part0027

My dad, a naval officer and former Navy master chief, was stationed in Saigon. He had been there for a couple of months, and the major would let me take off a couple of times to go down and stay with him. He had a very nice set of quarters with a living room, bedroom and bathroom. His bathroom even had a flush toilet and a hot shower. The first time there, another pilot, Mike George, was with me, and I found him sitting on the floor of the shower, just letting the hot water run over him. I had known Mike George since flight school although he was three classes behind me. I remembered his room well, as he had a picture of a very attractive brunette wearing a pair of shorts, sitting on a rock at the beach with her legs tucked under her. Her eyes were cast down; her blouse was totally unbuttoned with no bra, tastefully exposing her chest but not her breasts. I loved to inspect Mike’s room when I was the cadet battalion commander. He always passed inspection. He was from Sacramento and, like me, a bit older than most of the guys in flight school, having been a Sacramento firefighter before joining the Army. Clean sheets, hot and cold running water and a flush toilet made this trip heaven for Mike and me. Dad had a small grill on his balcony, and we cooked steaks that night that had soaked all day in Jack Daniels. Time to explore Saigon.

Mike and I caught a cab into the city. We weren’t used to being in crowds, especially crowds of Vietnamese. It was a bit uncomfortable at first, but we loosened up after a bit. Some rules were pointed out to us by Dad.

“Sit in the back of a bar with your backs to the wall. Know the exits out of any place you go into. Careful what you drink, and watch your drink at all times.” Okay, we got it. Walking down one of the main thoroughfares, we had our first encounter, with none other than the US military police.

“Excuse me, sir, but you can’t be in Saigon with a weapon,” he stopped me and said. Now this young man was just doing his duty in his starched fatigues and spit-shined jungle boots. Hell, we couldn’t even get jungle boots, let alone get a spit shine on them.

“And whose rule is that one?” I asked.

“Sir, those are the orders of the Saigon garrison commander,” he replied.

“Okay, but I don’t work for him. I work for the commanding general of the First Cavalry Division, and he said that we would carry our sidearms at all times,” I said with all the authority a warrant officer could muster. This discussion continued until Mike came up with a solution that was satisfactory to all parties. Mike and I were both wearing shoulder holsters. We simply took our shirts off and put them back on over the pistols. That made the MPs happy and us as well. How incredibly stupid , I thought. We were in a war zone, and yet we shouldn’t carry our weapons.

As the morning wore on, Mike and I stopped for some liquid refreshments at an outside cafe. Sitting there, we were approached by a Vietnamese man who asked if we wanted to sell our single-lens reflex cameras. “GI, you want to sell. I give you four hundred dollars each for your camera.”

There was an old saying that Dad had taught me. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is . Or was it, If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t ? I couldn’t remember. Mike was all over this transaction. I was not. Finally Mike wore me down into submission and the man asked us to come with him around the corner so he could make the exchange. This was just wrong, selling on the black market. I knew it and Mike knew it, but we went along. Still on a public street, the man took our camera and counted out eight hundred dollars, folding the money up and wrapping it with a rubber band. He thanked us and disappeared into the crowd. We went back to the bar and Mike unrolled the money. But there was no money, only a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around newspaper clippings. That was the smoothest con job I had ever experienced, and the sleight of hand was perfect. We were taken big-time. We both felt as stupid as could be but learned a valuable lesson. If it seems too good to be true, then pass it up.

Later that day, we met Dad at an officers’ club for lunch. This place had an in-ground freshwater pool and provided bathing suits and towels. It even had American women sitting around in two-piece bathing suits. Oh my God! We entered with Dad and noticed that several weapons were hanging from the walls on the coatracks. Unsecured weapons would never be tolerated in our outfit. We entered and took a seat at a table with tablecloths, cloth napkins and real silverware. The plates weren’t paper and food wasn’t being served on trays that doubled as plates. And a menu! A waiter came up and took our order for drinks. Beer, but there was a bar with everything you could imagine. This was going to be nice. So we thought.

As the waiter was taking our order, a master sergeant approached the table and addressed my dad, a lieutenant commander in the Navy. “Excuse me, sir, but I must ask you to leave.”

Dad looked up. “Are you talking to me?”

“Well, yes, sir. Actually, sir, you may stay, but these gentlemen are not permitted in this club,” he said. “See, this club is for field-grade officers only.”

“This officer is my son,” Dad said, pointing at me.

“I do apologize, sir, but they’re not permitted in this club.” By now some majors and above were looking our way.

“Dad,” I said quietly. “It’s okay.” I stood up with Mike. As Dad was starting to stand in a rather loud voice, I said, “I have no desire to eat with a bunch of rear-echelon mothers anyway. Screw you all.” And with that we walked out. Now I had been wanting to get a better weapon than the .38-caliber pistol I had been issued. When Mike and I got back to Lai Khe that night, we both had .45-caliber M1911 automatic pistols.

Getting back to the unit, I went and talked to the CO.

“Hey, sir, would it be all right for my dad to come up and spend a couple of days with me? Fly on some of my missions as well.”

I thought this idea would be shot down in flames, but the major said, “Sure, bring him up.”

I really liked Major Saunders. A couple of days later, I flew to Saigon and picked Dad up. Dad had a private pilot’s license but had never flown or been on the controls of a helicopter. My copilot jumped in the back and Dad climbed into the right seat. We took off out of the helipad, and I explained the controls to him as we climbed out. Once we were at altitude, I turned the controls over to him. To my surprise, he was maintaining altitude, airspeed and heading. Damn, he’s good . Then I started watching him and noticed his eyes were glued to the artificial horizon on the instrument panel. This instrument tells the attitude of the aircraft in relation to the horizon. It indicates a climb or dive, right or left turn. He wasn’t flying the aircraft, he was flying the instrument! Cocky SOB . The circuit breaker for this particular instrument was on the overhead DC electrical panel between the pilots. I’ll fix his ass. I reached up as if I was stretching and pulled the circuit breaker. Ever so slowly, the attitude indicator internal gyro began to slow down, resulting in the indicator showing a slow left downturn. Dad compensated for it, but it did nothing for the instrument but put the aircraft in a right climbing turn. It didn’t take him long to realize he had been had, and he turned to me with a laugh.

“Okay, smart-ass, you have the aircraft.”

“Damn, Commander Cory, I really thought you knew how to fly this thing,” Specialist Linam tossed over.

“Don’t encourage him,” I demanded and gave the controls back to Dad. By the time we reached Lai Khe and the refuel point, he was flying the aircraft quite successfully, but I wasn’t about to let him try hovering.

The next morning, with the CO’s permission, I left Specialist Francis behind and Dad filled in for that position. The night before, Francis had given Dad a class on how to operate and maintain the guns. Francis got to sleep in. Our mission for the day was resupply and one air assault. Just a normal day for a slick crew. Having Dad aboard made it anything but normal. Dad was wearing the same uniform as the rest of us, jungle fatigues. The new NOMEX two-piece flight suits hadn’t been introduced yet for flight crews, so we wore the same uniform as everyone else, except we wore leather boots instead of jungle boots. Jungle boots would melt in a fire, and fire was the one thing every crew member feared the most. Shoot me, but don’t let me burn . Since World War I and the birth of Army Aviation, burning was the one fear all pilots had. The one difference in Dad’s uniform was that his rank insignia was smaller than the gold oak leaf insignia for an Army major, but that was it. To an untrained eye, he looked like an Army major.

We had been working the morning resupplying companies, and all was going well. Dad was doing a good job of clearing the aircraft down in hover holes. Then we picked up the first load of troops for an insertion. I looked back and saw some discussion going on between the soldiers but didn’t think anything of it. Suddenly someone was pulling on my shirt.

“Hey. Hey, what’s your rank, sir?” a young soldier asked as he attempted to see my insignia on my collar.

“I’m a warrant,” I explained. “Why?”

“Well, sir, you have a major for a door gunner. How bad did he screw up?” he asked with all seriousness.

I passed that on to my crew, and we had a good laugh, to include Dad. As this was his first combat assault, I had briefed him on what to do and when to do it. Although this was Dad’s first helicopter combat assault, he wasn’t a stranger to combat. In World War II, he had served aboard the USS Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea, manning a 20 mm antiaircraft gun until the order to abandon ship was given. He then served aboard submarines for the duration of the war in the Pacific.

We were in the Chalk Five position of a six-ship lift and would be making three turns to the landing zone, with six grunts on each trip. It was a narrow landing zone, so we went into trail formation. At H minus six, the artillery began hitting the LZ; at H minus two, the Cobras rolled in with rockets and miniguns.

At H minus one, I said, “Door gunner, open fire!” Immediately a green tracer reached up and we had a hot LZ, with Chalk Two taking a hit and smoke coming from his engine.

“Mayday, Chalk Two is going down.”

“Chalk Three is taking fire.”

“Yellow One is going long and taking fire.”

We were committed now, with Chalk Two landing on the edge of the LZ, and it was a hot LZ. My crew chief was ripping the tree line with machine-gun fire, but crap, I wasn’t hearing anything from my dad’s gun.

“Dad, open fire. Dad! ” Nothing. Thinking he was hit, I looked back over my right shoulder, expecting to see him slumped over his gun. But no, he had his monkey harness on, which I’d insisted upon, and was standing on the skids, hanging out with only the strap holding him, taking pictures of the flight going in and the soldiers in the back of my aircraft shooting their rifles.

“Taking damn pictures,” I bellowed. “Dad! Get your ass back on that gun.”

He got back behind the gun and started shooting the tree line. We took no hits, and the mission was completed. However, when we arrived at the refuel point, Dad and I had a one-sided conversation about the duties and responsibilities of the door gunner in a combat assault. He knew he’d screwed up, and to his credit, he took his ass chewing in a professional manner. He knew he deserved it for leaving us unprotected and for scaring the crap out of me. 8

The next day, I had arranged for him to fly in an OV-10 Bronco. The Bronco was an Air Force aircraft used for adjusting air strikes. It was a twin-engine split-tail aircraft with tandem seating for the pilot and one other. Dad had spent the evening with the pilot that would fly the mission and was ready the next morning. He spent the day putting in air strikes and totally enjoyed himself, it seemed as he related the day’s activities that night in the club over beer. In typical fighter pilot fashion, it was all hand motions demonstrating how the Bronco dove, rolled upside down and fired his rockets to mark the target.

“I noticed one thing different about those Air Force pilots from you guys. Air Force pilots seem to be outgoing and always in positive moods, versus you guys, who seem withdrawn and pensive,” he explained.

“Dad, an Air Force pilot is that way because he’s flying a machine that wants to fly and if left alone will generally fly quite well on its own. In addition, compared to a helicopter, an airplane has very few moving parts that can cause a serious malfunction. On the other hand, helicopter pilots fly a machine that does not want to fly and only does so by the interactions of the pilot to balance four forces all opposed to each other. Plus, a helicopter has lots of moving parts, any one of which breaking can and does cause a major disaster. Helicopter pilots are moody because we know something is going to break if it hasn’t already done so.” That gave the old man something to think about.