As I drove along the road beside the main heliport, helicopters lurched into the air from the six takeoff pads and flew over me, flitting off in all directions over the central Texas hills. Twice a day, in the morning and afternoon training sessions, the school would put fifteen hundred aircraft in the air at the same time to crank out enough pilots to replace the ones getting killed in Vietnam. Wolters was dizzyingly crowded, and dangerous.
I had an eight o’clock aircraft orientation flight scheduled with Warrant Officer Gary Lineberry, a former classmate who had not yet gone to Vietnam. Actually, Lineberry hadn’t gone anywhere. They’d assigned him right back to flight school upon graduation from Fort Rucker, Alabama, the last stage of the Army’s helicopter course, because he was a superb pilot. While most of the rest of class 65-3 went to Vietnam, Lineberry became an instructor pilot (IP) and was now part of the Methods of Instruction (MOI) branch at Wolters that taught veteran pilots how to be IPs.
I pulled into a parking spot near the main hangar and got out, carrying my flight helmet—known also as a brain bucket—by its strap. It was the same one I’d used in Nam; still had the stupid picture of Snoopy I’d painted on the back. It was battered and chipped and looked awful. I had been told to exchange it for a new one, but I considered my helmet, my Zippo, my Nikonos camera, nearly all the objects I possessed in Vietnam, talismans that had helped keep me alive. A technician at the helmet shop, who seemed to understand my superstition—or was afraid to argue with a man with hollow eyes who spoke gravely of lucky helmets—had installed new earphones, new padding, a new microphone, and a new visor for me. I saw Lineberry putting his helmet inside the plastic bubble cockpit of a Hiller and walked over.
“Hey, Gary,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Been a while.”
Lineberry said hi, smiling as we shook hands. “Welcome back to the world.”
“Yeah. Good to be here. Really missed the place; even Wolters.” I smiled, looking around at the parched, paved-over central Texas wasteland called the main heliport. “Vietnam can do that to a person.”
“I’ve heard.” Lineberry shrugged. “But you got plenty of flying, right? Who were you with?”
“First Cav Division for eight months. Finished my tour with the Forty-eighth Aviation Company.”
Lineberry nodded—the First Air Cavalry was pretty famous, but the Forty-eighth wasn’t. “You got Huey time, too,” he said, looking envious. “How was it?”
I shrugged. Lineberry the IP would want to know about the flying and the helicopters, not about the war, not until he got there. He figured he was stuck flying these little pissant trainers while we lucky fuckers flew the big turbine-powered hot-shit Hueys. “Great. You know, great ship. Saved my ass a bunch of times.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Got shot down once—took some rounds through a fuel line. But I took hits in the rotors, fuel tank—you name it—for a year. No problem,” I said coolly, while my scrotum cinched itself tight at the memories.
“The armored seats work?”
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “if you get hit from the back, the sides, or from underneath, they work great. But there’s nothing up front, and that’s were we take a lot of hits. The Viet Cong learned the best way to shoot down Hueys is to kill the pilots.”
“Great to hear.” Lineberry scowled and shook his head. “I’m going over there next month.”
I nodded. What was there to say to that? Be careful? I pointed to the Hiller behind him. “That our ship?”
“Yeah.” Lineberry smiled suddenly. “Let’s go see if you remember how to fly one of these bone bruisers.”
The Huey I’d flown in Vietnam was turbine powered and had hydraulically assisted controls. The Huey was huge compared to the Hiller—it carried a crew of four and could fly with eight or ten fully equipped grunts—but controlling it was effortless. The Hiller, I was instantly reminded, was powered by a noisy six-cylinder engine and controlled with direct mechanical linkages between the flight controls and the rotors. The controls vibrated, shook, and resisted every move. When I pulled up the collective—the control that raises and lowers the helicopter—and brought the ship to a hover, the stick pushed itself up in my left hand. Right, I remember: you have to pop the collective to release the sticky control ballast system that is supposed to neutralize the collective stick forces. I popped the collective down. Now it pulled down. It would take me a while to get used to it again, so I just let it tug for the moment. I was having enough problems with the cyclic, trying to balance the Hiller in the hover. The Hiller’s cyclic—the stick between the pilot’s knees—is connected, via a system of push-pull tubes and a rotating swash plate assembly, to two rotor paddles that stick out of the hub at right angles to the main rotors. The paddles are short, symmetrical wing sections on the ends of two short shafts. The idea behind Stanley Hiller’s scheme was that a pilot would be strong enough to rotate these little paddles with the cyclic stick, and the paddles, in turn, would tilt the main rotors in the direction you wanted to fly using aerodynamic forces, eliminating the need for hydraulic assistance. It’s really quite a clever idea. It worked, but it also doubled the normal delay in the cyclic control response that was common to all helicopters, and made the Hiller notoriously difficult to handle until you got used to it.
While I wrestled the ship into a hover, I glanced at Lineberry. He was laughing: ace Huey pilot can’t fly his original trainer. The cyclic shook violently, jerking my hand around in a very rude, un-Hueylike manner. Two little tuning-fork things attached to the cyclic control system were supposed to dampen these feedback forces. I suppose they were working as well as they could. The only controls that felt reasonably normal were the foot pedals that controlled the pitch of the tail rotor, which let you point the helicopter where you wanted it to point.
The romantic memories of my first helicopter as a plucky, smooth-flying machine vanished. The Hiller was actually an ungainly, crude museum piece of a helicopter. I held it in a sort of hover, wallowing and pitching in a slight breeze, checking the tachometer and adjusting the throttle on the collective to keep the needles in the green because I’d forgotten how the engine sounded at the right RPM.
“Not bad,” Lineberry said. “Let’s go fly.”
By the Christmas break I had been an IP for a month and Patience and I were pretty well settled. We’d rented a house in Mineral Wells, an all-American place with a garage and backyard. This was the first house we’d lived in together. We were married in 1963, just before I joined the Army. Patience and our son, Jack, had endured crummy apartments and trailers while I went through basic training, advanced infantry training, and flight school. They seldom saw me while I was a trainee soldier, and then I went to Vietnam. Jack, two years old now, was getting used to me again. I’d been away half his life and had missed the previous Christmas. I wanted to make him a present to show him I was just a regular dad. I was home. I was going to build things, pursue hobbies, do well at work. Forget.
I wasn’t thinking about Vietnam, but it was there. Awake, in quiet moments, I felt a familiar dread in the pit of my stomach, even as I angrily informed myself that I was home. Asleep, my dreams were infected by what I’d seen. The explosive jump-ups I’d been having since the last month of my tour were getting more frequent. When Patience and Jack saw me leaping off the bed, Patience would make a joke of it: “Daddy’s levitating again.” But it scared her. I had asked the flight surgeon about it and he said I should be okay in a couple months.