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.
After that, we moved as unobtrusively as we could to our rendezvous point, seeing no one else on the way. After four hours, we arrived at twilight to find a platoon of Marine grunts sitting right where we were supposed to leave the stack of rocks for the rescuing SEALs to find. Our SEAL left us in hiding and went to find out what the grunts were up to. He returned about ten minutes later.
“Why would a CH-53D spin around in circles and throw things out the back?” he asked.
My reply was, “Exercise over,” as we three “escapees” and the SEAL ran as hard as we could toward the grunt’s camp.
When I came over the small hill between us and the grunts, I could see the 53 on the ground, still looking like a CH-53D, but with a major airframe change. Instead of being JM feet or so high, the top of the rotor hub was only about eight feet off the ground. All the rotor blades and the tail rotor blades were still on the upright aircraft but the fuselage was crushed, smashed down. The two main landing gear struts were driven up completely through the structure. One or both fuel tanks had ruptured, leaving the smell of jet fuel heavy in the air, but thankfully, the fuel had not ignited. Inside the CH-53D there were four dead men, crushed by the transmission coming down inside the cabin, but five men had survived, three in the cabin, and both pilots.
The CH-53D was supposed to pick us up for the E&E exercise. Since we weren’t there when the aircraft landed, the HAC picked up some backpacks to carry out to the waiting infantrymen instead. Several Marines that had been guarding the packs climbed onboard too. After flying the short distance to the LZ, the pilots brought the 53 into a 100-foot hover to select a good landing spot. Just as they arrived in the hover, the crew chief opened the rear ramp hatch to see the LZ better. As he did, the hatch actuator broke through its mount on the inside of the helicopter’s roof and went into the tail rotor drive shaft. The actuator acted like a lathe and cut the shaft in two, resulting in total loss of tail rotor thrust. Without the tail rotor to counteract the torque created by the main rotor in a hover, the aircraft went into a violent flat spin in the opposite direction of the turning main rotor.
If you are in forward flight and lose tail rotor thrust, the aircraft speed may keep the fuselage streamlined enough to allow the pilots to do a high-speed running landing like a fixed-wing normally does. In a hover, complete recovery from loss of tail rotor thrust is nearly impossible. You are quite probably going to crash. The only question is how. Will the pilot be able to maintain some control or is he just a passenger until impact? The only real option the pilot has to maintain at least minimal control is to remove the torque from the aircraft by shutting down the engines. One of the pilots did exactly that as the 53 began its violent spin. Even though the aircraft was spinning at a terrifying rate, one of the pilots managed to reach the engine controls and shut both engines off. As he did so, the spin stopped, but now they were falling straight down, straight down from 100 feet.
Had one of the pilots not shut down the engine, it is very unlikely that anyone would have survived. The CH-53D would have hit the ground out of control and the operating turbine engines would probably have ignited the fuel from the ruptured tanks, creating a giant fireball and leaving only shards of blackened, melted aluminum.
Both pilots survived the impact of the 100-foot fall, their seats absorbing some of the force. Both were unconscious and badly hurt, but alive, as were three of the men in the main cabin. The other four in the cabin were dead, some from the impact, some crushed by the transmission as it came down.
After medevac from Spain to Germany and treatment at the big hospital at Frankfort, both the pilots were well enough to return to duty several months later. The major and the aircraft commander moved on to another assignment. The first lieutenant copilot was promoted to captain and returned to the squadron in time for our next LF6F. One year after the crash in Spain he was in the front seat of the Cobra, taking an orientation flight, a “dollar ride,” that soft Greek spring day. There was no surviving this one.
We were supposed to be in the back of that aircraft, but because I had been bored waiting for it, we were not. Luck and superstition?
For the longest time, we sat there on the banks of that Greek river, engines burning and rotors turning, watching the small crowd of men in the river working with what was left of the Cobra. After a while, I saw some of them bring something to the shore and then return for another load. We were too far away to see exactly what it was, but that wasn’t necessary. I knew. After wrapping the loads they carried ashore in ponchos or some similar material, they lifted both bundles onto waiting stretchers and started carrying them toward my helicopter.
“Corporal,” I called over the ICS, but I didn’t have to. He was watching and had already begun folding up some troop seats and stowing them against the side of the cabin so that we could put the stretchers inside. I watched him in the cockpit rear view mirror as he made the cabin ready for the remains of our squadron mates.
I continued watching in the mirror as the stretchers and their loads were carried up the ramp and strapped down. everyone except the CO got back off the aircraft and stood just outside the rotor disk looking back at us. The CO climbed back in through the ramp but he strapped into one of troop seats in the back instead of coming up to the cockpit. The crew chief offered him a long cord to hookup to the ICS but he didn’t take it. He just looked forward, toward the cockpit, and without really looking, sadly gave a thumbs up to signal that he was ready to go. “All set in back,” the crew chief called over the ICS. The copilot and I completed the checklist, turned three on, and lifting directly into forward flight without a hover check, I climbed the aircraft up from the riverbank and turned toward the sea and our ship. Just before crossing the shore, we did our “feet wet” checklist, nose wheel and brakes locked, and headed to the ship, three miles out to sea.
“Center, 04, feet wet inbound, four souls onboard, one point oh to splash, two routine medevac,” I called over the control center radio channel, “Purple” in ship speak.
“Roger 04,” Center replied, “Cherubs three, your signal Charley. What assistance do you need? Say state of medevacs. How many corpsmen do you need?” all came out in a rush.
“Center, 04, two routine medevac. Require four stretcher bearers,” I replied.
“04, Center. Say state of medevac,” Center said again, more urgently this time.
In Vietnam what I was doing had been a normal course of events for those of us who flew the helicopters—men died every day and every day helicopters brought them into the hospital, but the peacetime Navy was not used to wartime radio calls, and for a moment I lost it.
“Center, 04. Both men are dead. this is a routine medevac. All I need are the stretcher bearers. Do you understand?” I shouted into the mic.
For a long moment there was silence. Then Center said, “Roger, 04. Switch tower when ready.”
My copilot changed the radio frequency as I headed down the starboard side in a normal approach pattern. When I passed just ahead of the ship, I turned across the bow, maintaining my 300 feet, to roll out on the course opposite of the ship’s course. When I called “abeam,” Tower cleared us to land spot 4. I rolled smoothly into a bank, turning the helicopter to 45 degrees off the ship’s course and reducing power to descend. As the helicopter crossed the deck edge, I saw the men that would carry the two body bags below, standing by the island in their white float vests with the red cross on them, waiting. I came in without stopping in a hover to position over the landing spot. Instead, I landed the helicopter immediately on spot 4, with the wheels exactly in the three boxes marking the proper position. I did it to the best of my ability, to give them, my squadron mates, their last ship landing as smoothly and as close to perfect as I could.
Once on deck, I waited while my copilot turned three off and the green-shirted deck handlers installed the chocks and chains. I looked back into the cabin through the rear view mirror and watched the men lift the two stretchers and move down the ramp. I did not watch them as they carried their loads to the starboard elevator to go below to the ship’s hospital and on to the morgue. I gave the “drinking” hand signal for refueling to the yellow-shirted LSE. He signaled for the purple-shirted refuelers and my copilot and I sat without talking while they pumped the fuel into the tanks. When it was complete, I signaled for takeoff. At the yellow shirt’s signal, the blue shirts ran under the rotor disk, pulled the chalks, and removed the three chains holding my 46 to the deck. They ran back out and held them for me to count so I would know all restraints were removed from the aircraft.
Chocks and chains off, the copilot turned three on, and after a “ready aft” from the crew chief, I lifted the helicopter into a hover at the LSE’s signal. my copilot called “gauges good to go” and I slid left as I added power and lowered the nose, we crossed the deck edge climbing and gathering speed and we were on our way back to our base camp on the beach. The death of two comrades and the loss of an aircraft does not end your mission.
Every flight requires you go into a room in your mind where there is nothing but the mission you have been assigned, nothing but flying. When you enter, you must close the door to that room behind you, shutting out everything else and look at nothing but the flight in front of you. Fail to do so and you may join the lost aircrew in death.
I closed the door to the room they died in, stepped into the one for flying, and my mission continued. The mission must be done. Always.