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Snake Pilot: Flying the Cobra Attack Helicopter in Vietnam
Army, Jan 2004 by Kurtz, James H
Snake Pilot: Flying the Cobra Attack Helicopter in Vietnam. Randy R. Zahn. Brassey's, Inc. (800) 775-2518. 283 pages; photographs; maps; index; $27.95.
Personal Memoir of Vietnam Offers Lessons for Today
"Enjoying the flexibility, mobility and firepower provided by the helicopter, the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry employed the techniques of modern cavalry doctrine. With the use of the 'pink team,' one AH-1G gunship helicopter and one OH-6A observation helicopter, the troops were able to cover large areas effectively. When the situation warranted, the Aero-Rifle Platoon (ARP) would be inserted to fix the enemy until a larger force could be committed to the area. The ARP would also search out bunker complexes, possible cache sites, and conduct ground reconnaissance. The squadron succeeded in bringing death to 985 enemy soldiers during this period. In addition to capturing or destroying 464 individual and crew-served weapons, over 579,000 pounds of rice were found and destroyed or hauled back by friendly units. Other equipment such as bicycles, rafts, clothing, trucks and various types of ammunition were also destroyed."
Thus did the 1st Cavalry Division describe the combined arms capabilities of its reconnaissance squadron and the squadron's performance in Cambodia from May 1 to June 30, 1970.
After Vietnam, the combined arms capabilities of air cavalry withered away. Proponency for observation, lift and attack helicopters was assigned to various Training and Doctrine Command centers, leading to "pure" units that did not mix platforms, as had the cavalry. Army Aviation upsized, making platoons into companies and companies into battalions. As focus changed from the Viet Cong to the Warsaw Pact, new platforms came along, optimized to kill tanks, not to perform classic cavalry reconnaissance.
Today, Iraq has created new interest in learning old lessons. Apaches and Kiowa Warriors are being paired to once again form pink teams, and their commanders and crews are turning to web sites and e-mail nets frequented by Vietnam-era pilots for advice on how it is done. Snake Pilot by Randy Zahn comes along at an opportune time.
Zahn was a Cobra pilot in Charlie Troop, 1-9 Cavalry. He writes with authority about the duties and responsibilities of the "high bird" in a pink team, the armed helicopter from the troop's red (weapons) platoon that kept watch over the Loach (light observation helicopter) from the white (scout) platoon. As a 19-year-old, fresh out of flight school, he went through a five-month apprenticeship in the front seat to qualify as an aircraft commander (AC). As an AC, he had responsibility not only for his own aircraft and the life of his frontseater, but also for the little bird and its crew, the Hueys from the lift platoon that inserted the blues of the aero-rifle platoon and the blues themselves once they were on the ground. Long before someone invented the term "battle captain," young warrant officers like Randy Zahn were expertly commanding combined arms teams in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
His book relates the tricks of the trade: how to keep the little bird in sight, immediately roll in with rockets to suppress ground-to-air fire, call for and adjust artillery and close air support, cover downed birds and Medevacs, extract long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) under fire, select and prep landing zones, insert airmobile forces and maneuver them on the ground.
With tight narrative and reconstructed transcripts of the radio transmissions typical of a pink team encounter with the enemy, he captures the intensity of moments long since buried in the memories of those who lived them. He is able to do so because in 1981 his parents gave him every letter and cassette tape he had ever sent home, from basic training, flight school and Vietnam. Included were tapes he had recorded during missions, where aircraft were shot up and sometimes shot down and their crews were sometimes killed and sometimes rescued; tapes bearing the voices of friends lost to enemy action and senseless accidents; and tapes made in the despair of having lost friends and wondering why. It took him 19 years to work up the courage to confront the ghosts in these tapes and letters and months to get through them when he did. Having done so, he produced a book that is not so much a memoir of events past as a freshly discovered, live report from the past.
Therein lies the book's weakness: it is told in the voice of the teenaged pilot he was in 1970 with almost no perspective added from the distance of three decades. In the index under the heading "CO (Commanding Officer), conflict with" are five separate entries, and those do not include the numerous confrontations he had with platoon, leaders, the military police and others-even his own brother. The book settles scores with everyone who wronged the author, naming their names, supplying their side of conversations and cursing their memories. Not even the dead are spared.
Some of the living people portrayed as fools and worse by Zahn are people I know, for I was assigned to Charlie Troop just days after he left it, after a "commanding officer, conflict with" of my own, only in my case it was with the squadron commander. I had been in A Troop as operations officer and red platoon leader, two positions whose occupants in C Troop Mr. Zahn found particularly unworthy of respect. I can and do sympathize with many of the frustrations he felt, for I experienced them myself, and like him they led me to challenge a superior officer in a way the superior found objectionable.
