- 6 hours ago
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00:00:00That night nothing had happened and we'd been on pretty much a ready alert status for weeks
00:00:07on end because they had constant strikes going over.
00:00:10In fact, just to digress, we could, in some of the strikes when we were flying there you
00:00:14could watch the aircraft, if they were in close enough to the coast, you could watch
00:00:18them make their bombing runs and see the puffs of smoke coming up and that.
00:00:23So this night we were sitting around and everybody was relaxing and I'd watched some
00:00:30forgettable movie in the wardroom and about 11 o'clock I'd gone to bed and
00:00:35everybody's in there and I was in bed just about half an hour, 40 minutes, something like that
00:00:40and all of a sudden SAR alert, SAR alert, bong, bong, bong.
00:00:44And so jumped out of the Iraq, got into my flight suit and ran after the flight deck.
00:00:52And my pilot, Clyde Lassen, his job was then to go to CIC, the Combat Information Center,
00:01:00to get a briefing on what this was all about.
00:01:03And my job was to get the engine started and get everything up to releasing the rotor brake.
00:01:09And so that's where we were and he came back, jumped in the aircraft and now this is midnight
00:01:15and like you say, we aren't flying at night too often and there was no moon, it was a black
00:01:22night.
00:01:24And the significance of that for helicopter pilots and any pilot is that there's no horizon
00:01:30and without a horizon you are totally dependent on the gauges and now here we are, we're taking off of
00:01:35a ship that's
00:01:36probably where we, the flight deck was about eight feet above the water, maybe ten.
00:01:42And the other thing about it is this was a single engine H2, they've much, right after this they went
00:01:50to adding a second engine.
00:01:52But the single engine H2 was very underpowered in that high humidity of the Tonkin Gulf.
00:01:59And on a normal day we would sometimes take off, leave one crewman on the deck,
00:02:05take off and get into the air, limp into the air, which we usually meant diving down towards water to
00:02:14get about five feet of it
00:02:15so that you could get what is called ground effect but over the water and suppose they'd call it water
00:02:21effect.
00:02:22But the rotor system is pushing down on the waves, it gives it a little more efficiency and the aerodynamics
00:02:27of the fuselage,
00:02:29once you get enough speed that the fuselage itself will take, will provide a little bit of lift, a residual
00:02:36lift.
00:02:37But we would have to take off, go dump fuel of at least two or three hundred pounds,
00:02:41which is the weight of one of our crewman, and then come back and land and pick up the second
00:02:45crewman.
00:02:45So that's, that was what we were taking off with on that dark night except we had both crewmen on
00:02:52board
00:02:52and a little cooler so that, but again we dove towards the water on instruments from eight feet
00:02:59and then got airborne and went up. And so then Clyde gave us a briefing that said that there had
00:03:10been an aircraft shot down
00:03:13about 15, 20 miles inland from the coast. They thought the pilots were still successfully evading,
00:03:23that they hadn't been discovered yet because it was late at night and everybody was sleeping.
00:03:31And so we said, well, we'll just go up and we're here to, we have to sit and wait to
00:03:35see if, if we're told to go in or not.
00:03:39And we agreed we would not be told to go in. Nobody had ever done it before.
00:03:46They'd need to, there weren't, there wasn't enough time to organize any sort of a close air support at this
00:03:52point.
00:03:54The Jolly Green from the Air Force, you know, their way of doing it, they went in,
00:03:59just bombed the heck out of everything around and they did a lot of close ground support.
00:04:05And we in the Navy had not done too many inland rescues. A few had been done from my squadron.
00:04:14And so we said, we're not going in, you know, we'll sit up here for half an hour and they'll
00:04:19call us back.
00:04:20Our biggest problem is how we're going to get back on board without crashing this thing.
00:04:26Well, they pulled the rug out from under us. They said, yep, your, your signal is, uh, Charlie, you can
00:04:33go.
00:04:33Now, in order to get approval and there was a person called Harbor Master. That was their call sign.
00:04:41I forget what the CTF designation was, but they were sitting down there and they were, their staff was assessing
00:04:46everything.
00:04:47And there were several things that had to take place. One, they had to have positive contact with the survivor.
00:04:53They had to have, um, the survivor had to be successfully evading capture.
00:05:00And in that, um, and they had to authenticate their, uh, their validity of who they were.
00:05:10And that was done. Everybody, when they went over, had a sheet of paper to fill out a form that
00:05:15gave,
00:05:16that they gave answers to. What's your favorite color? What's your favorite ice cream? What's your mother's maiden name?
00:05:21You know, those kinds of questions that only they would know the answers to.
00:05:25And, um, so we said, that's, you know, that's, that's not going to happen.
00:05:32But then again, they did. Now, where we were at the time was right at, uh, off the coast of,
00:05:38uh, almost parallel to Venn,
00:05:39maybe a little bit north of it. And Venn was noted for having the most anti-aircraft missile defense systems
00:05:48around.
00:05:48They just, when you looked at a map of North Vietnam and the little red dots showed where the, where
00:05:55the, uh, anti-aircraft was,
00:05:58Venn was almost all red. They were just everything there.
00:06:04So, we had, uh, a rescue combat air patrol who was giving us vectors and steers overhead.
00:06:10We had, uh, a man air traffic controller on board the ship who had taken the mayday call from the
00:06:16F-4 crew.
00:06:18The F-4 crews was, uh, John Holtzclaw and John Burns. Zeke, Zeke Holtz, uh, Zeke Burns and, and, uh,
00:06:25Claw were their nicknames.
00:06:28And they would, they had, uh, been on a mission where they had, were looking for some, uh, what they
00:06:35called movers,
00:06:36any trucks or anything going along. They had a flight of three aircraft, two, uh, F-4s and an A
00:06:42-6.
00:06:43Um, and they, they had their procedures for going well.
00:06:46What happened is that, uh, the F-4, uh, root beer, uh, was the call sign, got locked on by
00:06:55a surfaced air missile.
00:06:58And they evaded the first one. They evaded the second one.
00:07:03And in order to evade these two, it was jinking and zigging and they were moving back and forth.
00:07:07Well, by the time the third one came up, they had lost their airspeed. They'd lost their altitude.
00:07:12They'd run out of everything but ideas and it hit the wing and they managed to eject and, uh, come
00:07:19down over this rice paddy
00:07:21and, uh, get back together and then made their way up a, a small mountainside, which is an outcropping of,
00:07:28of rock.
00:07:28And first time I heard the term karst, but that's the, uh, geological name for it.
00:07:35So they were down and this rice paddy surrounded by a bunch of villages and, um, successfully evading.
00:07:43They hadn't been captured yet, but people were looking for them because now they'd awakened the neighborhood.
00:07:51And so when we went in, we went up, uh, just north of Venn and turned, uh, up this little
00:07:59valley.
00:07:59Now it's not like we were flying down the valley. We were at about, uh, what are we doing?
00:08:04I think at about 3,000 feet, which was outside of the small arms fire in case there,
00:08:09but that puts you right up in the range for anti-aircraft.
00:08:13And it was, uh, uh, we could see the F-4 burning up at about our 10 o'clock position,
00:08:19probably 15 miles away.
00:08:22And there's a big bright glow in the, uh, now the only way that we could find people on the
00:08:27ground
00:08:27is we had very rudimentary air, uh, instruments for fine, for detecting people.
00:08:32Every pilot on the ground, every pilot who flew in case he had to go on the ground,
00:08:37had his own personal survival radio with a little walkie talkie,
00:08:40but it would broadcast in three or four frequencies.
00:08:43And it also had a, uh, uh, a steady tone that just sent out this ear piercing.
00:08:51And if they talked, uh, and we were on that frequency,
00:08:54then we had an instrument in the, in the cockpit that would,
00:08:58a needle would point and say, that's where the signal's coming from.
00:09:01And that's all we could, could have, get.
00:09:04Yeah.
00:09:06So, as we turned up the, uh, north and, and, uh, got a steer from RESCAP flying overhead,
00:09:12and I, I don't, it had to be as wingmen, so at that time, the wingmen usually became RESCAP,
00:09:18the Rescue Combat Patrol, um, to give us the, the, the vectors and the steers
00:09:24to where their last known sighting was, where they went down.
00:09:28And, uh, and about that time, uh, we were flying in maybe a hundred knots,
00:09:34110 at the most probably because H2 wouldn't go too much faster.
00:09:39And all of a sudden I heard this loud whoosh and saw this trail of sparks go by
00:09:43the left-hand side of the aircraft, which was my side.
00:09:46And that, that was missile number one that was shot at us.
00:09:50And it missed, fortunately.
00:09:53And we've continued on up and said, well, you know,
00:09:56they didn't hit us that time.
00:09:58If they hit us, we won't, it won't hurt.
00:10:06Did you have any way of seeing these SAMs?
00:10:09Oh, no. No.
00:10:11See, and the F-4s and the other aircraft, they had detection equipment
00:10:16that they would know when they were getting locked on.
00:10:19In fact, Zeke Burns, who was the radar intercept officer sitting in the back seat,
00:10:23and Claw, Holtzclaw was the pilot in the F-4.
00:10:27When they made a first pass over, they instantly knew that there was a, uh,
00:10:33somebody down there who was locking on.
00:10:35There was a SAM sight that was locking on him.
00:10:38And, uh, Zeke, I've seen him and talked with him many times in the years since.
00:10:42And he said, you know, he made the statement to Claw, he said,
00:10:46that, that guy's pretty hot stuff.
00:10:48And the reason that he said that was not that the system,
00:10:52the SAM sight was hot stuff, but the operator was,
00:10:55because he said he's probably a Russian instructor or somebody,
00:10:59because usually you get vip, vip, vip, you know,
00:11:03the sound in your earphones that, in the headphones,
00:11:06that, uh, indicate you've been locked on,
00:11:09or that they're searching for you, rather.
00:11:10And then when it goes to lock on, vip, vip, vip, vip, it comes up.
00:11:14He said he took one sweep and it was a lock on.
00:11:17And this guy was good down there.
00:11:21So, but we in the helicopter didn't have anything like that.
00:11:25We had flight instruments.
00:11:26We had airspeed indicator and altimeters and stuff like that.
00:11:31There was no, uh, anti-missile defense.
00:11:34We continued to fly up and, and we kept trying to get a, uh,
00:11:37a fix on where they were, where the survivors were, Zeke and Claw were.
00:11:42And, uh, by the way, I should say my crewmen were, uh, Don West,
00:11:45who was a third-class, uh, jet mechanic,
00:11:49and, uh, Bruce Dallas, who was a, uh,
00:11:52second-class electrician at that time.
00:11:56And, uh, sitting in the, in the back.
00:11:58And so we were trying to get a, a lock-on to them, uh, to the, uh, survivors.
00:12:04And they were in such a dense jungle.
00:12:06Now, to get into this jungle,
00:12:08they tell us that they had to, to do a concerted,
00:12:12hit the vines like a tackling dummy, like a football tackling dummy,
00:12:15and they could make a few inches.
00:12:17And Zeke, when he ejected out of the seat,
00:12:19broke his ankle and broke his leg.
00:12:21I mean, he, it's amazing how he was able to do any of this, uh, in that.
00:12:28But, uh, so they made their way up into the jungle,
00:12:31to, to, rather than sitting out in the rice paddy,
00:12:33where they could be easily found.
00:12:37And so the canopy at that point is about 200 feet,
00:12:41and it's so dense that not, light's not penetrating.
00:12:44Because they had a little bright light strobe.
00:12:47You know, you know, airline passengers flying today
00:12:50get that little briefing on their, uh,
00:12:52if they go down in water and they talk about this little light.
00:12:55Well, that's, that's just a bright strobe light that they had.
00:12:58And couldn't see it.
00:13:00And the other signaling device they had was a,
00:13:03what we call the pencil flare.
00:13:04It was just a little cylindrical tube that had a plunger on it,
00:13:07and you would screw in one flare,
00:13:11pull back, and then the spring would go,
00:13:12and it would send up this, you know, like a Roman candle.
00:13:15That wouldn't penetrate the jungle.
00:13:17They couldn't get, they couldn't get the flare to go through the canopy.
00:13:20So we, we had no way of seeing them.
00:13:23Unfortunately, what they, we also had was 38 caliber, uh, survival weapons.
00:13:29And at that time, um, the Navy was giving out, uh, instead of it,
00:13:35it was like a tracer, but it was a magnesium coated,
00:13:38and so it would burn its way out.
00:13:40And they shot that through the jungle canopy,
00:13:42and here was this bright stream of light coming up.
00:13:45It says, okay, now we know about where they are.
00:13:48So we flew up to that point.
00:13:49It's still at 3,000 feet.
00:13:51We get up there, and when we were in the Philippines,
00:13:54we used to practice a quick descent to get from 3,000 to 500 feet
00:13:59as quickly as possible.
00:14:01And it's, essentially, unload the rotor system,
00:14:05turn it sideways so that there's no lift at all,
00:14:07and just fall out of the sky in a few seconds,
00:14:10and then come and bring it back into control.
00:14:12And we're doing this on instruments.
00:14:16About this time, the combat aircraft patrol overhead was dropping parachute flares,
00:14:21and a parachute flare is nothing more than a magnesium light-producing thing
00:14:26that casts the light down, and they have a little flare to make it.
00:14:28It's a metal canister, and the parachute just helps it descend slowly.
00:14:33And so now we have an artificial horizon.
00:14:35We have some moon, you know, a man-made moon,
00:14:39so that we can see the ground and we can get some shadows
00:14:42and get some relationship with where we are and where we want to be.
00:14:50But as we came up over 3,000 feet, we got another missile shot at us,
00:14:54and that went by on the storm side.
00:15:00Bruce Dallas and Don West both said they saw that one.
00:15:03I didn't see that one because I was on the wrong side of the aircraft.
00:15:07But we came down, got in there, and we found, flew around a couple of turns
00:15:13to see where the most likely landing place was.
00:15:16Now we're on a side slope.
00:15:19It's still rice paddy, but it's all mud.
00:15:23So as we came in to approach, Clyde Lassen had to, could not land the helicopter
00:15:29because there was so much mud, it would just sink in.
00:15:31So he was really having to hold a hover with the wheels essentially in the mud.
00:15:36And that was some tricky flying for that time of day and the conditions.
00:15:41And we told Zeke and Claude to come down the hill, and they said we can't.
00:15:46The jungle is around.
00:15:47We can't get out of here.
00:15:49Come get us.
00:15:49Come get us.
00:15:50So we said okay.
00:15:52Took off, flew back up, found their position where we got right on top of them.
00:15:57We could see the strobe light now, and pulled into a hover.
00:16:01Now, I said this model of H2 was very underpowered, and it did not want to hover at 200 feet
00:16:10very well,
00:16:11but that was the extent of our cable.
00:16:13We had a 200 foot, maybe it was 150.
00:16:16But anyway, we had to descend below the treetops in a clearing to get the cable close enough to the
00:16:24ground.
00:16:24And Bruce Dallas is the cable operator.
00:16:27He's running it out, and he can see the survivors on the ground.
00:16:30They are probably less than 10 feet away from where the cable was, and they can't get to it because
00:16:37of the density of the jungle and the vines.
00:16:42And we're holding this hover because we have the parachute flares, and we can see trees and everything.
00:16:47Then the parachute flares burned out.
00:16:50I had no visual horizon.
00:16:52And we're down among trees, and Clyde starts climbing out.
00:16:57And on the way out, we hit a tree.
00:16:59It grabs a hold of the helicopter.
00:17:01We pitch nose down to the left.
00:17:03I can remember this because I can see the branches coming out.
00:17:06Bruce Dallas gets hit in the face by the limb of the tree that we hit.
00:17:11And don't know how, but we flew out of there.
00:17:15But the helicopter's damaged, and we have a vibration now going.
00:17:18The tail rotor's been damaged.
00:17:20There's a little, what would look like a stub wing to a non-aviation person.
00:17:25We call it a horizontal stabilizer.
00:17:28Back on the tail pylon.
00:17:30That has damage.
00:17:32And we get up into the night and fly around for a while.
00:17:41One thing I miss, because this is my claim to fame.
00:17:43I can't, I don't believe I overlooked this.
00:17:46Before we went into that hover, we tried to do a hover, didn't have enough power.
00:17:50So Clyde told us, took off and waved off and circled the area and told me to dump fuel.
00:17:55He never told me when to stop dumping fuel.
00:17:57And I decided, well, that's probably enough fuel.
00:18:00And this is going to be one of our saving elements.
00:18:06So after hitting the tree and flying around and having this aircraft get the shutter to it.
00:18:11Now it's not flying very well, but it's fine.
00:18:17And we tell them on the ground, we can't do that.
00:18:20I mean, you were 10 feet away and you couldn't get to it.
00:18:23We can't hold that hover.
00:18:24And if you both get on that cable, I don't think we told them this, but I know that we
00:18:30were thinking this.
00:18:31If they both get on the cable, they may just drag us down and we'd have to cut the cable
00:18:35and leave them there for good.
00:18:37Because that's the only, we had a powder activated, what we call a guillotine, just a cable cutter in case
00:18:46that ever gets snared.
00:18:49So their adrenaline's running high.
00:18:51They can now hear people running along on paths around the jungle, around them, looking for them and calling to
00:19:01them.
00:19:02And these people running in the jungle, as Zeke and Claude told me, are literally 10, 12 feet away.
00:19:10I mean, the jungle is that dense in that part that they just, you know, were there.
00:19:15So they kept saying, no, no, you have to come get us. We can't come down.
00:19:20And I remember telling on the radio, I said, we can't come get you.
00:19:26And if you can't come down, then you're staying there tonight.
00:19:30I said, we'll make it. We'll be there.
00:19:33And so that set up the sequence for a couple of approaches into the same rice paddy.
00:19:40Now all of this light and all of the noise and everything, and there's probably, I don't know, five or
00:19:44six villages that I can remember.
00:19:46And village is not a good term. Hamlet.
00:19:48Just a collection of little hooches and huts around these rice paddies where, I don't know, maybe 30, 40, 50
00:19:54people would live.
00:19:55I don't know how many would be in there.
00:19:58But we see people running, stumbling across the rice, the dikes of the rice paddy.
00:20:03And they parachute flares and they're shooting at us.
00:20:07And of course, we'd been shot out in the sky when we were flying around.
00:20:12And you see the muzzle flashes coming up and we, the little light stuff we just ignored.
00:20:16But then something bigger came along and that's when we started shooting back.
00:20:20And one of the amusing anecdotes is I had the M-16 and Bruce and Don both had M-60
00:20:26mounted guns out either door.
00:20:32And just like split second timing, Don West on my left side, on my side of the aircraft, and I,
00:20:38with the M-16, opened fire at the same time.
00:20:41And this horrendous, the stillness that we would have.
00:20:43I mean, it was really quiet up there.
00:20:45It was, other than the circumstances, I mean, there was not, you know, much going on in the cockpit as
00:20:52far as there's noise and that.
00:20:54But all of a sudden, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
00:20:57And one of my hot shell casing ricocheted off the windscreen and came back and hit Clyde in the face.
00:21:03And he said, I've been hit, I've been hit.
00:21:04And I thought, oh, hell.
00:21:06Now, I thought something along that line.
00:21:09Now I'm going to have to fly this aircraft.
00:21:11And he reached up and wasn't wearing flight gloves, which is against, you know, the flight thing.
00:21:18We were flying in marine jungle fatigues with the sleeves rolled up.
00:21:22I mean, you couldn't get away with that in today's safety conscious Navy of, in case you go down, you
00:21:29have to have Nomex.
00:21:30And, you know, you don't want to burn and all that stuff.
00:21:33So he reaches up and he feels this hot, wet, sticky stuff coming down.
00:21:37You know, he thinks, oh, I've been hit in the head and I'm bleeding.
00:21:40It was nothing more than his perspiration.
00:21:42So he tasted it and he said, oh, no, I'm okay.
00:21:47So this set up, we made three more approaches back into that rice paddy to shorten the story up.
00:21:54Each time he said, yeah, we can get there.
00:21:55We'd come in, we'd sit again, holding it in a hover, watching the circle of people in the light come
00:22:02closer and closer to us.
00:22:05Bruce Dallas on the right hand side is firing back.
00:22:07Don and I are on the left hand side watching the jungle for any sign of life and nothing.
00:22:15So we get unnerved.
00:22:17They say, no, we can't quite, we're not quite there yet.
00:22:20And again, they're hitting the jungle like a tackling dummy.
00:22:23And so that set up the three more approaches into this area that we were in.
00:22:30Again, it was on the side slope and Clyde had to hold it in a modified hover.
00:22:36He could let the weight off just a little bit, but if he let it down, it would sink into
00:22:40the mud.
00:22:43And we saw this circle of people tightening around us and now you could see,
00:22:47where you could just see figures running before, now you could discern features in the figures.
00:22:52And fortunately, the Rice Dikes were there and they were running a crisscross pattern.
00:22:57You know, they couldn't run directly at us. They would run 90 degrees one way.
00:23:00It's like tacking in a sailboat, essentially.
00:23:07And Bruce Dallas was shooting back with the M60 to try and slow them down a little bit.
00:23:14And Don West and I were watching the jungle.
00:23:18And Zeke and Klaus said, nope, can't do it.
00:23:21Came back the other time, nope, we're still not there.
00:23:24And so the third time we were back there.
00:23:26And I think this is the fifth time we've landed in this same rice paddy.
00:23:29And, you know, people know where we're going to be by this time.
00:23:34And Bruce Dallas says we're taking fire from our six o'clock.
00:23:38There was somebody coming up the tail back and he couldn't turn his M60 far enough.
00:23:43Well, the H2 had this little skinny profile, narrow thing.
00:23:47It didn't sit wide, so that was pretty safe there.
00:23:52I mean, they would have to be a good shot to hit us on a run coming from that direction.
00:23:57And about this time, we saw the two figures, two dark pajama-clad figures burst out of the jungle
00:24:07and start running towards us.
00:24:10And I told Don, I said, if you watch him, if you see a muzzle flash, you start shooting.
00:24:16Unfortunately, it was Claw and Burns in their flight suit.
00:24:20They were in pajama, but at that distance, you couldn't tell.
00:24:24And they came running across.
00:24:27The last time we came into the approach, we lost our parachute flares again.
00:24:35Everything went black at about, we were coming through at about 150 feet,
00:24:39descending, slowing back through 60 knots.
00:24:42And on the collective, there are two switches that control the lights, and Clyde just flipped them all on.
00:24:46We had the hover spot going straight down.
00:24:50We had nose flubs going out to the right.
00:24:53And there we sat, waiting for these people, surrounded by this halo of light, just illuminated as a target.
00:25:01Prior to this time, the H2 had a dark gray paint scheme, just like your tape box.
00:25:06And we were on a moonless night.
00:25:08And I'm convinced that's what saved us, because they couldn't see us.
00:25:11They were shooting at a sound.
00:25:12And when they shoot at a sound, it's like trying to shoot a flock of geese where they are.
00:25:16I mean, you have to lead them.
00:25:17And the people on the ground had no idea where we were.
00:25:20I mean, they could hear the noise, but I knew they didn't know where we were.
00:25:24And that saved them.
00:25:24But here we were sitting, surrounded in this light, lit up like a cruise ship down in the Caribbean.
00:25:32And that's much of the light that we were watching Don, I mean, Zeke and Claw come at us.
00:25:40And they looked at the light and they say, we're not going to run into that light and get shot.
00:25:45I mean, that's it.
00:25:46We've been in the dark.
00:25:48And even though Zeke Burns had the broken ankle, he beat Claw to the aircraft, to the helicopter.
00:25:55They came around.
00:25:56And why Bruce Dallas did this, I don't know.
00:25:59When we said they're coming out of the jungle, he got out of the aircraft, walked around the front of
00:26:04the aircraft and looked around to see who was coming.
00:26:07And Clyde looked at him and says, and he's still connected to his ICS cord, the intercom system.
00:26:12And Clyde looked down to the right and said, Dallas, what the expletive deleted are you doing out there?
00:26:19Get back in the aircraft.
00:26:21And so about the time Bruce Dallas got back in the aircraft, John Burns rounded the aircraft and started coming
00:26:29in.
00:26:30And now the, the deck of the aircraft, the H2 is probably, I don't know, less than three feet above
00:26:35the ground, maybe about that.
00:26:37And so he, and there was a step on the, on the main landing gear as he went down.
00:26:43And whether Burns missed the step, I don't know, but Bruce Dallas grabbed him by the seat of the pants
00:26:49and with one hand threw him into the back of the aircraft.
00:26:52And about 10 seconds later, John Holtzclaw entered the same way, inverted and up, up position just through him.
00:27:01And the signal was, is that anytime you, for the air crewman to tell the pilot that they were ready
00:27:07to leave, that the survivors were on board, was to tap the pilot on the shoulder.
00:27:11Well, Clyde said Bruce almost knocked him out of the seat, even though he was strapped in.
00:27:17So there we go. We took off.
00:27:19And the, and the one comment about it is as John and Zeke and Claw rounded the nose of the
00:27:26aircraft, we started taking fire from the jungle right where they had to come out.
00:27:29The people were that far, that close behind them.
00:27:32And, in fact, we learned later that as they were getting to that jungle edge, the guys were, again, 10,
00:27:3915 feet behind them, shooting at them, and didn't hit them.
00:27:43They, they, they could hear the bullets whistling past them and thwacking the ground and the leaves around them.
00:27:47And so they had a lot of incentive to, to not stay there very much longer.
00:27:52And so as we, as we broke cover and, and made a very rapid climb out,
00:27:58and headed for the beach and, and, you know, Don West and, and Bruce Dallas were both using their M60s
00:28:05to shoot at the people, shoot back at the people on the ground.
00:28:09And John Holtzclaw had his survival radio on, and it was locked on that, survive, that distress signal going, pew,
00:28:17pew, pew, blocking out all transmissions, inside the aircraft and outside the aircraft.
00:28:23We could not hear the people on the ship.
00:28:25And now we've, we're getting pretty low on fuel at this time.
00:28:30And couldn't hear anything from the aircraft overhead because it was just so powerful, it just blocked everything else.
00:28:36And Clyde screamed through the cockpit into the cab and he says, I don't care if you have to strip
00:28:42him naked, get that damn radio and get rid of it.
00:28:47And so when it got that turned off, by this time we had flown up farther north than we wanted
00:28:52to be.
00:28:53And the only way to the ship was a straight line right across some heavy aircraft artillery, shore batteries again.
00:29:01And as we were going through about a thousand feet and accelerating through about 80, 90 knots,
00:29:06Bruce Dallas slid the cargo door open, or closed on the side, and it disappeared.
00:29:13It had been hit, it got damaged by the tree and it just flew out of his hand and went
00:29:18fluttering down to become a trinket for some North Vietnamese rice paddy farmer.
00:29:24Well, the significance of that is without the door closed, you have more drag, you use more fuel, you don't
00:29:30go as fast.
00:29:31But we, we pulled out of there at about 120 knots, which is red line air, air speed for the
00:29:38H2.
00:29:39And we were climbing up and went for, fortunately, the Jewett, which is the ship we landed on, had broken
00:29:48standing practice and had closed the beach within the 12 mile range.
00:29:53Otherwise we wouldn't have made it.
00:29:54Because as we were climbing out, we got the 20 minute fuel light and we had about 25 minutes of
00:29:59flight to get to the ship, normally.
00:30:03And Clyde had said while we were flying around in the night, he says, we're going to stay here until
00:30:07we have just enough fuel to get feet wet ourself.
00:30:10And then we'll, we'll leave, but not before, you know, unless we pick them up, of course.
00:30:17And so as we crossed the beach line, I could see down with the lights of Venn to the south
00:30:24of us, I could see a little bit of a horizon in the haze.
00:30:27And it looked like somebody had taken a bunch of flaming arrows and threw it at us.
00:30:32And there was a bit of a horizon.
00:30:33And any pilot who flies knows that if it's on the horizon, it's at your level.
00:30:38And so I scared Clyde for the second time that night and I screamed at him, get down.
00:30:42And I hit the collective and we dropped about 500 feet in five seconds.
00:30:47And, and whatever it was that was sent up at us burst probably a mile, a half mile, a quarter
00:30:53mile away.
00:30:55So it didn't, and then we got back up.
00:30:57And as we said, we made an uneventful landing.
00:31:00Clyde did an excellent job.
00:31:02We landed with somewhere between five and eight minutes of fuel in the tank, indicated.
00:31:09Never once were we hit.
00:31:12All that shooting, we were never hit.
00:31:18The flight lead got a call from the controlling agency and wanted to know if we were configured for escort.
00:31:24And I said, yes.
00:31:26And I said, well, if you guys can get back to the rendezvous point before this other flight,
00:31:31you can escort a single F-4 that's going to go back in to do an electronic search for a
00:31:37couple of guys
00:31:37that had been shot down the day before.
00:31:41So we dropped off the tanker and headed back in there and beat the other flight out.
00:31:48So we went in with this single F-4.
00:31:51It was searching a particular area at a relatively low altitude.
00:31:57And so we were doing a weave up above to make sure we didn't have any Migs jump the guy.
00:32:07And we'd spent a fair amount of time there.
00:32:11And it was about time, we were about bingo on our fuel, about time for us to leave.
00:32:18And so we were making a big turn to head out of the area.
00:32:22And there was this huge explosion and the aircraft had violent shuddering, vibration.
00:32:35I couldn't read any of the instruments on the instrument panel.
00:32:38It was in a violent roll left and right.
00:32:44There was no response to the throttle or the flight stick control, nothing.
00:32:50It was just like the control stick wasn't even connected to anything anymore.
00:32:56Fire lights were on and so I knew this wasn't going to go anywhere.
00:33:02And so I yelled over the intercom, let's get out.
00:33:06And then everything went into slow motion.
00:33:12It was just like time almost stopped.
00:33:15I can remember thinking that you've got to grab the ejection handles now.
00:33:21And it seemed like it took three minutes for me to get my hands down to the ejection handles.
00:33:29And when I got a hold of it, I looked down to make sure I had a hold of the
00:33:33right handle.
00:33:34And I pulled on the ejection handle with my head down, which is about as bad a position as you
00:33:42can get in for an ejection.
00:33:44The ejection sequence is going to instantaneously put 15 to 17 G's on you with my head down rather than
00:33:54being back against a headrest where your spinal column is straight up and down to absorb all that.
00:34:00So that snapped my neck and I don't remember anything after that.
00:34:07Just before that I remember I was aware that the canopy came off because there were papers flying around in
00:34:14the cockpit.
00:34:15And then that was all.
00:34:19The next thing, I'm not sure if I'm dreaming or what.
00:34:25It feels like I'm floating in the air, but there's bamboo that's right in front of my face.
00:34:33So that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
00:34:35And I look down and it looks like I'm on the right, it looks like maybe two or three feet
00:34:40above the ground.
00:34:41On the left side, it looks like I'm 15 or 20 feet above the ground.
00:34:45So again, that doesn't make any sense to me.
00:34:51Where am I?
00:34:53What's going on?
00:34:54And finally, slowly, things come back to reality of what's going on.
00:35:02And so I'm really exhausted, just too tired to do much of anything.
00:35:12I'm aware that something's wrong with my right arm.
00:35:16Don't know what, just know that's really not usable.
00:35:21Your brain sort of sets its pain threshold that I didn't feel any particular pain.
00:35:32But it turned out that my bone in my right arm was broken, the bone in my right leg was
00:35:37broken,
00:35:38and my left knee was dislocated.
00:35:40And during the ejection sequence, we were probably 450 knots or so going out in the airstream,
00:35:48and that probably most likely snapped my head back and it ripped my helmet off and then broke my jaw.
00:35:54But again, just hanging in the straps there, other than feeling extremely tired
00:36:01and knowing that something was wrong with my right arm, there wasn't any significant pain.
00:36:10The brain just sets the threshold saying,
00:36:12you idiot, you've hurt yourself and I'm not going to accept all this pain.
00:36:18So also in the back of your parachute harness is 150 feet of nylon rope that's tacked in there,
00:36:30so that if you end up being hung up in a tree that you can hook it up to your
00:36:38parachute harness,
00:36:40and it's a tree-lowering device, sort of like a repelling system that will let you get down 150 feet
00:36:49anyway.
00:36:50Hopefully you're not in a 200-foot tree.
00:36:54But only having one arm that worked and being tired, I thought,
00:37:00I'm just not going to take all that trouble to do that.
00:37:03Plus there's a vine here right in front of me.
00:37:06I'll just wrap my arm around it and I'll release my harness
00:37:10and I'll just sort of slide down the vine to however far I have to go to get to the
00:37:17ground.
00:37:19The F4's harness is difficult to lock into place when you're standing on the floor connecting things,
00:37:30let alone being suspended from it and all your weight on it.
00:37:34So you have to push two little levers to release the harness or your leg strap.
00:37:41And I don't know how long I worked at that, but for a real long time.
00:37:47And then the next thing I remember is that I'm sitting on the ground and the leg straps are dangling
00:37:57in front of me.
00:37:58So I was only a couple of feet off the ground.
00:38:04But what turns out the reason was that there's this gigantic tree growing out of the side of this hill.
00:38:12And where the trunk of the tree is growing out of the hill is the little platform.
00:38:18And that's where I happened to be.
00:38:21And the reason it looked like 15 or 20 feet is that off from that platform,
00:38:26the side of the hill sloped very steeply.
00:38:29I could have rolled down the side of the hill.
00:38:33But being on this little platform and my emergency kit was sitting right beside me,
00:38:41which is normally part of your seat, of the ejection seat.
00:38:48So I had some survival equipment in there.
00:38:51Plus you have a survival vest that you wear that has most of your survival equipment on.
00:38:57They had found again through trial and error that a lot of guys that get shot down would lose their
00:39:06survival equipment.
00:39:07And so most of it was put in pockets in the vest.
00:39:12And then again from experience they found that lots of times guys would take the items out of the pocket
00:39:20of the vest
00:39:21and then drop them and then couldn't find them again in the dense jungle and all.
00:39:26So each item was tethered on a string inside of the vest pocket.
00:39:34So I had a significant number of items available to me.
00:39:40And so the first thing I did was pull out my survival radio.
00:39:44And the way you turn it on is essentially you extend the antenna of the radio and it's on.
00:39:51And when I did that, it was in the middle of a transmission.
00:39:55Someone was talking on that emergency frequency.
00:40:00So when they finished the call, then I responded that I'd heard the call.
00:40:10And it turned out it was one of the Sandy aircraft, one of the A-1 aircrafts that are part
00:40:16of the search and rescue package with the helicopters.
00:40:20And they were looking for guys that had been shot down.
00:40:25And of course the North Vietnamese had oftentimes set up traps by getting the radios and making calls
00:40:33and then bringing the search and rescue people in and shooting down the helicopters.
00:40:39So there was a sequence of codes that had to be passed back and forth to make sure that this
00:40:48was authentic.
00:40:49And one of the questions that they asked was what my call sign was.
00:40:54And they changed the call signs on every flight.
00:41:02And oftentimes they're not—they're always different.
00:41:07They're never just the same ones used as a group.
00:41:12So I couldn't remember what my call sign was.
00:41:15And I thought, well, this is going to really be a bad idea that here I have contact with rescue
00:41:24forces
00:41:25and they're not going to come in and get me just because I can't remember my call sign.
00:41:28And so he prompted me with a couple of things.
00:41:33And so then I recognized what my call sign was.
00:41:39And so he said, okay, we'll make a search for you here.
00:41:45And I said, well, it should be pretty easy.
00:41:47I'm at the base of this really big tree.
00:41:50And, you know, I thought that was going to be a pretty descriptive thing.
00:41:55But then afterwards when I'm thinking when you're in the middle of the forest
00:41:57and you say you're at the base of this really big tree, it may not help a lot.
00:42:03So he's flying back and forth and he says, okay, well, get your flares out
00:42:08and get your signal mirror out.
00:42:11And when I come by, you know, you flash mirror.
00:42:14And I'll tell you if I want you to ignite one of the flares.
00:42:19Of course, one of the problems with that is other people can see the orange smoke
00:42:26and not only the search and rescue guys.
00:42:29And so I said, well, the signal mirror is not going to work well
00:42:34because the canopy is so dense I can just see just one little spot
00:42:40at the very top of the canopy, a very small area.
00:42:47Other than that, I can't see anything.
00:42:49So I certainly couldn't get any sunlight in to reflect on the signal mirror.
00:42:55So he says, okay, well, I'll just drive back and forth
00:42:58and you tell me when you hear me.
00:43:00And so that went on for a while and finally I heard him.
00:43:08And so I said, okay, I think I'm at your 9 o'clock about now.
00:43:15And so then we start working it in.
00:43:18And so he says, okay, I know where you are.
00:43:21And it turns out that that tree happens to be about 50 feet taller
00:43:25than all the other trees in the area.
00:43:28So it turned out to be fairly descriptive after all.
00:43:32So I said, and I told him that I had quite a few injuries
00:43:37and that I'd need some assistance getting out.
00:43:41So he said, well, that he was pretty low on gas,
00:43:45that he was going to have to go back and refuel.
00:43:48And that would probably be a couple hours or so before they got back in the area.
00:43:52And so just to get out your medical kit and take some pain medicine,
00:43:58get some extra batteries out for your radio,
00:44:03make sure you've got your flares out and your compass,
00:44:10and sit back and relax and we'll be back in a couple hours.
00:44:14And so I thought that sounded like a pretty good idea
00:44:18because I was pretty tired.
00:44:19And so I had my radio out, a spare battery, two flares,
00:44:26signal mirror, compass.
00:44:28So I had six or seven things out and they're all,
00:44:31each one of them was tied on a lanyard to each pocket.
00:44:36And so I looked down in my lap
00:44:39and it looked like a bowl of spaghetti
00:44:40with all these lanyards on there.
00:44:44So there was no way I could put any of them back in their pockets
00:44:48because they were all twisted up.
00:44:50So I ended up actually cutting several of them off the lanyards.
00:44:54So in my case, since I wasn't able to maneuver around anyway,
00:44:58that didn't help me any by having them tied onto the lanyards.
00:45:08So again, with the ejection sequence being unconscious
00:45:14and my arms flailing around, it had torn my watch off,
00:45:17so I had no idea what time it was that I was shot down
00:45:22or how long I was on the ground.
00:45:24Other than it was the morning go,
00:45:28so time-wise it was probably in the morning.
00:45:33Obviously it was in the morning that I got shot down.
00:45:37And then it was late in the day when they came back again.
00:45:45And I did lay down—well, I was sitting up occasionally,
00:45:51but it was very tiring just to sit up.
00:45:55So the hill was on a very steep slope,
00:46:00so I could kind of recline laying on the slope.
00:46:04I was sort of like in a recliner,
00:46:07and I slept for a period of time.
00:46:13And the way I could tell—there was some time had passed—
00:46:16that I could tell where the sun generally was,
00:46:21and I could tell that the sun was lower in the sky
00:46:25than it was earlier in the day.
00:46:29So some significant amount of time had passed.
00:46:34And again, turning the radio on,
00:46:38I think I made one transmission
00:46:40and immediately got a response back.
00:46:45And we set up communications then,
00:46:48and they had apparently several missions in to do some suppression there
00:46:57to be able to get the search and rescue forces in.
00:47:03And so at some later time they said,
00:47:08okay, we're going to bring the helicopters in now,
00:47:10and we'll tell you when to pop your smoke.
00:47:14And so again, it seemed to be a long time.
00:47:20And then finally I did hear helicopters, rotors in the general vicinity.
00:47:28And again, it seemed like a long time before the sound got louder.
00:47:35And finally they said, okay, pop your smoke.
00:47:38And so I ignited the flare.
00:47:42And with the dense foliage around there, the smoke wasn't going anywhere.
00:47:47And I thought, well, I don't know what I can do here to get this smoke out of here.
00:47:52It was just a big orange cloud right around me.
00:47:56And then actually the foliage started to move around some
00:48:04from the downdraft of the rotors of the helicopter.
00:48:09And so then I heard them say that they had my smoke.
00:48:14And then I saw the helicopter, and it looked minuscule.
00:48:20I don't know what altitude he was having to hover at,
00:48:24but it was a long ways away.
00:48:27And so I'm looking almost straight up above me,
00:48:31and it turns out that the tree's about 185 feet tall,
00:48:35so he's got to be slightly above that.
00:48:41So that's quite a distance.
00:48:42And so I'm looking up at the helicopter,
00:48:45and then there's some extra movement of the bamboo.
00:48:51And so I look down, and it takes a second or two to focus,
00:48:56and here's this brown helmet looking at me.
00:48:59And I said, oh, here's the helicopter 185 feet away,
00:49:02and I'm going to be captured.
00:49:05But then as I focused on the face,
00:49:07I could tell that it was American rather than an Asian.
00:49:10And the pararescue guy was there, and that's what had taken so long,
00:49:17is that they had to let the pararescue guy down on the ground to try to find me.
00:49:27And he'd actually gotten hung up in the thick bamboo,
00:49:31and they had to raise him up again and then let him back down and then get off.
00:49:36And then, again, it took him a while to find me.
00:49:40Another fortunate thing, I guess, was that my parachute,
00:49:44rather than being blossomed over some of the trees,
00:49:49it was actually wrapped around the lowest limb on this tree,
00:49:53which is maybe 10 or 15 feet off the ground.
00:49:57So it was really not a beacon for anybody to see.
00:50:03And during the time that I was there, I heard people looking for me.
00:50:12They had some kind of bell that I would hear ringing at different places during the afternoon.
00:50:23And my understanding was that that's how they used to kind of determine where they were in the search pattern,
00:50:31that each group would have a bell and they'd ring it every once in a while to tell each other
00:50:37where they were in the search pattern.
00:50:39So I heard that on a number of occasions, and I really expected to see someone from the sound what
00:50:50seemed to be close enough,
00:50:52but I never did actually see anyone there.
00:50:55And, again, I'm sure if my parachute had been blossomed over one of the trees that they would have found
00:51:03me long before the search and rescue guys did.
00:51:07But anyway, the pararescue guy did get to me, and so they tried to let a stretcher down to begin
00:51:18with.
00:51:19Well, the canopy was just too dense that they couldn't get the stretcher down through the bamboo.
00:51:26So they put that back up, and they decided that there was a clearing down at the bottom of the
00:51:36hill that we'd have to move down to the bottom of the hill in order to be able to get
00:51:42anything down there to pull us up.
00:51:47So Chuck McGrath was the pararescue guy, and I told him that neither leg was working and my right arm
00:51:57wasn't working,
00:51:58so he was going to have to drag me by my left arm.
00:52:03So he starts to pull me away, and it turns out, again, that this side of the hill is very
00:52:12steep,
00:52:13and I don't know, if you lay down on your back on a slope, it seems a lot steeper than
00:52:22it really is.
00:52:23And so my impression was that this was like a cliff, and he was just going to pull me off
00:52:31the cliff and then pick me up down at the bottom of the hill.
00:52:36But, and it was fairly steep, and so as he was pulling me down, as I said, my left knee
00:52:44had been dislocated.
00:52:45Well, it was completely dislocated. It was actually sitting off to the left side of the rest of my leg.
00:52:55And as he was pulling me down the slope, since it was fairly steep, the first time that I really
00:53:05felt pain was that the bottom of my leg fell off to the left side.
00:53:11And I screamed at him to stop, and then I straightened my leg up, and then he pulled me some
00:53:19more, and then it fell off in the other direction.
00:53:22And so I screamed at him again and straightened it up, and fortunately by then we were at the bottom
00:53:30of the hill.
00:53:33And so then we looked up and the helicopter starts to go away, and Chuck says, it's okay, it's okay.
00:53:44What do you mean it's okay? The helicopter's leaving.
00:53:47And then shortly thereafter, another helicopter, I thought it was the same helicopter, but there were actually two helicopters there.
00:53:58And the reason the first one left was that it had taken so many rounds of small arms fire that
00:54:04it also shot out the utility hydraulics so that the winch didn't work anymore.
00:54:11So there was no way for them to pick us up, and they were having to hover at almost 200
00:54:17feet at one point.
00:54:19And so then it turns out that a second helicopter came in and lowered a tree penetrator.
00:54:28I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's kind of the teardrop-shaped thing that has three little paddles
00:54:32on it.
00:54:34Theoretically, you could pull up three people on it, but there's barely enough room for two, let alone—I don't know
00:54:40how you'd ever get three people on it.
00:54:42But anyway, they let that down, and it only has one strap. It has three little pedals that you can
00:54:48put down to sit on, and then it has one strap.
00:54:54And so Chuck strapped that around me, and I sat on one pedal, and he sat on the other one.
00:55:02And we sort of did the bear hug on the way up, and the bad guys apparently had gotten to
00:55:13within about 100 yards of us as we were being pulled up.
00:55:18And there wasn't a lot that they could do. It turned out that it was sort of like a ravine,
00:55:24a very narrow ravine,
00:55:26and they were having to hover at the top of it, and there was a path at the top of
00:55:32the ravine,
00:55:33and there were several of the North Vietnamese up there shooting pretty much horizontally at the helicopter,
00:55:40as well as guys coming up to—it turned out to be a dry stream bed at the bottom—that were shooting
00:55:48at the helicopter and us,
00:55:51which I wasn't aware of other than I could hear things. There were a lot of debris and dry leaves
00:56:00and stuff around,
00:56:02and it sounded like somebody was throwing rocks into dry leaves. And so apparently they were shooting at us from
00:56:12wherever they were.
00:56:15And so as they started pulling us up into the helicopter, the helicopter essentially had to stay in a hover,
00:56:24otherwise they'd have been dragging us through the side of the hill on either side.
00:56:31So they kind of had to stay at the hover until they got us up into the helicopter,
00:56:36or at least nearly into the helicopter before they could move out of the way.
00:56:40And so they continued to take rounds as we were being pulled up.
00:56:46And just as we were right at the door, for the third time I felt some pain,
00:56:57and I didn't know if I had hit something on the helicopter or what,
00:57:01but it turned out that a round had gone through my ankle and shattered my ankle.
00:57:10The best thing that I could think of to correlate that was if you would take a hammer
00:57:17and just hit yourself just as hard as you could on your ankle.
00:57:22The bullet went right through the middle of the ankle and just split the bone.
00:57:27And so anyway, the guy in the helicopter pulled us in and closed the door.
00:57:33And I remember the crew chief had just had a big smile on his face,
00:57:37and he pointed down at the floor.
00:57:39And I looked down at the floor and there was a big bullet hole up through the floor.
00:57:45And so we departed the area and they put a helmet on me so I could talk to the pilot.
00:57:56And I could hear him, but he couldn't hear me.
00:58:00And so there was, again, from the damage that was done from the small arms fire,
00:58:06had shot out part of the intercom system in the helicopter.
00:58:12And so then the pararescue guy wouldn't know how I was,
00:58:20and I said, I'm okay, I'm just tired, I just want to go to sleep.
00:58:23He said, well, you can't go to sleep.
00:58:26And then he noticed that there was something on my boot.
00:58:31And so again, that was the fourth time that I felt some pain,
00:58:37was when he pulled that boot off my foot to see what had happened there.
00:58:45And then as we were going out, we were in North Vietnam,
00:58:48and the operation had taken quite a while,
00:58:52so the helicopter was going to have to air refuel on the way back.
00:58:56And so they had brought C-130 up as far as they could get it
00:59:03to refuel the helicopters on the way out.
00:59:09And so in the process of refueling on the way out,
00:59:17obviously the North Vietnamese were monitoring all that was going on,
00:59:20and so they launched a MiG to intercept helicopters.
00:59:26And it turned out that they were, oh, maybe ten minutes,
00:59:33the MiG was maybe ten minutes away from the helicopters.
00:59:37The MiG's probably doing 400 knots,
00:59:40and the helicopter's doing 100 knots at the most.
00:59:43So they broke off the air refueling,
00:59:46and the C-130's trying to accelerate out,
00:59:50and the helicopters are going down on the deck.
00:59:54And I thought to myself, oh, I don't want to get shot down twice in the same day.
01:00:01And it turned out that Captain Steve Ritchie, the Air Force,
01:00:06I think they were only ace of the Vietnam War,
01:00:10happened to be refueling several miles away,
01:00:15and heard what was going on.
01:00:18And so he made a transmission that he was heading back towards the intercept to MiG.
01:00:26Well, he was forty or fifty miles away, and the MiG was twenty miles away.
01:00:31And so by his conversation saying that he had contact with the MiG,
01:00:38and he was locking on and making the intercept and all,
01:00:40that the MiG broke off the intercept.
01:00:45And he was probably maybe a minute away from where the helicopter was,
01:00:50and Steve Ritchie was probably ten minutes away from the MiG.
01:00:56So that worked.
01:00:57And with the helicopter having taken so much ground fire,
01:01:02they didn't want to stop at the base where the hospital was,
01:01:07so they went back to the home base at Nicon Phnom NKP,
01:01:12and then transferred me to another helicopter,
01:01:15and then that helicopter took me up to the hospital.
01:01:19And I remember seeing the clock on the wall.
01:01:25It was about ten o'clock at night when I was being wheeled in for x-rays and all,
01:01:31and the day had started about four o'clock in the morning,
01:01:33so it was a pretty long day.
01:01:38And the timing for the rescue was pretty good, too,
01:01:40because it was getting towards the end of the day,
01:01:42and it was sort of the end of the time frame that they would be able to pick me up,
01:01:46otherwise it would have been the next day before they would have been able to do it.
01:01:52Prior to going into Cambodia,
01:01:56we were experiencing combat action of some sort in our troop almost every day.
01:02:04Mainly small incidences, but we had one platoon or another,
01:02:08or sometimes a whole troop in some kind of combat for months,
01:02:14probably three or four times a week.
01:02:17It kept everybody sharp.
01:02:21A tremendous difference from the war after Cambodia, our war after Cambodia.
01:02:27Prior to going to Cambodia, the enemy had fresh uniforms,
01:02:34they had haircuts, they were clean-shaven, they had canned rations,
01:02:38they didn't carry the usual rice sock, as we call it, this cloth,
01:02:44cylinder-type or tubular things stuffed with rice that they would carry.
01:02:50They had rations, they had bandoliers full of ammo,
01:02:54the RPG gunners had at least three rounds per RPG,
01:02:59the AKs had probably eight magazines.
01:03:04They were fresh, sharp, disciplined enemy.
01:03:09Tremendous contrast to afterwards.
01:03:12Our frustration was that we would meet them fresh coming from their base camp,
01:03:17from R&R or just from coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
01:03:20and we couldn't go after them.
01:03:22And we knew there's no way we could win the war
01:03:25unless we can erase that invisible line and go to those base camps
01:03:30or sanctuaries that they had that prior to that point
01:03:35was only hit when Nixon put his bombing in there.
01:03:41We went over in force at the tip of the fishhook, real close to it.
01:03:48The fishhook is an area that juts into a border area,
01:03:54that juts into South Vietnam approximately 40 miles,
01:03:58like a dagger aiming right towards Saigon.
01:04:01And because the border area pointed inward like that,
01:04:07it made sense for the enemy to keep their base camps there,
01:04:10because that put them 40 miles closer to the Saigon area
01:04:13and the major population centers.
01:04:17When we crossed over, we went over with the regiment,
01:04:23which was unusual, first regimental maneuver that I had participated in.
01:04:27Actually, I think we had two squadrons, if I'm not mistaken,
01:04:29at that first day.
01:04:32Even our regimental commander, Colonel Don Starry,
01:04:35was on the ground instead of the air.
01:04:37And we all thought that was neat
01:04:39and held a tremendous amount of respect for him for doing that.
01:04:44He was wounded three days later
01:04:48and brought into the same hospital where I was, actually.
01:04:51That was upsetting to see him being brought in.
01:04:58My platoon was like the scout platoon when we went in.
01:05:04They had a tank company in front and the troops following.
01:05:13And the column went in.
01:05:15As I recall, it was a double column, two files side by side.
01:05:22There were areas where we had a different maneuver formation
01:05:26as we first crossed over the border in some marshy areas.
01:05:29But we could move faster when it was on a column formation.
01:05:35The scout platoon, I'm sorry, let me back up.
01:05:39If you can imagine over a hundred armored vehicles
01:05:44in two columns maneuvering.
01:05:47It's a lot of firepower, a lot of people, a lot of vehicles.
01:05:51Up ahead we had the Air Cav Troop flying back and forth.
01:05:55And they're scouting the flanks, they're scouting ahead.
01:05:58And when they saw something, they had to have an element
01:06:01on the ground that was delegated to go out and check it out.
01:06:06That was my platoon.
01:06:08And so my platoon was sent to go here, to go there.
01:06:12Anywhere that the aircraft troops saw something in our line of march.
01:06:18And one particular point after a series of small, very small firefights,
01:06:27I remember hearing the Loach overhead.
01:06:32I don't know if it was the S3 or someone else.
01:06:35But he said, you have, he said, enemy on the left flank.
01:06:43No, on the right flank.
01:06:45No, they're everywhere.
01:06:48And I was told first to go to the left.
01:06:50So I took my men off, nine tracks off to the left.
01:06:58We went in a wedge formation.
01:07:00Didn't go but a couple hundred meters.
01:07:02Then when we were told to turn back, go to the right side.
01:07:04So our column was still moving.
01:07:06And I had a traverse go through the moving column.
01:07:11As they were going one way, I had to cross through them to go to the other flank.
01:07:15And during that process, I lost a Sheridan.
01:07:17It threw a track right there on the edge of the road.
01:07:20So I put the rest of the troop of my platoon on a line formation with an echelon to the
01:07:28right.
01:07:28That was to protect the right flank.
01:07:31Three vehicles off the rest on the line.
01:07:33And I could see the enemy.
01:07:35The enemy was running in front of us.
01:07:38Now the foliage was light.
01:07:40The trees were two to four inches thick.
01:07:43We were able to go a little bit faster than a man running, pushing them down as we moved forward.
01:07:47And I was asking for permission to fire.
01:07:50This was my main thing.
01:07:51I was calling up.
01:07:53I said, I see them.
01:07:54We'll go to fire.
01:07:55And I was told, negative, don't fire.
01:07:57And the reason they were telling us not to fire was they were maneuvering some of the troops up ahead.
01:08:01I think it was a tank company around.
01:08:03And they didn't want us to have a friendly fire engagement.
01:08:07And my men were yelling, I see them.
01:08:10I want to fire them.
01:08:11And I'm telling them we can't.
01:08:13And in the same token, we had this sense that they're leading us, baiting us.
01:08:19And they were.
01:08:20And after about 200 meters or so, the light foliage became just a solid green wall of thick jungle vegetation.
01:08:31And as we approached that, that's when I knew we had to fire.
01:08:37And as I was just at that point saying, fire.
01:08:42Boom.
01:08:43All hell broke loose.
01:08:45And they fired within a split second before we started pulling our trigger.
01:08:50And they began by focusing RPGs on my Sheridans.
01:08:56And they took those out instantly.
01:09:03I was first, I was wounded even though I wasn't on the Sheridan.
01:09:07And I was wounded from that blast.
01:09:12A piece of a torso.
01:09:23I flew across this area of about 30 feet.
01:09:26And it hit me in the side of the head.
01:09:36And it took a while before I could just shake the stars out of my eyes.
01:09:42And I pulled this thing off and I couldn't believe what it was.
01:09:45And it was a piece of torso of the commander by Sheridan.
01:09:51He took the, he took the RPG hit.
01:09:55It just hit him right in his chest area.
01:09:58And it was like getting hit in the head with a baseball.
01:10:01I mean, it hit me that hard.
01:10:03Boom.
01:10:04And it took maybe, I don't know, 10 seconds, 5 seconds.
01:10:09I'm not sure to recover from that.
01:10:12But by then, all hell broke loose.
01:10:16And that track was down.
01:10:19The Sheridan looked like a wounded elephant.
01:10:21I'm sorry.
01:10:23It looked like a wounded elephant.
01:10:25Because when he, the track commander was hit.
01:10:29Either here or the gunner was also wounded.
01:10:33Hit the turret control and the gun sort of went down toward the ground.
01:10:37And it just looked like a dying dinosaur.
01:10:41And the enemy was in a zigzag trench.
01:10:44They just built fresh.
01:10:47You could see it.
01:10:47The logs were just laid within days.
01:10:51And the enemy knew where we were going before we did, which was amazing.
01:10:57They set up this ambush.
01:11:00And some enemy from the trench was starting to get out of the trench to get on top of that
01:11:05Sheridan.
01:11:06And they were only like 40 feet away.
01:11:09Probably to take over the .50 caliber or the M60.
01:11:11I don't think they could have done anything with that Sheridan main gun.
01:11:17And I had, five days before that, suffered a lot of casualties in my platoon.
01:11:23I had seven people.
01:11:25We had several killed and wounded.
01:11:27And seven were gone from my platoon.
01:11:29So I was light.
01:11:30Each track was minus a person.
01:11:32My own track, when we went into Vietnam, was short a gunner.
01:11:37I had three machine guns and I only had two gunners.
01:11:41So my machine gun on my right flank was unmanned.
01:11:44I had myself, my driver, a left gunner.
01:11:48He could go back and forth, right or left gun.
01:11:50And a medic, who was a conscientious objector who couldn't pick up a weapon.
01:11:57And I saw the people come up out of the trench.
01:12:00And I was maneuvering my .50 over.
01:12:02And I was firing my .50 caliber and talking the radio at the same time.
01:12:07I was yelling for the CO, you know, and trying to get either artillery or get the gunships overhead.
01:12:14And I remember telling the CO that the Sheridan was hit.
01:12:19And I was putting some fire down at the machine gun that was firing at us.
01:12:25And I couldn't disengage to get the guys who were ready to leave the trench.
01:12:30It was either leave the gun alone that was aimed at me in the track next to me,
01:12:34or get the ones that were going to come out of the trench.
01:12:36And I was, they weren't firing.
01:12:38I was getting the one that was firing.
01:12:39But then my medic, PFC Doc Daly, who joined me just five days earlier when I lost another medic,
01:12:49was a conscientious objector.
01:12:52I don't think he ever fired a weapon.
01:12:55But he jumped up and he grabbed that M60, that side gun, and had seen enough of the other troopers
01:13:05firing it.
01:13:06And he got to hold that weapon.
01:13:08He laid down a solid base of fire and stopped that assault.
01:13:14We were going to come out of that trench line.
01:13:17He even knew how to reload, which I didn't think he did.
01:13:21For us, that was not an easy chore.
01:13:23We kept a 200-round link in the M60s.
01:13:26And then inside, we had these heavy cans, called mini cans, that did 1,200 rounds.
01:13:32And he threw that up on top by himself.
01:13:35And I was loading that when an enemy RPG gunner took him out our track next.
01:13:47And it hit him right here.
01:13:52And it killed him instantly.
01:13:56His position was like three and a half feet from me to this direction, inside my track.
01:14:04And he didn't fall right away.
01:14:06He stood, which was amazing that he stood there like that.
01:14:11And I was in the blast area of the RPG.
01:14:17The white hot flame, it burned off all my exposed hair, my arms, my eyebrows, back of my neck.
01:14:27Hit me back with a shrapnel, about 40 holes, mostly small, a couple of big ones.
01:14:36A piece of his skull went inside my neck, about this big.
01:14:43And that took off a lot of the forearm muscle from my left gunner, who is Dylan, a southern boy
01:14:53who I haven't seen since that day.
01:14:55I hope to someday.
01:14:57I just remember him.
01:14:58He didn't slow down.
01:15:00You know, he was cursing and cussing, and he kept firing.
01:15:09Then, my track was pretty silent for a little while.
01:15:11He was able to fire, Dylan.
01:15:14And my radios were out.
01:15:17Actually, it didn't matter because I couldn't hear anyway.
01:15:19The explosion took out my ears.
01:15:25I got my 50 up and going again.
01:15:28It took, I don't know how long, 20 seconds to recover from that.
01:15:36And an NVA soldier, again, out of the trench line, stood up.
01:15:41And the first thing he did was he fired a burst with the AK and just sort of sprayed the
01:15:46side
01:15:47of my vehicle.
01:15:47And I felt several rounds impact on my Prick 25 radio, which is my emergency radio.
01:15:55And it took that radio out, too.
01:15:57So I had no radio communications, even if I could hear.
01:16:05And I got a ricochet from that.
01:16:07It hit my right tricep.
01:16:11And it severed my tricep.
01:16:14The tricep fell down to my elbow, basically.
01:16:17And my arm went into a spasm.
01:16:20And I couldn't control it.
01:16:22And I couldn't fire my 50.
01:16:24You'd need two hands on that 50.
01:16:26And the operating handle's on the right side.
01:16:28And I couldn't do it left-handed.
01:16:30And I tried.
01:16:32I couldn't do it.
01:16:33So I took my right hand, and I shoved it in my belt to keep my arm from being spastic
01:16:43like that.
01:16:47And the enemy was still in the trenches.
01:16:49You could see them coming into the woods.
01:16:52Actually, I think it was from other trenches, adjoining trenches coming up to our area.
01:16:56Because our area now was almost silent.
01:16:58The Sheridan was down.
01:16:59My track, in effect, was down.
01:17:04And the first thing I grabbed for was the M16, because we kept the M16 back here.
01:17:09And I swung the M16 around.
01:17:12And I just made a mistake.
01:17:14I put it on full auto.
01:17:15And if you've ever fired an M16 on full rock and roll, it's useless.
01:17:19You know, it just goes everywhere.
01:17:21And when trying to do it one-handed, unbraced it, I just shot a bunch of trees.
01:17:26And I dropped it, and I reached behind me, grabbed our M79, which we always kept there.
01:17:32And I pulled the M79 around.
01:17:34But as I pulled it around, the stock fell off.
01:17:36So during that explosion, it destroyed that, too.
01:17:41And the explosion also knocked off all but one can of .50 caliber ammo.
01:17:46And I couldn't jack that back anyway.
01:17:49So what I had left was frags, and I had my pistol.
01:17:53And so I had my .45, and I'm right-handed, and not left.
01:17:57And I was able to lay my pistol across the gun shield.
01:18:05And it's hard to see, because I had dust and blood on my glasses.
01:18:09So my world was a surrealistic view.
01:18:14It was painted blood red.
01:18:16You can just imagine.
01:18:17That's the only thing I saw.
01:18:20And it was slow motion.
01:18:22It's like you read in a book or maybe see depicted in a movie where it takes two, three seconds
01:18:31for a professional soldier to change a magazine.
01:18:34I mean, it's fast.
01:18:36Off it goes.
01:18:36You slam in a new one, and you're ready to go.
01:18:39But this guy took forever.
01:18:42Everything was slow motion as he took out the magazine and dropped it down and grabbed
01:18:48another one.
01:18:49And while he was doing that, I was able to squeeze off seven rounds with my .45.
01:18:55And slowly at first, because I really couldn't see where I was going.
01:18:59And the last round hit him in the chest and that's when I fell in love with the .45.
01:19:05Because it picked him up out of that trench and just set him back about two feet and his
01:19:09legs laying down inside.
01:19:13By that point, we had no more firepower that we could use in my track.
01:19:18And I started throwing hand grenades.
01:19:20I grabbed the first grenade and I threw it and nothing happened.
01:19:25I realized I forgot to pull the pin.
01:19:28And I got another one.
01:19:29I had all kinds of grenades around me.
01:19:31I had a can of them and I had them strung along the inside of my cupola.
01:19:35I had smoke grenades.
01:19:36I had flares, thermites, frags.
01:19:39And the second grenade.
01:19:41I got it.
01:19:42I remember they got to pull the pin.
01:19:44And I couldn't pull the pin.
01:19:46All my training, three years of good infantry training at Fort Benning, Fort Lewis, Fort Ord
01:19:51and Panama, nobody taught me how a one-armed man is going to throw an arm and hand grenade.
01:19:58And I tried with my teeth like John Wayne did.
01:20:01And I still have a chip in that tooth.
01:20:03I couldn't do it.
01:20:04I just chipped my damn tooth.
01:20:08And I'm crouched down.
01:20:09I could hear the rounds ricocheting off of my gun shield.
01:20:16My driver was a young fellow.
01:20:21He had his M16 and he's popping in and out, firing everything he could have just over his head,
01:20:27out of the driver's compartment.
01:20:29But I finally realized if I hooked the pin of my hand grenade across the sight of my .50 caliber,
01:20:34I can pull it out.
01:20:36And so I did that.
01:20:37And I threw maybe the equivalent of a half a case of hand grenades.
01:20:41I threw smoke grenades, flares.
01:20:45When those were gone, I stood up in a cupola and I was throwing the ammo cans with my left
01:20:49hand.
01:20:49I threw everything.
01:20:50And in front of me was every color.
01:20:53And I don't know if I hit anybody or killed anybody or not, but it was smoky as hell.
01:21:00And quiet at that there.
01:21:04And then I started to get my hearing back just a little bit.
01:21:07And I got off my track and I could see another track about 50 feet over.
01:21:16And real slow.
01:21:18I had my .45 and I was able to put in an extra magazine.
01:21:23And I was trying to traverse that area.
01:21:26As I'm going over to that track, I'm seeing dust being kicked up around me.
01:21:30I'm trying to go fast, but just real slow.
01:21:34And then I see the guys in the track yelling for me.
01:21:36I said, come on, come on.
01:21:38And when I got there, I put my hand up and they pulled me up.
01:21:43And best I could, I got the radio and I tried to get a casualty count.
01:21:48But I just couldn't hear very well.
01:21:51But I went to each track and I think the track commander got the casualty count.
01:21:57And we got the troop CO, Captain Menzel, on the radio.
01:22:02And he said, stay where you are, I'm coming up.
01:22:05So we held the line and I was able to maintain consciousness until I saw the tracks come in
01:22:12behind us.
01:22:12And then he brought his reserve platoon in between our tracks.
01:22:17And then they continued the battle, which was over within a few more minutes.
01:22:23I woke up on the ground on a stretcher.
01:22:28And I was on my back.
01:22:31The first thing I wondered was, why am I on my back?
01:22:34It hurt so much because I was wounded in my back.
01:22:36I couldn't understand why they put me on my back.
01:22:39It hurt like hell.
01:22:42And one of my soldiers, and I don't remember who it was, was standing over me.
01:22:49And he had a warm Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette.
01:22:54And he just stood over me.
01:22:57And I asked him, how did we do?
01:23:00And he said, there was like 50 bodies out there.
01:23:05And I said, no, how many did we lose?
01:23:07And he told me the names.
01:23:09And the first two fatalities during the official invasion, May 1st, 1970, were from my platoon.
01:23:20The first two men killed were my men in that invasion.
01:23:23I was the first platoon leader dusted off in that invasion.
01:23:27So they did a little dubious honor.
01:23:30The shocking thing was my platoon of 44 men, and I had 44 men just three weeks prior to that.
01:23:37It was down to 23 or 24, you know, from the casualties of the previous two weeks in that day.
01:23:43.
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