realized that he was hanging by one foot, possibly because that was the only part of him that was not burned. He was carried that way, four thousand feet above the ground, to a safe landing in Dak To in Vietnam.

As an afterthought to this time when I almost died over enemy-controlled jungle, I realized that most of us who came over as Bird Dog pilots felt we were invincible. Although we didn’t talk about it openly, the feeling was there. For me, this incident put an end to that thought. And thinking back later on the events of that day, I had a strange but comforting feeling that I was going to be around to go back home.

Even so, this was way too close for me.

Tet

The Vietnamese annually celebrated Tet, the lunar new year. Traditionally they would set off fireworks and celebrate with parties of eating and drinking. Vietnamese soldiers tended to shoot all their ammunition into the air if they had no fireworks. The VC and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had chosen this celebration in late January 1968 to open their well-planned offensives against virtually all US and Vietnamese installations in the country, and Camp Holloway was not exempted. The many out-of-ammunition Vietnamese troops at their bases made this easy.

On the night of January 28, 1968 a huge explosion racked Camp Holloway when Viet Cong sappers infiltrated onto the base and detonated explosives in the ammunition dumps. We had been warned to expect “something” and something really happened. Although there had been sporadic mortar and rocket attacks throughout the three months I had been there, this major attack set things into motion. Before the dust settled from the giant explosions, we were running to our bunkers for protection from whatever was to come next. The Tet Offensive, as the next few months were called, caused the well known political reverberations in the States because high ranking military and civilian officials had been saying the war had been going well.

There was a standing procedure that in case the perimeter of the airfield was breached by the enemy, a green star cluster (a flare, like a skyrocket) would be fired and anyone moving around outside was subject to being shot. One night a firefight between our airfield security forces and the bad guys erupted outside the main gate, and before we could reach our underground bunkers a green star cluster was fired. A group of us jumped into the trash dump outside the hooches, a concrete walled area about fifteen feet square and two feet high. There I was again, defending myself against a ground attack. This time, however, I had a steel helmet, flak jacket, and two hundred rounds of ammo for my weapon and was in the company of a dozen or so other scared pilots similarly equipped and armed.

Nothing moved for us to shoot at over the next few hours, and close to daylight an Air Force “Spooky” gunship, an AC-47, a twin-engine transport airplane modified with three mini-guns that could fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute each, circled above the action at the main gate and put an end to the attack.

This early morning picture shows the Holloway control tower lit up by
 parachute flares dropped by an Air Force AC-47 "Spooky" gunship as it is
 circling and firing at NVA and VC troops attacking the main gate of the
airfield. The picture is blurry because it is a time exposure and I'm holding
the camera in my hands.

 The next morning we were in the air early. There were reports of NVA troops holed up in a particular group of buildings on the outskirts of Holloway called “Sin City”. These hovels were painted garish colors (red, green, yellow, etc.) and were allegedly the business offices of prostitutes and drug dealers. This time we were able to be the offensive force protecting the airfield since the attack helicopter companies were off flying in support of US and Vietnamese troops engaged with the enemy.

 Each aircraft would take off loaded with high explosive rockets and climb to about 1500 feet altitude. Stan Irvin was orbiting in his airplane above the group of Bird Dogs that were flying basically in an elongated traffic pattern around the airfield. Acting as an aerial air traffic controller, he directed the aircraft to whichever house he observed ground fire coming from (“One Four, hit the red house between the two yellows”). We would expend our rockets, continue in the pattern to land, re-arm and take off again until that threat was eliminated.

(Just a quick note on our protection. Beginning with Tet we began to receive ground fire on a regular basis. Not only were our Bird Dogs unarmed until we could add modifications, they were also un-armored. Helicopter pilots sat in armored seats and their crewmembers wore armored vests, logically because they would often be subjected to heavy ground fire dropping off and picking up troops. We, like soldiers on the ground, only had flak vests, made of tightly woven nylon designed for upper torso protection from shrapnel. We also wore flight helmets, the protective values of which were doubtful.  Once again, reacting to situations we wanted to change, we scrounged sections of helicopter pilots’ armor plated seats and placed them under our canvas seats. The back-pack-style parachutes carried in the airplanes made sitting more comfortable and might have slowed down bullets. However, because of the altitudes we flew there were no times when we could have used them for their intended purpose.)

Pleiku City didn’t suffer the devastating attacks that major cities in Vietnam did (Saigon, Da Nang, etc.) but the military installations around Pleiku, such as Camp Holloway, Pleiku Air Force Base, and the Fourth Infantry Division base camp at Dragon Mountain got hit often. Mortar and rocket attacks occurred each night over the next few weeks.  Needless to say we headed for the underground bunkers early each night until the threats of attacks were over. We got hammered a couple of times and the following pictures show the results of some of those attacks. Fortunately no Headhunter was injured or killed in any rocket or mortar attack while I was there.

The attack started with mortars falling on the airfield. One round caused this
crater in the road while we were safely inside an adjacent sandbag-protected
bunker. No one was hurt but the damaged jeeps and trailer (grill blown off,
 flattened tires and holes in the windshields) can be seen.

One of the hooches took a direct hit from a mortar round when the occupants
were in a bunker.

This is the interior of the hooch hit by the mortar round. Note the hole in the roof
and shrapnel holes that riddle the ceiling and walls. The large slash in the wall on
the right was caused by the fuse on the nose of the round. I forget who lived in
the room but he was extremely upset - his new stereo system was the only casualty.

Holloway wasn't the only Headhunter location attacked. The Second Platoon
operations and adjacent ammo storage rooms at the airfield at Kontum also took
direct mortar round hits.