19 Minutes to Live - Helicopter Combat in Vietnam

by Lew Jennings

  The next ten minutes were used to coordinate a plan over the radio with Home Base as we found our way back.

  The plan was to fly up the ravine at our Base Camp to the foot of the maintenance ramp, then turn the Cobra around, facing back out towards the perimeter in case one or more of the rockets were to launch or explode accidentally.

  Once turned around, I would not land but maintain a hover until the Maintenance Crews could position stacks of sandbags under each wing to keep the helicopter from rolling over if the landing gear failed.

  Once the sandbags were in place and all Ground Crew clear, I would gently settle the helicopter on to its landing gear.

  The plan worked like a charm to the cheers of hundreds of spectators as I humbly climbed out of my damaged Cobra. The poor thing was a sorry sight with branches and leaves sticking out of the rocket pods and a huge dent in the right wing where it impacted the tree. This was going to cost me more than a few paychecks.

  The Armorers couldn’t dislodge the tree branches jammed into the rocket pods so, for safety, they took the 19 and 7-shot pods off the wings and buried them in a pit with the rockets still in the tubes.

  Next, they disassembled the wing and did a dye-penetrant check to see if the wing mount hard points on the fuselage had been damaged or cracked. If so, the whole helicopter would have to be shipped back to the States for repair and I would probably be on my way to prison at Leavenworth. Luckily for me, the hard points passed inspection.

  The next problem was that we didn’t have a wing in stock to replace the one I had severely damaged. To compound the situation, the Commanding General was taking advantage of the bad weather and coming to the unit to present medals to many of us for actions out in the A Shau. We didn’t want him to see the damage and have to explain that one of our bonehead Pilots had run into a tree.

  The Maintenance Crew hurriedly reattached the wing, put the Cobra in the Maintenance Hangar and covered the damaged wing with a tarp. The helicopter was now officially in the hangar for “routine” maintenance while I was ordered to go find a new wing.

  There were only a few units in the Division that had Cobras. And of those, maybe one might have a wing they could give me. The price would be high for sure.

  I called the 101st Assault Helicopter Battalion. No luck.

  Then I called the 158th Assault Helicopter Battalion. No luck.

  The only unit left that had lots of Cobras was our arch rivals, the 4/77th Aerial Rocket Artillery (ARA). I reluctantly gave them a call.

  Lo and behold they had one on hand! And they were willing to discuss a trade! I headed right over to their Headquarters.

  Word had gotten around. I was famous, or infamous, depending on your perspective. The 4/77th CO and Maintenance Officer were there to greet me. They seemed to be stifling a chuckle as they extended a handshake.

  “Mr. Jennings! Glad to meet you. Heard you’re looking for a wing for your Cobra. How did you lose it?” the CO asked, as they both burst out laughing.

  “Never mind, we heard the story. How about we sit down and discuss how we’re going to handle the transaction,” he continued as we went inside.

  Apparently, they had already come to a consensus on how the deal would go down. We hadn’t even taken a seat yet when they both turned towards me, the Maintenance Officer announcing: “The cost is a case of prime Wild Turkey Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, delivered!”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Deal!” I blurted, as we shook hands all around.

  The case of Wild Turkey was on the next flight from the big BX (Base Exchange) at Da Nang, courtesy of the US Air Force. It had cost me nearly a month’s pay, however I had avoided a Court-Martial that day.

  I would be awarded a medal instead, as I looked past the Commanding General’s shoulder to the tarp-covered wing as he presented me the Distinguished Flying Cross for our actions when Speed had crashed back in May.

  Mike Talton receives the Distinguished Flying Cross for Valor from Major General John M. Wright. His eyes are closed as he describes that's how he reacts to enemy aircraft fire or GBOFs to survive.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ASSAULT 27 DISAPPEARS

  It was early September, 1969. During a lull in the action while resting at Firebase Rendezvous when another team had relieved us on station, I witnessed a sight I will never forget.

  We had already refueled and rearmed and I was lying on the open ammo bay door of my Cobra taking a rest break with Mike Talton and Eddy Joiner.

  There were many troops and Hueys awaiting deployment and a lot of activity going on.

  Mike poked me awake and pointed in the direction of a Huey that was just taking off. “Look at that asshole. What he’s doing is really dangerous and going to get somebody killed,” he grimaced.

  The Huey was nosed over at a crazy angle, almost vertical, with a load of troops on board, doors open, their legs hanging out, totally not secured. I was amazed they didn’t fall out.

  “Holy cow, let’s watch him to see what he’s going to do,” I said as the Huey gained speed and altitude and then turned back like he was going to land.

  “Let’s go over and have a talk with him when he gets down,” I said. Pious experts that all Pilots tend to be, we criticized each other mercilessly.

  We watched him approach and just as he was slowing down to come to a hover or land, it appeared he was losing control and started heading right towards us!

  Maybe he was experiencing hydraulic failure or something. In a Huey, when you lose hydraulic pressure the controls become almost like concrete and very hard to move. If you can control the helicopter at all, you want to get some airspeed and do a running landing. If you try to come to a stop and lose translational lift, the helicopter becomes uncontrollable, and that’s apparently what was happening now.

  We all got to our feet and started running as the Huey was rapidly approaching us just five feet or so off the ground.

  All of a sudden, it pitched straight up, seeming to climb for the sky! The troops and all manner of supplies and equipment started spilling out of the helicopter as it climbed with the nose pointed straight up.

  At about a hundred feet, it stopped in midair and came back down tail first, crashed, and rolled into a muddy ravine just yards from us and caught on fire.

  “HOLY SHIT!” Joiner exclaimed. “Let’s get ‘em out of there!” as he and Talton started running to the wreckage while I got the fire extinguisher out of my Cobra.

  They jumped down into the ravine and immediately sank waist deep in mud and who knows what other stuff. The aircraft was on its side, the front windshield was blown and the Pilot was still in his harness. The Copilot was missing.

  Joiner and Talton pulled themselves up over the nose of the aircraft to reach the Pilot. He was definitely wounded and incoherent. He had a hole in his forehead like a pen or pencil had stabbed him. Mike later theorized he had hit his forehead on the 'Chinese Hat" microphone button on the top of the cyclic. At that moment, he didn't seem to care about the head wound and was screaming about the pain in his thumb.

  I was futilely trying to put out the fire when a soldier nearly knocked me down with a huge fire extinguisher on wheels he had dragged over from the FARP area. He took over fighting the fire while I went forward to help Joiner and Talton with the injured Pilot.

  More folks had run over to help by then. Someone had a poncho we used as a stretcher to put the Pilot onto. As I knelt over him, he continued to complain about his hand as the wound in his forehead continued to bleed. Then a huge CH-47 Chinook helicopter landed near us after dropping off fuel bladders at the FARP and volunteered to take all the dead or injured to hospital facilities at Camp Evans.

  We searched for and found the Copilot standing on the other side of the ravine unhurt, but in shock.

  We located the rest of the passengers. All were injured, however miraculously none had been killed. We quickly loaded everyone aboard the Chinook, which headed to medical facilities in minutes.

&
nbsp; To this day I can still see the helicopter going straight up, in slow motion, as the soldiers and their equipment are spilling out both sides and falling to the ground.

  I later recommended Eddy Joiner and Mike Talton for Soldiers Medals. These medals are awarded to soldiers displaying conspicuous courage, saving the lives of others in a non-combat situation.

  It was September 15th and I was standing by at LZ Rendezvous for another mission, when I received the terrible news that my roommate and dear friend, Mike Talton, had gone down in his Cobra somewhere in the northern A Shau. He and John Bacic were flying as part of a Pink Team on a reconnaissance mission with Mike Ryan, Assault 18, as their scout. Our beloved Major Tom Curtin had turned over command of our unit to Major Tom Trombley, who was also with them in the Command and Control Huey. His call sign as the Commander was Assault 6.

  They had simply disappeared and a frantic search was on. What the heck had happened? Here’s Mike Talton to tell us in his own words.

  “We had been tasked to conduct a recon northwest of the A Shau Valley to identify NVA forces coming over the border from Laos. We knew they were traveling across the border at night and that they were using multiple crossing points through the mountain valleys and over the Xe Pon River, bringing men and equipment to the fight in the area south of the DMZ. Even though we had fought the NVA repeatedly during the spring and summer, they were still very active in the mountains and valleys of NW South Vietnam. Our job, as always, was to find them and stop them wherever and whenever we could.”

  “Assault 6 decided to fly with a single Pink Team on the recon mission up the A Shau Valley and points to the northwest, anticipating that we would require an ‘On-Station’ swap out of the Team once we got involved with the reconnaissance. It was a big area and would require a lot of flight time to run the border and then follow any active routes that we discovered. More flight time than we could provide in a single fuel load.”

  “With the load of rockets, minigun ammo and 40mm grenades that we carried in our Cobra, we had to limit our fuel to about 1.5 hours of flight time. Out of those 90 minutes, we had to carve out the time it would take to get to and then back from the mission area. Since the area we wanted to recon started at a point about 10 minutes away, even by the most direct route across the mountains, we would only have 60 to 70 minutes to spend searching for the bad guys before we had to head back for refueling.”

  “Our Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) required we land with enough fuel in the tanks to keep the engine churning. That would almost certainly guarantee that a second, and maybe even a third Pink Team would be called out to complete the recon mission.”

  “We were staging out of LZ Rendezvous, a Support Base plowed out of the flat terrain snuggled up to the eastern wall of the A Shau Valley, across the Valley and to the southeast of Hamburger Hill. Rendezvous was a forward staging area where we could pre-position helicopters and soldiers and some limited supplies like food and water.”

  “While the Rendezvous location allowed us to cut 30 minutes of flight time out of our reaction times to calls for air support, it required we preposition to Rendezvous from our home base at Camp Eagle in the mornings and recover back to Eagle when the sun went down. We didn’t leave helicopters in the Valley at night, as they would become primary targets for the NVA.”

  “Rendezvous was where we often sat waiting our turn at bat. If time permitted, we would sometimes have a C-ration lunch between missions after warming up the ‘entrée’ can in the hot exhaust tube of our L13 engines. We Snake drivers would kick back in our cockpit seats, canopy doors open, with the 27-inch wide ‘540’ rotor blades pulled into a position where their shadows could provide us shade and welcome relief from the typically hot sun.”

  “Combat troops (Airborne Infantry) sometimes waited at Rendezvous as well. They would ride into battle in the Hueys, with their legs hanging over the edges of the cabin decking, their weapons pointed toward the jungle beneath them, their eyes looking and watching and their pulses beating faster, waiting for something to happen.”

  “The CO, Tom Trombley, briefed the mission with us, as we marked our maps with the info and climbed into our respective helicopters. After we completed our run-up checks and confirmed that our three-ship team had radio communications on the three frequencies we would be using for the mission, Assault 6’s C&C bird took off to the west and then turned north as he climbed into the sky above the A Shau. Assault 18 followed him in his OH-6A Scout, westbound initially and then northbound and climbing. I followed my Scout, skimming the toes of the heavy Snake along the dusty surface of Rendezvous’ mostly flat surface. Once I accelerated through transitional lift and starting to fly for real, I rolled into a right-hand turn and adjusted my route of flight so that I could join up as number 3 in a loose trail formation, following the others. I keyed my VHF radio and transmitted a call to Assault 6 to advise both him and Assault 18 that we were off and running.”

  “Ahead of us and at higher altitudes, we saw our Scout and C&C bird established on a northerly, heading up the Valley, generally following highway 548, en route to our intended mission Area of Operations.”

  “The skies were clear and blue and it was a great September day for flying in the skies of South Vietnam!”

  “Though we had a full load of ordnance with 350 40mm grenades for the grenade launcher, 4000 rounds of 7.62mm bullets for the minigun and 52 2.75 inch rockets with 17 pound warheads, and were carrying 1.5 hours of JP4 in the two internal fuel tanks, the Cobra was running smoothly and climbing steadily as we flew on to catch up to our Scout bird.”

  “Since our primary responsibility as part of the Pink Team was to provide gun cover for the Scout, we wanted to be in a reasonably close overwatch position on him at all times, hopefully as a visible deterrent to any bad guys on the ground who might be anxious to bag themselves a seemingly vulnerable helicopter, and as a very real armed response in case the deterrent idea failed to work. At the moment, because he took off before we did, the Scout was further ahead of us than we liked, so we were hustling to catch up.”

  “About five minutes after takeoff, as we reached an altitude about even with the Scout bird, though still behind and slightly to the right of him, I increased the collective for a bit more power and thrust, and pressed slightly forward on the cyclic to stop our climb and to increase our airspeed to 100 knots or so. As I made the control changes, I automatically applied a bit of left tail rotor control pedal to compensate for the increase in collective pitch and power.”

  “Nothing happened. There was no response to my pedal input. The pedal moved forward as I pushed it with my left foot, but the nose of the Cobra continued to drift off to the right because of the increase in collective, just the opposite of what should have happened when I pressed the pedal.”

  “I instinctively applied more pressure on the left pedal and watched as the nose failed to respond. In fact, it moved further to the right. We were now in a slight sideslip with the nose cocked off to the right of our flight path and the fuselage rolled slightly to the left, in the direction of flight due to the earlier cyclic input, not much, but enough to tell me that we were now in the Twilight Zone.”

  “I realized that my tail rotor pedals were no longer controlling the pitch of the tail rotor blades. I had lost the ability to directly control the yaw attitude of my Cobra. I could not make the Cobra’s nose point in a direction of my choosing. Now it would point wherever the laws of aerodynamics and physics dictated and my Copilot and I would be along for the ride.”

  “I removed both feet from the pedals and as if to confirm my light bulb moment of inspiration, I tapped the left pedal with the toe of my left boot. It effortlessly glided forward to its stop, while the right pedal, mechanically linked to the left pedal, glided rearward. When the pedals reached the limits of their respective travels, they struck their physical stops and bounced back to travel all the way in their opposite directions until they again reached the mechanical limits of travel and again b
egan another glide. Not good!”

  “I placed my feet back on the pedals and confirmed by feel that there was no perceivable resistance to any pressure I placed on the pedals. They were now free spirits, serving only as foot rests. As anyone who has flown Cobras before would suspect, my front seat Copilot’s pedals were just as useless as mine, although at that instance he did not yet know it (as he was busy with other tasks, leaving me to fly the aircraft).”

  “Somehow, control for the tail rotor way back behind us, some 35 feet away, was severed or broken or disconnected or who knew what!”

  “Total loss of tail rotor control during flight is one of those events that qualifies as a genuine, five-star, highlighted-in-red Emergency. The Cobra’s Operator’s Manual addresses such an event in the section devoted to Emergency Procedures. It explains that depending on several variables, including airspeed and altitude, the best course of action might be a full autorotation to a ‘suitable’ landing spot, while attempting to decelerate and cushion the landing prior to impact.”

  “Ideally you want to land as slowly and softly as possible.”

  “The problem with tail rotor failures involving complete loss of control is that at the moment you are trying to cushion the impact, you will be increasing the amount of collective pitch in the main rotor system. This, in turn, will increase the amount of torque being exerted through the transmission on the fuselage and without a controllable tail rotor to counter the torque, the fuselage is going to spin in a direction opposite to the direction that the main rotor is spinning. To the right in all Bell helicopters, including this one.”

  “The result is that the soft impact idea suddenly becomes a soon-to-be-forgotten memory as the spinning helicopter does just about whatever it wants to do, including impacting the world with a lot of noise, dust and flying debris, but hopefully no fire.”

  “The Emergency Procedures further advise that since the crew cannot exert physical direct control over the tail rotor during the autorotation, care should be taken to delay application of collective pitch for as long as practicable, to keep the helicopter from spinning to the right uncontrollably due to torque effects of the main rotor system on the fuselage.”