Armed with a Red Cross

Flight Journal, Oct 1999 by Brady, Patrick

The patients were at the edge of a tree line backed by a river. The enemy, as always, invisible, had last been heard from a few hundred yards across an open rice paddy in another tree line. The landing zone (LZ) was classified "secure." We went upstream, dropped our Huey between the river banks, raced back downstream, jumped over the trees and sat down in the LZ.

Everything was nice and quiet. I was watching the green smoke that marked the LZ lazily dissipate in the rotor wash when all hell broke loose. Bullets snapped past sounding like firecrackers exploding between our ears as they broke the sound barrier. There we were-a sitting duck in a sack of JP4; our only meaningful protection, the .45s snuggled warmly between our legs. My physical reaction was a burning sensation in my ears; I tried to shrink, to somehow become a smaller target. That's when we learned the true meaning of puckering-when the cheeks from the lower part of your body slowly begin to envelop your ears.

A battlefield is always a mess; people shooting, shouting and crawling. This time, no one will stand up to help load the wounded, and we sit there in plain sight with our heads 10 feet in the air and grind and fret about getting the casualties on board. As I go back and forth, alternately yelling out the window and shouting into the radio, I catch a glimpse of my copilot engaged in a cockpit evasive action I have never before seen. (Strange things happen in a cockpit when someone is shooting at you. On one occasion, I looked for my copilot and he was gone-not really; he had just switched the location of his head to where his butt would normally be.) This time, my copilot was going through some extraordinary, snake-like gyrations with his head, to and fro, side to side and all around the cyclic stick. Back to the patients-"Come on, you guys; hurry up"and then to my buddy, whose head I feared would depart his shoulders as his gyrations became faster and faster the longer we sat there. Finally, amid the racket of the running helicopter and the all-engulfing sounds of battle, I could bear it no longer and began to laugh almost convulsively. He didn't miss a stroke as he coldly eyed me between gyrations and said, "Laugh you son of a bitch; but it's harder to hit a moving target."

That story, I think, illustrates the difference between the experiences of chopper pilots and other combat fliers. We often had to land right on the battlefield while the battle raged. While the jet jockey was up there in the wild blue yonder contemplating the "face of God," we were down in the mud between His ankles. Those pilots who have bailed out and slowly floated down through a dogfight will clearly understand what I am talking about.

Every chopper pilot searched for ways to beat the sittingduck syndrome, to be a moving target. But there wasn't a book on tactical helicopter flying in Vietnam, and as it was the first war in which helicopters played a critical role, we had no base of universal experience from which we could draw. We didn't have teachers such as Captain Eddy, Joe Foss, Gabby Gabreski or Richard Bong. We wrote our books as we went alongunique books based on each pilot's capabilities, imagination and experiences. Here are some chapters from my "book" about being a Dust Off (medivac) pilot during two tours in Vietnam.

My first Dust Off in Vietnam was in mountainous terrain near Plei Ku. My copilot was a short-timer who seemed quite relaxed until we neared the firefight. He then became very alert. Would I mind, he asked, if he showed me a "tactical approach." I didn't know what he was talking about, but although my feelings were bruised, I consented. He then flew directly over the target, beeped the rotors down a few hundred rpm, kicked it out of trim and, from 3,000 feet, bottomed the pitch and dived for the area. We were falling like a brick! Being fresh out of flight school (high-recon, low-recon, 500fpm stabilized descents), I was shocked. I was also surprised that we survived. His explanation was compelling: the only area with any hope of being secure was our LZ, therefore the shortest, fastest route down from altitude was the safest. I was to find acceptance of the "overhead spiral theory" pretty common; many thought it was the only safe way into a hot area. During missions in my first tour, I did, too, and used it often-perhaps once too often.

It was not a good day. Earlier in the mission, near the Iron Triangle, our servos had gone out. By that time, I had over two months in the country, and despite the fact that it took both pilots to out-muscle the controls, I should have taken the helicopter back to Saigon. Instead, we bounced it into a grass field rather than risk the flight back. We scrambled from the bird and set up a perimeter as I saw visions of bamboo cages, or worse. Fortunately, a friendly patrol saw us go in and rushed to secure the area. They brought us another ship and we returned for the casualties. The pickup site was west of a tree line in an open rice paddy. We were told the LZ was secure and the friendlies popped smoke. I identified the color, and we were good to go.