The following day we were scheduled for a late afternoon departure from Cam Ranh up the coast to Chu Lai. We landed at Chu Lai a little after seven in the evening, a little too early for excitement along the perimeter, but the flares were already falling with steady regularity. We offloaded our pallets, closed up the cargo compartment, and flew to Pleiku, where we picked up some Army troops for Bien Hoa. At Bien Hoa there was a delay while someone tried to find out what our load was. We eventually loaded a few troops and some pallets and then flew the short leg down to Saigon.
We landed at Tan Son Nhut just after eleven o’clock. It was a warm, humid night, and I opened the pilot’s window, turned up the overhead light, and began to read my current paperback. After a while I walked back to the rear of the aircraft. Brownie was sitting on the open ramp.
“Where’s our load?” I asked.
“They’re looking for it.”
I walked to the ops shack. “Where’s our load?” I asked. Someone shrugged. “We’re looking for it. Someone must have been moving some pallets around.”
“Great,” I said. “Just what I want to do—sit on the ramp in the middle of the night at Tan Son Nhut. Where are we taking it?”
“Danang.”
“Well, let’s find those pallets and get on the road,” I said. “We’re wasting time sitting around here.”
I looked at my watch. We had been on the ramp for nearly an hour and still weren’t loaded. Oh, well. I was paid the same whether we flew or sat on the ramp. I bought a Coke from the machine and walked back out to the aircraft. I climbed back into the pilot’s seat and started to read some more. Then, as my eyelids started to close, I tilted my seat back and went to sleep, the warm Saigon night breeze coming through the side window.
I awoke some time later and looked at my watch. One o’clock in the morning. I had been sleeping for almost an hour. What the hell? I sat up and looked around. The flight deck was deserted; so was the cargo compartment. I stormed into the ALCE shack. The crew members were sprawled over various chairs, most of them asleep. I strode over to the duty desk and demanded, in my most impressive demeanor, “What the hell is going on?”
The duty officer gave me a tired look. “Danang is under mortar attack. The flight line and barracks areas have been hit hard. They got at least one C-130 and some F-4s. We’re waiting to hear how bad it is.”
I staggered back a step or two. I had forgotten I was in a war zone. I hadn’t thought about mortar attacks in a long time. My first reaction was concern. I worried about how bad the damage would be, the casualties, the loss of aircraft. I could imagine the chaos on the airfield, which was busy day or night. I worried about the loss of the C-130. Was it one of our wing aircraft? What if it had been me? Then I realized: it could have been me. If events had worked out differently: if we had gotten out of Bien Hoa more rapidly, if they had had our load ready for us at Tan Son Nhut, if we had flown on schedule, we could have been sitting on the ramp at Danang taking a mortar. Thank God for the slow system at Tan Son Nhut.
We waited two more hours. It was bad at Danang. They wouldn’t know the extent of the damage there until morning. We were to go home. We flew back to Cam Ranh with a stack of empty pallets. Another incomplete mission.
The next day the single topic of discussion around Cam Ranh was the mortar attack at Danang. It had been one of the most serious attacks since I had been in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong had breached a portion of the perimeter fence.
We were scheduled to fly again that night, Sunday night, July 16. “We’re sending you up to Danang,” the duty officer said. “They’ll decide what they want you to do when you get there.”
We arrived at Danang just before eight o’clock in the evening. We taxied in to the ramp carefully. Even in the dark, we could see debris off to the side, mortar shell fragments, aircraft parts. On one portion of the ramp rested the remains of a C-130, mangled, sagging, and burnt. An A-model from Naha. It was a sad and disturbing sight.
We walked into the operations building to find out what they wanted us to do. “Air evac,” we were told. “We’ve got about sixty casualties we need to have airlifted to the hospital at Clark. We’ll send some men out to help your loadmaster rig the aircraft for litters.”
We returned to the aircraft for the slow, laborious process of reconfiguring the aircraft. The seats had to be stowed, stanchions installed down the center, and straps hooked up to hold the litters along the sides and in the center of the aircraft. The entire rigging had to be checked carefully because we didn’t want any straps to come loose and cause the injured men to spill out into the aircraft.
Mike Jones, Major Hartwig, and I walked to the flight planning section to prepare the paperwork for our flight across the South China Sea to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Mike came up to me, concern showing on his face. “Our radar’s not working very well,” he said. “It’s practically inoperative. And the weatherman is telling us we’ve got a sky full of thunderstorms between here and Clark. All that bad weather we’ve been dodging here for the last two days is right on our route to Clark.”
“And don’t forget about our autopilot,” added Major Hartwig. The autopilot had not wanted to hold a constant heading on the flight up from Cam Ranh.
I thought about what it meant that sixty wounded men needed to get to Clark. “We’ll give it our best effort,” I said. We filed our flight plan and walked back out to the aircraft. By this time two or three ambulances and buses with large red crosses on them were parked in the darkness around the rear of our aircraft, and in the illuminated areas of the ramp we could see men carrying stretchers carefully aboard and assisting with the slow process of securing the stretchers to the stanchions.
I tried to avoid thinking how uncomfortable the flight would be for them, having to lie strapped onto their hard canvas stretchers, suffering from burns and mortar wounds, bouncing around as our aircraft encountered bumpy taxiways and choppy air currents. Riding in the back of a C-130 was no fun, even for someone in the best of health. We walked through the cargo compartment, talking to some of the men. Many of them were wrapped in blood-stained dressings. The nurses were hooking up plasma bottles and ensuring that the dressings were holding. Finally a few more men, less severely wounded than the others, began to make their way onto the aircraft, finding seats along the side of the cargo compartment.
After three and a half hours of rigging and loading, we started the engines. One of the base fire trucks followed us as we taxied out of the ramp area north on the east parallel taxiway to the departure end of runway 29 Left, to be ready if some kind of emergency should occur on the ground. As we taxied, I turned the nosewheel steering as gradually as I could, trying to lessen the discomfort of the men on board. I applied the brakes as smoothly as I knew how. When we were cleared to take off, I aligned us with the centerline and eased the throttles forward gradually. Fortunately, the runway at Danang was long and we had plenty of room for a slowly accelerating takeoff.
We turned left out of Danang traffic and proceeded to the east, climbing to our cruise altitude. Once we rolled out on our climb heading, our fears were confirmed. “The radar’s not working worth a damn,” said Mike. I could see what he meant on our radar repeater scope, which rested on top of the pilots’ instrument panel. We couldn’t see any clear returns; everything was blurred, hazy. Far ahead through our windows lightning flashed across the distant horizon from north to south.
The autopilot, too, was useless. Whenever I tried to engage it, the aircraft would slowly turn left or right, wandering aimlessly in the night, ignoring the intended compass heading. We agreed we had better turn off the autopilot completely; we didn’t want it to give a sudden surge left or right, or worse, up or down, once we engaged the altitude hold. There we were, flying across the South China Sea at midnight in a thunderstorm-infested sky with no airborne radar and no autopilot. And a full load of burned and badly injured troops.
Major Hartwig and I took turns hand-flying the aircraft. We had to continually maneuver our way around the tops and sides of the thunderstorms, according to Mike’s best reading of the fuzzy radar and our own estimates of clear routes through the clouds. Whenever the lightning flashed, we attempted to locate a clear channel through the clouds ahead. But the clouds were so thick and evenly distributed that we could find no clear route through.
The lightning was both foe and friend. We didn’t want to fly too closely to an area of active lightning flashes because that meant heavy rain, turbulence, and the possibility of a lightning strike. But we needed the bright light of the sudden flash to illuminate our passage through the clouds. We found, to our dismay and discomfort, that an area of darkness did not necessarily mean a quiet sky and smooth flying; really dark areas more often than not were cloud buildups surrounded by turbulent air. We relied on the lightning to guide us through, wincing when the lightning was so close that it blinded us, relieved when it flashed behind clouds in front or to the side, showing us a temporary route through.
We continually fought to keep the aircraft on its assigned course. We were in constant radio contact, first with Saigon radio and then with Manila radio, about our deviations from our scheduled flight path. Fortunately, there was little traffic that night, and we had the airways over the South China Sea to ourselves.
Major Hartwig and I found that our endurance initially was about fifteen minutes before we began to tire and the other pilot had to take over. After two hours of working our way through the storms, we began to tire after ten minutes. We were working so hard that I scarcely had time to think about how uncomfortable the ride must be for the people in the back. We had no opportunity to walk back to see how our passengers were doing. Mike Jones was working as hard as we were. In addition to trying to read his radar, he had to keep track of our position in the night, no easy task because of our wandering, irregular path through the sky. At one point we figured we were moving one mile laterally for every mile of forward progress. Floyd Cupp was helping us too, looking for safe passageways among the boiling masses of dark clouds.
Finally, about a half hour west of the Philippine coast, the storm clouds began to thin out, and we found ourselves in a steady light rain between layers. At least the air was smooth, and we could relax a little. As we crossed the coast west of Clark, I retarded the throttles to begin our descent. Suddenly, a yellow light illuminated on the forward instrument panel. “Prop low oil light, number three engine,” Floyd Cupp announced. “It was written up before,” he said. “Apparently it comes on after the throttle is retarded. Add power and see what happens,” he suggested.
I moved the throttle on the number three engine forward. The light wavered, then went out. “It’ll probably come on again in the landing pattern,” Floyd observed.
Just what we needed. The prop low oil light signaled low oil in the propeller control mechanism. If the amount of oil were reduced to too low a level, there was a danger we could lose control of the blade angle of the propeller. The condition could result in a runaway prop, which would be catastrophic on a C-130 engine. There was probably nothing wrong, just a glitch in the warning system, but it was risky to ignore it.
We continued our descent to Clark, our airspeed higher than normal as a result of our increased throttle settings. But the air was smooth, and I didn’t mind arriving as quickly as we could. As we descended, however, the rain increased, beating heavily on the cabin and the cabin windows.
We were now talking to Clark approach control, which was vectoring us for a ground-controlled approach to land to the south. As we entered a downwind leg east of the field, the prop low oil light on number three engine flickered on again. It was unusually distracting in the darkness of the night, but I focused on my assigned heading and altitude. We were directed to turn to a westerly heading and prepare for landing. I decided that it was better to be safe than sorry. “Let’s shut down number three engine. Run the emergency engine shutdown checklist.”
Major Hartwig read the checklist aloud, and Floyd Cupp and I followed the instructions, punching the feather button for engine #3, pushing the #3 condition lever forward to the feather position, and retarding #3 throttle. It seemed unnatural to be sitting in the cockpit with glowing red and yellow lights, one condition lever far forward, and one throttle back. Fortunately, the affected engine was an inboard engine, and shutting it down resulted in minimal effect on directional control.
We notified approach control that we had shut down one engine as a precautionary measure and then followed their instructions to turn on our final approach. The approach controller told us that the fire truck was already awaiting our arrival; the truck would have been there anyway because fire trucks were called out on standby any time an air evac flight landed or departed.
The rain continued to fall; the closer to the ground we descended, the more heavily it fell. I concentrated on holding my heading and rate of descent as we approached the runway. I could vaguely see the lights of the ramp far off through the rain-blurred windows on the copilot’s side. “I’ve got the runway,” Major Hartwig announced. Reassuring words. “There’s the fire truck,” someone else said. “Over the approach lights,” Major Hartwig announced.
I looked up; we were safely over the runway. I reduced power first on the #2 engine and then gradually reduced power on the outboard engines. We floated and floated and finally touched down smoothly. I avoided using reverse thrust to minimize the discomfort on the passengers. I prided myself on the fact that it was one of the two smoothest landings I had ever made, and certainly the smoothest landing I had made lately. We taxied slowly up to base operations, where a fleet of buses and ambulances awaited us in the rain on the lighted ramp.
After we shut down the engines, I struggled to pry myself out of my seat and then walked back into the cargo compartment. “How was the ride?” I asked one of the nurses.
She tried to be nice. “Except for some of the men getting a little airsick, not too bad. The last part was smooth.” Before I could begin my detailed explanation about why the ride had been a little rough, she moved off to assist with the offloading of the injured men. “At least we got them here all right,” I thought. But it must have been a hard, hard ride for them. A small army of ground personnel carried the wounded through the rain to the waiting vehicles.
Inside the base airlift center, the duty officer waved some paperwork at us as we walked in. “Here you are,” he said. “We’ll have you loaded and ready for Cam Ranh in no time.”
“No, you won’t,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“We’ve got a sick bird: no airborne radar, no autopilot, and we had a low oil light on number three engine in the pattern and had to shut it down. We’ve hand-flown that beast all the way from Vietnam through two hundred miles of thunderstorms, carrying a load of injured troops, and we’re worn out. We’re calling it quits for the night.”
“You can’t do that. You’ve got four hours of crew duty day left,” he said.
“Yes, I can,” I said, “and I’m doing it. I hereby declare that this crew needs crew rest. Call us some transport so that we can get some sleep. And then you can call us when the aircraft is ready to fly.” I had never felt so physically and emotionally beat as I did when I fell into bed in our crew trailer that night.
* * *
We flew directly back to Cam Ranh late the next afternoon and flew two night runs to Qui Nhon, landing finally at five-thirty in the morning, just as the sun was starting to come up over the South China Sea.
We launched again at eight that night for another series of shuttle runs, this time between Cam Ranh and Tan Son Nhut. Nothing exceptional occurred. Well, one aspect of the mission was exceptional; it was the first mission we had flown since I had taken over as aircraft commander that we flew the mission as scheduled without interruption or deviation.
The following night we flew once again, a direct flight back to CCK. My shuttle was over. I had survived my first in-country mission as an aircraft commander. My performance had not earned particularly high marks, had anyone been there to grade it, but if it was a test, I had passed. I guessed.