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.