“We’ve got to get you ready to fly in-country on the shuttle,” Lieutenant Colonel Craig said to me. “I’ve put you on the local schedule to practice some assault landings and air drops.”
These maneuvers were practiced at the CCK auxiliary field, twenty miles south of the main field. Colonel Craig, the squadron commander and an experienced instructor pilot, was checking me out himself. We took off at nine in the morning on a bright, sunshiny day. After turning left, we approached from the west, maintaining 1500 feet of altitude, crossing over the rice fields that covered the western plains of Taiwan. The visibility was reduced by the sea haze typical of the area; the field at CCK was about 15 miles east of the Formosa Strait.
I was in the left seat. Colonel Craig, in the right seat, suggested I make a normal landing first before attempting my first assault landing. We flew straight over the runway at 1500 feet. As we passed over the far end, I turned the aircraft to the left to enter the downwind leg. “Gear down,” I said. Craig moved the handle, located in front of him, firmly down.
“Flaps fifty,” I said. Craig placed his left hand on the flap lever, located to his left, and moved it to the rear. The lowering flaps caused the aircraft to lift slightly and slow; I adjusted for the changes in aircraft attitude with the trim button on the top left-hand portion of the pilot’s yoke. The approach end of the runway began to slip under my left wing, and I made another 90-degree turn to the left to place us on base leg, simultaneously reducing power and easing the nose forward to begin my descent.
I turned to final, rolling out about a half mile from the end of the runway, 500 feet above the ground. “Full flaps,” I called, and Craig lowered the flaps to the full down position. Again the aircraft lifted and then slowed, and I adjusted the elevator trim so the aircraft felt reasonably light on the controls. “Not too bad,” Craig commented. “But in some of the smaller fields in Vietnam you won’t want such a wide pattern.” I expressed some surprise to myself, having flown what I thought was a pretty tight pattern, especially for a first landing at a field I hadn’t seen before. But aloud I said nothing.
I came in over the end of the runway, pulled the throttles back to the flight idle position and flared slightly, pulling the yoke gradually back and feeding in nose up trim with my left thumb. The aircraft settled in for a relatively smooth landing. When the weight of the aircraft was clearly on the main gear, I lifted the throttles over the stop and into the detent and waited for the engineer to announce “clear to reverse.”
It was the flight engineer’s job to observe the engine torquemeters for appropriate indications that the blades of all four engines had gone into the reverse pitch range. If one of them hadn’t, then instead of producing reverse thrust when I pulled the throttles into the reverse thrust range, the uncooperative propeller would produce forward thrust, resulting in an extremely dangerous asymmetrical thrust situation that would produce severe controllability problems at a crucial moment during the landing sequence. But the props functioned properly, and I pulled all four throttles to the full reverse stop. The aircraft slowed noticeably.
I maintained directional control with the yoke and then, after the airspeed slowed to a point that I could no longer hold the nose of the aircraft up, I said, “Your yoke.” I released the yoke, which I had been holding all the while in my left hand, and reached for the nose wheel steering. Colonel Craig immediately grabbed the yoke to prevent it from slamming forward or thrashing about. I applied the brakes, and the aircraft slowed to a stop.
“Okay,” Colonel Craig said. “Taxi it around for takeoff and we’ll do some assault landings, unless you want to make another landing?”
“No,” I said. I doubted I could make any better landing than the one I had just made.
“That landing wasn’t too bad. But you’ll need to speed things up when you do an assault landing, especially at the moment of touchdown. Your movements have to be accomplished much more quickly and smoothly.” We taxied back to the end of the runway.
I thought that I had made a good landing, moving the aircraft controls with better than average swiftness. I wasn’t sure that I could demonstrate a much more aggressive, more accurate approach and landing than the one I had just made. I checked the flaps, held the brakes, ran the engines up, then released the brakes. With no load, we moved forward quickly and were soon airborne. “We’ll leave the flaps and gear down,” I said. On downwind, I glanced down at the runway, which was passing rapidly out of sight under my left wing. I reduced throttles, turned base, started my descent, and, when the time seemed right, began a turn to final approach. So far so good.
“Too high,” Craig said. “Remember, you’re aiming for the end of the runway. That means right where the runway marking begins, not fifty or one hundred feet farther along.”
Captain David K. Vaughan at Tuy Hoa, South Vietnam, December 1967. Major Chick McWilliams seated on ramp in background.
In the States I never aimed for the exact end of the runway. But I wasn’t in the States any longer. I pushed the nose over. Now I was aiming for the end of the runway, but something didn’t feel right. Airspeed. Too high. I retarded the throttles abruptly. I should have pulled the throttles back at the same time I pushed the nose over.
“Flaps?” Craig asked.
“Full flaps,” I said. Damn. Things were going to hell in a handbasket. As the flaps extended, the nose of the aircraft rose slightly. The end of the runway disappeared under the nose of the aircraft. Trim. Nose down. Now nose up. Power off, throttles to idle.
“Keep your wings level.”
Lift the left wing—how did that happen? Here comes the runway. Flare! Pull back on the yoke! Too late. I had an awful feeling of not really controlling the aircraft at the moment of contact with the runway. I felt as if I was aiming the aircraft at the runway and flying into it. I didn’t feel as if I had much to do with the outcome of events.
The aircraft slammed into the runway with a great rattle of noise and dust. “Jesus Christ!” I heard somebody say. It might even have been me.
With my right hand, I pulled the throttles back to the stop, then over and into the detent, forcing myself to wait until the engineer called out “cleared to reverse.” Then I pulled them back to the limit of their travel in reverse range. Instantaneously the aircraft began to slow. I remembered I needed to use brakes also, and applied them much too heavily, pushing forward with the balls of my feet on the top part of the rudder pedals. The aircraft slowed in a series of jerks, as I pumped the brakes erratically.
“Nose wheel steering,” called Craig. I released the yoke and grabbed the nose wheel steering with my left hand. The aircraft was moving more or less in a straight line down the runway, but the airspeed had long since dropped below the speed at which the ailerons were effective. The aircraft slowed almost to a stop, and I moved the throttles back into the forward pitch range. Finally the aircraft came to a stop. We were well past the midpoint of the runway. I wasn’t sure how much runway I had used up, but I knew it was more than I should have.
Colonel Craig reached down and moved the flap lever from full flaps to half flaps. “Let’s taxi around and try it again. Everybody okay in the back?” The navigator, engineer, and loadmaster appeared to have survived the impact, and not only that, were willing to ride through another one. Good sports. I imagined they had seen worse landings, but I wasn’t about to ask.
We tried three more assault landings, and by the time I was through I began to feel a little more comfortable with my ability to manipulate the aircraft. At least I was getting the aircraft stopped near the midfield mark. “Okay,” Craig said finally. “Let’s call it a day.” We headed back to CCK.
We shut the aircraft down and walked into the ops building. Colonel Craig talked to me briefly. “How many assault landings have you made?” he asked.
“Probably two or three, when I checked into the 347th, in February or March, and then another three or four, back in October.”
“So you’ve done maybe six in the past year?”
“About that.”
“Mmm. Well, you’ll do a lot more before you’re through with your tour here. Making a successful assault landing is probably the most important maneuver you can do while you’re flying in-country. If you can’t do it well, some people might get hurt and some airplanes might get bent. You need to practice some more, to get some more experience, before you’re fully qualified.”
“Our pilots are classified according to the length of runway they’re capable of landing on. They’re listed as normal, assault, or short-stop qualified. Normal qualified means you are able to land on longer runways, 3500 feet in length or greater. Assault qualified means you can land on runways as short as 2900 feet. Short-stop qualified means you can land on runways as short as 2200 feet. Many of the runways in-country are 3500 feet long or longer. But some of them are in the 2000 to 3000 foot range, and those are ones you’ve got to be able to land safely on. Right now you’re in the normal category, and if you want to fly in-country you need to be at least assault qualified. So you’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“You’re scheduled for some air drop practice tomorrow,” he continued, “and I recommend you do a couple of assault landings at the end of the mission. You remember the old saying about the three most useless things to a pilot? The airspeed you used to have, the altitude above you, the runway behind you? Well, it’s true about the runway behind you when you shoot an assault landing—always aim to land at the exact end of the runway. Otherwise you won’t make it into, or out of, some of the small fields you’ll encounter in Vietnam.” He turned and walked into his office.
I stood in the hall near his door, remembering my reactions when I had made my first assault landings back at Dyess. I hadn’t said anything to Colonel Craig about how bad my landings had been then. I had never gotten used to the idea that this large, four-engine aircraft was supposed to slam onto the runway like some kind of Navy aircraft trying to catch a hook on a carrier deck. The idea of plumping this high-wing cargo aircraft onto a dirt strip and making a panic stop was foreign to everything I had learned in my previous flying experience. Landing this relatively large aircraft in a relatively short distance was one of the most bizarre departures from normalcy I had ever encountered. I hadn’t gotten used to it at Dyess, and I certainly wasn’t used to it here. I heaved a deep sigh. How would I ever be able to execute such an unusual and demanding maneuver?
I needed some diversion. I asked some crew members lounging against the operations counter, “What’s the easiest way to get into Taichung?”
“You haven’t been in yet?” one of them asked, eyebrows raised. “Well, your indoctrination isn’t complete until you’ve been to town,” another one said. He was one of the navigators in the squadron. “Tell you what, I feel like going into town myself. If you want company, we can go together.”
Just before ten o’clock, dressed in slacks, short-sleeved shirt, and a light jacket, I walked down the road to the main gate. My navigator was waiting. “Ready?” he asked. I guessed I was.
We walked past the entrance gate. The first in a string of small red cars moved towards us. “It’s about seven miles into town,” my friend explained. “The taxi is the best way in. Some of the support troops buy bicycles or motorcycles for transportation, but for us flying troops, it’s not worth the expense. We’re just not here that much.” We got in the back seat and closed the doors.
The Taiwanese driver didn’t ask “Where to?” but took off in a hurry. Once again I was venturing into new territory in the dark. The road into Taichung was paved, not especially well lit, and narrow. We passed through one small community, or at least I judged it was that because I could see one or two stores and one or two street lights. Our speed, which seemed pretty rapid for such a small vehicle on such a small road, did not decrease.
Eventually, we saw more street lights and then businesses and houses, which I assumed were part of the city of Taichung. The town looked prosperous, though it seemed unusually dark. The combination of faint florescent lights, sparse street lights, and weak display lights from the shop windows made the crowded city streets seem mysterious, unsafe. The special aroma of the city came in through the cab window as well, the sweet-sour smell of Chinese cooking.
“Since you’re new here, I’ll show you the main attractions,” my guide volunteered. Our first stop was a large nightclub on the north side of town. It featured a live band and was crowded with people dancing, Taiwanese women and American and Taiwanese men. We had a drink at the bar. While we were sitting there, I noticed that we were being given the visual once-over by a group of women sitting at a nearby table.
Two girls walked up to us. “Hi GI. You buy us drink?”
My escort said, “No thanks. Not this time, sweetheart. I’m just showing my friend around. We’re going to be leaving soon. But tell us your names in case we decide to come back.”
“My name is Mary,” said one.
“My name Sally,” the other one said. “Come back soon, GI.” They smiled and walked away.
The nav saw my look. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Their names,” I said. “Not what I expected.”
“Oh, they all adopt American names. It’s easier for us to talk to them. We have trouble saying and remembering their Chinese names. When you’re talking to a woman named Mary, it seems a little less like you’re a thousand miles from home sitting in a dark bar trying to forget the pressures of the job.”
“One other thing you need to know,” he said. “When you buy a girl a drink, she drinks iced tea. The bar profits from the drinks we buy the girls; iced tea is a lot cheaper than whiskey or beer. The girls stay sober, and the bar makes money. But some guys get sore if they don’t know about the system.”
Outside, my navigator escort gave the taxi driver instructions. As we headed into the central part of the city, he explained: “Each of the squadrons has its own watering hole. The place we just left, a lot of the guys from the 50th hang out there.”
The taxi pulled up in front of another bar. I thought we were getting out, but the nav held my arm. “It’s getting late. Let’s go over to the 345th hangout. But in case you ever want to know, this is where the 776th guys like to come.” He gave the taxi driver more instructions, and we headed further into town.
“Do the members from the other squadrons get upset if you go into their bar?” I asked.
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s just that the guys on the crews tend to party together when we’re in town. And there’s never that many of us around. Seems like we’re always on the road.”
The taxi driver drove up a street leading away from the train station. In the middle of the block on the right-hand side was a small, nondescript building. In neon lights over the door was a sign that said CHINA NIGHTS. “This is the 345th’s unofficial club,” said my escort.
We went through the door. There was a bar along the left rear wall, some booths along the right wall, and a few chairs and tables in front. There was a wooden dance floor and some American music was playing. Two or three long florescent lights were suspended from the ceiling at the front and over the bar. In the back booths, several women were sitting and talking, a few smoking cigarettes. There were one or two other men in the bar, which otherwise seemed deserted, at least compared to the last place we had been. The navigator and I sat in a booth towards the front.
“Do you have a regular girl here?” I asked.
“Yes. She would have come over already, but she’s waiting until they decide who’s going to come with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“To see who drew your lucky number.”
Even as he was speaking, I saw two girls detach themselves from the group and walk slowly but carefully over. One was taller than the other. “You want company?” the shorter one asked. But she wasn’t looking at me. My companion grinned broadly and patted the seat beside him. “Sure,” he said, sliding down the padded seat toward the wall.
I looked up at the other girl. She was tall, one of the tallest girls I had seen in Taiwan. Not that I had seen that many. “Hi,” I said, sliding over to make room.
The tall one sat down beside me. She was exotically attractive in a long silk dress, her dark hair piled up on her head to accentuate her height, and she smelled pleasantly of perfume. In a quiet voice, she told me her name and then asked, “What you drink?”
“Scotch,” I said. She said something to the waiter who had come over. She had a direct look when she looked at me, but she was reserved, even shy. She sat straight, her hands clasped in her lap. Her companion, however, was evidently familiar with my guide and was giving him an enthusiastic embrace.
The waiter returned with our drinks. Mine was scotch, sure enough, and hers looked a little like whiskey, a brown liquid in a glass with ice in it. She saw me looking at it. “I drink tea,” she said. I nodded and smiled.
“You from CCK? What squadron?”
“The 345th. I just came in from the States.” She nodded.
“You want dance?”
I hadn’t seen anyone dancing. But the dance floor was there, and the music was suitable. “I’m not very good,” I said.
“That okay. Slow music.”
We got up and went onto the dance floor. I was surprised at her height. She had heels on, and with her hairdo, she was taller than I was. Few women I had known were as tall as she. I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there. I’m not sure I’m ready for this, I thought. I held her lightly, at a distance. She was light on her feet and graceful, and when I made a misstep she pretended not to notice.
When we returned to our booth, my navigator and his girlfriend had moved and were sitting at a more secluded booth in the back, talking, their heads close together.
“How old you?” she asked.
“I’m twenty-six,” I replied. “And you?”
“I twenty-five.” I studied her. It was hard to tell. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Her face was smooth and from what I could see, unlined. But her brown eyes were wary and showed some unhappiness.
Abruptly, she asked, “You have wife?”
“Yes,” I said, after a pause, deciding there was no point in lying.
“How long you married?”
“Almost three years.” She took her time processing this information.
“You have children?”
I shook my head. “No.”
I realized I hadn’t heard her name when she mentioned it. “Tell me your name again. I didn’t hear it when you told me before.”
“Karla.”
My head popped back suddenly, and I gave her an astonished look. My amazement showed clearly.
She must have thought I was surprised that she had an American name. “That not real name. That American name. What’s the matter? You no like name?”
“Oh, no, it’s a nice name. I like it very much. It suits you well. It’s nothing. I just didn’t expect you to have a name like that.” My explanation wasn’t very convincing.
We talked some more, danced again, and then, as a group of men who were clearly from the base came in, she looked over at them and suddenly stood up, saying, “You excuse me now. I have customer.”
I didn’t know how the evening was going to end, but I didn’t expect it to end like this. “Oh. Oh, sure.”
She looked at me. “You come back and see me again?”
“I think so,” I said. “Yes, I think so.”
She smiled and walked over to one of the men, not looking back. While we had been talking, the bar had filled. I looked around for my guide, but he was not to be seen. I went outside. A little red taxi immediately pulled up, and the driver asked, “Base?” I nodded and got in. As the car raced down the narrow road, I kept thinking over the evening’s events, shaking my head in disbelief.
How could this tall, slender, good-looking woman who lived on the opposite side of the earth from me have chosen that name? How could she have chosen my wife’s name?
* * *
The next day I was scheduled for my airdrop practice with another instructor pilot, a captain I had never seen before and never saw again. “This is my last flight,” he told me, as we walked out to the airplane. “Going back to Pope.” Pope AFB was colocated with Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
We departed CCK to the northwest and began a low-level navigation training route, simulating an extended low-altitude run into the drop area. In Texas we had flown for hours over the sparsely populated areas of scrub and desert west of Abilene, bouncing along in the hot, dry air at 500 feet. Here, however, our available area for navigation training was limited. We turned inland, heading for our auxiliary base. As we approached the auxiliary field, we called the tower and told them we were approaching. About this time the flight engineer said, “We’ve got a slight problem. Number one engine has a mild RPM fluctuation.”
Sure enough, the needle on number one tachometer was wobbling slightly. But if the prop were moving as the indicator showed, changing speed as rapidly as the needle was moving, we would have felt and heard the sensation. It would have been a steady, irregular pulsing from the left outboard engine.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the IP said. “It’s okay right now. I’d like to get this drop out of the way.” We were dropping a pallet of sandbags on the dirt strip to the south of the paved runway. The navigator checked his time; simulating a realistic scenario, we were supposed to arrive at a specific time over the target. A newly arrived navigator was being checked out, as were two new loadmasters in the rear of the aircraft. On an airdrop the procedures were much more challenging for the navigators and loadmasters than they were for the pilots.
The navigator alerted us at the one-minute point prior to arrival at the pop-up point. When the pop-up point arrived, I reduced power, pulled the nose up, ascending from our en route altitude of 500 feet to 1000 feet, dropped half flaps, and held our airspeed constant at 125 knots. When we had slowed, we gave the loadmaster the red light, the signal to open the cargo doors. At this signal, he deployed the preliminary parachute, a small parachute that immediately filled with air and extended behind the tail of the aircraft. At the set time, the navigator gave the call and the instructor pilot, sitting in the copilot’s seat, turned on the green light on a side panel at his right elbow.
When the green light came on, the loadmaster released the main parachute. Once it deployed, he released the locks holding the pallet to the aircraft. The fully deployed parachute pulled the load along the rollers on the cargo deck floor. When the load moved out, the aircraft nose pitched up as the load rolled off the tail. In extreme situations, when a heavy load exited too slowly, the combined efforts of both pilots could be required to push forward on the yoke, to force the nose of the aircraft down before the high pitch angle caused the aircraft to stall. But on this run everything worked smoothly, and the load left the aircraft without a problem.
I was anticipating the opportunity to attempt some more assault landings. After my previous showing with Colonel Craig, it was clear that I needed more work. But it was not to be.
“Let’s call it a day,” the IP said. “That RPM indicator is still fluctuating.”
The engine in question appeared to me to be operating acceptably, but the IP had decided it was time to quit. I judged the mildly fluctuating RPM indication to be a malfunction in the gauge, but it was nothing to treat lightly, for it could also indicate an imminent loss of controllability of the propeller, whose stability was controlled by the prop oil supply. Although the problem was probably not serious, it was wise not to ignore it, especially now that the main purpose of the flight had been accomplished. So we landed at CCK after a two-hour flight and no practice assault landings.
“You’ll get plenty of practice in-country,” the IP assured me. He seemed preoccupied with thoughts of returning to the States.
A few days later I walked into the squadron and saw that I had been scheduled for my first in-country shuttle.