Tired

Company A

227th Assault Helicopter Battalion

1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)

Tired, Hot, Heavy, and Wet!
by WO-1 John L. Keller, 1st Flt Plt, A/227

Going into my third full month in country, in the summer of 1966, it proved to be a lot of moving around and daily flying in hot, dusty conditions. About the entire month of June, A Company was staging out of the airfield at Kontum. We had nice barracks to live in at the airfield, and the Officer's Club served a potent drink with five shots of "whatever" and some crushed Pineapple and juice. Ironically, it was named, "the Kontum Special," because if you drank it and could still walk out of the Club, you were "special." I had seen an Air America C-46 crash while landing that almost wiped out several of our First Flight Platoon birds parked near the runway. Recalling the crash in slow motion from my vantage point near the runway was not half as weird as it must have looked when viewed from the cockpit of the C-46. The pilots just got out and shook their heads!
During the same time span, an Air Force Captain flying an A-1E Skyraider out of Duc To did some extraordinary feat to qualify for the Congressional Medal of Honor! While waiting to pick up troops, we had watched him takeoff to tag along with a FAC Bird Dog. Further north, near Dak To, Army Captain Carpenter; I believe they called him "The Lonesome End," from his football days at West Point, called in napalm on his position. For that action, he was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. This area was really a busy place! All of the names: Dak Pek, Dak To, Duc To, Plateau Gi, Plei Djering, etc. were at the far northwest corner of our normal A.O. None of the "old guys" had ever been there in their previous 10 months in country. It was a nasty place and no doubt one of the terminus points of the Ho Chi Minh Trail?
Flying days were long, hot and tiring! During a 30 day period, I flew 21 days and logged 147 flight hours. During part of that time, I flew six of seven days and logged 67.7 hours! One morning, we were lifting off at 0500 and came back to base camp at 0030 the next morning. Bone tired and hungry, we hadn’t shut down all day, ate meals while flying and had logged 12.7 hours and 183 landings; while doing resupply, troop transfers, sling loads, and combat assaults. Sleep came easy wherever you could take a break. Awaiting troops while at a PZ, I loosened my seat belt and shoulder harness and slumped down in the seat to take a quick nap, because I was supposed to take the controls for the next lift. I was flying with 1LT Robert E. "Red" Smith, who was my mentor for a few months. He had flown "guns" with the "Jokers" of the 48th Aviation Company (Blue Stars) before he infused to our Platoon. The next thing I remember was being about 1,000 feet in the air, belts not fully tight and looking out my right, pilot's window and seeing the ground grow smaller. For some weird reason, I thought I was flying the bird. 1LT Smith looked over at me and said, "So Johnny, did ya have a nice nap?" Apparently I had slept for about 15 minutes, to include the noisy time when the troops were boarding and through engine start, commo check, takeoff and climb out.
As a less experienced pilot with the Company, I was being "pushed" to perform, so, when the original First Cav pilots went home at the end of August and first part of September, I would be ready to teach and lead the September "FNG's." I found out later, that CW-2 Jake Cogburn and a few others had requested that I be made an IP when they left. I must have done an "OK" job, because I was recommended for UH-1D Instructor Pilot later on in the year.
Our time in Kontum lasted until 24 June, 1966. A Company then went back to Golf Course to refit and resupply and then we all flew to the beach at Tuy Hoa. RMK-BRJ Construction was building the new Air Force Base, and we were to provide lift support for security forces sweeping the areas for: VC, weapons, ammo and supplies. On July 4th I was flying 63-12959 to a "lagger" area west of Tuy Hoa and the temperature in the shade was 122 degrees! Luckily, we didn't have to do any combat assaults that day. Our waiting troops; the reactionary force, were enjoying their time in the nearby river! We continued to provide lift support in the area while based at the beach and then the Division CG sent out the directive that, "no aviation assets would be allowed to take cots with them from place to place!" That made our ships lighter on the days we moved, but provided little comfort for sleeping. That same day, we went further inland that took us to Cung Son, Pleiku, Phu Tuc, Ban Me Thuot, Dalat, Ban Brieng, Ban Blech over the next three weeks. The rains had started, and we lived in red mud, soaked to the skin everyday, and coffee to warm hands and body.
A Pathfinder/Frontier runway had been set up at Ban Blech and the new, portable SONY developed ILS was set up for C-130 Hercules and C7-A Caribou approaches. The vinyl mat used for the runway surface was green and looked like grass. We watched a C-130 come out of the clouds at 400 feet and land on the mat. Well, it really didn’t land, it kind of went PLOP! It seems there was a stream of water under the mat and the Hercules sunk in four feet of muck! It took four days for the Air Force crew to lift the aircraft from the muddy pit and get it back on solid runway. That caused us to move everything to Ban Brieng and live in the rain there. While there I was wet and cold every hour of every day. Not even our flight jackets and ponchos could keep out the cold and wet! Remember the CG's "NO COT DIRECTIVE?" Well, we just used ammo boxes from then on to provide a sleeping platform for our air mattresses. There were always plenty of boxes around our area. A Company finally came back to The Golf Course on 19 August, 1966 for a few months and I went on R & R to Singapore.