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Chapter 14

  by Kathy Hufford

   INDIAN COUNTRY

Article from front page of the Stars & Stripes Newspaper in the fall of 1967.

Flight crews carried a side arm and the pilots carried survival radios. During my first tour, when President Johnson had over 600,000 troops in country, there were also lots of aviation around. If you needed help, you called on the “guard” frequency of 243.00 mhz and asked for help. The main problem then was to keep the calls in return from interfering with the one you wanted to talk to. Another major problem was the possibility of a mid air collision over you because of all the help that showed up. On my second tour, with Vietnamization in place, the airspace became desolate. You could make a distress call, and no one would answer, because no other US aircraft were around to help. Being in Indian country and flying become more dangerous. You took fewer chances, because you knew you had little possibility of someone coming to your aid.

On my first tour, we always flew gunships fully loaded with ammo because you never knew when you were needed, and an empty gunship is not worth much. So, after a support mission at Song Be, we refueled and rearmed up and started back to Bien Hoa, our base. We got a call from a control that an observation helicopter, an OH-23 was down, and could we look for him. We said sure. We spent about 20 min, then saw a smoke grenade come out of an opening in a forested area. I flew over, and saw the remains of the OH23 in a corner of the opening, and two soldiers huddling behind the wreck. I called on the guard channel for a slick to come and pick up the two. But, for some strange reason, no other aircraft were around. Should not have been that way, but was. I did not know if it had been shot down or went down because of mechanical failure. I made a fast pass, they waved, did not seem to be worried about being shot at. So, after another couple of calls for a slick, I decided to pick them up. I fired off my 14 rockets into the far corner of the opening to lighten the load on the aircraft. Told the crew what we were doing. My copilot, a camera buff, Ed was supposed to be on the controls backing me up. As I was landing, I looked over at Ed, he had his camera out, taking pictures! We loaded the two in the back of the gunship, between the crew chief and door gunner, not much room. Told the crew that if I yelled, to dump the door gun ammo boxes out of the aircraft, and pull the release handles to drop the rocket pods if I run out of power trying to get over the trees. Don’t know how we got out of the opening, but we did. Took the two to a base and dropped them off. They just walked away, and never thanked us. I’m told this same picture made it into the New York Times. Ed is still taking pictures today.