base manager and I were arguing. He turned a little right, climbing into the soup. Minutes latter, he disappeared from this life with all his passengers. The aircraft was found the next day where it had been flown at two hundred miles per hour straight into the rocks of Monkey Mountain. We never did learn why Frank did this- probably just some kind of vertigo or lapse in situational awareness. If he had remained VFR and stayed under the weather like the Beech that had passed in front of me he might likely have made the flight without incident.
Back in Saigon Jason and I had both moved out of the crew zoo and rented homes of our own. I was sharing my place with an old friend, Glenn Van Ingen, who, as I write, is living the life or Reilly in Hawaii. Of course Reilly is bound to come home some time and disrupt Van’s island paradise.
One day Jason came over and said that he had a “terrible problem” and would I please help him. “Sure, what’s the deal?” Well, he explained, his wife was coming to visit- I said Jason, I thought she was already here. He said, ”Rabbet, that ain’t mah wife, that’s Brenda.” I knew Brenda, I thought she was his wife. He had moved into the private house from the crew house because she had flown in to be with him. In those days, Vietnam wasn’t a hard ship post and a lot of the pilots had their families with them.
Jason’s real world wife had called and given him twenty-four hours notice that she was coming to visit. She didn’t know about Brenda but Brenda certainly knew about her. Jason asked if Brenda could stay with us and pretend she was my girl friend. This was easy, Brenda was lovely and this seemed like it might work. We all spent the rest of the day making sure that everything that Brenda owned was out of Jason’s place.
Mrs. Broussard showed up at Tan Se Nuit the next morning and Jason brought her home. The bear was there - he had forgotten to tell her about the little honey bear. That wasn’t all- Cynthia was there too. Cynthia, who’s that? Charlie, one of our stranger pilots, was Cynthia’s owner. She was a twelve foot 100 lb python who used to travel with Captain Charlie in his big flight kit between the seats in the Twin Beech. She had been with Charlie for years and was altogether a lovely snake with a gentle disposition. Charlie had a two week stint up-country and had asked Jason to take her until he got back. Cynthia was easy to keep, a rat every two weeks from the cage Charlie left and she slept under Jason’s bed or the closet floor.
Mrs. Broussard wasn’t impressed with our neighborhood. The drive to Chi Lang from the airport was pretty horrible for the uninitiated. The Mrs. had never been outside of her little state of Louisiana and the chaotic traffic, noise, filth, smells nasty little people, unbelievably crowded streets, all combined to make her regret her decision to visit her dear husband. This was before she got to the house.
Once inside, after traveling for more than thirty hours, she wanted a bath. Immediately she started bitching with considerable volume that there wasn’t a bath tub. Even if there had been there wasn’t any hot water. I had hot water, but I bought electric heater made for this and hooked it into the plumbing- Jason didn’t.
The Missus, according to Jason, came out of the cold shower and was sitting very unhappily on the bed drying her hair with the towel covering her eyes. This was the very moment the bear choose to rub up against her bare legs. The scream could be heard all over the neighborhood- louder even than poor Dan’s had been. Jason finally got her calmed down but not before he had to bring the bear over to my place too.
Later that night the end came. The Missus got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat down on the john, turned on the light, opened her eyes and saw Cynthia curled up in the shower. This time the screaming when on for thirty minutes- nothing Jason could say calmed her down in the slightest. He had to get a cab and go with her to a downtown hotel. The next morning he took her back to the airport where she caught a flight to Bangkok on the first departing aircraft out of this horrible country.
Brenda moved back in and fed the badly terrified little bear a whole jar of blueberry jelly which the little tyke adored more than anything. For weeks, smelling something only he could smell, he would hold the then long thoroughly empty jar in his little paws and rolling on his back with his long purple bear tongue, happily lick the inside of the glass jar for hours. With profuse thanks Brenda also gave Cynthia an extra fat rat for which she was also quite grateful. Sadly, one day the honey bear crawled through the porch screen, up the nearest telephone pole and began gnawing on one of the many wires. Unfortunately, the one he picked carried 250 Volts. Jason never did buy another bear.
CHAPTER 10
THEY’RE SHOOTING AT ME
“Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death”
— Major Robert S. Johnson, USAAF
I landed behind the wrecked Air America C-46. It was shot to pieces when it flew a wide square pattern into Victor 40, Tham Ke. The property just to the south of this aircraft was a free fire zone and we all knew it- This was Charlie country and the zipper heads were laying into anyone and anything that entered it.
The hapless Captain still flew way south of the airport and, when he was down to 1000’ turning final, the gooks opened up. The C-46 is indeed a big fat target but it doesn’t have many areas that are particularly sensitive to bullets. This is a good thing as there were likely a thousand holes in it when one engine finally caught fire. They landed and skidded off to the side at the North west end of the PSP runway.
Amazingly, no one was hurt. There were a bunch of Vietnamese Chief’s of Police on board who were there to attend some kind of meeting. They gave the dumb Captain a metal and he was their hero. I walked across the ramp to see the beat up aircraft. It hadn’t burned but it did have a bunch of holes. While walking out on the ramp, I heard what sounded like a bullet ricocheting off the metal runway. It was a bullet! The little bastards were shooting at me. I ran like hell and dove behind a bunch of sand bags.
The only place the shots could have come from was the tree line at the south end of the runway. It was a long way, maybe half a mile. I was lucky. That was the first time in my life that someone I didn’t know had tried to kill me. I never forgot it. Of course, that’s what war is all about isn’t it. What did Patton say, “the only way to win a war for your country is to make sure the other SOB dies for his” or something like that? I did manage to get the WW II flare pistol out of the wreck and have it today over my fireplace.
I picked up my passengers and flew them the forty miles north to Danang. The next day was sent down to Quang Ngai Victor 23, just south and west by some 50 miles from Tam key on the edge of Charlie country. This was the scene of my first accident- the first and last time I bent the tin. I was refueling at the eastern side of the strip just off the runway when a helio came along in a slow hover and blew the tail of the Porter into a ditch leaving the stabilizer supporting the weight of the empennage ripping the elevator hinge supports from the thin 028 gauge hull.
I called the base in Danang and in a few hours two mechanics showed up on another company machine. They lined up the torn attachments, drilled out the old rivets and somehow pop riveted the damm thing together. They said “OK, Cap, fly it home and we’ll do a permanent repair.” I got it back and they worked on it all day and got it fixed up like new.
By 0900 the next day I was back in Indian country. We had a young Embassy guy on board talking to a bunch of guys on a portable bayside. He was in the cabin with me flying around a place he had identified on a map. Suddenly, we started taking rounds. I broke off and, seeing that he was still alive, headed back to Quang Ngai to check
