Viet Nam Trivia

I recently did some on-line research of Viet Nam, in particular, Camp Holloway where I spent a year. I found a picture of the crashed CH47 helicopter that killed two crew members (Harold Lewis and Roy Davis) friends of mine, young like me, while I was enjoying my 7-day R & R in Sidney, Australia. Another crew member (can picture him but can't recall his name) was badly burned and last I heard was in a TX Army burn unit hospital. The two pilots were injured but survived. I came back from R & R and was assigned Harold's helicopter - for unknown reasons he was flying that day with another crew. I heard about it upon reporting back to duty from my R &R. The First Sgt said, "Welcome back, you're now a flight engineer." My time in country and rank qualified me for this minor promotion ~ no more guard duty every third night. (Guard duty was in sandbagged fox holes on the perimeter of camp in any weather, bugs, rain, cold and heat - sleep 3 hrs, watch one hour.) He told me the crash story. The Chinooks had a tendency to have the rotor blades go out of synch and cut into the helicopter. Such as what happened to the two who were killed; the blades took them out too fast for them to know what happened. My newly assigned chinook was to be my responsibility to ensure it was ready to fly everyday and to see that mandatory maintenance was performed at the end of the flight day(s). I had more than one 24 hour day. But, I was only 20 yrs old, too. I was immortal! I remember a partial tail number . . . . 049. (my birth year) I thought, "What an lucky number!" It must have been. The air medals and army commendation medals I earned mean so little to me now. During the long flight days, I ate C-rations - my favorite were Beans and Franks and cheese and crackers. I also, yuck, took up smoking Pall Malls that were free in each C-ration box. Wonderful government we had then, not counting Pres Lyndon Johnson and General Westmoreland (Democrats, by the way) who later admitting lying to the public about the war. I'm not bitter about it, glad I served, but I wouldn't do it again.

These two pictures represent fire-bases I flew into on a daily basis. These Chinooks were the work horse of the Army, supplying ammo, food, water and sometimes personnel, coming and going. We'd generally have a load slung under the helicopter as the pilots relied on the door gunner and crew chief to monitor distance of blades from objects while the flight engineer lay on his stomach, looking through an open trap door, to announce the distance the load was from the ground. None of it was precise, we worked in estimates, starting at "The load is 100 ft off the ground, 50, 25, 10 . . ." All on the intercom over the roar and whining of the noise inside. The fire-bases where manned by artillery units, stuck out in the middle of no where, sometimes on mountain tops surrounded by 100 ft tall trees, some barren hills, cleared for security reasons. Camping at its best 24/7.
Click on link - I can't copy & paste the picture, sorry for the inconvenience.

http://my.core.com/~campholloway/image16.htm