Graduates among the top 10 percent of the class from Primary Helicopter School at Fort Wolters were provided the option of choosing the site of their advance training—either Fort Rucker, Alabama, or Savannah Beach, Georgia. I was included in that 10 percent in spite of a rather undistinguished beginning. I chose Savannah Beach primarily because fixed-wing training was also conducted there. I was still looking for ways to avoid Vietnam. If I could wangle my way into fixed-wing cross-training after I finished with helicopters, it meant at least an additional six months stateside. After all, I had a wife and two daughters now.
Damn! It seemed this war would never end.
I knew a little about the UH-1 Iroquois utility helicopter, the “Huey,” dating back to my Fort Bragg days when helicopters and the “airmobile” concept were still in their developmental stages. Other parachute riggers and I used to go out on a Saturday for a few recreational hops-and-pops in a Huey. They were easy, fun jumps. You sat rigged in the door with your legs hanging outside. When you reached altitude, you simply pushed yourself out hard enough to miss the skids. By the time you hit the DZ, the chopper was waiting to take you right back up. I must have gone up in a Huey twenty or thirty times at least, but when I reached Savannah Beach I had yet to come back down in one.
The Huey was the army’s primary utility helicopter and the one most of us would be flying. First off, we incoming students were hustled into a dark room and treated to a training film. The army was damned proud of the UH series.
“The UH-1 Iroquois is the army’s latest utility helicopter,” narrated the voice-over while the film showed Hueys taking off and landing, hovering and flying in formation. None of them were getting shot at, however. “The T53-L-11 gas-turbine engine weighs only five hundred pounds, yet develops eleven hundred horsepower. The turbine is basically a jet engine with a fan placed in the exhaust. The fan is connected by a shaft that runs through the engine to the transmission. The pressure of gases pushing through the fan generates enough force to turn the forty-eight-foot rotor system and the eight-foot tail-rotor assembly and lift the five-thousand-pound machine and a maximum load of forty-five hundred pounds into the air. The Huey’s streamlined design allows for a maximum cruise speed of one hundred twenty knots with a VNE, Velocity Never Exceed, of one hundred forty knots. . . .”
Hughes trainers at Fort Wolters flew at about eighty knots.
“Though not recommended, the Huey is capable of hovering vertically up to an altitude of ten thousand feet on a standard day. It is fast, it is efficient, it is dependable. It also comes in several configurations.”
The film showed each of these configurations: a gunship, or “hog,” as it was called, bristling with pilot-directed machine guns, rockets, and grenade launchers; a troop carrier or “slick” with room for eight combat-equipped soldiers plus two pilots, a crew chief, and a door gunner; and an air ambulance or “medevac” carrying six litters. It had also been adapted as a flying command center and as a light cargo ship.
I could hardly wait to get a shot at flying it. My first impression was that this must be the Cadillac of helicopters. When on my orientation flight the IP squeezed the starter trigger, he received a shrill responding whine as the high-speed starter motor began to move the blades. That was a startling contrast to the hacking cough of the Hughes 300. The IP indicated that I was to do the takeoff.
“You got it,” he said.
“I got it.”
I pulled collective. The big rotor thudded a little with increased pitch. Then the bird leapt into the air like it had been goosed. This machine had power.
I did the “Huey shuffle,” the characteristic wagging of the tail back and forth by neophytes overcontrolling the sensitive pedals. I grinned at the IP as I flew the bird above Georgia. The heavy thudding sound of the main rotor, that distinctive wop-wop-wop-wop! that was becoming so familiar over Vietnam, was more than compensated for by the smooth whine of the engine. All helicopters were noisy, but there was no excessive roaring, vibrating, or shaking with the Huey.
The IP landed the bird on the helipad with the engine running at a normal 330 rpm. He looked at me, then cut power completely. He immediately pulled collective—and to my astonishment the machine lifted itself off the pad and did a 360-degree turn before the blade lost its inertia and lift and the helicopter sank back to the ground. Only a Huey had that kind of power. Ballast weights on each of the two main rotor blade tips gave the system tremendous inertia. I was much impressed.
Training at Savannah was what we had received at Wolters, except more of it, more advanced, and all of it in the UH-1. We did a lot of instrument training under the hood when all you saw were needles and bubbles on the instrument panel while your body told you you were flying on your side or upside down. Traditionally, helicopter pilots maintained visual contact with the ground. VFR and IFR were the same thing. Visual Flight Rule, VFR, stood for “visually follow roads”; Instrument Flight Rule, IFR, meant “I follow roads.” If weather came in and you couldn’t fly lower and slower, you set down in a field and waited. That wouldn’t work in Vietnam, we were told. Monsoon season produced a lot of rain and fog. You had to really fly IFR in it, because if you set your ship down you might be nesting in the middle of a bunch of pissed-off commies.
All training was geared toward a single goal: Vietnam. Combat flying techniques generally meant “contour flying” low to the earth to keep down exposure to enemy ground fire. Skimming along only feet above the treetops at one hundred knots per hour with the world passing by underneath in a green blur. As part of a “confidence course,” we sailed choppers under power lines and made low turns so steep the blade tips almost chopped into the ground. It was thrilling, it was exciting, and, we were told, we would find it practical and useful when we got to Vietnam.
Every lesson started with the preface In Vietnam . . . In Vietnam, because of terrain and enemy presence, flights of helicopters had to land in small LZs in the forest. They had to get in quickly, do their business whether that meant depositing troops or picking them up, then get out again just as quickly. On the ground itself was a helicopter’s most dangerous zone. The other danger zone lay in that belt of air below 1,500 feet altitude and above contour flight. Safety lay either in flying high or flying low and fast.
We practiced formation flying and formation landing on LZs. Distances between ships were measured in rotor diameters. Three diameters’ distance between birds was normal formation flight, but we often flew at one diameter or less. Some of the IPs who had been to Vietnam actually flew with their whirling blades overlapped. It took some getting used to. Visions of splintering rotor blades and helicopters tumbling out of the sky haunted my dreams.
“Honey! Wake up!” Sandy poked me with her elbow. “What were you shouting about in your sleep?”
“Promise me you won’t turn into the Wicked Witch of the East?” I said.
“You’re such a little smart-ass.”
Even our mistakes and accidents served as examples of what we might expect in Vietnam. One day a student in a Huey caught his skid under a refueling hose. The hose flipped the helicopter when he started to lift off. The bird beat itself to death like a chicken with its neck wrung. By some miracle, both pilots got out safely. In his desperation to escape, the student pilot ripped the door handle completely off and still had it gripped in his hand.
“In Vietnam,” the instructor explained, “you’ll all find out that these kinds of things happen when the adrenaline starts pumping.”
In Vietnam. My options for avoiding in Vietnam were steadily running out. The army needed helicopter pilots, I was told when my request for fixed-wing cross-training was rejected. It was no classified secret, it was common sense, that 99 percent of us were heading for Vietnam as soon as we graduated. Choppers were getting shot down over there, pilots killed. Replacements were needed.
“At least flying choppers is safer than being in artillery,” I tried to reassure Sandy.
I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.
It seemed that in attempting to circumvent Vietnam, I had got myself caught up in a whirlwind that was bearing down upon that which I most wanted to avoid. I resigned myself to the fact that I was going. I saw no way out. All doors had been closed to me except the one opening into southeast Asia. I cast around looking for an outfit in the war zone that might give me the best survival chance, wondering how I could get myself assigned to it.
It was common knowledge that of all the American units fighting in Vietnam, the 1st Air Cavalry Division was seeing the most action. Pilot survivors of the 1st filled us in on the situation.
“Within the First Cav,” they explained, “the most dangerous place to be is in the First Squadron of the Ninth Brigade. Apache Troop of the One-Nine is always in deep shit. You don’t want to go there.”
How could I avoid it? I was still pondering that question in January 1969, looking for an out, when I graduated from advanced flight training. It was the beginning of the bloodiest year of the war. The entire graduating class assembled in formation in front of the TAC office to receive our orders. The training commander called us forward in alphabetical order. Abraham . . . Akins . . . Alexander . . .
I frantically scanned my orders. There it was: Report to 307th Transportation Company, Vung Tau, South Vietnam. Where the hell was Vung Tau?
“Have you ever lucked out, Lieutenant!” an IP exclaimed.
Vung Tau, he explained, was a coastal in-country rest and recreation center on the seacoast. No guns were allowed inside city limits. Even the Viet Cong there played by the rules. It was a place where warriors from both sides went to drink beer, chase pussy and bask in the sun.
Had I ever lucked out! And I hadn’t done a thing to engineer it. Luck. That was all it was. If I had to go to war, this was the way to go. Lt. Ron Alexander was going to lie around on white sand beaches, haul ass and trash, and fly steaks to generals in safe rear areas. I had this war dieted.