photo courtesy of CHRISTOPHER GAYNOR

One soldier recounts his flight home from Vietnam. How many of you had a similar experience?

By Douglas Crow, retired

     We were given a ride in the Jeep on the morning of April 5th, 1970 to Phouc Vinh Airport and we waited four hours to catch a flight to Bien Hoa.

     While boarding the De Havilland C-4 Caribou, its engines idled with a low coughing moan. I took a seat while looking out the opposite window and saw a Navajo Cavalryman sitting there in the hot noon sun. Silently and without motion or seeming emotion he sat passively.

     As the engines idled, I watched the shadow of the rotating propeller blades being cast on the runway. The crew chief, sweaty as usual and carrying a revolver slung low on his hip, brought the boarding plank up into the aircraft’s belly and with a loud whirring sound of a servo motor brought up the aft door. The chief mumbled something in his headset, walked to the front of the craft just behind the cockpit cabin entrance, strapped himself in and fiddled with a circular slide-rule in conjunction with a map.

    

The pilot looked all around for visual clearance then slowly moved the throttles forward and as I looked out the circular port windows, I could no longer discern the shadows of the propeller blades but only a faint, grey oval optical shadow. The engines coughed a little but rallied and slapped the air with determination. The pregnant bird began to move and a vibration growled and grated throughout the fuselage as the bird’s wheels rolled faster and faster over the corrugated, olive drab-painted, steel runway. The grass on the airfield was tan and dead. As the Caribou taxied down the ramp I thought about the Navajo Cavalryman and it suddenly dawned on me that any time I left a place or arrived someplace in Vietnam, I had always seen at least one American Indian in jungle fatigues.

     It’s funny that I should have realized that so late in the year, but as I thought back over the times of traveling through in-country airports; the three-day R&R to Vung Tau, the Hawaii R&R, the battalion moves to and from Tay Ninh and Phouc Vinh, I suddenly recalled meeting, talking with, or seeing American Indians at practically all those locations and that seemed unusual to me.

     The Caribou swung around at the end of the runway, its brakes squealing as it came to a stop. After checking an operations list and conversing over a microphone, the pilot thrust the throttles fully forward for the takeoff. The craft sat there lurching for a minute, straining all its power against the brakes, wings shifting back and forth. Watching all the loose rivets bob and bounce as the craft trembled with a tooth-tingling vibration made me question whether the rivets were attended to during the craft’s overhaul maintenance.

     At last the brake was released and everyone in their side-by-side, single-line, orange polyester web seats seemed to be thrown almost on top of each other from force suddenly thrust upon us by the bird’s takeoff momentum. The aircraft seemed to struggle to get off the ground, like some frightened, waterfowl that had just been shot at. It rolled and rolled over the runway picking up more speed and with both engines thrumming with maximum power, the flight finally became airborne.

     The Caribou is an over-wing aircraft and its round, port-like, windows are beneath the wings. The portion of the red nylon webbing bench I occupied happened to be positioned at the point where the wings joined the fuselage which gave me a full view out the port window, rendering the underside portion of the engine nacelle fully visible to me. We must have now been at an altitude of about 1500 feet or so and as we heard a servo motor groaning somewhere in the wings, the still-spinning wheels retracted themselves up through and into the bottom of the engine nacelles with the landing gear doors closing shut immediately thereafter.

     At last, Phouc Vinh was behind and below us. Looking back, we could see the JAG and PIO buildings which seemed not all that far from the edge of the Camp Gorvad perimeter green-line bunkers and tower fortifications facing the vast rubber plantation stretching outwards toward a hazy horizon. 

     After an uneventful, short flight we were now in the approach landing pattern at Bien Hoa Airfield and in just 15 short minutes the Caribou’s wheels touched down on the airport’s runway with a barely audible and lightly felt screeching sound. As the aircraft rumbled up the ramp toward the terminal, the crew chief hurriedly unstrapped himself, hopscotched aft, and opened the rear exit ramp door. The door lowered with a slow but constant hydraulic moan as the horizon shimmered through the mirage-like heat rising from the runway. The craft slowed as the pilot cut the engines, and the prop blades swung ever slower until the sound of the engine’s valve lifters became discernible.

     A procession of red-soiled, soldiers clad in jungle fatigues emerged through the Caribou’s aft ramp bay. Their postures were thrust forward because of their weighty packs as they set one foot in-front-of-the-other. Fixed eyes stared intently from beneath the heavy steel helmets and a PRC-25 radio antenna swung absurdly as an RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) made his way to the terminal. Finally, they were all lost to the throng milling about inside Bien Hoa terminal.

     I must’ve sat at that terminal for an hour or so waiting for a bus to be transported to the Cavalry’s R&R DEROS Center. I finally boarded a bus, but got tangled up in misunderstood semantics and ended up in Long Binh for another hour or so before finally catching a bus ride and arriving at the R&R DEROS Center just before curfew. From then until late last night when boarding the “freedom bird,” my perceptions were a timeless blur of sleepless, hypnotic waiting.

     THE FREEDOM BIRD

     My entire military Vietnam out-processing phase had been blessed with artillery silence. There were tales I had heard from other soldiers about returnees being killed by enemy 122 rockets while they were waiting for or boarding their freedom birds, but I really didn’t know whether these stories were true or not. Admittedly, the fear those tales may have been true hung over me like an axe all year. Indeed, I think that’s probably why I never was really overwhelmed by “short timer’s fever” or never felt “short.” 

     At long last, we boarded the 707 passenger liner in our jungle fatigues and I broke out in a cold sweat as the bird whistled down the runway. Finally, the great silver bird roared off the runway and ascended to an altitude far out-of-range of enemy .51-caliber enemy guns or rockets in no time at all!

     But nothing happened, thank God, and the whole planeload of GIs cheered and screamed uncontrollably as the craft flew over the Vietnam Coastline out toward the Pacific and homeward. I have really never had such a feeling of total relief and freedom in my life as I had during that departure. To really know that at last, the threat of some rocket with my name on it was once-and-for-all extinguished at that country’s shoreline was unforgettable. The lifting of that burden puts a whole new fresh breath into one’s life! WOW, just plain WOOOWW!

    BACK IN “THE WORLD”

     By 1982, after the end of my stateside military service at Fort Riley, Kansas, employment difficulties, marriage tensions, the ambient anti-war sentiments, and a general cultural dislike of anything military, it became apparent to me that I was having just way too many close-call, near-misses, and narrow escapes. In analyzing these incidents, it became shockingly clear that there was something of a self-destructive dynamic occurring within my being. And that I was engaging in subconscious attempts to end my life! 

 

    Despite my analysis, just the fact that I was apparently being controlled by a “death wish” was an overwhelming shock. It was as if there was some indiscernible, subconscious, hunter-killer submarine pursuing me. All I knew was that I had to quickly discover the source of this threat before it sent me to the deep six. Becoming conscious of my apparent classic case of “survivors’ guilt” substantially unnerved me and I knew I had to overcome it in short order before it overcame me. 

     Upon that realization, I immediately sought help from my family, mental health professionals in the private sector, the Veterans Administration, and Vet Center Counselors where I lived.

     It heartens me to report that if it were not for my Creator, Family, Country and the VA in particular, I am certain, retrospectively, that I would have become yet another non-KIA statistic of that war. I credit my Maker, beloved father and mother together with the Veterans Administration for my recovery from that deadly, tumultuous interval. If it were not for these blessed positive elements available to me, I am convinced my physical and mental welfare would have been severely denigrated if not annihilated.

Douglas Crow had an earlier post published on my website titled “Close Calls”. You can find it here: https://cherrieswriter.com/2020/09/20/close-ones-during-the-vietnam-war/

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