WAR STORIES

From the time I was a little boy, I’ve always been fascinated by aircraft. Dad was in the U.S. Air Force most of my growing up years and at age 20, I enlisted in the Air Force also. Airplanes filled my memories with awe and wonder.

Unfortunately, my vision was never good enough to permit me to be a military pilot but, as an enlisted man I was able to work the airport flight line. Pilot stories of near misses and narrow escapes always drew my attention and I remember many occasions when myself and other mechanics would hang around job control or the debrief areas to hear the latest tale from a pilot or crew.

As my seniority increased, I was given additional opportunity in supervision and training which found me teaching jet engine ground run testing aboard the aircraft, as well as in the simulator. In those days, before video games and home computers, the aircraft simulator was as close as there was to being there, in real life. When the training was over, we were permitted to try out various emergency scenarios.

Examples of these included: Engine flameout at 30,000 feet; Main landing gear failure on landing approach; Massive fuel leak; Hydraulic failure; Aircraft Fire and so forth. We’d talk over procedures from the checklist, discuss what would be the best course of action and imagine ourselves as pilots. It wasn’t as good as the real thing but it was as close as we could get, short of getting a private pilot’s license, which was a financial challenge. My primary simulators were for the F-4, C-130, C-141, with a little, at the end of my military career, on the F-15 and F-16.

I never worked the helicopter simulators but have been equally fascinated by the pilot stories that they generated. Over the years, I have met former pilots who love to talk about their flight experiences and I have jotted down some of my favorites. For instance, I got the following from an army Cobra pilot by the name of Bruce Karn. He used to frequently say, “Helicopters make terrible gliders.” To the best of my knowledge, one of his stories went something like this:

“Our Vietnam squadron had two Mormon pilots, me and one other guy, I’ll call him Joe. We got permission to fly in the same chopper together. We were getting hit by the enemy pretty hard and lost a lot of men and choppers. Joe and I would return with our Cobra pretty shot up, but at least we would return and not get even a scratch to our bodies. This happened so often that our squadron commander put us in separate Cobras, that way he’d be sure that at least two of his choppers and pilots would return.”

Another of his stories was, “One of the cardinal rules you never broke was to pick up troops at the same place in the jungle where you dropped them off. It was just too easy for the enemy to lie in wait till you returned and destroy your men and choppers. It took careful planning to avoid this mistake. Nevertheless, in a particular fire fight, I was ordered to do an emergency pickup of troops and equipment at the same place where we dropped them off. I argued that for our contingent of six choppers to go there was unwise, but I was not listened to. As we were about halfway through loading, the enemy opened fire with all they had. We lost nearly half our force. It was one of our biggest losses."