Can You Give Me a Long Count?
The morning after the five slicks were shot down in November 1968, I was sent out with some help for the ground troops that came to their rescue. (To refresh your memory see “Five Slicks Shot Down”) When the slicks were shot down, they became very vulnerable to ground attack so two troops of the Armored Cavalry Squadron came charging down the road and pulled out into the rice paddies to protect them. The rice paddies were pretty wet at that time of the year and so their armored personnel carriers (APCs) got stuck in the mud. They were scattered about in a mess and that’s not what they wanted. First and foremost they wanted to be able to maneuver and get into a tactical formation. Overnight they stood their ground in their stuck positions and protected our crews that were shot down.
The traction in the rice paddies was very poor and the armored personnel carriers that were not stuck were not able to pull the stuck ones free. Sometime during the night the squadron came up with a plan to get them out of the mud first thing in the morning. The plan was to fly some helicopter cargo slings out to them and then have large Chinook helicopters lift on the APCs while another APC that was not stuck tried to pull them out. It sounded like it might work.
At first light the next morning, I got my four-place Scout helicopter ready to go on the mission carrying the slings. My assignment was to take an Engineer Corp Captain and as many boxes of these slings that I could out to the ground troops. While I got the helicopter ready to go, the captain supervised the loading of the boxes of slings. The entire back seat or cargo area was filled with these boxes.
Weight was an important thing when flying machines were being loaded, so I asked the captain how much each box weighed and how many of them were loaded in the aircraft. He told me the weight was fifty pounds each and there were ten or twelve boxes. (I can’t remember which it was anymore.) I quickly figured the weight and decided that it was near the maximum load for the helicopter but that we should be able to do it.
When I picked the helicopter up to a hover, the front end seemed to be much higher than I expected indicating the weight in the back was more than I had figured. The torque gauge also read higher than expected which would indicate that the weight of the aircraft and cargo was more than I expected. Matter of fact, it looked like we might be over the maximum allowed weight on the aircraft. Again I asked how much each box weighed and how many of them there were in there. The captain gave me the same answers so I decided it must be okay. Besides, those guys needed the slings and they took risks to rescue our people.
It was a dark morning at Cu Chi and the sky was one solid gray mass. I called the tower for take-off clearance and started my take-off. The area we parked our helicopters in was called “The Corral”, which is a good name for a cavalry unit. The name also fit because we had buildings and things all around us and when we took off we had to climb up over buildings, power poles, trucks and APCs parked around us.
When I cleared the buildings and was about fifty to seventy-five feet above the ground I went into the clouds! The “soup” was that low and now I had a big problem. What I needed to do was descend and get back out of this stuff. But, below me there were buildings, poles, trucks and APCs, and I could easily have hit them before I could see the ground. My aircraft was not equipped to be flown in the clouds because of lack of instrumentation. That was just attitude indicator (the primary instrument for flying on instruments in the clouds) that was known to be unreliable. To fly instruments, the Army requires two pilots that are instrument qualified and the captain with me wasn’t even an aviator of any kind.
In flight school the Army gave us fifty hours to learn how to fly instruments. There were two parts to the instrument training. The first part was primary instruments and the second was advanced instruments. I had struggled a bit in basic instruments and when we progressed to advanced instruments a new instructor was always assigned. My advanced instruments instructor looked at my records the first day and announced that I would not make it through the course. He proceeded to tell me that my primary instruments instructor didn’t know anything about flying instruments and obviously I didn’t know anything and wouldn’t make it. Those first impressions are so wonderful! During one of those first few days of flying together he had thrown his hands up in the air and said, “Go ahead and kill us! I’m ready to die!” I tried to tell him I didn’t want to die nor was I trying to kill us but he told me that he didn’t believe me. As the days passed I got better at instrument flying and recovered from the slow start my first instructor had given me. Now I was in it for real and there wasn’t going to be any help coming from anyone else!
To continue, there was little doubt that if I went down looking for the ground our chances would not be good so I continued to climb. After climbing about a two thousand feet above the ground, which was about four long minutes, we broke out into clear skies! I could see for miles! The bad thing was that the only thing I could see for miles was this nice gray cloud pillow under me. There was only one mountaintop; Nue Ba Dihn, (which means Black Virgin Mountain) sticking up through the clouds. The situation was now better but I was a long way from being home free! The captain sitting next to me seemed quite happy – of course he didn’t have a clue that the situation wasn’t good!
I knew the Helicopters and APCs were west of where I was; near a town called Tran Bangso I headed that way. The weather situation didn’t improve by the time we got to the area where I guessed they must be. I called the ground troops on my FM radio and asked what the situation was down there. They told me that the firing had stopped but that they wanted the slings right away. The weather was so bad that there wasn’t another helicopter in the sky so I asked them to turn off all of their equipment and listen to see if they could hear a helicopter. They came back and said they couldn’t hear a helicopter. So that idea had failed. I had hoped that they could hear me and could tell me where they were from where I was.
Most of that area was pretty flat and that’s why it was good for rice paddies. The ground in that area was about forty feet above sea level – more or less. My aircraft was equipped with a FM radio that had a limited ability to tell what direction a radio was from my location. It wouldn’t tell me if it was ahead or behind me or, tell me how far above the ground I was. But it would give me a direction. To make this system work they would have to be talking on the radio and I would have to switch my radio to the home position. In the home position, I wouldn’t be able to hear them or transmit to them, but it might help. It now was my next best hope of finding them.
Once again I called the ground troops and this time I asked them to give me a long count. A long count is counting slowly from one to ten and then back down again to one. That would give me a chance to tell what direction to go to find them. They were to keep this up until they heard a helicopter and then tell me. But for me to hear them, I had to switch the radio back to the transmit & receive position. This was going to be fun doing it single pilot!
They started their long count and I turned towards their position and started descending. I slowed the airspeed to about forty knots because if I hit something like a Vietnamese house, a hill, an APC, or the ground, I didn’t want to be going too fast. (Helicopters don’t have front bumpers or air bags and the pilot would be the first one there at the crash!) My aircraft did not have the instrumentation to tell how fast we are going down but I tried to keep a slow and steady rate of descent.
After what seemed like hours but was really only minutes, I broke out of the soup at fifteen to twenty feet above the ground. I snatched-in some power and stopped the descent before hitting the ground. I stopped at a three-foot hover in a rice paddy. There weren’t any APCs or crashed helicopters there. If I hovered straight ahead in the same direction I should find them. I was not going back in the clouds. My hope was to find the good guys and not the bad guys. Who I would find first was the great question. The captain next to me seemed calm and very happy. He was clueless!
After hovering for about five minutes in the gray fog I found an APC. They looked like Americans and they waved to go in a direction so I continued on. A few APCs later I found some officers around an APC that started motioning me to set down. They looked happy to see me but they didn’t know how happy I was. The captain jumped out and started unloading his boxes. I motioned for the ground troops to bring one of the boxes over to me so I could see it. On the outside of the box I found “75 Pound” written! Yup, I’d been overweight!
Back on the FM radio they told me that they hadn’t taken any fire in the last hour. But, they wanted me to leave quickly because I would be a good target. I was not invited to stay and I didn’t want to! The captain was staying to help them with hooking up the slings. So all alone in my light little helicopter I disappeared into the clouds!
Once I reached the top of the clouds I could again see for miles but all I could see was this cloud layer. I turned east and headed home for Cu Chi. At Cu Chi we had a radar approach called GCA, (Ground Control Approach). A GCA was the easiest instrument approach to fly and could bring me down closest to the ground. Also the GCA would be able to take me to the runway so that would be less risk.
I tuned my radio to Cu Chi approach and told them where I was, that I was a single pilot, and that I needed a GCA approach. Their reply was not what I wanted. They said their radar was down and that I would have to shoot (fly) a VOR approach (VOR stands for voice operated radio). My aircraft did not have a VOR radio! I thanked them for their help and tuned my radio to Cu Chi tower. When I called Cu Chi tower I told them my situation and asked them to give me a long count on their FM radio. Again I started the same not-by-the-book approach that I had gotten away with at Trang Bang!
After a few minutes of nothing but gray windshield, I saw the ground. The helicopter was again only about fifteen feet above the ground when I had the ground in sight. I continued hovering towards the origin of the radio call until I came to the perimeter wire of Cu Chi. At that point I didn’t dare try to “jump” over the fence so I hovered around the perimeter until I arrived at the main gate. At the main gate they opened the gate and let me in. I hovered down roads until I reached the corral. On the way I had blown sand all over a lot of people and I knew they weren’t happy with me but that’s the way war was!
Most of us have those times that we look back on and wonder how and why we ever survived some of the things we have been through. Some of those times were when what happened was probably above our skill level. Some talk about it being luck, others talk about it being fate, and others believe in Divine Power. When a person has one of these experiences in life they normally wonder if they aren’t left here to do something good. Wherever we believe that tender mercy of being able to live longer came from, we now have another chance to do good! Each day is a gift to use for good for others as well as us!
The traction in the rice paddies was very poor and the armored personnel carriers that were not stuck were not able to pull the stuck ones free. Sometime during the night the squadron came up with a plan to get them out of the mud first thing in the morning. The plan was to fly some helicopter cargo slings out to them and then have large Chinook helicopters lift on the APCs while another APC that was not stuck tried to pull them out. It sounded like it might work.
At first light the next morning, I got my four-place Scout helicopter ready to go on the mission carrying the slings. My assignment was to take an Engineer Corp Captain and as many boxes of these slings that I could out to the ground troops. While I got the helicopter ready to go, the captain supervised the loading of the boxes of slings. The entire back seat or cargo area was filled with these boxes.
Weight was an important thing when flying machines were being loaded, so I asked the captain how much each box weighed and how many of them were loaded in the aircraft. He told me the weight was fifty pounds each and there were ten or twelve boxes. (I can’t remember which it was anymore.) I quickly figured the weight and decided that it was near the maximum load for the helicopter but that we should be able to do it.
When I picked the helicopter up to a hover, the front end seemed to be much higher than I expected indicating the weight in the back was more than I had figured. The torque gauge also read higher than expected which would indicate that the weight of the aircraft and cargo was more than I expected. Matter of fact, it looked like we might be over the maximum allowed weight on the aircraft. Again I asked how much each box weighed and how many of them there were in there. The captain gave me the same answers so I decided it must be okay. Besides, those guys needed the slings and they took risks to rescue our people.
It was a dark morning at Cu Chi and the sky was one solid gray mass. I called the tower for take-off clearance and started my take-off. The area we parked our helicopters in was called “The Corral”, which is a good name for a cavalry unit. The name also fit because we had buildings and things all around us and when we took off we had to climb up over buildings, power poles, trucks and APCs parked around us.
When I cleared the buildings and was about fifty to seventy-five feet above the ground I went into the clouds! The “soup” was that low and now I had a big problem. What I needed to do was descend and get back out of this stuff. But, below me there were buildings, poles, trucks and APCs, and I could easily have hit them before I could see the ground. My aircraft was not equipped to be flown in the clouds because of lack of instrumentation. That was just attitude indicator (the primary instrument for flying on instruments in the clouds) that was known to be unreliable. To fly instruments, the Army requires two pilots that are instrument qualified and the captain with me wasn’t even an aviator of any kind.
In flight school the Army gave us fifty hours to learn how to fly instruments. There were two parts to the instrument training. The first part was primary instruments and the second was advanced instruments. I had struggled a bit in basic instruments and when we progressed to advanced instruments a new instructor was always assigned. My advanced instruments instructor looked at my records the first day and announced that I would not make it through the course. He proceeded to tell me that my primary instruments instructor didn’t know anything about flying instruments and obviously I didn’t know anything and wouldn’t make it. Those first impressions are so wonderful! During one of those first few days of flying together he had thrown his hands up in the air and said, “Go ahead and kill us! I’m ready to die!” I tried to tell him I didn’t want to die nor was I trying to kill us but he told me that he didn’t believe me. As the days passed I got better at instrument flying and recovered from the slow start my first instructor had given me. Now I was in it for real and there wasn’t going to be any help coming from anyone else!
To continue, there was little doubt that if I went down looking for the ground our chances would not be good so I continued to climb. After climbing about a two thousand feet above the ground, which was about four long minutes, we broke out into clear skies! I could see for miles! The bad thing was that the only thing I could see for miles was this nice gray cloud pillow under me. There was only one mountaintop; Nue Ba Dihn, (which means Black Virgin Mountain) sticking up through the clouds. The situation was now better but I was a long way from being home free! The captain sitting next to me seemed quite happy – of course he didn’t have a clue that the situation wasn’t good!
I knew the Helicopters and APCs were west of where I was; near a town called Tran Bangso I headed that way. The weather situation didn’t improve by the time we got to the area where I guessed they must be. I called the ground troops on my FM radio and asked what the situation was down there. They told me that the firing had stopped but that they wanted the slings right away. The weather was so bad that there wasn’t another helicopter in the sky so I asked them to turn off all of their equipment and listen to see if they could hear a helicopter. They came back and said they couldn’t hear a helicopter. So that idea had failed. I had hoped that they could hear me and could tell me where they were from where I was.
Most of that area was pretty flat and that’s why it was good for rice paddies. The ground in that area was about forty feet above sea level – more or less. My aircraft was equipped with a FM radio that had a limited ability to tell what direction a radio was from my location. It wouldn’t tell me if it was ahead or behind me or, tell me how far above the ground I was. But it would give me a direction. To make this system work they would have to be talking on the radio and I would have to switch my radio to the home position. In the home position, I wouldn’t be able to hear them or transmit to them, but it might help. It now was my next best hope of finding them.
Once again I called the ground troops and this time I asked them to give me a long count. A long count is counting slowly from one to ten and then back down again to one. That would give me a chance to tell what direction to go to find them. They were to keep this up until they heard a helicopter and then tell me. But for me to hear them, I had to switch the radio back to the transmit & receive position. This was going to be fun doing it single pilot!
They started their long count and I turned towards their position and started descending. I slowed the airspeed to about forty knots because if I hit something like a Vietnamese house, a hill, an APC, or the ground, I didn’t want to be going too fast. (Helicopters don’t have front bumpers or air bags and the pilot would be the first one there at the crash!) My aircraft did not have the instrumentation to tell how fast we are going down but I tried to keep a slow and steady rate of descent.
After what seemed like hours but was really only minutes, I broke out of the soup at fifteen to twenty feet above the ground. I snatched-in some power and stopped the descent before hitting the ground. I stopped at a three-foot hover in a rice paddy. There weren’t any APCs or crashed helicopters there. If I hovered straight ahead in the same direction I should find them. I was not going back in the clouds. My hope was to find the good guys and not the bad guys. Who I would find first was the great question. The captain next to me seemed calm and very happy. He was clueless!
After hovering for about five minutes in the gray fog I found an APC. They looked like Americans and they waved to go in a direction so I continued on. A few APCs later I found some officers around an APC that started motioning me to set down. They looked happy to see me but they didn’t know how happy I was. The captain jumped out and started unloading his boxes. I motioned for the ground troops to bring one of the boxes over to me so I could see it. On the outside of the box I found “75 Pound” written! Yup, I’d been overweight!
Back on the FM radio they told me that they hadn’t taken any fire in the last hour. But, they wanted me to leave quickly because I would be a good target. I was not invited to stay and I didn’t want to! The captain was staying to help them with hooking up the slings. So all alone in my light little helicopter I disappeared into the clouds!
Once I reached the top of the clouds I could again see for miles but all I could see was this cloud layer. I turned east and headed home for Cu Chi. At Cu Chi we had a radar approach called GCA, (Ground Control Approach). A GCA was the easiest instrument approach to fly and could bring me down closest to the ground. Also the GCA would be able to take me to the runway so that would be less risk.
I tuned my radio to Cu Chi approach and told them where I was, that I was a single pilot, and that I needed a GCA approach. Their reply was not what I wanted. They said their radar was down and that I would have to shoot (fly) a VOR approach (VOR stands for voice operated radio). My aircraft did not have a VOR radio! I thanked them for their help and tuned my radio to Cu Chi tower. When I called Cu Chi tower I told them my situation and asked them to give me a long count on their FM radio. Again I started the same not-by-the-book approach that I had gotten away with at Trang Bang!
After a few minutes of nothing but gray windshield, I saw the ground. The helicopter was again only about fifteen feet above the ground when I had the ground in sight. I continued hovering towards the origin of the radio call until I came to the perimeter wire of Cu Chi. At that point I didn’t dare try to “jump” over the fence so I hovered around the perimeter until I arrived at the main gate. At the main gate they opened the gate and let me in. I hovered down roads until I reached the corral. On the way I had blown sand all over a lot of people and I knew they weren’t happy with me but that’s the way war was!
Most of us have those times that we look back on and wonder how and why we ever survived some of the things we have been through. Some of those times were when what happened was probably above our skill level. Some talk about it being luck, others talk about it being fate, and others believe in Divine Power. When a person has one of these experiences in life they normally wonder if they aren’t left here to do something good. Wherever we believe that tender mercy of being able to live longer came from, we now have another chance to do good! Each day is a gift to use for good for others as well as us!
posted by Bruce | 11:21 AM
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