Combat Story (Ep 7): Eric Brethen OH-6 Loach & AH-1 Cobra Pilot | Vietnam Veteran | 3 x DFC

he had me he's his gun champ and so he's standing there with the ak that's not shooting and i've got a mini gun pointed at him and i said shoot him taylor i never in combat thought that i was going to be on the short end that doesn't mean that i didn't have opportunities because i got shot down a couple of times welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugent and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of eric brethren the former us army chief warrant officer and oh six loach reconnaissance and ah1 cobra attack helicopter pilot at just 19 years old eric found himself flying missions out of kuchi northwest of saigon in hunter killer teams from scenes reminiscent of apocalypse now during his 19 months in country eric flew 3 600 hours and was awarded three distinguished flying crosses and three bronze stars i hope you enjoyed his stories as much as i did all right so eric thank you for uh taking the time to share your story today we're really looking forward to hearing from you thank you it's a it's a pleasure it's a it's a on you it's unusual for me to be in a position where someone's looking at me like i'm sort of like i feel like i'm an icon and it's a different feeling but for sure and um you know i think i'd like to start out hearing about your background but i'd really like to kick off with just what age were you when you got to vietnam because i think that really sets the tone here i got to vietnam in may of 1969 and i turned 20 in july wow okay so you couldn't have been out of high school for more than two years i would imagine before that's one semester of college so take me through that where where were you when you decided to join up and what made you do that i grew up in upstate new york uh dairy country not new york city but upstate right on the st lawrence river canadian border we had dairy farms small mom and pop uh my dad was a world war ii veteran i my brother older brother went to the air force academy and and so i was my dad was army and to me i was my brother wanted to be a fighter pilot that's what the air force was about i saw myself being a a commissioned officer with a platoon or in my mind that's what i thought if i went in the military but i went to cop my dad impressed on us he didn't want us to work as hard as he had to growing up and uh so his idea was you guys get an education so when i naturally got out of high school i went off to college well being from a rural county that i'd only been out of a few a few a handful of times because of sporting events i was participating in or visiting relatives in a neighboring county i've never been anywhere when i went to college uh my first semester in college it was such an it was so difficult for me to adjust to it i mean there was no one making me get up and go out to the barn and that kind of i just wasn't i didn't do well and so when i went home at christmas on the christmas break i said i'm not going back well my draft notice uh was low enough where it was self-evident that they were going to call me up and my dad wise man that he was says you can let the army pick a job for you or whoever you're talking about or you can go down and see what they got to offer and maybe you can find something better and that was the writing on the wall and i army for me was my dad i mean my brother was focused on the air force academy from a young kid he wanted to fly jets but me it was i really hadn't thought about military i was kind of a guy that thought maybe i'd make it in sports somewhere that's kind of what i wanted to be and so it was just a case of uh they're going to come for you anyway why don't you just go talk to somebody so my i went into an army recruiter and in a long story short that he said to me i i see you got some college and you got 20 20 vision have you ever thought about being a pilot my answer was i'm thinking about it right now so it was well let's go so we filled out the paperwork and i went through the process and i and i was accepted as a fl as a candidate for warren officer flight training and that's how i got in and then went to basic training in fort polk louisiana going going from upstate new york to louisiana you know was with was was a real treat but i did i did well there and then we went fort walters texas was where i did my primary and i guess it's all at record now yeah and then our advance was at rucker and then they would pick guys to go to hunter stewart for cobras or they'd go to fort hill oklahoma for chinooks and flying cranes and that's i was a guy that i wanted i had i was high enough in my flight class where i had a choice i really wanted chinooks for flying cranes but i my size um they have a limit on how much they can adjust the seats and i just didn't have the the leg my femur was an inch and a half too short so i ended up being going through the normal you know fly hueys go to vietnam and my first really good story is how um how i ended up in the three-quarter cab at cochin and that's when we flew over on a 747 and a guy that was on the plane who i happened to we were two warren officers in first class with a bunch of field grade and to me as a w-1 a w-2 scared me and uh i'm sitting around all these feel great guys and a smattering of captains and stuff like that so so we ride together and we kind of hit it off and to this day we're we're very very close friends we get off the plane you and the other warren officer eric oh internet they're very well it took us 30 years to get but you know there was no computer naturally computers what internet's what got us together and there was some other guys i was real tight with but but michael was was he was from indianapolis uh he was a class ahead of me he got set back because he had a family issue and had to go home so he graduated at the same time he would have been two weeks ahead of me uh we're on the plane we get off they landed at benoit which is east of north was a little bit northeast of saigon and we get off that we did plane and we're out in the tarmac and we're we got our delta bags and and they're sending sending buses out to get us and all of a sudden this jeep comes riding up and it stops in front of me and michael and this major gets out and he says you and you get your stuff and get in the jeep we're thinking vip this is so i had talked to an air force guy when i got off the plane and he had a wall unit air conditioner by his leg and i go you want to sell that he said 150 bucks so i coughed it up and i had i for the 19 months i was in vietnam my hooch was air conditioned which was oh my gosh it was a pretty cool thing but i tried lots of friends because they were all hanging but uh this major gets out there's a sergeant driving the jeep he goes get your stuff and get in the jeep and we go i guess we're bypassing the bus so instead of going towards the terminal they go out to the flight line and as we're coming down the flight line a huey cranks up he pulls up in front of the and had the cross savers in the front and that was my first experience with aircalf and he says get get your stuff and get in the helicopter so there was the co-pilot a warrant officer that was sitting there and door gutter and crew chief sitting there looking at us they're all wearing helmets and we get in with our duffel bags and my air conditioner and we're sitting there and we're not hearing a thing that's going on because they're all on radio the major gets in and we take off he turned out to be melvin laird's nephew belgian melvin larry was secretary of defense major laird was a west pointer and he was uh apparently uh he could pretty much do what he wanted because we we end up going to coochie we landed in what the corral is what we call the place where we the revenants were the aircraft park all the way there is a probably a 35-40 minute ride by helicopter we we had no idea what this was all about because we were told you get a two-week orientation uh and then you get assigned a unit and so all of a sudden we're we're we're not even inside god anymore we're out flying around so we're looking out the door sightseeing and we landed coochie and they shut it down in in the in the middle of the of the corral the major gets out and he goes you two men have been assigned to me i'll take care of the paperwork true story so they lead us to the the holding barracks where they put new pilots that come in and when a hooch opened up you know you would you could get a hooch and that's how i got into that unit all of a sudden i was a member of the of the third squadron fourth aircraft attached to the 25th infantry division that's how i got that's how i ended up there um and we both were just your basic generic pilots with the nine months of flight school behind us and they had they they flew what we what we're called at that point 100 killer teams which was a a low to the cobra and uh hughes 500 was our loach that was before the the jet rangers came in and so it was a huge 500 and and those were the aircraft and they had a they had an aero rifle platoon so they had some they said that huey's and that was for the aero rifle platoon if you find something that you wanted to investigate they would insert the aero rifle platoon like you know you found things like tunnels which is primarily the kind of stuff we would run into um that's what they did so that was the aircraft they had they had the hueys the cobras and the and the heat the loot he was 500. um go ahead sorry eric i wanted man there's a lot to unpack here i i actually want to go back to a little bit about your family just before jumping in more into combat because you mentioned your dad was a world war ii vet her brother went to the air force academy so was your brother also in country with you or no no my brother never never went to the area of fact when he went for his flight physical to fly fighters he he failed his flight physical because he had a stigma test so he never in his lifetime he's never flown an airplane he ended up being an engineer at the eastman kodak where he he retired from kodak but he was never i was there by myself i just went over there it was naive enough to think that uh i was naive enough to to think that uh this was kind of like a movie and that i wasn't concerned about something happening to me i honestly wasn't and so but that's how i ended up there my dad uh in world war ii was an e7 uh staff sergeant i guess what they are now and that yeah and for a guy that went in as a molestee to be an e7 by the time he got out was pretty good the reason i chose rme i had an uncle that fought in korea uh it was another guy that i admired a lot my mom's brother and so it was a kind of a military history in our family it's you know it's kind of the so the natural thing for me admiring my father was army and i thought i'd be a as i said i thought i'd be on the ground and i i wanted to be a platoon leader or something like that yeah that's how i like until flight school so okay that's that's really interesting so when you got to flight school and i understand you did basic at polk then you went to walters for for primary correct um and you mentioned you were interested in doing chinooks so how how did it work at that time how did you end up finding your way into loaches originally or were you kind of a generalist they assigned you that's a very easy thing i did not want to be a co-pilot for six months loaches were a single pilot aircraft what i thought what i found out about what i found out about it was after i did a little while nobody volunteers for the loach it just you just didn't do it i didn't know it and michael did the same thing and my whole reasoning behind that was i didn't want to sit around and watch someone else fly that was 100 i'll be the flying around here bubba louie that's how i that's where it was for me that's why i did it and they were happy to have me because they had openings and uh so that's how i got it checked me out in the i had to transition into the aircraft and that that's my first funny story do you want to go forward with it from this point yeah can you tell me when you said you were high enough in your class to choose how did that work like when you went through you had 20 30 i don't know how many people in your class how did they decide how did they give you the decision um it was basically it was any setbacks you might have i had i had zilch and i was just we matter of fact in my flight class we had two airline pilots that flunked out they couldn't they just couldn't hover and and they were airline pilots but it was uh and we all were looking at them like wow these guys are going to breeze through this and that was just a case of as you know eye hand coordination you know you got you've got two hands and you use them all but it was just um and also the the two the hughes 250 which is what we trained in as the primary was it was a smaller version of the use 500 although it was a piston engine it was still basically it was the same company and you know you got that high rotor speed and that same feeling and when i when i took instruments in a bell oh 13 that was my first taste of sloppy controls and it was a lot different yeah anyway the loach was a no-brainer for me because it was a single pilot aircraft and my my transition into that was i got checked out by a guy that was going home in two weeks he was a their instructor and i actually took his call sign centaur one three but he we shoot an auto rotation to the ground sound on the perforated steel plate runway at koji and i had a little bit of forward motion uh when we touched down and my skid shoe caught in a hole and we started to pitch forward and so i pull back on the cyclic and i pulled back too hard i didn't even have to because we just would have rolled back i just overreacted i sheared the tailbone and so i sat there with him and we watched the tailbone go skidding down the runway and he looks at me as just you know deathly silent if you're in a car accident where your car engine stops it just total silence and he looked at me and said you know that's the only damage i've ever done to an aircraft in the year i've been here and he was going home but he signed off on me and that was my there was there was no check out i mean they didn't take me out and ride door gunner with a guy that was experienced here's your aircraft and and so when i went out with my crew i just i winged it when they told me to go down and look around the cobra goes okay this is it get down there i made up my own way of flying which worked really well for me i did a lot of a lot of guys were like right angles same altitude enough height where they could look around real good i did mostly contour i made a lot of radical movements uh both you know vertical and horizontal thinking if someone's going to open up you know i i just not anticipating it but in the event that it happened i wasn't a i wasn't it wasn't an easy target that's how i that was my mindset well as it turned out it was a real good plan and it worked really well and the court was like covering me because because of that and the fact that i ran into stuff so but that's how it happened and it was merely a matter of of me not wanting to be a cop pilot yeah so eric um any pilot knows what an auto rotation is could you just very quickly explain to the non-pilot community what that is because i it almost doesn't do justice to the high the high pucker factor that that thing brings okay well that's a that's a power off maneuver where you you you you roll your throttle back to idle so you don't have anything pushing your rotors and what's pushing you you lower your collective which is what changes the pitch of the rotor blade uh and what that does is build rotor speed and then you make a is close to a 45 degree approach as you can to the target you picked out for a landing site and as you approach the ground when you get when you feel like you're close enough to the ground to do it um you flare the aircraft which builds rotor speed and then you level off and ideally you come you come straight down and your collective you pitch you pull your pitch and the pitch is forced in the air down and that cushions your landing well in my case i had a little bit of force it had been a asphalt runway it would have been nothing but the fact that i rolled a little bit but that skid shoot which they had on those aircraft because a lot of times we took off over gross and we bounced down the runway to take off and so they had skid shoes on them to keep from wearing out the bottom of the of the uh um the skin yeah but it was i i it was i mean even when i was giving check rides and i was very accomplished i mean if i wanted to put it on the on the x at the end of the run or that's where i put it but it was always something to sit there and let someone else do it yeah especially when i was doing the guys the rank guys that the the majors and lieutenant colonels because they got very little flight time and and a lot of times i'd get on the controls and say i got it and they didn't care they're hanging on to those controls and so so those were the times when i was doing auto rotations that that the the experienced guys that were flying every day i mean it was typically something that they were pretty good at but it was that was there was always that pucker factor uh when i was doing the auto rotations because we did them to the ground and there was very little recover and you get close and it looks like you did everything right so go ahead and recover we shot to the ground flight school and over there definitely so so effectively i you are cutting the engines and falling without anything you just got you got more going for you than someone in the fixed way yeah they go on thrust and you're good you're going on lift and so you can adjust it at the end i mean if you zero out your speed in the airplane uh it's a it's a rough ride to the ground you know you're it's so that was the thing about it one of the things i like best about a helicopter is that you could recover if you had an so eric when you all right how many flight hours had you had when you did that check ride that check ride i had 250 flight hours coming out of flight school and that was my first that was my first ride actually i flew a week before that loaches i flew a week and you know what nighthawk is no it's a huey flying around at night with the tungsten light around the perimeter of the base camp turning the light on periodically looking for people setting up rockets that kind of stuff i was i was a co-pilot for a what i would call one of the craziest guys that i had ever met over there and he was going home too and the first thing he said to me when i got he came to me and we're watching the ed sullivan show on armed forces tv which was delayed it was the last weeks because you know we're 12 hours ahead but um we're watching the ed sullivan show and i'm sitting around with two or three other pilots waiting to know what's going to happen to us and we're wearing civilian clothes and this warrant officer walks in he's a w-2 he goes he goes who's brevan and i said me sir he goes get your helmet and come with me i'm wearing shorts and a and a button-up button-down collar short sleeve shirt he goes get your helmet and come with me and i said i don't have a helmet he goes come with me he goes to the to the nco hooch and tells the supply sergeant i need a helmet and that's all he said to me i'm following him around we go i get a helmet and we're walking out to the flight line and he says nothing to me so he gets in on the ac side and he goes get in and i get in and i'm thinking this must be a check ride and it was it was getting dark it was dusk and he gets we put our helmets on and he said i got two weeks to go and i'm going home and i'm not going to let any rookie woe coming out of flight school kill me don't touch anything so i go okay so we we did one one flight we did one fuel load around the base camp and i'm watching him fly and of course it's dark and they're turning the tungsten light on and off we come back in and refuel and we go back up and he goes you got it and he took his hands off the control and i flew and then he went into the ceo and he said for the rest of the time i'm flying nighthawk i want that guy for my co-pilot wow we hit it off pretty good and that was my actual first two to but there was no check ride i just got in the heel and an h model and i was you know but that's how that happened but my actual first hours on the stick was in the loach and i had 250 to 250 hours so eric how all right so i'm just trying to envision you you do this auto you hit the ground you shear the tail boom and i think i read about this where like maybe the tail boom goes flying past your cockpit flying down the runway we're both watching it i mean we watched it like it was you know we're watching a dog run by or something we're just watching the tailgate go skating down the runway and i've been in in this scenario like you described where everything's quiet and you're you're listening to the co-pilot and you're like what like you both know something bad just happened yeah so you are 19 you got 250 flight hours at your first flight in a loaching country and you're here with this experienced guy and your tail boom is skidding down the runway so like correct how did you did did that phase you at all i mean like i thought i thought i was in real trouble i thought you know this is it they're gonna they're gonna send me home they don't need guys like me uh it was it was nothing nobody really said anything to matter of fact they they repaired the aircraft and they put it back online his devastation was the fact that he he was so proud of he had never done any damage to an aircraft in his whole tour and then come in and he's got two weeks to go and i mess up his perfect record so that was really it but uh no he handled it real well and as far as he didn't he wasn't and he was in doug and that and as i told you i was intimidated by those guys because i i was at w1 and uh you know did you actually issues going forward because of that i had none i mean i was i was flying with it i was flying like the next day in my own helicopter i was they i was i did everything else so yeah i was blessed with the crew i got i got a really good crew chief that was experienced he was out of salt lake city as a mormon guy look my god not the wack santa melon but the amount of times that guy saved my butt uh or just um i just can't tell you he just was special and he had no problem letting me know his spec five but he had no problem let me know if he didn't like what i was doing and and we had a really good relationship and i had a very stable door gunner a lot of those door gunners typically they they rotate it a lot they would bring guys in from the field that had been lerps that kind of thing and their last couple weeks in country they'd get to go for helicopter rides until they went home although that was that probably was more dangerous than anything they did in the field because it was we were not we were not looking for trouble so okay so um so i guess if you're you get done with your check ride you're flying the next day can you take me through your first flight outside the wire on your own we we we were clear for takeoff they would they would typically call in coochie tower this is centaur five two for example that was a cobra number uh gotta gotta take it a snake in the corral for hover takeoff and then they would give us again who's the snake uh the snake is the cobra and the loach is the pig and the snake uh in in in the in the corel for hover takeoff and then power would give us clearance and then give us take off this way and we'd go out and all i did was all i did was fly in the the cobra was giving me directions we're up at 2500 feet that's typically what we flew at going to and from or 2500 feet and they would go uh okay turn this heading and i'm they're behind me and uh and if you ever looked any uh if you saw any pictures that i posted but uh if you notice the loach is always out in front of the cobra and the white strike down the white stripe down the back of the loaches so the front seat and the cobra can keep track of it when it's doing its thing down in the ground that was the deal so that's how it was and so all i was doing was following instructions and we got out to where where they wanted to look around it was a first light we the the best activity in the hunter killer business was first light and last light they're not the guys they're not done yet they're still out or they're just coming out and that's when that's typically when it got exciting that's when it happened when it got exciting and so this was my first of a first light experience taken off into a big red sunrise and uh and the armed forces radio cranking and uh doing doing what dude are you solo in the cockpit or do you have a door gunner at the time your gunner next to me and the crew chief behind me and they both had m60s on bungees and and and uh that was our that was our armament and we also carried a lot of smoke grenades different you know different colors so if we hit something what the idea was the guy up front holds the smoke grenade and if if i say if we come into contact or see something he just lets go of it and we got to mark that's kind of how that went so for that yeah sorry eric i was going to say for that first mission when you're taking off outside the wire through this 19 year old you just had an accident the day before you got two people in the back seat relying on you like how how much uh what was your physical reaction how tense did you feel or were you just young enough that it was okay and you're like let me get out of this wire yeah i was like you know i figured i knew i could fly the aircraft and you know i i you know i i've flown with co-pilots before like when we did our night cross countries and stuff and always had instructor pilot pretty much in flight school so it wasn't like i didn't fly people and the aircraft was was powerful enough where it did everything that i wanted it to do better than the 250 or the a and b model hueys that we flew in flight school and it was uh it was one of those things where i didn't know what i was getting and the the door gunner would sit to my left where that w where a co-pilot would be typically and then the crew chief was directly behind me that's and i'm on the right as you face the aircraft that would be it's my i would call it right because i'm right-handed and but if you're facing the aircraft the pilot would be on the left side of the aircraft and anybody else that was in the aircraft would be on the what you would say is the right side if you're facing the aircraft and that's where the door gunner would be there and the crew chief not only did he maintain my aircraft but he flew missions and and uh and your uncle um he never flew missions he just he just worked on aircraft and but in our unit my guy and i always trusted my aircraft because taylor was flying with me i had no i had no doubt it was up to snuff but that's how we went into it and i just went low level i got down there where i was comfortable and and started tooling around and uh and the car was just watching me and if they wanted me to go a certain direction they'd tell me go go ahead and head in this direction and i would do that but i just played around and looked for stuff that's kind of what i did that was my first mission which ended up in that particular situation we didn't run into anything it just was uh it was just my it was my orientation into a low level flying basically so wow so you said you kind of fly in with the cobra 2500 feet then i'm assuming the cobra stays at altitude and you drop down and then when they tell they tell me okay go ahead and go down and all i would just do is i just would i would just nose dive and go down and and uh and when i got to to the to the terrain i would just start you know looking around and you know just basically he's snooping moving at it varied you know if it was wide open i wouldn't i thought nothing to go and i wanted to be able to see stuff you don't want to go buy stuff so fast you miss it so it was i'd say you know 30 25 30 45 knots and and most of the guys they got in trouble they got shot they got shot down or got hurt they were the guys that were they'd have that they'd be at a set altitude and they're doing all these right hand these 90 degree turns and stuff and uh sitting ducks and my thought was i'm going to make them you know more than once i would just make a radical turn and somebody's leading me and they're shooting out in front of me and then we're all set up to take care of them that's how that went so it just it just worked well for me you know i just said it was just thought of it i don't know where it came from i just decided that i wasn't just going to do a bunch of you know you know same altitude i mean i just i played around i played yeah interested so what was a what was a typical day like there was it a bag of gas is two hours you go out if you're in contact with about about hour and a half and you and you're going back to refuel i mean that was 90 minutes would be it you know and if you got into something that you're interested in you go back to the area a typical day we got farmed out a lot they would send us i was at coochie we're right in the cambodian border northwest of saigon and then tainan which was right where two chord and three-quarter come together uh you get north of tayden and khatum and that was the first aircaf and that was that was who we that's what we boarded with those and if we cross the river we're in cambodia so we can in uh was kind of mountainous yeah and so we we went up there a lot and uh and did missions and what we would do is we would go land at the airfield and the guys out in the field if they ran into something or they wanted there's we got we got movement out in front of us we would get we'd get sent out and lodge goes down and looks around to make sure they're not getting ambushed or whatever that was what the purpose was and if somebody was in contact what we would do typically was go out and the load should go down and and try to try to try to snake the guys that were shooting at the troops by coming in behind them and typically that worked well and if it got too hot like i said you drop a smoke grenade and the kroger rolls in and and the punches off a couple pair of rockets and that always got their attention and typically that was the end of it but that was a typical day unless it was a major a major contact but it was we did the bulk of our fighting was events against the viet cong and then we started running into late in my tour when we were in cambodia we were running into nba regulars and that was a whole different game okay so interesting um how what would you average for flight time a day would you say eric are you talking like five hours usually there were days where it was a lot more than that and there were days where you just sit around up there and drink cokes in the officers club and chain in and and wait for a call and it was just having fun with the with the lady the bar made was always she was a pretty funny lady and so we had a lot of fun with her she'll vietnamese woman and we had fun with her but it was and then i'd feel guilty and go out the crew would be out sitting by the helicopter in the heat and i'm i'm sitting and drinking coke in the office club at the airfield and my i'd started feeling guilty i'd go out and hang out at the helicopter with those guys but there were days like that yeah and and there were days where you put it a lot out i would say what i can tell you is i had 250 hours when i went to vietnam and in 19 months when i when i de-roast i had 3 600 hours oh my god all right that's amazing so well some of it you know as i did a lot of test flying i did a lot of it's i did a lot of check rides so i got over and above the mission stuff i was getting air and the other thing i would do on a day off is i would just go fly a co-pilot in in a huey because i just wanted to you know just go and fly so but 3 642 hours i think is what i ended up with that's pretty amazing so um i would love to hear just some of the stories when you're outside the wire um but there's one that i read about that i would love to hear more about which is i think it's an encounter with the uh air traffic control tower at coochie where i shot the tower with our minigun yes uh my crew chief brilliant guy that he was said you know we both got m60s he goes i want to i want to mount a minigun on the back back door and i go taylor can you do it and he goes yeah so he went to the hangar and the hangar guys in him fabricated a a uh a mount for the minigun and we had and we we took it up and test fired it and it worked really well and and so we go we're going with it and when we what we found out was we had stops on it so we couldn't shoot the skids he had it on the swivel uh he had we had stops on it so he couldn't shoot the rotors she couldn't shoot the skids couldn't shoot the tailbone that's all we had other than that he had free range what we were finding when we first used to shoot it we'd come back and it looked like we had a bunch of bullet holes in our rotors and what it really was was expended shell casings flying up and hitting the leading edge so we put a guard on it and it worked really well and a true story is that they wanted they were concerned about the um the stress on the loach they weren't sure that it was they they were actually talking about making me take it off and hughes flew an engineer over and i took him up and let him test fire it and we had a place called aor where they had a burnout uh deuce and a half or something like that out there and we used to go out and and uh and zero weapons and test fire rockets and the cokers that kind of thing and so i took him out let him shoot it he signed off on it and so i had a minigun in the back instead of an m60 which got any time he opened up with that minigun um that that had a real impact on anybody that was shooting at us so but but that was that was a later thing initially it was just the m60s but um it's a mini tower the tower was a short you know that's electric and what i would do on takeoff is you haven't sewed it pointing straight down and what we do on take off when we were cleared for takeoff while i'm taking off he would swivel it up and be in position it had it had upright handles he would he would bring it around swivel it up so he's ready and i would turn on the power up front well when i turn down the power we're going by the tower and it just it would open up and that's you know 4 000 rounds a minute i i bet you i bet you 200 rounds went off before before i got the switch down yeah so i called you as you read i called the tower and said is anybody dead and the and and they didn't even the guys the the supervisor looked around and his guys were laying down on the floor but i didn't even break any glass or anything i just i hit the building and the maintenance for the 25th maintenance division was was right there by the airfield and so i was worried about someone like that they're being hurt too but what they decided was that the static electricity from taking off uh on the perforated steel plate runway uh caused it caused a shard and it made my gun fire and and so what what we did after that was we i never armed it until we got outside the berm yeah oh so then i would then i would arm it but it was in hindsight it was funny it could have been pretty bad but it was that was uh that was my first bit of notoriety so the things that happen in combat geez okay so and that was it but the minigun was uh was a the smartest thing that that i did in the loach was had with letting him mount that minigun yeah i mean now i'm i'm pretty sure the ohs or the mhs have a minigun there were so many guns when i got there on a couple of loaches but you have to turn the aircraft to shoot it i mean you don't have any all you've got is vertical you've got vertical movement and not very much and then so if you're if you're being shot at you've got to turn the aircraft to shoot back and if you've got a mini gun and you're carrying the ammo you can't really arm anybody with anything heavy you can't have two guys armed with m60s and ammo can't you can't do that so so his idea was i didn't like the stone because it was like i said yet to turn and so the the idea of him having free range and i could stick to flying you know the other thing is you shoot if i'm shooting it and i would if it was stowed i've got to shoot it too so i've got it so the idea was to let me fly and let him fire the weapon system and uh it was a good marriage and they went when i left they had four helicopters um set up that way so wow that's really neat okay so one of my pictures is the engineer that the engineer that came over there there's a picture of a black and white picture that that bell sent me or that you sent me of him sitting behind the minigun after he had shot him when we came back he wanted his picture taken and they sent me a copy and that's in my that's in my list of pictures so that's how that happened and then they went to them for like i said we had four and we were the only unit that i'm aware of they even researched it they use miniguns nobody else did so but the firepower is startling and uh and and there was nothing dumb about the people that we were we were looking at they were they cobras and miniguns they knew enough it's time to duck for cover and wait for a better opportunity and it was it really helped a lot when you when there was when it was a case of you you're not going to blow by him and so fast that they can't do anything that's what that's that was it was just a great innovation and and i give a hundred percent of credit to my crew chief and the fact that i i was smart enough to say go ahead so it worked okay so so eric how about um if you can and as i had mentioned in the intro i mean three distinguished flying crosses three bronze stars multiple air metals some with valor um if you could take me through one of the hairier scarier um engagements or or missions they had i would love to hear about it well my very first one this is my first actual combat it was a first light where uh outside of a village the the actual area was the boloy woods which was pretty famous in in our era boloy was the name b-o-l-i and uh it was outside of a village called godaha and we were looking for for guys that were out doing things like what they would typically do is they'd be out setting up booby traps that kind of stuff but we came on we came out a guy that was apparently setting a booby trap i didn't see him i flew by him my crew chief taylor said got a i don't know if i can use the g word we call them gooks right he said [ __ ] in the bush and i was probably going 30 40 knots and i did a i did a 180 well it zeroed out my air speed and when i zeroed out my airspeed um you know zeroed out to the point where i had no momentum uh what and and i was set i was set parallel to the to the guy in the in the bush and he stands up with an ak and between him and me is it was rice paddies a bunch of bunch of water and he was he was bringing the he was bringing the ak up he was shooting already and it was it was going into the water as he was bringing it up and just because he was coming in he had me i mean i'm parallel to him and no door loaches no doors what distance i mean i'm going to say 30 yards it might have been close i'll tell you how close it was when we shot him i i uh he he's his gun jammed he had me his gun jammed and so he's standing there with the ak that's not shooting and i've got a mini gun pointed at him and i said shoot him taylor and he shot him and the force of the of the minigun blew him back and he landed on the claymore mine that he was using and blew up and of course then the cobra rolls in and they start punching off rockets but i felt stuff hit my leg and my pant leg or my boot and i looked down and it was it was pieces of him that's how close i was yeah i mean i made a lot of the i made eye contact a lot of times with people that that we terminated i mean like eye contact you could you could tell that they knew you could just see it you could see in their face that they were resigned they got i'm dead and it was uh it was um well surreal that's the best way i could say it i i used to tell myself all the time i'm not really doing this yeah it was uh it just didn't especially at night because we didn't have night vision and we'd get when i was in cobras i never went on the loach at night except for when we flew down to saigon stole a helicopter and flew down there but uh go to the go to the president's hotel land on the roof bring it back so we did did that a couple times never got caught although they knew we they knew we were doing it they just never caught us but uh eric hold up so we got to come back to the steel in a helicopter but right before we go i just want to understand on this first engagement you had so you're you're flying just over a rice paddy so you're you're only i'm i'm ambitious i'm basically parallel with the guy with the exception of kids i'm three i'm my schedule three feet off the ground so you're flying forwards you don't see him taylor sees him and he's like hey there's somebody here so you know did a real quick 188k and i was parallel and he pops up with the ak and start shooting and i mean i'm talking i knew i knew he had me because i'm watching the bullet the pattern of the bullets that are hitting the water and if he'd brought them up to bear he had me but it's gun jammed and then taylor as i said took care of it and and then that wasn't the only one there was a couple more that we ended up getting and then that turned into i guess the the captain in the cobra put me in for a dfc for that and that was my first one that's how i wrote that combatic like engagement was was that kicked it off and there were some more people in that engagement as well they were actually they were they were there and then we and we found them and basically in the same time frame and and the other thing about that mission is we didn't we didn't go back to the base camp because i had i had stuff in my pants we i finished the rest of the mission that way looking down kept looking down looking down at it so it was that was that was hard that was different but yeah and so after i'm curious because because you're working with the cobra after that first contact like you found him right and you engage are you then supposed to kind of break contact and let the cobra come in ideally that's when you drop the smoke and uh and let the cobra come in and they're carrying either 10 or 17-pound warheads and punch off a couple pairs of those and you know they were line of sight but they were if you had the reticle and you're in trim you're gonna hit it and that's how it was and uh so uh that was the method and i just i could have just said we didn't drop but first of all we didn't drop the smoke we would buy it my crew chief saw him and he just he brought it up and i just did the 180 kind of a reaction and then the other two indigenous where um we're laying low and we we we got them too because um we found them and that was uh that's how that happened but cobras the thing about the hunter killer team is is the action is is almost always in the in the loach yeah because and the cobras hated that they like going out on gun team missions because these guys want to shoot those weapon systems and then and so that was the deal there but uh so of the two jobs if you wanted the excitement it was it was more in the the cobra was it just was a lot safer you know if you wanted the adrenaline the loach was the ticket all right so i i think now you have to tell me more about stealing a helicopter okay well once in a while i only did it twice we had a guy that another warrant officer and him and this captain had this deal where they would they would take they'd go out at night take one of the loaches and we'd fly they'd fly to saigon and land on the president hotel and party and then they it's the president's hotel so i was in saigon like three years ago i went with my dad and my brother's back to visit kind of where people all right is is the president's hotel this one downtown where kind of the reporters would hang out yes that's it and then they had of course they had the uh they had the beautiful women they had all that there and and so we would uh we would land on the roof and we'd go down in and we'd uh i only did it twice but we'd uh one time i was flying and sometimes the other time i was riding but uh and i got to the point where i just didn't like flying in the dark in a loach thinking you know we have an engine failure or something uh i don't want to be out here in the boonies so i was i i had it in my head that that probably wasn't and it wasn't the right thing to do and then i only did it twice but yeah that was uh and they almost got caught once the two of them that did it they all the time they did it quite often and uh they actually thought it was me because i had a reputation of being a kind of a loose cannon uh young and dumb is what it was but loose cannon and uh so i'm i'm laying in bed sleeping and all of a sudden my hoots door pops open and there's two mps there and they look at me and i'm laying i'm laying in the bed and they and one guy goes it's not him and they just closed my door and by the time they got to the hooch where where carnathan and the captain that lived connington for some reason a warrant officer but he was in the commissioned officer's hooch because the war officers hooches were um were all filled up so he had he was in with it and he hit it off with his captain and plus he was a non-com first so he knew the ropes in the army yeah the time they got to him um they'd they both have been put to bed so it was just a matter of a general meeting and we know this is going on and if we catch a you got a one-way ticket to leavenworth and uh that's that's pretty much uh how it went and uh but yeah that's uh you know our motto was uh what are they gonna do send me to vietnam right so that's how especially when you find what we're flying which you know the whole goal for us was to go out and shoot it up and get shot at that's the goal and so um you know you figure you know who knows this might be it so i never thought that way be honest with you i never once thought i would get hurt uh just too young and john wayneish to know better so it was almost like it was so certain literally surreal the the vietnam movie that i most identify with and hokey as it is is apocalypse now because it was absolutely surreal that i used to i can't count the times that i was in combat where i thought to myself i'm not really doing this yeah especially at night because you don't even have a ground reference you know you're basically looking ambient light uh you can find the the contact area because they'd have a they'd have a forward air controller out there and an ov-10 flying overhead and their their equipment was much more sophisticated than what we had in our helicopters they were more like what you'd find in in today's aircraft the air force was way ahead of us on that so it was easy and then you'd see on the ground you'd see the you'd see the activity and it was really easy to identify who's who because they had green tracers and we had we had red traces so you could and so it was a matter that the trick was lining up at 2 500 feet uh rolling in uh have my uh my front seat this is in cobras have my front seat keep his eye on the strobe light which is the only consistent thing you could see because i'd be too busy setting up getting in trim and stuff and rolling in and they'd be whispering into them into their radio and we're trying to we're trying to hear that and there's traffic on on the radios in the helicopter and they he would say they would say something like they're they're 30 meters to our to our northeast and so what i would do is roll in put my crosshairs on the strobe and then pop my nose up what i thought was 30 meters and i'd punch off a pair of rockets and say give me a mark and and i was doing it what was the strobe sorry was that the marker for the the guy our troops on the ground had so that we could identify their position so you could be lying on that strobe i would i would my front seat would keep his eye on that once he had it i would roll in and i'd say where is it and he'd say he'd tell me and i would i would make sure i was in trim and i'd put my crosshairs on the strobe and i would i would raise my nose and just punch off a pair and say give me a mark and uh that's all and then to make a go and of course i have a it was a gun team cobra would come in behind me and uh and that's kind of how we did it but there was no there was no highway no way of identifying uh anything other than the then that was it i mean and then you know and and i was flying cobras as a 20 year old so that was you know it was pretty it was pretty hairy yeah and you you had mentioned earlier like for rockets if you're in trim you got the reticle like they're gonna hit the target and i i think that's being even more humble because i've had to shoot rockets and you can go over or under on those so lining up on the ground unit and then kind of bumping your nose for a 30 degree 30 meter offset my idea of the distance and just give me a mark you know and what would normally happen in those kind of contacts is they weren't large numbers of troops and once the rockets hit uh those guys would kind of melt into the into the woodwork so that was then the other thing to do is um now that they've been they've been spotted then the next thing to do is like get them to the closest landing zone and when they had enough light to do so we we'd go extract them and with one of our hueys and one of my or even put in the the uh the uh platoon are a rifle platoon to protect them and maybe keep them there but but back off any because it was typically an alert team that would be in trouble at night and they would that's when it would be a six-man team and you know listening and they would they would be in contact and typically would be a small group of the other guys so it was just a matter of making enough noise a lot of times just to make the other guys think it's not worth staying here that's kind of what it was but it was the the concern was hitting my own guys with 17 pound warheads that's that was my concern and it just luckily for me i never had any issues like that i did have one guy tell me in one of the runs i made that that was a little close she got my forward observer just as calm as he could be but all he did was he got i guess there was splash from where the rockets blew up and he got pelted with rocks or something because that was a little close she got my forward observer but i wasn't hurt he just he felt the he felt the feedback from the rocket blowing up but that was it and the the whole thing was that you had it was the only red cockpit lights and uh hopefully ambient light which was normal because you don't go out when it's cloudy if you your ceiling is 2500 feet uh you don't have much room to play and so it was uh it was a case of typically if it was the couple times i went out i don't remember if there was a moon or anything but there's no city lights there's no ground reference so all you got is the is the ambient light and and that was it and you know i think back on it now about being that young and playing with the most technical aircraft helicopter that was in the planet at the time and and i was i was 20 years old and it was just kind of you know it's just kind of shocking to me that and now that i was so calm about it yeah it was just it was like yeah i could do it so what about i this question probably won't even make sense after your first combat experience but was there a time where you really felt like i don't know if i'm gonna get out of this i had nothing to do with combat i actually i never i never in combat thought that i was going to be on the short end that doesn't mean that i didn't have opportunities because i got shot down a couple of times but it just was it was it was just that um i just never thought that it would be me i literally never thought it would be me awesome but you said um outside of combat there were some times you thought you might not make it there was one time the only time i can ever remember being afraid i can't say i was nervous about whether i was going to get back they they some monsoon season was coming in and uh they weren't sure that they wanted to send the the 100 killer teams up to kane in or sometimes we go down to the ninth division and uh and we'd uh we'd front for them but they were down in the delta and not much going on there but tainan was kind of a hotbed and and so we weren't sure we were going to send low slow ceiling uh looked real cloudy and they sent me up on a weather check and and i was flying i was flying loaches and i had my crew with me and so i left him in that and what i wish i had done in hindsight was tell my crew get out and i would have gone up and done the weather check i got up on top and it was just wall to wall i could just i mean it was just wall to wall horizon the horizon all you saw was dense clouds and i'm sitting up on top so i go i got to get back down well i'm not going up in the blind was one thing because i'm going to get on top going down in the blind i didn't know where i was because i'm flying around up there looking for holes and stuff so i called in for it for ground control approach um you know you got a air trace you know air traffic controller on the ground and and he's got you on a heading and an azimuth and he brings you in and so i shoot i i i asked for a gca i told him this is pretty funny i told him i was five or six miles northeast of the airfield and he goes and i'm in a right-hand circle he goes well we got a helicopter and a right-hand circle but he's in cambodia i was in cambodia give me a heading and he gave me a heading and it was me so he they brought me they brought me in and i started i i didn't have any problem with instrument training i did real well with it i did real well with it and so i wasn't worried about that but i'm shooting this gca and i followed his instructions and i'd approach minimum altitude and they'd say you got the airfield in sight and i go negative make a go around so i was making these go arounds and all in the blind they're giving me headings and uh i'm on instruments and i told my crew don't talk i got to really concentrate um i made three or four go-arounds couldn't couldn't find the airfield i couldn't i couldn't see the airfield and my low fuel light comes on you know you know so so i go boy i don't i don't know how many more shots i got at this so when it blinks at least in the hughes 500 if your air if your low fuel light is blinking it's get it on the ground so so so i made i made a gc my last my last gca um before the one i landed with uh minimum altitude you got the airfield in sight negative make a go around i go i got my low fuel light on make a go around so i go back around and i'm going this is it i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna make a hard landing before i'm gonna i'm gonna crash and i know i'm gonna be over the runway because they're watching me so when he when i set up on that week i got in a minimum altitude uh you got airfield in sight i said airfield in sight clear to land i didn't have the airfield inside you have it in sight i just kept coming and then i could see my kids and so i knew i was i was there and i came down and i was about i don't know maybe 40 maybe 100 feet off the runway and uh i asked for clearance to go to re-arm and refill and they gave me clearance but i thought i was thinking i'm going to kill my crew i really thought that that man because i'm going to run out of fuel and i just decided i was going to make a hard landing so yeah that's that was that was i was kind of scared then so it's it's hard to like as a pilot i am feeling the the pucker factor of that right now as you describe it like being in the cloud if you haven't done that it's hard to appreciate just how nerve-wracking that is and just telling me quiet like i completely understand how you must have been feeling there wow to me it was i just believe steadfastly in my instruments you know i had you know of course you got two two sets and and so i so i i just completely believed that what i was looking at my artificial horizon and my airspeed and that stuff was what i had and so i basically i like i just felt like i was under the hood you know it was uh it's what it was i just i just never took my eyes off that off the instruments so but the the hard part was making those go-arounds thinking i'm not i'm gonna run out of fuel so we got in and it was like a kind of an anti-climax so we got in and and i thank the the gca controller and uh i switched radio frequencies and asked for clearance to go to the pll and refuel back to normal so you mentioned you were shot down a couple times is that right i i didn't do that can you like tell me about one of the one of them i guess well one thing is the auto rotation was for real okay i mean it was power off and uh and i didn't do any damage to the aircraft it was just um it just was you know it was the real deal and we had to run to the chase ship that they brought in that he had a huey up there that that came in and picked us up and we running from there uh to the to the aircraft that was picking us up we we we came under fire from the from from the tree line and i remember pulling my my 45 out i had straight tracers in it because i want to see where the bullets were gone not that it mattered and i just was going pop pop pop at the tree line and running behind my guys and we got in the helicopter and then they went in and they they uh they slung the helicopter back to uh to the base and and put the patches on the on the airframe where the bullet holes were and repaired the damage and and i was flying it within a day or two maybe same year what caused the engine failure um they hit they hit the fuel line with the with the ammo and uh when when it ran out of fuel um the engine just stopped and then it's that's that that was a sickening feeling was the dead silence and i'm i'm in altitude and i've got to put it on the ground and all i did was look for a place to put it down what do you remember what altitude you were at i probably was at five or six hundred feet i was on my way up i was on my way up and that's what made me vulnerable i was climbing up and uh and they they started shooting and they they hit some stuff i had a tail road to get shot out and that was a you know i made a running landing at the airfield with that but that was that that count is getting shot down i mean i would certainly put me out of commission so wait in that case eric was it um you still had the tail boom it just wasn't the the tail rotor knocked out the tail i had no tail rotors so i had no anti-torque so you just had to come in like what 90 knots running landing you want to have true flight until you touch down and then you roll off trial that's what you do and then you you keep pulling pitch so you don't so you don't if i if i didn't pull pitch i would hit and it would stop and we'd roll or whatever would happen well if you're as if you're pulling the pitch you have um that's keeping it light enough where you're sliding along the runway till enough weight slows you down enough to drop it down but that was a i turned like about 70 degrees on the runway before i came to a complete stop because there was no you know you're basically going the direction of the of the of the rotor so that was that that was a that counted this one and that was that was pretty hairy because as i said it was a perforated steel runway and we had we had skid shoes so it was uh it was one of those yeah when you were outside the wire you you do your auto you land and you're running what aircraft picked you up a huey we had it was up there was a cnc commander control cnc was out there lieutenant colonel we were we were scouting for him and and they they they came in and landed and we actually i went in and landed and and picked up guys in a cobra in my loach and they they sit on the skids because i had my crew they they said they they stood on the skids and hung onto the airframe hand the handles and in the in the rear doors until i could i could hop them over into a another field where they could pick them up with a helicopter they're just enough i just jumped from that and i got a medal for that i don't remember if it was an air metal or a distinguished flying cross but that's so in that case it was a cobra that went down you came in and picked up the two crew members correct flew them out right popped them out into another plant another lz where they could come in and pick them up what shot them down just gr just ground fire and i don't know and the the aircraft was pretty damaged at that it was laying on their side but they both got out and uh we just i just we just there was no one there but us and uh in the the cnc ship and we went and picked them up and we hopped to another lz and then they came in and picked them up because i couldn't there was no place for those guys to sit in a in a four-seat aircraft when i got three seats full and the other see we made homemade bombs out of ammo cans and c4 and flechettes and white phosphorus that we would we would throw into tunnels we and that's how close to the ground we were as we'd hover over a tunnel and drop one of those one of those bombs that we made and it was and then we go off and and they were just i mean they were it was they made a lot of noise that they i mean you can basically lift see the ground lift up and settle back down that's how that's how much was in them but uh we had stuff like that we we did that kind of stuff because we were we hung it out i mean there's no question we we took a lot of risk and that that's why i think one of the reasons young guys do it and one of the reasons smart guys we're too smart to say i want to fly loaches i mean you know i'm i want to be john wayne or audie murphy or you know that's what i'm thinking actually that's kind of how i looked at it it's like yeah i mean i really did i kind of looked at it like i'm the i'm the good guy and they're the bad guys that was that's how naive i was so yeah did did you before you left or while you were there i'm sure while you were there you're writing letters but did you did your dad talk to you at all about what you were about to experience since he had been in it sounds like he was on the ground in world war ii he was in in pacific he was army but they would they would go in after when the um when the marines took the beach heads the army went in and mopped up that was the deal and my dad that's what my dad did so he was he did that and he was an e7 and so that's what he did but no there was no basically i wrote letters home but my communications when i was over there was basically i would write letters home and my mother would write me letters that was pretty much it once in a while we had an opportunity to to call home there i forget what they called it it was a lot different than this now but but it was you'd have like five minutes where you could you could talk to someone in the states and i did that a couple times you know you get really melancholy like at christmas or something and so that's that was that was how it was but um it wasn't all i mean there was some some fun some funny stuff that happened to us too just by by the fact that uh you guys are guys and and you do crazy stuff and the one of the fun that actually i always look back on the on the tailbone is humorous because we both were so nonchalant about it there wasn't no raised voices or he did i looked at him like i guess i'm in trouble i didn't say it but he goes i that's this is the first time i've damaged an aircraft in my whole tour i mean he was just devastated so but that was he just said it normal tones and we're sitting there in the runway you know and my tailbone is um 150 feet in front of us laying in the middle of the runway it's uh so how about um i i wanted to ask about a story that harry had mentioned to me um he had mentioned once that you had flown into a structure before with um it's a temple my crew chief wanted to see he was mormon from salt lake city and we flew by every day going to and from canaan beautiful big cathedral kind of place big front doors and uh i didn't know anything about it because we'd never seen it open we were coming back from tainan on the last light one night and we're we're flying we used to fly down this river the godaho river which was the border between cambodia and vietnam and we'd fly back and then go to it was a bridge and all of us loaches used to like to go down and contour fly on the river and go under the bridge and pop up again that's what we did that tipping on the cobras would stay up and we we just there'd be like maybe three teams that we'd be up there so we would we would fly a contour fly under the bridge just for kind of like for fun recreation thing and so we're coming back one night and it's it's getting pretty dark and we see that we see the all the the the the building was all lit up and it was what it was banks of candles up both sides and that and there was this long procession of of uh it was a it's a cowardice temple which my understanding is a it's a it's a vietnam religion that's a mix of christianity and buddhism and cao dai kaudang and this was this beautiful temple like oriental buildings were very ornate a lot of red a lot of a lot of yellow that was the colors and these guys this long procession of the monks wearing orange robes shaved heads and they're all carrying candles and they're walking towards it so my crew chief we're flying over it and he said boy i'd love to see the inside of that that church and i said i said you want to see the inside of that church and he said yeah so i told i went on on the air and i said um uh this i'm breaking formation i'll be right back and i went down and i i i feel bad about this i flew over the monks heads but i was low enough where i blew out a lot of their candles they never flinched they they were marching like i wasn't even there and so i pull up as i'm getting closer i to the to the doors i thought i got this i can i got this so i thought i thought i'd just give him a you know i was gonna fly up to the door let him look and and uh and you could see through the back doors were open too and i go i got this well i couldn't get all the way in but i flew right up and he got a real good look at the inside of the temple and then i went back up to altitude and and it was it was just total silence in the helicopter and i got to about 500 feet and my crew chief said i can't believe you effin did that it's just as not small as could be i can't believe you even did that and i go i go did you get a picture and uh we flew back to the base camp so oh my gosh okay i'm thinking i'd be in jail now yeah if if if that had come to anything but right and the other aircraft saw it and uh it just kind of added to my reputation and as a daredevil or whatever and i just uh i guess i didn't i didn't reason very well on the on the do's and don'ts yeah so it was just did you ever try like a barrel roll with one of these i i came real close i i and i know a guy that says he did it yeah it's not a barrel roll i i i wanted i thought i could do a loop that's what i mean yeah concern in a loop because we had fully articulated rotors you put negative g's on on the on the rotors and and you're done i mean yeah so you got if you're going to do it you got to do it quick well the trick was i mean i see song like that to see when i would start feeling something that felt abnormal where i not know what the cutoff was and then i thought you know what if i've got enough airspeed i can do it but you you'd have to pop it real quick but i i was i was afraid to try it i did because i i didn't want to hurt my guys but i thought i could do it but i did do basically i'm sure you know what a wing over is i just wing what that is a wing over you just basically go inverted and you drop your nose and you fall through and it's i mean almost every time in a cobra when you're rolling in you almost always do that you get up over the target and you do a wing over and you drop your well you can do the same thing in the load so i would i would go to that degree where i would so i i went close to him inverted uh but it was you know in the cobra it was almost it was a part of doing it i mean everybody did wingovers were very common and the loach everybody there was such a fragile aircraft that people were afraid to play around with him too much well you get a couple of thousand hours in them and uh i could there wasn't much i didn't think i could couldn't do them i just had this idea that you know i love the aircraft i compare that if i was going to be in a uh an air in air fight with another helicopter i'd take a huge 500 over anything that i know of it just they were they were the poorest 911 of helicopters and then the cobra was just you know smooth as silk and a lot more speed and you could in a in a dive uh you could you could scare yourself stuff you could you could get that thing cranked i mean you're going pretty fast and now i need almost vertical descent and uh and uh that's the other thing i noticed is i only salvo twice you could fire six pairs of rockets a second in a cobra and so your 72 rockets you're empty in six seconds if you sell though yeah and i always carry 17-pound warheads i never carried tens because i figured uh if i'm gonna shoot something i want the most firepower i got a lot of guys would put in their inside pods they'd have the 17 pounders and their outside pods they would they because of the weight they would go with the 10 pounders and with that they could come up to a nice hover and take off like normal but when i would when you if you put the four big white wing pods on like i had on my cobra uh when you were full of fuel and you got all 17 pound warheads in there and your mini gun and your 40 millimeter cannon ammo in there you're bouncing down the runway taking off until you until you burn until you burned enough fuel to lighten the load of course coming back if you did some shooting it's just business as usual but but i just i thought the most more firepower the better but in a dive you come very close to stalling stopping yourself when you salvo you just the push back basically almost made you stop in the air and then you just you'd fall through and and go back up down with you so so how about your transition from loach to cobra because i would i would imagine it you did 18 19 months most people are like counting the days to get out of vietnam somehow figured out a way to do more i assume part of that in airframe maybe what made you want to do that i i extended for an early out and and the humorous thing about that is the guys that went home after a year when they got to when they got to uh to north carolina they let them out and i i had i had six more months to go because i re-up for an early out but i i didn't mind it because i like doing it but i went into i went into they sent me to in country cobra school and this is one of my favorite stories because it was such a compliment to me in my mind um i got sent down there after about nine months in the loach so i had a lot of hours and and so i was very i thought it was a very good pilot plus i test flew all the aircraft coming out of the hangar i did the check rides and all in all three aircraft so i had experience actually i wasn't i wasn't cobra i ate a i wasn't a cobra instructor pilot at that point they send me after nine months and i've always i never knew why they picked me except for i think i was highly regarded but i also think they thought i was getting to the point where i was getting a little too dangerous you know reckless kind of a thing i was just sticking it out a little farther than they were so they sent me to vangtal and it was a civilian bell helicopter instructors and i get up they put me up in a in a french mansion uh that's where i stayed and they had the veterinarians that took care of the dogs that's where they were and they had all these dog channels in this big entryway with these with all these dogs and these but i had a nice suite in there and that's where i stayed in my first flight i was getting an orientation flight to transition into cobras and i meet my instructor pilot and we go out and get in the cobra and he said um it's in the revetment which was up you know just a little bit below the the rotors on both sides and and he said do you think you can pick this up and get us out of here and i said yeah so i pick it up and i back it out and we take off and i'm supposed to get a 45 minute orientation flight and so we're flying around and we're going down the beach and he does his obligatory roll off throttle and i make my obligatory auto rotation and being a civilian instructor he goes he goes okay roll on and we never we didn't have to touch the ground but we go back up to altitude and he said he said and we'd been out maybe 20 minutes he said he said take me back and i said i said excuse me he said take me back and i'm looking at all the instruments and i go everything looks okay he goes just let's just take me back so we go back to the airfield and that's all he said and and i go into the revenant and i park it i get out and i'm thinking i i'm i'm bombed i'm flunked out they're going to send me home that's what i'm thinking and uh he looks at me when we got out of the helicopter and he goes i can't teach you anything that's what he said so so so so i thought i wonder what that means so the guy came knocking on my door about seven o'clock the next morning told me i had to be in an office at eight o'clock that was uh in another building and i went over there and there was a major in there that told me that i had been selected for uh instructor pilot training in the in the ah1g and they made me an instructor pilot so i went back overrated and also graded as an instructor in the cobra so to me the here's a civilian instructor telling me that he can't teach me anything i was so that was you talk about a a dove with his chest puffed out i was i was riding on i was riding pretty high with that but uh anyway so that was it so man so eric after after the war when you get back did you did you want to you did you stayed in so you could get out do an early out i mean you sound like you you were a gifted pilot 3 600 hours did you want to stay in and fly more or you just knew like this is too dangerous i was regretted i got out uh but you know what really was to be honest with you in hindsight i would because of the area that i'm from is opportune when i went home i was other than the fact that that a small area every pretty much everybody knew what that what i was when i went over and everything so that part was okay but there was really no there was no opportunity for anything there was no there was no internet to go look for something and so i i and i really didn't know what i was going to do so i just kind of pushed around and and that was and i always thought boy you know i should have stayed in and and i wouldn't have done maybe any more time in vietnam but but i could have come back and probably been an instructor at one of the one of the flight schools or maybe going to germany or something and yeah i've always thought i kind of wish i had done that but back then there was set the mindset i mean they told us when you're flying don't wear your uniform yeah which was laughable because you got a military haircut everybody in the airport and on the airplane knows you're in the in the military i mean it wasn't it was obvious that everybody else was growing their hair out and and and and we were clean-shaven and short hair and so it was but they told us don't don't fly in uniform you just antagonize people and it's gonna you know but uh so that was the mindset was was pretty anti and and i i can't say that i was but but it was uh it was it was kind of like the military had a bad name it was really what it was and and i didn't know anything else and then when i got out i really said what are you gonna do and i had no idea and the coast guard even came to my parents house and i was still living with them and they wanted me to join the coast guard and i told them because i was already trained you know and so we we've got a spot for you in the coast guard we'd love to have you and i go well if i wanted i wanted to be in the military i'd stay in the army that's what i said to him but then i thought geez i mean how how bad could it be being in the coast guard i mean the odds of combat probably pretty minimal so i just judgment young i was barely 21 i just didn't didn't have a handle on the what i had going for is what i really and there were no the other thing was even though i had a commercial i had a commercial rating i took the commercial test when i was in flight school so i had a commercial license they just were the only people that had the helicopters in that area were there was the military civilian use is a byproduct of the military right so i it was just nothing for me especially in the area of the region i was living in in it was upstate rural new york there was nothing unless i joined the reserves or the national guard i could have flown with them but i did yeah but it just was i just touched around and i finally decided to get serious and went back to school so okay interesting and then just a couple more questions because i've taken you a long time here um was there anything that you flew with that had sentimental value to you or like a good luck charm that you or just something you had i was i wore it the whole time i was over there i'm wearing one now and that is what i was sorry i missed it saint christopher medal i he protects travelers and and i wore that and i swear i came home and i had also had that as a boy growing up i was an altar boy and i had been i had been uh because of some clout that the priest and my parish had uh when the pope came to new york city i was one of six boys from across the state that got to serve mass for the pope and they they told us uh before the mass his aides said and the pope's gonna bless you after it's over with and don't don't say anything don't say anything to him so we're all on our on our knees and there's a gallery watching and the pope comes down and he's doing his blessing and he gets to me and i hold up my saint christopher's and i said i said holy father will you bless my medal and he blessed my medal and i look over at his aid and if looks could kill we wouldn't be talking right now but i got it bless so so i wore that the whole time i was over there and i attributed that to a lot of my good fortune because i did a lot of dumb things that could have got us killed and i always i think that's any day but uh but i just was very lucky that some of the times when i hung my neck out like going around for that guy in the bush what saved me was that guy's gun jammed so i always attributed my good fortune over there to saint christopher and then and and i don't still have that anymore uh but uh i'm wearing one now it just is one of those things where it's ingrained in me and yeah so yeah i had a good luck charm so that was there so and just the last last question eric is um sounds like you crammed probably three lifetimes worth of danger and insanity into 19 months um you were very young when you went over there you arguably probably saved many lives helped a lot of people that's what i did i hope that was it that was when my goal was bring my crew back and then help the guys that i'm out to help that was that i there was no i didn't relish i didn't think other than to think that they were the bad guy i didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on what i was actually doing and i don't know how i would have handled it if i reflected on it that i'm taking life i mean i and i also had thinking while they're trying to kill me well you know so there's some truth to that but but my my ultimate purpose was to was to protect the guys that we were there to protect and get my crew back alive and i never lost a crew member i mean i very proud to say would you have would you have done it all again if you could go back i wouldn't want to know what i know now because i'm not sure i would do the same things but that was an experience the best way i can say it is i i wouldn't i wouldn't wish that on anybody but it is the best thing that ever happened to me in my life because it absolutely changed my life i mean it it made me think you know what you can it just made me think i'm just not some hillbilly from upstate new york that gonna be milking cows the rest of his life it made me think you know i'm it made me feel like i i don't know that somebody's the word it just made me think you know that's i did what a lot of people have never done or never will get a chance to do and then the the the fortune of me getting in with an air cab unit instead of being you know and there's nothing wrong with the guys at flu hueys and and and the and the the couriers and those guys but but i got into the action end of it and not that getting shot at when you're going into an lz and a huey isn't action it is but we went out and we we sought it and we we engaged and if we couldn't handle it we'd call in airstrikes and uh i did i did that and that you have uh and i got as you saw by what i sent you um and i gotta tell you i did stuff that i didn't get medals for yeah that are better than anything i got a medal for i'm sure in cambodia there's probably stuff that you did that yeah when we got into the nva i mean i got a couple medals there too but i did things and i can't come up with anything right now to tell you but i know i did things when i was over there that i didn't get anything for and i wasn't looking i never did anything to get a medal i was never i never put myself in for a medal i would come and they didn't pin them on you i would come home to my hooch and there would be a piece of paper and i've got still have them saying what i did to get it and there would be a box and then it would be the metal and that was the distinguished flying crosses and that kind of stuff and there was none of this parade standing line flags up in the middle on i didn't there wasn't that wasn't it it was on the bed wow so you know i boxed it up and brought it home so that's just amazing well i am super appreciative of your time what a fantastic story to hear um really thank you for sharing it well it's i appreciate that and and i i'm glad you know it's kind of i feel like we're the new world war ii guys you know and it's it's nice that uh that some of the stories are getting out and that people are much more amenable than they were um in in the era that it took place and so it's it's a good feeling that people appreciate my efforts and and uh i'm glad i had the opportunity to serve my country i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combatstory.com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan at combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at one eight hundred two seven three eight two five five two seven three eight two five five stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 38,166

Rating: 4.8736329 out of 5

Keywords: Army, combat, story, combat story, Eric brethen, brethen, OH-6, AH-1, Loach, Little Bird, Cobra, vietnam, vietnam veteran, DFC, Distinguished Flying Cross, Stolen helicopter, private pilot, Cu Chi, President Hotel

Id: IQCoomuF8PI

Length: 90min 16sec (5416 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020