Rattler One-Seven: A Vietnam Helicopter Pilot's War Story

Air & Space Power Journal, Summer, 2009 by John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Rattler One-Seven: A Vietnam Helicopter Pilot's War Story by Chuck Gross. University of North Texas Press (http://www.unt.edu/untpress), P.O. Box 311336, Denton, Texas 76203-1336, 2004, 248 pages, $27.95 (hardcover), $14.95 (softcover).

Over three decades have passed since Ameri cans last saw combat in Vietnam, and we might suppose that the supply of first-rate, first-person memoirs by those who fought there had dried up. Wrong! Interest in the Vietnam War remains strong, and the erosion of antiwar editorial bias has led to the release in recent years of some remarkably frank and gripping personal accounts, the work under review among them. Rattler One-Seven--the title comes from the author's personal call sign--is about author Chuck Gross's one-year tour of duty as a warrant officer UH-1 "Huey" pilot assigned to the Chu Lai-based 71st Assault Helicopter Company of the Americal Division, beginning 15 May 1970, prior to his 20th birthday.

Time tends to smooth memory's rough edges, and the value of Gross's account is greatly enhanced by frequent reference to his letters home--letters that preserve an emotional intensity and authenticity of language that otherwise would have been lost. The book is well illustrated with photographs taken by the author and his fellow aviators (the incredible youth of the warrant-officer pilots and their crews is striking), and these surely enhance the intensity and authenticity as well. Gross also makes good use of the testimonies of comrades who served with him. His style is spare and straight-forward, and his account modest and direct, unsparing in his assessments of himself and others. His observations on leadership, good and bad alike, are compelling. After returning from Vietnam, the author embarked on a career in aviation--at the time he wrote this book, he worked as a captain for American Airlines, flying Boeing 757s and 767s. He knows his flying, and it shows. In the reviewer's perhaps biased opinion (I flew Air Force HH-3E and HH-53C "Jolly Green" rescue helicopters in Southeast Asia in 1965-66 and 1975), Rattler One-Seven is one of the most authentic pilot's memoirs to come out of Vietnam--and surely the best by a helicopter pilot.

Gross takes the reader with him from his decision to join the Army, through his experiences with helicopter training, to the long flight from McChord AFB, Washington, to Vietnam. Arriving as a "newby," he undergoes the trials and tribulations of learning the operational environment and aircraft while gaining acceptance from his unit's experienced pilots. Gross preferred to fly "Slicks"--UH-1 D and H troop transports--as opposed to UH-IG Cobra gunships, though he had friends in his brigade's attack helicopter company and draws extensively on their experiences in his narrative. We follow along as he grows in skill and experience, finally earning election (yes, election--very different from Air Force procedures!) as senior aircraft commander at the tender age of 20. Gross flew a variety of missions, ranging from being on night flare-ship alert, standing by to help beleaguered outposts; hauling ground commanders and their staffs; spraying Agent Orange; and inserting special operations groups into Laos as well as extracting them. His account of a night extraction of a compromised patrol from a minuscule landing zone (LZ) in south Laos had the hair standing up on the back of my neck!

The author logged the bulk of his missions in the assault role, hauling mostly troopers from the Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam (ARVN) into combat (US line infantry was being withdrawn when he arrived in-theater). This was mostly routine--but not entirely. The climax of the book comes with the participation of Gross's unit in Operation Lam Son 719, the ARVN's drive west from Khe Sanh to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail by land in February-April 1971. One of the most ill-conceived operations of the war, Lam Son 719 was hamstrung by a congressional edict prohibiting the use of US ground forces in Laos. Consequently, the ARVN battalions went in without their American advisers and, lacking English-speaking forward air controllers, had no access to close air support. That became a matter of life and death--mostly the latter--when they found themselves heavily outnumbered by North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks and antiaircraft artillery.

The congressional ban did not apply to US aviators, and the results were not pretty. The beleaguered ARVN infantry depended totally on US Army helicopters for insertion and extraction, and the assault-helicopter companies depended on Huey gunships for fire support, affording what protection they could against North Vietnamese .51-caliber heavy machine guns and, on occasion, 23 mm and 37 mm antiaircraft artillery and tanks. Gross's gripping account of the LZ Lolo fiasco of 3 March (because the author did not fly that day, he depends on his friends' eyewitness accounts) alone is worth the price of the book. The vision of over 100 Hueys going into a single-ship LZ in trail formation under constant fire, uncertain as to just who controlled the LZ, made my blood run cold. In the end, the courage, skill, and determination of the Army aviators salvaged something from defeat, but at a heavy price: 107 helicopters destroyed and battle damage to an additional 618 (pp. 179-80). The devil, of course, is in the details, and Gross handles them well. The Army helicopter side of the Vietnam War has been poorly served in the literature, but this fine account goes far in making good the deficiency.