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Chapter 16

  by Kathy Hufford

   CROP DUSTERS, COWBOYS AND VETERANS

UH-IC Helicopter Gunship on standby at a Special Forces camp at Song Be, RVN, late 1967, waiting to provide cover to US Air Force C123 spray aircraft, call sign Ranch Hand.

A major problem trying to do recon from the air looking for Viet Cong is that a lot of Viet Nam had a triple canopy of dense foliage for its “jungle” areas. One device the US came up with is the people sniffer. It was mounted in a slick and flew low and slow over the trees while sucking in outside air looking for traces of ammonia that would have been in the enemy’s urine. When the machine found a spot, it was called out, marked on a map, and sometimes the gunships following the people sniffer could then fire up the area. There were a couple of problems with these tactics and equipment. The slick going low and slow over the trees would get shot at a lot. More than once, the slick got shot down by ground fire. The slick pilots did not like to fly this mission for obvious reasons.  The other issue was the urine. The sniffer could not tell friendly piss from enemy piss. Nor could it tell the difference between human and monkey piss.  On one mission we fired up a small mountain, then we had infantry sweep the area on the ground for a enemy body count. We got the call back, we had 110 killed…. MONKEYS.

Another tactic to solve the dense foliage problem was to spray the jungle with a defoliant. It was called an herbicide at the time. Years later did we get told this was “Agent Orange.” A flight of Air Force C123 twin prop fixed wing would fly low, and fairly fast over an area that needed to be cleared. It would spray the defoliant, and about 3 weeks later, you could come back and see thru the trees that now did not have any vegetation. It worked great. Because the C123s flew low, they too, got a lot of ground gunfire, so we flew gunship helicopter support right behind them to suppress the ground fire. Since the C123 fly’s a spray mission at about 140 mph, and our gunships could only do about 105 mph in level flight, it became a challenge to cover them. We would have to do diving passes to keep up with the C123s. On one mission, we showed up before the C123s, we thought. Flying into the area, we hit a large mist cloud. The aircraft got soaked. The copilot and me got a little wet, but the crewchief and doorgunner setting in the open doors got real wet. The mist cloud was an early pass of a C123 spraying Agent Orange. We were not happy about it. 

After the Viet Nam war, a group of veterans got some research done to show that Agent Orange can cause all kinds of health problems. Birth defects, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes. They sued the US government and got the Veterans Administration to agree that any VN veteran with Type 2 diabetes should get some form of disability pay, automatically, upon application. As far as I know, my crew chief and copilot are fine. I have two, beautiful, smart daughters, but I do have Type 2 Diabetes. I know it is caused by being old and overweight. I have not applied for my VA payments.