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  The IPs believed that student errors were premeditated attempts on their lives, and reacted accordingly. (When later I became an IP at the same school, I shared this feeling.) The IPs had several different ways of showing their displeasure. Most of them shouted over the intercom at every repeated mistake. At least one of them hit his students with a stick. All of them used bad grades to underline bad performance. Tom Anderson, however, used extreme disappointment to point out our mistakes.

  A week before I was to take my primary check ride, Anderson cut the power as I cruised toward the stage field. I bottomed the pitch immediately, turned into the wind (everything that flies lands into the wind—it reduces ground speed at touchdown), and glided down in autorotation, just like an automaton. I was very proud of the fact that I had remembered to bottom the pitch satisfactorily, and was intent on landing straight ahead, into the wind. But Anderson had picked a place where to turn into the wind was also to turn toward some huge power lines. Being a dumb candidate, I was concentrating on doing the maneuver by the numbers. I noticed Anderson shaking his head forlornly, out of the corner of my eye. My feeling of pride and competence turned to stark terror. I saw the power lines. I turned abruptly away from them, but I was now very low, heading for a stand of trees. Anderson kept shaking his head sadly.

  “I’ve got it,” said Anderson. A hopeless tone in his voice completed the rest of the sentence wordlessly. “I’ve got it, asshole.” I nodded my head in agreement. How could I have not seen all those wires? Anderson restored the helicopter to intelligent control, brought back the power, and nursed us gently away from the trees. He looked like he was attending a funeral.

  “Bob, if you land in the wires, you will get killed.” At that moment, I would have preferred death to his disappointment. Back at cruising altitude, he gave me the controls again. “Let’s just go to the stage field. Maybe you can land without hurting us?” He sighed.

  I nodded eagerly. I would definitely get us back okay. “I’ve got it,” I said.

  Anderson nodded and sat back with his arms folded. When I turned to look for the stage field, he cut the power again—at the same place, with the same power lines. This time I looked for a clear spot first, then maneuvered to approach it into the wind. Anderson just sat there. When we were fifty feet from the clearing I had picked and he hadn’t taken over the controls, I knew he was going to let me go all the way. I hit the ground and skidded twenty feet into a shallow ditch I hadn’t seen and came to a halt.

  “That’s more like it,” he said, smiling.

  I knew then that I would pass my primary check ride.

  After the check ride we concentrated on advanced maneuvers: takeoffs and landings in confined areas and pinnacles, cross-country navigation, night flying, night autorotations.

  Anderson very carefully demonstrated the flight school’s procedure for getting into and out of confined areas. It was a method designed to minimize damage. A student helicopter pilot wallowing around in a hover in a tight clearing is an accident waiting to happen. You circled the clearing you picked until you had determined the best approach path over the lowest obstacles, into the wind. You would then pick a spot in the clearing and make your landing. On the ground, you would lock the collective down and the throttle at idle position and get out of the helicopter, leaving it running. You put a rock or a stick under the chin bubble so you could see it from inside. Then you went to the downwind side of the clearing, paced a distance equal to the length of the helicopter plus five paces safety margin back from the nearest obstacle, and deposited another marker. Then you paced it out to see if you were able to turn around in a hover over the first marker without hitting the trees at the upwind side of the clearing. If you could, you were finished analyzing the area and could get back into the machine. If you couldn’t turn it and were going to have to hover backward from the upwind marker to the downwind marker, you had to install a line of markers between the two points as a guide for your rearward flight.

  Each clearing was different. Some required much pacing and marking to get out of. Others were so big and free of obstacles that the drill of placing markers seemed pointless. Months later, in Vietnam, I realized that I automatically analyzed each clearing before I landed. The drill worked.

  Anderson sometimes took two of his students on a demonstration ride, to save time. One day we landed in a very small, confined area marked with a red tire, signifying that it was to be used only with an IP. Hovering at the front of the clearing, the tail rotor was only a few feet from the rear. Anderson backed the helicopter a few feet and tried to take off. Several factors were against us. One, it was a very hot day, making the density altitude very high, giving us less than normal lift. (Air density is corrected for altitude, temperature, and humidity. Hot, humid air raises the density altitude; cold, dry air lowers it.) Two, the machine was overloaded for this density altitude. (This was a common flying condition in Vietnam.) Anderson made one attempt to get over the trees in front of us and had to abort the takeoff midway, sliding backward into the clearing. The ship would not go. I offered to get out and walk to a nearby field.

  “Not necessary,” said Anderson. He picked up to a hover and began to circle around in the tiny clearing, just missing the trees with the rotors. My classmate and I thought he had gone nuts. But after two tight turns we could see what he was trying to do. He was accelerating in a circle to translational-lift speed. When the ship lurched into translational lift, Anderson aimed for the gap between two trees and went. He made it. It was a much tighter fit than a student would be allowed to try, but he made it. I never forgot that takeoff. There is always a way.

  A few days later I ended my five months at Fort Wolters with an hour-long, sweaty check ride in which I successfully demonstrated my abilities to the army inspector. Our class was to continue the course at Fort Rucker.

  We arrived with eighty-five hours of flight time from Wolters. We logged eighty-eight more in the H-19 Sikorsky, learning to do confined areas without markers, landing on pinnacles, and doing lots of cross-country and tactical flying. During the last month we would log twenty-seven hours in the ship everybody lusted to fly: the Bell HU-1 Iroquois, known as the Huey. Huey time was divided between ten hours of orientation and seventeen hours of instrument flying.

  Though the flight training progressed noticeably, our status did not. We had become senior candidates at Wolters, only to begin over again as junior classmen at Rucker. It wasn’t a complete regression, though. Married students were allowed to live off base with their wives.

  The two trainers we flew at Rucker occupied two poles in the technological developent of helicopters. The H-19 Sikorsky, which looked like a giant tadpole with four wheels, was so tall there were built-in steps leading from the ground to the cockpit. The monster was powered by a heavy, thirteen-cylinder radial engine that took up a large percentage of its potential cargo capacity. The ten seats in its hold, filled with passengers, rendered the machine unhoverable on most days. It had to make running takeoffs even with moderate loads.

  The Huey, on the other hand, with its powerful, lightweight engine, had power to spare. It could hover and take off with ten passengers and a crew of two. It was also quiet, started easily on cold mornings, and was simpler to maintain. Flying the two ships was a telescoped course in the development of helicopters.

  For all its drawbacks, the H-19 was still a good trainer. The H-23 had had direct mechanical linkages to control the rotor system and required heavy-handed operation. The H-19 had hydraulic controls which required a light touch. Its sensitive controls, coupled with its under-powered bulk, made it fly like an overloaded Huey.

  We expected to jump into the new trainer and show our new IPs we were pilots. On my first try, as happened to everybody else, the H-19 just sank to the ground when the IP let me have the controls.

  “The reason you’re sinking is because you’re moving the cyclic too much. That dumps the air cushion from under the disk. Use pressure. If you can see the control
s move, that’s too much. If nothing else, flying this machine will teach you subtlety on the controls.”

  And so it did. In a few hours I didn’t think about the control response at all. I even enjoyed flying the monster.

  The last twenty hours or so in the H-19 were spent in the field, simulating air assaults in student aviation companies. We flew reconnaissance missions, day and night cross-country, and were given turns at planning and leading air assaults composed of many ships flying in loose formation.

  Near the end of our training with the H-19 we began to see more and more of the Huey in our ground-school classes.

  “The Huey is the army’s latest utility helicopter,” said the narrator of a training film. A Huey flying low level filled the screen. The camera zoomed in to the main rotor hub spinning above the engine nacelle. “The T53-L-11 gas-turbine engine develops eleven hundred horsepower yet weighs only five hundred pounds. The turbine is basically a jet engine with a fan placed in the exhaust.” An animation showed an engine cutaway. A twelve-inch-diameter turbine fan spun in the gases behind a jet engine. “This single turbine fan is connected by a shaft running back through the engine to the transmission. The pressure of the gases pushing through this fan generates sufficient force to turn the forty-eight-foot rotor system and the eight-foot tail-rotor assembly and lift the 5000-pound machine plus a maximum load of 4500 pounds into the air.” The animation dissolved to a Huey banking away to swoop down to a jungle. “The Huey’s streamlined design allows a maximum cruise speed of 120 knots.” We laughed at this point, because our H-19s flew at 80 knots. The film showed a Huey sitting in a clearing. As the announcer spoke, the craft began to rise vertically. “Though not recommended, the Huey is capable of hovering vertically up to an altitude of 10,000 feet on a standard day.” The film went on to show how it was variously configured as an air ambulance (Medevac) carrying six litters; as a gunship (Guns) carrying pilot-directed machine guns, rockets, or grenade launchers; and as a troop carrier (Slick) with room for ten soldiers and two crew-operated door guns.

  My first impression of the machine was that it was pure silk. When the IP squeezed the starter trigger on the collective, the response was a shrill whine as the highspeed starter motor began slowly to move the blades, not the clacking cough and roar I was used to. At operating speed there was no roaring, vibrating, or shaking, just a smooth whine from the turbine. The IP signaled me to pull up the collective. The big rotors thudded a little as they increased their pitch, and the machine left the ground like it was falling up.

  I overcontrolled the pedals, making the tail wag back and forth. This was a common reaction to the sensitive controls and was called the “Huey shuffle.”

  The heavy, thudding noise of the main rotors—the characteristic wop-wop-wop sound—was caused by their huge size, 48 feet from tip to tip, and a 21-inch chord (width). With ballast weights at each blade tip, the whirling rotor system had tremendous inertia. The IP demonstrated this inertia with a trick that only a Huey could do. On the ground at normal rotor speed (330 rpm) he cut the power, picked the machine up to a four-foot hover, turned completely around, and set it back on the ground. Incredible! Any other helicopter would just sit there, not rising an inch, while the rotors slowed down. These big metal blades with the weights in the tips would serve me well in Vietnam. Their strength and inertia allowed them to chop small tree branches with ease.

  During this orientation period in the Huey, Patience drilled me at home on the checklist. Her method was negative reinforcement. She kicked me in the shins at each mistake. I learned it so well that even now, when I recall the Huey cockpit check, I get a twinge in my leg.

  Flying an hour each day, it took two weeks to finish the orientation in the Huey. Next was instrument flying.

  We were one of the first classes to get instrument training. Helicopter pilots traditionally maintained eye contact with the ground. To the old pilots, VFR (visual flight rules) and IFR (instrument flight rules) were one and the same: “visually follow roads” and “I follow roads.” If a storm got bad, you just flew slower and lower. If it got real bad, you stopped in a field. That innocent philosophy was coming to an end. The helicopter was going to war; in war you can’t fly slower and lower or stop just because the weather is bad.

  I enjoyed the instrument training very much. You got into a Huey with an instructor, put on the hood (a device which restricted your vision to inside the cockpit), flew all over Alabama, making practice landings at airports you never saw, and returned an hour or two later, never having seen the ground or the sky or anything except the inside of the cockpit. On my final check ride I flew from Fort Rucker down to Gainesville, Florida, and back, making four approaches to strange airfields and two course intersections. The dreamlike flight lasted four hours. The only clues that I was flying were moving needles in gauges and radio conversations with various control towers. I had to use this training only a few times in Vietnam, but it saved lives when I did.

  On May 11, 1965, we got our warrant-officer bars and our silver wings. My father and sister and Patience and Jack were there to see me graduate. (My mother was sick, and couldn’t attend.) I was very proud. It had been the most eventful ten months of my twenty-three years.

  ———

  Sixty percent of our class were sent immediately to Vietnam. I was among the forty percent who thought they had somehow lucked out by getting assignments in the States. This was an illusion. I had asked for and been assigned to the 3rd Transportation Company, Fort Belvoir, Virginia—the VIP flight. This unit flew congressmen and senators around Washington and maintained a twenty-four-hour scramble-alert status to rush certain people to underground installations in case of Bad Times. The tour was traditionally eighteen months to two years. This duty was too good for brand-new pilots. It was where you went as an old salt. The post was manicured; the local town, Washington, D.C., was fun; and the officers’ club was posh, overlooking the Potomac. We were too dumb to realize that we had been sent here just to be in a holding pattern for a few weeks. Patience and I went out shopping for furniture for the first apartment since our marriage.

  For a few weeks life was okay. I got up in the mornings, put on my orange flight suit, and drove ten miles to the airfield. There I spent two or three hours transitioning into the tandem-rotor Piasecki. After that I would sit around and talk flying with the other pilots.

  Some of the pilots had been to Vietnam. They told us that you could get a stereo in Saigon for about a third of what it cost in the States. That’s what I knew of Vietnam: It was a good place to buy stereo equipment. Many of those pilots had flown in support of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in a nine-to-five war whose objective was to gain control of the South Vietnamese in the face of Ho Chi Minh’s popularity. The Vietnamese Communists in the South—the Vietcong, or VC, as they were called—hadn’t stopped fighting since President Diem had refused to hold the scheduled free elections in 1956. I didn’t know these facts then, but I did know that these pilots talked of the ARVNs as reluctant warriors in an American operation. They had used helicopters to lift the ARVNs to battles they almost always lost. Meanwhile, the VC continued to gain strength.

  Three weeks after arriving, I received orders to report to Fort Benning, Georgia. The orders were not accompanied by explanations.

  “What the fuck is at Fort Benning?” I asked a friend who had received the same orders.

  “I hear they’re forming up a big, new division. Probably we’re going to Vietnam.”

  “Huh?”

  At Fort Benning was the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), which had been developing and testing helicopter air-assault techniques for more than two years. After several big war games in the Carolinas, in which the 11th Air Assault fought a simulated enemy played by elements of the 101st Airborne Division, it was decided that the techniques did indeed work and that an actual air-assault division should be formed and sent to the interior of Vietnam. Since there were all these helicopters and pilots already the
re, they simply changed the name of the test division to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and acquired more pilots and aircraft to bring it up to full strength.

  Hundreds of pilots arrived at Benning in the middle of June, but until July 28 we were told that there was no special reason for this buildup. “There’s no truth to the rumors that we’re going to Vietnam, but don’t sign a lease” was how they put it.

  We were given a rush course in some of the combat techniques the old salts from the test division had devised. Their specialty was low-level flying, called “contour flying.” This technique was supposed to keep exposure to ground fire to a minimum. They had a special low-level route called a “confidence course” where we were taught tricks like flying under power lines and making low-level turns so steep the rotor tips nearly touched the ground. These guys were cowboys.

  On one flight with an old salt named Bill James, I experienced the lowest and fastest helicopter ride I had ever seen. With three air-force pilots along for the ride, James flew along a railroad track bordered by tall trees. At more than 100 knots, he squeezed the fuselage down into this channel of trees while the rotor just brushed the tops. It was blinding. The air-force pilots screamed, “He’s crazy! Tell him to stop! Stop!” James accelerated when he heard them yell. At 120 knots, between two rows of trees, the world is a green blur. I had no idea how James was able to see what he was doing.

  Another procedure the old salts had refined was formation flying. In flight school our formations could be defined as two or more helicopters flying within sight of each other in the same sky. We had not been taught close formation flying, because it was considered too dangerous. But to get a flight of four Hueys into a small landing zone (LZ) at the same time required that they fly, land, and take off very close together.