Suzanne Rice

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“HEY, NEW GUY!”  I felt every eye in the bar focused on me.  “Gimme a beer!”

*       *        *        *        *

My Uncle Nick used to be a helicopter pilot in the Army.  All I know is, he was in Vietnam for a long time when I was growing up.  After the war was over, he got too sick to stay in the Army, so he was medically retired from the Army.  So he opened a bar in Fayetteville, NC, which he called “Nick’s FAARP” – why I never knew.  It’s right next to Fort Bragg, where he had been stationed at the time.

Last month the cancers finally took him.  To my complete astonishment he left me his bar!  Don’t know why he did, because I really never knew him very much.  Maybe he just felt sorry for me, after I flunked out of college in my first year.

By the way, my name is Gil Edwards.   Anyhow, I had just arrived in Fayetteville, and only about ten minutes before had walked into Nick’s FAARP, the bar I was now owner of.  I had been warmly welcomed to the establishment by Miss Peggy.  She was Uncle Nick’s bar manager, now mine, who had been with him since the day he opened the place.

Miss Peggy had written me a letter after his death, telling me that her late husband and one other guy had been Nick’s best friends, ever since they had all finished Army flight school together in the early 1960s.  She had lost her husband in Vietnam in 1972, and had been struggling to raise their son as a single mother.  So when Uncle Nick offered her the job as bar manager, she had jumped at the opportunity, and was fiercely loyal to him.  I had been surprised when I met her, although I guess I shouldn’t have been, to see she had a lovely milk chocolate complexion.

*        *        *        *        *

“Gil.” Miss Peggy startled me out of my shock at being called “New Guy.”  “I told all of the regulars here at the ‘FAARP’ that you were arriving today.  And that short, fat rude bastard who just walked in and yelled at you is Chief Warrant Officer Rod Jordan, your Uncle Nick’s other oldest and best friend.”

I noticed he wasn’t really very short or fat either, but rude certainly fit.  I also saw now that there was an amused twinkle in his eye.  He sat down between two other guys in Army uniforms who were at the curve of the bar, looked me over, and said, “Well??”

I gulped, and figured I’d better do something, so I reached in the cooler and pulled out a can of the classiest beer brand I knew, Mitchell “Great Life!”  Popping the top, I poured it into a frosty mug and set it in front of him.

All of a sudden the whole bar went silent.  The look on this Jordan fellow’s face got icier than the mug I had handed him.  He stared at me, then at the beer, then me again, growled “FNG!” and stomped out of the place.

I looked helplessly at the guys at the bar, then at Miss Peggy.  “What the hell just happened?”

Miss Peggy shook her head sadly at me and said, “Now, you’ve really done it.”

“What?” I asked.  “What did I do?”

“Kenny, maybe you’d better tell him,” she said to the younger of the two men at the bar’s curve.  “By the way, Gil, this is Captain Kenny Wayne, one of our regulars here at the FAARP.”

The soldier called Kenny looked me in the eye and slowly said, “You gave him Mitchell beer in a can.  You don’t ever do that to anyone who served in Vietnam.”

“Why not?” I implored.  “What’s wrong with that?”

Captain Kenny patiently began to tell me the story:  “It seems that during the height of the Vietnam war, when we had over half a million troops in country, the US government was awarding huge contracts to supply everything the troops needed.  Every major American company was getting their ‘fair share’ of the government business.  It seems the Mitchell Brewing Co. had a batch of beer that spoiled on them in their process.  Instead of dumping it, they decided to can it anyway and send it over to the troops.  Guess they figured, what the heck?  They’re just a bunch of GIs, so who cares?

“Back in those days canned beverages came in steel cans, not these new aluminum pop-tops we have today.  As soon as that Mitchell beer started getting distributed in country, the troops who tasted it began puking their guts out.  Very soon the word went out, that stuff is bad, bad, BAD!  The units quit issuing that brand of beer to the troops, so it just sat in the PX warehouses, corroding in the steel cans and getting nastier and nastier.  Anyone who ever tasted that rotten stuff will never again in his life touch Mitchell beer from a can.  And that’s what you just gave to Chief Rod Jordan.”

“Wow,” I said.  “I guess I’ll never make that mistake again.  Thanks for telling me, at least.”

“The tale of the Mitchell beer doesn’t end there,” said the older guy sitting there beside Kenny.

Miss Peggy introduced me. “Gil, this is Major Williams, another of our regulars.”  I just now noticed some kind of gold leaf on his uniform.

“Gil, I’m Tony Williams,” he said, reaching out his hand to me.  “We all loved your Uncle Nick like a brother.  Kenny,” he continued, “let me tell Gil the rest of the story.”

“Yes, sir, Major Williams, sir!” said Kenny.

“Oh, cut the crap, Kenny.  You know we don’t have rank in here.”  He turned to me and pointed to Kenny’s collar.  “You see those two silver bars?  They mean that Captain Wayne here is still a probationary officer in the US Army.  He is a company-grade officer, as we field grade officers refer to our juniors.  After ten or twelve years of exemplary service, he might be selected for promotion to major, like I was.”

“I’m Gil Edwards,” I said, shaking his hand.  “Guess I don’t know a thing about the Army.”

“That’s ok.  We don’t mind –” and he turned his head and made a spitting sound, “– civilians.  Now, as I was going to say, here is the rest of the story:

“By the time I got over to Vietnam for my second tour at the end of 1971, the American forces had been drawn down so far, there were more Korean troops in country than Americans.  I was still a captain then, fresh out of flight school.  My first tour had been with Special Forces, and I had been so far back in the boonies we never saw beer of any kind, so I hadn’t heard about the bad Mitchell.

“I had just arrived in Saigon for a few days in-processing before going up-country to my flying assignment.  In the PX there I noticed that beer was $2.40 or $3.60 a case, depending on the brand.  But they had Mitchell ‘Great Life!’ for only a dollar a case.  Sounded like a bargain to me, so I took a buck’s worth of beer back to my temporary hootch.  But when – “

“Wait a minute, Tony,” I interrupted.  “Hootch??  I thought that means rotgut liquor.  What are you talking about?”

Captain Kenny interceded, “Gil, ‘hootch’ is Army slang for living space.  It can mean anything from an infantryman’s tent in the mud to the fancy apartments the Air Force guys have, even in a combat zone.”

“As I was saying, thank you very much, Kenny,” resumed Major Tony.  “When I punched a can opener, what we called a churchkey, into my first can, I almost vomited.

That’s when I noticed the can was corroded, as were most of the others in the case.  I took the case back to the PX and demanded my money back. The cashier showed me the asterisk on the sign, which said, ‘Absolutely no refunds on Mitchell beer.’ I just walked out, leaving the case behind.

“It seems the PX system still had tons of this nasty Mitchell beer in their inventory.  With all the American units standing down and going home, the PX was desperately trying to get rid of this stuff.  Under government rules they had to clear it off their books.  They could write it down and sell it at a discount, or else they had to ship it all back to the US.

“A month later, Mitchell beer was going for a quarter a case, then a dime a case, then a nickel a case, but still no takers!

“Finally, in the spring of 1972, at the giant PX warehouse in Nha Trang, they got a great idea:  ‘Let’s let the little people steal it!’  That way, they could write off the beer as stolen and be finished with it.  So one evening they moved all their pallets of Mitchell beer just outside the PX warehouse yard by fork-lift.  Then they instructed the MPs to stay completely away for the entire night.  That should take care of it!”

“So, what happened?” asked Captain Kenny.

Tony Williams continued.  “Next morning, when they came in, the little people had been there in the night, sure enough.  They had broken down the pallets of Mitchell beer and stacked the cases to build a ramp over the fence.  Leaving the Mitchell beer behind, dang if they hadn’t gone over the fence and stolen all the Coke and Pepsi in the whole PX storage yard!”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

 

 

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, MISS PEGGY, what does FARRP mean, anyway?”

“I was standing behind the bar at my uncle’s cozy watering hole for Army guys in Fayetteville, North Carolina, just outside Fort Bragg, which I had only recently found myself the new owner of.  My Uncle Nick, whom I barely knew when I was growing up, opened the bar after he had to leave the Army several years ago because he got really sick after all his tours in Vietnam.  Two weeks ago, I found out he had finally died, and to my astonishment he left the establishment, called Nick’s FARRP, to me.

I had just arrived here a couple of days ago, to learn that it was being run most effectively by Miss Peggy, widow of Uncle Nick’s long-time Army buddy Miguel, who died in 1972 when his Cobra gunship was shot down in Vietnam.  Because of her deep affection for my Uncle Nick, Miss Peggy has really taken me under her wing.  Knowing nothing about the Army, I have to ask lots of questions in order to try to understand what these Army guys are talking about.

“Well, Gil,” Miss Peggy replied [my name is Gil Edwards], “the best person to answer that question is sitting right in front of you.”  She nodded to a stout fellow sitting at the bar.  “Rod, can you explain the term FARRP to Gil?”

“Sure, New Guy, that’s really a good question,” he began with a twinkle in his eye.  He always referred to me as New Guy.  “Your Uncle Nick was a master Army aviator, right along with me and Miss Peggy’s husband Miguel, that we all called ‘Mikey.‘  We three all entered the Army in 1961, then went through flight school as Warrant Officer Candidates, and served together from time to time in aviation assignments over the years.  We were known as the Three Musketeers.

“Your Uncle Nick came down with cancers while we three were all serving here at Fort Bragg in senior aviation positions.  The Army gave him a medical retirement, because he was a few years short of the twenty years’ service it takes to earn a regular Army retirement.  Because his cancers were caused by exposure to Agent Orange during his three flying tours in Vietnam, he received full disability health benefits.  He decided to open this bar as a watering hole for his aviation buddies, as well as any other guys who wanted to hang around.

“Several years ago, the Army’s battle doctrine evolved to apply maximum use of the aviation lessons learned from Vietnam toward the Soviet threat in Europe.  They established stations to refuel and re-arm combat helicopters as far forward toward the battle zone as possible.  These stations were designated as Forward Area Refuel/Re-arm Points, or FARRPs for short.  When your Uncle Nick opened this bar, he chose that name to represent a refuge where his aviation buddies could relax and recharge themselves from the stresses of duty here.  Hence, Nick’s FARRP.”

“I get it,” I replied.  “It’s a helicopter pilot’s refreshment place.  But all the guys in here aren’t helicopter pilots, are they?”

“Good point, young lad.  Sitting next to me here is Captain Kenny Wayne.  Kenny, tell this New Guy what your connection to aviation is.”

“Right, Chief,” spoke the fellow in starched Army fatigues.  “I have the distinction of having over 65 more aircraft take-offs than landings.”

“That’s crazy,” I replied to Captain Kenny.  “How can you take off in an aircraft but not land in it?”

“What Kenny is trying to say, in his clever way,” spoke the man on the other side of Chief Rod, “is that he is a master paratrooper, what we call a Master Blaster.  The mathematical difference between his take-offs and landings is the number of successful parachute jumps he has made.  And as you have seen in these past few days here, paratroopers are really proud of those silver wings on their chest.”

“Okay,” I said to Major Tony Williams, “I know about the parachutist wings with the wreath on Kenny’s chest.  But you have two types of wings on your chest.  What are they, anyway?”

“Sure,” replied Tony.  “My upper wings that go out long and narrow are aviator wings.

You see mine are plain, but the aviator wings Chief Rod wears have a star surrounded by a wreath on top.  That’s because he is a master aviator who has been flying for 16 years, since 1962.  Below my flight wings are my parachutist wings, with a star on top which means I am a senior parachutist.  But you see the big insignia on top of Captain Kenny’s jump wings?  That long rifle with a wreath wrapped around it is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, known as a CIB.  That means he served in combat in an infantry role.  That is the most highly esteemed award you see around this bar.”

“But, Kenny,” I replied, “I thought you are an engineer.  How did you get your CIB?”

“Well, Gil, it might interest you to know that all Army engineers have the secondary mission to fight as infantry.  However, I did not get this CIB as an engineer.  Originally, I was commissioned as an Armor lieutenant, and served my first two years in armored cavalry.  In Vietnam I served in the armored cavalry unit in the 173^rd Airborne Brigade, E Troop of the 17^th Cavalry.  Armored cavalry units, even at the platoon level commanded by a lieutenant, always contain an infantry section, along with their scout sections, tank sections and mortar sections.

“We were organic to an infantry brigade and we had infantry troops in our command, and we operated primarily with modified infantry armored personnel carriers.  The brigade headquarters assigned all the officers in E Troop the secondary specialty code of mechanized infantry and awarded us the CIB after we had served a few months in combat.”

“So, Tony,” I asked, “you wear a CIB too, over your aviator wings.  I thought you told me you are in Military Intelligence.  So how did you get that?”

“Well, Gil, when I graduated from Texas A&M in 1965, I was commissioned an infantry lieutenant and assigned to a mechanized infantry battalion in the Panama Canal Zone, the 4^th battalion of the 20^th Infantry (Mechanized).  It was pretty neat in the Canal Zone, because the Army element of the Southern Command, the 193^rd Infantry Brigade, contained our mechanized infantry battalion, plus a straight leg infantry battalion and an airborne infantry battalion. On top of that, the 8^th Special Forces Battalion in the Canal Zone operated a jump school plus the Jungle Operations Course, known as Jungle Warfare School.  I spent almost two years down there, and went through both schools, earning my jump wings and ‘the coveted Jungle Expert tab.’

“It was while hanging around those Special Forces guys, the Green Berets we called ‘snake eaters, ‘that I decided SF was what I wanted to do.  I completed the Special Forces Officer Qualification Course here at Fort Bragg in 1967 and served two years in 5^th SF Group in Vietnam.  They awarded me my CIB.”

          I was puzzled.  “But why did you tell me you are Military Intelligence?”

“Gil, in Special Forces everyone on a twelve-man A-team has specialties, besides their language qualifications, such as medical, explosives and engineering, weapons and communications.  As the senior officer on the team, my specialties were operations and intelligence.  After Vietnam, while still an infantry officer, I served in several intelligence roles in various places.  When the Army created Military Intelligence, or MI, as a new officer branch toward the end of the Vietnam war, it became a magnet for duds and turds who weren’t competitive in their own branch to get a fresh start.  MI branch had a bad name, so I avoided it like the plague.

“After I made Major and completed Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1976, the Army sent me on an exchange assignment to the Mexican National War College.  I could never have performed that assignment if I had been in MI, because the Mexicans would have regarded me as a spy and never let me in country.  But once I completed that assignment and became a fully qualified Foreign Area Officer for Latin America, MI branch finally won me over.”

“But why do you have aviator wings too?” I had to ask Tony.

“Well, Gil, in 1971 I applied to go to flight school before returning to Vietnam for my second combat tour.  So, I flew Huey helicopters in Vietnam from January 1972 to January 1973.  My last day in country was the day the North Vietnamese finally agreed to sit down at the peace table, so I have always told people that I am the guy who won the war.”

“Wow!  So, you’re the guy!  But I am really puzzled.  ‘A lot of you guys are helicopter pilots, but you keep saying the word ‘aviator. What is the difference between a pilot and an aviator?”

“All right, New Guy!  That’s the best question you have ever asked,” replied Chief Rod.  “The Air Force has pilots.  All those guys do is operate aerial machinery.  An Air Force pilot colonel does exactly the same thing that an Air Force lieutenant does – fly an airplane.  The only difference is that the colonel is at the front of the formation and the lieutenant is flying the last bird.  The Air Force does their own thing pretty much, sometimes supporting the Army with airlift or close air support.  But they never know the people they are supporting.

“In the Army, aviation is integrated with the ground forces.  Major troop units all have their own organic aviation assets, guys they eat and sleep with and know face to face.  A pilot is a machine operator, but an aviator is a pilot who is primarily focused on the troops he is integrated with.  In fact, for commissioned officers like Tony here, who we Warrant Officers like to refer to as RLOs, meaning real live officers, being aviation rated is considered an additional skill.  Tony started out as a combat arms officer, was still a combat arms officer when he was flying in Vietnam supporting combat troops, and remains primarily a combat arms officer, if you want to consider MI a combat branch.  That is the difference between a pilot and an aviator.”

“Yes, Gil,” concluded Miss Peggy.  “We have a lot of aviators here at the FARRP, but we hardly ever see a pilot.”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

 

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, KENNY.  What does that castle on your uniform mean?”

I was speaking to an Army guy, working on his beer, at the bar I just recently inherited from my late Uncle Nick, called the FARRP.  Uncle Nick had opened the place in Fayetteville, NC, just outside of Fort Bragg, after he got cancer and had to leave the Army.  He had spent many years in Vietnam flying helicopters, and his friends here in this bar told me his cancer came from some chemical he was exposed to while he was there.

By the way, my name is Gil Edwards, and I know nothing about the Army or Vietnam, which is why I keep asking these guys questions.  I had learned that Kenny was known in the Army as “Captain Wayne.”   He always sat at the same place in the bar with a couple of his Army buddies, who were all very patient with my endless questions.  Guess it was because they had really liked my Uncle Nick.

“Well, Gil,” Kenny replied.  “That castle is the insignia of the Corps of Engineers, which is my branch in the Army, just like Major Williams here is in Military Intelligence and Chief Rod there is in Aviation.”

“But I thought you told me you were Cav,” I said, puzzled.

“I was commissioned in Armor branch and spent my first years as a lieutenant in Armored Cavalry assignments, where my branch insignia was crossed cavalry sabers.  After I branch-transferred to the Engineers, I changed my cav sabers to this castle.  But once you have been Cav, you’re always Cav,” he replied.

“Hey, Peggy, bring us another round of beers, would you, please?” he asked.  Miss Peggy was my bar manager, ever since she had opened the FARRP with Uncle Nick.

“Kenny, now I’m confused,” I responded.  “So can you just change around whenever you feel like it?”

“Kenny here is a ring-knocker,” interrupted Chief Warrant Officer Rod Jordan, who had been my Uncle Nick’s best friend.  “West Point grads get to do anything they want in the Army.”

“Oh, knock it off, Chief,” responded Tony, better known to the Army as Major Williams.  “You know that’s not true.  Besides, not every officer in the Army can be lucky enough to be a Texas Aggie, like me.  And since we’re on the subject, I’m a branch transfer myself, from Infantry to Intelligence.”

“Thank you, Peggy,” Kenny said, continuing to me: “Well, my request for branch transfer to the Corps of Engineers came through when I was still in Vietnam in 1971.  They wanted to send me to Germany to command an engineer company, but I protested that I needed to get branch training as an engineer first.  So they sent me to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, home of the Corps of Engineers, for the Engineer Officer Advanced Course.  The branch advanced course is a career requirement for all officers.  I wound up there in 1972 as a young captain in a class with mostly more experienced captains getting prepared supposedly to serve as engineer battalion staff officers.

“A huge portion of both my class and the one behind me were aviators who happened to be in the Corps of Engineers.  All through the Vietnam war, aviators in every branch were so critical to the war that they were centrally managed by Department of the Army.  Even though these guys were in Engineer branch, they had mostly spent multiple combat tours in Vietnam flying helicopters, and between tours they were working as instructor pilots training new aviators, or other critical aviation assignments.  Engineer branch had no control over their assignments, because they were required to focus on flying duty.

“When the war finally started winding down in 1971, the Army allowed control of the aviators to revert back to their branch.  These guys were all getting to be senior captains, so they were overdue for the advanced course, and made up the majority of our class.

“That’s when the first huge post-Vietnam reductions-in-force, or RIFs, began.  The Army gave each branch their quota of officers to declare excess and throw out of the service.  Engineer branch always considered all their aviators to be over-paid deadwood who had never done anything for the glory of the Corps of Engineers.

“So they knew just what to do.  They handed down RIF notices to almost all of the engineer aviators who were attending the advanced course, nearly wiping out my class and the one behind us.  When I began the advanced course, Engineer branch had 384 captain aviators on their rolls.  When the dust settled, there were only 77 left, and they were mostly the Regular Army officers that couldn’t be touched in that RIF.  Those RA aviators got wiped out in the next RIF the following year.”

“Engineer branch did the same thing to their Special Forces officers,” added Major Tony.  “In that RIF, we lost dozens of Green Beret engineers who had tons of years of service in Vietnam, many with combat valor awards and multiple Purple Hearts.  Most were good buddies of mine and didn’t deserve to be treated that way.  But the hyper-parochial Corps of Engineers figured if their officers hadn’t been running a rock-crushing detachment or commanding a dump-truck company, like engineers are supposed to do, their service was all bad time.”

“I had never realized how parochial the Corps of Engineers was,” Kenny continued, “until I became one.  They really don’t think of themselves as part of the Army – they even have their own distinctive uniform, with special engineer buttons.

So, in my class, besides me there was just one other branch transfer, a former artilleryman, getting remolded into an engineer like I was.  When I asked him how he happened to switch branches, he told me his story:

 

“He was in the right place at the right time a few occasions in Vietnam, and picked up some impressive awards and decorations, so at the end of his tour in 1969, his Artillery assignments officer offered him what was considered the most prestigious assignment in Field Artillery, in an Honest John battalion in Europe.  Honest John is a truck-mounted giant missile designed to carry tactical nuclear weapons.  For the assignment he had to get a super security clearance for nuclear weapons and go through special schooling for handling, securing and deploying nukes.  He said arriving in the unit was like joining some special exclusive fraternity, where everyone knew the secret handshake.

“All the Honest John firing batteries in Europe went through a rigorous year-long training regime, with continual inspections for nuclear weapons security, operation, assembly and arming, targeting, and procedures for every imaginable scenario.  It was a really high-pressure environment, where everything and everybody had to be absolutely perfect.  At the end of each annual training cycle, the most outstanding firing section of the most outstanding Honest John battery got the greatest honor available – the chance to fire the single live missile that was allocated for launch each year, obviously without a nuclear warhead.

“It was a gigantic big deal, with all the Honest John units from across Europe gathered to watch.  Every field artillery group commander throughout NATO was there, along with all the Army’s division commanding generals and the two Corps commanding generals and their staffs.  Dignitaries came from all over Europe and the Pentagon and joint staffs.  This was the high-prestige annual demonstration of how the US nuclear umbrella would defend Western Europe from overwhelming Soviet invasion.

“So, my buddy had been in his new battalion about six months when it came time for the great annual gathering at the special range for the Honest John demonstration.  Another unit, not his, had won the competition for the honor of firing that year’s missile.

“The Honest John missile is mounted on a firing rail angled over a giant truck called a transporter-launcher.  It is aimed simply by parking the truck facing the direction of the enemy target.  You don’t have to be extremely accurate when you are launching a tactical nuclear weapon, since presumably the invading enemy is so thick you can’t miss.

 

“So, the big moment finally arrived, and they had the suspenseful count-down:  THREE, TWO, ONE, LAUNCH!  With a giant whoosh the missile shot away from its launcher, climbing and heading downrange.  But as it flew away from the truck, two big objects went flipping away from the missile, tumbling back to earth.  They were two of the four tail fins of the rocket, which had not been correctly secured for launch.  Lacking half of its fin stabilization, the Honest John continued climbing but began to arc around, heading back toward the cantonment area behind the demonstration stands.  Finally, as it was passing overhead en route the family housing area, someone hit the self-destruct switch and blew the missile to smitherines.

“Needless to say, it was an enormous embarrassment to all concerned.  Everybody from the Secretary of Defense and the Supreme Commander of NATO on down vowed that would never happen again.  So, for the entire next year, every section of every Honest John battery in Europe drilled, and drilled some more, on securing the stabilization fins to the missile before launch.  That became the most important component of the training and inspections and evaluation for the whole year.  So finally the annual honor firing section was selected, and all the customary dignitaries gathered again for the famous Honest John demonstration firing.

“First, the firing officer made a big show of inspecting the fins, testing the torque on the attachment bolts.  Then the battery commander climbed up and gave his check, followed by the battalion operations officer, then the battalion commander, then the artillery group commander, and lastly the aide-de-camp of the Corps Commanding General.  Everyone gave their approval for the launch, so the countdown commenced:  … FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE, LAUNCH!

“With another gigantic WHOOSH, the missile ignited, building tons of thrust….

“In all the attention paid to attaching the stabilizing fins, they had forgotten to unbolt the missile from its launch rail.  As the thrust built, the missile lifted the entire truck transporter into the air, landing about thirty yards downrange.  It bounced back into the air again, then tumbled end over end twice and blew up with a giant explosion that scorched the faces of everyone in the viewing stands.

“My buddy said to himself, ‘They want to put thermonuclear warheads on this thing???’  The very next day he requested a branch transfer to the Corps of Engineers.”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

 

 

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, TONY, WERE YOU EVER SCARED FLYING IN VIETNAM?”

I was speaking to Major Tony Williams, who was sitting at the bar, sharing beer and war stories with a couple of his Army buddies.  They were regular customers here at Nick’s FARRP, a bar located in Fayetteville, NC, just outside Fort Bragg that I had recently inherited from my Uncle Nick.  My name is Gil Edwards, and I know nothing about the Army, which is why I keep asking these guys questions.

“No, shit, Sherlock,” Tony replied, “more times than I could count.  Anybody who says he wasn’t scared is either lying or was a REMF.”

“What is a REMF?” I asked.

“That, young civilian,” responded Captain Kenny Wayne, sitting beside him, “is an Army acronym for ‘Rear Area personnel,’ if you understand what I am saying.”  Kenny, I had learned, is an Airborne Ranger engineer officer.

“Oh,” I said, as it dawned on me what the ‘MF’ stood for.  “So, Tony, what scared you the most?  Was it enemy fire or getting shot down?”

“Not really,” he answered. “All the bad guys shooting at me were really bad shots.  I’d say probably running out of left pedal over a pinnacle was the scariest.”

“You’ll have to tell me what that means,” I said.

“Well,” he went on, “you know that a helicopter has a tail rotor.  Its job is to push sideways on the tail to keep the aircraft from spinning as the main rotor is pushing the air down to make lift.  The more load on the main rotor, the harder the tail rotor has to push.  You have foot pedals to control the tail rotor, so left pedal makes more push on the tail and right pedal makes less.  The tail boom works like a weathervane, so the more airspeed you have the easier it is to keep the tail straight.

“One day early in my flying tour, I was still a new guy flying co-pilot in the right seat of the Huey.  We were on a routine, single-ship resupply mission all day, what we called ‘ash and trash.’  We were carrying rations and water and ammo out to Korean company outposts on mountain pinnacles.  We called the Korean troops ROKs, for Republic of Korea.  It was pretty turbulent that day, and the Aircraft Commander was at the controls for this one approach.  The ROKs would pop a smoke grenade as we approached so we could see to land into the wind.

“So we were slowing out of translational lift, almost over the helipad where the ROKs were standing, waiting to get their supplies.  All of a sudden, the smoke shifted, as the wind came from behind and grabbed our tail boom.  The Aircraft Commander slammed the left pedal to its stop, trying to keep the bird straight, but we whipped around out of control.  To keep from crashing into the troops clustered under the bird, the AC pulled hard on the collective, trying to get more lift, but that just made us spin faster.  As he pulled and we spun, I saw the transmission torque meter surge through the redline limit of 50 lbs, up to 59 lbs overtorque, while the engine tachometer bled from 6600 rpm down to 5800 rpm, which is way too low to keep flying.

“We had spun clockwise 540, wildly out of control, when the bird plunged down over the side of the pinnacle.  As it accelerated falling, the tail boom caught enough airspeed to stabilize, and the rotor began to regain lift.  The AC regained control of the bird, then had me fly, because he was shaking too bad.  I took it back to a ROK battalion helipad, where we shut it down.

“Through one of our sister birds in the area, we relayed the radio message back to our unit that we had survived a severe overtorque and the bird was shut down, not safe to fly.  The company maintenance officer, a very senior captain on the major’s list, relayed back to us that he would bring his bird out and fly us back.  We were done for the day, and the shakes had begun to set in for all of us.

“When the maintenance bird arrived, the maintenance officer loaded us all on board, then put my AC and me at the controls to fly back to our airfield.  When I asked how he would recover the damaged helicopter, he said, ‘Just watch,’ and he cranked the sick bird and flew it back with us in formation, solo, for a hundred miles.  We were all afraid the damaged transmission would seize up at any time on him, but he wasn’t fazed a bit.  He said his job was flying birds that weren’t right.  I thought he wasn’t right.  Those maintenance officers were absolutely insane.”

Major Tony paused his story and held up his empty beer mug.  “Hey, Peggy, bring us another round, if you would, please.”  Miss Peggy was my bar manager, having been with my Uncle Nick since he opened the FARRP a few years ago.

Tony continued, “We called our maintenance test pilots AMOCs, for Aviation Maintenance Officer Course.  They didn’t normally fly on combat missions, but instead got their flight hours ‘test flying’ sick or unsafe helicopters to determine how to fix them.  Then they flew the repaired birds to see whether they were safe to turn back over to us combat pilots.

“Our company maintenance section was headed by that senior captain, with a junior captain and two or three warrant officers, all of whom were AMOC-rated as test pilots.  They supervised the work of the 25 or so enlisted specialists.  Those guys worked all day and most nights to keep our birds flying.

“One day a young AMOC warrant officer talked me into riding left seat as pilot-in-command with him in one of my sick Hueys on a ‘test flight.’  This Huey was having hydraulic problems, so the AMOC asked me to fly the bird for him, so he could perform some test procedures and take notes.  The crew chief, the enlisted man who ‘owned’ the bird, came too.  I took us up to 2000′ elevation and leveled it off.  The AMOC said he was beginning the test and turned off the hydraulic switch. This was a normal thing we did occasionally to train for losing all our hydraulics.

“The bird got that stiff shuddering feeling, but it was flying normal for hydraulics out.  The control stick which controls the tilt of the rotor disk is called the cyclic.  After about 30 seconds flying with hydraulics out, all of a sudden, my cyclic got a mind of its own and started driving back and left.  I was pushing so hard trying to get it back centered, I thought I was going to bend it.  But that servo had gone—“

“Woah, Tony.”  I interrupted.  “What does ‘sir voe’ mean?  It sounds like you are addressing someone special.”

“I forget, Gil, that you don’t know the lingo we speak here at the FARRP.  There are three hydraulic cylinders, called servos, that transfer the pilot’s controls to the rotor system.  It was one of these that had gone berserk and I couldn’t counter it.  In about a New York second the Huey chin bubble had gone straight up and rolled left, and I was staring at the horizon over my head through the ‘greenhouse’ roof bubble.  The crew chief, riding along in the left rear seat, later told me he was standing on the back wall staring straight down at the ground.  We all knew we were going to die.”

“Hate to interrupt,” said Kenny, “but you might explain to Gil what a New York second is.”

“Sure, that’s 0.37 sec, the time from when the light turns green till the guy behind you is honking his horn.  Anyhow, there we were, flipping inverted, when, cool as a cucumber, this crazy AMOC put down his clipboard and said, ‘I’ve got the controls.’  He took the cyclic in his right hand, and with his left he flipped the hydraulic switch back on.  Had I not let go of the cyclic when he took the controls, I would have still been pushing and we would have snapped around the other way.  Instead, he leveled us back out smoothly and said, ‘That’s what I thought would happen.  Let’s try it again.’

“The crew chief and I simultaneously screamed, ‘No damn way!!’  We declared that the test flight was over, and I flew the bird straight back to land at the maintenance pad.  The crazy AMOC said, ‘That’s ok — I think I know how to fix it now.’

“As I was shutting it down, the crew chief came up to my door and said, ‘Sir, I ain’t never NEVER flying with you again,’ and just walked off.  The AMOC said, ‘We should have this fixed by midnight, but I want to wait on the acceptance test flight until the morning.  Where can I find you?’

“I looked him straight in the eye and lied, ‘I’m scheduled for a combat assault in the morning – sorry.’

“He said, ‘You guys are crazy to go out there where people are shooting at you.  I would never have the balls to do that.’

“I told him, ‘Yeah, it’s a tough job, but you know …’ and headed straight for our officers’ club hootch.  There really was no combat assault the next day, but I made sure the Ops Officer had me flying ash and trash all day, just to be sure that AMOC couldn’t find me.

“Our assault helicopter company was located on the edge of the big Korean White Horse Division compound, so we had perimeter on two sides of our flight line.

Another time, that same crazy young AMOC was working on a different Huey that had an intermittent problem with the engine fuel control.  Shortly after sundown, he thought he had it fixed, so he took the bird out for an acceptance test flight, absolutely solo.  The tower had already shut down for the day, so no one knew he was out there except the Korean infantry troops on perimeter duty who saw it.

“He took off out over the perimeter wire, and was climbing out, too low and slow yet to really be safe.  We call that combination the deadman’s curve.  Suddenly, the fuel control malfunctioned, and his engine quit.  He autorotated the helicopter to a safe touchdown, just about a Claymore anti-personnel mine’s blast range outside the perimeter.

The damn fool climbed out of the bird, probably not even aware that he was in a minefield.  With a flashlight in his teeth, he fiddled with the fuel control on the engine, then climbed back in and restarted it.  He did his hover check, then began climbing out to turn crosswind leg to make a traffic pattern.  As he was turning from crosswind leg to downwind, it conked out again.  Another autorotation into the perimeter minefield, another restart, another takeoff.  He had three more engine failures before he finished his downwind leg, and a total of seven by the time he finally finished his traffic pattern and got back inside the perimeter.

“So as far as I know, he set the world record for the number of actual solo night autorotations into a minefield in a single traffic pattern.  We were sure impressed.  So impressed that absolutely NO ONE would ever fly with him again, except the other maintenance officers.

“And they were the ones who thought we were brave guys to go out in daylight with infantry aboard, and nothing more dangerous to face than some bad guys who were mostly lousy shots.”

“So, then,” I asked Tony, “what is the moral of your story?”

“Simple, Gil,” he responded.  “Aviation maintenance officers are ALL insane!”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, ROD, WHAT MAKES A HELICOPTER FLY, ANYWAY?”

I was talking with some regulars at the bar I had recently inherited from my late Uncle Nick.  It’s known locally as “the FAARP,” some sort of Army aviation term.  Just outside Fort Bragg, the FARRP is a hang-out for off-duty paratroopers and aviators, all Vietnam combat veterans who tell some crazy stories.  Since I know nothing about the Army, these guys must get tired of my questions.  Chief Warrant Officer Rod Jordan is an old-timer, a flight school classmate and for years a super buddy of my Uncle Nick, who has taken me under his wing since I arrived here in Fayetteville, NC.

“Well, New Guy, it’s really pretty simple,” Chief Rod replied to my question.  “You surely know that a helicopter has an engine, right?”

“Of course,” I said.  “I may not know much about the Army, but I’m not a total idiot.”

“Well,” he went on.  “Maybe you didn’t know that the engine has a very important purpose.  Its job is to make lots and lots of noise and vibration.  Because the earth doesn’t like noise or vibration at all.  So when the helicopter engine makes enough noise and vibration, the earth can’t stand it anymore, and it tells the helicopter to get away.  So the helicopter comes up and starts to fly.  And it keeps on flying as long as the engine makes enough noise and vibration.  But if the engine ever stops, the noise and vibration stop too.  So, the earth says, ‘OK, you can come back now.’  And down the helicopter comes.”

“Dang, Rod!” injected Major Tony Williams.  “Gil was asking a serious question, and you treat him like a child!”

“All right, hot dog.  You are such a smart ass, being a recent graduate of flight school and all.  You tell the lad what you know about it.”

“OK, I will.  Gil, the big rotor on top blows air down. That’s called rotor wash – the wind you feel when you are near a helicopter that is hovering.  The helicopter has a tail rotor, which pushes the tail sideways to keep the aircraft from spinning.  When a helicopter is hovering, it is really balanced on its rotor wash, which is extremely hard work for the aircraft.

“It actually takes more power for a helicopter to hover than it does to fly.  So, the normal way to take off is to lift up to a hover, which ensures you have enough power.  Then very gently you use the control stick to barely tilt the rotor disk forward, which makes the aircraft begin to drift forward, faster and faster.  As the bird gets ten or fifteen knots airspeed, the rotor disk begins to overrun its turbulent downwash and bite into undisturbed air.  When this happens, the effectiveness of the blades increases on the forward part of the rotor disk, so the disk tries to pitch up in front, tipping the bird back into its own turbulence.

“So as soon as you begin to feel the nose pitch up, you tip the rotor forward more, so the whole rotor disk slides completely into undisturbed air.  This is called translational lift.  At this point the helicopter begins to accelerate and climb out.  Usually the power setting for a hover is enough to enable you to climb at cruise speed.  Once you get to your intended altitude you can reduce power and maintain level cruising airspeed.”

“Wow,” I exclaimed.  “I always thought helicopters took off straight up.”

“Well, they can,” replied Chief Rod, “but it’s pretty dangerous.  It requires pulling in a lot more power, which increases the chances that your engine will quit.  And if that happens, having altitude but no airspeed means most likely you will break the bird when you crash.  And aviators always hate it when that happens.”

“Did you know that it’s possible for a helicopter to take off when there’s not enough power even to pick it up off the ground?” interrupted Major Tony.

“How could that even be possible?” I asked, very puzzled.

“In Vietnam, sometimes the Huey gunships were loaded so heavy with rockets, ammunition and fuel that they could not lift the skids off the ground.  So the technique known as a ‘Charlie-model takeoff’ was developed.  The crew chief and the door gunner would stand beside the loaded aircraft, plugged in to the intercom with long lines.  The pilot would pull in max power until the rotor RPM just began to bleed back, making the aircraft light on its skids.  Then he would ease the rotor disk forward, making the bird slide on its skids.  With the crew chief and door gunner running beside the helicopter, the aircraft would gradually accelerate into the wind.  When it reached translational lift, the helicopter would begin to pick itself up, but the pilot had to hold it just off the ground, staying in ground effect to gain enough airspeed to finally begin a slow climb out.  The crew chief and door gunner running beside the bird had to watch the toes of the skids carefully, because as soon as the skids tipped up they had to jump into the bird, or get left behind.

“If that happened, their intercom cords would unplug.  So, they had to call to the pilot immediately that they were on board, or else he had to abort the takeoff.  Kept those guys in pretty good shape.  It wasn’t a problem landing after the mission, because the birds were always lighter in fuel and ammo.”

“Well,” I concluded, “that makes sense, if you think about it, I guess.”

“But it’s even more complicated than that,” continued Tony.  “When you are flying forward, the rotor blade advancing on the right side of the aircraft has more relative airspeed than the retreating blade on the left.  The faster the helicopter flies, the greater the difference between the airspeed of the blade on the right and the left.  The amount of lift a wing has is related to its airspeed, so the faster you fly the stronger the lift on the right side gets and the weaker the lift on the left side.”

Captain Kenny Wayne broke in.  “Hey, maybe that explains why it’s so dangerous to parachute from the left door of a helicopter.  I’ve made a bunch of chopper blasts, but always from the right door.  Early on I watched a jumper ahead of me going out the left door of a Huey get caught in the turbulence, so his parachute static line got snarled in the skids of the helicopter.  He was hanging helpless, face down under the bird.

“Since it was impossible for anyone to climb outside and try to free him, they had to fly the helicopter back for landing at a high hover, while people on the ground got him untied.  If he had come loose from the skids while the descending helicopter was below 300 feet, there wouldn’t have been enough altitude for his parachute to open.  In that case, he would have splatted into a giant pizza on the drop zone.  So my personal rule is:  Never jump the left door.”

“Thank you very much for that extraordinarily superb insight, Kenny,” Tony resumed explaining.  “As I was saying, the helicopter would flip over if it didn’t reduce the right-side lift and increase the left-side lift.  The aircraft does that by flattening the pitch angle on the rotor blade advancing on the right side and increasing the pitch on the left side to keep the lift balanced.

“Just one problem though.  The blade on the left side already has less relative airspeed, and when you increase the pitch angle as the airspeed decreases, eventually you reach the point where the airflow across the top of the retreating blade breaks turbulent and you lose lift completely.  That’s called a stall.

“The faster an airplane flies, the better the lift from its wing.  But in a helicopter the faster you fly, the closer you get to ‘retreating blade stall,’ which means the rotor disk violently flips the bird left and back.  That indicates the moment before the simultaneous finale of the flight, the aircraft and all those misfortunate enough to be on board.  Bad news,” Tony concluded.

“Wow!” I exclaimed.  “Sounds like there are a lot of ways to die in a helicopter.”

“That’s not the end of it, young lad,” continued Chief Rod.  “When a helicopter flies slow enough, there is another hazard.  You can lose translational lift, which means the rotor, instead of finding undisturbed air for lift, can wind up in its own turbulence.  That’s called ‘settling with power.’  The sudden loss of lift is indicated by an instantaneous plunge.  If you have enough altitude you can get out of settling with power by nosing the bird forward to get the rotor back into undisturbed air.  But if it happens at low altitude, you will probably break the bird, and likely some of the people on board.  We always hate it when that happens.”

Tony interrupted Rod.  “In flight school they taught us a lot of simple rules which it really pays to remember.  For one, crashes normally only happen at or near the ground.  For another, it is always a good idea, before you take off, to have a plan for where you intend to land.”

“Gee,” I said.  “No wonder people are scared of flying in helicopters.  Too many ways to die.”

“Yeah,” Rod replied, “you could say that about a lot of things.  But helicopters are way safer than fixed wing planes, as far as I am concerned.  I’m a rated instructor in all of them, but airplanes scare the hell out of me.  Not enough moving parts for my taste.  Tony, what’s the very first rule they taught you in flight school?”

“That’s easy,” Tony replied.  “The engine is mandatory for takeoff, optional for landing.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, astonished.

“It means, my fine young friend,” replied Chief Rod, “that your engine can quit on you any time it feels like, and probably will chose to do so at the very worst moment possible.”

“Well, doesn’t that mean your helicopter will crash when it does?” I asked.

“Quite the contrary, lad,” replied Rod.  “The beauty of the helicopter is that, as long as the rotor is turning and you still have controls over it, you should be able to bring the bird down and walk away from it.  We call it autorotation.  You may be coming down pretty steeply, compared to the glide in an airplane, but you can still fly the bird.  If you have already selected a fairly clear and level spot to land in, there is enough energy in the momentum of the spinning rotor to cushion your touchdown to the point that you should be able to walk away.”

“But how can you find a clear and level spot after the engine quits?  What if there isn’t any close by?” I asked.

“Remember I told you the engine is guaranteed to quit on you?  You should never be surprised when it does, because you are always picking out safe landing areas all the time you are flying.  Tony, what always happens every time you fly with someone who is instructor-rated?”

“They’re going to chop the throttle on you, sending you into autorotation.  At least once, every flight, guaranteed.  After a while you learn to fly expecting the engine to quit at any time, so it’s never a surprise.  You get to where you can do an autorotation in your sleep.”

“Now, New Guy,” Chief Rod concluded.  “How did I originally answer your question about how a helicopter flies?”

“The engine makes noise and vibration that the earth hates.  So, when the engine quits, that’s what you meant.  Down it comes.  Actually, I guess, that seems like a pretty good explanation after all.”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY