Another old war story

HueyPilotVN said:

Here is another short one.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your stories. And welcome home! I like the war stories where nobody gets hurt and I have one of my own.

I was in the infantry, Army 11B.    B-3-8,  4Th Infantry Division. 1969/70.

This is  one of my favorite Vietnam war stories which happened to a guy in my squad in the Central Highland Jungles somewhere around An Khe.

We hump to a hilltop a few clicks away, but we get there later than usual to set up. It's getting dark.

We set up the perimeter, dig our foxholes and such.

Tony, a guy in my squad goes out to set up the claymore. Remember, now somewhat darker. He puts down his M16 to put in the blasting cap. At this point, he is sitting much like a Vietnamese would.

Out of the thick jungle, from nowhere it seems, a NVA troop quietly comes out of the thick jungle and puts his arm around Tony and starts speaking Vietnamese, mistaking him for his own NVA buddy.

Tony jumps up, kicks the NVA troop in the ***s, grabs his AK47 and tries to figure out how to fire it (we had no training that I can recall on AK 47's). The AK47 was on safety. Much different than on a M16. The NVA yelled and  went running without his AK47. Tony finally got a round off, but missed, as the NVA was long gone by that time.

Then after all the chaos is over (there is always chaos in an infantry company for a while when an unexpected small arms  round is fired off close by), Tony comes back into the perimeter with his M-16 in one hand and the AK47 in the other.

I wonder if he has nightmares these days. It didn't even happen to me and I cannot forget his experience.

-Don-  SSF, CA

Don,

Thanks and Welcome home yourself.

11Bravo was the real army.  We were just the taxi drivers.

I was hoping that some of you guys would add your stories.  I hope that more will add thiers.

Strange things happen in the fog of war.  I imagine the NVA guy had his own nightmares and caught some grief for losing his AK.

HueyPilotVN said:

Don,

Thanks and Welcome home yourself.

11Bravo was the real army.  We were just the taxi drivers.

I was hoping that some of you guys would add your stories.  I hope that more will add thiers.

Strange things happen in the fog of war.  I imagine the NVA guy had his own nightmares and caught some grief for losing his AK.

Click to expand...

Well, thanks for the support. They taught us that all other MOSs in the army only have one purpose--to support the infantry.

Yeah, that NVA might have had some difficult explaining to do.

I once caught  some grief from losing my helmet. We had to jump between two cliffs several feet apart(kinda hard to explain).  My helmet then fell off and went down between these two cliffs. Long ways down. I think it must  still be rolling down hill .

Anyway, when we got back to the An Khe basecamp, I got another helmet, but they took it out of my pay.

The problem was that there was no combat that day.

The lost equipment form asks how lost:

1. Lost during combat (means the army pays).
2. Lost through neglect (means I pay).

No other questions.

IIRC, they took $45.00 out of my monthly pay for that one month  in 1969.

-Don-  SSF, CA

Bill,

The "great person" you are comes through in your war stories.  I respect you more and more as I read your stories.  Thanks for sharing!

JerryF

Here is another one and I would be more than happy if someone else wants to add thiers.


Another old war story
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I have been known to tell a few stories about long ago and far away in Sunny South Viet Nam. This is another of them. This story is true; of course I might say that anyway.

I was very fortunate to either not have as many bad experiences as most or maybe I just forgot all of them. This is not a bad memory, not particularly funny either, but it might be interesting to read.

During the two tours I spent doing the same job in the Delta; I came to recognize the places where we would usually get fired upon from. I tried to avoid these places. One of them unfortunately was an outpost in the far western part of the Delta which I had to resupply on several occasions. These were single ship missions and we did not have any gunship cover.

The first picture below is a picture of Chi Lang, south of Moc Hoa and west of the Mekong River. The actual camp was farther west and was a Special Forces camp that had the typical triangular shape and was smaller than this one.


Whenever we would shoot a normal approach to this location we would almost always get shot at. We developed two ways to avoid coming under fire. The first way was to come in right off the deck and actually fly under the tops of the trees. We would keep our main rotor above the branches and leaves and allow the body of the Huey to hang below the level of the trees to avoid being seen in the sky.


When we got to the camp we would pop up slightly and lay the Huey on its side like a motorcycle and kill all our forward speed and then just sit it down inside the perimeter.


The second way to get to the camp without drawing fire was to perform a maneuver that was never taught in flight school. We developed this technique among ourselves and had to be very careful doing it because of the danger and consequences of not doing it right.

A normal rate of descent for a landing is 500 feet per minute. This kind of hanging in the air descent would draw fire. We would approach the camp at an altitude of about 2,500 feet. Normally, small arms fire such as an AK-47 was not effective above 1,500 feet.

A 51 cal round was effective, but that is another story.

We would reduce our airspeed and literally come to a hover at 2,500 feet directly over our landing site. I would then lay the aircraft on its side and fall out of the sky. We would fall like a brick as the main rotor sliced thru the air and did not provide any lift falling sideways. One side of the Huey was facing the ground and the other side faces only the sky. I would fly a 360 degree circle slowly nosing the cyclic control forward to gradually fly into air that would gradually provide some lift.

If done properly I would arrive at the end of a very fast descent at the same time as I completed the 360 turn and at the same time that I regained enough lift to cancel out the descent.

If I was too soon recovering I would end up a couple hundred feet in the air as a sitting duck. Worse yet, if I did not recover in time I would have flown into the ground at a deadly rate. Needless to say we never did that.

The crew always knew what we were doing. The passengers might or might not know. If they did not know what we were doing they certainly got interested in a hurry.

That's my story and I am sticking to it.
__________________

Another good story, but something is wrong with your images.

My bad...I guess.  I exited the thread and went back and they opened okay.

I was editing them as they were out of order, look again and thanks.

Another old war story
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This story is about the same base camp as the previous story so I thought I would share them together. This one is still true but I will soon run out of the true ones and might have to start adlibbing. I did make up some stories when my two sons were very young. They were some whoppers. At the end of a whopper story I would finish with "and then I died". They would say "Ah Dad" and jump up, but I had them up until then.

This story involves those same two high ranking passengers as the time that I was shot down, (The Senior Advisor to IV Corp and his counterpart a Vietnamese General). I spent almost all of my two tours flying these guys or their replacements around. I actually enjoyed flying them because if something happened to us we would get everyone?s attention. Everyone wants to rescue a General or two and collect a hero badge.

We started that day by picking up General Hahn, (the warlord of Cao Lahn), at the monument pad in Cao Lahn where he had a compound with about 100 troops to guard him at home.

We were going to spend the day doing a sweep of the Delta to visit a few of the Special Forces A team bases, (also called Snake Eaters). The first base camp we were going to was out in the far west side of the Delta. This base was a triangle shaped fort in the middle of nowhere. It has a small village and two medium sized hills on either side. The camp was fortified with rings of wire and claymore mines. A claymore mine is a square plate about the size of a dinner plate. It has a side that says "This side toward the enemy" and they stake it into the ground facing out. It is activated by a trip wire or a detonator.

We landed at this base camp outside of the wire in a field and shut down while the Brass and their staff went into the small village for a meeting.

As we were waiting for them to return, one of the Special Forces team members came out and was talking with us, (the crew). Our Huey was facing with our tail boom toward the base camp perimeter. We heard a loud explosion near the perimeter between us and the camp. We all looked over there and saw smoke and mud flying up in the air. I thought it was a claymore going off. Sometimes a rat can set off the trip wire.

As we were staring at the perimeter we saw the trail from a B-40 rocket coming down from the hill to our left. It hit between the first explosion and our Huey in a direct line. I was facing the base, my crew chief was standing to my right, the door gunner was to my left, and the Special Forces Sargent was in front of me. The shrapnel from the rocket hit the other three and completely missed me. They were not badly wounded but were peppered with small metal bits. The Sargent went running for the base camp. We looked at each other and then jumped under the Huey between the skids with the aircraft over us. We then realized that the two rockets were in a straight line and we were in the correct position for number three to hit. It also dawned on us that we were sitting directly under 1400 pounds of JP-4 jet fuel. As strange as it seems I was struck with an odd thought which I voiced. "Me and my ******* extension. I had just recently extended for my second tour in Viet Nam and otherwise would have been home or as we called it "Back in the World"

As we started to crawl out and run for the tree line we came under automatic weapons fire from that very tree line. Our only choice left was to crank up the Huey and get out of dodge. We jumped into our seats; Hit the fuel switch, battery and the minimum switches needed to crank the turbine. If you have never heard a Huey start up, it is a slow buildup of the RPM in the engine that eventually starts the rotor turning. As soon as we had enough rotor speed to get off the ground, I nosed it over and tore out a wire fence on my skids getting out of there. We called the guys on the ground in the village. We circled around and picked them up on the other side of the village.

The first safe place to land was at a refueling and rearming point at Chi Lang. We made it there and landed and shut down to inspect the Huey. It had over 50 holes in the tail boom.

I guess that Charlie only had 2 of the B-40 rockets on that hill. He sure got my attention.

That's my story and I am sticking to it.

I'll bet flying with you was a real heart thumper at times - and I don't mean from the enemy!  I assume the two generals both survived your flights because you did....

ArdraF

I'm telling you Bill.  Write a book, your memoirs.

A lot of these guys will get a co-author, or professional writer, to help them research and pull it together.

You've mentioned a few times about not having enough stories..... but I'll bet with 2 tours you do.  I often get the impression that these co-authors will help in doing a lot of research, tracking down an interviewing other folks that were there, looking at old military records, etc.... that would all serve to expand your memory and expand the stories!

Now get with the program and start your book.  Or do you really want us to beg?  :

Normally war stories are not my thing, however the way you describe this is in such a positive and interesting manner. You sure have a captive audience on this forum.

Thank you both for the encouragement.

I really am not interested on making any money from a book.

I think that more and more people are reading online as opposed to buying and holding a traditional book.

I will expand the stories and what I really hope would happen would be for others with stories that they want to share would take the oppurtunity to tell some of thier stories.  I kind of regard my telling of stories to be a sharing experience and I think it might help some of us old vets to remember and reinforce the good memories, the funny memories, and whatever other memories that you want to share.

What we did was not dishonorable and it is good for us to be able to take pride in telling them even if it is 45 years later.

Here is a very short story


This story is about a part of the war that most people never heard about.


In Viet Nam we used Military Payment Certificates, (MPC). We were paid in MPC, we used it in the same manner as regular US currency. We gambled with it, used it at the PX, used it to buy money orders to send home, and for any other thing that we needed money for.


Unfortunately this system could be manipulated to make money by trading on the difference between the value of MPC?s and regular ?Greenback dollars?, or regular U.S. Currency in the local economy.


The way that this was done was by obtaining Greenbacks by sending home a money order to the states. The person back home would cash the money order and put the cash in an envelope and send it back to Viet Nam. US Currency was much more valuable than MPC in the local economy and it could be sold for double the cash amount in MPC.


Every time this was done the seller of greenbacks would double his money. They would then repeat the process.

This problem led to two procedures to attempt to catch the people who were doing this.

The first was the introduction of a MACV ?credit card?. This card had to be presented anytime a money order was purchased. If someone was sending home more money than could be accounted for by his income then he was investigated.


The second procedure was much more complicated. With no advanced warning, all the bases were shut down and all the MPC in circulation was collected and converted to a new series.

I was the ?Currency Conversion Officer? for our unit during one of these episodes while I was in Viet Nam.


The procedure was to stop all traffic in or out of the base. I then collected from each of our troops all the MPC that they had and gave them a receipt for the amount of MPC turned in.

At the end of collecting from everyone in our unit, I took the briefcase full of script and turned it in for replacement with the new and different MPC.

I then redistributed it to the troops.


During this process the locals would be desperate to get their MPC traded in for the new currency. The day after the conversion the old MPC was worthless.

The following pictures are not MPC but they are pictures of Viet Cong money. Notice how the first side shows the VC capturing an armored car.

HueyPilotVN said:

Thank you both for the encouragement.

I really am not interested on making any money from a book.

I think that more and more people are reading online as opposed to buying and holding a traditional book.

I will expand the stories and what I really hope would happen would be for others with stories that they want to share would take the oppurtunity to tell some of thier stories.  I kind of regard my telling of stories to be a sharing experience and I think it might help some of us old vets to remember and reinforce the good memories, the funny memories, and whatever other memories that you want to share.

What we did was not dishonorable and it is good for us to be able to take pride in telling them even if it is 45 years later.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's kinda the reason I'm encouraging writing a book...... I have no thought or idea if you would ever make money or not..... but no biggie, I enjoy reading your stories this way too!

Thanks

Maybe write the book,  and donate the proceeds to a worthy cause of your choice. I do enjoy reading your stories as I usually don't hear NamVets talk about too much.

Your story about the MPC reminded me of the same thing we did in Japan.  Worked OK but you had to be careful about the money orders as you indicated.

In keeping with the theme of telling positive stories, I would like to tell you about my first roommate in Viet Nam. His first name is Ben and I will change his last name to Stein because I am not sure about the Statute of Limitations.

Ben was our Unit Scrounger. He was also a Huey Pilot, but his contribution, and it was a great contribution, was to keep us supplied with spare parts and necessary equipment.

There is a picture of Ben below:

Ben's job was the redistribution of supplies between Units in Viet Nam. In other word he was a horse trader for parts to keep us flying. Ben had a couple of Conex containers full of trading inventory. Just about anything you needed Ben had. He had pallets of paint, cases of steaks, and if someone left a jeep unattended he probably would have that also. Now as far as I know Ben used his requisitioning skills for the good of our unit and did not personally benefit from his reallocations, (trades).

Ben had his own personal Huey and he would leave in the morning and return later with all kind of goodies.

Ben was the only person I knew in Viet Nam that got the Wall Street Journal delivered every day.

A few years ago I attended the 7/1 Cav reunion in Tampa. While talking to the fellow that was our Squadron Safety Officer I was told that on one occasion Ben was letting a customer...err another supply person fly his huey at a hover. This other fellow hit something and damaged the Huey. The Huey was repaired and nobody ever heard a word about that while I was in Viet Nam. Ben was a valuable asset to our unit and did his part in the war in the best way he could.

I have never heard from Ben in the last 40+ years but I am sure that Ben was very successful in his business career after Viet Nam.

That?s my story and I am sticking to it.

That is funny. I served with the Canadian forces, we had a guy like Ben who was extremely useful. We took good care of him too. ;D

Ben was very good at his job.

About 6 months later I got a different room mate.

Here is a story about him.

It is a kind of funny story and I have told it to others maybe I can make it even funnier the second time. Most old war stories get better every time you tell them, at least mine do.

I did two tours in Viet Nam and most of the time my room mate was Michael Phillips. Mike was from Billings, Montana. We took our two adjacent rooms and created the best Officer Quarters at Vinh Long. We had a double room with a Bar, Entertainment Center, desks, and even a slot machine that we sto.....rescued from Dong Tam when the 9th Infantry went home.

Here is a picture of Mike followed by our BOQ


Now I have mentioned Mike for a couple of reasons. For over 35 years I tried to find out what happened to Mike after Viet Nam. A few years ago as I was attending a reunion of the 7/1 Air Cav in Tampa I found out that Mike had contacted the organization and I got his phone number from the membership comittee. I called and found out that Mike lived just west of Houston. Mike has spent most of his career working for Phillips Oil Company. I made the trip to see him. We had a great time, swapped pictures from Viet Nam and told stories.

Oh yes, He also told me that after I left, some Captain kicked him out of the party hooch and took it over.

The following is a story that Mike swears is true, but I do not remember it.

We were both in the Headquarters Troop and we got all kinds of different missions and request from the Squadron Commander. Anything that was out of the ordinary was usually given to us to do. According to Mike we were asked to develop a "Smoke Ship" to be used to cover combat assaults by laying down a smoke screen to hide the slicks as they unloaded or loaded troops in an LZ (landing Zone).

Again according to Mike, we supervised the mounting of a tank under the center canvas seat, installed a pump, lines, and nozzles to spray hydraulic oil into the exhaust of the turbine engine.

Now this is the part that is absolutely Mike's recollection and not mine.

We fired up the Huey in a revetment (protected parking space) and got it warmed up. Mike turned to me and said "Where should we go to test this thing out?". Again according to him, I shrugged and said "Heck, lets just let her rip right here" and flipped the switch.

This is a revetment:

A Huge, billowing cloud of smoke engulfed us and started moving downwind enveloping the entire flight line. Surely I would have remembered that. I did leave Viet Nam on a flight a few days later, but I am sure that was purely coincidental.

Every fire truck on the base decended upon us to put out what they thought was a fire

The crew chiefs and door gunners from every ship that was down wind of us spent a week cleaning a film of oil off thier aircraft.

That is Mike's story and he is sticking to it.

Here is a shot of a smoke ship in action, you can see how effective it was.



I thought I would add a few comments about Mike Phillips.

Mike would never eat fruit cocktail. One day I asked him why. He said that when he was a kid, (like we were not still kids then), he had taken a big jar of marischeno cherries and drained the liquid. He then filled the jar with some clear vodka. He got sick as a dog from eating them and could not even look at cherries after that.

The most dangerous thing that Mike ever did in Viet Nam was the following

One day when he was off from flying, he went downtown off the base to Vihn Long. He bought a huge stuffed Cobra, the snake..not the gunship. He brought it back to the hooch and sat it in the middle of the main room facing the door. It sat up about 2 feet high and was in the striking position. We usually came in well after dark from flying. That night I opened the door. switched on the light and just about had a heart attack on the spot. Probably why I had my open heart surgery a few years back. Next time I see him I am gonna box his ears....

The last tale about him is that Mike was mentioned in the book that Col David C. Hackworth wrote. Both Mike and I used to fly him around on occasion. Well I take it that they both went down in a huey one day and Hackworth wanted to thank Mike by putting him in the book. It must have happened after I left because I do not remember it happening, course sometimes I do not remember a lot of things.
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Edit:  Looking at the pictures of our Hooch reminded me of two other things.

I had a extension cable for the headphones and I used to listen to music as I fell asleep.

One morning as I went out to the flight line they guys asked me where I was the night before.  It happened that our base camp had been mortored the night before and everyone spent the night in the bunkers except me.

The second memory relates to the TV in out hooch.  We had one channel AFVN (Armed Forces Viet Nam).  However the strange things was that we were next to the TOC (Tactical Operations Center) that was in a bunker.  They were transmitting on an FM radio with a encription device on it.  Clear as a bell over our Television audio came the call.  "Blackhawk 6 this is Blackhawk 4 SECURE, over".  That was supposed to mean that it was a secure transmission.  I wonder how many vietnamese downtown were listening in.

Mmmm... nice hooch. And thanks for the stories -- neat.