- Tonight's speaker is Neil Hansen.
After growing up in
northern Michigan and moving to Detroit in his early teens,
he caught the aviation bug.
Back in the dawn of the '50s,
you could ride your bike from your home.
He rode his bike from his home in Harper Woods to the city
airport and hung out on the flight line.
Anybody ever done that growing up?
Hanging out at the airport before we put fences up and things like that?
The proximity and the magical contraptions that were able
to defy gravity earned him the moniker of airport bum.
Longing to fuel his desire to aviate was obtained by
washing airplanes.
By the time he turned 17,
a private license was in his possession and his savings had
reached the point where he was able to purchase a Cessna 120
in Cadillac, Michigan, for $1300.
You can't buy any of those these days, can ya?
That summer, he was a nomad,
flying from airport to airport, oftentimes sleeping in the
airplane under the wing.
In the fall, he traded the Cessna
for a Mooney Mite M-18L.
The single seat, single engine retractable gear
served him well,
including a trip to Jamaica.
A commercial license was
his before he actually got a license to drive a car,
and even before he graduated from high school.
The years following took him through aviation jobs
and airplanes and progression of new license, culminating
in an executive pilot job with the Teamsters Union.
As the demise of our leader, Jimmy Hoffa, as he said,
approached, he sought other employment.
And this is where he entered
the smokey world of covert aviation.
And tonight, we'll get to hear about that.
Please welcome Neil Hansen.
(applause)
- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
I hope I can be fairly astute.
You all are aviators, so I won't have to go
into detail on many things.
But the Teamsters Union was a
wonderful job, but going with Air America
promised to be a little more exotic.
The Teamsters Union's lawyers
told me when they found out I was leaving,
"Where was you going?"
And I said, "Well, Air America."
And they said, "Oh, yeah, the CIA."
Which got my hopes up for Terry and The Pirates stuff
and all kinds of weird things like that.
But the truth is very far from that.
It's much rawer and brutal.
And sometimes funny.
Air America's motto, of course, as you see on the screen.
Anything, anywhere, anytime,
professionally.
And that last one, professionally, could be dubious.
(laughing)
We did it, though, despite that.
My bio is on the screen now,
and I ended up getting airline
transport ratings in U.S., China,
Cambodia, Laos, and
commercial down in New Zealand.
So aviation was my thing.
It was my opium.
And it went onward and upward.
There was a movie made, as I think most of you may have
seen, called Air America.
And it was a movie.
It wasn't real life.
Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr.
played in the thing.
And I wrote some of the stuff too.
But it was not a documentary
because you can't pay
Mel Gibson $4.5 million and Robert Downey, Jr.,
and make a documentary that'll get your money back.
You're going to have to Rambo it up, and they did.
And it wasn't all that bad, but some people didn't like it.
Some of the flying scenes were great.
But Air America,
and similar transport, started back in the 1930's.
Basically with China being at war with Japan.
And FDR, at that time, decided that he needed somebody over
there to thwart the Japanese, but he wasn't going to send
US troops.
So he gave the Chinese 100 P-40s,
and then he allowed people in the service that wanted to
fly them to leave the service, go to China,
and fly these P-40s with Chinese markings.
They'd get $600 for every Japanese
plane they shot down.
And this was pretty big money back in those days.
But then, after Pearl Harbor and the US entered the fray,
they moved these guys back into the military, and they
started flying there, but General Chennault was in love
with the far east,
and he decided after the war to stay.
And he started CNAC, a Chinese airline.
And he was flying
C-46s all throughout mainland China.
Then, as the bad guys got organized through Mao Zedong,
he regrouped and moved to Formosa.
And there in Formosa,
he changed the name to Civil Air Transport developed a
passenger service and even got involved in some of the
logistics of the Korean War.
Later on, the CIA,
which was just emerging, discovered that
this would be a wonderful vehicle in an area that they had
no expertise or no presence.
So they up and they bought
Civil Air Transport, and it developed further.
Air America came into the view.
But General Chennault was
the president until he died.
And the CIA was in the
background there.
All of our dead, which was 240 some,
are on a plaque in Langley, Virginia,
at CIA headquarters.
None of them are on the Vietnam wall.
And our first
fatality in the Vietnam conflict was "Earthquake McGoon,"
James McGovern, and Wallace Buford
in a C-119 with French markings.
The French had 100 C-119s given to them
to help them in their fight against the Viet Minh,
or the north Vietnamese, that wanted to take Vietnam back.
Now, these airplanes were French markings,
but they didn't have any pilots to fly them.
So they approached Civil Air Transport (chuckles)
and the agency to loan them pilots.
So, many of the guys who Civil Air Transport started flying
the C-119s out of Hong Kong.
And on one of them,
the C-119 got shot down,
and they tried to make it into Laos.
It landed by a riverbank, but they didn't make it
and they crashed and they died.
We just go the remains back
about two years ago,
which was kind of bad.
But the fragments were
almost not identifiable.
But that was the first fatality,
really, in the Vietnam conflict.
And it went onward and upward from that point.
Air America was a later...
Endeavor that came into existence in the 50s.
There was a small little operation in Saigon
that Civil Air Transport bought,
and it was called Air America.
And they had three Helio Couriers there.
Well, then we moved in Twin Beeches and many other
aircraft, but it was
a separate organization
from Civil Air Transport.
In this conglomerate that the agency had bought,
there was Civil Air Transport, Southern Air Transport,
which was flying DC-6s out of Tachikawa, Japan,
flying troops and the Stars and Stripes newspaper
throughout the far east, and occasionally you'd go into
Okinawa, they'd strip the markings off the airplane,
you'd come out at two o'clock in the morning
and find it loaded with munitions, and you'd
fly down to southeast Asia, 10-hour trip.
You wouldn't follow a flight plan, you'd fly 500 feet off
regular published altitudes
all the way down, off-load it,
turn around, come back 10 hours, and same thing.
No communication with anybody.
Nothing with ATC or any of
that sort of thing.
And when you're 20 miles out of Kadena,
give them a call, and they'd clear you to land.
And then they'd paint this bars and stars back on it, and
you'd fly a regular (chuckles) route after that with troops
and cargo on board.
As Vietnam escalated,
I'd been flying the six out of Tachikawa,
and I wanted to get down into southeast Asia.
Well, Don Teeters, the chief pilot there, said that, "Well,
if you can pass the Chinese
airline transport rating test,
I'll move you," and I said, "Okay."
So I did.
And the way I passed that was when I was staying in Taipei,
I met a friend at the desk in the hotel we were staying by
the name of Lena.
And she was good enough to teach me Chinese etiquette.
And that was, when you go in to take a
test, sit right in the front.
Don't try to hide in the back.
Dress like you're going to go to a formal outing,
with a tie and a shirt and all of that.
Not jeans and sloppy shoes and the rest of that.
Take the papers,
when they give them to you, with both hands.
Put them on the desk, make all your stuff as neat as
possible, and when you finish the test, bring them straight
up to the desk in the front and hand them to the guy with
both hands.
And that worked.
I passed it,
and I was the first guy in 18 months that got it.
(laughing) And, as a result,
I took my American airline
transport rating test in a C-46 in Japan
and the flight test there with the FAA.
And then I got my Chinese DC-3
rating and my C-46 rating.
And so I was off to southeast
Asia, into Saigon, which was
very rough at that time.
We had 10 airplanes when I first got to Saigon
and 10 pilots.
So they needed people.
We were flying 100 to 130 hours a month.
And so they didn't have enough crews.
I got rapidly checked out in three days
and turned loose on the line.
A week after that, they made me an instructor pilot,
which was kind of weird because I hadn't been to all
the strips in the country yet.
And three months after that,
I was made assistant manager of flying and in charge of the
C-46 program, the Twin Beech program.
The Dornier, which is Dornier 28.
I don't know if people know what that
is, but it was twin engine German airplane
and a good stole-burg.
And also we had a Piper Apache.
So I was managing those programs and scheduling the pilots
and more or less eating,
sleeping, and flying all the time
and checking other people out.
We initially, in '65 and into '66,
we hired 700 pilots.
Many of them couldn't hit their butt with both hands.
They were very lax in basics.
Basics in combat or stalled
environment are airspeed an altitude control.
When you get on short final into a short strip
and you're low,
don't pull the nose up or you're going to die.
Your speed is controlled by you attitude.
Altitude with power.
And if they didn't learn that simple,
basic fact real quick, they got a ticket home.
And a lot of people were very upset with me because I was
being so hard on them.
Well, I didn't like going out
and picking up body parts at crash sites.
That was no fun whatsoever.
But it evolved from that point.
I became very much hated one time
due to this being a hard
butt about the whole thing.
What we did in Vietnam was mostly food,
concertina wire, and all sorts of other things.
Infills and exfills and evacuations.
As the Viet Minh
or the Viet Kong were getting close to
sites, we'd fly the people out of there, which were
chaotic.
The people would be in panic mode,
running towards the airplane.
Running into propellers
and fighting each other to get inside the airplane.
Sometimes they had to be beaten off a ladder with a stick
to keep from overloading.
But most times you just tolerated
it and kept going.
Those were not the fun deal.
And we've resupplied munitions to fire bases up near the
Cambodian border.
And we had catastrophes too.
Bill Pruner was a good friend of mine.
He was flying for
Cummins Diesel here in the United States
down out of Columbus, Ohio.
And I'd met him when I flying
for the Teamsters.
He was an excellent pilot.
And we used to fly the Gooney Bird every now and then just
to play with it.
And I was supposed to go with him one day,
but a scheduling mess up caused me
to have to stay in operations.
Well, about an hour after he'd left,
the radio and LC (mumbles) came in
and said "Captain Pruner's down".
And that was not good.
But he'd been gone down in a rice paddy.
And we were getting relays from
another airplane in the area.
He was on the radio.
They'd taken rounds and one engine had failed.
He'd taken a round to his left leg and to his right arm.
But they had the bleeding under control.
They were in the paddy, and they were all right.
So we had a chopper about 20 minutes away.
This was good news because the first hour is the key to all
of that stuff.
You're either going to get them in or go in
with body bags after that.
And the chopper pulled up
alongside the Gooney Bird in the rice paddy,
and the bad guys came out shooting at them.
And one co-pilot took a round through his hand.
He end up, actually, later on as being a Washington lawyer
after that.
But they got two bodies out later,
and they said they were oriental.
And they saw one guy
being led off down the rice paddy in Air America uniform.
Oh, boy, this is not going to be fun because
I knew Bill's wife in town.
I thought, well, worst, you know.
He's going to be real drunk tonight...
but we'll laugh it off.
Well, when the chopper came in with the two bodies,
I went out there.
And they thought they were oriental,
but in death the skin changes,
and it was Bill.
He had both eyes cut out and his throat slit and was
covered in blood.
Well, I ended up having to go to let
Betty know.
And, of course, she wanted to see the body.
And I found out that is really a good thing.
If you let them see the body and realize what has happened,
it will help the healing process.
But I didn't
and ended up taking her out
to Tan Son Nhut about three days later,
and the body in a casket in the hull
of a Pan Am 707 and shipped him back to the states.
Well, I figured I've done a pretty good job there.
And five days after that,
I get a telegram, which were
called TWXs back in those days.
Please advise disposition
of Captain Pruner's remains.
His wife is calling.
I thought, "Wow, this isn't right."
And I sent a barn-burner back to them.
I said, "Yeah, I sent her back with him."
And then I got another one "That wasn't the wife".
(chuckles)
He'd brought his girlfriend over instead of his wife.
Well, that ended up being a big mess. (laughing)
But two weeks after that, I'm out at the terminal in
Tan Son Nhut, and Pan Am comes in
and down the stairs comes
Betty along with one of our Porter pilots.
And she'd come back with another pilot,
which the grief syndrome is a little erotic and exotic.
You don't know what's happening.
Multiple marital relations,
I found, are not that uncommon.
Jason Broussard was another one,
a fellow from Louisiana.
And his wife, Brenda, came over with him.
And then I get another telegram
that said, "Please send Captain Broussard to Bangkok;
"his wife is waiting for him."
Oh, god, I called Jason in and says,
"Hey, you know, you've got another lady in Bangkok."
He says, "Oh, yeah. That's my wife. I've got two.
"Doesn't everybody?" (laughing)
I found out that was another thing that happened.
It happened to me too. (laughing)
But that's why I've been married a little over 80 years.
I had two at the same time for 35. (laughing)
But our area of operations was Laos,
Thailand, Cambodia,
Okinawa, Japan, and the Philippines.
Primarily, the hazardous areas were Vietnam and Laos.
Laos was where the real war was going on because of the
Ho Chi Minh Trail traversing from north to south, mainly on
the Laotian side of the border.
It didn't come down through
Vietnam except when they penetrated the border to bring
more ammunition in.
That was kind of a...
Convoluted thing.
We were in Laos
and the Ho Chi Minh was in Laos.
The Ho ChiMinh Trail, and
we had 100 case officers that were
scattered throughout the country.
And they had indigenous troops.
They didn't have American troops working for them.
Most of them were Hmong people,
which are in this state and Minnesota.
And they were fierce warriors and very
protective of their high ground.
They did not inhabit the
riverbanks or the low country in any of the countries.
And General...
Vang Pao was their leader.
General Vang Pao had come up through the ranks, and
during the French Indochina war, the French decided he was
a great leader.
So they sent him to military school in France.
And when he came back, they made him a general
and put him in charge of all the Hmong troops in the
middle part of Laos.
And also there were some other things going
on that were illegal, but they utilized him in that respect
and he did a good job.
He really did.
Getting shot at in Laos was something
that happened regularly.
When I moved up to Laos, instead of having all of these air
crews and programs to supervise,
I went into the C-123 program.
When I first got there, we had what they called a
B model C-123.
It had two R-2800-99Ws,
which were big reciprocating engines.
2500 horsepower with water injection.
And later they hang two jets on it.
J85s, which were on the Sabreliner.
And it gave us great
short fuel performance.
The one that you're seeing on the
screen is 293.
That one disappeared up near one of the
sites on the way into
the area near the Burma border.
Now, the Chinese were building a road
from Hunan Province
down to the border of Thailand.
To protect that road,
they had radar controlled weapons.
Some of them 57-millimeter, which is a big round.
Very impressive.
It looks like a red hot fence post coming up.
But bad weather prevented this crew
from dog-legging around it.
And I estimate there was an 80 knot wind that blew them
up within range of these, and they got nailed in the soup.
On that crew was one of
the Tuskegee airman, Clarence Driver.
And we just got the bodies back on that,
or remains, there was no bodies, of course,
by this time, here about three, four years ago.
And one part was kind of funny in a way.
The co-pilot's wife
was living in Los Angeles, was still
getting his retirement pay from the Air Force.
Well, she didn't want the body back because that would have
stopped the pay.
And I don't know how that ever worked out,
but it was a mess to say the least.
There was another one
that went down in the same
manner, Jim Ackley.
And that whole crew disappeared too.
And they finally found
what scattered remains that were there of the wreckage,
and that's back.
We had a number of large aircraft.
The 123 was perhaps the biggest.
We had Caribous, which is C-7A.
And we had C-46s and a few DC-3s that were operated.
Not many DC-3s at one time.
But C-46 was a great rice drop airplane.
And you'd free fall the rice,
which I don't know if anybody has ever done any free
falling goods out of an airplane,
but if you fly over the site
at 800 feet, 105 knots,
push out a 1200 pound pallet of rice,
it was triple bagged with only 40 kilos of rice in
a 100-kilo bag, it will go forward and in the last bit it
will fall vertically.
So the bags won't tumble and break.
And it was an art form, really, dropping that stuff.
It was fun.
Millions of tons of rice were dropped that way.
In 123s, our primary thing was
either dropping fuel or munitions.
Now, fuel was not that bad.
Initially, they would take a 55-gallon drum,
put a metal ring around the top of it,
and then rig a shoot to that.
And that worked fine.
But I had one up at site two
alongside the plunge jars.
I came in and I called drop
and usually the kicker, the load master in the back,
would call "load clear" when all of it came off the ramp.
And this time he said, "Oh, my god." (laughing)
And I kind of figured we're getting shot at.
So I cranked it around to the left real hard
and looked out at the drop zone
and two shoots were right in the middle of it.
But there was also two shoots fluttering down like a
bag of rags, and the trenches around this site
were a river of fire.
What had happened, the rings were not secured on
two of the drums, and they free fell
into the trenches
and broke, and they just started their noon cooking fires.
And the poor customer on the ground who I'd been talking
to, which was a local,
he came on there and says,
"Big Bird, Big Bird, please don't drop any more."
(laughing) And I can see his point.
I went back and we corrected that problem.
But, from then on, I started checking the rings
when we had an air drop on that stuff.
It wasn't really part of my thing,
but I kind of figured I may as well be
double sure on the thing.
The Caribou, we had one shot
down in Pakse.
Everybody died in that too.
But most of the time when we
had shoot downs, it was very few
escaped unscathed.
Porters were another airplane we had in Laos.
Great short field aircraft.
Put 10 people in that thing,
go into a 400-, 500-foot strip, make your whole day.
It was very effective.
They also had a door in the belly of that thing.
And if you took the floorboards up,
loaded bags of rice on that door,
you had a lever you could
pull like a bomb bay, and you could drop rice out of that
thing very accurately because you could slow it down to
about 40 knots.
And so it had very little forward velocity on any of it.
But one poor fellow, he was dating a
beautiful Laotian gal,
and her brother was a load master.
And they were going up country to drop rice at one of
the little sites up there,
and her brother was tired, so he
went to sleep on top of the load.
Well, the pilot caught a
break in the clouds, punched it down, dropped the rice,
and looked back and he was gone.
He went with the rice and, of course, did not survive.
Those were bad days, and they happened.
And that's kind of typical of the operation.
You had risk involved.
Now, French cross shoots
were very accurate, and that was literally,
as you see in the picture, a cross of two
panels, and it came down fairly fast.
But you could very accurate with it.
And I liked them, but some people didn't
like them because there was a lot of damage
involved in the high impact.
Our one kicker here, he will attest to that.
But helicopters, we had H-34s.
We also had H-34Ts,
which were a twin engine version of the H-34 that was used
by the Marine Corps and others.
And it was a good,
heavy lift helicopter.
We had 204Bs, which were the Huey,
the civilian version.
We had those in Vietnam.
We also had them in Laos.
They were all based on the Thai
side of the border,
and they came north to do their work in...
Laos.
The H-34T in this picture had two Garrett engines in
it, which gave it a lot more safety.
You had two engines instead of one.
You also had a lot more power.
You could lift an awful lot of stuff.
And I really enjoyed those.
The last day picture in Vietnam
was Air America.
We were the first in and last out.
And that was picking up
people off a rooftop.
That's not the embassy.
It was another building there.
The embassy had gone earlier on that thing.
But it was everywhere in the media as far as
being the iconic last day picture.
This was pictures of a
Porter in Saigon, and it's on
the ramp in Laos.
This is a picture of Lima site 20 alternate.
That was in the middle of Laos.
It was one time dubbed the
most secret place on Earth
due to our operations out of there.
It was called alternate because 20 was up above that
ridge there, and they called this 20 alternate for some
obscure reason.
I think they thought they were hiding it,
but they weren't.
Everybody knew where it was.
The media also knew where it was and tried to get in there
and get pictures, but they were thwarted at every turn.
The approach into that was down
into that runway that ended
abruptly in a karst, which is the small
mountains on the end.
You were not going to go around there.
Except in the 123, you could.
But in other aircraft,
once you started coming down the hill to the approach end
of that strip, there was no going around.
You're either going to crash it there or make a landing.
So it was kind of an iffy place.
And there was a lot of
operations in there.
Us, we were going in there,
the Laos were going in there with T-28s, Continental Air
Services was going in there.
So it was fairly high traffic.
And the control tower was a couple
Laos guys with limited English.
So you really had to kind of watch out for what
you were doing there.
You could get in a lot of trouble real quick.
It was a high
volume operation.
That is another picture of the iconic
last day at the thing.
And that is all the pictures I have.
I've got a lot of other pictures, but I've got an ex-wife
that doesn't want to release them.
So that's the problem there.
My last day, or not really last day but worst day,
was down near Pakse in a C-123.
Now, after you air drop awhile in Laos,
you find what you need to look out for.
One is what kind of cargo have you got.
If you got fuel
drums and things like that you're dropping,
you know the site is probably relatively secure, and you
can make more than one pass.
If you got artillery around,
yeah, they're booking those things out a long ways
and the bad guys are kept a long ways away.
Now, if it's hand grenades, small arms ammo,
and clay moremines, those guys are pretty close.
So you better keep it
in tight and try to make only one pass.
Some people in a
hot area would come in high and circle down.
Well, I didn't really subscribe to that theory because all
you're doing is letting them see you come overhead and come
down and give them plenty of time to get set up to try to
put a hole in you.
And that isn't really what you want to do.
In an hot area, I used to like to come in very low.
Put it down in the treetops.
Now, with a big weapon,
you can't swing that sucker fast enough to lead you to put
a hole in it.
Now, the only downside to that is small arms
might get into the back of the airplane.
But I didn't live in the back of the airplane.
All the load masters lived back there.
The kickers lived back there.
(laughing)
So that wasn't particularly my problem.
And, in the case of this one down in Pakse,
I had two sites to drop at.
It was small arms
and claymore mines.
Oh, gosh, I knew this was going to be hot.
But I went to the first one and choppers had been in
there, and I asked the guys, "You guys come out of there,
"did you pick up any rounds?
"Did you see anything?" "No, not a thing."
Okay.
I made two passes in this one site.
Put the stuff right down in their perimeter, and the next
site was only about five clicks away.
And I said,
"You know, don't close up, leave the jets
"running, and we'll go over there and we'll get the other
"half of the load out."
Well, as I overhead the strip,
the little guy on the ground calls, "Triple A,
triple A, get out of here." I believed him
and started jinking and called for 100% on
the jets and climbed out of there.
Now, I didn't see anything,
but the guys in the back said there was red balls
going by the tail.
Okay, well, red balls have got to be
some pretty big stuff.
.50 caliber, they had green tracers,
or 12.7 as they called them.
And that, of course,
couldn't bother me all that much.
23 millimeter was white hot.
And, boy, they rapid fire.
They were quad barrels.
Now, 37 millimeter and bigger looked red, and they looked
like a ball 37.
But their fire was not that fast.
Five rounds is about as much as
they had in a clip in those things.
I went back to Pakse and told the customer,
or the case officers as they called it,
why I'd come back
without dropping the load there.
And he said, "Oh, man, there's nothing there."
I said, "Well, gosh, you know, your man on the ground is
calling you a liar because he's the one that called the
triple A fire."
And he says, "Well, if it makes you feel
"better, I'll have him send out a patrol, and we'll sweep
"the area."
"Okay.
"Yeah, that sounds reasonable."
We'll go hang out at the airplane, eat the lunch we had
brought with us from the hostel, and did that.
The poor copilot, he was really rattled.
He had a PhD
in bug science, entomology.
And I tried to calm him down,
but he wouldn't calm down.
He was twitchy.
The two Thai kickers I had were okay with that.
And finally, in about two hours, a tall man,
the customer there, came out and said, "The area is clear,
you can go back."
And I said, "Well, how about I go in
"after the choppers go in and bring out the wounded?"
If they get wounded on the site, that's not a good sign.
"And how about give me some T-28s as high cover?"
Yeah, he agreed to that.
So I let the choppers get out.
They got about 20-minute head start out,
and I took off out of there.
Low cloud deck up over the plateau
and stayed on top of that.
Waited until the choppers
started calling coming out of there and asked them,
"You guys taking any fire?" "No."
"We got a lot of wounded, though."
Okay.
So I punched it down right to the top of the jungle,
and called for them to pop smoke in the
drop zone.
Just keep throwing smoke grenades out there.
I want a big bubble coming up.
And as I neared the thing,
pulled up about 400 ft, about ready to drop,
and they hit me.
I lost both ailerons and part of the
elevator and started rolling to the left into the trees.
Well, I pulled the power off the right side, idled the
right jet, and it slowly rolled back to level
and was making a little headway,
but it was shaking like hell.
And there was an old Japanese overgrown strip
not too far away that supposedly
was not friendly but not that
unfriendly either.
And I thought, well, maybe I'll try to
put it down there.
And, if not, we'll go for a walk.
And as we got close to that thing, the choppers started
going, "You're losing fluid."
And they'd holed right in the cell tank,
which is about a 730-gallon tank,
and it was streaming fuel.
And the controls were flaky,
and it was shaking like hell.
I had the load masters close
the back end up, and I told them, "Well, it looks like
we're going to bail out of this thing."
And the co-pilot was still frozen in his seat.
He hadn't done anything except hang on.
And I told him, "Okay, you go back with the
"kickers and prop open a door
"and when I turn final on this
"thing, I'll ring the bell and you guys go,
"and I'll be right behind you."
Okay, sounded like a good plan.
But as I was about to ring the bell,
he's back up in the cockpit.
He's climbed up the ladder into the cockpit.
I said, "Bill, what the hell do you want?"
He says, "I want my camera." (laughing)
Well, he'd bought about a $400 Nikon in Hong Kong,
and he wanted his damn camera.
Okay, well, I can understand that.
You know, he's not going to be able to hang onto it anyways.
When he exits the airplane, it's going to fly out
of his hand.
But I let him get that and go to the back
and turned it around again.
And it was getting pretty wobbly,
but as I came around and lined up one more time,
he's back in the cockpit.
I said, "Bill, what do you want?"
"I want the survival vest."
Well, Jesus, you know.
And that's when I hit him.
(laughing) But he went back down
the ladder with a vest, and I told the two Thai kickers in
the back, "Take it away from him.
"Throw it out the door
"because he's going to try to put it on over his parachute,
"and the parachute won't open."
You know?
I said, "Next pass,
"please get him out of here because this
"thing's in trouble."
And, as I lined up one more time
and rang the bell, one kicker jumped,
and when Bill looked
out the door, the other one shoved him out.
(laughing)
Now, the only bad part was Bill had never jumped before.
And he thought you come in, you grab the D ring,
you go like this.
No, it doesn't always happen that way because
it'll crimp in this conduit is going over your shoulder.
Grab the thing with both hands and go straight down.
You'll strip the pins out; you'll be okay.
Well, he fell for quite a ways before he got the damn thing
deployed, and of course ruined his clothing too.
(laughing)
It was too late for me to go after they'd gone through this
dance in the back.
So I turned around one more time.
The rudder let go on the damn thing,
and I killed the engine
and the jet on the right side completely and shoved
the prop control full forward so I had a lot of flat plat
drag out there so it wouldn't start rolling on me.
And you could lock the controls as long as one throttle was
all the way back.
Locked the controls, jumped down the
ladder, grabbed the static line, and ran to the back
and out the door.
And I tried to go full delta
and make some tracks towards the drop zone.
I got some speed, and when I opened it, it was a standard
wrap parachute, and when they open like that,
damn they hurt you.
It was a hell of a snap.
But I ended up in some
low trees next to a little clearing.
And stripped off the parachute harness
and took the D ring and put it in my back
pocket, which is a habit from jumping sport chutes,
and went over to this little clearing.
Well, the chopper was coming in
and I could see he's going
to try to land.
I knew it wasn't big enough.
I thought," Jesus, you fall on me and kill me, I'm going to
"really be mad."
(laughing) This is not going to make my day at all.
Well, he showered me with branches when his tail
rotor hit some trees, and dropped the sling,
and I got into the sling and rode that up to the door of
the chopper and got in the thing.
And he had wounded on board
and was in one of the canvas seats at one side of the cabin.
And poor little Laos soldier across from me had a
bloody arm and a puddle of vomit between his boots.
I kind of knew how he felt.
It was a bad day.
Well, we started shaking pretty bad because the tail rotor
was coming apart.
And we went down on this Japanese strip
and came to a stop and shut down.
And Bob Terrell,
who was a pilot on the chopper, said he'd
called for another chopper to come back for us.
I said, "Great.
"That's a good deal."
We had Uzis on board.
So everybody grabbed an Uzi,
and got out of the thing and go the wounded
out of the cabin.
And the other chopper comes in and lands about 300 meters
away from us.
You know, what the hell?
We're helping these guys over to the chopper and ask him,
"Why did you do that?"
He says, "Well, you guys are in a minefield."
(laughing) Well, obviously it wasn't very good mines.
(laughing) But he took the wounded.
Didn't have enough room for us because he was overloaded.
And we sat down in the elephant grass and waited for
another one to come back.
About 20 minutes later,
another chopper came in, and we all got on that one.
And the plain to Bolaven was a big mesa,
big, flat mesa, and it dropped off down to
the (mumbles) plain next to it.
And about time we got to the edge of that mesa,
he ran out of gas.
And we started auto-rotating down next
to a little village there.
Well, we didn't know whether it
was good guys or bad guys, but we've still got our Uzis
and probably about 200 rounds of ammo a piece.
So it was better than nothing.
So we flared out into a little paddy
next to the village, but as we're flaring out,
one of the H-34 twin packed with gun mounts on it came in
alongside of us.
And that finally ended up my last ride
into Pakse.
Still had the Uzi.
And before that,
I really think I might have done something
rash to tall man because I know he lied to me,
but I can also equate later on,
after all that'd gone on,
that he has got the responsibility for
maintaining order in his area
that he's been assigned to.
So he would want me to get the
ammo in there for his guys.
So he did have a reason for it.
I didn't like his reason, but he did have a reason.
And I walked into the operations shack there,
I had the Uzi in my hand,
and, boy, he just turned as white as that shirt there.
(laughing)
And I said, "Who's going to go get the beer?"
He said, "I'll go." (laughing)
And he smoked out of there.
And the other case officer says,
"He's not coming back."
And I said, "That's probably a good idea." (laughing)
But, like everything, your adrenaline level is so high
after things like that, I don't think you can drink enough.
It doesn't seem like it.
But I went back to Vientiane
and made out all the accident reports and the rest of that.
And the one I showed Chris here, you get to claim
everything that you had.
10 copies of this stupid form
and how you lost it.
Well, I lost it due to enemy fire.
"And witnesses?", they ask?
"Yes, enemy watched it."
(laughing)
But I also had a bad reputation for harassing new co-pilots,
and I do that for several reasons.
To find out what I had
there, and I do that by after takeoff,
"You got it, hold this heading,"
and pull out a coloring book
and crayons and start coloring.
(laughing)
And one kicker we had, very special,
Beetle Bailey, he was in on this deal.
And he'd come up, "Can I color too?"
I said, "Yeah, but only if you stay inside the lines."
(laughing) You know?
And another good one too was to start
crying as you're coming into a strip.
Have the kicker come
up and console me so I could land it.
(laughing)
But if that really bothers them that bad, they were in the
wrong place.
If you didn't expect the unusual or be able to
cope with things like that, you were going to be nothing
but trouble for somebody somewhere.
So if it scares you
and you go home, good.
I saved your life.
But that's about all I have there, other than Cambodia.
When I left Air America, I went down to Cambodia and was
the last American airplane to fly out
three days after it fell.
Nobody told me.
I was operating down the coast.
But that's all I have on the Air America thing, other than
one sad part.
We never got credit for any of the time we
spent in country.
Either military wise or civil service,
and we're still fighting that.
And we're looking for all
the support we can get to try to get something for the
widows and the children that are left of the people that
died, and those of us that are still toddling around.
It would be kind of nice to get credit for that time.
It would sure supplement my Social Security quite nicely.
(applause)