by Lew Jennings
Most of us would solo within 15 hours, however there were those who simply couldn’t get the hang of it and we would lose another 10 percent of the class to attrition.
The second eight weeks we studied advanced helicopter flight techniques. Landing in confined areas or to a pinnacle or cliff. Landing on a slope. Take offs over 50 foot obstacles. Formation flight. Night flight. Cross country flight and more.
I especially enjoyed flying down the Brazos River with my instructor and landing on sand bars. The freedom of flight offered by a helicopter was amazing. I loved it!
Back at the barracks the intense military training continued.
We would lose another 10 percent of the class by the end of 20 weeks.
I was fortunate to graduate at the top of my primary flight training class at Fort Wolters and received orders for advanced helicopter training at Hunter Army Airfield, Savannah, Georgia.
UH-1 Huey Graduation Fly-By Formation
CHAPTER SEVEN
ADVANCED FLIGHT TRAINING
Most graduates from Primary at Fort Wolters went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, the official US Army Aviation Center and “Home of Army Aviation” for their advanced training.
I wanted Hunter Army Airfield at Savannah because at Hunter we were able to start advanced training right away in the infamous Bell UH-1 “Huey” helicopter that was being used so successfully in Vietnam. I couldn’t wait to get started!
Upon arrival at Hunter, I reported to my new unit and advanced flight school class at an austere looking, but sparkling clean concrete barracks. I was a “Senior Candidate” by now when I left Fort Wolters, enjoying some semblance of achievement and respect. That was immediately dashed when I met my new tactical non-commissioned officer or TAC NCO.
“BRACE MAGGOT!” he ordered as I approached. “Who do you think you are just sauntering up here like you’re on a Sunday stroll? Get all your shit out of your vehicle and up here, now! You have room A-6 Jennings. Consider yourself confined to quarters until further advised. MOVE IT SCUM BAG!”
I was in shock. But I wasn’t alone as he treated everyone else who arrived the same way.
Some of the candidates had traveled across the country with their wives and children in tow thinking they would be allowed to live off post in residential housing like those candidates who had been assigned to Fort Rucker.
Not so. This was an entirely different regime that would insist on making it nearly unbearable for the Warrant Officer Candidates.
Even though we were confined to quarters and couldn’t leave our rooms, we spent the rest of the day and that evening helping our married class mates haul their stuff up from their cars by tying their gear to sheets we had dangling from the upper story windows. This kind of tough treatment would continue for the next four months until graduation.
We had learned a lot in boot camp at Fort Polk and Primary Flight School at Fort Wolters. We knew how to maintain and present our gear. We knew how to make the floors shine like glass and the room presentable for the most exacting inspection. We were about to learn a lot more.
Our first day of classes at Hunter was an introduction to the UH-1 Huey helicopter and a dream come true. At the end of the day, we double-timed back to the barracks with smiles on our faces, until we arrived.
We “fell in” to our standard formation outside the barracks directly in front of our waiting TAC NCO (Tactical Non-Commissioned Officer or Sergeant). We looked up at the second floor to our rooms. Every window had some kind of nasty graffiti written on the inside in black shoe polish, OUR shoe polish. The TAC NCO’s had conducted their first inspection. The place was a wreck.
As I entered my room, I remembered how it glistened when we left that morning. The floor had been polished and buffed to a mirror reflecting the clouds outside the window. A sparkle of sunshine gleamed off the sink faucet. Our gear and displays perfect.
Now it looked like a tornado had swept through. The TAC NCO’s had disassembled the sink plumbing and dumped the contents of the sewer trap on the floor. They had ripped the beds apart, strewn our gear from one end of the room to another, did “360s” with their boots to ruin the floors, then took our boot polish and wrote inspirational messages on our windows. It would take hours to repair the damage. No problem, we had all night. Wake-up isn’t until 0500. Look for this every day, they said, until you meet our standards. Welcome to Hunter candidates!
The classroom and flight instructors would secretly commiserate with us. We would arrive at flight training soaking wet with perspiration after hours of military drilling and running all over hell and back. It was our penance. Those of us who chose or were chosen to go to Hunter paid a dear price for a few more hours in the Huey.
Our classmates at Rucker rubbed it in when they wrote to tell us what a country club like atmosphere it was there.
Married candidates at Rucker did get to live off post with their families. Those candidates who lived in the barracks were treated as if they were already Warrant Officers.
We at Hunter were determined our training would better prepare us for combat. At least we wanted to think that was true.
In fact, the helicopter training at Rucker and Hunter was probably the best in the world. Combat seasoned Vietnam veterans were our instructors. And teach us they did!
We practiced combat formations keeping it tight. Performed low level and terrain flight following the contours of the earth. Practiced combat tactics and techniques learned through their experiences. Conducted troop pick-ups and drop-offs. Flew single ship, multiple ship and large formations in daylight, nighttime and marginal weather conditions.
Especially thrilling were low level and night auto-rotations to the ground where you chopped the throttle to simulate engine failure, pulled back hard on the cyclic to gain altitude and made the rotors go faster with the air streaming through, picking your landing target, maintaining rotor rpm and airspeed until 50 feet, then flaring to bring the helicopter to a stop in midair, and pulling the last remaining lift from the rotor blades as you settled to the ground. One mistake, one missed step, one errant calculation, spelled disaster. What fun!
At the end of nearly a year of training, we had accumulated around 200 hours flight time and thousands of experiences in all kinds of conditions and situations. We truly thought we were the best combat helicopter Pilots in the world! Time would tell.
Somehow, I managed to graduate number one in my class and was named Distinguished Graduate.
My father, Wilson Jennings, was now long retired from the Coast Guard and had been teaching electronics courses with the Navy at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. I called him with the good news. Dad told me he had recently fallen ill and didn’t think he would be able to attend my graduation ceremony.
I informed my chain of command that there would be no family attending my graduation. They ran it up the flagpole and what happened next was unbelievable.
The Commanding General at Hunter personally placed a call to my father to let him know how well I had performed and how important it would be if he were able to attend.
My father rallied from his illness and the Air Force gave him a free ride out to Charleston, South Carolina from Travis Air Force Base in California.
I met him at Charleston and drove him down to the Army base at Savannah. Dad had brought his old Coast Guard uniform he had retired in as Command Master Chief at Coast Guard Station San Francisco. In the formal graduation ceremony at Hunter he was proudly wearing his uniform while he pinned the Warrant Officer bars on my shoulders along with the Commanding General and then pinned my wings on, designating me a bona fide Army Aviator.
After the graduation ceremony, I wanted to show my father the Company area. As we approached the barracks I would be treated to a totally different experience than when I arrived five months earlier.
The TAC NCO was drilling a new class of candidates out on the parade field. Like right out of the movie An Officer and Gentleman, when he saw us approaching he brought the entire
class to attention, then turned and saluted me.
“Mr. Jennings (that’s how Warrant Officers are formally addressed: “Mr.”), congratulations on your selection as Distinguished Graduate and appointment to Warrant Officer. It would be an honor Sir to have you inspect the new class.”
With that, he turned and ordered “Open Ranks March!”, “Dress Right Dress!” and “Ready Front!”, then escorted me down the line as I inspected each candidate of the new class with my father looking on. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
I had a week off before my new assignment to Cobra School there at Hunter, so Dad and I took the opportunity to drive together to Kentucky and Tennessee to visit his family. We spent the next several days with aunts, uncles and cousins I hadn’t seen in many years and bonding with my father as never before. It was a melancholy trip for us both when I returned him to Charleston to catch his flight back to California.
I felt I was following in his footsteps. I had always wanted to be just like him.
My Father and I at my Graduation from Flight School, Hunter Army Airfield, Savannah, Georgia, September 1968.
CHAPTER EIGHT
COBRA HALL
As Distinguished Graduate, I had a choice of further training in cargo or attack helicopters or heading straight to Vietnam, flying Hueys. I chose to attend Cobra School there at Hunter to qualify in the first-ever helicopter specifically designed and built as an Attack Helicopter, Bell’s new AH-1G Cobra.
Cobra Hall, as it was known then, was the primary training school for this new machine.
The Cobra was designed by Bell Helicopter who also made the UH-1 Huey.
The engineers at Bell had taken the engine, transmission and drive train from the Huey, wrapped it up in a tight airframe only 36 inches at its widest point, put the Pilot and Copilot behind one another in a tandem seating arrangement, installed a rotating turret up front with an Emerson Electric Gatling Gun that fired up to 4,000 rounds per minute and a Grenade Launcher that could fire 300 grenades a minute, plus little wings on each side that could carry up to 72 rockets.
The more streamlined fuselage saved weight and allowed the helicopter to fly faster than the Hueys it would be escorting into combat. And the lighter weight allowed the Cobra to carry more weapons and ammunition than other gunships that were overloaded and slower modified Hueys.
The Cobra looked like a jet aircraft with its sleek fuselage and tandem seating.
Unlike fighter jets of our sister Services where the Pilot sits up front, in the Cobra the Pilot sits in the back seat. He’s a little higher up so he can see everything out front and has all the flight instruments and conventional controls to fly the helicopter. The Pilot can also control and fire all the weapons systems from his rear cockpit.
The Copilot/Gunner (CPG) sits in the front seat. There is a flexible gun sight the gunner can use to aim and fire a Gatling gun or grenade launcher mounted in a moveable turret under the nose of the aircraft.
The Copilot’s station has miniature controls on either side of the cockpit to be able to fly the helicopter in the event something happens to the Pilot.
The Cobra was a fast, mean machine, loaded for bear. I thought it was the most beautiful helicopter I had ever seen (and still do).
Cobra school was four weeks long. The class was a mix of Commissioned Officers and Warrant Officers. The highest-ranking officer was our class leader. The training at this school was totally unlike all the previous training I had gone through. Here I was treated with respect as a Warrant Officer professional. It was a dream come true.
I lived off base in a house I rented with a fellow Warrant Officer and classmate, Pete Parnell.
No terrifying Drill Sergeants. No screaming Tactical Officers or NCO’s. No one waking us at zero-dark-thirty hollering “TIME TO WAKE UP GIRLS, GET UP, GET UP, ITS ANOTHER GREAT DAY IN THE ARMY AND ANOTHER FINE DAY FOR THE CORPS!” No thunderous sounds of garbage cans being flung from one end of the barracks to the other to make sure we leaped out of bed. No falling out in the Company area for physical training and a five-mile run before breakfast.
Just the soft sound of a bedside alarm clock. I was in heaven!
Not to say Cobra school wasn’t intense. It was! All the instructors were combat veterans and focused on teaching us how to best employ all the capabilities and firepower this incredible gunship could provide. They knew that when we graduated in just four weeks, our destination was Vietnam and our job would be to find, fix and destroy the enemy while supporting and protecting our troops, and to try and not get killed in the process.
We rose early each day to attend classes to learn all the intricacies of this new machine; electrical systems, hydraulic systems, engine, transmission, drive train, main rotor system, tail rotor system, aerodynamics, flight controls, stability augmentation system, and weapons, weapons, and more weapons systems.
The classroom instruction was augmented with daily flight training sessions to incorporate what we learned in a real-world environment.
We spent hours on the range learning how to properly load, aim and fire the rocket systems. We learned how to load, aim, fire and clear the Gatling gun. And we learned how to load, aim and fire the grenade launcher.
We flew day and night to learn the flight characteristics of the Cobra, conducting low level flight, high speed dives and low-level pop-up autorotations to simulate recovering and landing from engine failure. The training was intense and relentless. I loved every minute of it.
As I was getting ready to graduate from Cobra school and head to combat in Vietnam, I received word that my father was gravely ill. He had collapsed while teaching a class at Treasure Island Navy Base and lay in serious condition at Letterman Army Hospital, Presidio of San Francisco, California.
I rushed home to be by his side.
Bell AH-1G Cobra Attack Helicopter
The AH-1G Cobra was the first helicopter specifically designed as an Attack Helicopter. Tandem seating, two-place helicopter with the Pilot in back and Copilot/Gunner in front; 44.7 feet long, 13.5 feet high, fuselage is 36 inches wide, 5,810lbs Empty Weight, 9,500lbs Gross Weight, powered by a Lycoming T53-L-13 Gas Turbine Engine producing 1,100 Shaft Horsepower with a cruising speed of 149kts and maximum speed of 190kts.
Armament included 2-75” folding fin aerial rockets (FFARs) on the wing stores and a 40mm grenade launcher and six-barreled 7.62mm Gatling gun in the rotating turret up front. The grenade launcher could fire up to 300 grenades per minute. The Emerson Electric Gatling gun could fire 2,000 to 4,000 rounds per minute.
AH-1G Copilot/Gunner (CPG) position. Small cyclic control visible on right and collective control on left. The flexible gun sight, upper right, allows the CPG to fire the Gatling gun or grenade launcher in the rotating turret.
AH-1G Pilot position. Full instrumentation and Pilot can control all weapons systems with turret in stow mode.
CHAPTER NINE
PRESIDIO OF SAN FRANCISCO
After graduating from Cobra school, I was given a 30-day leave to visit with friends and family before heading off to Vietnam. On arriving home to the San Francisco Bay Area, I immediately met my sister Gail and headed to Letterman Army Hospital at the Presidio of San Francisco to visit Dad.
His condition was far worse than he had let on. The doctors told us he was probably not going to make it. He had been diagnosed with Polyarteritis nodosa, a somewhat rare disease at the time that affected the arteries, heart and kidneys.
I was reeling in shock and dismayed at what to do. I had orders to Vietnam and needed to see if there was some way to delay my departure so I could be with my father and take care of things on his behalf.
There was a small airfield on the Presidio down by the water with some older looking airplanes and helicopters, called Crissy Field. I headed down there to see if there was someone I could talk to.
Crissy Field was built in 1920 and named after an Army Air Corps Pilot, Major Dana H. Crissy, who was then the commander at Mather Field and had d
ied when his de Havilland DH-4B crashed at Salt Lake City on a “Transcontinental reliability and endurance test”.
At the time Colonel Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who would later become a 5-star General of the Army and Air Force at the end of World War II, was in charge of the construction of the airfield.
This beautiful location right on the water at the foot of the Presidio and below the Golden Gate Bridge had been used as a Coast Guard sea plane base and Army airfield from 1920 to 1936, when it was closed as a first line base and Hamilton Field opened across the bay in nearby Marin County.
Now in 1968, Crissy Field was being used to support the Sixth Army Headquarters at the Presidio. There was a small flight detachment on the field. It was a choice assignment for a privileged few.
I nervously entered a small Flight Operations building and approached what appeared to be a flight planning counter. I found myself facing a full bird Colonel sitting behind a desk.
As a 22-year old “Wobbly One” just out of flight school and having had my butt kicked for the last two years by Corporals to Sergeants, standing in front of a Colonel was like appearing before God. I was petrified!
As he looked up at me, I came to attention, saluted and stammered “Sir, Mr. Jennings, I have a serious problem I need to talk to somebody about.”
“Relax Jennings. What’s up?” he asked.
I started to explain my situation when he raised his hand “Hold on, let me check with the Commanding Officer,” as he stepped into an office nearby.
Geeez, I thought, you mean there’s somebody here that outranks him?
He motioned me to enter where I met another full bird Colonel. “Sir. Mr. Jennings reporting,” I blurted out as I snapped to attention and saluted for a second time. He saluted, they both smiled and he asked me to take a seat. “What’s this problem you want to talk to me about?”
