by Ed Nelson
I took the controls for a while and found it was heavy on the controls, one could get a real workout flying the plane. I found that the trim tabs were a pilot's best friend.
I figured that with another ten or twenty hours I could be checked out on this plane.
We took off just at dusk from Hanoi and made our flight to the Golden Triangle. When we reached the designated coordinates, lights flared below. They had heard our aircraft which was now circling at ten thousand feet.
The jumpmaster had the SEALs ready to go. The door of the aircraft had been removed for this flight, so it was easy for them to go out.
After Harry Beal, the last man left the plane, we turned for Hanoi. They were walking out but I wanted to stay in the area if we were needed.
I had the radio they left with me and tuned to the correct channel. About half an hour after the drop the radio squelched twice. They were down in the landing zone with no injuries.
We returned to Hanoi where my pilot and jumpmaster left for a night on the town. I just hoped they didn’t get arrested. It turned out a vain hope as the Police let me know they were in custody and not to expect them back soon.
It was a good thing I had brought a sleeping bag and extra food. I would spend the next two days listening for signals from the SEALs. I did wonder how I had gone from providing transportation to South Vietnam to listening for mission signals in North Vietnam. I suspected I shouldn’t tell Mum about this.
Chapter 3
My pilot was in jail, along with the jumpmaster. I had made phone calls to the government but all of a sudden no one wanted to talk to me.
It was a case of me having to offer bribes or they were in bed with the drug lords. Probably both. No one was touching me, but they certainly weren’t helping.
Having nothing else to do until I could free my flight crew, I waited by the radio to see if the SEAL team came on the air. If they did, they had dire problems.
The team was supposed to walk out so I could have flown home as soon as they were dropped. That was all well and good, but I remembered that in war the enemy had a vote. This was war.
Two days later my flight crew was still in jail, I did manage to find out that they had gotten into a fight in a brothel and that someone had been stabbed to death.
They were both being held on murder charges and wouldn’t be getting out shortly. The only reason the aircraft wasn’t seized was that I was on board. If I left it would be impounded as a flight risk.
One thing they had right, it was a risk to fly this plane.
Late afternoon the third day the radio came alive. The SEAL team had accomplished their mission, but one man had been severely wounded, and they could never carry him out. He would die before they could get him to safety.
When I answered it took a few minutes for us to gain trust in our communications. When a guy said he was looking forward to seeing Marge again I knew it was Harry Beal at the other end.
Now the question was, “Was he under duress?”
No matter the answer I couldn’t be certain. That is until I thought to ask him if he was still thinking of joining the Wallenda’s.
“That ship has sailed.”
That told me he was not held captive. I had allowed him to lie, and he hadn’t. Not the best way to handle it, but all I could think of at the time.
“How close are you to the drop zone?”
“Our friends are hiding us very close to it.”
“Is there anywhere near there that the plane can land.”
“Yes, there is an open field that is long enough to land and take off from. It looked clear of obstructions, but you never know about potholes.”
“Can they light the place up like they did the drop zone?”
It took a couple of minutes for the reply to come back but the answer was, “Yes.”
“Okay the plane is good to go, and it is two hours flying time, so when they hear the engines have them light the zone up. If possible, make a visible arrow showing the wind direction.”
“Will do. Hurry if you can, Steve is in a bad way.”
I knew it was terrible radio procedure on a covert op, but you do what you have to do.
“On my way.”
The DC3 hadn’t been tied down but I had to remove sandbags from in front of the tires. I did a perfunctory walk around.
The obvious problem here was that I wasn’t checked out on this aircraft, and it normally took two people.
One person could fly it, but the controls were so heavy that a person would tire out.
As Mum would say, “Needs must when the devil drives.”
She talked about the devil a lot.
I fired up the first engine and counted twelve prop blades passing by before trying the other. The second one had the same procedure.
At least the Hanoi air control tower wasn’t manned at night. It also meant there were no runway lights. Fortunately, for being a tail dragger, you could see out the front fairly well.
To this day I’m not certain how I did it, but I got the bird up in the air. Now the problem was to find the small village. I had no navigator and no idea what the winds aloft were doing to my flight path.
I was able to follow a road west out of Hanoi into Laos so my first hundred miles or so were on track.
The plane had a rudimentary autopilot, so I was able to set it and look at the maps we had brought with us for the first flight in.
There were enough villages with lights along the way that I was able to feel confident that I was on track. Also, as the lights of the next town came upon the horizon, I could tell that I had little wind drift that night.
Thank the lord for small, or not-so-small favors.
The last twenty or so miles were the tensest. I flew by compass heading towards where I thought the small village was.
The radio came alive with, “We hear you. We are lighting up.”
At first, I couldn’t see the lights of the burning fifty-five-gallon drums. But all of a sudden, I saw one of them, then others.
I circled the area until I was pretty sure of the runway layout. Well, the open direction of the field. I was going to put to the test the DC3s ability to land on rough ground.
The next problem I faced was getting this plane on the ground. How do you tell where the ground is at night? I had no reliable landmarks.
All I could do was turn on the landing lights and go in low and slow. I had to hope that the lights would show me the ground before I crashed into it.
As I passed the first set of drums, I saw land below. I was too high but had enough open area to bring it down. The plane was a beast fighting me all the way. I was too hyped up to notice it now, but I would pay a price later.
I had to stand on the brakes while idling the engines. At least there were no large ruts to cause a ground loop.
As the plane rolled to a stop a car came up alongside the rear door. Three men jumped out of the door. One of them was using a fireman's carry to handle a fourth.
No sooner were they out of the car than machine-gun fire ripped into it. The car was shredded and in flames. If anyone was in it, they were gone.
The guys helped each other to the plane. I had to turn the plane around so we could take off. I had idled the engines but hadn’t shut them off. I had planned on a quick turnaround, just not this quick.
I could hear bullets tearing into the plane's fuselage but nothing vital had been hit to my knowledge, at least yet.
As I completed turning the plane around, I heard yelling from the back.
“We’re in!”
I started my forward roll. The DC3, at least the one I had, featured a mirror outside of the pilot's window, just like a car.
It was dark out but from the flames of the burning car, I could see one last man running hanging from the doorway. He hadn’t got on board before I started rolling.
That was when I saw Harry Beal catch the door frame and lift himself one-handed. In his other hand, he had some sort of light machine gun
, and he was firing it at some unseen target.
I could still hear bullets hitting the aircraft, so I started zigzagging down the field as we picked up speed. I heard the door in the back thud closed so Harry was on board or not. I couldn’t check at that moment.
He was because he came up to the cockpit as I rotated the nose. He sat in the copilot's seat and put on the co-pilot's communication gear.
“Where’s your pilot?”
“In jail in Hanoi, he and the jumpmaster got in a fight in a brothel and killed a guy.”
“Are we going back for them?”
“No way, I have broken so many rules tonight they would keep me forever.”
“Well, we appreciate it.”
“How’s Steve?”
Steve wasn’t his real name; it was the one he was using on this mission.
“He’ll make it now; we didn’t have enough anti-biotics with us. When we got to the village there was a kid in dire need, so we used them on her.”
“So where are we going?”
“We have enough fuel to make Saigon.”
“Good.”
“Did you get your guy?”
“Oh yeah.”
That was the last I heard of that. Harry went to the back to check on the other guys. They were chowing down on some k-rations which were probably old when Custer was making his stand.
While I flew Harry worked the radio. He reached a contact in Saigon who arranged for a doctor with the antibiotics to meet us. I had him contact my real flight crew to have the 707 ready to go.
At least they had lights at the Saigon airport and a manned control tower. I landed the plane and taxied over to the 707.
I turned off the engines of the DC3 and we left it. A doctor was on board the 707, he was being paid to accompany our wounded guy to the States.
It was only when we were on board my jet, I realized how tired I was. That had been a wild ride.
I slept most of the flight home. We refueled in transit at Tokyo and landed at some airbase in Alaska. There the SEAL team disappeared. At least they got off the plane.
We flew on down to Ontario airport in California. There the flight was treated as though we had just returned from Washington D. C.
I always wondered what happened to that DC3 I left in Saigon. I suppose it is still flying somewhere in the world.
Chapter 4
It was the middle of the day when I got home. Both my parents were waiting for me. I knew I would have to face the music sometime, just not now.
Dad asked, “Rick, what did you do in South Vietnam? We thought you were just ferrying a SEAL team into place.”
“Things got out of hand.”
“How,” Mum asked?
“When we got there, we couldn’t round up a full crew to fly the team to Laos.”
“Round up a team, I thought you were just allowing them to fly on your plane, once you got there they were on their own.”
“The CIA was going to have them hike up there, they would have never made it, much less got back. At that point I went to the South Vietnamese government for help, they sold me a DC3 and gave me leads on a flight crew.”
“So, you were done?”
“Well, no, we had a pilot and jumpmaster but no co-pilot.”
“So, the mission was aborted?”
“I decided that since I’m checked out on twin engines I could act as the copilot.”
“So, you flew into Laos and helped drop the SEAL team.”
“Yes Sir.”
“Idiot.”
“Yes Sir.”
“Then what?”
“After the SEALs jumped in the designated drop zone we flew on to Hanoi.”
“Why there, why not back to Saigon?”
“The SEALs had left a radio with me, I figured that I had better keep the plane close if the pilot had to go back in.”
“Did he?”
“No, he and the jumpmaster got in a fight in a brothel and killed a guy. They are still in jail.”
“How did you get back to Saigon?”
This was worse than being grilled about my schoolwork.
“I flew.”
“Flew what?”
“The DC3.”
At that point, my Dad lost it, “Damn it, Rick, spit it out, tell us all that happened.”
“On my second day there with the flight crew in jail, I got a radio message that the SEAL team had accomplished its mission but were in trouble.”
“You slept with the radio?”
“I slept on the plane with it. One of the team members was wounded and would not survive being carried out. He had an infection.”
“So, you flew a DC3 by yourself, finding them, landing, picking them up, and flying onto Saigon.”
“That is about it.”
I hoped they wouldn’t ask if there was any trouble with the pickup.
“Was there any trouble on the pickup?”
“The warlord's men chased them down. While I turned the plane, their car got shot up, but they got out okay. Two of them managed to get the wounded man on board.”
“What about the fourth man?”
“The fourth SEAL, Harry Beal was firing at the warlord's men while lifting himself onto the aircraft, which I had just started to taxi.”
“It’s a wonder they didn’t hit the DC3.”
“They did, luckily nothing critical. I zig-zagged enough they couldn’t get a good shot.”
“Anything else?”
“No, I flew us back to Saigon, there was a medical team waiting. We all transferred to the 707 and got out of Dodge.”
“What about the DC3?”
“I left it there with the keys in it, so it is probably gone.”
“The South Vietnamese government called; they want to know what you want to do with the airplane that has over one hundred bullet holes in it.”
“Repaired, I guess. I may need it again to fly back upcountry.”
Mum looked at me and shook her head.
“Over my dead body.”
I took that as a no.
“Your father told them to have it repaired and flown back here to the States. It is a good plane; we shouldn’t waste it. Though if I had my way, we would dump it in the Pacific.”
Mums get worked up over everything.
“Also, the President would like you to call him when you have the time.”
Now seemed like a good time, the President was less likely to give me a hard time than my parents.
The operator managed to place the call in ten minutes, it must have been a record. Half a day would have been fine with me, being on the phone when my parents were unhappy seemed like a good deal.
“Rick, congratulations on a successful mission.”
“Thank you, Mister President; not what I set out to do.”
“But you did it when the chips were down. The country owes you another debt of gratitude but just like in the past we can’t acknowledge it.”
“I didn’t do it for any glory.”
“That’s what makes you a hero. But you do have a job offer.”
“What's that?”
“The CIA would like to hire you as a pilot for their Asian airline, Air America.”
“No thank you. On second thought are they serious?”
“Yes.”
“Now that is scary, they are offering me a job like that without doing a background check to see if I could take the job or even needed the money.”
“That’s what I told them.”
We both chuckled at that thought.
“Seriously Rick if you ever need anything call me. Also, there is a SEAL team that would run through brick walls for you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind; never know when you might have a brick wall that needs running through.”
“Smart aleck.”
“Part of my job description, I’m still a teenager you know.”
“May I speak to one of your parents please?”
“Here is my Mum, she kno
ws the whole story.”
They talked for a while. When she hung up, she had a funny smile.
“That guy is nothing like his Dad. It’s a shame I hadn’t met him first.”
I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and make funny sounds, somethings you didn’t want to hear.”
“Rick, I do think our problems with the Kennedys are over, at least with JFK, I'm still not sure about Bobby.”
After that, I took the afternoon off. I rode George over to the Forestry Service station and hit a few golf balls.
At dinner that night Dad informed me that since I was here it would be a good time to have a business meeting. I agreed, so we planned to bring everyone together at the end of next week.
Mum brought up that she had seen a brief article that Nina was dating a young actor from the studio.
That announcement didn’t give me any pangs at all. It did make me wonder about all my agony when she cheated on me. Maybe it was my ego about being cheated on, rather than a betrayed love for Nina.
Food for thought. As it was, she could date whomever she wanted, it didn’t bother me anymore.
Dad also advised me to stop at the Jackson R&D center to see what all the excitement was about. The chips that they had developed had everyone in an uproar.
I didn’t understand this as other people had made and patented some forms of chips. The only thing we could have done differently was come up with a practical chip. One that worked in the real world and not just in the laboratory. One that could be manufactured.
I told him I would stop by and ask to be updated. He frowned at that statement.
“Maybe I had better call them in the morning and make an appointment so they will be ready for me.”
“Good idea.”
At dinner, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I knew they weren’t happy about what I had done in Vietnam. They had grilled me in detail. The one thing I expected was a lecture at least if not being grounded, or whatever parents could do with an emancipated kid.
I was about to die with nervous anticipation after dinner, so asked if we could talk in the library. Mary didn’t help when she asked, “What did Ricky do now?”
Mum told her, “Just his normal heroics.”
“Oh, okay.”
When we got to the library, I asked them what they had to say or do about my actions in Vietnam.
