The day after my arrival at Tay Ninh, Captain “Blue” Beatty took me out for a combination check ride and orientation flight. Regulations required all incoming pilots to be checked out and certified. I was a little nervous about it since this was my first time piloting over enemy territory. I cleaned my issued .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and felt like a medieval knight girding for battle as I drew on the rest of my gear—NOMEX fire-resistant flight suit, color OD green; leather fire-resistant boots; fire-resistant flight gloves and OD helmet with adjustable visor; sunglasses that would probably melt in a fire; survival vest equipped with a K-bar sheath knife, a pencil flare gun, a map on oilcloth, a booklet containing key Vietnamese phrases, a portable AM/FM radio; and a bulletproof “chicken vest” that most of the guys, instead of wearing, stuffed into the Plexiglas chin bubble at their feet as added protection.
I reached inside the cockpit and connected my helmet to the radio cord and hung it above the seat on the hook before I stepped back to follow Beatty’s preflight check. Most of the time, he said, preflights were conducted when we came in from a mission in order to be ready in case of a scramble. He would go through it now, however. He was a stickler for a good preflight.
“Too many assholes kill themselves by overlooking a good preflight,” he lectured. “Two things I want you to do. First is a good preflight. Second, memorize the emergency procedures. I want you to know the location of every damned circuit breaker on this helicopter. Sooner or later something will happen—a malfunction, a bullet through the electrical system or the hydraulics—and you won’t have time to decide on which circuit breaker is which or to try to think what to do. It has to be automatic reflex. Is that clear?”
My guts told me everything he said was absolutely right.
I was impressed. He understood the machine thoroughly. I intended to take the same precautions to increase my odds of getting home in one piece.
He checked the crew chief’s log book for repairs, concerns, peculiarities, and other notations. After draining the pitcock valve to bleed off moisture condensation from the fuel, we checked the tail rotor and removed the tie-down strap. After that, I followed him climbing onto the roof deck, using concealed foot holes between the pilot’s door and the cargo door. We inspected the rotor hub, the mast, transmission mounts and control rods, safety wires, push-pull tubes, stabilizer bars, and the control dampers. He pointed to the top of the mast at the big nut that held the whole works in the air. It was called the “Jesus nut.” If it went, the only thing you had left between you and the ground was Jesus.
“But what good does the Jesus nut do if you don’t look for hairline cracks in the blade-root laminations at the same time?” he asked rhetorically. “If the blade splits and breaks off, you’re coming down like an anvil, Jesus nut or not.”
Preflight completed, Beatty tossed me a short weapon that resembled a sawed-off single-barrel shotgun of an incredibly large gauge. “Take this,” he said. “Do you know how to use it?”
“I was in the Eighty-second Airborne.” I broke open the 40mm M79 grenade launcher and looked down the barrel. It was clean.
“Take it with you from now on, in case we go down and have to fight our way out.”
I started to climb into the right seat.
“Take the left,” Beatty said. “Over here, most ACs fly left seat so they can see down through the chin bubble.”
He was the one conducting the check ride. I stashed the M79 in netting behind the seat where I could reach it quickly. Blue stuffed an M16 standard-issue infantry rifle behind his seat. I climbed in, donned my helmet and switched into the intercom. A crew chief called Shaky, a lanky Texas kid with a hay straw cowlick and a drawl, helped me strap in.
Following Beatty’s example, I slid the armor plate across the door. There was also armor behind the seat and underneath it. That left the pilots most unprotected and therefore vulnerable from the front. I detected another drawback to being short when I pulled the seat all the way forward; it left me partially unprotected by the side armor.
“You can help protect your family jewels by sliding that than pistol around between your legs,” Shaky suggested.
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “It’s your jewels,” he said.
“Anytime today will do,” Beatty commented, waiting for me to fire up the bird.
“I gotta be able to reach the pedals first.”
I adjusted the pedals to their farthest extension. With the seat forward and the pedals extended, I could fly it all right. Shaky murmured something about making me pedal extenders out of wooden blocks. He grinned and ducked into the cargo bay to tend to his machine gun. From now on, I knew, pilots who flew after me would be cussing me while they tried to let out everything and get their knees out from underneath their chins.
I pressed the starter trigger. The rotor moved slowly until the turbine caught. Then it blurred overhead. Stress patterns spiderwebbed brightly in the plastic windscreen canopy against the morning sun. I eased in power to get the Huey light on its skids. When the nose came up light and shifted, I corrected for drift, then added power and lifted the tail. Nose down, I hovered away from the bird’s revetment before climbing out of the base and roaring over the trees east of camp at a steady speed of eighty knots.
Not bad, I thought. I looked to Blue for his endorsement. He stared out the side window, pretending indifference. I was actually flying a helicopter above Vietnam, a war zone.
Once we crossed the brown ribbon of the river that ran through Tay Ninh the city, Beatty directed me up to four thousand feet, well out of most ground fire range. That suited me. There were no clouds. The sky was a fine cobalt blue. A rare good day for flying.
Blue pointed out the Michelin rubber plantation, the relay station and antenna on top of Black Virgin Mountain, and, in the distance, the cities of Bien Hoa, Saigon, and Cu Chi. I thought of B-I-L-B-Y.
“Where’s Vung Tau?” I asked.
He pointed far off to the sparkle of the South China Sea. I sighed.
Our AO was an irregular-shaped thirty kilometers by eighty kilometers. It included more than one hundred miles of border with Cambodia. The border was our primary concern. Flying near it, I studied the trails webbing the other side, part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network. Beatty said Cambodia was full of NVA troop staging areas and camps teeming with military activity. The NVA engaged in maybe a week or two of fighting each month. They would come across the border, attack our FSBs and conduct a few ambushes, then hightail it to safety to recuperate for the next round. Not being able to cross the border and strike the NVA in their backyard was a real source of frustration for pilots at Tay Ninh, but we had strict orders forbidding it. The rear echelon pukes issued lots of such orders regarding “rules of engagement.” For example, said Beatty, if you were shot at, the “source must be positively ascertained before the target can be attacked.” You got your tail in a wringer if you didn’t.
Blue ran me through a series of movements, emergency procedures, and an autorotation. Then he relaxed in his seat, hands in his lap, and sighed.
“I’ve had enough for one day,” he said.
“I take it I passed my check ride?”
He looked at me.
“What if I had failed?”
He shrugged. “You’d still be flying until you went down. We’re always short of pilots. Now see if you can find your way home.”
How could you get lost? Black Virgin Mountain stuck up out of the flats like an ol’ girl I once heard of at Bragg who had only one tit and that a D-cup in the middle of her chest.
“Sometimes during the monsoon season when there’s fog and rain, you can’t see the mountain,” Beatty cautioned.
I found my way back to base. I thought I did all right for my first mission over a hostile zone. But, of course, I hadn’t been shot at yet.