"Krztalizer" wrote in message
...
snip Death of Liz story

Hysterical, Brooks! Sounds like rotorhead humor to me.

Yeah. I wish he was still around; he had plenty of those kind of stories. He
was always the cut-up type, barely made it through highschool, did not score
high enough on the screening test his first go around, which landed him in a
Nike Hercules unit at FT Lewis. Signed up for community college classes,
studies his butt off, had a BN CO who encouraged him, retook the test, and
went off to Rucker. The stories he told me (I was the doting baby brother,
about thirteen years his junior) were usually the funny ones--the lizard
story, the time he bought a little sunfish sailboat from a DEROSing USAF
type, and then transported it back to Danang by sliding it into a Huey, bow
hangin out one side and stern out of the other (he always wondered what any
NVA troopie who happened to see them fly over thought about *that* sight),
the resulting "Regatta" they held back at Danang, where the local USAF
engineering outfit wanted to attend (mainly because the Dustoff guys had
better access to the nurses) and turned a big drop tank into a half-assed
outrigger (and sank it offshore, resulting in the party being interrupted by
an actual rescue flight to hoist the waterlogged "crew" out of the ocean),
the jeep races on the beach (they once wrecked one and just walked away and
left it there). He only talked about actually seeing the bad guys on one
occasion (saw lots of their weapons fire coming his way, but not the
shooters themselves)--they were on another test flight and were at altitude
when they saw this guy with a rifle scurry into a clump of brush. They
orbited over head (way overhead), and his crew chief drops a grenade out the
door, which of course goes "bang" waaay up above this poor guy (no danger to
him). The guy bolts from cover and heads to another clump of brush. They do
it again...and again. Each time this poor guy bolts to new cover. I asked
him why he did not drop lower and just shoot the guy (typical small kid
reaction, I guess). He just laughed and said that would have brought them
into *his* effective range as well.

It was many years later, after I had already gone into the service myself,
that he told me the full story of the evening when he and his crew were shot
down. I believe it was during Lam Son 719, when the ARVN went into Laos.
They responded to a medevac call from a hot LZ, and as he was pulling out of
the LZ after making his pick-up they got rocked by a NVA 12.7mm, trashing
their transmission. So he was low and slow, and with no power--bad
combination in a helo. Ended up dumping it on his side (he was the AC, so
that would have been the right side in a Huey). For many years that was all
I had known. But a few years before he died he told me that as he was going
in, he saw two ARVN's hunkered down below the on the edge of a crater,
eating their dinner. His Huey landed right on top of them--not a darned
thing he could do about it. It still kind of bothered him those many years
later. Maybe that's why he concentrated on telling me the funny stories as I
grew up.

Brooks


v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Donate your memories - write a note on the back and send your old photos
to a
reputable museum, don't take them with you when you're gone.