There is an old
Army saying, “Hurry up and wait”. Flying combat assaults, you spend a
lot of time waiting for the infantry to show up, or to conduct their
sweeps, then go back and extract them. We wound up setting on the ground
next to some small village. The local South Vietnamese Army would provide
the “security” for our aircraft. These soldiers did not keep the
locals or the children away from the aircraft.
As
in any war, children come around the soldiers. Seems children have no
fear, whether it is in
Vietnam
,
Afghanistan
,
or
Iraq
.
Each box of C-rations came with a Tropical Hershey Chocolate bar, which we
called the “
John
Wayne
Bar
”,
because it was made hard, not to melt in the heat. We saved those bars and
gave them to the kids that showed up. Sometimes we wound up near a very
poor village, then we would by the end of the day, give them the whole
case of C-rations.
Was I scared in
Viet Nam
? Yea, only when I was not flying. When you are
flying, you don’t have time to worry about being scared, you do what you
were trained to do. As a new pilot in
Viet Nam
you are assigned as the co-pilot, sometimes
called the “peter pilot”. The new pilot flies with a more seasoned
pilot (one who might have been there 3 months). The seasoned pilot is
called the Pilot in Command (PIC). The PIC is responsible for the whole
crew, aircraft and the training of the peter pilot. One day I got a new
peter pilot who had only flown normal not assault flights for about a
week. This day, we flew combat assaults far west of
Saigon
, and received a lot of ground fire. On one
flight into an LZ, we took an AK47 round thru my door, went under my legs,
thru the floor console and knocked out an air vent that then blasted under
the new pilots legs…. A normal flight. We went back to refuel and top
off on ammo for the door guns. We don’t shut down the aircraft, one
pilot stays at the controls, the other one gets out to take a leak and
supervise the refueling by the crew chief and door gunner. It was the
peter pilots turn to get out, so I stayed at the controls. Something was
wrong. The crew chief came up to me and told me I had to look at the
co-pilot. So I had to shut down the aircraft. I got out, came around the
side of the aircraft to find my new peter pilot curled up in a little ball
and shaking. I talked to him for a while, about life, the states, getting
shot at, etc. I got him to get back into the aircraft and finish about 4
more assaults. Guess some folks cannot overcome the natural fear of being
shot at. He became a full time “awards & decorations” admin
officer for the rest of his tour. No one that flew, wanted that job.
