Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Read Online Free Page B

the staff wash you out of flight school, or maybe having one of your classmates write you up in a peer review that would accomplish the same thing, whereupon the Army would hand you a rifle and send you wading into the Vietnamese rice paddies. This, of course, is exactly what they did do in 1968 when you washed out of flight school. You still owed Uncle Sam a year and a half—plenty of time for a Vietnam tour.
    I had soloed in the OH-23D helicopter the week before. After six-and-a-half hours of dual flight, my instructor looked over at me, smiled, and said, “Take it around the pattern three times, then come back and pick me up.” As he opened the door to climb out of the little helicopter, he started laughing, laughing so loud that I could hear him over the engine noise. I watched him walk to the ready shack where we waited between flights without even looking back, still laughing.
    My first solo flight was uneventful, despite the pounding of my heart. After the three wobbly landings and takeoffs, with shaky hovering in between, my instructor came back to the aircraft, no longer laughing but smiling broadly.
    “Congratulations! Looks like you won’t get washed out after all, well, not yet anyway. Let’s take it home now, while we’re on a roll,” he said.
    He let me hover back out to the runway and make the takeoff. I remembered where our home field was, more or less, and after more or less leveling off (plus or minus 100 feet or so, i.e., the height of a ten-story building) I turned the aircraft toward it. Feeling very pleased with myself, I actually felt like I was in control of the aircraft, for once. Five miles from the outlying field we had just left, the instructor said, “I’ve got it” and as we had been taught, I immediately let go of the controls.
    Looking over at the instructor, I wondered what I had done wrong, since they did not normally take the flight controls without a reason. He was still smiling as he took the controls. With his left hand he pointed out to the front of the bubble.
    “See that buzzard at one o’clock, just a little high,” he asked? “
    “Yes, sir. I saw it and was going to avoid it,” I replied, thinking he thought I was going to get too close to the bird and have it hit the bubble of our aircraft.
    “Watch this,” he said and turned directly for the bird.
    The vulture saw us, or had been watching us already, and turned to escape from the larger “bird” attacking him. As the vulture turned, we turned with him. As he dove, we dove, always staying far enough away to ensure we did not hit him. For what seemed to be three or four minutes, we followed him through the sky, turning, twisting, climbing, diving, and then, laughing, my instructor turned the H-23 back toward the base, resumed level flight, and gave me back the controls.
    It was the first time I had ever been in a maneuvering helicopter. We were not just taking off, climbing out and flying level around the traffic pattern—we were actually twisting and turning through the sky! With the assurance of a god-like flight instructor sitting next to me, I knew there was no danger to us and it was fun! After the grind of basic training, the terror of preflight training and the pressure to solo, it was the first time that “90 days between you and the sky” seemed real, the first feeling of freedom, of real flying, like the old war movies.
    Now, another week and another five hours of flight time later, I was being entrusted with flying an aircraft the fifteen miles from the stage field back to Fort Wolters, all by myself. I was sure it would be no problem. I felt good, having had a good flight earlier in the day. So I pulled up on the collective, and not wobbling too much, took off to head for home. I leveled off at 500 feet, plus or minus only 50, instead of the 100 feet of last week; this time it was a five-story building instead of a ten-story. At about the same place as the week before, a vulture was