Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (22 page)

After a few seconds, the HAC called, “Coming left,” over the ICS. In the back, the crew chief looked out into the blackness and replied, “Clear left.”

The HAC rolled the Phrog into a left hand, 15 degrees of bank standard rate turn. I kept my eyes on the flight instruments and called, “Flight instruments look good; twenty degrees to go.”

The HAC lead the roll-out by ten degrees and smoothly rolled out on heading, 180 degrees opposite the heading of the ship. The heading bug was now at the 6 o’clock position on the AHRS. The airspeed stayed pretty close to the 80 knots traffic pattern speed we should be holding. Outside, straight ahead and to the right, there was nothing except blackness. I took a look to the right and could dimly see the red glow of the ship’s deck and the position lights on the superstructure.

In a few seconds the HAC transmitted, “tower, 05 is abeam, right seat.” When he called “right seat,” the tower passed the word to the deck crew and the LSE moved to position himself so that the pilot in the right seat would have the best view of his lighted wands as the aircraft approached the flight deck.

“Roger, 05. Cleared Spot 4. Wind is port 20 at 15,” the tower replied.

“Alt hold off, coming left,” the HAC called. “Alt hold is off,” I replied as I moved the switch on the center console back. I kept my eyes glued to the instruments as the HAC rolled the aircraft into a standard rate turn of 15 degrees of bank giving us three degrees of heading change per second to the left. He lowered the collective slightly to start us down the 250 feet we had to lose before landing. A fixed-wing carrier pilot told me once that he thought it was insane to do a descending turn from 300 feet at night, but that is the way it’s done in helicopters. Concentrate on smooth, slow, carefulness and don’t think about the fact that you are seconds from water impact if you screw up.

Port winds at 15 knots meant that the combination of the ship’s for-ward speed and existing wind had created a wind that was 15 degrees off the bow of the ship and would be blowing us toward the ship’s superstructure. to keep from hitting the steel wall with our rotors, we would have to get the airspeed down and carefully watch our closure rate to the ship’s deck to make sure it was under control and we were not coming too fast. Sometimes if you are too fast, you can do a side flare to lose the speed, but not at night. You might lose sight of the ship if you flare too much.

I called the airspeed and altitude as we came down the glide slope, watching for high rates of descent, “60 knots 200 feet, 50 knots 150 feet…” I moved my eyes from the red-lighted dash to the windshield. The dim red patch in the blackness was the ship, coming into view.

“Go visual,”

I called. The HAC looked up from his instruments and called, “Deck in sight.” It was still more a red glow in the darkness than the distinct lights of a flight deck.

As we closed the remaining distance, the deck seemed to get much bigger than that first dull red glow but still, it remained small compared to the darkness all around. But we did not look at the darkness, we only looked at the red glow. The lighted wands of the LSE came into view as he raised them above his head to show us where he was.

“75 feet, closure looks good,” I called.

From the back, the crew chief called, “Over the deck,” as we crossed the ship’s rail and life rafts on the port side at about 60 feet above the water and 10 feet above the deck.

Watching the wands and judging his position by the dim line of lights built into the flight deck, the HAC stabilized the helicopter, more or less, in a hover over the spot. Although the controls did not appear to move very much, the HAC was working extremely hard. Like always, he was trying to anticipate the movements of the helicopter and counter them before they happened, a process made all the harder by the darkness, wind, and tension of night boat flying. In these moments, you grip the stick so hard your arm aches afterward as you try once again to squeeze the “black stuff out of the plastic” of the cyclic.

As the HAC lowered the collective to put us down, I could see the LSE giving “body english,” trying to will our wheels onto the three painted spots. We hit hard, but well within the design limits of the aircraft, as nor-mal a landing as any, especially at night. If you hit too hard, say above 3.5 gee, and the interior “crash” lights come on automatically, there isn’t a sign that you have damaged anything, but it’s embarrassing nonetheless.

Because we were doing CQ’s, the blue shirts did not bring out the chains to tie us down to the deck. The LSE kept his wands crossed and held low, indicating we were to remain on deck until the tower cleared us. The HAC pushed the collective all the way down, past the normal position to hold the aircraft more firmly on the deck. He turned to me and said, “ASE and SAS off. You’ve got it.”

After turning off the automatic control systems, I took the controls, not sure I was ready to fly but not really having a choice. I knew, as I cleared the deck, the blackness would return but I would not see it, could not see it. All I would see would be the red glow of the instruments in front of me as I concentrated: attitude-altitude-airspeed-heading, attitude-altitude-airspeed-heading; climb, climb to 300 feet; altitude hold on, turn left, roll out, hold heading-hold speed.

“05, We’re going to put you in the carrier-controlled approach (CCA—the afloat version of a GCA radar approach) pattern for a few turns,” tower called.

“Roger,” I replied. They must be going to turn the ship or maneuver somehow. I would have time to get used to night flying before I had to land. After takeoff, we would climb into the marshall pattern, one of the three holding patterns oriented around the ship, and hold therere until they brought us around for a carrier radar-controlled approach, a CCA, up the stern.

The LSE held one wand up in a “thumbs up” signal. I asked for three on and the HAC reached over and turned on the ASE, SAS, and speed trim auto. “three on,” he replied. From the back the crew chief called, “All set in the back.”

The LSE’s other wand came on and holding them out to the sides, he raised them in an “up” motion. Holding the stick just slightly back, I lifted the collective up and brought the helicopter into a hover, about ten feet over the deck. The LSE gave a hold sign as he looked toward the bow to make sure there was no other aircraft that we could collide with, and then he gave us the launch signal, pointing his wand off into the darkness.

“Gauges good, cleared to go,” the HAC announced.

I applied more power and moved the stick to left. The aircraft started up and sideward at the same time. As we cleared the deck edge, I took out the sideward movement and applied a little forward stick to get us into forward flight. I had put in enough power to get the aircraft rapidly climbing so by the time we reached the end of the deck, we were through 100 feet and our speed was up to 50 knots; attitude-altitude-airspeed-heading. As we approached the bow, the lights of the deck were gone and all was blackness again.

The HAC now made the calls that I made on the first trip around, air-speed, altitude, and so on, but this time the alt hold did not come on when we passed 300 feet. We continued to climb to “Angels one point five,” 1500 feet the altitude for the CCA pattern.

“05, switch Purple,” the tower called.

“05, switching.”

“Switch Purple,” I told the HAC. He already had his hand on the radio switch to change us to the frequency of Center, the ship’s air traffic control. The tone indicating that the radio had been changed to the new frequency sounded as he withdrew his hand.

“Up Purple,” he said.

Still concentrating on keeping the helicopter at 80 knots airspeed and in the climb, I depressed the ICS to the transmit position and said, “Center 05.”

“05, Center. Say state and souls,” Center replied.

“Center, 05 is one point zero to splash, three souls on board.”

“05, Center. Climb Angels two point zero and proceed to marshall three. Report level.”

“Center, 05. Roger,” I replied.

“Passing 1000, everything looks good,” the HAC called.

Center was moving us around to the holding pattern on the starboard side of the ship, a “marshall,” in this case marshall One in Navy speak. The idea was to sequence us into the pattern so that we would not interfere with the other traffic.

I could feel vertigo building in me as I concentrated on the flight instruments—vertigo and a mild sense of panic. It was a sense of being completely disconnected from reality and dizzy at the same time. I concentrated as hard as I could on the gauges, my eyes moving from altitude to airspeed to rate of climb to attitude to altitude and around again. A side glance at the engine, transmission, and hydraulic gauges to see they were all steady, no impending failures of critical systems, and then back to the flight instruments—attitude-altitude-airspeed heading-attitude-altitude-airspeed-heading.

The voice of the controller called for us to go to marshall two and I moved the helicopter around the TACAN’s line to the new holding point: attitude-altitude-airspeed heading. The vertigo faded as I concentrated on attitude-altitude-airspeed heading. In a few minutes we were in position and we vectored into position for a CCA: attitude-altitude-airspeed-heading. On course, on glide path, on course, on glide path—look up, there is the red glow of the deck lights in the blackness and the yellow wands of the LSE. With a bump, we land on the spot after a wobbly hover, then back up again to complete another five landings. The vertigo is gone. Finally, after another 30 minutes in the air and the required landings, we get the signal for chocks and chains and then the shutdown signal, the wand across the LSE’s throat.

Across the deck and back into the red lights of the ready room. No racing mind now, just a feeling of fatigue and weak legs. I am very, very tired. After the flight’s debrief, I walk to my room through the darkened ship. my flight gear is much heavier than it was on the way to the launch. On my bunk is a small brown paper bag, two illegal airline-sized nips of brandy, compliments of our flight surgeon. Rules or no rules, he under-stands—understands the absolute drain of tonight’s flight and the need for the pilots to spool down.

After finishing the second little bottle, I lay back on the bunk in the glow of the red dark adaptation lights above my rack, listening to the sounds of the ship and thinking, “luck and superstition, that’s all that lets us cheat death one more time…”

19

WIRES

GREECE ■ AUGUST 1979

Luck and superstition are not always enough; even if you are counting on them, you cannot ever get careless and expect to live to be an old aviator …

T
he northeastern part of Greece is mountainous, like much of the country, and here too, the mountains run down into the sea. Some of them run up to nearly 7,000 feet. The town to the northwest of our operating area had once been called Amphipolis, very appropriate for our amphibious exercise. As the Landing Force for the Sixth Fleet (LF6F), we had been sailing around the Mediterranean Sea for five months, doing those same things, at the same place, that military men have done since the time of the Greeks and Romans, minus all the carnage and pillage of those days. Now we were spending five days puttering around a very small area of Greece trying to keep our skills sharp, just in case we might be needed somewhere.

The practice assault had gone well: half by surface and half by air, plus follow-on training. As the squadron WTI, I had laid out terrain Flying (TERF) routes that the pilots had been flying for four days. TERF was relatively new in 1978. It was an attempt to take advantage of the helicopter’s ability to fly low and out of sight of the enemy; and to legalize something we had always done anyway. modern weapons had made the statement, “If it can be seen, it will be killed,” absolutely true. Shoulder-fired missiles and accurate rapid-fire machine guns were in the hands of virtually everyone now, and the odds of surviving against a prepared enemy were now even lower than they had been in Vietnam.

To keep TERF under control, the Marine Corps had broken it down into three varieties: low-level flight at a constant altitude on the barometric altimeter (generally 150 feet or below) and a constant airspeed; contour-flight at a constant radar altitude with varying airspeed; and nap-of-the-earth (NOE), flight that varied altitude from the surface to fifty feet, and airspeed from a hover to maximum allowable.

All the pilots in the squadron (and probably all pilots in the marine Corps and Army) had flown at these low levels at one time or another, but most of it was of the illegal kind, “flathatting” in Navy terms. But to survive on the modern battlefield, they would have to really learn how to fly close to the earth without “tying the record for low flying,” i.e. actually hitting the ground. that record cannot be broken, but pilots keep on trying; if they could, they would be easy targets for missiles and modern high-speed gun systems.

Generally we only flew NOE in training on military reservations or other areas such as North Carolina’s Pocosin Swamps where we could be sure we would not create a nuisance and/or scare the hell out of people, particularly since there weren’t any people in those areas. But now, since we would be flying over civilian territory in a foreign country, we would only fly contour here. I had carefully planned and flown each route, slowly, both backwards and forwards, noting the hazards that they presented. In designing low level flying routes, masts, such as radio or television towers, are always a problem; the chief hazard has always been telephone and electric wires. High tension lines are the worst, although even a small telephone line can be fatal to an aircraft. Here in Greece, one set of high tension lines had me particularly worried, a huge set of power lines that crossed a river several miles to the west of our base camp. They came down off a mountain and crossed a river at about 150 feet above the surface of the river, the same altitude that we flew when we flew contour flight. I highlighted this set on the big area map in the operations tent and had the ODO brief each launch on the danger they presented. All pilots were to mark them on their maps too.

We had been there for three days, flying and training as Marines always do. In two more days, we would load all our gear into the helicopters and then be back on the ship. We would then depart for our last port to de-snail, i.e., wash down anything such as agricultural pests trying to hitchhike back to the states, before we headed west across the Atlantic to North Carolina and home. Our six months as LF6F was all but over.

Our base camp was near a small beach with the usual dust and sand, but it was pleasant to be off the ship and living in a tent in the cool Greek spring weather. In the afternoon, a Greek man would bring a bicycle loaded with ice cream in coolers to our base camp. We would buy his wares and eat them looking out at the sea or the mountains. Wine would have been nice, but that was beyond reach this time, bosses looking on and all that.

When we flew, it was nice, too, also pleasant in the Greek spring weather. We saw the remains of ancient Greek temples and cities here and there, columns still standing. And we saw more recent ruins, the abandoned villages that had been left when the people moved to the city or immigrated, possibly to the United States. But more than that, we saw the beauty of the countryside. We saw mountains 6,000 feet high with sheep grazing at the top and small bays, where the water was clear blue as it broke against the rocks. Crossing the top of one of those 6,000 footers at 50 feet above the ground, lower than I should have been, I came face to face with a man herding sheep from horseback. Hard to say who was more surprised when his horse reared as my Phrog rushed past, the cowboy or me? When I last saw him, his horse was rearing and he was holding on, just.

On that third day, I had just come back from my final morning TERF flight and all was right in the world. My lieutenant student had done well, staying more or less on the route I had laid out during the navigation portion of the flight, certainly within standards. When it was his turn to fly while I navigated, he had done well, too. Done well in that he had not scared the living shit out of me even once as he wove in and around our flight path to my called out directions and more or less, kept us at the correct altitude. I signed the bird off as OK, no major gripes with any of the systems, and picked up a “C rat” box for lunch out of the carton in the Ops tent. I walked over to the BOQ tent, sat on a cot and started to open the box, joking as always with the other pilots about student inadequacies, when the operations duty officer (ODO, pronounced OH-doe) came running in, red-faced and excited. to no one in particular, though aimed at the CO sitting on a cot about five feet from me, he said, “A grunt unit just called in and said they saw a helo go down. I lost com with them before they could tell me what kind of helo it was and where they saw it go down. I’ve been calling and calling but they are not answering”

Four of us including the CO left our lunches and ran with the ODO back to the Ops tent. The flight status board showed that we only had two birds still out after I had returned from my training flight, a Snake and a Phrog. The ODO was on the radio immediately trying to contact them. Just as one of the aircraft replied, we saw the CH-46 in the far distance, near the mountains.

As the ODO began explaining to the airborne CH-46F what the grunts had passed over the radio, I turned to the CO. “Sir, I just brought my bird back. It’s up and fueled. I can tear up the yellow sheet I just filled out and be back in the air in five minutes.”

“OK,” he replied, “Do it, but don’t takeoff until I’m on board.”

I turned and ran for the CH-46F I had just left. My copilot was right behind me and as we covered the short distance, I was yelling for my crew chief to close the panels he was starting to open in preparation for doing a turn-around inspection for the next aircrew. I told my copilot to get in the back and help the crew close panels or anything else that needed doing. I would start the aircraft by myself and hold the left seat open for the CO. In a couple minutes, I had the aircraft turning and burning, ready to take-off as soon as the CO strapped into the left seat. I talked to the ODO and the other CH-46F on squadron common Fm frequency to develop a quick search plan. We agreed to split the area to search for the downed bird; he would take the eastern part of the training area and I would take the western part. As I waited for the CO, the other CH-46F was already on his way to his agreed upon search area.

Even though both the airborne CH-46F and the ODO called over and over again on the fox mike, no word was heard from the Cobra or the grunts who had made the first call.

I could still see the other CH-46 in the distance as the CO climbed into the left seat. As he was finishing strapping in, the other 46 called us.

“Found the site. The grunts are with the aircraft now. I’ll orbit over-head the crash. Don’t hurry getting here,” he said.

With those words we, the crew of my helicopter and the ODO back at the base, knew it was beyond serious. No pilot would orbit the crash site of one of his squadron mates unless there was no point in landing. The CO just looked at me from the left seat as I completed the takeoff checklist without his help and after an “All set aft” from my crew chief, pulled in power to climb out of our base camp LZ. Turning toward the west and the orbiting CH-46F, I did hurry, even if the other pilot had told me not to. I couldn’t go slowly, my hands would not let me. As if by themselves, the right one pushed the stick forward and the left pulled up the collective. I could see even on takeoff that the other aircraft was orbiting the power lines over the river I had worried about.

In five minutes we were there, closing at 130 plus knots airspeed. From 500 feet above the ground and several miles away, I could see what had happened. The top-most power line was down where the lines crossed the river, one end dangling in the water and the other still attached to its tower on each side.

“Go on back to base and refuel. Stand by on the ground and I’ll call if I want you back here,” the CO called over the radio to the other Phrog.

As the other aircraft pulled away, I circled the crash site on a high reconnaissance to pick out a landing spot before beginning an approach. I learned long ago at Fort Wolters how to land in unfamiliar LZS. The proper procedure for landing in uncleared sites is first to do a high recon to get an overview of the area and potential obstacles, followed by a low recon to a wave off, to see if there is anything you missed from higher above. After that, you did a full approach to landing. I was not going to shortcut the procedure, not this time.

From the high recon, 500 feet above the site, I could see below me what remained of the Cobra. The main portion of the fuselage was in the middle of the river. Neither the tail nor the rotor blades was visible. The water looked about chest deep, judging from all the men splashing in it around the wreckage. Apparently they were trying to get the pilots out. Picking a clear spot well back from the crash site, I landed on the western bank with my aircraft facing the wreckage in the river. As our wheels touched, the CO was unstrapping, and as I lowered the collective, he was on his way out of the cockpit. through the chin bubble, I could see a piece of green metal, oblong and about six inches long, probably a part of the Cobra’s skin, under us. I thought to myself that for it to be this far from the wreckage, he must have really been traveling fast when he hit the wire. Looking back through the companionway, I waved my copilot into the seat the CO had just vacated.

This one was more difficult to handle than most crashes. The senior pilot on-board the crash aircraft, a captain, was not a Cobra pilot. He was a CH-MKD pilot taking a “dollar ride” in a Cobra, a tourist on that soft spring Greek day.

One year before, in March IQOP, the captain had been copilot on a CH-53D during another exercise, this one in Spain, again on an LFNF. As it happened, the CH-53D’s mission that spring Spanish afternoon had been to pick me and two other Marines up to take us out for an “escape and evasion” (E&E) training mission.

For training purposes, our CH-46F had been “shot down” over hostile territory and we were escaping back to friendly lines. The training was not really for us but for the Navy SEALs (a group of uniquely trained and equipped Navy special operations personnel who operate from, around and in maritime areas—Sea, Air, and Land) who would be picking us up and bringing us back to the ship by rubber boat in the dark. We would find our way to a rendezvous point, leave a pile of rocks stacked in a certain manner for the SEALs to find. They would come to us and basically take us prisoner. After asking a series of questions, taken from our files to make sure we were who we were supposed to be, they would lead us to the boats and take us back out to our ship. This exercise would be quite different from when I was actually shot down in enemy territory in 1971. That time, my crew and I sat behind the aircraft’s M60D machine guns until a Huey came to get us.

Right after breakfast, we caught a helicopter from the ship to the squadron’s base camp LZ down in a valley on the edge of the exercise operations area. We spent the morning discussing what we were going to do as we worked our way across the five or so miles of Spanish desert to the pickup zone (PZ). The mission was supposed to start at IMHH hours but by IKHH hours I was bored with just sitting in the LZ and was ready to get started. The SEAL that was our lane grader (evaluator) was bored too and readily agreed that we might as well get started, so instead of waiting for the CH-53D that was going to fly us out to the “crash” site, I got on the ODO’s fox mike and called down a passing CH-46F that was only too willing to take us the ten miles to where we would start.

We arrived on a dusty Spanish hilltop in short order and ran from the aircraft to begin our “escape.” It was a beautiful, warm, but not hot, spring afternoon. We were feeling good and playing the game as best we could, that is with a little humor thrown in. Since we were close to where the “Spaghetti Westerns” had been filmed, we decided to use the theme from the movie,
the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
as a challenge and response call—the challenge, “Doddle-duddle-do,” the response “Dah-Do-Do.” We did our best to sneak across the Spanish desert but after only about KH minutes, as we rounded a hillside, a woman came out of a house just below us. She had a bag over her shoulder and started walking toward a tied-up mule in front of her adobe house. She must have seen us, because though she did not look directly at the armed, uniformed men trying to hide in the thin brush on the hillside above her, she froze for a minute. Then, moving casually, oh, so casually, she strolled over to the mule, untied it and climbed nimbly into the saddle. As soon as she was settled in, she spurred that mule into what passes for a mule gallop and disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust. Even the SEAL joined us as we all just sat down on the dusty hillside, convulsed with laughter.