Chickenhawk

Afterword

I recently visited the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment (Airborne). These army aviators perform rescues, medical evacuations, and combat assaults wherever in the world they are needed. (Their mottos: “Night Stalkers Never Quit.” When they want to be more specific, they use: “Death Lurks in the Dark.”) They lost two Blackhawk helicopters and several pilots and crewmembers in Somalia which was depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down.

The Night Stalkers had invited me and Bill Reeder (Col. USA Ret) to talk about jungle flying. Bill tells people that if they want to know what it was like to fly helicopters in combat in Vietnam, read Chickenhawk. Which is a stretch considering that I was a WO-1 Slick pilot, a landing-craft-of-the-air driver who got out of the army the moment his commitment was up. Reeder is a two-tour combat pilot, shot down on both tours in Vietnam. He was shot down first in a Mohawk surveillance airplane in 1969. He and his copilot were recovered by the air force after a firefight with the encroaching enemy. In 1972, he was shot down in a Cobra gunship while defending the Special Forces camp at Ben Het, which was being overrun by the NVA. Bill, his ankle wounded, his back broken in the crash (his front-seater died soon after impact), was able to evade the enemy in the jungle for three days before being captured. He spent almost a year as a POW, first in a cage in the jungle and then, after a 400-mile walk, at the Hanoi Hilton, from which he was released in 1973.

Colonel Andy Miliani, Regimental Commander of the 160th, told us that because the Night Stalkers were flying in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq, they were not as knowledgable about jungle operations as he thought they ought to be. Considering the present state of the world, Colonel Miliani thought it would be good for his men to hear from us what it was like to fly helicopters in jungle missions.

More than a hundred Night Stalker pilots showed up for the presentation, which consisted of Bill and me talking about our experiences thirty years ago and taking questions. Almost all of them were younger than my own son, Jack. And almost all of them were veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq, or both. They flew CH-47 Chinooks, UH-60 Blackhawks, and OH-6 Little Birds, which, except for the Blackhawk, were flown when I was in the army; at least there were aircraft then with those same names. They looked about the same to me, until they showed us one of the Chinooks that the Night Stalkers use in Afghanistan. While they had suffered mechanical problems and were grounded several times early in the war, the new Chinook is reliable and amazingly powerful, able to lift more cargo than our heavy lifting Sky Crane could in 1965. All their helicopters are now highly advanced fighting machines. Computers, electronic cockpit instrumentation, night vision goggles, contact radar, and incredibly tough training allowed the Night Stalkers to do things with helicopters that Bill and I had never dreamed possible. Using contact radar, these guys routinely fly Chinooks at zero visibility, low level in mountain ravines, at night, in fog or rain or snow, following the moving needles on the dials of their instrument panels. Sweat pours off aviators focused this intensely. The slightest deviation could kill everyone on board. These pilots were the best ever. What the hell could they learn from us?

Well, some things never change. They still have to land and take-off from tight LZs, overloaded with troops. They still have to dodge bullets. They still get shot down.

Safety tips when flying combat missions in the jungle? My advice: don’t go! Which they thought was pretty funny. As it turns out, these pilots have the same questions about the decisions that move them into the hottest places on earth as we did about being in Vietnam. The bottom line now, as then, is that it’s not their call. They are doing their jobs, unknown to most Americans, better than any group of aviators in the world.

At the beginning of the talk, Bill asked the pilots who had read Chickenhawk. Almost all of them raised their hands. It turns out that Chickenhawk—over twenty years in print—has become a sort of handbook for helicopter pilots all over the world. Since it was published in 1983, I’ve gotten a letter, a phone call, or an e-mail from a reader every day. The North Sea oil pilots read Chickenhawk; I’ve heard from air force, army, navy, and marine pilots. Military pilots in Great Britain and Australia read Chickenhawk. It’s published in English, Dutch, Hebrew, Polish, and Chinese, with a Czech version on the way. Now that I have a Web site (robertcmason.com), I get messages almost every day from Chickenhawk readers all over the world.

When I wrote the book, I had no idea where any of the guys I was talking about had ended up. A few months before publication, though, I located Jerry Towler through the Department of the Army. When the book got to the stores, accompanied by television interviews, great reviews, and news stories of my subsequent time in prison, I started hearing from my friends. They all approved of the book. And they wanted to know why I hadn’t used their real names.

The answer was that my original editor at Viking thought that in our litigious society, we would get sued. I took his advice, and changed the names of my friends to protect their privacy and our butts. However, none of that was necessary. You have to lie about someone to get convicted of slander. I don’t lie in my memoir. Errors, yes.

Because of this new edition of Chickenhawk, I have the chance to mention real names and make some corrections. I served in two aviation units during my year in Vietnam. The Preachers really existed—B Company, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. I made up the name for the Prospectors. The Prospectors lived and performed their duties much differently than did my compatriots in the humongous First Air Cav. My descriptions of ambulance loads of Vietnamese call girls showing up at the club, the Prospectors stealing ice-making machines from the R&U compound, or the fact that maintenance was trading Hueys, reconstituted from wreckage, for trucks, among other incidents, really made my editor nervous. The real name of the Forty-Niners was the 48th Aviation Company, call sign Blue Stars. This independent aviation company operated all over Vietnam from 1966, when I joined them, right up until 1973 when they were stood down. In 1972, the Blue Stars were part of the infamous Lam Son 719 invasion of Cambodia, and paid dearly for it with lost pilots and crew. By the time of the Lam Son invasion, the North Vietnamese Army was not only using Soviet-built tanks as they invaded South Vietnam, they also had acquired heavy antiaircraft guns, which they used against our choppers, a fact that gives me sweaty palms just thinking about it. By 1970, pilots in my old units, the Blue Stars and Preachers, were figuring out how to avoid heat-seeking missiles! I consider myself lucky to have been a pioneer combat assault pilot with the Air Cav, in the good old days of spears and man-traps, rattling assault rifles, thudding 50-caliber machine-guns, whumping mortars and artillery.

I arrived at the Blue Stars just a week before Gerald Towler (Resler, because he’d been a wrestler in college). Jerry and I flew together in the Cav and the Blue Stars. A former crew chief, Tommy Dorsey (PFC Miller), told us recently that in the Preachers, we were known as The Kids. We were both fresh out of flight school and twenty-two years old in 1965. Most of the other Preacher pilots were career soldiers. By the time we got to the Blue Stars, we were old salts in the business of flying helicopters in combat, having logged three or four times as many combat hours as anyone in the unit. They had only arrived in-country in 1966.

This edition contains a photographic section showing some of the pilots I knew in the Cav, mostly the people from the 2nd Platoon.

Our trusty platoon commander, Captain Robert Stinnett (Shaker) was an avid chess player. There’s a photo of him playing a game with Captain Gillette (Gill) while Captain Hugh Farmer (Marston), calm as ever, practices his golf swing in the background.

Jerry Towler (Resler) and I flew together as WO-l’s both in the Cav and when we were infused to the 48th Aviation Company.

Lee Komich (Connors) and Dallas Harper (Banjo Bates) were a team, flying together often. Lee was also the company IP, and he helped me learn formation flying and the value of careful preflights, among many things.

I think Don Reynolds (Kaiser), the best gambler I ever knew, won enough at poker to buy a new car when he got home. Don became an airline captain for Eastern. He died of his second heart attack two years ago.

Woody Woodruff (Decker) and Howard Phillips (Morris), both from Arkansas, were like brothers. You can see it in their eyes in the photograph. Phillips, a skillful woodcarver, as well as combat assault pilot, is on the Wall in D.C.

Captain Duane Denton (Farris) was our section leader. He made Jerry and me line the walkways with rocks, and yet we still liked him. He died in an airplane crash, a training accident, not long after he got home.

Chuck Nay (Nate) is captured for eternity modeling a towel in our bath area in one of the photos. I guess Chuck can go ahead and sue me.

I don’t have any good photographs of Bob Sweazey (Wendell) or Ken Faba (Barber), another team that usually flew together in the Preachers. Sweazey was the amateur photographer and Vietnam historian, the one who kept reminding us that the French had been there, done that, and lost.

Captain Sherman was really Bruce Thomas. He’s a lot nicer than he was during the times I ended up talking about him in the book.

I say that Ron Fox, the pilot who had replaced me in the Cav, was killed. It was WO-1 Allan L. Cox, killed by a sniper bullet in the forehead on August 1, 1966. That same day, at the 48th, Ringknocker was walking the board trail across the beach at Tuy Hoa. A minute later, I’m watching our maintenance officer, Major Frank Gundaker (Major Steve Richards), trying to use a Huey to haul a junk rotor blade over the ocean and dump it. The blade is whipping around under him as Gundaker hovers forward. People on the ground are yelling, waving. The three maintenance guys along for the ride, PFC Ronald Russell, SP5 Ernest Shuman, and SP4 Donald Wallace, are waving back. The blade whipped up into the Huey’s main rotors. Gundaker’s ship tumbled out of the sky and burst into flames on the beach. Everyone on board was killed.

Crew chiefs and gunners made the whole combat assault thing work. They worked in the field, at night, all the time, keeping the choppers flying. There’s a photo of my door gunner, PFC Ubinski, in the back of our Huey. I called him Rubinski in the book. He was one of my best friends over there. I can’t find him these days.

Gene Burdick (Reacher) is shown running with the boot during the extraction of wounded when a remotely triggered road mine blew up their Jeep.

PFC Tommy Dorsey was hit by 50-caliber antiaircraft fire during the assault at LZ Bird in 1966. A single bullet was deflected by his chest protector, and the shards tore into his shoulder, tearing off his arm. I saw him bleeding in the back of his Huey, his arm hanging by a tendon. Tommy’s pilot called, said he was turning back to the aid station. The next time I saw Tommy was at an Ia Drang reunion. He has the arm. They sewed it back on. But he said it doesn’t work too well.

The crew chief I call Collins was actually Keith May nard, who was a big help when we needed parts, from wherever, to keep ‘em flying.

We were in Orlando at the VHPA twentieth annual reunion in July 2003, and there were Ringknocker and Sky King sitting at a table in the Blue Stars room. I pointed them out to my wife, Patience, and we walked over. Sky King, my old partner in the ice business at Dak To, looked up. His impish grin shone through the age gathering on his face. Then Ringknocker, who’s been a retired general for twenty years, looked up, smiling. “Mason, it’s great to see you!” he said. “What a book! I had no idea you had such an imagination.”

“Sir? It was my memoir.”

“Memoir?” Roper is grinning. “Where did you get all this stuff about stealing supplies from the R&U compound?”

“Or that myth about us trading Hueys we salvaged for trucks?” I ask.

“Yup. That one, too.”

Patience laughs. She says, “The ambulance load of whores?”

He shakes his head. “Not a chance.”

“Or you letting me and Towler borrow a Huey like the family car to go visit our friends.”

“Definitely wouldn’t have allowed that.” Ringknocker is still in form, having fun. He holds up his drink. “Here’s to Chickenhawk, fiction though it may be.” He laughs as Jack Home, Jerry, and I raise our drinks. Harry Roper, graduate of West Point, retired brigadier general, has been racing his sailboat single-handedly back and forth across the Pacific. And at seventy-two, he’s winning races.

Turns out that Jack Home, my partner from the ice cartel at Dak To, is a partner in a law firm in Atlanta that specializes in intellectual property, patents, contracts, and he wants to help me get my VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing project) going. You know, gratis, until I make enough money to be interesting.

During the two and a half years I spent writing Chickenhawk, I was not able to do formal research about the war. I relied on my memories and I made mistakes. I confused Stoney Stitzle (Stoopy Stoddard in the book) who shared a tent with Jerry and me at Dak To with someone else. When Ringknocker was told he had to transfer his best pilot to headquarters aviation unit in Saigon, I thought that Ringknocker chose Stoopy because he was not that good. Commanders wanted to keep the best pilots. But I was completely wrong, and I apologize. Ringknocker sent someone else. Stoney Stitzle became one of the Blue Stars’ most accomplished assault pilots after Jerry and I shipped home.

Captain Daisy and I are friends these days although he doesn’t want me to use his real name. He says my description of the way he flew during combat assaults is incomplete since a pilot can fly a helicopter into combat while scrunched up behind his chest protector. We still have this difference of opinion, but I respect Daisy for having gone to Vietnam, flying in combat, and doing the best that he could.

As depicted in the movie We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, Colonel Harold Moore (Grunt Six) was the first man on the ground at LZ Xray during the Ia Drang battle. Around Veterans’ Day every year, at the annual la Drang Valley reunion banquet, Moore has everyone stand up at their table and sound off, “like you got a pair!” with their name and what they did at Ia Drang. At two of the tables some of the aviators who were in the battle, including me, sit with our wives: Jerry Towler, Lee Komich, Daisy, Dallas Harper, Walt Schramm, Ken Dicus, Bill Weber, Neal Parker. We all sound off. Don Reynolds used to stand up and shout, “Don Reynolds, helicopter pilot, LZ Xray and LZ Albany!”

Dicus and I, Jerry and Reynolds, Kiess and Harper are mentioned in We Were Soldiers for making the midnight extraction at LZ Albany. We’ve even met some of the men we hauled out that night at the reunions. They like to shake our hands and thank us for the ride out of hell.

At dawn the next day, we gather with General Moore by the Wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. where he and Joe Galloway perform a roll call of the dead. It’s obvious to me that General Moore really cares a great deal about the men who did not return.

There are a lot of real people I haven’t mentioned so far. Ray Ward, my friend throughout basic training, advanced infantry training, and flight school, is Ray Welch, now a building contractor in New Hampshire. Ken Klayman, who I traveled with over and back, and who I’ve never seen again is Aaron Varon. W0-1 Tom Wolf is a classmate of mine, Jim Nunn. We called Dick Armstrong Jack Armstrong, and he still owes me a camera and photos that were in my ammo box in the back of his Huey.

The names of the people I don’t know, or whose privacy I want to continue to respect, will remain unacknowledged here.

In 1993, the sequel to Chickenhawk was published. My friend, Mike Costello (author of A Long Time from Home), described it as, “a litany of fuck-ups that makes you glad you’re not Mason!”

Back in the World was intended to flesh out the sketchy last chapter of Chickenhawk, which ends, “No one is more shocked than I.” Referring to big trouble with the law. Now that I’m a graduate of the federal prison rehabilitation process, my criminal tendencies are mostly in check, although I still speed. In Back in the World, I described my life after Vietnam, jobs I tried, businesses I started, marital problems. I also told about my sailboat pot run to Columbia, my arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. My life’s an open book, but this one didn’t sell well and went out of print. You have to buy that chapter used.

Inspired by two young television producers, Chris Fetner and Jeremy Wood, I decided to produce a documentary about the Army helicopter pilots of Vietnam. I flew out to Bell Helicopters in Fort Worth to talk to John Wright, the head of sales for North America. While I was there, bending John’s ear about giving me money to produce the show, he had their senior test pilot take me for a demo ride in their latest Bell 407 helicopter. John said that it was same as Harrison Ford’s. “Even Patricia Cornwell owns one,” said John. “You’re a writer, too. When you going to get one?”

“How much you say they run?”

“Full tank of gas and everything you see here, one point four would do it.”

“I’d buy it, John, but it’s just the wrong color.”

We flew the gorgeous red-with-white-swoops high-tech Bell 407 from Fort Worth out to Mineral Wells. Fort Wolters, former home of the U.S Army Primary Helicopter School, has become a rundown industrial park. We flew over countryside full of sagebrush and willow, out to Stage Field 3, one of the practice fields where we used to train thousands of beginning pilots how to fly. The six lanes at Stage Field 3 were covered with tall grass growing through the spidery network of cracks in the concrete. The control shack leaned, the window was broken, a shutter banged. We came to a hover on lane two. We hovered a minute, watched the grass blowing in the rotor wash. Then we took off, heading for the Brazos River.

I used to come play on the river with a Hiller H-23D I’d borrow from the flight line on Saturdays. I would sit on a ledge, high over the river, then just leap off backward, spin around, dive, and skim down to the sandbars. We didn’t do that that day with the 407, just took a little ride down the river. We swooped out of the riverbed and back to the Bell factory heliport.

When I was thinking about who should be the narrator in my documentary, I recalled that John Wright said Harrison Ford owns a 407. So I called John, asked if he could ask Mr. Ford if he’d be willing to help me out.

John had me send a book to Mr. Ford’s business manager. Two weeks later, the phone rang. Patience answered. Her eyes widened. “The real Harrison Ford?” She squeaked and handed the phone over to me. “Here! Talk to him!”

“Robert Mason?”

“Yes, hello.”

“Robert, I read your book. I think you and I have a lot in common. Consider me a fan.”

“Well, I’m a big fan of yours, too, Mr. Ford.‘

“Call me Harrison.”

“Okay, Harrison.”

And he agreed to introduce my documentary on screen, and to record additional narration. Free!

Just before we started filming the host introduction scene in September 2000, Harrison invited me to come up to New York and go for a ride in his chopper. His Gulf-stream G-4 was coming down to National, in D.C. I could ride back on it. I flew up, the only passenger in this beautiful jet, spent the night at a motel near the airport. Harrison picked me up the next morning, took me to his hangar at Teterboro. We sat in the office and talked about a script for his narration for a while, then we went into the hangar to get his chopper. As we walked under the G-4, he said he didn’t fly it, just the small planes and the chopper. He waved around the hangar. Five airplanes and a Bell 407 were parked around the G-4. I noticed a Beech Bonanza and a DeHaviland Beaver. The Beaver was restored, perfect down to the rivets. He said it was in better shape than the one he flew in Six Days, Seven Nights. We walked over to his 407. It was equipped with emergency floats, skinny tubes above the skids that can be inflated to full size in a second if needed. Harrison grabbed a powered tug, steered it over to his 407. He slipped the tug under the fuselage between the skids, then pushed a button. Jacks whirred up to the skid supports then lifted the machine an inch or two off the floor. Harrison steered the tug outside, set the helicopter down, and removed the tug. We climbed up the side of the 407 and checked out the rotor head and pitch-change links and stuff. We climbed down and talked while he finished his walk-around inspection. We were both impressed with the size of the turbine under the cowl. This helicopter can carry seven people at 150 miles an hour, yet either of us could’ve lifted the engine barehanded (well, Harrison could have). We got inside the cockpit where I watched him go through his checklist. He flipped a switch. The chopper whined, whirred, did its own instrument and power check, green light blinked on. We both wore headsets with voice-activated mikes. I heard Harrison call the tower for takeoff. He lifted off, steady as a rock, hovered out to the active runway. He nosed over, we were off, heading for Manhattan. This was in September 2000. We flew from Teterboro down the Hudson at about 400 feet. When we flew past the World Trade Center, Harrison said, “Can you believe they let us fly this close?”

Harrison let me take the controls for a few minutes as we flew past the ventilator shafts for the Holland Tunnel. I held altitude and airspeed okay. I was working on feeling the aircraft, but I was pushing too much right rudder and the ship was out of trim. “Left rudder. Left rudder,” Harrison said.

“Yeah, I’m a little rusty, eh?”

“Yeah,” said Han Solo, Decker, and Indiana Jones, disappointed.

Later, after we pulled his chopper inside the hangar with the tug, I asked Harrison why he had read my book. “Everywhere I go, if it has anything to do with helicopters, people tell me I have to read Chickenhawk. So I did. And I agree.”

When he sat down at his desk to fill in his logbook, I noticed he had about five hundred hours in helicopters. He’s quite good for that amount of time.

Three months ago I had the chance to go visit my cockpit buddy, Jerry Towler. He lives close to Detroit, near one of our Vietnam pilot friends, Bob Baden. Bob had just restored a 1973 Bell-47G2 (the M^*A^*S^*H helicopter, known as an H-13 in the Army). He’d let me rent it at cost, to see if I could still fly.

I rummaged around, found my army flight records, and checked the date of my last official flight. June 6, 1967! When I took the controls of Bob’s 47, I had not flown a chopper for almost thirty-seven years. What I wanted to do was attempt to get it up to a hover and not crash, unaided. Bob, who’s been flying all those thirty-seven years, agreed.

I’d never flown an H-13, the army’s designation of the Bell 47, when I was in the army. I knew it was a good machine.

I gradually got the machine light on the skids, feeling it beginning to shift a little, twitch like it was alive. Instincts took over. We lifted off the tarmac, the little Bell sounding far louder than the much larger Huey. Turbine engines are beautifully quiet in comparison to the 400 HP, six-cylinder, fuel-injected, snarling beast behind the cockpit seats.

It was thrilling to be drifting around just three feet off the ground. I wasn’t locked over a spot like I would’ve been thirty-seven years before, but I wasn’t dangerous, either. The chopper was noisy, it vibrated, and the throttle was sloppy—something Bob, who had worked as a helicopter mechanic and pilot for thirty years, advised me to notice. I was able to turn around, hover forward over the grass next to the runway. Mercifully, Bob operated the radios. I had my hands full keeping the machine within the confines of the taxiway. We were cleared with the local traffic for takeoff. I nosed the Bell forward, holding her close to the ground while she accelerated. We hit translational lift, surged up, free of gravity. You can call it translational lift, but that hardly describes how much fun it is.

Bob points beyond the plastic canopy. Don’t fly over those warehouses; avoid this neighborhood; break right here; give the highway plenty of clearance.

I’m looking for a place to land in case the engine suddenly takes a nap.

I was taught to fly as though the engine, brand-new or not, was preparing itself to enter motor oblivion precisely when you needed it alive and chugging. But there was nowhere to land below us except little tiny postage-stamp yards, wire-draped suburban streets, and a few swimming pools.

“Forced landings?”

“Anywhere you can fit it. Except roofs,” he said, nodding toward a vast complex of flat-roofed factory buildings.

“Why not?”

“Chances are you’d fall through the roof when you hit, probably kill some people working inside.”

“The highway?”

“Yeah, if you’ve got no other choice.”

I listened to the Lycoming grumbling. “She sounds great, though.”

Bob nodded, smiled.

I kept the airspeed somewhere between fifty and seventy, altitude around 500 feet as we fly toward the main airport. I was still grinning about how much pure fun this is! So what was nagging me? We flew across a crowded parking lot. Then I realized I’ve never flown over houses full of people before. That’s what was making me nervous? Houses? I flew combat assaults in jungles. Never neighborhoods. Flying over a perfectly normal American neighborhood, apparently with nobody shooting, made me wary.

Patience and I stayed with Jerry and Martie Towler while I went out to the airport every other day for flight instruction. And after a hiatus of thirty-seven years, everything I did was fresh and exhilarating. I still felt the thrill of practicing to control a machine that has been built to hover off the ground and not kill you. I was happy in the world of foot pedals, collective, throttle, cyclic. By my third hour with Bob, it was beginning to come back. We did autorotations: hovering, straight-ins, one-eighties, to make sure I’d at least be competent enough to survive a forced landing. If I had been grading me, I’d have given meaCride. I could do the maneuvers, but not with the smoothness of a practiced hand. But it was still fun. I would only get better each time I flew. Unfortunately, even at the reduced rate my friend Bob was letting me pay for the Bell, it’s obvious why it’s only military pilots and people like Harrison Ford who can fly helicopters around for the fun of it.

There’s got to be a way to make a more affordable hovering aircraft.

Patience is a publisher, writer, and editor. Her book Recovering from the War is still in print. She gives talks to veterans all over the country about post-traumatic stress disorder.

My son, Jack, is in school learning digital graphics. I have a grandson, also named Jack, who visits me on weekends, and who is the best grandson in the world.

My plans keep me busy. That frustrated engineer inside me is getting out more often. I’m writing, too. Upcoming is a book about the invention of vertical flight, a screen-play about Bill Reeder’s survival as a POW in Vietnam, a third Solo novel, and a movie I want to write and produce myself.

Where do I file for a life extension?