The Cambodian Incursion

A Helicopter Pilot Remembers . . . .

^©Daniel E Tyler, 1995

1995 was a year of remembering for a lot of us. Maybe it was appropriate that we should do so, approaching a new century and a new millennium. I know I've been retrospective for a while now. The 50^th anniversary commemoration of the D- Day Invasion started me thinking that way. With all of the news footage and interviews of the troops who had returned to Normandy, I couldn't help but reflect upon my own feelings when faced with my own D-Day so many years ago.

Later in 1994 my nostalgia was sharpened when my employer, NRMA-CareFlight, decided to buy a Bell 412HP helicopter to replace its Twin-Dauphin. I had spent most of my early flying career in Bell Helicopters.

I first soloed in a US Army OH-13 - better known as the Bell 47G. After instrument training in a TH-13T (Bell 47G3B), I then transitioned onto "Huey's", the Bell UH-1 Iroquois which is still in military and civil service around the world. It was in that machine that I really learned to fly. Most of my early civil flying had been in Bell JetRangers and LongRangers before the European light twins became popular for emergency medical service (EMS) work.

When CareFlight told me that I was going to Fort Worth to do my Bell 412 conversion training at Flight Safety International, the timing added to my sense of nostalgia. I was going back to Texas to learn to fly a new helicopter - only 70 miles from where I had first learned to fly helicopters exactly 25 years before.

I found that the best thing about the new Bell was that the things that needed changing had been changed - but the things that were great about the Huey were still the same in the 412.

Just before leaving for Texas in October, 1994, I had looked up the address of my old flight school room-mate and written him a letter. Originally from north Texas, he had moved to Florida and was flying Bell 412's on EMS work. We hadn't seen or spoken to each other since Fort Rucker. He had shipped out to Vietnam two weeks after me.

When I got to Flight Safety in Fort Worth, there was a message pinned on the bulletin board that he was in town and would be coming out to see me. We did a lot of catching up and discovered that we'd been based only a few miles apart in Vietnam. He was still married to the same girl who I'd met when we were room-mates.

Then we discovered something that amazed us both -- the exact helicopter CareFlight had bought and I would be flying in Australia, had been flown by his air medical program in Florida. I know it's a small world in the helicopter industry -- but that just blew me away.

One day, after I finished in the simulator, he and I drove out to Mineral Wells to see if we could find what was left of Fort Wolters. He had been back once since training, but I hadn't visited the place in twenty-five years.

Back in 1969, Fort Wolters had been turning out helicopter pilots at the rate of about 250 every two weeks. But it was closed down in the early '70's. Part of it was converted into a state prison. Some of it had been sold off to create an industrial estate and low-cost housing. A small section of it remained a military installation which was used by the Texas National Guard.

We found the maintenance hangar and the flight line - where hundreds of TH-55's, OH-13's and OH-23's had been based at the height of the Vietnam conflict. A couple of twisted OH-13 tailbooms were the only sign of what had been.

To our surprise, we found our old barracks completely intact and virtually unchanged apart from the long grass. The odd tumbleweed blew past, reminding me of the opening scene of the movie "Twelve O'Clock High".

We peered through the window and saw the same tables, chairs, bunks, and lockers that we had used in 1969. Memories of the hours spent braced against the wall at "attention" as Tac Officers paced up and down harassing us came flooding back.

I recognized the Warrant Officer Candidate Recreation Room where I spent my only free time - from 0930 to 1130 on Sundays. We also saw the post swimming pool - still used by the City of Mineral Wells. It had been blistering hot there in July and August of 1969, but we had only been allowed to swim there once - the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

It was great to be able to reminisce, but soon we both had to go back to work. I started to get all nostalgic again as March 3^rd, 1995, came and went. That was the 25^th anniversary of my leaving for Vietnam. Other people around the world were remembering the end of the "Battle of the Bulge", and crossing the Rhine, and were starting to talk about the upcoming 50^th anniversary of V-E Day.

My youth was spent in the aftermath of World War II - even though I was born four years after it finished. My father had flown B-24 Liberators in the South West Pacific. He had stopped flying in the Air Force Reserve when my mother became pregnant with me. Korea was threatening to break open at the time and the thought of his going away to war again was too much - or so I've been told.

As a kid I was fascinated by the Veteran's Day Parades and the American Legion Meetings. I was only eleven when Kennedy was sworn in as President, but I remember him saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country..." I also remembered Kruschev banging his shoe on the podium at the United Nations and saying "We will bury you!"

I think it was inevitable that the generation ahead of ours would be inclined to try a military solution to counter the perceived threat to western security posed by the Vietnam conflict. And it seems hardly surprising that my generation would answer the call to arms so readily - especially if it meant the CHANCE TO FLY HELICOPTERS!!!

I remember the day President Johnson announced that he was committing ground troops to Vietnam. The 1^st Cavalry Division was mentioned. After reading his prepared speech, Johnson took off his glasses, stared straight into the camera, and said something like: "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth into battle. .." I was sixteen years old and felt a great sense of adventure. My parents had tears in their eyes as Johnson finished his speech.

About thirty-five thousand of us were trained as rotary-wing aviators during the Vietnam era. For their sense of adventure, 2177 helicopter pilots paid the ultimate price in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos between 1961 and 1975 -- including six Australians - four from the Royal Australian Navy and two from the Royal Australian Air Force.

[Postscript:- I've been told there was one Australian Army helicopter pilot killed there too, but I cannot find reference to him in the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots' Association data.]

The Vietnam War was at its peak by the time I finally got accepted for flight school and finished my training. By that time, I'd heard a lot about the 1st Cavalry Division. The "Cav" was the first airmobile division in the US Army - that is an Infantry Division with sufficient organic helicopter support to take to the air and fly away. It was developed as a consequence of the Army's Howse Board air mobility study in the early '60's.

The Division had been de-commissioned in Korea and re-commissioned in 1965 when the old 11^th Air Assault and 2^nd Infantry Divisions were merged at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Shipped to Vietnam as a Division, the "Cav" had earned a reputation in northern South Vietnam (I Corps and II Corps) between August 1965 and late 1968. NVA and VC signs and leaflets had been found which translated into English read, "Beware of the Helicopter Soldiers".

By 1967, the Ho Chi Minh trail had been routed through Laos and Cambodia - giving the 1st Cav and the 101st Airborne (the other Airmobile Division in the US Army) a big miss. Cambodia and Laos were neutral and we couldn't touch them there - at least theoretically.

According to military intelligence, the Ho Chi Minh trail spread out into several major infiltration routes through War Zones C and D in northern III Corps. It was into this area that "Cav" was launched in late 1968 to interdict the supply routes to the VC in Saigon and the Mekong Delta. Tet of '68 had been a major political and public relations victory for the communists - albeit a disastrous military defeat for them.

Media coverage of Tet '68 focussed on the fact that a few VC or NVA had managed to get into the center of Saigon to throw some satchel charges. That their supply lines had been overrun, that the VC and NVA quickly ran out of ammunition and food, and that they were massacred by the thousands - many by helicopter gunships - was never reported in the media. Public perception was being molded - the world's greatest superpower wasn't winning, according to the media.

Captured documents showed that the NVA command - known as the "Central Office for South Viet Nam" or "COSVN" - planned repeat performances for Tet '69 and Tet '70. That those offensives fizzled was testimony to the effectiveness of the airmobile concept in War Zones C and D. However, the NVA could still hide in Cambodia and launch raids across the border on American fire bases. That was what was happening in early 1970, when I arrived in Vietnam and was assigned to the "Cav".

More particularly, I was assigned to Company C, 229^th Assault Helicopter Battalion, at Tay Ninh located in north western War Zone C and close to the Cambodian border. I arrived there on 11 March, 1970. We were welcomed with a rocket and mortar attack that night. I hadn't even flown a mission yet and already I had a Purple Heart.

C/229 was a "lift" company. Most of the helicopters in the "Cav" were in the 11th Combat Aviation Group. That Group had three battalions:- the 227^th, 228^th and 229^th. The 228^th consisted of three companies of Chinooks. The 227^th and 229^th were identical Assault Helicopter Battalions consisting of three lift companies (eighteen UH-1H's each) and one gunship company (twelve AH-1G "HueyCobra's").

The "lift" companies provided the airmobility for the three Infantry Brigades of the Division while the gunship companies provided armed escort for the "lift" ships. The "Cav" was different from the 1^st Aviation Brigade units in which each aviation company had two lift platoons, one gunship platoon, and one maintenance platoon.

Other aviation assets in the 1^st Cav included the "aerial rocket artillery" (ARA) and the 1^st of the 9^th Air Cav Squadron - also called the "real Cav". The 1/9 normally operated as "hunter-killer teams" or "pink teams" - with infantry ("blue's") ready to check out anything the "scouts" spotted.

The day I arrived, C/229 was in chaos. The CO had been killed the day before - shot through the heart with an AK47 round while flying peter-pilot (co-pilot) on a combat assault. The XO was on R&R in Hong Kong and a very junior Captain was acting CO. He didn't have much time for new guys. I was told to check out my flying gear from supply and get comfortable, they wouldn't have time to give me my "in-country check-ride" for a couple days at least.

The next morning at 0430 the operations corporal came around the hooches, waking the pilots. When he came into my hooch, I told him he had the wrong guy - I hadn't had my "in-country check ride" yet. He said, "You're Tyler, aren't you? Get up, you're flying 'White-Three' with Van Landingham." Just like that - after all the years of anticipation and preparation - I was finally going to war.

I wasn't disappointed. Van Landingham told me to sit on my hands unless he specifically told me what to do. After awhile, he even let me touch the controls for a minute or two. On our second combat assault of the morning, the jungle beneath us suddenly erupted.

As I watched the tracers coming out of the triple-canopy below I recalled, while in flight school, some guy had asked one of the instructors how you could tell what the bad guys were using. How could you tell an AK from a .51 cal, for example? The instructor had said, "Don't worry, you'll know. The .51's look like orange basketballs coming up at you." All at once I knew he was right.

We were Chalk-6 in a six-ship trail (line astern) formation. I watched in amazement as the helicopters ahead flew through a stream of .51 cal tracers. I couldn't believe they weren't being hit. Then, right in front of me, Chalk-5 took a hit and rolled into a 90^o right bank. The new guy peter- pilot started screaming over the radio that the AC (aircraft commander) had been hit. "Thumpy" who was flying "Yellow One^" (flight leader) spoke firmly over the radio to him, commanding him to get a grip and fly the ship straight back to Tay Ninh to the evacuation hospital helipad. His voice sounded so calm and authoritative over the air that the new guy got it all together and found Tay Ninh. Unfortunately, the AC died anyway. We continued to take fire for most of the morning but my ship took no hits.

That night, back at Tay Ninh, the battalion flight surgeon came to the de-brief. He was livid and ripped into the maintenance officer because the lever to tilt the armored seat back had been unserviceable in Chalk-5 and they couldn't get the pilot out of his seat to try to stop the bleeding.

The next day was more of the same. Major actions involving battalion and regimental-sized NVA units were happening all over War Zone C. Another pilot got killed - I hadn't met him as he came from another company. I looked at the company roster after the de-brief and saw the names of twenty-eight remaining pilots. I'd been with the 229^th only four days, and in that time three pilots had been killed. That night, in my hooch, I wrote that special letter and gave it to my buddy to pass on to my family. . . . you know . . . . if anything should happen . . . . He did the same and gave his to me. The sense of adventure had been replaced with a foreboding that even now, twenty-five years later, I still cannot describe.

Typical of the Vietnam conflict, things got just as quiet as they had been hot a few days before. Then they got hot again. Throughout March and April, 1970, the "Cav" played hide and seek with NVA units trying to infiltrate though our area of operations (AO). The Generals decided to move our fire bases up close to the border - a decision that brought the bad guys out and cost them dearly but also put a lot of our guys in the ground.

Some of the Fire Support Bases - Wood, Hannas, and Illingworth are the ones I remember - were hit really hard in night attacks. It was eerie watching such a fire fight from the flare ship or "Chuck-Chuck" (Command & Control). The red tracers going out from the inner concentric circle - the green tracers going in from the outer circle - the tracers from the Cobra's miniguns looking like a bright red stream of water from a hose spraying onto the ground and splashing up. Invariably, before dawn, the bad guys would break off and retreat back into Cambodia.

At Hannas, they pushed the dead bad guys up into a pile with a bulldozer and poured diesel over them and burned them. At Illingworth, I was flying "hash & trash" the day after and wound up carrying "Line-One's" (KIA's) all day. When it looked like we wouldn't get them all back to Tay Ninh before dark, we put the remainder into a cargo net and carried them on the sling.

They had so many dead, they ran out of body bags and had to cover them with poncho liners. I hovered my Huey up next to a pile of bodies and blew away most of the poncho liners. I stared at one poor kid - a red headed, freckled kid who looked barely eighteen - whose lifeless eyes were wide open and were rapidly filling with red dust moved by the rotor wash. I wanted to climb down from the cockpit and close them for him. I wanted to send a message back to Tay Ninh to say, "make sure you wash the dirt out his eyes before you ship him home and his mother sees him." I guess what I really wanted to do was cry, but I didn't think officers were expected to do that. Nobody had cried in World War II - at least none of the characters in "Combat" or "Twelve O'Clock High" cried.

By late April, we were all pretty ticked off about the bad guys being able to hit our guys and then go hide in Cambodia. Some of the gunship pilots, if they had any ordnance left on board at the end of the day's missions, would fly up to the border, lift the nose, and salvo all their remaining rockets. We were surprised that almost immediately a memo came down saying "don't do that again". We couldn't figure how they found out. It never even occurred to me that some of our people might already be over there.

At about that time I got locked into reverse-cycle living, flying "Nighthawk", for a couple weeks. "Nighthawk" was an H-model Huey with a Starlight Scope, a Nightsun, and a 7.62 mm "minigun" - all mounted in the left door. It had a .50 cal. in the right door. We flew around low-level at night with our lights blacked out - all except for the top of our anti-collision light - escorted by a Cobra - looking for signs of the bad guys. We were radar-vectored around a "box" by a tactical radar station at one of the base camps. Several times it seemed like we were in the wrong place. When we checked, we found ourselves a couple "clicks" (kilometers) inside Cambodia.

On about the 27^th or 28^th of April, 1970, the rumor started that we were about to invade Cambodia. Someone suggested that the rumor came from one of the Vietnamese hooch maids at our Tay Ninh Base Camp. That sounded pretty reliable to me. The bush telegraph always seemed to work a lot quicker than military channels.

Another rumor, which we saw as supporting the first rumor, was that our maintenance officer had been told to have all eighteen of our H-models serviceable for May 1^st, 1970. All of the maintenance guys were working 'round the clock and everyone was really on edge.

It had been quiet for a few days, we hadn't lost any pilots since the middle of March, and I guess some of our bravado had returned. Also, the idea of striking the bad guys in their Cambodian sanctuaries really appealed to us. For one reason or another, the sense of great adventure returned - at least to me it did.

We had watched the movie "The Longest Day" in our outdoor theater a few weeks before - in fact it had been punctuated by a real life rocket attack in the middle of a screen attack It had taken some of us a few seconds to realize the explosions were from across the runway and not from the movie projector.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time thinking about how it must have felt for the troops preparing to invade Normandy. I suppose I knew that, in the great scheme of things, what we sensed was about to happen was nothing like going ashore at Omaha Beach - but it was our D-Day nonetheless and we were excited.

On the night of the 30^th of April, 1970, I couldn't sleep. Several times I walked down to the TOC (tactical operations center) to see if the next day's missions had come in. They usually came down from battalion between 2300 and 0100. My name was on the list of pilots in the reaction force, but no missions had been assigned yet.

I was hanging around the TOC at about 2330 when "Sugar Bear", our maintenance officer, came in - his eyes hanging out of his head from lack of sleep. The last of our ships was down in Phu Loi at the 15^th Transportation Battalion for a 600-hourly and they had just sent us a message saying it was ready to be picked up. "Sugar Bear" wanted another pilot to fly down with him to bring it back. Since I was awake, I got the job.

I wasn't an aircraft commander yet, but I had enough experience that the Ops Officer authorized me to fly the second ship in company with "Sugar Bear". I jumped at the chance to have my first flight in command in Vietnam.

When we got back from Phu Loi at about 0200, I hurried into the TOC to check the missions. The first thing I noticed was that some of the grid coordinates were prefaced with XU, not XT, as was used for locations in War Zone C. I looked at the map and, sure enough, all of the landing zones were in the "Fishhook" region of Cambodia. The move was really on!!

Then I looked at the mission sheet and couldn't believe it - my name had been scratched out of the reaction force. I queried the Ops Officer but he said that I couldn't very well fly all day if I'd been up all night. I told him that I thought he'd need every pilot he could get, but he had extra pilots from battalion staff and didn't need me. He was a Captain and I was a Warrant Officer, so there wasn't much I could do but go to bed.

My "longest day" was spent in the orderly room, waiting for news about how the lift was going. When the flight came back, everyone was excited and talked about being in a 42-ship lift - the first time the "Cav" had used such a large a reaction force since the A Shau Valley battles in '68.

At the debrief, the guys had talked about how it looked crossing the border - leaving behind the pock-marked landscape of Vietnam and flying over the pristine greenery of Cambodia. It wouldn't stay that way long, though.

Resistance in Cambodia was fairly light but one of the Huey's had taken a hit in the fuel control unit and gone down. The area was open and the autorotation was successful. The crew were picked up by one of our ships and no one got hurt. As Awards and Decorations Officer, I was told by the Battalion Commander to put our pilots in for DFC's and the crew in for Air Medals.

Soon it was my turn. The "Cav" was still consolidating its position in the "Fishhook" region and we had heaps of 18-ship combat assaults into new areas. Someone had directed that all of the Cambodian missions be flown low-level. It was okay for the lead helicopter which was contour flying, but with all of the following helicopters stepped up, that put "tail-end Charlie" about 75 feet above the trees. I sure didn't feel very comfortable when I was stuck back there.

A few weeks before the incursion we had mounted a second mini-gun onto the right side of "Nighthawk" and sometimes that ship was added to our reaction force flights to help suppress enemy fire directly beneath the flight and when we were in hot "LZ's". Initially we called that ship "Dayhawk", but before long it became known as "Da' Judge". "Da' Judge" really came into its own on some of those low-level combat assaults into Cambodia.

By the end of the first week, we started to get reports of huge "arms caches" and "base camps" being uncovered. Resistance became a lot stiffer but we were still "kickin' ass and takin' names" at that point. The rumor spread that we were trying to capture the infamous COSVN headquarters. I later read that capturing the COSVN headquarters was never on the military agenda for the incursion, but when Nixon announced the invasion at a White House press conference, he referred to that objective as an additional justification for what was seen as an expansion of the war. Since the COSVN headquarters personnel were never caught, the media labeled the operation a failure.

But at that point, I'd have to say I was pretty optimistic.  It seemed clear to me that we were winning all the battles. Even though we were losing some people, our losses were nothing compared to the price we were making the bad guys pay. I felt pretty good about the whole deal. I remember how we began to talk about "finishing the job" and going home.

I should point out, that the 1st Cav was not the only unit involved in the Cambodian Incursion. The 25^th Infantry Division, the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and a whole lot of ARVN's (South Vietnamese Army) were heavily involved in other areas nearby.

While many of us who were directly involved were feeling pretty optimistic about the job we were doing, events in the US soon overshadowed everything that was happening in Cambodia.

For reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained to me, some trigger-happy, week-end warrior National Guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio.

From that point on, it seemed to me that the Vietnam War was fought mainly outside Vietnam and Cambodia and not by soldiers.

Nixon was under political siege and tried to appease those protesting the situation by making what seemed to me to be a ridiculous announcement that the incursion would be of limited scope and duration. He announced to the world (and one assumes Moscow and Hanoi had access to TV sets even then) that the ground forces would go no deeper than 30 kilometers into Cambodia and that no American ground troops would remain in Cambodia beyond June 30^th.

Naturally, some of us thought that was great. We invaded Cambodia - allegedly to deny the NVA a sanctuary from which they could hit us at will and then retreat. Then, our Commander-in-Chief draws a line on the map and tells our enemies that if they wait on the other side of that line for a few more weeks, they will be safe. At that point I really began to wonder whether Nixon was on our side or theirs - but of course "ours is not to reason why . . . . "etc.

Despite the political flak generated by the incursion in the US, the Cav located and captured or destroyed some absolutely humongous arms caches. The main caches were given names:- e.g. 'The City", "Rock Island East", and "Shakey's Hill" - to name a few. I read in "Stars and Stripes" that "The City" was discovered by a scout pilot named James Cyrus - who had been a flight school classmate of mine at Wolters and Rucker.

I got to see one of the arms caches in situ by flying a demolition team in to rig it for destruction. I also saw huge piles of recovered weapons and ordnance alongside the runway at Bu Gia Map, just inside Vietnam. There were stacks of crated AK47's as big as a hangar. Personally, I didn't think that was a bad capture from a supposedly neutral country.

As time for the withdrawal approached, enemy activity got more intense and our guys took some heavy hits. Our crew got decorated for a night emergency re-supply of an ARVN company in the "Fishhook" just east of FSB Center in late May.

The company was surrounded by an NVA battalion and was almost out of ammunition. The AC was a guy named Les Tatarski and I was the peter-pilot. We took several hits doing a "hover-down, kick- out" of the ammo in triple-canopy jungle. The door gunner was slightly wounded. An AK round ricocheted off the bottom of my armored seat; another round smashed the iodine bottle in the First Aid Kit on the pillar beside my head. We had an American major on board who was senior adviser to the ARVN company. Four Americans were with the ARVN's on the ground.

We heard that the major was killed the following day. Our door gunner was killed a few months later in a mid-air collision (in a flight I led). Les Tatarski was called upon to do the same thing about two weeks later only a few kilometers away. That time they took 48 hits, including one AK round through Tatarski's heart. He was due to go on R&R the next day.

The story I heard was that his wife had already left home to meet him in Hawaii. The Army finally caught up with her at the airport in Honolulu, standing at the gate and wondering why he wasn't on the flight he was supposed to be on. I don't know if the story is true or not - a lot of myths were circulated and perpetuated in and about Vietnam. But it wouldn't surprise me if it was true.

We invented a word to describe how it was during the last couple weeks of the Cambodian Incursion - "skosh". Things were pretty "skosh" when all of the units started withdrawing toward the border or toward staging areas for helicopter final extraction. By then that part of Cambodia was pretty well pock-marked and looked just about like Vietnam.

On one of the last days, I was hanging around the company area in Tay Ninh - having flown "NightHawk" the night before but unable to sleep due to the heat. By that stage I was an AC. I must have been the only pilot not flying because one of the maintenance sergeants approached me and asked me if I could test fly a Huey that had just been fitted with a smoke generator.

I had heard stories and seen films, while in flight school, about "smokeships" being used to screen troop movements. But I had never actually seen it done in Vietnam or Cambodia. I tested the smoke generator and it seemed to work okay, so I returned to Tay Ninh.

Then the Ops Officer asked me to go back out and play with it for awhile to see what kind of airspeeds and altitudes were necessary to give a good, thick smokescreen that couldn't be seen through. I did that and I found that if you went above 60 knots, you could see right through the smoke screen. But below 60 knots, it was opaque.

That night I was taken off Nighthawk and told that there would be a smokeship mission the following morning and that I would be flying it. I protested that I knew nothing about smokeship tactics. The Ops Officer told me that I had flown the smokeship twice and that was two more flights than anyone else in the company had with a smoke generator fitted. I was it.

The next morning we flew under a 700' overcast to reach a firebase up near the border which was battalion headquarters for the 1/7 Cav. The story that emerged, as best I can recollect, was that a company of GI's had been retreating from Cambodia in accordance with Nixon's timetable under some pressure from an NVA battalion. They had followed a stream down to a river which formed the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. The stream converged on the outside of a horseshoe bend with a long, low open flat on the inside of the bend - being part of Vietnam. The open area was surrounded on three sides by high ground covered with trees - being part of Cambodia.

Having crossed the river and being unable - due to the Presidential mandate - to re-enter Cambodia, the company had been pinned down in the open area by the NVA who had taken up positions on three sides - safely inside Cambodia. This must have been about the 27^th or 28^th of June, 1970.

The plan was to extract the company in two lifts from the open area by helicopter. In addition to the reaction force, there were two or three fire teams of Cobras, a flight of USAF F-4's, a Forward Air Controller (FAC) and a smokeship.

The "command & control ship" (Chuck-Chuck) couldn't get in because of the weather. Therefore, I offered to let the rifle battalion commander fly on board "Smoky" to coordinate the lift. The plan was for the Phantoms to put in some air strikes on the hillsides; then we were to smoke the bad guys down so they couldn't see out; then the lift ships would go in for the extract with the Cobras ready to pounce on anything that shot at the lift ships.

We may not have been allowed to go back in with ground troops, but as far as we were concerned, we could fly over Cambodia as much as we wanted up 'til the 30^th.

If my memory is correct, the battalion commander, was a Lieutenant Colonel with an Italian- sounding name and the nickname "Mad Anthony". He sat in the doorway with a PRC-77 handset in one hand and a Thompson sub-machine gun in the other hand.

We took off for our first pass and started smoking and immediately took very heavy small arms fire from a wide area. I kept thinking we would fly out of it soon but, the enemy fire just kept coming. I really had a helluva time resisting the urge to nose it over and get the hell out of there. At 60 knots, it seemed like we were hovering there with a big sign on us saying "shoot us please" and the bad guys were trying hard to oblige.

"Mad Anthony" was in the middle of a radio call when we started taking fire and he got all confused in the excitement. I have an impression of him stamped forever on my mind as he sat in the doorway - blazing away at the bad guys with his Tommy-gun in one hand and a radio handset glued to his ear in the other hand -- yelling "Smoky's taking incoming, Smoky's taking incoming!!" as he coordinated the lift.

The Cobras came in and covered us. I think they were from 2^nd/20^th - "Blue Max". I was later told that one of the Cobra co-pilot/gunners was seriously wounded while trying to suppress the ground fire. I'd love to meet those guys to say thanks because I have no doubt they saved our butts.

I was so scared that I could have howled like a coyote when "Mad Anthony" asked me to go back in and make another smoke pass to cover the second lift. We took some pretty intense fire but once again escaped without a single bullet hole through our machine. I was doing plenty of bobbing and weaving -- not that I thought I would outrun any bullets at 60 knots!!!

Once that mission was over, we all were greatly relieved and as I flew back toward Tay Ninh, the sight of several large convoys of ARVN and American troops heading south added to our elation. Within days, we were told that we would be moving from Tay Ninh to Bien Hoa, much closer to Saigon and in a much more secure area.

[Postscript:- Since first writing this article I have been shown the official "after-action report" for C/229 covering the period of the Cambodian Incursion. It refers to the smokeship having been fitted out but not used. I guess our little mission was considered insignificant in the overall effort . . .]

War Zone C, comprising most of Tay Ninh Province and bordered on two sides by Cambodia, was handed over to the ARVN. Our new AO was to cover War Zone D, north to the central highlands and east almost to the coast.

Just prior to the move to Bien Hoa, I wrote my parents and told them that my tour was only one third over, but I felt like I had seen most of the action I would see. That prediction turned out to be right, however we continued to lose people in aircraft accidents.

At the end of my tour, I tallied up that twenty-six people were killed -- either while assigned to C/229th or while flying with us. Of these, only eight were actually killed by the enemy. The rest died in aircraft accidents.

Soon after moving to Bien Hoa, I was given a direct commission and appointed a "Yellow-One" flight leader. After ten months in country, I was assigned to battalion staff and left Charlie company. By that time, Nixon was fully committed to "Vietnamization". Major troop withdrawals had already commenced and even the 1^st Cav would withdraw two Brigades and leave only one behind.

There were some ominous signs even then of what was to come. One day, while flying C&C with the battalion CO, I overheard a desperate radio call on "guard" asking for any gunships or attack aircraft within range of Tay Ninh to help out - there were bad guys "in the wire" - i.e. penetrating the perimeter defenses.

After two years of work and many scores of American lives lost in War Zone C, it took our ARVN allies only five months to lose it all.

Just before I was due to leave Vietnam, Operation Lam Son 719 was launched - an ARVN attack into Laos with American helicopter support. It seemed like a disaster, from what I was told. Nonetheless, American troop withdrawals continued.

On about 25 February, 1971, I was released by my boss at 229^th Assault Helicopter Battalion Headquarters and told to start clearing the country. My "DEROS" (Date Eligible for Return from Overseas) was 2 March. I went by operations to pick up my records and found I had 992 missions.

I didn't want to leave without 1000 missions, so I went back down to Charlie Company and signed in again, asking for all the combat assault's they could give me over the next two days. After having gone several months without getting shot at, bloody hell if I didn't get shot at on my last day - though not too severely.

I wound up with a thousand missions - plus two more - and still left Vietnam a day before my official DEROS.

After my last mission, I got out of the H-model Huey and started to walk away, just as I had been doing for a year. I remember that I suddenly turned around and walked back to it - struck with the realization that - having worn it around Vietnam and Cambodia on my back for a year - I might never, ever fly one again.

That almost turned out to be true. It wasn't until 1986, when I did a short job in a civil Bell 205A-1, that I again flew a Huey. But nowadays I fly a Bell 412, a derivative of the Huey with four rotor blades and two engines.

After a year at Fort Benning in the Infantry Center (as a Courts-Martial prosecutor and Brigade Legal Officer) I left active duty. Six months later I brought my Australian wife home to her family and started law school in Sydney.

From 1968, before I joined the Army, until 1973, a year after I had left the Army, Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger had been engaged in peace talks in Paris. By the time I got to Vietnam in 1970, they hadn't even agreed on the shape of the table yet. But in early 1973, just a day or two after Lyndon Johnson died, they announced the peace accord which (supposedly) ended the war.

Nixon called it the long-awaited "Peace with Honor". I'm sure all Vietnam Veterans felt much better - even though most of us weren't too surprised to watch the North Vietnamese roll into Saigon in April of 1975.

The TV shots of the helicopter evacuation of the embassy onto the Navy carriers in the South China Sea certainly taught us all a lot about helicopter ditching techniques.

On ANZAC Day, 1995, it was appropriate that the focus should have been on the 50^th anniversary celebrations of the end of World War II. The Vietnam War is properly dwarfed by the historical significance and human sacrifice of that conflict.

[Note: ANZAC Day is Australia's Veteran's Day and celebrates the anniversary of the Gallipoli Invasion - 25 April, 1915 - by the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps.]

I wasn't surprised that the 20^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon rated media coverage on 30 April, 1995. I was, however, immensely disappointed that the story conveyed the distinct impression that America's full fighting force was chased out of Vietnam by the conquering North Vietnamese - instead of the handful of Marines left to guard the embassy after the main troop withdrawals finished in 1973. I'm sure the media version is what my kids will remember and accept as gospel.

I listened to news broadcasts the next day, 1 May, 1995, thinking that perhaps there might be some mention of that day being the 25^th anniversary of the Cambodian Incursion - but my own unit's D-Day was not deemed to be of historical significance. Four days later, the 25^th anniversary of the Kent State "Massacre" was commemorated, but only an oblique reference to the Cambodian Incursion was made. I wondered if the whole thing might have been a figment of my imagination.

I saw a lapel pin for sale on ANZAC Day which read, "Vietnam - we were winning when I left!" It reminded me that, after Richard Nixon left the American Presidency in disgrace, he wrote a book which he called: "No More Vietnams". I didn't buy it and I haven't read it. But I'm told he made the profound observation, "we didn't lose the war, we lost the peace".

I would be tempted to agree, but I think more American and Australian Vietnam Veterans would be inclined to say, "we didn't lose the war, and you lost the peace". And while those of us who fought in Vietnam cannot help but envy our World War II colleagues who get to celebrate a victory, at least those of us who learned to fly helicopters in the Vietnam era can see tangible evidence of some good that came out of that war.

Vietnam was the helicopter war. Not only did helicopter technology receive a huge boost - not only was immense experience in helicopter operations gained - but millions of non-aviator types were exposed to the benefits of helicopter transport first hand. Many of these ex-servicemen are now movers and shakers in industry and the community and are in a position to open up new business opportunities for the civil helicopter industry.

So, in a sense, our victory parade is found in the steady stream of civil helicopter traffic that has developed over the last two decades - into and out of hospital heliports, TV stations, airports, oil platforms, high-rise rooftops or anywhere else helicopters are used to save time or lives.

I guess I can live with that.

DET

Daniel E Tyler
C/229, 1970
heli-con@acay.com.au