Jocko Podcast 275 w/ The Relentless Danger From The Air in Vietnam w/ Huey Pilot, Col. Matt Jackson

this is jocko podcast number 275 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening i have thought about writing this for the past 48 years [Music] as i wrote i felt it was important to relate to those great soldiers that made this such a great company we all have a journey in life with many crossroads curves and offshoots the synergistic effect created by individual journeys coming together at this point in time at this location created an organization that truly stood above the rest the quality of an organization ebbs and flows with the quality of the leadership and the dedication personalities and expertise of the individuals present at a particular time during this time period i witnessed the synergism of the unit only increase further with each passing month this story is important so that people know who the helicopter crews were and what they were asked to do and did in 1964 and 65 the army ramped up the warrant officer candidate program to meet the expanding need for helicopter pilots in vietnam between 1965 and 1971 44 000 warrant officer cadets were awarded flight wings most were high school graduates and some had some college the average age of pilots crew chiefs and door gunners was 20 years old badly needed they were trained quickly and given enormous responsibility to maintain a very complex piece of equipment our aircraft were not as sophisticated as the machines today but the uh-1d and the uh-1h models were exceptional forgiving workhorses without which this war could not have been waged of the 5 000 uh-1 helicopters that went to vietnam starting in 1962 over 3 300 were just were destroyed in combat this undeclared war also could not have been waged without the young men that supported maintained and crewed these aircraft average age of pilots and crews 20 years old 3 300 out of 5 000 helicopters lost in combat and that is a little excerpt from the introduction of a book called undaunted valor an assault helicopter unit in vietnam 1969 to 1970 the book was written by colonel matt jackson who served as a uh-1 also known as the huey pilot in the 227th assault helicopter battalion in vietnam and he also continued on in the army after vietnam becoming an infantry officer and eventually commanding a battalion during the first gulf war and conducting the largest air assault in history with the 101st airborne division and it is an honor to have colonel matt jackson here with us tonight to discuss his experiences and share his lessons learned colonel thanks for coming on thank you jocko for having me it's pretty awesome to read your book and then be sitting here talking to you and before we jump into the book let's talk about because the book the book jumps right into basically you enlisting in the army let's let's go back a little bit further than that so you were born in in in the navy yard in brooklyn and your dad was a was in the navy yes yes i was born dad was stationed at the brooklyn navy yard in 1947 uh he had been on submarines during the pacific his first ship was in lexington until it went down and then he decided to transfer the submarines at that because he felt they were safer than receiving dive bombers so so so so he was on he was on the court he was on what ship in in the battle of coral sea the lexington and it went down and he got recovered by one of the other vessels yeah he was in the water for about six hours before he got picked up by a destroyer so then he transferred when he got out he he went back and transferred over to the submarine service he thought that the submarines would be safer he didn't like airplanes oh man so yeah i was born at the brooklyn navy yard and every three years after that for the rest of my life until i joined the army we moved to a different place constantly moving around dad jumping from one submarine to another norfolk key west naples italy yokohama japan coos bay oregon so quite extensive travel as a kid and your dad was was an enlisted guy in the beginning he started as enlisted he was a master chief i had 19 years in and then through the ldo program got promoted to a lieutenant jg and stayed in until he made lieutenant commander and he got out in 1973 uh he was commanding the navy base in coos bay oregon and so what was your dad like i mean was he going on deployments all the time when you were growing up what was that like yeah dad was gone a lot uh but in those days the old diesel subs they go out for two or three weeks and then he'd be back in and mom ruled roost then uh you know i've been hit with a shoe a spatula a bell to back of her hand uh but dad was a disciplinarian and from a very young age i was taught that you say yes sir no sir yes ma'am no man and don't you dare get caught lying there was nothing that made my dad madder than a catchy line i would get a spanking never got beaten but uh my little fanny got worn out a couple of times by dad i learned real quick uh but he was a good man so was mom yeah and so you're you're traveling around all these different places are you playing sports what's what's like uh what are your hobbies when you're growing up hunting uh dad taught me to shoot when i was seven years old and any chance we had we'd be out on the weekends out hunting some play squirrel hunting or deer hunting that was when we lived in virginia and connecticut uh in italy i learned to play soccer uh because all my friends were italians and and i learned to speak very good italian you are comma maya houser and that was the way i spoke italian but yes played a lot of baseball softball when i was a kid typical kid things typical kid things and so what'd you do where were you when you graduated when you graduated from high school i was in yokohama japan and there i learned i learned to play football because we had to have every high school kid playing in order to have a team uh all the boys playing anyway and uh that's where i learned judo took judo lessons while i was over at the codacon and uh really enjoyed my time in japan we were there for two years and uh i found it very enjoyable so then when you graduated high school was your dad looking at you um ready to throw you out when you turned 18 all right go you go figure it out now well dad said the day i graduated he said son you have three choices you can go to college you can go to work or you can go in the military but the operative word is you can go so two days after after i graduate high school i went back to oregon i got a job on a login crew sitting chokers and then went to college for a year then the next summer i shipped out on a merchant oil tanker uh the ss american trader and did two trips to from okinawa to saudi arabia on an oil tanker and then came back and did another year of college and it was a pretty worthless year so so what year is this this is in uh let's say i went to college in 65 in 66 i went out on the merchant mariners and then when i came back 67 was a worthless year and at the end of 67 dad was coming back from japan and we had a little discussion about my future and i was going to go back in the merchant mariners he said if you do that you'll never go back to college and he was right i wouldn't have i love the merchant mariners and i said okay i'm going to join the marine corps he said you join the marine corps they're going to take us both to the hospital extract by foot from your rear end so i thought this conversation is going nowhere you're o for two oh for two and he said look it you've got a private pilot's license why don't you go into that army warrant officer flight program so the next day i went down signed up so you you had your private pilot's license already yeah what was that i mean how come you did that were you just interested would you like flying yeah the first two years i was in high school we lived in coos bay oregon and i got a job working at the airport refueling airplanes and instead of getting paid in cash i got paid in flying lessons so by doing that i was able to get my private pilot's license just before we went to japan so you like flying and your dad says your dad knew about this warrant officer program did you recognize what was going to happen with this warrant officer program i mean we in that introduction that i just read you know you're talking about the fact that they needed they needed pilots they needed pilots for a reason i mean they were they were losing them and did you just think okay well that's that's that's the path i'm going to take i thought i'm getting out of college i really didn't think much about you know what was happening over there we'd see it on tv you know but uh no i just i was determined i was getting out of college one way or the other and that was the path to get out of college right then and there so i joined up so this book undaunted valor um there's actually there's actually three books that you've written called undaunted valor the first one is this one an assault helicopter unit in vietnam the next one is called uh medal of honor and then lamsan 719 that's volume one two and three so in this book you the way you explain to me or the way that i understand it is that this first book volume one you're the lead character even though the lead character has a different name dan corey that's that's this is your story that's correct and i mean it's real i mean uh if you were trying to cover it up you didn't do a great job because like dan corey's dad was a master chief who became an officer uh then you know he grew up in all these different places and so you didn't do a good is there a reason why you said you know what i'm going to change my name in this book it's just because my attorneys said that uh you want to change your name you don't want to use your real name yeah uh in the book so that's the reason i i come up with dan corey did you did you pull dan cory out of anyone was that a name that meant anything uh corey was a good friend of mine in college and uh dan i just kind of pulled that one out of the air or so right on uh so we're gonna jump into this first book here a little bit and well here we go okay first chapter is called it begins it says raising our right hands we all took the oath of allegiance those of us that were flight school wannabes were escorted to a waiting cab that was to take us to the airport we were there were anti-war protesters blocking the front door so we went out the back through an abandoned storefront instead of bands playing as we went off to combat as our grandfathers had experienced we were sneaking out the back door that's correct this is back in uh let's see this would have been february of 68 and in portland oregon at that time as today uh they had demonstrators outside the mep station all in front of the mep station so what they had is the mep station had a back door that went through an abandoned storefront and they would take us in and bring us out through that back door so that we didn't have to put up with the protesters that were out front yeah and you said as your grandfather as your grandparents went off the water but this is actually your parents your dad went off the war well my dad and my grandfather my grandfather was in uh destroyers in world war one uh served in the navy back then and went to the big wars oh man uh fast forward a little bit you get to boot camp highlight this one section of boot camp the hill was a hundred yard dirt and gravel field with a steep slope of 50 feet at one end we were lined up by squad in four ranks of 10 on command we had to crawl to the top of the slope when i reached the top my hands knees and elbows were raw for the next three days we revisited the hill each evening before chow on the third day i was really feeling sorry for myself suddenly i had to come to jesus moment hey dumbass you volunteered to be here you weren't drafted you quit college and volunteered for this [ __ ] so stop your crying and suck it up yeah yeah it was the hill would say yeah it was kind of a frightening thing now you as a seal sitting there you're chuckling because you think my god what a bunch of wimps going but uh you know a bunch of guys that just got muslim were draftees and we were in a state of shock because that was a the very first day in basic training you spent five days in reception station and they treated you so nice and then you get over to the the company and oh my god the drill sergeants were devouring us and so we start up this hill and i'm thinking oh my god this is you know this is killing my knees it was all stones knees are getting torn up hands are getting torn up and on the third day i had the you know premonition came suck it up so so you're going to boot camp with just everyone just normal everyone that's going in the army oh yeah yeah there's no there's no special treatment because you're going in this warrant officer program no basic training was uh you were thrown in with everybody draftees national guard reservists uh regular army guys enlisted and you all went to fort puke louise uh fort polk louisiana uh fast forward a little bit you get done with basic training and look you've got all this is the thing i always have to make this statement i'm not reading the whole book people if you got to get the book to get all of it but so when i when it might sound like it's jumping around it is jumping around i'm just jumping through sections the story you got you got a bunch of great stories in here and and they're just tons of lessons learned i'm gonna fast forward a little bit you get done with basic training and then you go to pre-flight and you say basic training taught us discipline pre-flight is going to teach us attention to detail cadet brady trade the 1800 briefing welcome to pre-flight i'm a holdover from a previous previous class so me and the other cadets were directed to meet you and get you settled in after tomorrow morning we're just like you and in this with you first formation will be at 0 5 30 and it will be frightening our tac officers our warrant officers who finished their flying tours in vietnam now they're babysitting us instead of being instructor pilots and they're not happy about it you can expect to get your ass smoked in the morning nothing you do will make them happy so be prepared for it this is my second time going through this and i'll try to laugh my way through tomorrow morning because it's the only thing to do he explained yeah that's all you could do they they smoked us that first morning in fact they smoked this all the way through preflight and the the big thing at pre-flight and we didn't realize at the time was attention to detail uh because the quickest thing that'll get you killed in a helicopter is a broken safety wire or a bolt that that's turned and the slippage marks aren't lined up so that's what they were adamant about there in preflight is teaching you attention to detail how much detail at the end of the third week we had to take our belt buckles apart our brass belt buckles and clean the inside to get the penicillin out or they'd be tearing their belt buckles apart um your shoes your low quarter shoes you had to be sure and take a black nitrogen marker and go around the outside to cover up any any stitching that it turned white your uniforms you had to take black magic marker on your uniforms or your name tags rack and make sure that that thread hadn't turned any white toothbrush you better be sure there's no leftover toothpaste inside that toothbrush uh it was all those kinds of things that uh that they went through and and uh it paid off i mean it really paid off once we got to the flight line though the idea of attention to detail yeah the um that's that's a common theory i went to uh navy boot camp and i don't think it was as stringent as that but and officer candidates school the same thing attention to detail's huge and i remember they have uh the drill instructors at officer candidate school they have a they walk around with a metal ruler in their pocket and they're measuring your folded underwear to make sure that they are whatever it was four and three quarters inches by four and three quarter inches perfect square that's what it's got to be and it's out you fail attention to detail ours was uh rolled underwear at nine inches there you go so and they they had the rulers [Music] and if they didn't like it you'd come back and that barracks would be torn apart bids be upside down mattresses upside down everything out of foot lockers and tack officer be standing there waiting for you god help you uh again i hate to fast forward through so much good stuff but i have to on the flight school we did get a pay raise coming to flight school as we were promoted from e1 or e2 privates to e5 sergeants our pay went from 98 to 225 a month almost all extra pay went to two things haircuts and laundry bills yep every day uh you'd spend half a day on the flight line in a flight suit it was those gray flight suits uh over from the 60s that air force wore navy war and orange one the other half of the day you're in fatigues starch fatigues and they better not be broken over from yesterday you'd better be breaking starch every day and they would start so bad that you had to work at getting your leg down your pants or your arm down the sleeve i mean it was it was brutal starch but by god you had to do that every day and between haircuts and the laundry bill there went your pay raise right there so that lasted well and i know you were in the army until the 90s but when i came in the navy and when i got the seal team and when i was going through basic seal training the same thing which is freaking crazy because that is the most pointless thing in the world to have combat uniforms starched and i think it was the marine corps god bless them was the first service that i saw where they said look you don't starch those uniforms and they started just looking like normal clothes which was a good thing i remember i remember when the army got away from it i think it was in the the mid 70s that you know you don't need to start your fatigues anymore and then definitely when the the bdus came out it was a big no known to get those things starched so i was glad to see that i wish the navy would have known that because i had starch bdus for the first 10 years of my career absolutely as a matter of fact my son was going through some of my old gear the other day and he was picking up a pair i had a pair of pants they're freaking 20 or 30 years old and they're still you could put them on inspection ready they had so much damage in them uh boom once we completed fleet pre-flight training we entered primary flight training at any one time in 1968 there were 10 flight companies in session you ended up you you get to pick well you i guess you draw what kind of helicopter you're gonna fly now you're told okay you get you're told and you get the th55 love that aircraft looks like uh uh looks like kind of a dragonfly looking yeah it's the this it was bought the army bought them right off the shelf from hughes aircraft and it's in the civilian world it's a hughes 300. you you started the engine up and then you engaged the clutch which engaged eight rubber bands that started turning the main rotor and uh so we got that going for us yeah i got them before but the thing had a ton of power and down here in texas in the summer the oh-13s and the 23s the other two training aircraft they could barely get off the ground th55 would spring off the ground so it was just a great little aircraft to fly i loved it awesome about two months into our flight training we returned from the flight line and we were told to get in company formation right away once all 275 of us were assembled as we'd have had about 75 drop out the class at this point our company commander came forward and addressed the class one of our fellow classmates crashed that day and was killed that was something none of us had considered at this point in our training his death would not be the last either another student and his flight instructor were killed in a mid-air collision with another aircraft flown by someone from another class how there weren't a lot more merit mid-air collisions always amazed me a little bit of a wake-up call well it was you know you had roughly around 1200 aircraft at eight o'clock in the morning leaving and coming back in at 11 o'clock and then leaving again at one o'clock and coming back at five o'clock and most of them were flown by students so you know the students had anywhere from 10 hours to 50 hours or let's say you got yeah you got 100 hours total while you're in in flight school early flight school first stage there so you had a lot of inexperience out there running around and not that big of an area and why we didn't have a lot more air midairs i have no idea the uh the one student the first student that we lost he flew into a cloud and we hadn't had any weather instrument training yet at that point well he went in the cloud and people that saw me came out upside down he was inverted and uh you just don't invert in a helicopter it doesn't work so that he got killed that way then the other one was a student an instructor and another aircraft slammed into them uh we lost them there those are the only two that i knew about there were others that that did happen in other flight classes but we were kind of fortunate we started out with 350 we graduated i think one 150 somewhere in that neighborhood there uh i get done with that it's on to advanced flight training um this was i i kind of had to there's there's a good leadership lesson here that i wanted to jump into it says we're approaching the end of our instrument training when we returned to the barracks from the flight line the night prior to the meteor meteorology exam mr clinton wasn't happy with the condition of the barracks and had gone on a rampage aided by a bottle of jack daniels beds were overturned wall locker contents were fl were lying on the floor the fire hose was spraying water and the contents of everyone's foot lockers were everywhere except in the foot lockers he was on a tirade one cadet was singled out mr clinton was berating him evidently the cadet was responsible for his five o'clock shadow mr clinton told the cadet to get into the push-up position once there he placed a razor on the floor in front of him and told him to shave the cadet looked scared and i was mad i had had enough of mr clinton's crap with all respect for his rank that i could muster i stepped forward and gotten clinton's face sir you've been drinking and you are drunk if you do not leave this minute i am going straight to the company commander and have him resolve this situation now leave i shouted there was dead silence mr clinton just stood there and glared at me with his bloodshot eyes everyone was watching finally he laughed turned and staggered out of the barracks everyone including me sighed with relief we spent most of the night getting the barracks back in order and no one had an opportunity to study for the weather exam it showed the next day the exam was in the morning when we returned to the barracks after flying in the afternoon we were immediately informed by the company first sergeant that we were all restricted to the barracks until further notice and i was to report to the company commander's office when i arrived the senior officer from the weather committee was present as well i was told to sit down cadet corey do you know why i've restricted the company and called you here the company commander asked like i was some clairvoyant and i could read his mind this was the first time i'd ever spoken to the man again dad's words of wisdom came to mind no sir i replied knowing this wasn't the time to be a smartass it appears cadet corey that most of your class failed the weather exam we need to know why he stated oh [ __ ] most of the class which includes me too again as class leader it was my fault didn't you study for the exam last night asked the weather committee instructor who didn't look happy why did i suspect that [ __ ] rolled downhill here and it was coming right at me however i was seeing a u-turn for this [ __ ] storm no sir we did not study last night we had a party instead i replied their eyes bulged and i thought both men were going to drop dead from heart attacks you did what gag the company commander you had a party the night before the most one of the most important exams in this course do you realize by by having a party and failing that exam you could all fail flight school and be sent to infantry immediately yes sir i replied and let them stew on this revelation now the weather instructor had a grin on his face as he turned to the company commander well i guess the problem wasn't with the instruction but with the discipline of these cadets i was beginning to see what was going on here somewhere above their level the [ __ ] had hit the fan and someone high up was looking for somewhere to lay the blame the army needed helicopter pilots at this point had spent considerable money training 80 cadets the army couldn't afford to wash out 80 cadets at one time the company commander wasn't looking too good right about now cadet corey why in the hell would you have a party the night before a major exam sir we had no choice i answered sheepishly i was beginning to enjoy this i had been around the military long enough to know when people would have stayed a panic over something that had gone terribly wrong oh dad you taught me well what the hell do you mean you had no choice the company commander sir when we returned from flightline last night mr clinton had torn apart the barracks to include turning on the fire hose and told us to get the mess cleaned up before morning we had a barracks cleaning party to get it squared away and that took until midnight light out lights out was at 2200 but we worked on stuff until dark until we had it taken care of only the married men had a chance to study last night you're dismissed cadet corey and there you go so you you you then up you know you go to the company commander then you end up with a battalion commander and the school commandant and the school commandant finally uh you end up all assembled the battalion commander comes out i am lieutenant colonel barlow your battalion commander i have not met most of you and normally do not meet cadets until graduation however because this incident i have met some of you and thought i should meet all of you what you've experienced is not typical of the treatment of cadets changes have been made the first being that you have a new company commander major kid or will be your company commander for the remainder of your training mr clinton sergeant first class [ __ ] will no longer be your tax either major kitter and he turns it over the uh to back up a little bit our class got a bad rap the first the very first day we showed up me and another guy we had flown into savannah the night before so we had a 1200 hour report him and i got there at about 11. so we we report on time the rest of the guys they all flew in on a flight that was supposed to land at 8 o'clock in the morning but didn't because of the weather so they all showed up an hour late so that set clinton off and for eight weeks we never got a pass to get off the base where every other class had blanket passes on the weekends and so clinton and and the man had had a drinking problem and this wasn't the first incident with him but this is the one that broke campbell's back uh when he when he went through that that weather exam as as i said in the book you couldn't afford to flunk 79 guys right now somebody was gonna go ballistic over this so it worked its way up and thank god when we got to the brigade commander's office and they asked me they said why do you think mr clinton did that and i said well sir because he was drunk well the three of them looked at me like do you know what you just said you accused an officer of this well i was a little bit older than most cadets i i joined the army i was 21 the day i came in and all the other classmates they were 19 20 year olds and been around the military all my life i had an idea how things worked so i was i was going to play my trump card and that's and that's where i played the trump card was with the brigade commander you know over the next couple of days they called in every day they call in three guys and they'd ask them the same questions and and everybody backed my my comments up so uh we got mr clinton got rid of mr clinton got just rid of sergeant [ __ ] and i use the name sergeant [ __ ] i never heard the guy ever speak he had he had tattoos covering him everywhere before tattoos were popular and so i don't know anything about the man outside of he never said anything so i figured it was more uh but then after that we we went into our advanced training uh huey transition was the following monday morning and and things went along really well after that with the unit major kid him it was a he was a great guy how did you like that huey when you started flying it oh i loved it i still love the huey to this day the huey is a fantastic aircraft had plenty of power even the delta models had plenty of power they were forgiving they were just they were a dream to fly and they still are uh isn't it great oh i guess it's not too crazy i mean i joined the navy in 1990 and we still had huey's and they're still huey's right now uh the army's put all layers in museums what about the marine corps uh the marine corps has got a different huey they got a big beefed up one okay muscular thing so it's twin engines and i'm not sure if it's got four rotor blades or just two but uh they've got a beefed up huey that's much much bigger than the armies ever wore so it's great aircraft i mean why wouldn't still be using today i don't know i mean we got the blackhawks now yeah they're way bigger i mean they're way smaller than a blackhawk though oh yeah yeah tiny we could get uh we could get six combat troops uh besides the crew crew four aboard and had power to you know to do things and stuff like that the blackhawk when we assaulted into iraq uh back during desert storm uh there was 15 guys in my aircraft with me and uh my rtos my and i had one squad of infantrymen with me we went in so much more power much more a much faster aircraft and it was an aircraft the blackhawk i was on the test bed for it they were designed in case we went into war with iran and that's that's really what we were looking at for an aircraft they could get the altitude uh the mountain is out mount altitude around iran uh to replace the huey and the blackhawk was the the choice over it they were two there was a boeing put a proposal up for the utas and then sikorsky put a proposal up for the utas it was called utas at that time utility tactical transport system and uh sikorsky's the one that won so and it seems like when you look at the the huey it's like a freaking 1969 muscle car just in terms of hey that's the engine there's you know you see the the the uh aircraft now the helicopters there's so many computer parts too it's like when you open up the hood of a car nowadays you don't know what the hell's in there right it's all you can't you can't fix any of it with a wrench well you look at you look at the huey who's the guy crewing the huey the guy was eight 19 years old maybe 20 and he was the crew chief and what those kids did with those engines was just amazing they'd work on them and you know i was a pilot and the most dangerous thing you could do is let the pilot up there around the engine my crew chief wouldn't dare do that but uh these kids they really maintained those things well and what what they couldn't do at the operator level at the crew chief level they went into the the maintenance level which is right there with our unit and they were all 19 and 20 year olds doing the sheet metal work and the electronics i took a bullet through the through the wiring bundle one day and the wiring bundle was about that thick and it was maybe 35-40 white wires in there and i saw a kid sit down and sit there and put each one of those wires back properly to each one of them to get the get the communications and the electronics all working to me it was a bunch of spaghetti jack so um let's fast forward a little bit let's get to let's get to vietnam um the flight from fort lewis washington to vietnam was 14 hours with a two-hour stop uh at yokota air force base outside of tokyo japan the plane was a commercial airliner contract by the government most air force transport aircraft were carrying cargo and not passengers we arrived in cameron bay vietnam in the dead of night jumping forward a little bit you get to where you're going a jeep came just and look in order to get there i gotta bypass all the a bunch of good stuff get the book uh a jeep came to stop in front of me with a hatless captain driving you mr corey yes sir i snapped to a chance attention and saluted and saluted [ __ ] you trying to get me shot damn sniper sees you doing that i'm i'm gonna be the one that's gonna get shot don't you i don't have a hat on for a reason so get your [ __ ] and let's go he said with a disgusted tone sorry sir i tossed my duffel bags into the jeep and climbed in he extended his hand and grinned there's no snipers here just thought i'd scare the crap out of you i'm captain good night uh the operations officer for our merry band welcome to the chicken coop the chicken coop is the company location and this here is the parking area and the is the chicken pen our call sign is chicken man chicken man that's our call sign i responded that'll ought to instill the courage in the hearts of our troops and fear in the minds of the enemy why couldn't it be something bold and dynamic i thought chicken man sir how did we come by that call sign i asked the official call sign is drumstick there's a popular radio show in the chicago area and now it's on armed forces radio in vietnam about a wicked white winged warrior called chicken man some of the episodes are hilarious when the unit first came to nam we were the hoot owls and the name has changed several times over the years to apache and lucky shot in 1966 sidewinder and swordfish in 1967 and drumstick in 1968 some of the warrant officers decided about six months ago to start using chicken man call sign and it's pretty much stuck so now it's the unofficial call sign for the unit i was starting to like this chicken man call sign now the uh that you gotta you gotta understand warrant officers back then uh again they're all 19 year olds some were 18 20 year olds and it's the 60s so you know once you got out of flight school your hair regulation kind of slipped and you're trying to grow a mustache when you don't have any hair to grow a mustache and what are they going to do to you bend your dog tags and send you to vietnam you're already there so foreign officers were kind of a rebellious bunch to the army we had the warrant officer protection association that you know if something was going right in the unit all the warrants would get together and [ __ ] about it but so when they when they came up with this name drumstick everybody did you know thought oh my god what a stupid name and then the chicken man series started on afvn and then it stuck and even after uh they changed the name drumstick officially [Music] chicken man chicken man we still kept the chicken man call sign we never gave it up and like on the front of the book there it's got a picture of the aircraft with the chicken on the nose and we never took the chickens off the nose uh awesome so you're going through kind of in doc learning what's going on there and and and finally we get to this how much how much flying are we getting i asked every newbie asked that question captain goodnight chimed in you'll get all the flying you want and more than you can handle there'll be days when you go to bed with your butt cheeks hurting and they'll still be hurting when you wake up and you have another 12 to 15 hour day ahead of you some days you'll get 20 hours in before you shut the engine down normally when you get 140 hours for the month you get a two-day stand down if i don't need you here explained is another individual walk-in this is lou price he's going to show you where you can set up housekeeping lou price was probably absolutely one of the best helicopter pilots i ever knew uh lou was 21 years old his first mission in vietnam was about six about eight months before i got there and it was into the oshawa valley he flew in and he walked out because his aircraft landed upside down and he had to punch his way through the greenhouse bubble they were shot down going in and the aircraft rolled uh lou he left after the year and in the book as you see he came back about eight months later he said vietnam was a hell of a lot safer than being an instructor at flight school and lou stayed for the next year and he had been discharged from the army and was still flying in vietnam they had to get a marine escort i mean a mps court to come and get him and take him back and it was because the first cab division had left all of our personnel records had left and so they didn't know how much time anybody had left in the unit so luke just he was enjoying it he was flying his beard drinking and flying his helicopter drinking his beer had nothing better to do so luke just stayed and finally they had bringing mps up to get him out of there lou uh he got out and last i heard lou had been a financial advisor to a major corporation before he passed away but he was a great pilot awesome um you did note in here that there was uh the latest led zeppelin song was playing on a real real tape player oh yeah he's wild i was talking to this so i have a son who's uh 18 years old and he listens to metallica so when i was thinking about this the first led zeppelin album came out like 1968. i was born in 1971 and and and when i grew up led zeppelin seemed really old right they seemed so old i mean i love led zeppelin but they seemed like they were way before my time well my son was born in 2002. the first metallica album came out in 1983. that's all so like way before he he's way older than metallica he's much much further away from metallica's beginning than i was from led zeppelin's opening you know it's really crazy how that time goes by but you guys were there in the in the thick of it listening to some zeppelin has your side ever hurting god of david oh yeah oh yeah i love playing on guitar i still i still play it around the house my wife looks at me she goes oh we're gonna have one of those moments [Laughter] this is always a good a good thing to do here you just kind of talk about some of the characters the pilots were a mixed bag most of the warren officers fell into one of three categories either high school graduates college dropouts or former ncos that had gone to flight school most of the warrants were bachelors with girlfriends back in the states except the old guys who were married with wives and two kids back in the states the commissioned officers or as you call them real live officers or rlos as warrants referred to them we're all college graduates but i didn't notice any west pointers in the unit you could spot them by the large ring on their finger hence the nickname ring knockers although no one did pt there were no overweight pilots most were attempting to grow mustaches with limited success we were all just too baby-faced most of the crew chiefs and maintenance personnel were volunteers who had enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted there were 29 draftees the most and most were door gunners who had volunteered to extend for door gunner duty to cut their draft time short or to put more money in their pockets before going home all were prior grunts they were all good soldiers there was an occasional drunk and disorderly and maybe an occasional pot use but i couldn't recall any specific cases of a lack of discipline if pot was being smoked it was kept pretty quiet and infrequent the the crews that the crews in the unit were just they're fantastic kids uh the door gunners they they most of those guys i think just about every one of them was an infantry guy who volunteered to come and serve as a door gunner and they were an essential part of the aircraft not only did they take care of the guns on the aircraft they also assisted the crew chief in cleaning the aircraft and running the engine stuff like that the pilots as i said you know college dropouts most of us or the old guys and the old guys they were we tried to give them the easy missions but they never took them they they stepped right up to the plate like everybody else uh fortunately we only lost two or three guys in my time there that were married men uh my roommate dave hannah another two other guys that that i knew real well that we lost but both of them were married guys uh the crew chiefs uh all of those guys had gone they had enlisted four crew chief duty and they had gone to the the maintenance course and came back over um really a great bunch of guys and i still uh keep in touch with several of them commissioned officers the rlos the real live officers as us warrant officers referred to them most of them were pretty good guys uh we had one or two that were less than stellar let me put it that way but most of them were really really pretty good uh our maintenance our maintenance officer was fantastic and i still uh communicate with him quite frequently um the the operations officer he i talked to him a lot he was good um even our previous operations officer who left the day i got there uh howard burbank he kind of heads up our reunions and everything's a great guy so most of the officers were really fantastic and easy to work with in the unit aircraft commander didn't make a difference what your rank was you had to earn the seat to be an aircraft commander and it took four months of flying time and a vote of confidence by all of the existing aircraft commanders before you got that honor did it make a difference if you're a warrant officer or if you were an rlo if you didn't cut the mustard you didn't get in the left seat and they held that pretty pretty pretty steady through my entire time there it was and it was good there was a lot of respect for aircraft commanders everybody understood how it worked if you're an rlo you're going to be in the right seat until you get voted to be in the left seat and it worked well as you're kind of learning the um the the ropes of what's going on there you're talking to a guy sergeant first class robertson like like an ops guy i guess you guys called him pops he's a good man he lays some stuff out for you um what are most of the missions that we fly i asked sir it's a bit of everything you may start the day off flying ash and trash resupply for a battalion followed by being part of a 6-2 combat assault followed by flying knight hunter killer or chuck chuck chuck chuck i ask command and control a battalion commander will jump aboard with his staff usually a fire support officer and fly around the circle flying a circle around a unit in contact while the battalion commander directs artillery fire boring as hell for you generally what's a 6-2 i asked a 6-2 is a flight of six hueys and two cobras the cobras will come from our delta company on the other side of the chicken pen they refer to their area as the snake pit and hunter killer that's a fun one three aircraft a cobra flying at about a thousand feet a huey full of flares flying at about a thousand feet following the cobra and a huey flying between the ground and 500 feet nice and slow with lights on so charlie can see you and shoot at you the low bird is equipped with a 50 caliber machine gun replacing one of the m60 guns and a searchlight with a low angle with a low light intensity night vision scope on top is mounted in the cargo door if the little bird sees something or gets shot at the cobra rolls hot on it and the flare aircraft starts dropping flares so the cobra can see targets want some more coffee yes please how do you get our how do you get how do you get missions during the night and generally before 200 hours the maintenance officer will tell us how many birds we can put up for the next day we pass that to battalion sometimes around zero 200 battalions start sending the missions to us captain goodnight comes in about 0-400 and assigns the pilots on the missions and we start waking everyone up generally we get the birds in the air at first light most of the birds aren't instrument-rated so that can be a problem in the monsoon season which will begin in about three months when do i get to fly i know what you're thinking and that's good but enjoy sitting on the ground for as long as you can but because once you're cleared you'll get all the flying you want and then some yeah you did get all the flying you wanted some that was one thing that was interesting to me and i guess i kind of knew it but not this clearly you you you guys did everything whether it was logistics runs whether it was supporting assaults you were doing everything everything you did every the only thing you didn't do is operate as a gunship because we weren't equipped to be a gunship there was aircraft specifically before that but everything else in medevac it wasn't common for the slicks to fly medevac missions unless it was really an emergency and why is that well we didn't we weren't equipped with medics or any medical supplies on board we had little first aid kits and that was about it so they would try to get the medevac birds to come in and take care of them now uh they had medevac birds and dust off dust medevac birds were part of the first cavalry division and the 101st airborne division they were equipped with guns had the big red cross on the sides but they had guns on board dustoff had the red cross on the side but they had no guns and they were part of the 44th medical brigade so that was the difference between the two and people hear the term dust off from medevac well which one was which well that was the difference between them the only time i ever flew medevac is when i was actually supporting a ground unit with a log mission and they got hit at the same time and i came back in and they threw on a bunch of guys that were wounded and i flew them out but that was about it for a medevac mission uh the missions we didn't like that medevac wouldn't fly is pulling the bodies out medevac wouldn't touch a body we had to fly those out so we did those but everything else we did it all resupply cnc 900 killer i love 900 killer i'd fly the low bird i didn't want to fly that flair berg one bit uh so isn't the low bird the one that's the bait yeah the look like that one i like that one the flare bird he just orbits around up there he's getting bored and the bad thing is he's carrying 20 1 million power candles oh yeah these huge huge flares don't want to take a trace around and then he takes the trace around that bird's burning and the fact they carried them in 55 gallon drums out on the skids that were held on by straps so that they did take a round they would take the machetes and cut those straps and drop and try to drop all that stuff right away so i i never want to fly the flare bird low bird i love flying the low bird that was fun bait bait fast forward a little bit sleep came quick and i dreamt of pleasant things as i hadn't been in country though long enough to have bad dreams as i slumbered i began to dream about the jet i heard coming for coming in for a landing on our airstrip it was getting louder and louder and holy [ __ ] jets can't land here i was on the floor of our tent with everyone else when the rocket impacted behind our tent followed by a second impacting the vip landing pad behind the majors 10. incoming i heard as i grabbed my flak jacket and my helmet i was half running half crawling to the bunker in my boxer shorts when another rocket impacted with the flash spraying shrapnel diving through the door of the bunker i plowed into someone in total darkness of the bunker and got shoved to the other side hey watch it man someone said anyone seen the new guy i recognized lou's voice over here lou i answered this your first rocket attack new guy he asked well yeah i've only been here for two days is this common i asked yep almost nightly and since this is your first you get to buy the beer be sure the refrigerator stock tomorrow morning when we come back in the darkness the sounds of laughter could be heard over the sounds of impacting rockets and secondary explosions any time you did something for the first time you had to buy a case of beer case beer and that was the cost of learning so i bought a lot of beer just like everybody else those first couple of months yeah yeah those 122 rockets they uh they weren't accurate but boy they would sure wake you up and just you know create havoc for your evening uh they were always trying to shoot at the the runway or at the chicken coop snake pit area and every once in a while we lost an aircraft to want to slam in there the mortars they were accurate and we did not like getting the mortar rounds in and you may bring it up later on but uh yeah the mortars the uh the barber our barber was the one that was registering the mortar rounds on us um well casey beer so yeah that was i don't know i don't know when that i don't know where that came from but when i got the seal teams same thing oh there's your first time jumping cool quesadilla oh your first time doing a fast rub cool quesadilla oh your first time what uh you know first time shooting an mp5 yep okay so beer so they got their beer out of us that's for sure uh in the air at last uh now you're flying and um you get the you get the aircraft turned over to you okay dan your turn oh wow it was dan and tony now cause you're on a first name basis i have the aircraft tony you have the aircraft he responded indicating he recognized i had positive control of the aircraft with my left hand on the collective right hand on the cyclic my whole hand i started coming up on the power the aircraft broke ground oh [ __ ] screamed the door gunner we're gonna die wailed the crew chief as and i was [ __ ] my pants all right you two knock it off tony said to the crew they were laughing their asses off oh sure can't we screw with the new guy yeah they did that to me well of course they did it to every new guy too so uh like i said the crew chiefs and door gunners they're a bunch of jokesters and if they if they could jerk your chain they jerky chain all in good fun though so uh you talk about doing combat auto rotations loved it so explain the auto rotation and then what what gets different on the on the combat automatically okay in flight school they teach you how to do the standard army issue auto rotation 1 000 feet over the approaching the runway chop the throttle pull the nose back to a 60 knot air speed put the collective down completely let the aircraft fall 75 feet from the ground you flare the aircraft and pop the collective as the aircraft continues to settle you level the skids and come in with the rest of the power to set it down on the ground just love doing auto rotations so the purpose of an auto rotation is you have some something wrong with your aircraft yeah the engine the engine quits and you you can you can land an aircraft you can land a helicopter safely without an engine yeah yeah it's basically the momentum of the helicopter blades that's right they're just spinning and they keep spinning because they've been spinning really fast and then as you come down does the does the air keep them spinning as you come down keeps them spinning in fact when you execute that flare you've got to pop that collector or you're going to get an overspeed on your rotor head so you pop the collective and that that keeps from the rotor speed and going out you want to keep your rotor in the green at 6 600 rpm and no correction at 335 our 345 rpm engines at 66. so you keep it at 345 when you flare you're going to go well above that 345 so you pop that collective and then that lets you settle the aircraft down and then when you get to about four feet off the ground you come in with the rest of it as you level the skids easy set down you don't want to try to parachute out of a helicopter with no engine you might get beat up on the blades so nobody wears a parachute to exit a helicopter in an emergency a combat auto rotation there's a thing in the book called the dead zone and pilots have to know the dead zone there's a certain area that if you don't have air speed and altitude air speed or altitude you're going to die you want to have air speed or you want to have altitude if you can have both you're better off but you have to keep one of those too the combat auto rotations especially the low level one you'd come at a tree top level at 90 knots air speed and chop the throttle right then and just start your flare and just as the aircraft comes over where you want to touch down you keep the flare going keep the flare going keep the flare going and pull the power in and set it down i love doing low level level rotations they were so much fun then you get the advanced stage you do the 180 auto rotation 1000 feet chop the throttle take the aircraft turn it in a tight turn and come down or what i was taught by a guy that was a test pilot at the bell helicopter 1000 feet chop the throttle zero the air speed do a pedal turn punch the nose straight to the ground build up your rotor rpm and just do a normal touchdown and you can do that at 360 too and a 360 save me one time are you so like how many times when when you start trying to do the combat auto rotation how many times do you try this before you've got it uh about three or four times you do enough auto rotations in flight school that you've got the basics for an auto rotation down pat and you go up with an experienced pilot and they'll run you through a couple of times and you'll have no problem then again two once you become an ac you can do auto rotations whenever you want you don't have to worry about an instructor pilot sitting next to you and we would do that we would go out and when we were coming back at night after a mission let's do an auto rotation let's go shoot some auto rotations so you practice those things constantly when you're coming back in but now today they don't even teach touchdown auto rotations i don't think why is that i have no idea what do you do if you lose power i think they teach them the auto rotation but they make them put the power in before they get to the ground and set it down but i had heard that they don't teach touchdowns anymore they don't let them take them take them all the way to the ground how much does a how much does an hh-60 cost oh god how much does a huey cost a huey right now you can get by huey for about 500 thousand what about nom i mean what about in this time period oh in this time period i think there were 250 250 000 and i mean what's your best guess on a blackhawk probably somewhere in the neighborhood of about eight or nine hundred thousand right that's just a guess yeah oh that's way cheaper than i thought i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to check that one out yeah i'm not i'm not sure roger seems like the huey was way way way cheaper oh it is there's nothing sophisticated about healing i mean engine was simple the l-13 engine a great engine but nothing no complicated computer electronics in it you had just standard flight instruments and none of it was computerized no computer chips very simple aircraft to work on and a simple aircraft to fly and it was an amazing aircraft to fly it would take uh so many hits that and it still keep going the the biggest i saw was a friend of mine al hass uh bill hess he got hit and i covered it in one of the books i i forget which one it's covered in he had 107 bullet holes in his aircraft one of which was a 50 caliber round that went through the uh the the frame right above the pilot's head in fact uh one of our canadian lieutenants um he had gotten shot in the groin and it leaned forward and when he did that 50 caliber round hit the the post and if he hadn't leaned forward he would hit him in the head but yeah but he had 107 rounds in that aircraft and the aircraft still flew uh another thing that you do over there is the combat takeoff yes so what's the combat takeoff all about okay a nice a nice flight school type helicopter takeoff is you come to a three foot hover you pull your power you drop your nose and you climb out at a nice rate of climb combat helicopter take off you pull that power in and you shove that nose over at the same time and so you're coming out of there like a bat out of hell uh it's know this three foot hover stabilize and then go it is push roll the nose over give it full power and get out of there as quick as you can and the first couple times you do it for a new guy it scares you because you think you're going to hit the rotor blades on the ground you roll it over so far but uh how much clearance do you have oh you got your front rotor blades six or seven feet easy no factor yeah it's no factor but when you're sitting there and you're normally looking at you know it's sitting up there 15 feet and then all of a sudden it's six feet off the ground you go okay scare the crap out of here uh you say here dan or he's you're getting advised dan don't fly without a map and know where you are at all times on that map if you go down you're not gonna have a lot of time to figure that out this was another cool thing is you guys were just doing land nav the whole time yeah no you're not you're not looking at any kind of instrument to know where you are i mean i guess other than your compass the the you had a db ndb non-directional beacon uh there was one in tayden we had one at lyqae and i believe there was one up at song bay and if you had to do an instrument approach you're going to do a an ndb approach or a gca approach but that was it so you really needed to know where you were at at all times and have a good idea where you were were you were you flying in a small enough area that you got to know everything just really easily from leica up to 10 in was probably uh 80 90 miles from teen in across along the border was probably another 100 miles and then back down to leica was probably another 80 miles so that was about the area you're working in so you had a bunch of geographical references there there's that road there's that mountain there's that whatever there's the river there's a bridge uh in fact the funny thing was three core the area we flew on was pretty flat uh the vegetation wise but at tayden there was a mountain there that looked like an extinct volcano it wasn't but it's just this big tit sticking up and that song bay was another one sitting there so if you could see those two you knew exactly where you were at and then there's thunder road that went up the middle uh so you had a pretty good idea where you were you were at all times um you're on a mission you're out there fast forward a little bit you're still learning as we made a pass over the intended landing point mr leak went into education mode okay the smoke tells us almost no wind so that's not going to be a factor the trees on the south side look lower than the north side the units on the south side as well so we'll make final approach over the south side never make your approach the same twice in a row if you can help it always make the approach from a different angle each time turning into final at the last minute if you can you make the approach you make the approach the same each time and charlie will fire your ass up got it got it yes the the big lz's uh you had a lot of options where it came critical was when you got into a smaller lz or a hover hole that you're gonna have to resupply at if if you came in the same way three times in a row charlie's probably going to smoke you on the third time you always tried to come in a different way a different angle you had to keep in mind what's the lowest approach path i can use especially if you had a heavy aircraft where's the wind blowing i want to come into the wind and i want to come in on the lowest path so a lot of times that would dictate that maybe the final turn would be the same but you want to come in from the left side you want to come in from the right side if you could you'd come in from into the you come in with the wind and then do a pedal turn although that seldom very happened so you just did not want to have the same approach the same path every time when i was home on leave after my year there somebody was using my aircraft went into a hover hole the same way three times and the third time charlie got him and we lost the aircraft lost the crew and lost everybody on board you know what's as you as you mentioned the weight of the aircraft one thing that i really got an appreciation for and i noticed that you know when i would get out of helicopters you could see you know the helicopter would move a little bit depending on what kind of helicopter it was but you know when you drive a car if you put 500 pounds if you put 200 300 400 pounds into a car you don't really notice it you have to put a lot of weight into a car before you notice it takes a little longer to break you know maybe if you're if you throw a bunch of you know 2 000 pounds of bricks into the back of your pickup truck you notice that but the huey you guys could notice the weight you know three four hundred pounds is is is a lot different and you have to be it's like you guys were so attuned to those aircraft the uh the weight and balance you know if we were at a hover and there was 300 pounds off to one side you're going to notice that you noticed it especially the guys started jumping out of the aircraft you'd notice the rocking in it a lot of times going into an lz for the first time on a resupply i would try to take 30 water cans that gave me a good size load for that trip it also gave me a load light enough that i could see how the aircraft was handling based on the wind conditions and the approach uh there was one time i got into an lz i only had 10 water cans on that's how bad that hover hole was but most of the time 30 water cans was good and then the only going back the second time you know if i could take more than 30 water cans and some ammo we'd throw that on as well but you always had to be careful and the crew chief was really the guy responsible for this watching where the weight and balance was at making sure that they ain't putting too much weight up forward to the pilots keep trying to keep it all back back center around the transmission well in the center of the aircraft another little section here sort of about what what life was like over there for you guys it was obvious that the rear echelon lived a lot better than those closest to the front action we lived good as aviator certainly much better than the grunts but these rear echelon mothers ramps as we called them were living the life there was always had been and always would be some animosity between those on the front lines and those in the rear those in the rear areas enjoyed levels of comfort only imagined by those on the front clean sheets hot chow good boots and movies were just some of the perks besides never getting shot at and all the while bitching how tough they had it because of the paper cuts they received history shows general eisenhower wanted paris to be an r r center for the frontline troops just after it was liberated a hundred and fifty thousand ramps took up residence and he could do nothing to dislodge them some things never change and they still haven't changed to this day during desert storm i was i was out there with my battalion and we're wearing jungle boots we used super glue the club closes the holes up on the side to keep the sand out and it got to the point we were using duct tape to hold the boots together because they were just getting torn apart in the flint and up shows some rims from the back end and they've all got brand new desert boots we never got desert boots the whole time we were there we were front line infantry so it hasn't changed and it never will change you're always going to have that argument a perfect example is you look at the movie uh uh what the glory about the 54th massachusetts infantry regiment and what was their big complaint boots it hasn't changed we're still arguing about boots in the military i have i have a leadership consulting company the name of the leadership consultant consulting company is echelon front and there's a very specific reason why we have that because we wanted people to know like we're we're talking about what leadership is like from the front on the front lines not what it's like in the rear with the gear that's right well we used to say nothing's too good for the infantry so the infantry gets nothing uh check next section is called reality sets in that evening this is fast forwarding that evening we were in our tent discussing that day's activities the assistant the assistant maintenance officer came in looking for a beer hey john how's it going i asked give me a beer and i'll tell you how it's going one of the other pilots opened the refrigerator and handed him a cold one we have 13 of our 21 aircraft shot to [ __ ] two have got to be evacuated back to the states they're shot up so bad 251 and 228. of the remaining 11 we have an estimated 3 000 hours of work ahead of us to get them into flying condition tomorrow we'll have a total of six aircraft that we can put into the air as i already had two in for periodic inspections the first of those shot up today will be up the day after tomorrow and that's 7 40 as i only only need 24 hours of maintenance to solve that one i can tell you that maintenance platoon is not going to get any sleep for a few days i silently thank god i wasn't a maintenance officer again just pointing out that the teamwork that it took to keep these birds flying was immense immense immense teamwork to keep them up uh it was incumbent upon the pilots to make sure that we weren't messing the aircraft up with with tree strikes on rotor blades or tail rotor strikes on on on bushes that that was a bad factor that happened not paying attention you bend the skids on a stump or on a log or you punch a hole in the bottom of the aircraft from on a stump so it was incumbent upon the flight crews first of all make sure you don't screw the aircraft up because the maintenance guys when we got in situations they had more than enough work to keep them busy another kind of interesting thing here at this time we had no standardized markings on the noses of our aircraft the pilot's doors had a green triangle with a lightning bolt through the triangle but that was all across the nose of each the aircraft commanders and crews generally put their individual pet name on the nose iron butterfly green lantern devil's advocate and hard luck to name a few we had some really good we had a really good nose art artist sergeant scovell who who was kept busy some units had a bit more discipline and had a standard emblem on the noses of the aircraft which you guys eventually got the chicken we eventually got the chicken mike scoville uh he is now a famous artist in in southwest america uh he's out there and he still does great artwork i've got a couple of his pieces and he keeps busy with that but at that time our unit had an assortment of nose art and it's got uh it's got changed there's a great book that a guy named john brennan just published his second one and it's nose art of aircraft and it covers all a lot of units that had nose art on them both of my birds are in there um what'd you have on your birds well the first one had the chicken and then i had a hard luck so what was that what was the nose art for hard luck uh it was the cav patch with the chicken in the middle of it got it and then hard luck written across the top i'll send you a picture of it that's awesome uh this is another interesting thing and this is this is i was gonna bring this up earlier as you were talking about why it's so important to have confidence in the aircraft commander as lou is bringing us into position as chalk 6 he asked how much formation time do you have just when we got in flight school in a couple hours the other day i replied without looking in his direction don't tell me this is your first combat assault okay i won't but it is oh i see it's going to be a long day he took a breath okay formation flying here isn't like flight school he said as he moved closer to the right side of choc five in mother rucker which is where you guys go to flight school and mother rucker they wanted two rotor blade widths between aircraft here we fly at one to one half rotor from the other he was going for the half rotor distance and my pucker factor was starting to suck the seat up my ass i looked back at chalk seven oh [ __ ] he's going for a half rotor distance as well lou was calmly smoking his cigarette and continuing to lecture while he held the cyclic cyclic in his hand index and middle fingers the one thing you don't want to do is over wrap rotor blades oh trust me that ain't happening okay you got it he said i responded i got it and i wished i hadn't immediately we started sliding back to a two rotor blade distance chalk seven called us hey chalk six did the new guy just take it great now the entire formation knew i had it yeah and he's [ __ ] in his pants now that wasn't true but it wasn't far from the truth okay let's close it back up and get with the formation i pulled in some more power and ease that aircraft forward good now just hold it there lou said and i immediately started drifting back no get back up there yeah formation flying to be truthful i didn't like formation flying i didn't like it in flight school i don't even like reading about it i wanted to be i really wanted to be a dust off pilot because dust off pilots didn't fly formation so that made me happy and then they said no you're going to lift me and i went oh hell i'm gonna have to learn how to fly formations i hate formations so it was not easy for me to get in there with lou and fly formations but he is such a good pilot and such a good and calm instructor and it may be because he usually drank a six pack in the morning before he got an aircraft i don't know but anyway he was really good and really set me to ease and probably after about five hours i could get in there and be comfortable flying at one road of blade out and and in the book i go through about how he taught me about you know how to get judge your distance how to judge where you're going to be how to keep yourself out of trouble in lz's and stuff uh really really a good pilot but yeah that that half rotor blade that's that scared the living bejesus out of me uh you have a section here fast forward a little bit you're talking about it's a good conversation as you know i tend to bring things back to leadership and there's a good conversation you have about leadership in here and it starts where you're talking about the current company commander that you had at this time yeah and the question is have you ever seen him in the cockpit or on the flight line or out of his tent when you do please please let us know it'll be a first said mr toliver the other seconded that comment how come i asked the ceo is on his third tour over here his first was as an advisor in the early 60s and his second was in 65 as an aviator pretty rough assignment he took a couple hits in the aircraft and on his body he's paid his dues he only has another couple of months in command and then he'll probably move up to battalion or brigade staff he's all right he just doesn't care to fly anymore responded mr toliver well what makes a good flight leader i asked as i open another beer for myself and others mr reynolds field that fielded that question he had been in the unit for about seven months and was considering extending but not for our unit no one seemed to do that extending your tour was a rare occasion in vietnam even in those units that appeared to have high morale and good leadership a good flight leader must be a good pilot must first be a good pilot and know his aircraft know what its limitations are and how far he can stretch them he must be a good aircraft commander taking care of his aircraft and his crew just because we're officers doesn't mean we can't help the crew take care of the aircraft did you notice when captain bullock landed the first thing he did was leave the aircraft to his crew and beat feet to the club for a beer instead of stay behind and help them sweep it out and post flight it no he left that to hess his co-pilot for today and the crew self-centered bastard just because he's an rlo he thinks he's too good to get his hands dirty do you think he helped phil sandbags to build the bunker not him or any of the rlos for that matter jameson stood there that day and supervised while everyone else did the digging and stacking okay reynolds that's enough venting interjected mr toliver besides being a good pilot and aircraft commander a flight leader must plan coordinate and anticipate the mission once he gets his brief from the ground commander he needs to do a recon flight over the lz or pz he needs to judge how many aircraft will fit in and what formation will work so we're not doing last minute dick dance like we did today bullock never did a recon and that's why we were dick dancing in the kill zone once he's done re once he's done his recon he needs to coordinate with the ground commander on what formation will be so they can plan accordingly he needs to coordinate with the attack helicopters if it's going to be an insertion he needs to coordinate with the aircraft commanders and let us know what's what and he needs to anticipate what all can go wrong and have a plan for that as well be it an aircraft breaking down before the mission or ground fire on the lz or pz yes aircraft commander and leadership was so important i found out recently that the commander that we had before the current man i talked about in there was worse than the current company commander and the current company commander he just was not interested in being the company commander or or exercising leadership uh leadership in the unit was from the rlo's it was from our operations officer and one of the platoon leaders one of the other platoon leaders who i mentioned in there uh did not exercise leadership and very seldom do you ever see him exercise leadership and it was pretty much up to the operations officer and this one other platoon leader that that really took things by the horn they were the flight leaders um and really guided us pretty much that's one of the reasons nobody ever re-up for the unit the morale on the unit wasn't that good at the time it was it was good with the warrant officers and and the crew chiefs and stuff but as far as a unit cohesion goes it was lacking uh the you mentioned something in there about the the flight leaders if you had a flight leader that was screwed up everybody's lives were going to be in trouble and on this one mission there that bullock was the flight leader uh we got a bunch of aircraft shot up that was march 6. and i think we went in with something like seven aircraft one broke down before we got there the other six went in and the lz had to go in two two and two and the nva were sitting there waiting for us if we ran it against nva we were gonna be in trouble vc didn't worry about them they couldn't shoot for [ __ ] sorry but uh they they couldn't hit their their ass with both hands but uh the nva knew how to shoot at a helicopter and they did a good job of shooting at him but yeah the leadership was important and it just was lacking when i first got there yes that that scenario that that i skipped over it's it's real obvious you know when you look at it you're thinking okay how long is going to take us to put two birds at a time multiple lifts in a row before the enemy goes okay well we'll wait for them and we'll hit them next time they come in here yeah a lot of times they'd let you in on the first lift and then the second lift that's when they'd open up on you or the third lift usually if it was an extraction you could expect the third lift coming out to take fire last position you wanted was number six in a six ship lift coming out of a two ship lz because you're gonna catch every bit of it they're just waiting for you if they could knock an aircraft down then what happens is they've got a there's a wrench thrown in everything everybody's got to come back in you got to pile on uh and you better have a plan ready for if you don't have a plan ready for it there's a crew going to get killed yeah even you're talking about the contingency of hey one of our aircraft might go down before we even take off that's right maintenance problem if you don't have some kind of contingency and that's a another thing that we'll get into but the idea so you have the aircraft commander who's obviously in charge of their singular aircraft but then you've got the flight lead that's leading the whole operation that's in charge of it overall and that that's the person that has to account for all these different things that's right that's right usually he would go out the flight leader would go out about an hour before everybody else and get the coordination with the ground commander done the artillery etc go out and do his recon of the lz uh make sure he knew what formation was going to finish make sure the ground commander knew what formation he needed to have his troops in to pick up and he knew what formation you were going to drop them off because that would make a difference in his ground assault plan so all that coordination had to get done you had to have a flight leader that was on his toes that to do that kind of stuff initially when i got there only the rl's rlos could be flight leaders warrant officers we were technical officers not tactical officers so warrant officers weren't allowed to be flight leaders when i first got there here's a mission that we hadn't talked about yet what's a sniffer mission i asked this machine picks up ammonia which bodies give off in this heat in the form of perspiration when the machine gives off a reading of max the operator will call our call out max mark which means he has a large group giving off a lot of perspiration and we should engage problem first problem is not only do humans give off ammonia but so do monkeys so we'll probably be shooting a lot of monkeys second problem is in order for this to work we'll be flying at tree top level at 60 knots the two cobras and from el lobo will be 1 000 feet and following us and will engage if we call for fire or are taking fire bob and bob informed me you're [ __ ] me right we're going to fly at treetop at only 60 knots i [ __ ] you not bob said with a grin so that's an interesting one yeah the sniffer missions were they were they were interesting uh the the first time i took a hit in the aircraft and we were flying along and the guy ran out max mark and about that time a claymore in the top the tree went off and uh like a shotgun blast hit the front of the aircraft so but uh i am sure that more monkeys died than nba from the sniffer missions tell you the truth it was um now here's something that you mentioned uh before fast forward a little bit mike and i walked back to the aircraft and saw that i had that it had a light load of ammo morning missions usually meant picking up empty water and mermite cans from the night before and taking ammo in for the day ahead as we started the aircraft dave asked have you done any hover holes yet just around long bean which i understand isn't much compared to this area i replied he says back you're about to experience the scariest thing about flying in vietnam yes yes around so talk to us about talk to us about hover holes hover holes long been uh the vegetation around long bend was the biggest trees were only about 30 feet well scattered out you had some brush and stuff like that so it was it was pretty open terrain uh you could find an lz pretty easily nothing to it up along the cambodian border song bay region that we flew in a great deal there it was different there it was triple canopy jungle uh the trees were about 300 feet high and it was packed there was no lz's to get an lz you either had a bomb crater from an air strike or they would bring in a daisy cutter a 15 000 pound bomb that had chains welded around the outside the casing they dropped it from a c-130 on a parachute and it had a probe on the end of it and it would come down when that probe hit the ground that thing would go off and it would make a nice one-ship helicopter lz it would clean out every tree every stump everything just beautiful but most of the time you didn't get that you got the bomb crater from a b-52 strike to go down in and so when you come into that thing here you are you got a load on board 30 water cans you coming in that thing you're looking for the wind you want to land into the wind turn into the wind and you start down you're at a hover and you're hovering down 300 feet the eyes in the back are the crew chief and door gunner and they're telling you bring your tail right bring your tail left drop down stop come right come left start down stop move your tail to the left and you worked your way down through those trees to get to the bottom that hole there were times i would look up through the greenhouse window and i couldn't see the sky these kids would wander make us come down we'd slide around drop down on the tree limb slide back down underneath that tree limb and start back down turn the tail boom slide down some more and it takes all the eyes all eight eight high balls in that aircraft to bring that aircraft down into those holes are you working with the same air crew all the time yes well the only the only person that wasn't the same would be the the right seat pilot aircraft commanders flew left seat right seat right seat pilots flew the uh they were the new guys and we rotated new guys through through the aircraft commanders but it'd be me my crew chief my door gunner be always the same and that's the full loadout co-pilot pilot co-pilot door gunner and crew chief yeah so you know exactly when this guy says left a little bit you know what that means yeah in fact uh they would have to say uh mr jackson come left your other left so everyone swallowed i screw up oh okay uh yeah that sounds freaking scary um you're having some uh some chow and captain bullock and what's captain bullock's position he was one of the platoon leaders okay so he's one of the platoon leaders and he's got he's doing some introductions he says this is lieutenant weed he said indicating the new pilot lieutenant weed was tall lanky with long blonde hair reminding me of a california surfer which he claimed he was during his introduction we didn't pay much attention until someone asked him for his first name richard was his response lou couldn't let that one go looking at the four of us he said prob probably loud enough to be heard by the group lieutenant dick weed we couldn't keep it in all three of us were in hysterics lou maintained a straight face standing up and turning to lieutenant dickweed to introduce himself welcomes her i'm lou price heading back to the states in a month he said and left the mess hall lieutenant dick weed was in vietnam on his first tour and he would prove to be a cocky guy if he wasn't in charge of something he tried to make himself in charge and on one more than one occasion was put in his place by a flight leader or an aircraft commander he arrived the unit before i made aircraft commander so i was fortunate enough never have to fly with him yeah he was one of those lieutenants that thought because he was a lieutenant he would be in charge of the aircraft it it took him a while to realize that no you don't get to be in charge of the aircraft until you're voted charge of the aircraft so we had many many times with lieutenant dick weed uh the night the night hunter killer missions you already you already kind of briefed what those were and that you preferred to be the bait oh yeah yeah i'd much rather be the bait uh they they were they were good missions uh a lot of times she flew them down the rivers uh so you'd be flying along and and one of the reasons you liked it because you knew if you had an engine failure you'd be better off going into the river than you would into the jungle so we always flew it right right along the edge of the tree line there uh but you'd fly along it was interesting uh you were looking for something you weren't just born a hole in the sky like the the cobra and the flareship or you had the same crew all the time usually the guys that were on the searchlight and the starlight scope that was usually somebody from the supply room or one of the kids out of maintenance that wanted to go out and do something besides his normal job so they would jump up and volunteer for that the knight hunter killer mission that crew got that mission for a month so when everybody else was out flying in the daytime we'd be sleeping and when they came back in that's when we were going back out so you got to work with the usually the same units and you got to know the the brigade staff at the you know the second brigade and the areas that you're working uh you got a good relationship with them that that carried over once you're back on day shift with these guys did you feel like um safer because you're flying at night and it's hard to see a helicopter at night or was a little bit a little bit but then again too you know you know you're out there trying to get shot at uh we flew at the pilot's doors open uh off took those off the aircraft why is that because each one of the pilots would carry an m79 grenade launcher on his lap check and we'd fire it out the door if we needed to so and you know it was just kind of nice to be able to look out there i couldn't couldn't fly the doors off during the day for some reason but uh we like flying it at night like that so and and go an example there you talked about three times so you got the so you got the 50 cal in the back you got what a cobra gun ship as well with all their munitions but you guys had to make sure you had those m79 that's right that's right we had a 50 on one side and 60 on the other and the two m79s in the laps the one time we got in trouble and it we it was one of the cases where we almost flew the mission three times the same way uh we were coming back we've flown twice up in song bay on the river threw it the first night one way flew at the second night the same way the third night thought let's change up so we came around and we flew in the opposite direction we're coming down and the cobra starts screaming at me you're taking fire and my crew chief he looked behind us he said yes sir we're taking 51 fire from behind us you can tell it's 51 because it looks like a flaming basketball coming up at you and the cobra starts to roll hot and another 51 opens up in front of me and then a third 51 opened up on the other side of the river and that's the way they would do it they'd set up 350 once and try to catch you in the middle of the cone and they were set up perfect if i'd been coming from the other direction i'd have been right caught between two of them easily but as it was one gun was out of position the flare ship dropped his flares and then we spotted all three of them and the cobra went to work and my crew chief which was our company commander at that time uh flying his first night hunter mission uh he was on the phone calling the artillery up so the next day they went out and found what the results were and and then the mission went to another unit i warned them about that they did the same thing i did and the third day they got fire and they were ready with the artillery and the next day they went out and picked up pleased up all three guns and about 21 bodies so are you getting shot at the 51 cows that is that green tracer coming at you yes see that's the weird thing and i've talked about this with some other guys in viet that we're in vietnam is for us everyone has red tracer now yeah so you just it's cr it's it's different we don't have that distinguishing characteristic of green traces green tracers and they look like flaming basketballs at night in daytime it looked like a bit you know flaming hardball but at night that was a basketball coming up you just oh my god there was no doubt in your mind what was shooting at you a little uh leadership here major anthony so you get a new a new company commander major anthony now the new company commander just stood there looking over us and we had him no one said anything until he finally told us to take our seats he then went on to give us his philosophy on command and how he expected the unit to operate an hour an hour later in the club some discussions took place about what had been said mike said dan what did you get out of the major speech i'm run wondering if i heard wrong what i heard was don't do anything that's going to jeopardize my success and command and will get along fine do so and i'll be unmerciful upon you yeah i heard that too mr hess agreed i continued you know i've seen commanders like this when i was a kid with some of my dad's skippers having a command is a is a mandatory is mandatory for a successful career especially the higher up you go however managing and leading that command effectively and efficiently is what's important some officers view it as a threat if their subordinates do anything that would reflect badly on them major anthony strikes me as that type we'll just have to wait and see i guess and he did not prove us wrong uh he was really afraid that we were going to ruin his career and his last comments when he finally gave up command was well i don't have you guys to ruin my career anymore so wonderful i never saw him fly a mish a combat mission uh he'd fly the ashen trash going down the saigon to the px and stuff like that he moved his tent because we lived in tents at that time he moved his tent out to the flight line and he would sit there in a chair and when you it was time for you to launch he'd check your times off if you launched late you're gonna hear about it that night when you got back in but uh he was very very much fearful of his career and i'm sure that uh his career puppy ended disastrously for him i hope on april 16th 1969 i was flying with mr driscoll returning from a long day in quan loy i say that right yep in kwan loi area flying resupply of one of the infantry battalions it was late in the afternoon the sun was setting we were monitoring monitoring the four radios when we heard the mayday call mayday mayday lobo one three is going down mr driscoll a cobra just went to the bamboo at three o'clock said our crew chief specialist grossman lobo13 got off one call before he plowed into the bamboo he was in a dive on a gun run and pulled out too late only being able to get the nose of the aircraft up but not enough to stop his downward motion he crashed into 10 foot high bamboo and put the aircraft over on its side he was on top of an nva bunker complex quickly mr driscoll took controls from me and told me to plot our location and get out an additional mayday call which i did alerting everyone where we were while i did that mr driscoll made an approach into a small clearing he spotted close to the downed aircraft and landed it was just big enough for us to fit into the first thing i noticed was the nva bunker opening not 10 feet from my door i drew my 38 caliber pistol and pointed at the opening expecting someone to open fire at any moment the downed crew was struggling to get the miniguns off the front of the cobra when they began taking small arms fire specialist grossman opened with the m60 machine gun shooting at nothing specific but in the direction of the enemy fire as did specialist leonard our door gunner i cocked my 38 and waited as soon as the down pilots got the miniguns off the down cobra they ran to our aircraft and mr driscoll pulled power to get us out of there as both gunners were firing and i emptied my 38 at the bamboo worthless weapon the down pilots thanked us profusely for saving their butts as they occupied the other side of the chicken pen their co came over that night and bought drinks for us at his club since we no longer had one he invited major anthony who declined to drink with us but made sure we didn't fly the next day a few months later i came in from my flight and lying on my bed were orders for an air medal with v the downed aircrew had put in our crew for the award there was nothing our ceo could do about it but instead of presenting the awards to us in front of the entire company he simply put them on our beds or at least had the orderly room clerk do it he did that as well for the crew chief and the door gunners awards the man held grudges his last words to anyone when he departed the unit after six months was something to the effect of he wouldn't have us around to ruin his career i think he may have done that on his own so his lead his leadership style uh when he first got there that first night and i put this in the book he came into the club which was our we had a big gp medium tents where our club was at and he came in and uh he asked he says how many who who's flying tomorrow well a bunch of the guys raised their hand he said gentlemen no drinking 24 hours before you fly and everybody's going wait a minute we fly every day and that was his point army of policy was you would not drink 24 hours before you fly or smoke within 50 feet of the aircraft well warrant officers to us it meant you didn't smoke 24 hours before you flew or drink within 50 feet of the aircraft but he didn't go along with that so he shut the club down and that way there he could say if somebody crashed he could say hey it's my policy they violated my policy because they drank the night before so they couldn't blame him that's the way he was well the cobra company commander he invited us over so we went over there our company commander wouldn't go he made sure we didn't fly the next day but uh but yeah it's just the way that man was okay well i'm glad that you had a horrible leader but damn going into that lz landing on top of an nva bunker complex grabbing those guys it must have been mayhem well it's you had no choice i mean you don't leave somebody behind and that's kind of one of our mottos was you don't leave people behind you saw the cobra go down we didn't know it was a bunker complex until we got on the ground there with them and i look over and i see this opening there and i've got this worthless pistol that you couldn't hit a thing with and but that's what you do and we did that many times over is that you go into some place that because you had a crew down you go and you get the crew out did your aircraft take any hits on that one no we didn't take any hits on that one no uh that's just what you're doing no time to think about it no no time to think about it if you thought about it you would have never become a helicopter pilot to start with you know i had a i had a guy by the name of dean ladd who was a marine corps officer in world war ii and he was going into tarawa ooh and he'd already been into a couple other islands i mean he was a he just combat combat combat now he's going into tarawa and you know there's shelling and there's machine gun fire and i asked him i said so when you are getting out this is as they realize at tarawa you know they hit the coral reefs now they got to walk 800 yards and there's freaking japanese machine gun fire coming i said when you know when you when you realize you're gonna have to walk were you thinking uh i might get shot or whatever he's like nah that wouldn't happen to me no it'll happen to somebody else and that's pretty much what everybody everybody says like it might happen and he ended up getting shot he ended up getting gunshot and somehow survived but the attitude of like well look it's going to be dangerous for other people but not for me i think i think the helicopter parts for a large extent had that same attitude you know hey we hate to see an aircraft go down it's going to be somebody go down but it's not going to be me and you just you just didn't think about that happening to you if you did you probably wouldn't have finished the mission yeah i was going to say maybe you get a guy like your earlier company commander who had deployed already who had done a tour over there and he had seen combat take taking hits to his body and to his aircraft and eventually he realizes oh this i'm not quite as good as maybe you're not as lucky as i think i am and i'm going to sit back here yeah and i'm i'm not invincible so and i can see that would happen with an older guy like that but uh young guys and that's the reason they have young guys as helicopter pilots and crew chiefs is that young guys just don't have any fear maybe we're not smart enough to have fear uh oh yeah absolutely absolutely uh fast forward a little bit throughout the spring and summer of 1969 enemy forces attacked firebases along the border their tactics were always the same waiting until after midnight the enemy would commence their attack with a mortar and rocket barrage in concert with sappers attempting to penetrate the wire followed by infantry waves attempting to penetrate the perimeter lz grant was a favorite target of these attacks several times between february and may lz grant experienced major attacks the first in february saw the battalion commander lieutenant colonel gorvad killed when a round hit the talk he was seriously wounded but refused to leave the battle the enemy managed to penetrate the perimeter wire and fighting was fierce to include artillery lowering the tubes and firing point blank into the charging enemy with anti-personnel shot bluemax gunships were called in and engaged the follow-on enemy as well as pursuing those attempting to retreat in may lz grant was under attack again simultaneously quan loy lz jaime and lz phyllis also came underground assaults that night the enemy wanted the first cavalry division out of three core region which was not going to happen yeah they they started stepping up the fight back then and uh hitting those three lz's at the same time that that had everybody up and scrambling we got pulled out in the middle of the night to start flying resupply in there and you had to be careful when you took the resupply in because you had you're trying to go in there but where the nva at around that wire so you're looking to see where most of the shooting is at and you come in most of the time you come in fast and low and kick out and just that's the way the grunts want it they didn't want to have to run out there to grab ammo or grab your aircraft but then as daylight came out then you'd start going in there and start getting more of the resupply in bringing reinforcements in i talked about we did one night combat assault that we brought reinforcements in and we put them about two clicks out and they were catching the nva as the nba were trying to get back to cambodia but yeah that they started picking up hitting those firebases pretty hard fast forward a little bit we had a new commander arrive in august who was a major improvement major robert saunders am i saying that right saunders he was a leader and we recognized it almost immediately one of his first actions was to allow us to hire hooch maids previous commanders wouldn't hear of it so we cleaned our own tents now we had hooch maids that would come over from the village and clean out our rooms do our laundry and shine our boots in an effort to raise morale major saunders director that one hooch would be turned into an officer into a club for the enlisted members of the unit there wasn't another there wasn't another empty hooch available so he directed that the officers should build our own club we had an engineer rl rlo pilot and he drew up a design for the commander's approval with a design we then began a scavenger hunt for building material and before long we had an officers club the brigade the engineer brigade headquarters poured a concrete floor for us in return for some flight time for their projects yeah yeah the about time sanders got there we moved out of the gp medium tents and moved to the other side of the chicken coop uh or the other side the chicken pen and took over some wood buildings that were hooches and that's when saunders said okay you can have hooch maids now but he said i'll tell you right now better not be any sex going on with the hooch mates and so the guys were they were pretty adamant about watching that that there would be no boom boom girls and uh that that increased morale significantly right there but then he said okay uh there's an empty hooch that's your em club officers if you want one you build it yourself and we did the engineer officer he drew up the plans for we started scavenging and scavenging stuff up i seem to remember a pallet of uh of tin coming flying in one day on the bottom of a helicopter being delivered but it was a great little club they had a we had a stone bar that in we were located in a rubber tree plantation taboo cutting down a rubber tree you didn't dare cut down a rubber tree in fact you couldn't even run military operations in the in the uh plantations rubber tree plantations so we built the bar out of stone and it went from the wall to a tree in the middle of the club i mean it was a nice looking bar we got done with that you got any pictures of it oh i wish i did i don't but we had this big tree growing up through the middle of the roof and so we we built our club and it was sheet metal on the outside tin roof we had a big cargo parachute that we requisitioned one day uh spread out over the top of it for extra shave we put we got two of those parachutes we put one over the enlisted club as well so the guys could sit outside and enjoy themselves outside it was a nice club and we used to have the pilots would be over there and then a lot of the other pilots from other units or the engineer battalion brigade their headquarters guys would come over the medevac nurses would come over so it was a pretty nice little place so this is what called what do we call the club just the club the chicken coop what do we call it just call it the chicken house the chicken house we had a chicken uh you know our mascot was a rooster for a dollar you could buy the rooster a shot of scotch brewster would not drink beer he dropped but it would drink scotch he'd drink scotch and that was it you'd buy a shot of scotch for a dollar from uh sam our bar made and she'd set it down for him and the rooster would walk over and he'd sit there and drink that scotch now about two of those that rooster couldn't walk anymore but it was funny as hell watching that rooster what was the rooster's name rooster the the seals that seal team two during vietnam had a had a um monkey that they brought home from vietnam oh my god and they had it on the quarter deck and it was like the most ornery evil monkey the monkey's name was jocko you read the partner in our book about the monkey didn't you what about it oh one of our pilots peter oh yeah yeah yeah when he took it in the aircraft yeah he took him here go ahead yeah the guy is a he's a right seat pilot and they had in vietnam they had these monkeys they were gibbon monkeys they're they get pretty damn big well he bought one of them and it was kind of small and he brought it out to the aircraft thank god i was not the aircraft commander that day so the monkey's sitting there and the monkey's jumping on his seat and he'd jump over to the aircraft commander's seat and then he climb up on the first aid kit behind the aircraft commander and scurvy on over first aid kit troops jump on board going for a combat assault and they think this is funny watching the monkey run back and forth two minutes out cobras roll hot one minute out the door gunners open up and when they opened up that monkey opened up with his bowels and his fists all over the pilot all over the aircraft commander screaming his head find the aircraft man who reached up and grabbed him grabbed him by the neck and about 200 feet up tossed that monkey out the window i don't know if he learned how to skydive but that monkey was gone but nobody would go near that crew that day they stunk so bad yeah like i said i'm fast forwarded through a bunch of stuff there's some stories in here you gotta read for sure that's one of them the other one i was thinking that the monkeys and i'm not gonna cover it today but the the guys are calling in that they're being attacked they're surrounded and all this stuff and you guys got over top and said uh you're surrounded by monkeys we didn't tell them those monkeys we didn't we didn't want to we didn't want to bust the chops it was a brand new patrol leader it was a alers team out there so we just went ahead and okay yeah we engaged the monkeys and yeah and they were able to e and e out of the area so when we got back into the brigade talk i said hey what what the report you get on the enemy situation out there might not quite be true jack um next up ralph was a good aircraft commander a quiet man he was the youngest pilot in the outfit as he joined the army right out of high school he was not a drinker and spent his evenings working on college correspondence courses his mission for that day was flying cnc for the division's engineer battalion commander the engineer battalion commander wanted to fly out to where his engineers were working on various projects in the ao to see their progress not unreasonable as they were scattered all over the ao improving roads building a school and supporting projects on the various firebases the day started off normal and they were visiting the various locations however just after lunch things changed the colonel wanted to go on a recon of some areas ralph agreed to fly those areas and be and proceeded to fly between kwon loy and song bay the colonel was focused on looking for clearings finally he asked ralph to take them down and land in one ralph asked for the frequency and call sign of the unit in the clearing so he could contact them prior to landing especially as he didn't see anyone in the clearing the colonel came up with an excuse for why he couldn't provide the information and told ralph just to land ralph insisted on a call signing frequency before he'd take the aircraft down the colonel became irate but when he accused ralph of being a coward that was when things exploded ralph reached up and disconnected his helmet from the intercom system took the controls from the co-pilot and headed back to camp goat uh gorvad the colonel was livid ralph didn't care didn't care reaching camp corvad am i saying his name was that's named after the command commander that was killed during that assault ralph landed at the engineering pad and told the colonel politely but firmly to get out of his aircraft he then called our battalion headquarters on the radio which was being monitored by almost every pilot from the battalion and told them that he had just tossed the tossed engineer 6 out of his aircraft and was returning to base to say the least [ __ ] was about to hit the fan making that call on the radio alerted every aircraft on the frequency as to what had happened however someone saw ralph's position in this and nothing came of it at least on for ralph yeah you talk about egos and the engineer had an ego and he was out to make himself a name for himself in the division he was a fairly new guy and he would do that he tried to get an aircraft to go down at a clearing without anybody being in the clearing to protect them uh ralph's was smart enough to to say no calling ralph a coward bad mistake ralph had already had a silver star at this point and a distinguished flying cross this engineer battalion commander did that to my roommate and my roommate flew into the clearing they never came out the nva were waiting for him and everybody was killed so ralph did absolutely the right thing with this guy because of his ego wanting to impress everybody that you talk about that here exactly what happened when i this is fast forward a little bit when i returned from my mission that evening major saunders approached my aircraft as i was shutting down mr corey a word please he said as posey opened my door the major was standing in front of my aircraft and hadn't approached me yes sir i unstrapped climbed out and came over to him it's mr corey now and said to dan what did i do wrong let's walk mr cooper he called over his shoulder addressing my co-pilot sir would you grab dan's gear and put it put in his room please yes sir he called back with a question to look on his face we walked halfway back to the chicken coop with nothing said between us but were angling towards his hooch finally he said dan i have some bad news dave and y.a were shot down today i'm afraid the entire crew was killed y.a was dave's co-pilot for the day and fairly new to the unit i felt like i had just been gut punched what happened sir as best as anyone could tell while supposedly flying from quan lloyd to boo dopp the engineer colonel had again gone on a recon and convinced dave to land in a clearing a scout team happened to find the aircraft sitting there it was obvious that someone had landed the aircraft before the enemy opened fire with some heavy weapons as the only damage to the aircraft was in the cockpit and transmission and none in the engine or belly the skids indicated a normal landing dave and y.a were still strapped in their seats and sergeant alfred the door gunner was in his as well the crew chief however was found about a hundred yards from the downed aircraft it appeared that specialist collins fought as emptied as empty 556 shell casings were around him but not a weapon the aircraft was booby-trapped the colonel and his staff were dead in the back of it there had been no friendly soldiers at the location damn that son of a [ __ ] has gotten more aircraft shot up than anyone damn his sorry ass and now he's gotten people killed at least as sorry ass was one of them bastard major sanders just let me rant while he opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of johnny walker scotch filling two class glasses he handed one to me and raised his own to absent comrades to dave y.a alfred and collins a few days later i was sitting in my room writing a letter when my new roommate owie richie came in from flying he looked troubled as he grabbed a beer and tossed his flight gear on the bed what's up richie i asked just a bad day saw my first crash and it was not pretty he said finishing off the first beer and opening the second what happened was it one of ours i asked no it was a charlie company bird and one of the pilots was in my fight class i just been talking to him before we launched and now him and his crew are dead hid a tree damn were you under fire no we were coming out of an lz which we had been in four times already and the blade on the right side hit a tree at about 75 feet rotor blade just came apart and they crashed and burned no one got out damn sorry owen who are the pilots let's see warren officer thomas brown was in flight school with me warrant officer dennis varney was the ac specialist marcin shelby was the door gunner and the crew chief was specialist robert lazarus i just met them not an hour before when i went over to talk to tom opening another beer for myself i raised it and tapped richie's beer in a toast to absent comrades a few nights later our platoon leader came walking down the hall the ceo wants to see everyone in the club he said we all started heading that way the co did not look happy gentlemen take a seat after you get a beer he didn't have to say that twice after everyone was seated and holding a cold one the major raised his beer to absent comrades the look of shock and dread was on everyone's face we all stood and raised our drinks to absent comrades we all repeated and chugged our beers still wondering who'd we lost motioning us to sit down the major looked over everyone before he started to speak charlie company lost a crew last night they were on a night mission out of lz buttons and ran into bad weather at about zero 200 hours they attempted to take off in the fog the grunts on the perimeter said they had all their lights on so they could see them in the soup the aircraft got to about 200 feet and then it crossed the perimeter wire it as it crossed the perimeter riot wire it appeared to roll 90 degrees and crashed into the trees on the perimeter the whole crew was lost yeah that that period of time we started losing crews and we knew a lot of the crews in the other units because we flew a lot together a lot of times they'd have maybe a unit could put four birds up for a lift and you'd get tagged to put two of your birds with them so you got to know the other crews and the other pilots as well but this period of time when saunders got there that's when we started losing a lot of birds and it kept right on up for the rest of the time i was there the night birds the huey had minimum minimum instruments for weather flying and if the guys didn't practice their weather flying they were rusty at it and tried to pull off in the fog that sounds like what happened there he just wasn't on his instruments that tight and he lost control of the aircraft hitting a tree that happened frequently in fact my last mission one of my last missions one of our birds hit a tree at about 75 feet up and and we got one guy out we didn't think he would make it but uh last summer i had lunch with him at the congressional golf club in washington dc and he pulled through he's in a coma for six weeks but uh he looks good he he said from the from nick down he said i'm one big scar but from the face up he looked john looked pretty good so and the the thing is and i think a lot of times people don't understand i mean when this stuff is happening the war goes on oh yeah it's like okay we still have a mission to do we're still going to get the birds spun up we're still going to go out and do our job yeah yeah you still you got to put it behind you at that time i don't know how it was in other units but at that time in our unit we never did have a memorial service when somebody was lost the just before i left we had a guy that we all loved dearly a crew chief and we were on a combat assault and he got shot in the armpit well the chicken plate didn't cover the armpit and he died we had a memorial service for him but anybody else we lost the memorial service was get drunk in the club that night so a lot of us just didn't have any any good thoughts about when we left there so it was it was good to see good good to have a a drunk fest anyway with the guys fast forward a little bit my crew and i arrived at the aircraft and conducted our pre-flight good morning posey how's she look i asked my crew chief all goods missed all good mr c he answered as he closed the engine cowling quilling how's the guns in ammo i asked my gunner fresh cans ammo this morning mr curry we're good mr corey we're good he responded i climbed up and looked over the rotor head while my co-pilot for the day warrant officer ron fender did the walk around inspection and tail rotor all appeared to be good we strapped in started the engine and waited ready ready to assume the mission if called upon hey one niner two seven is down assume his mission and contact badger six when you reach quan loy for further instructions flight operator instructed roger three india one niner has it i started pulling power oh god okay guys coming out about this time i saw chip rumble chicken man two seven along with his co-pilot warren officer mccartney waving to me and running over i set the aircraft back down jumping on the skid next to my door chip asked hey dan i'm i'm low time pilot for the month let me take the mission he had just returned from a seven-day r r trip to hawaii and hadn't flown much for the past month you got it i said as ron and i unstrapped and and climbed out turning over the aircraft aircraft to chip and mccartney we watched as they hovered out of the chicken pen and onto the runway we were walking back to flight operations when they started down the runway and disappeared behind the trees reaching flight operations we went in first class sergeant first class robinson was crying he saw us and immediately got a shocked look on his face oh my god who's flying your aircraft he asked i told him why what's the problem they got off the runway and were climbing out when the rotor head came off they're all dead yeah i was stunned and suddenly sick to my stomach outside i threw up ron dropped through his knees and start and stared at the ground i went back to my room and just sat on my bed 30 minutes later major saunders stock stopped by you okay danny asked i don't know sir i checked that head and it all looked good what happened i don't know but the accident investigation board will figure it out you just take it easy he left but about an hour later he was back dan i hate to ask you but can you take a mission it seems lieutenant weed is too upset to fly his mission and has brought back his aircraft lieutenant weed was close to chip the aircraft commander yes sir i got it i picked up my gear i'll walk out with you i want you to see i want to see just how upset he is the major and i walked together to the flight line we didn't say much as there wasn't a lot to say i didn't expect what came at me as soon as lieutenant weed saw me he threw his helmet on the ground and came at me you son of a [ __ ] corey this is your damn fault major saunders step between us lieutenant stop right there get your [ __ ] and go to your room not another word do you hear me now go turning to me the ceo said dan forget this and get on with the mission this wasn't over however that night at the club lieutenant weed proceeded to loudly bow mouth me i let it go as he was a lieutenant and i was just a warrant but i finally had enough hey lieutenant dickweed with all due respect for your rank go to hell i knew using his full name as modified by the warren officers would piss him off and it did with that he was up and headed straight for me i was off my bar stool and eager to get it on with him looking forward to hurting him i was not a brawler but could hold my own in a fight just before he got to me captain armstrong a platoon leader stepped behind him and jerked him off his feet don't you dare move lieutenant captain armstrong was an infantry officer of considerable size very tall and very muscular he was a no-nonsense man mr corey i think you should retire for the night now he told me yes sir and i departed back to my room in the warren officer's hooch after any aircraft accident an accident investigation is held my co-pilot was interviewed as were the assistant maintenance officer and myself the crash site was well was examined as well the rotor head was flown to a general aviation support facility at vung ii and examined the results were posted and indicated that the rotor head had not come off but it failed the rotor head that had been put on the aircraft the night before was a rebuilt one during the rebuilding the bolt holes for the bolts that held the pitch change horn had been cleaned and resized one millimeter however the same original bolt sizes were installed upon the usns corpus christi a floating aircraft overhaul facility those original bolts were one millimeter too small between the test flight and the takeoff the bolts holding pitch change horn had failed due to the stress and the result was a loss of control over the blades making the aircraft unstable in flight the investigation board found that there was no way to the assistant maintenance officer or i could have found the problem as the bolts hadn't twisted out but it's simply and instantly torn out the bolts were never found but the condition of the bolt holes told the story easy for them to say but this would haunt me every day i couldn't help but think that it was something i should have caught on the pre-flight it could have been me and my co-co-pilot we had come that close yeah that haunt that that incident has haunted me for a long time uh i lost posey i lost quinn and it was that close that uh that we almost bought the farm the maintenance officer had flown the bird the night before after they put the rotor head on it and all seemed well and then we got out there in the morning and looked at it and i did the rotor head the safety wires were all in place the slippage marks were all lined up and everything looked good and but when chip went out he pulled full power when he came off the end of the runway and those four bolts that hold that pitch change horn on uh they just blew out and they said when they maintenance officer told me he said when we took it down the wrong town they looked in there they could see where the threads had just been ripped apart they hadn't they hadn't been screwed out they just where the bolts exploded out of there so we lost the crew lost the aircraft talk about some other missions that you did you talk about doing some psyops missions which yeah they didn't like me to do psyops missions why why is that well i did that one sciops mission and you know it was just after david died it was just after uh chip mccartney was killed and they say okay you're gonna go out there and fly this slash mission okay so they put these big loud speakers in the side of the aircraft and this vietnamese captain jumps in and they say okay we want you to go out this crossroads so we fly to this crossroads we're at 2 500 feet and we're flying around this guy's in the back of the aircraft you know sing-song vietnamese language for true hoys right yeah for two hoys keep trying to get the the north vietnamese to surrender so my crew chief love lace at that time he looks down he says hey mr corey there's a bunch of guys down here in the in the bamboo they're digging trenches right alongside the intersection i said yeah so i look over there i thought well [ __ ] there they are nva down there and i turned to the american the sergeant and i said hey yeah you think those guys can hear from us being up here 2500 feet wouldn't you like us to go down a little lower he goes mr corey nobody will fly 1500 1500 is ideal i said yeah i'll take you to 1500. so as i'm lowering the aircraft down to 1500 flying this orbit around these north vietnamese guys now i turn to my copies and get songbay artillery on the line he calls up song bay ardy and says fire mission standby gives them the coordinates everything we get down there sure enough nva starts shooting up at us so i said we're taking fire and he says he said yeah we are mr bridges you need to go back up i said no we need to get a little further out so i've just moved out a little bit further at least kept shooting well that's what i call the artillery in on them and the vietnamese captain in the back he just went ballistic i mean you know they're supposed to surrender and i said well if he talks adam now they're going to be more willing to surrender after we hit him with some artillery we did we put about 12 rounds in there on top of these guys and after that the vietnamese guy didn't want to argue with anymore but he took us back in the american captain in charge of the sobs program he came up he says we're going to have to crash scratch this mission off as a failure and i said well yeah i said hey you know they started shooting first and i was protecting my crew and your crew as well so he's he just kind of laughed at me and he tapped me on the shoulder he says yeah i got it i understand i hated saps missions uh this was crazy your dad was still in the navy at this time yeah and he's now an officer and he's in freaking saigon yeah yeah he was living well he was one of the reps he was one of the ramps in saigon well deserved i mean after he fought world war ii and was on submarines i got no real problem with him enjoying some time in saigon so i went and asked the company commander i said hey sir this is sanders still i said uh and he was sanders getting cords at the end of his tour so i said hey my dad's in saigon uh can could he come up and fly three days with me or something like that and i thought sanders would say you know hell no but he said sure bring him up okay we'll bring him up so dad came up and i i picked him up in saigon he jumped in the front seat before you get there when you're in saigon i know you went to uh officers club with him oh yeah and they they come to kick you out well as you're going into the officers club you see like a bunch of nice pistols hanging up on the wall and you're thinking yeah unscared no one's watching them and you're thinking well that doesn't seem very smart so then you sit down having some lunch with your dad they kicked us out they kick you out because you're not a field grade officer which is a a major lieutenant commander above so they kick you out on your way out some of those weapons went with you [Laughter] so you end up with a nice instead of that 38 caliber pistol that wasn't very effective you end up with a 45 a nice 1911 i'm sure no not that's not quite this the right way let's just say that when i got back to light k i had a brand new 45 okay so so your dad ends up freaking coming up how old your dad at this point uh dad's probably in about 43 44. he's in the game oh yeah he's in the game i think he was he was about 50 when he retired from the navy and this was three years before he retired from the navy so he's in his late 40s okay uh so he came up and uh what was he doing what was he some kind of a liaison or something no no he was uh in j6 at mcv headquarters communications and uh i guess i can say it now it's not classified anymore but he was working on the communications plan for the repatriation of pows got it is is what he was doing at the time so uh so he came up to like a and uh spent about three days with it flew as my crew chief or no he's my door gunner gave my my crew chief some time off but he did good he he had have his ass chewed a little bit yeah so so tell us about the first gunfight again that's a good one yeah we're flying along there and uh he's we're working the lz's and and he's doing good clearing this in clearing us out stuff like that so we got the troops on board troops all get on the aircraft and dad's uniform is the same as ours fatigues and he had his major his lieutenant commander's leaf on you which is just a little smaller than the the army major leaf the grunts are back there in the back and all of a sudden somebody starts pulling on my collar i looked over this this grunt's pulling he goes hey sir what's your rank i said i'm at w-2 why and he goes damn did that major back there screw up since he's your door gunner so i told him no it's my dad he's flying with us so they thought that was pretty cool so we go in on this combat assault we were in chalk five or six position and uh we're going in in a staggered right formation so you got one aircraft in front of you and you got one off to the side six minutes out the artillery goes in the artillery cuts off at two minutes out the cobras roll hot one minute out door gunners open fire and right away we start seeing green tracers and i hear my crew chief's gun firing but i don't hear my dads and i said dad open fire nothing and i'm thinking oh [ __ ] he's been hit and i turn over my shoulder and look he's standing on the skids he's got his monkey harness on and he's taking pictures out in front i got on that ra i got on the intercom i said dad get your ass in here and get on a goddamn gun so he gets on the gun when we got back uh we had a discussion about crew chief dude he's a door gunner on the aircraft and he wrote my mother and he said you know i've had a lot of ass tunes in my navy career but that's the worst one i've ever had and he took it i would give him credit he took it uh quite well and uh he came back and flew us about three or four times that's crazy uh i i like this this conversation you had with your dad it says uh he says i noticed one thing different about those air force pilots from you guys air force pilots seem to be outgoing and always in a positive mood versus you guys who always seem withdrawn and pensive he explained and then you replied dad an air force pilot is that way because he's flying a machine that wants to fly and if left alone will generally fly quite well on its own in addition compared to a helicopter an airplane has very few moving parts that can cause a serious malfunction on the other hand helicopter pilots fly a machine that does not want to fly and only does and only does so by the interactions of the pilot to balance four forces all opposed to each other plus a helicopter has a lot of moving parts any of which breaking can and does cause a major disaster helicopter pilots are moody because we know something is going to break if it hasn't done so already that's right that gave the old man something to think about yeah dad had flown with uh one of the things he did when he came up there to like hey we had a uh ov10 squadron that flew out of there the broncos and we got him a ride in one and he went out and flew at them he flew with a captain rider an australian captain it was an exchange officer and he thought that was pretty cool out there flying with those guys and so when he came back in that night that's when this this conversation came up about you know the the fighter pilots they're just jovial and happy and cetera and you guys you're all kind of moody and down in the dumps and they said yeah and that's why you know we fly something that doesn't want to fly harry reisner about 1973 wrote a great article about uh helicopter pilots and helicopters and it's it's kind along that same line is what uh what dad night's conversation was yeah well it's like you said a a a plane you can you can let go of the stick and it'll kind of just cruise for a while yeah it'll fly itself but a helicopter is not that's not happening no that's not happening that's not happening uh they have now uh helicopters that do have an autopilot on them but in those days you let go of those controls in the huey yeah no telling where she's going to go uh fast forward a little bit you get you eventually get orders and you're going to go to fort ord which to you sounds great because it's up by monterey and you start like thinking oh i'm going to california i'm going to be yeah but it's going to be awesome and then you start asking people about what the deal is and you start hearing that it's actually horrible to be there it's expensive as hell and the high school kids are driving around in jags and mercedes and and you're gonna barely scrape by won't be able to afford anything as a warrant officer and so you figure out okay i'm gonna try and get my orders changed and you go talk to your ceo and and you say hey can i get my my order's changed he's like no i can't do you think you think i'm magic and then he says now wait one there is a way you can change your orders now i was excited there is how you can extend for six months and stay in nam he was grinning did he have something to do with my rfo i wondered sir you're kidding hell i've already had my cherry busted had a door gunner wounded had hydraulic failure and a compressor stall add to that um over 1300 hours of flying here i didn't mention the aircraft had gone down with the pitch change horn failure the one i'd almost ridden in he knew that was on the scorecard without me mentioning it yeah you've racked up some time but that's only but that's the only choice you have think about it and he headed to the bar yes yeah and i really thought at the time i thought well hey he can just change my order it's not a problem but no it wasn't but him and the and the platoon leader lieutenant beauchamp or captain beauchamp they had probably already worked this out ahead of time i'm thinking they didn't have anything to do with me getting orders to ord but putting the idea in my head to extend and up to this time we had not had guys extending at least for our unit and so when i said okay yeah i'll extend i'm thinking i'll go to a medevac unit which is what you kind of wanted to do yeah because you don't have to fly in formation yeah so because i didn't have to find formation but uh then boat champion so so they so they get you to extend yeah they get you they say listen yeah you don't go to medevac unit it'll be in the rear with the gear you know and you'll just have to fly and you'll be nurses there and the whole nine yards so you agree it seems like a good idea you're not going to get it or you can go back to some place once you get orders you'll go back to some place better than ored and so you get that extension yep and then and then then you guys go out you do some drinking and and now you guys are drinking hard i'm gonna go to the book after about an hour of this the company about an hour about people feeding you drinks the company clerk came up to me in the office club and asked me to sign some papers what's this for i asked with a slight slur and blurry eyes i was becoming as drunk as our rooster who frequented the club each night was fed scots a damn rooster would not drink beer expensive taste oh it's just some paperwork i need your signature for on the extension he said and i signed it without another thought i thought i had submitted everything as he left the rlo's excuse themselves slapping each other on the back and laughing their asses off two nights later i found out what was so funny the major wanted all the pilots in the club for a meeting and then he goes in there and he announces that uh i'm happy to announce one of our chickens has decided to stay in the coop mr corey has graciously modified his extension to remain with us instead of going to a medevac unit thank you dan that's what happened oh yeah they got you drunk and you signed papers to stay on i did and then uh right after that he announced well who's the new instructor pilot and one of the pilots asked him that and he just kind of grinned and he looked around he goes mr corey's the new instructor pilot so tell us about the instructor duties yeah the instructor duties yuri the unit instructor pilot and your job was to when a new pilot showed up in the unit they flew with you their first orientation flight would be with you and then frequently they would fly with you then well major decided that since i was going to take my extension leave in about a month and a half he wanted me to fly with new pilots only so a pilot new pilot would come in and we had two come in right away almost mr i forget the one gentleman's name the other one was dumas but i would fly with one on one day and fly with the other one the other day and vice versa the days they weren't flying with me they'd be flying with another ac but it was my job to teach them combat flying combat auto rotations combat takeoffs how to get in a hover hole uh those sorts of things and you're still doing your normal missions oh yeah we're still having to fly with the new guys yeah yeah you just you fly the normal missions just now you got really new guys flying with your right seat on may 4th 1969 two aircraft from our sister company company b joined a formation with a second aircraft in a right echelon to the first the second aircraft attempted to pass the first aircraft on his right side there was a miscommunication between the two aircraft resulting in a mid-air collision all crew members on both aircraft were killed yeah yeah when you flew formation you flew it by sop but if but if you were going to do something outside of the the normal formation flying like trying to pass somebody on the opposite side you had to be sure and communicate with them so that everybody understand what you're going to do and evidently there was a lack of communications with these two guys and one flew right into the other you know you had to worry about getting shot at you had to worry about the aircraft maintenance failure and you had to worry about somebody flying into you yeah i was telling you earlier that pilot was never really my kind of thing like i have no desire to be a pilot that's one that's like couple the reasons right there i don't like relying on some big big machine with a bunch of parts that i don't understand that's gonna keep me alive and keep my friends alive i don't like that it was just a matter of trusting each other you know i trusted 100 percent the guys in our unit that i flew with 90 the guys in other units i didn't fly with so but you had that trust and bond built up amongst you you know you all went to the same flight school you all understood about what what the different formations were and so you didn't do anything radical and even when we would fly you know our company would fly out their company because we all flew by an sop we had a system we understood the system and so things were relatively safe it's when somebody would go do something like this that's out of the ordinary that that people got killed yeah and this is because everyone's relying on each other so much i mean it's similar in the seal teams if somebody if somebody's outside it's if if the job is outside their capability like it's a non-starter that's why i like what i like what you guys had with the with the ac in order to be an aircraft commander you had to get the thumbs up from the other acs there's a standard there that you can't compromise because it's truly putting everyone else at risk that's right everybody fast forward a little bit coming around the end of the valley i climbed up the ridge and popped up looking south right down the runway this is just out on another freaking mission which you're doing all the time there's a sniffer mission on the on the left specialist linman started shooting the sniffer team let loose with a 40 millimeter round un under the bamboo canopy on the edge of the runway was a regular village of nva soldiers lying around some were in uniform some lying in hammocks some cooking chao tables were made out of bamboo as were chairs they were totally surprised as were we and this is they're they're occupying an abandoned air fuel yeah so that's why you see an airfield and there's the nva right there lobo on my left in the bamboo fire i screamed as i increased power and air speed rapidly staying low to the ground i had never seen so many enemy soldiers before as soon as i spoke 2.75 inch rockets were slamming into the bamboo and as nva troops ran and dove for cover lobo was firing ripple effect automatically launching 28 rockets with just one pull the trigger and punching the target then his minigun opened on the tree line on my left as we were hauling ass down the runway as we cleared the abandoned sf camp and runway we stayed low level until we were confident we could climb to altitude and not get hit by a 51 cal machine gun but something wasn't right and in the feel of the aircraft the cyclic felt stiff and was getting stiffer mr corey we have a problem the housing for the push-pull tube is shot away and each time you move the cyclic control it's binding the rods can you fix it i was surprised at how calm i sounded when i was [ __ ] bricks here no sir i could hold up the tubes but then i would be flying the aircraft from here he said well what do you suggest slowly descend and find a clear area that we can do a running landing into you might be able to raise the nose but it'll be a one-time move not to be countered by attempting to lower the nose okay i can do this running landings were practiced and the further south i flew the better terrain for this a runway would be nice but the closest was song bay and it was laid out east to west where as i was flying north to south that ain't going to work guys start looking for an open area what about the road bruce said he was now on his third cigarette since i had taken the controls damn he better save a couple for me i thought in the distance we could see a straight stretch but the trees were close and the sides were lined with bamboo it's gonna have to do i want everyone up forward and seat belts on linman make sure everyone is strapped in tight as i got to treetop level with the road under the chin bubble i started easing up on the i started easing the nose up slowly the air speed began to bleed off 80 knots 70 knots 60 knots and our speed continued to drop we were slapping the tops of bamboo stocks now 20 knots bamboo stocks were breaking off and i could feel the main rotor buffeting as we hit thicker vegetation i just didn't want to know what kind of vegetation at this point just don't let us hit a hardwood tree trunk and rip the rotor head off at 20 knots the skids touch the ground and we're sliding along steering with the pedals to maintain a straight line broken bamboo was whirling about as if it was in a tornado as the aircraft came to a stop i was shutting the engine down while linman and dietrich had the guns in hand with belts of ammo in their arms and and we were on asking the aircraft as mike landed right behind me he didn't worry about tree limbs one look at my rotor blades told him that i'd cleared out everything for him as if a giant lawnmower had passed over the bamboo field as mike flew us back to song bay dietrich had asked the question that i knew was coming hey mr sinky was that your first time shot down bruce walked into it yeah i've only been in country a couple months thank you sir you're buying the beer tonight i considered it i considered if i should speak up as well as it was my first then mike spoke up hey mr corey that's your first two isn't it there'll be lots of free beer tonight guys i started a protest but to no avail yep yep yep yep they took uh we took one round and it's all it hit us but it hit right on the housing for the the push pull tube for the for the cyclic so every time i move that psychic i can feel it starting to bind up i didn't dare try to move it left or right because i you know i did not want the aircraft in a turn and it just so i just kept moving it forward and back and finally we just found a straight stretch of road and said okay let's let's go down the road and we practice running landings all the time so that was no big deal i was just worried that i wasn't going to get that nose far enough back up to slow the aircraft down now last thing i wanted was be doing 60 knots sliding down that road on my skids so making sure we had enough room to ease that nose up and keep that aircraft from sliding too fast but yeah mike mike saw us go down he heard the mayday lobo put out a mayday for me as well and uh they got in four hours later schnook came in picked the aircraft up and flew it back to lykay and yeah that's what's crazy you these helicopters you get shot down and you just leave the bird and then a ch 40 47 would come in strap on to the thing and take it home well what would happen is that a bird would go down and first of the ninth calf they always had a rapid reaction force let's call their blues and they would fly in that rapid reaction force into where the aircraft was if it was salvageable set security yeah set security and then they'd hook the aircraft up to a ch-47 and 47 would pull the aircraft out and fly it back to its own base and that's all they did with this one they replaced the rotor blades they replaced the bell housing on the bottom and that was it two days later that bird was back up and flying again now when you did do you get that do you stay in your own bird like all the time are you always flying the same bird yes unless it's down for maintenance for some reason so did you get some other random bird are all the birds a little bit different now they're pretty much laid out the same i mean there were little corpse about them but nothing that you'd really notice we had we had uh outboard motors right for our zodiac boats yeah and they even though they're all from the same company they're all supposed to like we had names for them you know and they would all be just a little bit different temperamental temperamental like there's one i remember it's called frankenstein it was like the one that was it was all it looked like it would never run but it was the most reliable but you but it's but for you you didn't care if you got a different bird other than hard luck yeah yeah i didn't care we'd fly anything uh what you didn't like though is you got a different crew chief you always got a different crew chief and a different gunner because the crew chief and gunner always stayed with their aircraft if the aircraft was now for maintenance they were down for maintenance as well helping help get the aircraft ready so that's the only thing i didn't like about is i had to learn different crew chiefs and different gunners but uh otherwise yeah it's the aircraft were pretty much the same are you so you're flying this is analog flying right i mean this is you're moving the stick and it's moving a piece of uh whatever cable that's moving something it's moving a tube it's moving a tube but that's what it is so this are is a blackhawk the same thing is a hawk is it is it analog like that where you're actually moving a a gear somewhere or moving a cable or moving a tube i think so i'm not sure about the blackhawk uh but on the huey it was always tubes the only place you had cables was back in the back and the tail boom and that was a cable two cables two or four i can't remember i think it was two cables that ran down the tail boom back to the tail rotor but for the for the cyclic the collective uh and the pedals initially those were all push pull tubes they were called but it's all mechanical it's all mechanical it's all mechanical there's no there's is there anything like uh power steering uh the only thing that was at was the governor the fuel on the the huey that was controlled the throttle was controlled by a governor so once you started the aircraft up you brought the throttle up all the way and the governor would stop it at uh 6600 rpm on the engine and you had a governor control switch if that went out then you had to fly the aircraft manually and you learned how to fly it manually with the th55 in flight school but on the huey that was really sensitive with that trying to fly that thing with the the manual control on the throttle but that's the only thing that was automatic so to speak on the hue it was that throttle control man these are some like durable beasts oh they were the huey the cobra gun ship uh the old charlie model gunships they were just great i mean bell helicopter built a great aircraft force and it did well the uh hughes built the oh6 which you you see those with the mh6s now in in task force 160. the the oh-6 guys love to fly that thing because if it got shot down uh it would crash the rotor had come off the tailbone come off and it rolled like an egg and so guys really they they didn't mind well they didn't mind getting shot down and crashing but their survivability rate was really good in the oh six all right um going back to the book here you take some leave and and while you're on leave you know you go to where you go dc baltimore area dc yeah yeah mom was going to college at the university of maryland um and then you know you you spend some time with uh with mary is that right yeah spend some time with mary get to know her and then uh let me give you some background on mary let's hear about mary i met mary dad was stationed in morocco my dad and 67. yeah and i went back to morocco uh for christmas of 67. met mary one night in church in morocco in morocco there what was her parents doing uh they were stationed at the same navy basically it was a communications base so she's another navy brat navy brat and uh the base is no longer there it was at city air uh outside of uh konitra but uh i met her at church we went out for a ride my dad's mg the next day and that was it and then a year later just before i went to vietnam i came back and uh met her parents you know saw her parents and everything but she'd already gone back to the states and so when i came back from vietnam the first time damn you go all the way to morocco and marion there yeah mary ain't there and uh so so i i came back to the states and mom said hey why don't you go down and see uh the simmons and and i said yeah we used to live in virginia beach but that was stationed on the cobbler uh ss-344 so i thought yeah that'd be kind of cool i'd like to go back and see norfolk so i went down there and met her and we got kind of hooked up then and that was that was while you were on leave yeah that's why i was on my extension leaf got it so that's you know kind of a mission accomplished there yeah yeah stateside mission accomplished you you come back from leave and you you mentioned that you were ready to go back from leave you were ready to go back to nam yeah i was ready to get back i just i was climbing the walls a little bit um you get back there hey i read in the paper in dc that an aircraft went down wasn't one of ours no one said anything but everyone looked uncomfortable finally someone spoke up yeah it was one of us that was all he would say well who was it did the crew get out everyone okay it was your aircraft one nine no one got out what what the what happened i asked i was in total shock shock they were on a resupply over a hover hole the gooks opened fire on them on their third pass and they crashed into the trees grunt said that they made each of their three approaches over the same ground they had five new replacements on board their grunts got to the aircraft and were shooting gooks in the cabin and cockpit who was the crew it was ash as ac and newby taylor your crew chief linman linum is that how you say his name linum and dietrich were on board too sorry they told me i didn't know the co-pilot who had arrived the day after i'd left to go home the ac like all our guys was a good man good man he had just received a dear john letter from his wife telling him she was getting a divorce i guess she didn't need to know i guess she didn't need to now i raised my glass and they joined me to absent comrades so the guys lin linum and dietrich who you just went through that uh was that called a crash landing what you did yeah you went through that crash landing you go home and both those guys get killed yeah and the thing that's that struck me was that here i'm in washington dc i'm reading the paper in the morning and it's talking about this helicopter shot down 100 miles north of saigon i'm thinking what's so unusual about that i mean helicopters getting shot down all the time in vietnam and i just it just kind of struck me odd that that would be there and then i get there and i find out it was my own aircraft there's a chapter in here called stand down and it it really points out the the importance of um crew rest you guys were run ragged clear i mean you go through one point where you you you're in a helicopter flying you wake up yeah and you see that the the person well i guess it's the lead pilot my co-pilot is also asleep and the crew's asleep yeah that happened uh we had a policy it got to the point where you know earlier you said in the book you know if you had 140 hours you got a couple of days down i was pushing over 160 hours and it got to the point where most of the pilots were the same boat we were short of pilots uh we were training our crew chiefs uh to fly the aircraft because it was getting that desperate so what we did was if we were flying a long leg one pilot would sleep the other would stay awake and so that's what we were doing well he was flying we're coming back at night beautiful night to fly and i told her i said i'm gonna i'm gonna get some sleep he said okay so i closed my eyes and right away fell asleep well something's told me to wake up and i kind of woke up and looked around and it may have been a one of the first indications of a problem is a change in sound in the aircraft uh you know if suddenly the engine's quiet you know you got a problem but there was just you really listen to sound in the aircraft and that would that would tell you something's wrong a whistling sound you just got a bullet through the rotor blades so something just woke me up and i just sat there and just kind of looked around everything looked great and i looked over at him and i thought i wonder what he's looking at his head was down and then i realized he's asleep and we just sat there and the aircraft was flying along perfect and then she just and i suspect what happened is that he probably just left a little pressure off his hand and the cyclic just eased forward a bit because the nose started dropping we started picking up speed and pickup speed sounds going to change the aircraft started vibrating and then he woke up and looked over at me and i went you had a nice nap so yeah we got back in that night and the medical officer came out and they they stood the whole unit down because i was the third aircraft to come in that day and the other two aircraft came in and pilots both declared that's it we're done so the medical officer came out when the company commander came out and they grounded the whole unit you guys end up getting a a valorous unit award yes yes we got a valles uniform for the action on six march 69. um uh here's another thing that happens uh you're in for a briefing mr corey you and i will have three lifts tomorrow and that should about do it mr roberts you and i will fly together the day after tomorrow sir mr roberts responded looking at me and i at him you two are going to be the next flight leaders the policy about warrant officers not being flight leaders has changed you will be first if you guys want the assignment all the warrants in the room were smiling and talking softly my platoon leader was smiling and while captain weed wasn't he didn't protest nor did any of the commissioned officers i never knew if the major had spoken with them before the meeting or not yes sir i'll take it you you alluded to that earlier where the real the real life officers were the only ones that could be flight leads and now like you were saying you're so undermanned that they open it up and you and one other guy get to be the first warren officer flight leads yes they changed the policy because we're just we're so short of officers uh we didn't have any experienced officers uh that were ready to take over flight lead positions so the company commander he went to the brigade commander and said hey we got to start letting the experience warrant you know he said i got i got two warrants that are over uh over 12 months in the unit and these guys know what they're doing you gotta you gotta open the policy up and the brigade commander uh colonel suck really a good guy uh he said absolutely open it up so you said you were training some of the crew chiefs to become pilots did any of them ever make that transition while you were in vietnam oh yeah they could they could they could we would train them sufficiently to land the aircraft not hover or running landing but we always felt that you know if somebody got shot if both pilots got wounded somebody's gonna have to bring this bird back so we would train the crew chiefs to do running landings my crew chief was pretty darn good at it and uh one crew chief i think it was grossman uh he came back and went to flight school and graduated from flight school and came back to nam as a pilot here we go another mission and look i'm covering a tiny percentage of this book and just trying to figure out which one of these freaking crazy missions to to highlight i it just it's like throwing it's like a roll the dice pick one they're all they're all nuts here's one at h minus one the door gunners open fire concentrating on the tree line as we touch down the grunt started off the aircraft that was when a sledgehammer hit the side of the aircraft one two times and then i lost count the engine started winding down the rotor rpm started dropping as the engine rpm went to zero where taking fire screamed peters it was on his side of the aircraft and it was concentrated on our engine his gun was ripping through ammunition get out i yelled and we began unasking the aircraft chalk two was leading the rest of the flight out we were now on the ground with the grunts peters was on his m60 machine gun and i told him to get down no need for him to sit in the gunners position and be a target to his credit he did and took his gun with him dragging ammo as well specialist lovelace was doing the same the cobras were coming in around for a second pass and using the remaining rockets and 40 millimeter ammo that they had rattler 6 was on the ground next to me and began calling for artillery support as the second flight crew flight came into view the artillery silence and the anti-aircraft gun that it worked us over as well as a small arms fire that was coming from the trees we remained in the lz until the third lift and jumped on an aircraft to get out already the battalion commander had notified brigade that an aircraft was down in the lz a recovery team was getting ready to come and get the aircraft and fly it fly it back under a ch-47 a new engine would be installed that night and that aircraft will be flying in the morning hopefully flying back lovelace turned to me damn mr corey you're psychic with your feelings and that's something i kind of skipped over you have a whole a whole chapter that's called psychic so you had some kind of whatever sixth sense about i i don't think things are gonna go well i the first the first time i happened i went out to the aircraft one day and just didn't have a good feeling got got shot up bad that day and it happened just a second time third time i came out to the aircraft i asked lovelace i said hey how's the aircraft today he goes you got your feeling don't you and i kind of lied and i finally said yeah i just it's gonna be okay guys i just got a strange feeling that strange feeling hit me six times and it just i would go out to the aircraft and i would just have this feeling of dread for that day and lo and behold we'd get hit and i just think i'm a believer in the supernatural and my patron saint is saint uh padre pio and i just think padre pio was was watching over me he blessed me when i was a little kid and uh i think he was just watching over me saying hey be careful so okay well it's gonna ask you like what i i appreciate you saint pio but just letting me know that i'm gonna get shot up i need a little bit more than that just let me know it's not gonna hit me yeah uh that's so so six times you had that feeling yeah and each time you had that feeling we got we got them living daylight shot out of us didn't lose anybody did you ever have the feeling it didn't and it didn't happen yeah yeah i see i had a guy i had a guy named johnny and the great guy but man every time we rolled out he thought he was we were all going to die every time he'd go he'd he smoked chain smoked and he'd say niko tonight tonight sir i can feel it this one you ready you ready because it's coming every night it didn't matter what we were doing we do the logistics run he goes i got a bad feeling about this one boss this is coming you'll be like you like this jocko you like where this is going i'm like okay so i had to take that and destroy it i didn't have saint peel i had saint johnny we're all gonna die we had and you know what that guy went out on every single mission and as a matter of fact this is on my first deployment to iraq and our senior and my senior enlisted advisor said hey man you got to get you know get johnny out of here man get him on the first because you know it takes it takes a couple weeks to get everyone flown home and i said uh i said he said hey you gotta you know get talk to johnny get him on that first bird out of here man he's gonna you know he's he's he's losing it and he's not gonna want to leave and he goes he goes you need to you need to get him on a plane and i said i'm not going to put him on a plane he's not going to want to leave and he goes well just ask him and i go all right fine i'll ask him so i go up to johnny one day and i said uh i said hey johnny you know the first first planes are heading home uh you want to be you want me to get your seat on that plane he goes [ __ ] you i was like roger that just checking and sure enough he was all the last bird home you know like he was he was paranoid but he was doing his job didn't want to go home we had a we had a warrant officer that come into the unit and he flew made aircraft commander and never flew a combat mission after that as aircraft commander he would he would take the aircraft out and within 30 minutes you know he'd be coming back in complaining about something wrong with the aircraft and finally they made him an assistant ops officer and he served as assistant ops officer but he never flew a combat mission again he had a bad feeling yeah he just i i would say he had a yellow streak he didn't have a bad feeling he had a yellow streak but uh yeah well that was the difference johnny had that bad feeling all the time but no yellow streak there he was ready to rock and roll another one on april 30th arvind forces along with some u.s forces crossed parrot's beak into cambodia the arvind forces consisted of 12 infantry battalions and three ranger battalions the us elements consisted of a brigade from the 25th infantry division tropic lightning and two squadrons of armed cavalry operation rock crusher was on so here this is the first major operation going into cambodia because of course the sog guys were going in there oh they were in there all the time on may 1st 1970 at 0 7 10 hours company c 227 ahb inserted an arvin airborne rifle company to secure a landing zone just across the border inside cambodia once the landing zone was secured six hundred and fif hundred 105 millimeter howitzers and 355 millimeter howitzers which would support additional insertions throughout the area of operations were brought in by ch-47 helicopters later that day the second battalion seventh cavalry was inserted into landing zone x-ray marking the first american ground troops from the first cavalry division to enter cambodia throughout the day 1st battalion 9th cavalry flew reconnaissance missions while elements of the 227th and 229th helicopter assault helicopter of italians provided lift support to arvind grunts and the 228th assault support helicopter battalion provided ch-47 heavy lift capability for the movement of artillery and other heavy equipment the invasion of cambodia didn't didn't know what was coming the night before uh i got called into the company commander's office me and reynolds and uh a couple of platoon leaders and uh he said uh he poured eight drinks scotch we're all sitting there looking each other like what the hell is this hey wait how many of there was you there was about eight of us in the remainder one per guy yeah one guy got it maintenance officer platoon leader flight leaders and he said gentlemen i can't tell you where we're going but we got a big lift tomorrow and the maintenance officer had been real stingy about letting us take an aircraft and he turned to the maintenance of he says what's availability tomorrow i mean his office said sir we got 21 out of 21. he says good they turned to uh to me and he says uh you're chalk two tomorrow if i go down you take the flight in i'm thinking what the hell he turned to reynolds and he says if corey goes down you take the flight in okay sir he says now i want you to get every one of your pilots and your crew chiefs up and i want every aircraft pre-flighted tonight i want maintenance to know right away if an aircraft's got a problem but we're cranking 21 aircraft tomorrow morning so the next morning we got up all the birds cranked up colonel or the boss the ceo he led the assault we went up to a stage field and we're sitting there with our 21 aircraft and here came bravo company where they're 21 and charlie company with their 21 and then 10 ch-47s and we had all of the lobos that was that was 20 aircraft and we had uh 20 aircraft from blue max and we're sitting there going what and the hell we've never seen this many battalion commander shows up he takes map board he throws the canvas over the map board and says gentlemen we're invading cambodia the crew chiefs crew chiefs and organists all got up and left and went back and started cleaning guns and cleaning ammo right away and we did we picked up uh an arvind force and uh we flew tree top level uh the battalion commander was at 3 000 feet he was navigating uh telling chalk one uh what his heading was etc and directing the artillery and the cobras and we flew at about oh maybe 200 feet above the trees and punched across the border as we went across the border there was a road parallel at the border look down there's guy nva and their khaki uniforms as far as you can see down the road both sides of the roads sling arms and they're just standing there kind of shocked that all these aircraft are passing over them went in hit the landing zone uh picked up didn't take any fire going in we thought oh this is great took a lot of fire coming back out across that road but uh that was the first day of the cambodian invasion we did three assaults that day uh putting vietnamese soldiers in so it was a big day then things got hot the next day next day the nva waiting for the helicopters and we started taking a lot of hits the next days it's uh it's kind of crazy i always i always kind of joke about um hollywood and in hollywood you know they show like the platoon's about to go in and the commander shows up right as the birds are spinning says all right gents here's where you're going and here's the mission and i was talking about how unrealistic that is but that's what you guys did well yeah kinda in fact i'm glad you brought that up because uh i've got two screenwriters and a uh a producer right now and the screenwriters are taking the three they're taking two books the first two books and they're writing a screenplay and one of the things i've told them i said look guys i do not want this to be typical hollywood and they're they're good guys rich graff who starred in making the mob uh new york he played lucky luciano in that and a guy named rocky cartilage and rocky owns uh ghost walker productions and then my producer is amy soto and she's worked with john malkovich mel gibson several of these guys so there there's a good crew but i told them i said i do not want this to be a typical hollywood movie and i and i've given a list of of movies to watch this is good ones and this is this is terrible i don't want these terrible ones so we've had some some lively discussions about what will be in this movie and not in this movie so but yeah hollywood just makes it look kind of odd but when you have an sop you can say all right this is what we're going to do and here's how we're going to do it and you don't take a lot of discussion with it and and some of that works out pretty well it worked out well for me for one exercise where i found out my lz the op4 reserve was sitting on my lz and i grabbed the flight leaders grabbed the company commander sat down pulled the poncho over our heads turned the flashlight on said okay here's your new lz's any questions no let's go so you can do that stuff if you have a system and if you have a good working procedure but yeah some of the stuff that hollywood puts out is just um here's one mayday mayday dragon breath 2 3 is bailing out and going down vicinity and there's the grid coordinates you all are in the air watch the parachute go down so there's a guy bailing out of of one of these he's a four-door observer so what's he in an ob10 he was in yeah he no uh what was that twin tail cessna they had a push-pull yeah yeah i don't know i don't remember the nomenclature on it but it was it wasn't the ov-10 but he was in one of those when he went down so this guy punches out of his aircraft and you guys are on this operation looking watching this parachute go down watch you know track and as it goes into the jungle you're flying you're looking for it and here we go as captain beauchamp slid the aircraft over the pilot sergeant west informed him sir the pilot appears to be out cold he's just hanging there hanging in the tree there okay we have to get him quick quick captain beauchamp said surveying the ground for a place to land there wasn't one as the vegetation wasn't dense but the trees were 30 feet high and close enough together that it didn't offer a clearing big enough to land in west had already climbed into the cabin area and was preparing a 200-foot repel rope that was maintained in the aircraft sir i can get him and with that he dropped the rope and was prepared preparing to go down okay but and west was gone he'd forgotten to put gloves on and his hands were paying for that mistake how am i gonna get him out he said more to himself than anyone particular jameson you keep an eye on him and keep him covered captain beauchamp said to the door gunner dropping the 70 feet or so west sprinted to the pilot who is still unconscious and hanging in the tree only a few feet off the ground small tufts of graft grass and dirt were being kicked up around west as small arms fire was directed in his direction damn parachute release won't release son of a [ __ ] damn it come on wes screamed hoping the pilot would wake and give him some assistance he did not gotta get a knife pausing at a low crouch west waited a moment before he sprinted back to the aircraft which was still at a hover engaging the nva position as he ran west made a cutting motion hoping the gunner or co-pilot would recognize the signal and drop a knife they did picking up the knife west didn't hesitate to sprint back to the hanging pilot cut him free and throw him over his shoulder just then an rpg round slammed into the tree the pilot had been hanging in with the pilot over his shoulder in a fireman carry position west ran for the aircraft and the dangling rope grabbing the rope he wrapped it around the pilot and himself and motioned for the aircraft to take off west didn't have time to tie a knot but only had the rope wrapped around himself in the pilot because of his rope burned hands west couldn't climb the rope but pradee could hold on long enough to get safely back to ground as the aircraft climbed out and built up some speed small arms fire continued captain beauchamp didn't fly couldn't fly with any speed as the drag on west and the pilot would be too great and pull them off the rope west was dangling about 70 feet below the aircraft which was flying over the jungle at two to three hundred feet helicopter crews did not have parachutes as west cleared the trees captain beauchamp nosed the aircraft over and began picking up speed all the while praying west didn't fall everyone was well aware that if they had an engine failure or any other emergency west and the pilot wouldn't survive arriving over a clearing captor beauchamp captain beauchamp lowered the aircraft to place west and the pilot on the ground and then the aircraft this was an unsecured clearing only about 1500 meters from where they picked up the pilot detaching the rope west and jameson quickly loaded the pilot into the aircraft and departed for lz center where the unconscious pilot was quickly transferred to a medevac aircraft that had been requested west resumed his duties as crew chief wes went on to receive he was put in for the medal of honor it was downgraded to the distinguished service cross and he spent 20 years in the army retired as a command sergeant major at fort eustis virginia uh yeah that's um that's a that's a that's a crazy story and and the crazy stories just kind of continue they they just kind of continue uh throughout this book just incredible heroics on every page um you end up getting commissioned you end up getting commissioned now do they commission you as an infantry officer while you're there do does that is that orders that you get that you have to wait for no no i got commissioned while i was there as an infantry officer battlefield commission basically totally surprised the living daylights out of me you know what what it happened i i got i was getting calls that that morning i got a call from somebody saying hey uh mr corey understand you're going to battalion i said what are you talking about i'm not going to battalion yeah it's uh understand you're going to the battalion i'm thinking that's impossible i extended to stay in the unit well a little while later my platoon leader beauchamp jumps up on my skid says i'm getting refueled he taps me on the show he says damn i hate to see you leave you know send the good missions to us when you get up there on battalion staff i'm thinking oh cripe my team leader's saying this this might be true throughout the day i keep getting radio calls hey dan sorry to see you leave hammerhammer so that night i get to the you know i get back in i'm really dejected i'm feeling down i throw my gear in the room i go over to the bar and get a beer company commander walks in he says hey everybody get a beer i need your attention so i'm thinking oh cripe so he gets in he says hey i got good news and i got bad news i said the first good news first bad news okay he says corey come up here so i'll go up there and he says uh you all know corey's been with us now what 16 months down i said yeah it's been about that sir and he says you know everybody's flown with him you've done a great job hamahama but uh it's time for you to leave so we're gonna miss you dan but uh we know you'll go forth and do great things for us congratulations so i go back up and get on my bar stool i'm sitting there and he says now we but the good news is we got a new new guy's arriving he's got about 1600 hours of flying time and a lot of experience and that's what we need guys with a lot of experience here in the unit let's welcome the new guy lieutenant cory and i'm sitting here at the bar and i'm not facing him facing the bar mate i'm going lieutenant cory that dude's got the same last name as me i wonder where the hell he's from i turned around and everybody's looking at me and the old man looks at me says come up here lieutenant cory and so i thought wait a minute they're talking about me so i get up walk up there and he congratulated me and somebody had put me in for a direct commission the first lieutenant so i was the first lieutenant in the infantry now is there no such thing as how can you not a first lieutenant pilot is that is that not a thing well see at that time we didn't have an aviation branch the army had uh um they had all the other branches but we didn't have an aviation branch and there was some politics involved with that with the air force and they did not form the aviation branch in the army until about 1985 and at that time you had a choice if you were an infantry officer if you were another branch you could decide if you're going to go to the aviation branch or retain the branch that you were in and i retained the infantry branch because i lost the the retina my left eye just before that so i would have been able to fly anyway so i just stayed in the infantry so back to the book a little bit i mean so you get this commission you're you're still conducting all kinds of missions i'm jumping through all kinds of missions um you're starting to get short meaning you're close to heading home yep um picking it up here i was in the chalk two position and it just cleared the trees and was really paying no attention to chalk three who attempted to fly between two trees and caught a rotor blade on one yeah to everyone's heart the aircraft slowly rode rolled to the right where the damaged rotor blade made contact with the ground when it did the rotor blades began to disintegrate with pieces flying everywhere soldiers in the back began falling out of the aircraft and they were fortunate and they were the fortunate ones as the aircraft was now descending toward the ground as the right side impacted the transmission was ripped from its mounts and tore through the cargo compartment as the aircraft came to a stop the engine was still running now at ever increasing rpm as there was no rotor to turn or transmission connected fuel began to spill across the engine at this time the aircraft aircraft were not equipped with self-sealing fuel cells that would prevent a major fire the aircraft began to burn and burn rapidly as bill had been waiting for chalk three and four to take off he was only he was only light on his skids when the accident happened his crew chief door door gunner and captain head immediately jumped out and ran to pull people out of the aircraft soldiers on the ground also moved forward to assist lightning and that was a call sign one of the guys was attempting to climb out but was dazed and having difficulty moving quickly to assist lightning captain head was having difficulty as well as the fire was now in the cockpit and spreading rapidly the co-pilot was consumed in the flames as was the crew chief the gunner could not be seen as he was under the aircraft having occupied the right side of the aircraft that day finally lightning was extracted from the wreckage and fire yeah yeah that's the story that you told earlier yeah yeah lightning uh that was his name is john copenhaver a great guy and his nickname was lightning because john just always kind of walked kind of slow kind of talked a little on the slow side but we all loved him dearly and he was he was really a great platoon leader as well and but yeah they hit this tree and i was always worried about john and this this particular crate seat pilot flying together uh there'd been an incident the month before with them flying together and they landed on some stumps and there's just something about this right seat pilot that the day i met him i looked at him and said this kid's not going to make it there's nothing about him tell me you know he wasn't competent he was he was a halfway decent pilot he was a nice guy but there was just something about it that told me he ain't gonna make it and so they had that first accident him and john and i was kind of concerned about them flying together again but i i didn't make flight assignments so there's nothing i could do about it and then they had this happen and hit the tree and we got john out we didn't get anybody else out and john spent six six weeks in a coma and uh but he's doing quite well today listen lives in maryland rockport maryland i think it is but he's doing well so you say no one was in good spirits that evening everyone in both the officers club and enlisted man's club wasn't a sober mood it hurt even more when we were informed that the division commander's aircraft was missing and presumed crash my good friend bill do you say michael mike bill michael was the pilot the division commander was major general casey a very much like division commander very good guy casey casey was a super he had been the division assistant division commander and then uh moved up to gorez division commander hadn't hadn't been division committed very long but he was a guy that was always out there with us uh you you be in an lz or you get back to a refuel point in their case you'd be in he'd be talking to you like okay how'd it go you know what problems you got how's the aircraft running maintenance working okay uh he was concerned he was he was what everybody considered a good leader and we were all very much down we found out they crashed into a mountaintop in bad weather then this happens lieutenant cory sir you got your orders you're going home you're to report to two division rear no later than tomorrow we have a bird waiting for you at 1400 today to take you to ben hoa what what are you talking about sir you are to report to division rear casualty assistance office you best get packing fast it suddenly dawned on me bill's parents had requested that i bring bill's remains home yeah i was close with his family i stayed there before i went to vietnam and then when i came home on leave and before i went back again i stayed with this mom and dad great great people up there they lived in monroe washington outside of snohomish he had a little brother that had just gotten into the air force academy bill was really proud of norm and this happened and they they had me be the escort officer to bring bill home you say arriving at the funeral home this is after you get back arriving at the funeral home i made sure bill was settled in for the night and then i was taken to bill's parents house in monroe washington mom and pop wanted me to stay with them as they considered me family two other couples were there with mom and pop when i arrived after putting my bags away in the upstairs bedroom i came into the dining room where they were all seated dan what are you drinking pop ass i wasn't much of a drinker except beer but took a scotch on the rocks when i sat down mom placed her hand on mine and asked what happened he was a vip pilot she was a tough woman but i could see from the puffy eyes that she had been crying i tried to explain as calmly in as much detail as i could what had happened bad weather bad maps but i didn't have the heart to say that the general is probably flying the aircraft generals could fly but not in weather and on top of that bill wasn't instrument rated either but could handle the aircraft in weather conditions then the hard part came bill's in the casket but i advise that it be a closed cast casket ceremony i said before taking a sip of scotch why is that asked pop well there was an explosion and fire his body is in a plastic bag under a glass case on the glass case is his uniform with all his decorations the glass case is held down by 300 screws opening the lid is easy but not the glass case the rest of the evening was spent telling good stories of bill from flight school and our one mission in vietnam together between drinks and teary eyes we got through the night the day of the funeral came and bill's sister judy arrived early with her husband and children to cook breakfast the ride to church was quiet and we all sat together in the front of the church it was packed as monroe was a small town and everyone knew the michaels the preacher stood and gave the eulogy praising the work bill had done in the community and for the nation he said that bill was not afraid of death but loved life few helicopter crews in vietnam were afraid of death it was part of the job but they all loved life they were some of this nation's finest when the preacher finished sex army pallbearers came forward hoisted bill's casket and solemnly moved outside to the hearse at the gravesite i lowered my salute and accepted the flag from the commander of the burial detail executing a smart about face i walked over to mom thinking that this was one strong woman as i saw no tears standing in front of her i knelt and said on behalf of a grateful nation i present this flag that was what i had been instructed to say but in my heart i had my doubts about this being a grateful nation standing slowly i came to attention and again raised a slow salute in the distance the command for the firing squad could be heard and three volleys of seven rounds each caused many to jump as the 21 gun salute was fired on the last volley of the three the distant sound of taps was heard no one held back tears at this point i slowly lowered my salute turned and walked to the side my official's duties concluded as many started to leave i came back put my arms around mom and wept just like every other human there and i weep to this day yeah that was uh that was kind of a hard hard period for me going through the the funeral with them i picked norm up at the airport from the air force academy they gave him leave emergency leave and he was home for that and and he struggled his first year through that academy uh because of this but he got through just fine he became a c-141 pilot uh and he went to work for the airlines and he's retired from that now so he's doing well we stay in touch and mom and pop they've passed away at this point but uh yeah bill was a great guy we got the chance to fly together one time uh had had a kick a kick day that day picked him up he'd never flown a combat mission you know flying vips around that's all he ever did so i picked him up went out to a fire basin they had a battalion commander out there he was crazy as hell had a big red bow on the back of his helmet and i never asked him why that was there but he get there and he says uh hey yeah how do you feel how do you feel about dropping bombs i said sir wouldn't really not equip the drop bumps because yeah you're equipped dropped these bombs he said how do you feel i said well yeah we'll do it so we get out to the aircraft and they got this box that's on the one end of it's sitting on the floor and the other ends up on stands and in this box he's got about six 81 millimeter mortar rounds with aerial bomb fuses in the nose and tape tied around the tails any and so what we did is we flew along 2000 feet and we went over these four crossing points on the river and as the as the the crossing point came up through the petals i would say mark mark mark and they'd open the door on that box and these mortar rounds would fall out at 2 000 feet and it was just like a bombing run and we did this about four or five times that day and bill thought you guys are crazy this is great stuff and then we did a log mission that he'd never done before he'd never been down how how accurate were the uh it was darn accurate it was really it was really pretty darn good accuracy uh surprise eleven days but the battalion commander said he says i don't have any mortars in this range but i want the nva to think that we've got guys pretty close to them so that's the reason we were doing that and we did we did one combat assault and uh bill just he was excited when the day was over we flew about 10 hours that day but uh yeah he really enjoyed that day and then it was it wasn't two months later that uh that he crashed up there so so now you're home from vietnam yep and you're you you're now going to become an infantry officer you talked about your retina when did that happen uh that happened in 83. oh okay so so you still could fly but you still but you have to become an infantry officer is that how it works yeah yeah i was an infantry officer so i went uh i got home and went to fort benning attended the infantry officer basic course went to fort lewis washington took command of a infantry company up there and then we formed the ninth infantry division up that had been stood down in vietnam but they stood it back up i was there so i was there as the aviation officer for the first brigade so i was back to flying again then i went to fort benning for the advance course then went to alaska are they are they taking you with your combat experience and throwing you as sort of a leadership position in these oh yeah yes company commanders uh i got to alaska and they made me the operations officer for the air cavs squadron so i was up there for that for a year and then uh on a friday night i got a phone call saying you you need to report to anchorage on monday morning we just relieved the company commander of the airborne company and you're going to take them out of the airborne company why do you get relieved i didn't ask that question [Laughter] jack so you roll in and take it so now you're company commander company commander of one of the airborne companies in alaska how did you like grunt work i loved it i loved grunt work uh i enjoyed flying but i honestly one day was thinking when i was flying you know i'm i'm really a glorified greyhound bus driver [Laughter] and and i saw all the things that was to do in the army and i want to do other things besides fly that helicopter so when they say you're going to be an infantry officer i had no complaints about that i loved grunt work uh commanding that airborne company in alaska uh people go well it's 30 below zero you're going to jump out of an airplane yeah let's jump uh so he did that and then uh so what year is it now uh that was eight that was 78. i was commanding the airborne company 79 they made me the operations officer for the infantry battalion how was the how was the post-vietnam years in the army terrible absolutely terrible uh we didn't have any any ammunition to train with in fact the soldiers they would charge up a hill and a training exercise and they go bang bang bang 13 cents bang bang bang 13 cents because that was the cost of training rounds uh 13 cents a round but we didn't even have training rounds uh it was really pretty bad in the army uh we went through a period from 70 to 75 where we were rifting captains and that just killed the morale in the captain's ranks uh i was in the advanced course in 73 there at fort benning we had 10 200 man classrooms on one side of the building 10 200 million classrooms on the other side of the building all full all of them infantry captains back from vietnam and on one day they walked in and from being a 200 man class every one of those rooms went down to be in 140 man class those captains were pulled out they told you have 90 days to get out or you can avert to being a sergeant one or the other wow so and they did that for four years so that really ruined the morale and the captains ranks so no it was not the early years after vietnam were not not good years in the army before uh one more question about vietnam um this is a question i bring up and you already talked about it but um you said most of the guys that you had most of the crew chiefs most of the most of the support people that weren't flying they were people that had volunteered was it was it if you were going to be a dork could you be just assigned a door gun or was those all those people volunteers uh door gunners were volunteers may have they have been drafted and then they volunteered for that's what a lot of them were they were drafted into the infantry they did a tour in the infantry and then they volunteered to come be a door gunner got it so could you tell the difference between someone that was a draftee and someone that was a lifer no you really couldn't there was and the guys that were drafted you know people say oh they had bad attitudes i never saw it they all had a good attitude they were all in this together now what did happen guys that that were drafted when they came back from number they still had a year left they would send them to germany and there's where the problems were all at in germany uh they had big-time morale problems there what are you going to do send me back to vietnam and bent my dog tags it got to the point in germany in the early 70s where the duty officers were armed with 45s yeah they had one incident over there where a duty officer was stuffed in a wall locker throwing out a second story window yeah the morale in germany in the early 70s was not good at all uh but in vietnam the very seldom saw a problem i had one problem once in the aircraft where an e6 just refused to go to the field last i saw of him the mps had him and they were driving away with him but that was it so now now we're in the in the 70s bringing but bring us back to time it's just morale is horrible it's it's tough it's tough especially in the officers court because because of all the rifts going on guy doesn't know he's gonna have a job next month or not uh what are they basing it on how do you know if you're gonna get ripped or not you don't it's basically it's not performance it's just numbers it's it's i i would like to think it was based upon your efficiency reports but we had a guy in my class had distinguished service cross they rifted him what yep yeah all of us all of us said the same thing how in the hell did he get rifted i mean he's got the distinguished service cross this is in 73 and he got rifted uh one of the guys that i work with in 75 charlie had he had silver stars a couple of silver stars a purple heart a couple of distinguished flying crosses got rifted he's now he got out and he became the i think the eastern manager for michelin tires but you didn't know it was supposed to be based on efficiency reports and i think at some point in time they just said all these guys have got great efficiency reports we just got to have numbers now and if you're a reserve officer uh up till 75 you were definitely in the hunt to get rifted regular army officers didn't face that the next rift 76 regular army officers were in that boat too so uh yeah it's just it got bad so you're just keeping your fingers crossed basically yep yep i hope to god the army never has to go through that again do you know do you know off the top of your head how much smaller the army got from 1970 to 1978 no i don't i don't there's just a massive downsizing massive downsizing i can tell you this today you could take all the 11 bravo infantrymen in the army and put them in rfk stadium and you'd still have empty seats so the army's not nearly as big as it used to be well not even close not even close that's crazy you know today we rely a lot on the national guard and the army reserve and they've really stepped up they stepped up in desert storm uh and and a lot of the animosity that existed in the 70s between the active army and the army guard and the army reserves a lot of that disappeared thank god during desert storm uh well i worked with the national guard all the time in in iraq and they were freaking awesome yeah they were outstanding outstanding professionals yep they've stepped up and done a great job i was the aviation advisor from maryland for two years and uh we had an aviation maintenance company that was fantastic we took them down to bragg every year and fort bragg always wanted these guys to come down and work on the aircraft for them they're just really super so so so this time so you're continuing kind of up through the ranks you become uh you do your company commander tour what comes after that uh company commander then i was uh an instructor at the army commanding general staff college i was a tactics instructor and then i got tagged kicking and screaming to go to germany as an exchange officer in the german army for two years teaching tactics interoperability issues with german forces then came back went to fort campbell and in fact we got a phone call in the middle of the night and a guy called me and he said this is the personnel officer for the 101st airborne division how quick can you get here and i said sir i could be there in five days he said start packing stuff you'll be here in five days i turned around on my wife and said start getting the stuff off the wall it's where being transferred back to the states in five days she started to laugh at me 20 minutes later the phone rang it was my boss he says you are relieved from that assignment get the four campbell as fast as you can what was that all about uh there was something coming down and they needed me to be there to be the brigade executive officer for the for the second brigade did you know someone there was one of your friends or something didn't know anybody just just random just random branch branch pulled my hat name out of the hat and said get to fort campbell and so what was your role then i was the executive officer for the brigade second brigade oh okay and then uh i was at for two years and then i went over to command of 3rd battalion 327th infantry for two years and had that during desert storm so tell us about desert storm uh it got boring tell you the trips sitting out there in the desert you know we i i had the task force at west point training the cadets for the summer and my exo was sitting there he's reading the sunday newspaper he says hey you know this is what the heck's going on with iraq and kuwait so we read that and i say you know billy if they go into kuwait we're gonna go to war and i think it was two weeks later it was in the wall street it was in the new york times and two weeks later he got the call and i turned the building i said let's get out of here so right away we got the west point staff we planned out what we had to get done that week and to get out of there so when we got the call on a friday night to get out of west point we were gone the next morning and got back to campbell had three weeks back at campbell before we'd shipped out to to iraq or out to saudi arabia well if if saddam had attacked we we in the 82nd would have been speed bumps and thank god he didn't attack but we went up and sat about 60 miles from the border and we had a defensive position set up there and that's where we sat from august to february january to january oh man good times oh yeah sitting out there in the middle of the desert you know at least you were there in time for summer yeah yeah in august well it made us appreciate when when when february january rolled when you were now freezing yeah now we're freezing at night so but yeah we sat up there and just ran tactical exercises and like we would back in the states you know it was it was it was different because we'd always trained in in forests and woods and stuff like that but we got up there we said all right we're a new environment let's learn how to do this new environment so we spent a lot of time learning desert techniques studying up on what the desert rats had done in world war ii uh looking at some stuff that we've received from sas about desert operations and just started practicing that stuff and the kids the kids did great the soldiers did fantastic and and then the the war kicks off and you did i get that right when i opened up you that was the largest airborne assault ever it was the largest air air mobile air mobile assault sorry yeah air assault ever and for people that don't know air assault is with helicopters airborne is with parachutes yeah so it was the largest era how so what the hell did that look like you know i talked about in the book about we had uh 60s hueys and you know 10 snooks and all those cobras well this made that look small because these were all blackhawks and uh blackhawks do you have any idea how many i think uh let's see we probably had close to 80 blackhawks and 80 blackhawks all taking off at the same time and we took off from several different locations and then joined up in the air and and flew in for this thing and i am sure that the iraqis that we flew over just kind of oops oops uh because we got we got in there and there was uh there were four or five positions that uh that were set up that that we went into right away and took over and what we did is we set up a big perimeter out there so we did you you guys flew into iraq oh yeah yeah and then you hit the ground and we're your your mission tasking was to secure some positions where our mission task was to secure this big area that right away they started flying in fuel blivets and we were securing for lack of a better term a giant gas station for the cobras and the apaches the apaches were flying out of there going after the iraqi tanks and stuff so we we sat there for my battalion sat there for two days doing that and then we flew out and went with another brigade to another location and secured that for the gas station i was going to stay shocked though we got to that second location we were engaged in some iraqis and my s3 came up and said sir ceasefire i said what are you talking about cease fire we're in the middle of contact here cersei's fire it's word came down from brigade we have to cease fire i said you go back and call brigade for clarification on that i'm not cease firing right now somebody's shooting at us and he came back he said ceasefire so we were shocked after four days this thing's over with and all the troops oh it was a ceasefire because the war was over yeah yeah and all the troops said the same thing we're going to be back here sir we're going to what what are we doing we're going to be back here someday we can't stop now and we did did you take any casualties uh i had one soldier dislocate his shoulder that was it i'll take it yeah yeah in fact that was kind of kind of unique because when i when i took command of the battalion my training guidance i gave it to the battalion and i said that in conclusion we will go forth we will win the we'll win the last battle of the next war and we will win the entire war and we will bring everybody home i didn't realize i was going to bring everybody home alive but i was happy to do that so that worked out good when you were when you were getting ready during that august to whenever the invasion kicked off did you were you thinking it could be a major battle and major casualties because i so i came in the navy in 1990 and i remember they were saying on the news there's going to be 40 000 casualties in the first 48 hours yes in fact our operational plans my last objective was the airport at baghdad we had planned it out that far as where we were going to go and so when we got the word stop after four days we're going what in the world has gone on i have heard because because right now i'll put a shameless plug in i'm writing another three book series on desert storm and and i have found out in my research that one of the reasons that we stopped was because turkey did not want us to overthrow saddam because saddam they felt was the only one to keep the kurds in check and turkey said don't go to iraq and then schwarzkopf's guidance was kick him out of kuwait he didn't have any guidance supposedly to go after him in iraq so that's one of the reasons we stopped but yeah we thought we were going to go all the way to baghdad very disappointed that we didn't yeah well so what'd you do after that what was the next move uh the next move was to to an army headquarters that was worthless headquarters in the army and i did two years there after i got promoted and then they said sorry next time it's the pentagon and i said i'll take the option thank you very much so i went ahead and retired 93 and uh now you have you have two sons yes two sons both boys uh yeah they're sons they're boys jay he joined the marine corps reserves while i was commanding when i first got command of my battalion and i came home from a field exercise that just kicked my butt i walked in the house and my lovely wife mary is standing there and she's got her arms crossed and she said guess what your son did i'm thinking my son you know as far as i know it's our son i know that jay what'd you do he goes semper fi i went you joined the marine corps he said dad dad i joined the marine corps reserves i just he says he was in college and he says i'm just tired of going to school i'm going to go in the reserves i'll drop out of school one semester i'll do you know my two weeks in the summer one weekend each each each month and and you know i just wanted a break so i said okay that sounds good mary's standing there she goes well what if they have to go to war and i said mary the marine corps reserve hasn't gone to war since korea and nothing's gonna happen there you go there you go words thanksgiving day i'm standing on the iraqi the iraqi saudi border my brigade commander flies in he goes uh hey you call home lately and i said yes sir there's a phone booth behind every sand dune out here no i haven't called home since we got here he said well you need to call home when we get you back to eagle and i said what's happened he says your son's unit got activated he's on his way so three days three days before the air war started i got a chance to go down to where the marines were at i got to spend the day with him and i'm sitting there as we're we're leaving and i'm looking at him and i'm going damn he's just a little kid so i got back i was talking to my brigade commander tom hill and he says damn jay just looked like a little kid tom reached over and tapped my lady says every one of your troops is just one of those little kids and i got damn he's right i'm the oldest guy in that battalion he's right they're all a bunch of kids so but jay came through fine and then came back got a two-year rotc commission or rotc scholarship and came in the army as an armor officer and now he's an 0-6 and nato headquarters in brussels chris uh he did the same thing quit college joined the army i got a phone call from a recruiter one night saying hey i got your son here we're gonna sign him up for four years and i said no you're not you're gonna sign him up for two so and chris wound up back in my brigade the first brigade of the 101st uh and the scout platoon got out uh went to college came back in on an rotc commission infantry and uh he just retired two years ago as lieutenant colonel and he got he was in the infantry and then he got over into strategic intelligence a good friend of ours uh lieutenant general uh fridavich an sf guy taught chris going into strat intel and chris has done a lot of work in that that arena there with with you guys and some other people so he just retired a couple years ago he's back in the pentagon doing the same job back in the same office so he can't wait to get out of there and come down to florida and what did you do after after you retired uh two days after i retired i started uh as a real estate appraiser a friend of ours had an appraisal company and found out i was retiring and said why don't you come do this so i went up there and saw what it was about and thought yeah i don't have to work for the government and it's back in the town that we want to live in makes a decent wage so why not so went back up there and spent two years as an apprentice doing that and then took my my exams passed those and just kept doing real estate appraising for 20 years or so and then what at what point did you decide you're going to write the books uh we came down here in 20 or down here we came to florida 2016. that's when i finally said okay i'm fully retired sailed my boat down from tennessee sailed it over and uh my wife had a problem come up she couldn't get on the boat anymore we had a 36-foot sailboat so i thought okay i'm going to sell the sailboat uh she can't get on it we're not going to can't do cruising i was doing boat deliveries from panama and mexico but she never went on those so but anyway so suddenly i didn't have anything to do and we we went down to the to the dav because see about this this retina and we're talking to the guy and he said something about vietnam and i broke down i mean big time and he said have you ever been evaluated for ptsd and i said no he said we're getting you evaluated and they sent me over to the va for an evaluation i had always thought and i hate to say this but i always thought ptsd was a bunch of bull i thought it was just a sham and i'm sitting there with him my wife and i'm crying and they took me over there and i got evaluated and they put me in a 16-week program with a psychiatrist and for about eight weeks we spent one day a week me crying and working through this thing so one of the things he suggested he says you know why don't you write everything down that happened while you're in vietnam so i said all right so i started writing the first book and at first i started write it as an autobiography and i thought well hell nobody's going to read this so i'll make it a novel so i wrote it as a novel and went to a reunion in 2019 of our our unit it's the first time i'd ever been to one so i took the book with me and presented it there and the guys loved it and they said well what about what about this what about this why didn't you include this so i wrote the second book and did that and put that out there and it's had great reviews and then guys started calling me hey you know we were in lomson 719 the biggest battle that army aviation has ever been in why don't you write a book about that so i wrote the second book or the third book and uh put that out and now they've come back and said well we love the third book but we want more of the wife's side as to what wives are going through when this battle is going on they're hearing about it so right now i'm drafting out a fourth book that'll that'll be coming out sometime after i get this this series that i'm working on now about desert storm anyone who's who kind of guided you through the writing process uh there's a guy named uh james rosen and james wroten a couple of books a couple he's got a bunch out there and he wrote one interview with a terrorist he was an interrogator and he wrote that and he wrote a couple of books my mommy has ptsd my daddy has ptsd and he wrote those and i read one of his books he's got a series called rigged and i read that and i wrote him sent him an email saying hey i really enjoyed reading your books welcome to find out he lives around the corner from me and he called me up he said let's go to buffalo wings and we went to buffalo wings and he's been kind of my mentor guiding me through uh on how to write the process of how to get published and we publish on amazon i fixed me up with a great editor she's really good drives i drive her crazy but so he's been kind of guiding me along and then i got this while here about we need to make a movie and we're working right now on that with the with the two screen writers and my my producer any any idea when that's going to come to fruition well we're hoping to have the screenplay done by the end of the summer and the producer is putting together the package that we're going to start taking to the studios i'm just hoping that i'll still be alive when we get it on the screen you know it takes it's about a three to four year process i'm finding that to get a movie made yeah no i i think that's a a minimum and it can the other weird thing about movies are you can you can sell a screenplay tomorrow for a millions of dollars and it can never get made yeah you can just sit and someone someone buys it from from you and it just sits there and that's the way it is sometimes i would rather have it made than make a million dollars and i know people are gonna go yeah right i think our story is important enough that it needs to get out there uh i've already talked to a couple of organizations what money we make on this a lot of it is going to get donated back to the army aviation association the wings of liberty museum at fort campbell uh the american huey huey huey chapter 365 i mean these are outfits that have been helping me out and stuff like that so that's our intent is to get a lot of this money donated back to those that helped us well that's that's awesome um look we've been going for over three hours right now i i i uh well i kind of we should probably wrap this thing up for people to find you um online i know you have you have mattjacksonbooks.com is that the main place to find you uh they can find us at www.mattjacksonbooks.com uh we're on facebook matt jackson we're on facebook undaunted valor and uh very soon we were going to have a website for the movie uh the galaxy effect she sent me an email yesterday i got to see her on saturday and we will have that out coming out pretty soon the books are all for sale on amazon uh that's who we work with for for publishing stuff yeah and we'll we'll have those linked up so people can just we have a thing on our website called books from the podcast we'll we'll have all these on there so people can click right in and get the books echo yes do you have anything i do okay see now now we get to the real part of the year yeah yeah it's one he seemed awful quiet over there okay what's going through his mind uh okay so when you started working with the uh the screenwriters right and you were like hey these movies don't follow this you know bs but these movies you sort of can what were the movies that you kind of can't like that had some integrity with their profession oh uh hacksaw ridge uh that's great one of the best ones is hamburger hill i thought that was that was a pretty good production that they need to focus on uh one of the ones i said no to was uh what was the clint east one where he's a marine oh uh heartbreak heartbreak ridge no no no no uh 1917 i thought was pretty good uh those those are the three big ones that that i focus these guys on looking at what about saving private right oh saving privates definitely good right yeah that's that's a great one all right what about apocalypse now absolutely not what about platoon because we had a platoon's a good one oh okay all right potentially never seen platoon you never have yeah i tell you what he was reprimanded but you haven't seen cobra so i haven't seen cobra either of course so yeah when you guys watch cobra then yeah you added to your list platoon was one of the first good ones that came out you know apocalypse now came out and yeah because that came out in 75. yeah 75 and that was such i don't want to say the word on the air but absolutely not i nearly threw up watching that in fact i never watched the whole thing i watched bits and pieces here and there and just that told me i didn't want to see this thing but platoon came out and it was pretty darn realistic uh i love the part where uh in hamburger hill where they make them brush their teeth as soon as they arrive happened to us in vietnam as soon as we got off the airplane we had to brush our teeth so you know stuff like that was pretty realistic to what was going on where apocalypse now was blowing smoke well when uh the the joke that i forget who who it was they played a joke and you said hey don't salute me that was right that was our operations officer when i got there yeah okay so that's from a scene from forrest gump by the way yeah yeah yeah he's like delicious yeah yeah yeah except for he says it for real yes he's not joking yeah yeah he's being serious yeah and forrest gump was made way after so that's interesting yeah you know i wonder if there's some sort of a through line or something well i don't know i'll i'll call tom hanks up and ask him that question gary we had gary sinise on the podcast yeah he was pretty good briefing on it he definitely said it yeah i like gary yeah you can't you cannot not like gary great great guy a huge supporter he's a huge supporter of the military of america uh sir you got anything else you want to add no no you guys i hope i answered all your questions we're just getting warmed up i will tell you of the three books people ask me this okay you wrote three books which one's the best in my opinion lumps on 719's the best uh people that have read that have called me up and they said i'm crying i've read this thing it's intense and and i will warn you right now if you thought the combat scenes in the first one were intense that one there is just unbelievable it is absolutely unbelievable what those guys went through in in flying that operation uh i just can't say enough about it the bravery uh the determination the dedication the loyally the courage well you know what would be awesome is if um if you've got any friends or you know anyone that was there and they want to come on here and and talk about it and talk us through the book that'd be awesome how many would you like to have them at one time we'll i'll have them all at some point you know you can if anyone wants to come on this with this that's what this podcast is for i will i will i know i know the guy in particular uh that i will i will call him up and ask him if he'll come talk to you about it because uh he was an integral part he was part of the comancheros and uh and they did a great job of course every one of the units the the blue dolphins uh the robin hoods that were at like a with us one up there they all just amazing what they did and how they did it and uh you know when you go into a battle and you lose in 45 days 600 aircraft 1100 crew members uh and you still accomplish the missions just unbelievable what they went through but yeah i will call one guy in particular and and see if he'll he'll come out and sit down with you open invite to anybody you send me there the chair is waiting for them it'd be an honor to have them on and it's you know you're talking about it's incredible what they did but as far as i'm as far as i can tell as far as i know what you all did over there was incredible and and well thanks for joining us today and and more important thanks for thanks for your incredible service and your incredible sacrifice and we won't forget we we will not let it we will we will not forget what you all did and we will not forget your brothers that did not come home well thank you very much jaco for having me in for those thoughts thanks for joining us sir thank you and with that colonel matt jackson has left the building and we are here um echo charles yes sir another guest another another example of how much more we can do as human beings yeah so i'm going to think something for us to think about because we should want to do more right so yeah in our lives yeah we should want to we should want to get better and be better any suggestions on how we do that yeah plenty but but the part where you know when he was talking about i forget the term when how they got a lower and they got a you know when you go through the jungle yeah with the helicopter i probably felt that part it was making me kind of nervous like yeah imagining there's not a lot of times when i read stuff and actually i didn't read those sections because it was a lot of dialogue and the dialogue would be like hold left pull left tail and you know it's just like this dialogue going back and forth i don't i didn't think i could do the dialogue justice yeah so i just asked him to kind of describe what it was like but yeah crazy crazy stuff the whole thing just the fact that those helicopters are basically like a 1968 vw bug yeah like they got an engine they got a steering wheel you know there's not a lot of there's no computers in this yeah just completely manually being maneuvered through space and he made a good point too that like you kind of don't think about compared to when he compared it to airplanes where it's like bro the helicopter is all you the airplane a lot of time you can sort of let it cruise you know yeah where the helicopter is like man you you can't wait to tell that to dave burke good deal you know yeah exactly exactly either way all right cool yes we're all improving trying to believe we're on the path yep i'm on the path i used to say maybe one way to try and improve is seeing how quickly we could get through certain tasks oh yeah yeah like efficient yeah efficiency getting more efficient as opposed to rushing it because we don't want to rush nothing or do we i don't know am i wrong should i should we rush it um i'm thinking we could probably move more quick more quickly more efficient efficiently i get it um i know you think that there's a bunch of people that are listening they're not they're not they're not listening they shut it off they they heard uh colonel jackson left the building like oh cool let me get back 70 minutes of my time right now because i can just press stop on this podcast all right okay all right okay i got you i got you hey look we're all we're all in the path we may need some help how about that we'll supplement our selves with supplementation from jocko see that right there that whole sentence did not need to exist right it exists and it has it has a massive value first off okay i'm just saying look hey look if i'm about to give you some help how should i should should i declare that i am here to help if you need help okay or or could use help i'm just saying you know what you're not saying you should tell us what we need to know okay all right i'm over here trying but you're over here you that's the thing i bring this on myself yes i should just be totally silent yeah yeah well okay i don't know i don't know about all that okay uh how can we help ourselves echo through supplementation choco fuel you got problems with your joints or you don't want to ever worry about your joints anymore take supercrew oil and joint warfare boom you want vitamin d three supplementation which is good for all aspects of health if you care about that which we do because we're on the path boom choco is that that as well also you want some additional protein we got milk and it tastes good how about that it's true put a banana in there that's what i do sometimes also we got discipline and discipline go which are at its core i like the fact that i tell you to hurry and i tell you that everybody already knows all this and you still tell this stuff to me like i'm hearing it for the first time well you're looking at me like hearing it for the first time some of us either didn't hear it or it's cool to get a reminder okay you assuming yep all right everyone's reminded good stuff yeah supplementation look hey get the discipline go i was i was going to go into this earlier off air but the so if you drink energy drinks yep i don't care if you get the sugar-free one but it's like at a certain point usually after the first one if you taller if you're even into it after the first one you're like brownie i can't do these anymore at least for for a day your body knows and they it tells your mind this is not good that is the point right there yep yeah it's like your body knows yeah your body knows what there's something wrong with this one jocko discipline go it it your body still knows your body knows it's good yeah your body says hey i could use a little bit more of that so bro if you're listening to a four-hour vietnam pilot scenario bro those things just keep rolling with it with a smile i'll tell you that yeah yeah hey if you want to get any of this stuff and you want to get it shipped to your house for free go to jockofield.com and then what you can do is subscribe if you subscribe to it'll come to your house for free anything that you want in this category of supplementation you can also get the drinks at wawa you can also get the whole line at vitamin shop jockofield.com get some uh also origin usa.com you can get this stuff there as well uh also jiu-jitsu stuff and when we're doing our jiu jitsu we want some new stuff a new ghee just face it we could with uh colonel jackson we could have gone down he's trained at the codacon judo we could have gone down that well that's a two-hour three-hour podcast yeah didn't even get there yet because when that guy was coming when when lieutenant dick weed was coming at him right yeah that guy was about to get judo tossed right on his head so that's what i'm talking about so jiu-jitsu we're doing jiu-jitsu sorry but yeah origin usa i'm saying if you you know you want to get some new jiu jitsu stuff boom that's where you get it all made in america by the way i say it i say by the way but it's a huge deal here's the thing though if let's say you need stuff beyond just jiu jitsu stuff like you got your jiu jitsu stuff handled you got the ghee you got the rash guard you still might need to go to the grocery store you can't wear the guitar grocery store what you can wear is american-made jeans yep not to mention what you can make it is american-made boots it's true you can get it all there and don't think 100 work industrial like this that but let's face it there's some i know you don't like the word fashion but there's some fashion in there leave it to pete there's some function there okay yeah pete roberts bleeds over in some some situ scenarios uh put it this way he added a significant amount of aesthetic value to both by the way jeans and boots i don't agree you just can't see that kind of stuff no it's just functional yeah yeah yeah like i said like i said you can't really see that kind of stuff but nonetheless it is there so yes origin usa that's the spot to get these items also choco has a store so called jack store this is where you can get your t-shirts that say discipline equals freedom good death core uh take the high ground hardcore recondos hardcore condos i like when somebody comes onto twitter or the gram and says you should make a shirt that says back to the book or you should make a shirt that says this link was freedom or you should make whatever right and i go to chocolatestore.com yeah it's right there yeah i'm not saying we've thought of every shirt by any stretch but there's a bunch of shirts there speaking of thinking of every shirt so we've expanded into a subscription scenario and this is where we can experiment for lack of a better term with all other ideas for shirts every idea pretty much what's this thing called the shirt locker see that's a good name what did you originally call it i forget that was a long time ago i forget well are you trying to block that further you know from your mind like i said i am it's a good it's a good little deal it's fun check that one out again dracostore.com if you like something you know get something uh you can also subscribe to this podcast there's not just this podcast also there's jocko unraveling myself and daryl cooper of martyr made fame is he famous from martyr maid yes in my mind he is uh you can check out jocko unraveling we're talking about a bunch of different things historical things and how they tie into what's going on right now we've got the grounded podcast we've got warrior kit podcasts have some new episodes up there you can also check us out at the jockonunderground.com this is look it's a what do they call it paywall yeah i always say firewall yeah you correct me yeah what's the difference uh firewall is a security thing has nothing to do with paying okay so we have a thing that you can pay it costs eight dollars and eighteen cents a month it's basically you're supporting this podcast you're supporting all these podcasts that we're doing and also we have a contingency plan in case we get removed for whatever reason or if we we hear that other platforms are injecting advertisements into our podcast we don't like that i don't like that i don't want to have colonel matt jackson talking about flying a mission to vietnam and have somebody edit in a freaking advertisement so we don't want that we don't want that uh so that's why we made jockowunderground.com we also we also put a little additional podcast on there just to say thanks so we appreciate it if you're if you're helping us out there you're you're helping us remain free so go to jocklowunderground.com if you want to help out there we also have a youtube channel a youtube channel because echo charles is a youtuber technically you're the youtuber technically so you know charles is a youtuber and he wants you to subscribe to his youtube channel where he posts youtube videos first okay first off the youtube channel is called jocko podcast and doesn't have echo in there at all ever pretty much maybe in some of the titles yes what's the difference between a youtuber and somebody that's posting youtube videos i don't think there is one yes there is well i don't know i guess if you go through youtube youtube no youtuber is that that's their primary occupation is to be on youtube but then again even that yeah that that is it i think as far as i know there's some really legit youtubers out there that make freaking awesome stuff and and post it yeah fully there's also a lot of youtubers out there it's hard to throw them in that same bucket with the awesome yeah the awesomeness so i think you're more in the bucket of like you know wait all right what's the next section anyway all right cool good i mean you're a youtuber i'm a youtuber no that's not our primary so technically we're not youtubers we have a youtube channel and it is yeah i think it's legitimate okay so check that out if you want all right also psychological warfare is an album that jocko made we made of draco telling you how to get through moments of weakness i was actually telling you yeah telling me no it's everybody not everybody that wants because we all have them from time to time you see what i'm saying but yeah you can get that anywhere where you where you get mp3s whether it be amazon google play boom that's where you can get them also also you want a visual representation you want things to hang on your wall basically yep hopefully go to go to flipsidecampus.com my brother dakota meyer he's got a company made in america making cool stuff to hang on your wall which is legit bunch of books we've got a bunch of books we got the books that we talked about today the book we talked about today primarily was undaunted valor an assault helicopter unit vietnam there's also volume 2 medal of honor and volume 3 which matt jackson colonel jackson said was the best of the three about about lamson in uh 17 718 largest air battle um final spin i have a novel coming out myself and it's a story it's a book it's a poem it's a new form of writing am i allowed to do that we don't know yeah i don't know if i'm allowed to do it but i did it it's a story if you want to get final spin if you want that first a dish boy that first dish is going to be legit all right hey if you want the first to dish order it because guess what the publisher's thinking the publisher's like well you know jocko you uh you mostly write books about leadership so you know what what's this thing over here they're not going to print enough they're not going to print enough and then it'll come out you'll be mad because you've got the third to dish brutal shame just shame [Laughter] uh leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols display equals freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons about face this is getting to be a long list isn't it yes sir and then the the original books extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership that i wrote with my brother leif babin also we have echelon front which is our leadership consulting company we solve problems through leadership go to ashlandfront.com if you want us to help inside your company we have ef online which is online training for leadership you can get your whole organization into the game go to efonline.com for that muster our leadership events we are executing we didn't execute in 2020. there was the virus and whatnot we were about to execute one in 2020 and guess what happened i got the virus i got it i had i had miss rona yeah and so when i had miss rona i couldn't go spread it to everybody so we we didn't execute any in 2021 we are 100 executing in 2021 orlando may 25th and 26th phoenix phoenix august 17th and 18th and las vegas october 28th and 29th go to extreme ownership.com everything that we've done has sold out these are going to sell out too especially because we got a little less people for social distancing and whatnot so less seats so they're going to sell out if you want to come go to extremeownership.com asap we have ef battlefield which is us for this particular one the next one we've got up is us walking the battlefield at gettysburg this is a small number of people attending very small it's like 35 people so if you want to come go to slumfront.com events you can sign up for that or you can sign up for the ftx we do combat missions simulated combat missions to teach leadership awesome stuff if you want to help service members active and retired if you want to help their families if you want to help gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors and if you want any more i mean if you just feel like you need more of my protracted pontifications or you need more of ekko's confounding catechisms you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram or on that facebook echoes that equity charles and i am at jocko willink and thanks once again to colonel matt jackson for joining us and for writing these books but most important for his service to america and we will not forget the fallen soldiers of the 227th assault helicopter battalion freedom is not free and thanks to all the other men and women out there in uniform who are always on watch and ready to protect and defend our way of life and that includes not only the military but also police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all the other first responders thank you for protecting and defending us as well and to everyone else remember the price that was paid for our freedom and in the book undaunted valor there's a part that i did not read today this is where dan corey and his team fly to an out station to pick up some bodies of two soldiers that were killed in action and they arrive on scene and the two fallen servicemen wrapped in ponchos are are loaded onto the old huey warbor warbird and dan corey whispers a prayer that he had written he says may they soar with the angels on wings of eagles may they watch over those they loved and those who love them may they rest in peace until we gather for the final formation amen and that's all i've got for tonight and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 634,644

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint, vietnam, pilot, huey

Id: 9wbMdm6xpJM

Length: 235min 20sec (14120 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021