Unbelievable But True - A Vietnam War Story - See Description Below

we were coming north of the mekong river flying to just south of the plain to jars we were at 8 000 feet when all of a sudden bam right between my feet and i was sitting sideways in the seat looking out a window to my left and this 23 millimeter anti-aircraft shell came up right between my feet right between my knees came up like this and it exploded right here [Music] hi my name is richard smith and i have an interesting story to share with you it was back in 1972 i was just 29 years old i was overseas i was in the country of laos i was flying on a caribou uh tale number 430 john bannerman captain bannerman was at the controls we were doing an aerial resupply mission during the battle for skyline ridge there were 27 000 north vietnamese regulars trying to take the area the skyline ridge area longchan valley and so we were bringing in supplies and our supply that we were carrying the code name for it over the radio so that nobody knew what we were doing was called hard rice which was for a code name for high explosive ammunitions of whatever kind that were being called for the airdrop we picked it up in udor in thailand and we were coming north of the mekong river flying to just south of the plain to jars we were at 8 000 feet when all of a sudden bam right between my feet and i was sitting sideways in the seat looking out a window to my left and this 23 millimeter anti-aircraft shell came up right between my feet right between my knees came up like this and it exploded right here and it was less than a foot away from the high explosives and anyway you can see that i wasn't hurt it was as if there was a an invisible shield between me and the explosion the explosion took out well immediately red hydraulic fluid started spraying down from the overhead because the explosion went upward mostly and uh hydraulic fluid was spraying down and my first thought was the airplane's bleeding it's what your mind does in a quick sense like that and anyway i got up and moved right away and like that was a bad place to sit and anyway we broke off the approach to the drop zone and we started heading back and we had to access assess the damage and we knew that we had lost the ability to use our flaps and the landing gear and the brakes because they were all hydraulically operated well as we headed back we were going to land at vincenne we thought well we're not sure that the landing gear would stay down on landing and if if the landing gear collapsed because we're going to try to free fall it if the landing gear collapsed we could ignite you know sparks and gas and whatever could ignite the explosives and so we decided to jettison the cargo made up past alongside the runway we dropped the cargo swung back around dropped the landing gear and hoped that it would stay down we made it okay but i can't explain how come i didn't get hurt i can't explain it now i'm here obviously and it doesn't look like i'm hurt actually i never received a scratch now most everybody i share this story with will say well that's unbelievable and in a sense it is but there's more to the story i want to i want to share the story this is the first this is one incident of of several that happened when i was overseas stories that were unbelievable that uh just hard to explain and i didn't know what was going on at the time so what i want to do to to help you get an idea of the story a little better idea of the story i want to back up a little bit to my early childhood how i got into this position uh before i was five years old i had pneumonia five times and i almost died i was mostly in the hospital or sick in bed and by the time i got to kindergarten um i didn't even know how to play with other kids i never had a chance and so i ended up flunking kindergarten a silly thing and so trying to catch up and and and all of that so i was small for my age and but i made it through high school i graduated from high school but what high school couldn't give me i i thought you know what can i do you know am i really a man i graduated from high school so i thought okay i know and just on the spur of the moment i decided i'm going to join the army not only that i'm going to just sign up that i want to go be a paratrooper and beyond that whatever you know if i could if i could do that then i'll know that okay maybe maybe i am a man maybe i can make it in this world so off i went i make it through basic training through advanced training and they shipped me off to the 82nd airborne division and it was there that i was to take the um the training the jump training go through jump school fort bragg north carolina and uh so i i went through that made my five jumps i made it i thought okay this is it i've done i've i've done what i wanted and so i just got to finish my hitch in the service and then off off i go with the rest of my life well before it wasn't very long that they recruited me to be a parachute rigger i'd finished jump school and said okay well that sounds like fun learn how to pack parachutes and make airdrops dropping supplies and stuff like that like i talked about in vietnam there and in laos and so i went off to jump to rigger school in fort lee virginia came back and i wasn't back more than a month and i was recruited and transferred into the fifth special forces the green berets it was on smoke bomb hill which is in fort bragg north carolina just just down the road from the 82nd airborne division now i'm in special forces i never requested this i thought oh wow okay what's going on why do they want me over there and so they we had some advanced training trying to get me caught up you know they tried to teach some language and and some other things that i was going to need when i got in country and soon i was on a plane headed for for vietnam when i got to vietnam what was what i was doing is i was doing a lot of parachute drops of supplies into special forces a teams and also those were routine supplies routine airdrops but there was also a team that might have that was being hit you know during some night they came at night always and attacked these various teams and and so we'd come in with whatever supplies they needed in an emergency situation i'd do the air drops that kind of stuff and i'd also when it come time for a team to do a parachute jump i would go in with the parachutes and get them all rigged up and i ended up making several parachute jumps in vietnam here you can see the guys are all suited up well most of them anyway getting ready to get on the airplane i'm the guy that has to check them make sure that they get their shoots on correctly and so we're just waiting for everybody to get lined up here there's a shot of me coming yes that's me and that black case is where i keep the camera when i make a parachute jump so when i get out and parachutes open i can pull the camera out and shoot pictures here i am shooting pictures of the other guys around me it's really quiet when you make a parachute jump there's no wind because you're floating with the wind it's really neat really cool that was a lot of fun anyway that's me with my mustache i'm looking up at my parachute there and i just flip the camera around and that's south vietnam and we're floating down and it's a lot of fun and anyway and i would go out with the guys to make a jump and pick up the parachutes when we're done bring them back to the base repack them and get ready for the next mission whatever that happens to be and we're floating down the slots are in this parachutes or for steering so that's basically what what i was doing in vietnam but the very first unexplainable thing that to this day nobody can can figure out what happened how it happened was i was at an airfield out on the out on the ground it was just a grass field and um and it was during the monsoon season and during monsoon season you could just about set your watch every day at four o'clock a a storm front would come in a wall of clouds sometimes just as flat as you would think a piece of paper and extending up twenty thirty thousand feet and it would come in marching across and coming right over you and of course when it hit it started raining cats and dogs and it would rain for twenty thirty minutes and then it would be over and and uh anyway so on this one particular day we had covered everything up it was like five minutes to four and so we'd all headed for cover and there was two of us myself and another guy i remember his name albert p griffith he was a big guy and i was a little guy i probably weighed 125 at that time and he was probably close to 180 pounds maybe closer to 200 i don't know but the two of us were standing just inside the opening of a a cp tent a command post tent a canvas tent you'd see in military movies probably with a 10 foot wide opening and maybe 20 feet maybe 25 feet deep well inside this was an office the command post for for you know loading you know if we had to make an air drop emergency air drop that would come through this this tent out in the field had telephones and radios and all kinds of gear there was a a desk chairs filing cabinet and a bunk i was scheduled to spend the night there in case an emergency call came in i would be the first one i'd jump out of the bunk and and go find the right packages that needed to be dropped ordinance whatever needed to go out and i would start that process so when the when the pilot got there you know we'd be half ready to go well as i was standing there inside the opening of the tent and griffith was right next to me on my right side just inside the opening of the tent we were watching the storm front come in and there was always a little uh wind gust ahead of it the wind gusts would blow the leaves around and maybe flap the tent flaps a little bit but but never amounted to much excuse me well on this particular day as i was watching the storm front which is always a spectacular sight this these clouds as they were coming in across the field all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye i saw griffith's feet come up in the air about the height of my shoulder both of his feet up in the air and i turned to look to see what is going on and as i turned to look he was flying backwards into where the tent was because the tent exploded like a bomb went off just blew the tent and it just went flying up into the air along with all of the furniture that the desk and the chairs and the filing cabinet which had all kinds of of secret documents in it about where we're sending supplies that filing cabinet was tumbling across the grass and all these papers were just flying through the air just a huge cloud of stuff griffith landed probably 30 feet off into the grass over there and everything was skinned off including the the metal bunk that i was supposed to spend the night on except that there was a um a mattress on it was just laying over beside where the bunk was on the outside where the tent used to be as i turned and looked at all of this everything was gone it didn't even blow my hat off i was standing there like like i was watching a movie or something but it actually happened everything was blown away but i wasn't touched not not a scratch and not only that i had brought a a small shortwave radio i was going to listen to that night and i brought it i set it on that bunk the mattress like somebody had come in and folded the mattress over that radio and set it down on the ground and took the bunker which was made of steel and blew it away and the mattress was still sitting there me and my stuff were not touched before i left vietnam i had been doing a lot of this work a lot of airdrops and stuff i had also worked with a company called air america i've flown on a few of their planes and while i was still in country they recruited me to join air america as soon as i got out of the service and i thought oh this that's interesting and and and soon i rotated back to the states and within a couple of months i was out and then i called up this the headquarters which was in washington dc and um air america at the time was a cia operation it was quite secret they said okay they knew all about me i gave them my service number and they checked everything out and they had me on an airplane within three days they told me how to get my passport in one day and and get on a plane and i was headed overseas and i ended up in laos well now i'm with air america i'm in the country of laos which is primarily working along the ho chi minh trail watching you know what supplies are going down into south vietnam essentially i'm doing the exact same thing i did in in vietnam but now working for air america and getting paid a lot better than i was in the service and i ended up with air america for five years total doing this flying as much as oh up to 180 hours a month in in some cases but typically less than that so then the very first thing that happened to me in um the country of laos is i was on a cargo plane a c-123 provider airplane and we were carrying aviation gasoline this gasoline was in 55 gallon steel drums and the cargo plane was had a wide body so we could load we could roll these steel drums in and stand them up on end and fit them as tight together as possible we could get about 30 drums 30 32 drums on the airplane and we were headed up country to a place where we could land off load and this aviation gas would be used by helicopters that were working from a main base out to the different teams that were out in the field and so they needed this aviation gas and it was 115 145 octane high octane the higher the octane is to so that when you have really high compression engines it doesn't predetonate and which would destroy the engine so you could go under military power and anyway so this is very volatile fuel well we were headed into this this site it was lima site 32 i remember that the designation i can't remember the name of the site it's been quite a few years but anyway we were headed in there and we were going to land well we had we were flying about an hour and a half and we got up to this spot and overhead and it was all socked in there was clouds below us but the captain remembered that well we passed a hole in the in the clouds back a ways about five minutes back let's circle back we'll go down through through the hole and come up underneath the clouds and we can land and when we take off we'll just punch up through the clouds no big deal this was pretty much standard routine it wasn't a big deal and so i was sitting in the back waiting for the gear to go down it's usually the first sign okay we're close and we're getting ready to land and when we go into these really short airfields we have locking pins that we put in the main gear through little excess panels and we do that to make sure the gear doesn't collapse on us because we hit pretty hard trying to trying to get the plane stopped and so waiting for the gear to go down and we had dropped down through the hole and now we were coming up underneath we were just punching over or just clipping over the top of these ridges and i was kind of kicked back and i was looking up at the ceiling and suddenly i started seeing i started seeing holes appear in the ceiling little spots of light and all this happened really fast and immediately i recognized these are bullet holes and with all the noise of the airplane and the headset and everything i couldn't hear the gunfire going off but i can hear the sound the punching of of a bullet punching through the the metal of the of the um the ceiling in the airplane and i got on the horn right away we're taking ground fire and then they were hearing it up there too so everybody was on the was uh recognizing what was going on immediately they applied power and we started climbing back up through through the the clouds and well we got it punched out on top and well we didn't dare attempt to land we had all these bullet holes in the airplane and we didn't know i was busy checking okay is there an oil leak do you see any fires back there you know what's going on and checking everything even checking the tires we're going to head back to the base and land and try to figure out what kind of damage was done to the airplane and as i was sitting there looking up at the bullet holes in the ceiling i realized how did those bullets come up through the floor get in between those cans of gas there's very tight space if you can imagine lining up a bunch of cans as tight as you can get them together it had to come up through the spaces between the cans none of them hit the cans of gas and my knees started getting a little wobbly and i thought boy this is really a close one and so we called ahead and boy they had the fire trucks lining up the runway and and and as we as we touched down we didn't know if we were going to have brakes or if we were going to blow a tire or whatever it would have been very serious with all that gas on board you know we could have had a big explosion as we pulled up on the ramp everybody at the airport was there standing there waiting for us to taxi in and oh wow and they and as we pulled up and parked everybody was underneath the wings pointing up at holes in the airplane and i thought oh my but nothing happened unexplainable unbelievable but there's more next i want to tell a story of when this is during the time we call we there was it was called the battle for skyline ridge skyline ridge in central laos was a ridge right above um the the secret base that uh long chin which uh if any of you watched the movie air america they were always trying to get the senator was trying to get them to go to this secret air base well anyway it was at this secret air base we were in there almost every day or i was i mean hundreds of planes landed there every day bringing in supplies they had uh lao fighter plays which were t28s would take off from there and anyway it was a pretty busy spot so anyway the the bad guys the north vietnamese and the pathet lao were pushing in to take over this field because it was causing them a lot of problems and so we landed there we were in a caribou and we would be loaded up with a parachute air drops of ordnance because we had we had teams up on the ridge line which were looking down at at this airfield and so they were trying to defend to keep the bad guys from getting from taking over the ridge and they would come down in and then hit the airfield and so we were trying to keep them resupplied well we would we would load up climb up within five minutes we'd be making an air drop we'd be landing loading up again and going again and we were doing this all day and every time we flew over this one team there was a guy with a with a big gun down there shooting at us poking holes in our airplane and so we we called we we called in says do we have any magic dragons in the area that could come in you know magic dragon the airplane that has the gatling guns that shoot out the side window they circle around and can hit a target on the ground and they did have one that would come in and help us and so we had to stay there to spot for this airplane for the the magic dragon to come in to show him where the this problem was and it was late in the day and um we were getting low on fuel and we're going to finish this drop and then head back to the main base back invention well anyway um as we were circling uh we we called and and um you know where is this magic dragon says well we're here and we were looking around you know and trying to figure out we don't see any you know magic dragon airplane and we were down probably 1500 feet above the ridge and says okay what altitude are you at and they were at 10 000 feet the guys with the big guns weren't going to come down where we were and just as we were looking at each other you know like what are we doing here you know just then we hit we went through the wake turbulence we had heard it on the radio that an artillery group had started an open fire on these guys and we had flown right through right behind the shells that almost you know we almost got it right there and we looked at each other and said let's go home how did we make it through that oh wow another story this one it's sort of believable but it's unbelievable we were in it was late in the day and we'd picked up we were to make an airdrop of food supplies into a a little valley and it was it was very late in the day and as you get closer to the equator when the sun goes down it goes down fairly quickly and you know it was about that time of day that the sun we were just getting over the drop zone just as the the sun was setting and and we were we were running pretty late and we thought oh boy this is going to be a tough one and we had to drop down in this valley and the mountain ridges we were probably 1800 feet in the tops of the mountains were probably 6 000 7000 feet and so we were down in a hole a long valley and we were circling and we'd drop a bundle sin a c-47 a goony bird like a dc-3 you remember what those are c-47 is the military designation and oh as we made the first pass we said hey you guys light up bonfire down there we can't even see anymore it was that getting so dark that you know we don't even know where to drop we're going to keep circling we have a bonfire so they got something lit down there and we were dropping you know our cargo goes down by parachute and it doesn't actually land on the bonfire you know it it scatters around maybe three or four hundred feet but anyway we were dropping on this and dropping probably two bundles at a time we had to make about four passes and as we finished the last pass the captain applied power and the right engine died now a c-47 can maintain altitude at just under 5000 feet on one engine but climbing to 5000 feet on one engine well that's that would be a big job and it would take a long time you might climb at 50 to 100 feet per minute maybe and here we were down in this small little valley and this was back in the days when there was no navigational aids of no gps none of that stuff it was all visual flight rules and pretty much you had to be able to see the mountains and to recognize okay this we're at so and so place and and so there was all of this issue so here we were at well below a safe altitude with one engine totally dark and i mean pitch dark this little the camp that we had dropped at there was only that bonfire there weren't any other lights there was nobody else in this valley the bad guys were clear down at the other end and there was nothing we couldn't see anything we couldn't see the mountains the ridges we could see a few stars overhead but not not enough to be able to navigate by and we had a problem the captain kept the airplane lined up on the long axis of the valley as we tried to figure out what to do and things happened really fast i ran up to the front i knew we were in trouble when we lost that engine and the captain told me and the other kicker that was with me a local allow kicker that was on the airplane helping me uh you guys better jump and says we're gonna stick with the plane because as it turned out we had picked up another american pilot uh who uh his plane was broke down up at 20 alternate the long chin his plane had broke down so he decided well i might as well go back to the back home and you fix the airplane i'll come back and fly some more you know and so four of us had parachutes the captain co-pilot had a parachute and myself and the other kicker but here was this american on board and so the captain said they told told us we better jump they're going to stay with the airplane and and and see what they can do and uh wow i thought okay i went back and i alerted the other kicker and we put on our survival vest our survival kits it snaps onto our parachute harness we were standing in the door and we were both ready to jump and i don't know for some reason i wasn't scared i'd made many many jumps and it was no big deal but i got to thinking you know we're headed down to the wrong end of the valley and in laos if any anybody was shot down in laos and captured by the pathet lao or or the north vietnamese or whatever they were never seen again because we were not supposed to be there and so it was an unofficial war and i was thinking about this as i was standing in the door ready to go out and i thought that's not a very good option either and what the captain and the co-pilot and this other guy was a helicopter pilot the helicopter pilot said at the other end of the valley a right turn there was a river that went out and if you could get into that gorge that canyon it would lead you south out to safety at this altitude that we were at well the problem was okay you're totally blind there's nothing going to tell you when you get to that valley to make the turn that canyon that was uh a dog leg 90 degrees off to the right and so what they had to do was they had to guess now normally if you know you're at one position and you're going to fly say 10 miles you would calculate by your air speed how many minutes and seconds it would be for you to make that turn well that would be all great and good we knew the distance but nobody was thinking to to take a time hack of exactly when we left the drop zone they were busy jocking the throttles trying to get feather the engine that died and and to get going so nobody looked at their watch at that time so they had to guess they had to guess when they were going to turn down this valley and it was a narrow gorge and so i was standing in the back of the airplane thinking about okay do i jump out and take my chances on the ground or do i stay with them and maybe they're going to make it and what was going through my head was you know just just about that time they started to bank the airplane to make the turn into the valley and i thought okay this is it we we're going to know in a probably 30 40 seconds if we made it into the canyon and i was thinking okay i could jump now but then i got to thinking you know maybe it's kind of foolish that i'm i joined this outfit and playing this this dangerous game but i thought okay i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna stick it out and i was thinking i'm not going to jump and the plane made the turn and leveled off and i says okay any second now and i was thinking you know if we splat into the side of the canyon it'll be over in a second i won't even know that we hit the wall and that'll be it that'll be the end of my life and and anyway it was fun while it lasted and these kind of things were going through my mind well we got leveled again can't see anything totally black i was standing in an open door looking out pitch black nothing and you know and and in 10 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds after about a minute i thought we must be in the canyon i ran up into the cockpit and i asked the captain you know the captain the co-pilot and this chopper pilot were all up there um you know trying to guess what to do next and i run up and i said we made it he says we don't know that we made it i could be inches from this canyon wall on this side or the other side i don't i don't dare turn i don't know what to do we're flying straight ahead any moment we could we could run into something and uh so now i was up in the cockpit up in the front and i thought oh boy and i decided i wasn't going to jump and so i was sitting there so the four of us were up there and we were flying probably another two to three more minutes we were flying along and then suddenly suddenly off to our left front about 30 degrees off of our course there was a light up in the sky and we all saw it at once the only thing that we have seen the whole time this was going on besides the bonfire that was back down the valley here was this light and we didn't have to tell the captain why did you turn towards the light because there's no mountains between us in that light but the captain was already turning i mean everybody was on board we knew okay that's safety if we can go towards that light so we turned on that light and we started flying and we thought oh wow you know and we we could tell we were used to seeing lights at night whether another light is moving like another airplane we could tell if the light was moving or if it was stationary and it was a stationary light so we knew that if we got our nose on it we're okay now as we started flying towards that light suddenly after about two minutes suddenly off to our left we could see the valley floor we had broken out on this side of but of of the canyon we could see that on the valley floor but the left side was still blocked we could see village village lights down below us probably oh by this time they were 2000 feet down below us and we could see them scattered out there and then after about another 30 seconds then suddenly this had cleared and then we could see the valley down there what we realized was if we'd have kept going the way we were we'd run smack into this mountain that was blocking the straight direct course that we were headed on and this light that appeared guided us off now as we as we turn and we were looking at this what happened to the light the direction that the light came from there were no mountains out there for at least 150 miles some distance we were looking out over the basin of the mekong river and which was in some distance off and then way beyond that there were mountains but this light was very visible and it didn't seem to be that far away it was stationary up in the up in the sky right there what was that light that saved us these stories that i've just shared with you and there's a couple more um not quite as dramatic as those these were unexplainable issues i didn't know what was going on at the time some years later some years later i had um been introduced i'd found i gone to a revelation seminar and in this revelation seminar it talked about prophecy and different things and i'd come to come to a decision that okay i wanted to follow the lord now i'm back in the united states and married and um both my wife and i um had decided to be baptized and we were getting ready preparing to be baptized and i was thinking about all of these issues things that had happened in my life that were unexplainable when i was a kid and and and getting in the service and and you know making it through the 82nd airborne division through jump school and ending up in special forces and and then being recruited by air america and all of these things and then these unexplainable events the wind event and and the different situations that i got into that just you know just seemed impossible how could that ever happen well but i was remembering these things and i was thinking oh wow you know you know maybe the lord was guarding me but that doesn't make any sense because i didn't know the lord then i was a heathen like everybody else you know drinking and partying and and uh not thinking about god or anything like that and but you know still this question was in my mind what's going on and then after we were margie my first wife after we were were baptized my parents came to visit me now my mom was a spiritualist uh she uh you know we didn't we didn't go to church or anything when i was a kid did we pray did we do anything there was none of that but as i was sharing this story with my mom telling her about these events she said richard don't you remember because because uh let me back up here uh i was joining the seventh day adventist church and and i'd mentioned that we we were baptized in the seventh-day adventist church and so my mom said richard don't you remember me telling you that when you were born right in the delivery room right there the doctor picked you up held you in his hands and he said a special prayer over you he said that doctor was a seventh-day adventist [Music] after i picked myself up off the ground [Music] i realized the prayer of a righteous man availeth much [Music] could it be the day i was born the prayer was said to protect me and god sent his guardian angels watch over this kid as i think about it it chokes me up [Music] i hope to meet that doctor in heaven [Music] god bless [Music] you

Channel: Mick Dunnewin

Views: 375,664

Keywords: Green Beret, CIA's in Laos, unbelievable but true, Secret airbase in Laos, cargo kicker, miracle storys, Vietnam War, Air America

Id: G-dKSYcWoz4

Length: 41min 44sec (2504 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022