My father completed two tours in Vietnam and this Veterans day I am sharing one of his stories. He was an aircraft commander flying cobra gunships, part of the United States Army’s attack helicopter fleet. In 1969, at the age of 24, he was awarded The Distinguished Flying Cross for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight.
He wrote down many stories from Vietnam and saved them on floppy discs, which I gained access to only after his death. One of them was about landing a combat-damaged Cobra with loss of fore/aft flight control for which he was awarded the US Army Aviation Safety Broken Wing Award.
The story is best told in his own words:
"I was told by investigators that an estimated nine of those three hundred, forty millimeter, grenades we had carried aboard the aircraft that morning, had gone off in flight.
Out of all our miracles, of life and death importance that day, the biggest was -- why only nine? Why hadn't fifty‑five or all three hundred of the grenades exploded? Once that chain reaction had started what had stopped it?
My guess would be that the explosion itself must have blown the grenades away from the blast until they were no longer exploded by each other. To us on board, at the time of the explosion, it sounded as if one large grenade had exploded. It was an altogether “big bang” thing. Nothing went off in a boom, boom, boom style as if it were a chain reaction. It was all of a sudden and one time.
I couldn’t understand how we’d survived this flight. It was a greater puzzle than I could manage. I suppose part of me died that day. The part inside myself where I believed I was immortal died forever more.
I remembered in my original Cobra class back in flight school, I had personally asked, “Can the ammo below our feet blow up and kill us?” The answer they’d told us students was a matter of fact, “Never.” The instructor explained further, “The grenades must be fired first and then spun rapidly before they can become armed. They cannot explode accidentally inside their own ammo-bay.” Yet, those enemy bullets had struck our grenades and exploded them just the same. I’ve always felt as if it was just a lucky shot the enemy fired but it bothered me still to consider I’d been flying around in a bomb, just waiting for its reason, to explode.
So many things kept us alive that flight, that it seems over all too strange for me to believe, but I am a true believer. Even the rain that day had softened the ground enough for the skids of the aircraft to plow through without turning us over or breaking the skids off.
A week later a high ranking officer from the helicopter maintenance office, over all of the regional South Vietnam’s helicopter maintenance programs located near Ben Hoa, called my Company Commander with information and asked the following question, “We know what’s wrong with that Smiling Tiger Cobra, of yours, that we have down here. The one that exploded recently and we also know exactly what caused the damage, but we’ve sat around here and talked about this incident until we’ve turned blue and finally we decided to call your company and ask you just one question -- How did that pilot of yours land that aircraft?”
I received, “The United States Army Aviation Safety Broken Wing Award,” for bringing that aircraft back in one big broken chunk. I never really thought about saving that helicopter while I was trying to land it. I believe if I'd had a parachute with me I would have used it. Helicopter pilots within the Army, at that time and today as far as I know, never have worn parachutes or had them available. We were forced to fly those ships or die trying to land safely.
I knew that night after the incident, as I lay my twenty-three year old combat bruised body down on my bunk, thinking over the day, I was no longer just a wing commander in the First Cavalry, D-229th Cobra Company. I had become someone and something else entirely.
To this day I love rainy days. Those sounds of water drops falling are truly my life savers, from my version of heaven, here on this earth. That rain had softened the ground permitting us the ability to land. Without soft ground that day our aircraft would have surely rolled over and crashed into an exploding fireball.
If given the opportunity I’d tell anybody and everybody, that might listen... to truly become alive one must know and understand their own death."
To all the Veterans – a heartfelt thank you for your service to our country.