Rare Combat Audio Of A Helicopter Company Commander’s Vietnam War HH

It was just before Christmas of 1966. A small group of American helicopter gunships was circling above a clearing in the jungle of South Vietnam. The Army called the clearing landing zone stump. Below them, artillery shells were still falling into it. Smoke from those shells hung over the trees.

So did smoke from earlier air strikes. There was very little wind to carry it away. One of the pilots later said the zone was almost IFR. That is a flying term for weather so thick a pilot must fly by his instruments instead of his eyes. Behind the gunships, a formation of troop carrying helicopters was already on its way. The men called them slicks.

Each slick carried infantrymen and had only a machine gun on each side. In a few minutes, those slicks would have to drop into the clearing through the smoke. The clearing was not an easy place to land. The trees on each side stood about 150 ft tall. The zone was steep to get into and steep to get out of.

It sat out in the middle of what the pilots called the boondocks, far from any road. The gunships had to go in first. The plan gave them 4-minutes to hit the edges of the clearing with rockets and machine guns. Then one of them would fly low across the zone and drop colored smoke to show the slicks exactly where to set down. But the artillery ran long.

It kept firing for 2 and 1/2 minutes into the gunships 4-minutes. That left the gunships about a minute and a half for work that was supposed to take four. The troop ships would not wait. They were already flying toward the zone. The man leading the gunships that morning was a young Army officer from Tennessee.

On the radio, he was 86. He led the gun platoon of an aviation company called the Cowboys and that morning, he was the one responsible for marking the zone. He rolled in and fired. One rocket left his tubes, then nothing. “That sound you just heard,” he explained years later, “was the one and only rocket that came out of my tubes.

” We know this because a fellow pilot he flew with, a man he remembered as Dick, had brought along a small tape recorder. Dick slipped the earphone up under his flight helmet and plugged it into the microphone. As the mission unfolded, the recorder captured all three radio channels at once.

It caught the pilots’ voices, the chatter of the machine guns, the rockets leaving their tubes, and a heavy rhythmic thumping that came from a 40-mm grenade launcher mounted on one of the gunships. The pilot later called it the hottest operation his unit had that year. The tape survives. It gives us something very rare, the sound of an American helicopter assault in Vietnam heard from inside the cockpit in real time.

Now the troopships were minutes away. The zone was covered in smoke. The leader’s rockets would not fire. And somewhere in the trees at the edge of that clearing, the enemy was waiting. If these stories have kept you watching, there’s more to them than what you see here. I’ve collected 15 of them in my new ebook, Vietnam 50 Years Remembered Volume 1, with extra details and stories that I couldn’t fit into the videos.

If you’d like to experience these stories in more depth, the ebook is linked in the description. Over the next hour and a half, this story follows that tape and the man whose voice is on it. The question underneath it is simple to ask and hard to answer. When the plan falls apart over a smoke-filled jungle clearing, what does it take to get American soldiers in and bring them back out alive? The answer involves weapons and machines.

It involves a new way of fighting that the army built for Vietnam. But most of all, it involves men watching over other men. The cost of that war was very large. Some 2.7 million Americans served in Southeast Asia. More than 58,000 did not come home. Many of those who did come home returned to a country that did not understand where they had been or what they had seen.

In Vietnam, many of them found something they could count on, a bond with one another. When they came home, Vietnam veterans began greeting each other with two words they had rarely heard from anyone else. Welcome home. The man on this tape was one of them. He served three tours in Vietnam from a quiet posting in early 1964 to command of a helicopter company in 1969 and 1970.

He saw the war grow from a small advisory effort into a large American fight. But, to understand how he got to that smoky clearing, we first have to understand the job he was trying to do that morning and why a few minutes of lost time mattered so much. An air assault like the one at LZ Stump depended on timing. Every part had its turn.

First came the artillery. The big guns pounded the landing zone to drive off or kill any enemy troops hiding there. Then, the artillery was supposed to lift. The gunships would come in next. They fired rockets and machine guns into the tree lines around the clearing, where enemy soldiers were most likely to hide.

Then came the marking pass. One gunship flew low over the zone and dropped smoke grenades. The slicks were still a minute or two out when the smoke went down. The colored smoke told the lead slick exactly where to put down. The pilot explained why this mattered. When the gunships marked the right zone, it worked well.

When they marked the wrong one, he said, “It could mess up the whole lift. A company of infantry set down in the wrong clearing could be separated from its battalion, far from help in unknown ground. The gunships themselves were not the heavily armed helicopters people sometimes picture today. In 1966, his gunships had no mini guns.

They carried two machine guns on each side and rocket pods of different sizes. Some also carried a 40-mm grenade launcher mounted on the nose. That gave the gunships enough firepower to keep enemy heads down, but only while they had ammunition and fuel. Once the rockets were gone and the fuel ran low, they had to leave.

His company was built around this teamwork. It had three platoons with eight helicopters in each. Two platoons flew slicks, which carried troops and supplies. The third platoon flew the gunships. His platoon was the gun platoon. On the tape, the gunships used numbers in the 80s. 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, and 88 were all ships from his platoon.

The Cowboys were attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade based at Bien Hoa. Their area was the part of South Vietnam the Americans called Third Corps, the region around Saigon. For the 173rd, the Cowboys did whatever was needed. They flew troops into combat, pulled them out, and hauled supplies. Other crews in the company sometimes dropped ropes down through the trees to pull long-range patrols out in a hurry. He never flew on those.

His job was guns. At LZ Stump, the operation had already been running. Before the lift that morning, he told his crew they would do it the same way they had done it the day before. The plan was clear. The gunships would make one firing pass to prepare the zone. The second pass would be the marking pass. “We’re about 3 minutes out,” a voice says on the tape.

“We’re going to prepare one pass. The second pass will be the marking pass.” Then the artillery kept firing. Then his rockets failed. The first solution had already broken down, and the slicks were closing in. On the tape, you can hear him talking to his crew. He sounds calm but busy. “Check my second breakers,” he says.

“I don’t have any rockets.” A circuit breaker could cut power to the rocket pods. If one had popped, the rockets would not fire, but there was no time to fix it. The troop ships were coming. He had another way to keep cover over the marking run. He called to one of his other gunships. “88, this is 86. I’m cutting in by you. Come around and cover me for the mark.

” His ship would drop the smoke. Another gunship would fly behind and beside him, ready to fire on anyone who shot at him. A helicopter flying low and slow over a hospital clearing was an easy target. The escort was what kept it alive. Now the radio fills with voices. The pilots are counting down. They are about 45 seconds from the mark.

The same line passes from ship to ship. 45 seconds. The lead slick is asked whether it has the red smoke in sight. He then turns to 87, another of his gunship leaders. “87, take your fire team and cover the flight.” “Roger,” comes the answer. “I’m covering the flight.” That short exchange shows how the whole system worked.

A fire team was two gunships. One team guarded the incoming slicks. Another guarded the leader as he marked the zone. No one went into the clearing without someone watching over him. Then comes the order to his crew. “Get the smoke ready. Get the smoke ready.” He had explained the method the day before.

The crewman would pull the grenade, let the safety handle flip off, and then throw it on his command. Seconds later, the voice rises, “Drop the smoke. Drop the smoke.” The smoke went down into a clearing already full of smoke. This was a new problem. The artillery and the airstrikes had left the zone so hazy that the marking smoke had to cut through it to be seen.

On the tape, someone reminds the others that there has been only one smoke put down. That one marker was all the slicks would have. The clearing was also small, too small for the whole lift at once. That day, they were bringing in 10 helicopters. The zone could take only five at a time, so the lift was split into two elements, and each group of five had to drop down between the tall trees, unload its troops, and climb back out before the next could come in.

Each extra minute the slick spent near the zone was another minute the enemy had to shoot at them. The first flight came down. Somewhere in that smoke, the fifth ship in the formation drifted too close to the trees. It hit one. On the tape, voices crowd the radio. Someone asks about a lost tail. Someone else says to call if they need help getting a hold of somebody.

The fifth ship had struck a tree with its tail rotor as it settled into the zone. The tail rotor keeps a helicopter from spinning out of control. Losing it can mean a crash. This time, the pilot kept the helicopter upright. He got it down. Everyone got out. The pilot on the tape later said the ship needed a new tail rotor and a new tail rotor gearbox.

It was repaired right there, and it was flown out about 3 hours later while the fighting was still going on. But, in those first moments, no one above the clearing knew how bad it was. Later on the tape, you hear his voice again, quieter. “Well, I hope it didn’t hurt the boys down there.” A damaged helicopter sitting in a small landing zone was a problem for everyone.

It took up space the next five slices needed. Its crew was on the ground in a clearing the enemy was watching. It had to be guarded until it could fly or be carried out. The army took this seriously. An army film from the time pointed out that damaged aircraft were often recovered from forward areas while the recovery crews were under fire.

A helicopter was valuable. So were the men who flew it. Neither was left behind if it could be helped. At LZ Stump, the damaged ship now became one more thing to protect. And the enemy had not yet shown its hand. The second flight of five came in, unloaded, and pulled up out of the clearing. As it climbed out, it caught fire from the ground.

On the tape, one voice cuts through. Line me up on it. He explained what that meant. The guns on his helicopters could swing a certain distance up, down, left, and right. But they could not point everywhere. To bring them to bear, the pilot often had to turn the whole helicopter so the gunner could line up on the target.

This was the gunship’s main work during a lift. While the slicks slowed down to land, the gunships flew circles around them. One ship of a fire team watched the right side of the formation. The other watched the left. On the tape, you hear pilots telling each other who has which side.

When a gunship made a firing run and turned away, that turn was called the break. You hear the pilots calling their breaks, left or right, so they would not collide in the smoke and would not leave a gap in the circle. There was also a simple signal. If a slick was fired on, its crew threw white smoke out the door. The gunships then fired into the area where the white smoke fell.

Again, he explained, when the slicks get fired at, they throw smoke and we shoot at the smoke.” But even this had limits. By now, American soldiers were on the ground in the landing zone. Every burst of gunship fire had to miss them. That is why you hear warnings on the tape about friendlies.

A gunship firing into the tree line could not afford to hit its own men. There was also another rule, and it was strict. He called it the rules of engagement. “Under those rules,” he said, “a gunship had to be fired at first. The crew then had to identify the man or the place firing at them by seeing muzzle flashes or seeing a person before they could fire back.

” That meant the gunships often could not shoot first. They had to wait for the enemy to reveal himself. Their answer then had to be fast and exact, and it had to come without harming Americans a few dozen meters away. On the tape, he tells a crew not to leave the fire until they find it. A few moments later, the lift into LZ Stump was finished.

The battalion was on the ground, but the gunships could not relax. Their own fuel was running out. A helicopter burns fuel quickly. His crews tried to keep a good amount on board in case of emergency. But a lift like this one could last a long time. Every minute spent circling the zone drained the tanks. There was one rule he would not break.

Gun cover had to stay on the slicks at all times. “We try to keep gun covers on them all the time,” he said. “In fact, it’s mandatory. So, the gunships could not all leave at once to refuel. If they did, the slicks would be alone over enemy ground.” The solution was to rotate. On the tape, you can hear him laying it out. “This is 8-6.

When you come out after the next drop-off, you’ll immediately refuel and rearm. 8-7, roger. 8-1, you’ll refuel, rearm after 87. He’ll call you when he’s off. One, roger. This was the rhythm of the gunship war. One fire team peeled off to take on fuel and ammunition. The others kept circling.

When the first team came back, the next one left. They used the gaps between the pickup zone and the landing zone, the time when the slicks were flying back to get more troops, to refuel. The pilots called those places the PZ and the LZ. Keeping it going meant the ships still on station had to fly in orbits over the area, waiting. 84 and 85 acknowledged it.

Everyone knew their turn. Meanwhile, his own ship still had a problem. His rockets were dead. “Well, what’s wrong with my rockets?” he asks on the tape. “I got one rocket out. I don’t have another rocket.” A gunship with no rockets could still fire its machine guns, but it had lost much of its punch. On this day, he stayed up anyway, controlling his platoon from above.

The Army film from the period described the whole air assault as a team. Artillery pounded the ground. Air Force jets struck enemy positions. Then, as the troops closed in, the gunships took over close support with rockets and machine guns. The film made it sound smooth. The tape shows what it really took. Timing broke down. Weapons failed. Fuel ran low.

What kept the troops covered was a set of simple rules followed under pressure. Always keep someone on the slicks. Always know who has the right side and who has the left. Always take turns. At the end of the insertion, a report goes up the radio. A follow-on flight received fire leaving the landing zone.

One ship is down in the zone. They would control the area. He summed it up simply. So, that’s what we call a CA, a combat assault mission. And like I say, it was an interesting one. Then he said something unexpected. He admitted that it was good in a way to get in on a mission like this. His unit had not had much contact with the enemy since he arrived.

When things were quiet, he said, “People got complacent. Complacent in flying the lift ships. Complacent in flying the gunships that covered them. We tend sometimes maybe to not get in the best of position,” he said, “by sloughing off and not being alert all the time. It takes one of these good things to keep us in the proper perspective over here.

That is a very honest thing for a combat leader to say.” He was not bragging. He was warned. A gunship crew that relaxed its orbit or drifted out of position could leave a slick uncovered at exactly the wrong moment. And the job at LZ Stump was only half done. A battalion that is flown into a clearing must eventually be flown back out.

Taking troops out of a landing zone is often more dangerous than bringing them in. By then, the enemy knows exactly where the Americans are. The enemy has had time to move closer, to set up weapons, and to wait for the helicopters to come back. Those helicopters would have to drop into the same steep, narrow clearing surrounded by the same tall trees.

They would sit still on the ground while soldiers climbed aboard. Then they would climb out slowly, heavy with men. Before we follow them back into that clearing, it helps to understand who was leading the gunships. It also helps to know how he came to be over that jungle at all. His road to LZ Stump began a long way from Vietnam, and it did not begin with any plan to go to war.

He was born in Cowan, Tennessee, on the 15th of October, 1936. He went to school in nearby Sewanee. His family had a strong military streak. His brother went to the Naval Academy and later made a career in the Air Force. He thought he wanted to be an engineer. Georgia Tech was the best school close by, so he went there, graduating in 1958.

It was hard work. Early on, he could see it was going to be a tough run. At that time, Georgia Tech required ROTC, the Reserve Officers Training Corps, for the first two years for students who were physically able. He saw an opportunity. He figured those military classes would be easy grades and he would need them.

After two years, he found he still enjoyed it, so he kept going. That choice came with a cost. Finishing ROTC made him a second lieutenant with a service obligation of two years. A regular Army commission meant three. Then, near the end of his junior year, his instructor announced a new ROTC flight program for the coming year.

He volunteered. That summer, he passed the physical. During his senior year, at an airfield in Atlanta, he completed 40 hours of ground school and 40 hours of flying in a small Piper J-3 Cub. He earned his pilot’s license. That license carried an obligation of its own. He had to request flight school once he entered the Army. He did.

First, he went through basic training, Airborne School, and Ranger School. Then, he went to flight school. Here, timing worked in his favor. Before his class, Army combat officers who became aviators usually learned to fly airplanes first. Only then did they take a short course in helicopters. His class, which began in January 1959, was the first class from the combat arms to go straight into helicopters.

About 22 of them graduated. He learned in a small Hiller trainer. Then, he moved to the Piasecki H-21, a tandem rotor helicopter shaped like a curved tube. Men called it the flying banana. His first assignment was to Korea. When he arrived, his orders still carried an old code. The Army tried to put him in a unit with L-19 spotter planes and a beaver, both fixed-wing airplanes.

“I’m not even fixed-wing rated.” he told them. Someone checked, found the mistake, and he went to a helicopter unit instead. It flew the Bell helicopter people know from the television show MASH and an early Sikorsky called the H-19. In Korea, a fellow officer was heading home. He asked the man what he would do next.

The officer said he was going to Fort Bragg for a special forces course and then to Vietnam. And I said, “Where’s that?” It was the first time he really understood that the United States had something going on in Vietnam. Back at Fort Rucker, Alabama, recruiters came looking for men to go teach the South Vietnamese how to fly the Sikorsky H-34.

He was not qualified in that helicopter, so he was not chosen. He did spend time in a unit that was working out how to arm helicopters. That idea would shape the rest of his career. He then served a year and a half in France and a year in Germany. In Germany, he asked again to go to Vietnam. “Why ask for a war?” His answer was plain.

“Well, if you’re trained to do something and you’re paid to be able to do it, it’s a shame to hide from it.” His tour in Germany ended in December 1963. He took 2 weeks of leave. Around the 20th of January 1964, he reported to Vietnam. He was going to a war most Americans back home still barely knew existed. He flew over on a chartered DC-6.

In his helmet bag, he carried three handguns, a a .357, a lightweight .38, and a lightweight .45, plus some ammunition. When he boarded, a flight attendant told him to put the bag under his seat. They did not want it falling out and hurting someone. That was Vietnam in early 1964. It had not yet become the large American war it would become.

It was about to change, though. In August of that year, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution would give President Lyndon Johnson the authority to widen the American role. When he arrived, the Americans had only about five or six aviation companies in the country. Their job was to support the South Vietnamese Army. They carried Vietnamese troops on operations.

They supplied American advisers in the field. They flew medical teams and psychological warfare teams out to the villages. They also flew medevac, evacuating wounded, because the Army’s dedicated medevac system was not yet well established. He flew the UH-1B, the early Huey. He was well qualified in it.

In 1964, he never had what he called a really hot mission. There were no big battles that year. He kept a small notebook, a short paragraph for each day, for his first 7 months. The rules were different then. On routine flights, pilots stayed above 1,500 ft, which gave them the best chance of avoiding small arms fire. Sometimes, they even flew with only one pilot on board.

Each Huey carried three radios. One was UHF, used mostly by the Air Force. One was VHF, used mostly by the Army. The third was FM, the radio soldiers on the ground used. When flying from place to place in 1964, crews set their FM radios to 37.0. Special Forces teams and American advisers on the ground knew that frequency.

If they saw a Huey pass overhead, they might call it. A Special Forces camp might ask whether the helicopter had room for one man headed to headquarters. Or they might have a wounded man who needed to go to a hospital. For those pickups, there was a simple defense against trickery. The ground team would say it was throwing a smoke grenade.

The helicopter crew, not the ground team, would name the color they saw. That way, an enemy listening on the same frequency could not throw his own smoke and lure the helicopter into a trap. It was a small precaution, but it showed a basic truth. Even in a quiet year, the enemy might be listening. That quiet year had one night he never forgot.

He was then the operations officer of the 119th Aviation Company, based at Camp Holloway near Pleiku, an old French base in the Central Highlands. Around 11:00 one night, a call came in. A Special Forces camp west of Kontum was being overrun. Years later, he could not recall its name. The weather was socked in, too cloudy for normal flying.

The Air Force could fly over the camp, but its planes did not have FM radios. No one could talk to the men on the ground. His battalion commander wanted someone over the camp who could. He and another pilot, Ed Messeldine, took a UH-1 and launched into the night. A radar controller guided them toward the camp. Just as they reached it, they flew into an opening in the clouds, what pilots called a sucker hole.

It was maybe 2 miles across. Through it, they could see the ground, and they could see fighting. They tried every frequency they had. No one answered. They stayed overhead until their fuel ran low. Then they were guided back to Kontum to refuel. They could not get back out until morning when there was enough light. Even then, they could not land sooner because they had never made contact with the camp.

When they finally set down that morning, he saw the aftermath. “I guess that was the first time I ever saw people laying on the ground.” He said. He learned what had happened. The camp had a special forces team surrounded by Nung tribal fighters and some Vietnamese troops. They told him the first mortar round had hit right on top of the A-frame where the team was.

One American was wounded. He was moved down to the river and placed on a floating barrel and another soldier stayed with him away from the camp. No other Americans were hit, but the camp was a wreck. It happened on the night of July 3rd going into the 4th of July, 1964. That night taught him something his later missions would repeat many times.

A helicopter overhead meant little if it could not reach the men below. Radios, timing, and contact were as important as guns. Not every mission was grim. Just before Thanksgiving, he flew gun cover for a C-47 cargo plane that circled over special forces camps dropping frozen turkeys by parachute.

His company also flew into a flooded area and lifted Vietnamese people out of the water. But the war was growing and the helicopter was about to become its signature. Why did the helicopter matter so much in Vietnam? The Army’s own film from the period began with the land itself. It said about 80% of South Vietnam was undeveloped wilderness.

In the south, there were endless marshes, bogs, and waterways. The Viet Cong used that land as a weapon. Troops on foot could move only slowly. Trucks and armored vehicles were tied to roads. An enemy could hide in the jungle and in tunnels, strike, and disappear. The Army’s answer was what it called the airmobile concept.

Helicopters and their crews would be assigned directly to the fighting units. They would answer to the ground commander. They would carry troops over the jungle and set them down wherever they were needed. The film described small details that show how carefully this was planned. Soldiers were loaded so that the first man off each helicopter carried an automatic weapon ready to cover the others as they jumped down.

A company’s mortars and machine guns were spread across several helicopters. That way, losing one or two helicopters would not wipe out all of a unit’s heavy weapons. The army knew helicopters would be lost. It was planned around that fact. The film also named the most dangerous moment. Landing the assault helicopters, it said, was the most critical phase of the operation.

Even after heavy preparatory fire, enemy small arms, automatic weapons, and mortars could still be severe. That was exactly the moment the gunships existed to protect. When he was asked years later why the helicopter was so important, he did not describe tactics. He pointed to the medical records. “Look at the medical statistics of wars before the helicopter,” he said, “and then look at them after.

” He also spoke for the infantry, the men he called the ground pounders. They knew that whatever they needed would generally come or go by helicopter. That included ammunition, water, and reinforcements. It included the ride out when a man was wounded, and the ride home at the end. That is what was riding on the tape from LZ Stump.

The battalion was on the ground. It’s only way out was by air. Later on the tape, the day’s work shifts. This time the job is to bring the battalion back out. He described it on the recording. They had about 16 lifts that day. They divided the troop ships into two groups, Alpha flight and Bravo flight. The gunships had to cover both flights coming in and out of a single clearing that was hard to get into and hard to get out of.

We got to go in and pick them up, he said, and bring them out of the place, out through the trees. The stakes were now at their highest. Every slick would have to descend into the same small clearing surrounded by the same tall trees. Everyone would sit on the ground while soldiers climbed aboard.

Everyone would have to climb out slowly and heavily, right over the tree lines where the enemy was. The enemy had had time to prepare. A control ship, call sign 25, coordinated the air above the zone. His gunships, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, and 88, flew their orbit around the slicks as they reached the ground. The fire started almost at once.

A voice from chalk 3 reports enemy action at the landing zone. The gunships answer. They will hit it again on the way around. Watch for friendlies. You can hear the rockets leaving their pods and the heavy thump of the 40 mm. One pilot counts slowly. The machine guns chatter underneath. Then another voice, I’ve got a heavy weapon as well, receiving.

That guy was full of tracers at that time. Tracers are bullets that glow, so a gunner can see where his fire is going. When a pilot says a man was full of tracers, it means he was firing a lot, fast, and aiming right at them. The gunships were burning through their ammunition. On the tape, one pilot reports that he is out of 40 mm rounds.

Down in the clearing, the slicks were taking hits of a different kind. One pilot calls out what the men on the ground were facing. These bastards are tough, one voice says on the tape. Then chalk nine reports. Chalk was the term for a helicopter’s place in the formation. Chalk nine says it took fire within 50 m of the landing zone just as it cleared the trees.

50 m is about half the length of a football field. The enemy was not far off in the jungle. He was right at the edge of the clearing. Then, the lead ship of Bravo flight comes on. Its crew has spotted something specific. One automatic weapon right on the edge of the landing zone itself firing at them. The control ship asks for a six-digit map coordinate.

That was precise enough to direct artillery or air strikes onto a small spot. Now, the gunships and the command ships faced a hard choice. The enemy weapon was close to the landing zone, close to the American troops still waiting to be picked up. Hitting it meant firing very close to their own men.

Leaving it alone meant every slick coming in or out would fly right past it. Then, fuel pressed in again. A voice identified as 96 reports it has about 45 minutes of fuel left. It recommends arranging the timing so there is always an air time buffer, some aircraft always overhead while others refuel. The answer comes back that the other ships also have about 45 minutes.

They agree to break and refuel while the air and artillery are controlled and then come back to the station. This was the same problem as the morning, but worse. The enemy was closer. The ammunition was lower. The lift was longer. And the gunships still had to keep a buffer, never letting the slicks go uncovered.

An air strike is called in. On the tape, the controller clears a pilot for one more pass. This is 25 Roger, you’re cleared to come in. Then, the gunships go back to work. He positions one of his teams. “They need to be a little in front of the flight,” he explains, “so they can fire from north to south under the slicks as the slicks go in from west to east. It is a matter of geometry.

The gunship’s fire has to cross in front of the troopships, not toward them. You hear 88 calling 87 about which way to swing. You hear the fire team calling its breaks. We’re breaking left, 87. You got it. We’ll be in your orbit after you. There’s 87.” “Coming in.” The circle held. One gunship fired and broke away. The next one rolled in behind it.

There was always a gun pointed at the treeline while a slick sat in that clearing. Near the end, he calls 81. “How much fuel do you have on board?” 81 reports it still has rockets and 40 mm left. He asks if they can keep it up. “As I say, sir,” comes the answer. “We’ll manage to keep it.” Then, near the end of the recording, a simple line.

“Roger. That was a fine job this time. Thank you.” He later described the whole operation in one sentence. “It was,” he said, “a tape of where we took those people in and brought them out under rather heavy fire.” The battalion went into LZ Stump by helicopter. It came out by helicopter. The one slick damaged by the tree on the way in was repaired and flown out.

The tape does not record how many men on the ground may have been hit during the fighting around the clearing. What it does record is how the protection worked when almost nothing went to plan. The artillery ran long. The smoke blinded the pilots. The leaders’ rockets failed. A helicopter struck a tree.

The enemy fired from the very edge of the zone. Fuel ran short. Ammunition ran out. Through all of it, the gunships kept one promise. The slicks would not be left uncovered. They did it by taking turns, by calling their sides, by calling their breaks, and by waiting to be fired on before firing back. He was careful, years later, not to make his war sound bigger than it was.

“You can say I spent a lot of time over there,” he said, “but I really can’t sit here and tell you that my time over there was when the worst part was going on.” He added a caution that matters for anyone hearing his tape. Many of the gunners and crew chiefs flying with him were 18, 19, or 20 years old.

Some had never even fired a shotgun. “For a young man hearing bullets go by for the first time,” he said, “the experience was very different from his own. Someone who was there with him, but young, would probably have a different view of how bad it was.” He added another caution. “I’m an aviator, okay? I wasn’t down there under the trees.

I was not down there in the rice paddies. When you talk to a veteran,” he said, “find out what he did. That colors how he feels.” He also warned against comparing his missions to those of other services. “An Army helicopter mission might last 30 minutes or 2 hours. He might fly three different missions in a single day.

An Air Force or Navy pilot might fly one long mission that took all day. The numbers,” he said, “are not comparable.” In 1966, he was not the only member of his family in that sky. His brother, the Naval Academy graduate, had gone into the Air Force. That was not unusual. Before the Air Force Academy graduated its first class in 1959, about a quarter of the graduates of West Point and Annapolis could choose the Air Force.

His brother served a little over 4 years in Vietnam and Thailand. In 1966, while both men were in Vietnam, his brother was a forward air controller. He flew small L-19 spotter planes over third core for long-range patrols. It was his job to find targets and call in the jets. It was, as the pilot put it, a very dangerous job. He told one of his brother’s stories.

His brother was over a patrol in trouble. The men were struggling to find a place to be picked up. His brother was nearly out of fuel. He told the patrol he had to leave. He flew to Ly Ke, home of the First Infantry Division, where he knew there were L-19s. A sergeant was working on one.

His brother pulled up and yelled at him, was the plane flyable and did the radio work? >> Yes, sir. >> His brother jumped in with his maps, called the tower for an emergency takeoff, and flew straight back out over the patrol. When he finally landed, the tower said the post commander wanted to see him. His brother reported and explained what had happened.

The colonel asked only a few things. How did it fly? Did you fill out the book? Come back to see us. It was the same rule the gunships lived by at LZ Stump. You did not leave men uncovered if there was any way to stay. His own time over that jungle ended with a single bullet. He had extended his tour in 1966. At that time, any service member who extended by 6 months got a round-trip ticket to anywhere he wanted and 30 days of leave that did not count against him.

His brother had called about it. So, he extended. When he came back from that leave, around March or April of 1967, he took a new job. He was supposed to stay through the end of the year. He did not make it. He was flying a small helicopter where the pilot sits upright and holds the control stick between his knees.

An AK round came up through the bottom of the aircraft and went right through the control. Most of it went in the stick, he said, and the rest of it went in my hand. He was medevac’d out of Vietnam. He spent a few months recovering. Then he went to Texas and trained new helicopter pilots for about a year.

The army was training helicopter pilots in huge numbers now. The war that had been so quiet in 1964 now needed thousands of them. He could have stayed out. He wanted something else. He had never earned his army fixed-wing rating and he wanted to go to fixed-wing school. He called the man who handled his assignments. The man told him that the only people getting fixed-wing training were those being sent back to Vietnam.

He did not argue. What class number am I going to be in? He asked. It was a bargain. He got his fixed-wing training. He learned to fly the L-19, the same kind of airplane his brother had flown over Third Corps. He called it a powerful and dependable machine and he went back to Vietnam. He arrived for his third tour in June of 1969.

At first he was given a staff job in aviation safety, which he held for about 5 months. He called it the worst part of his Vietnam tours. For a man who had flown guns over LZ Stump and taken a bullet through his control stick, that says a great deal about where he felt he belonged. In November of 1969, he was given command of a helicopter company.

It turned out to be the same company he had flown with in 1966. The war had changed. So had the mission. This time, his company supported South Vietnamese forces down in the Mekong Delta and in Three Corps. The Americans were beginning to hand more of the fighting back to the South Vietnamese. The company had changed, too. It had 52 flight positions, officers and warrant officers, mostly warrants.

When he looked over the roster, he found something that surprised him. He was the only aviator in the company who had flown in Vietnam before. Every other pilot was new to the war. The lessons his platoon had learned over LZ Stump were not in their heads. They would have to learn them the way his men had, in the air and under fire.

He admitted he had wondered about that, but the answer came quickly. It was obvious pretty early on, he said, that these were great people. He said the real high point of that tour was the people in the company. He believed in what young American soldiers could do when leaders fell. Part of the success of the American military, he said, was that there was always someone else who would take over.

We’re brought up over here not to be led around by a ring in our nose, he said, but to take charge. His company still had one threat he watched for above all others, the enemies’ .50 caliber heavy machine guns. He saw very few of them. He left Vietnam before the enemy began firing shoulder-launched missiles at American helicopters.

By his account, his last day in the country was the last day of February 1970. He came home, married, and went to Florida State University for 3 years. He and his wife had two sons. He attended the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Then he returned to Atlanta to work in the Army’s Southeast Region Recruiting Command.

After that, he worked in personnel, recruiting, and retention at Forces Command Headquarters, also in Atlanta. He retired in 1982 after 24 years. Many Vietnam veterans came home to a cold reception. He said that never happened to him. No one spat on him or put him down. Maybe it was where he was from, he said, or where he was assigned.

He did not claim his experience was everyone’s. He believed people carried the war in different ways. Some people carry it with a bone structure, he said, and some people carry it with their muscles. And those that carry it with their muscles are going to be hurting pretty soon. He had his own views about the war.

He believed political decisions kept the military from doing what it could have done. He said plainly that the United States lost a lot of people over there. Decades later, the men of his old company found each other again. A young man named Dominic Fino, who served in the unit in 1969 and 1970, worked with four or five other former enlisted men to build a list of several hundred people who had served in the company.

About every 2 years they gathered, lately in Las Vegas. Anywhere from 30 to 60 veterans came, plus their families. What struck him was how easily they fell back together. “You could walk in after 2 years,” he said, “and almost pick up the conversation right where it had stopped.” He knew why. “In the military,” he said, “you did not just work with someone. You lived with him.

” After months together, the bond was amazing. That bond is the real answer to the question this story began with. When the plan fell apart over LZ Stump, the machines were not enough on their own. The artillery ran long. The rockets failed. The smoke hid the zone. The enemy waited 50 m from the clearing.

What got the battalion in and out was a set of habits built on trust. Someone always covered the slicks. Someone always took the right side, and someone the left. Pilots called their brakes and took turns refueling. Every man watched over the others. A young man with a tape recorder under his helmet happened to capture it. Without that tape, the voices of that morning would be gone. Instead, we We still hear them.

The calm orders, the counting down, and the warning to watch for friendlies. Near the end, we hear one quiet line of thanks. Roger, that was a fine job this time. To the men of the Cowboys, to the infantry of the 173rd who rode into that clearing, and to the millions who served in Southeast Asia, many of them still carrying that war in their own way, there are two words that were owed to them long ago. Welcome home.