One afternoon Loach pilot George Gerard was burning coal flying across a rice paddy. It was near the end of his mission, he was low on fuel, nothing much had happened, and he was heading back to Tay Ninh and a cold brew. Loaches generally stayed over trees so as not to expose themselves to open areas. It had been an uneventful afternoon, however, and George and his crew were in a hurry.
“Taking fire! Taking fire!” he suddenly shouted over the radio. “My blades are coming off! I’m going in . . . going in . . .!”
Taking fire or taking hits meant rounds were actually impacting. Receiving fire meant you only saw muzzle flashes and smoke.
The Loach went in hard, bellying into rice paddy water and mud. George and his two-man crew were banged up, bruised and shaken, but nothing serious. Lifts snatched them out of the rice paddy. A Huey airlifted the crashed Loach out of the mud and deposited it at Tay Ninh, where the maintenance officer looked it over.
“My engine quit suddenly,” George explained. “I was taking fire when my engine quit.”
“There are no bullet holes. You weren’t shot down. You ran out of fuel.”
“No. We were taking fire.”
George’s crew backed him up. Pilot error like running out of gas, while excusable with a hot date, got you grounded over here and slapped with a statement of charges. George would be paying for that helicopter for the next one hundred years. The AMOC, which was what we called the maintenance officer because he had completed the Aviation Maintenance Officer Course, asked me to sling-load the Loach underneath my Huey and take it to Cu Chi. Cu Chi was the site of the highest station of maintenance in Vietnam, a depot outfit that could determine the cause of engine failure. By now, we all suspected the Loach quit because of fuel starvation. George was sweating it out.
I burned up all the excuses I could think of not to do it, but was finally forced into submission. It was tricky enough slinging a load underneath a Huey, much less a broken chopper that would not streamline because the tail boom had been knocked off in the crash. Maintenance wired the tail boom back on.
“Now it’ll streamline,” the AMOC, Captain Stiner, assured me, satisfied.
I smoked a cigarette and looked it over, skeptical and more than a little uneasy. George came out and stood next to me, clearly worried, as a crew rigged lines to his broken bird.
“Hey, what else am I gonna do?” I asked in exasperation, throwing up my hands. I felt like I was about to deliver a fellow sky jock to the guillotine.
George shrugged. “Nothing you can do, Mini-Man.” He turned and walked off slowly.
I ground out my cigarette butt underneath the sole of my boot and climbed into the Huey cockpit with Mighty Morris riding the second seat. I hovered the UH-1 above the smaller wreckage of the Loach. I felt the lines tug, then slowly lifted the bird off the ramp.
“So far, so good,” Mighty Morris cheered.
“We ain’t there yet.”
I took off to the east, cleared base, and turned north between the outer wire perimeter and the river while I clawed for altitude. I wanted a couple of thousand feet of air between me and the ground before I cruised out over Indian country toward Cu Chi.
First, the Loach’s wired-on tail boom came loose and fell off. Astonished, Mighty Morris and I watched it whistling down through space until it struck earth in an explosion of dust. Morris looked at me and shrugged.
“I don’t guess we needed that,” he said.
We needed it a lot more than we thought. Its loss altered the entire aerodynamic equation of our odd airborne configuration. Without its tail boom, the remaining bubble of the Loach started to gently swing back and forth underneath us. By the time we were at 1,200 feet, it was oscillating back and forth like a wrecking ball. It took control. I felt like I was in a rowboat hooked to a whale. It was jerking the Huey from one side of the sky to the other.
When I looked out my side window and saw the wreckage pendulum up to almost eye level, yanking the Huey toward it, I knew something had to be done quickly. I radioed TOC. I must have sounded desperate.
“This thing is not going,” I complained. “It’s dangerous.”
“You’re the aircraft commander,” came the welcome response. “If it’s too dangerous, cut it loose.”
That was good enough for me. I needed no further encouragement. We were out over the cleared fields of fire surrounding the post. I hit the release button and dropped the Loach. A fall of 1,200 sfeet flattened it like a steel roadkill.
I thought George was going to kiss me. He was all grins. He bought beers for me all evening, and for the rest of the time we were there together. Nothing could convince him I hadn’t destroyed the evidence on purpose. After a while I stopped trying and just enjoyed it. It was a lot cheaper on him buying beers for me than it would have been paying for the Loach.