Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Chicks like Hueys

Huey's, the ultimate war machine. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'.

Thanks from an old 67November....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRd-yMT_5NE&feature=related

We neber took that long to get off the ground though.

The UH-1 served it's time and purpose, and served well, I will agree. But that time and purpose has came and gone.

The USN & USMC has improved & modernized both the UH-1 & AH-1 to a better transport & weapon system. The USN utilizes UH-60's in a ASW mode and other missions.

There's combat missions in the current world that a B,C,D,H, model UH-1 couldn't perform, such as the high altitude missions of Afghanistan. The same with the SAR missions of the USCG. In the Army, manytimes a UH-60 isn't even the choice. That with the CH-47 being the chosen aircraft.

Huey pilots had enough sense to have the USAF lower terrain elevations when required. The B-52 was built for that purpose. F-4s and A-6s did trim after the fact.

I'm talking about troop transport, the missions in Afghan. are flown in a country with a higher ASL then that of Vietnam.

In the early days of Afghan. SF units that were being supported by 160 SOAR from one of the neighboring 'Stans' had to fly well over 10,000 ft. over the Mtns. to support the missions.

FWIW the vast majority of CW3's & CW4's who transitioned into UH-60's in the late 70's were all Vietnam Huey Pilots with many hours of combat time. I never heard one of them say, that they'd rather be flying the Huey instead of the Blackhawk. I've never seen one of them attempt to get reassigned to a UH-1 unit, that were still in existence at that time.

Or door gunners!

We never had an ASL but our AAD was always open for interpretation by our crew and the mission....

Our pilot pulled up when the leaves started coming in the doors and were leaving green streaks in the windscreen, most of the time!

Looks like a lot of us were 67N.

here you go T

B 229th AHB Bein Hoa '65-'66 door gunner Par' Excelon! In support of LZ X-Ray for one thing.

That is how I rolled, free 60 on a bungee, only in a slick. The Crew Chief and I were the only armament!

That's a fact Jack!

Short story:

Whilst assigned to B/229th at Bien Hoa I spent a fair bit of time flying Nighthawk. Curious mission to be sure and we had a bird equipped for just that mission and no other. It had a xenon searchlight on the left side with a minigun. It was manned by the same fella all the time and he was pretty much a poster child for what the army wanted of it's troops.

On the other side there was this crew chief fella that had been there for about 4 years, had a Vietnamese wife and wore his father in law's ashes in a little gold pagoda hanging on a chain around his neck. He was about 6'4" and skinny as a rail, pale as a sheet and was more or less an "Oddball" character like in "Kelley's Heroes."

He took a bunch of Huey landing lights (5)and put them together in an articulating frame so he could focus them or if need be use diffuse lighting for a panoramic view. All that was mounted atop a quad M-60 that he also put together on a custom modified pintle mount. He did the thing with the lights so he could see too, and they told him the electric bus wouldn't support two xenon lights. I guess he did the quad 60 just because. He had more kills than the guy with the mini, despite the peace sign patch on his Nomex.

When the unit went home in '72 he went over the hill (elevation slightly above sea level) and was never seen or heard from again so far as I know. Can't recall his name.

Before the unit left we spent a couple of months up in MR-I working around what was left of Quang Tri and the foothills leading into the A Shau and Khe Sahn area, all of which was my old AO. He told me right after we got there that he didn't like flying in the mountains. I was surprised and asked him why. "Don't worry about it," I said, "it's only some SA-7s and 23mm and 37mm AA. You want to live forever?" He says to me, "Well, down south we always flew at night and there weren't any mountains and I couldn't really see all that other stuff. Here we're flying during the day and we're doing really crazy chitt! We're landing on the sides of mountains! Really, really big fuggin' mountains!" So I says to him, "There's not a one of them over 7,000' tall and if they were bigger the Army would put two engines in your bird." "Well why don't they use Chinooks,they got two engines." So I says to this maniac, "Cause they are really big targets and they leak hydraulic fluid all the time and they're really easy to hit with RPGs and they make these really big fires when that happens." He didn't seem too happy with that answer and mumbled something about "fuggin' mountains" when he walked off.

God is my witness, most of that is true. I may have mangled the content of the discussion slightly.

I believe, I met my share of eccentric souls whilst in country as well.

We tried a Ma Deuce in one door but the pilot really did not like it! Said the vibration was [bleep] up his instruments and feel for the stick!

Mr. LEE,
I've dealt with door gunners as a UH-60 Plt Sgt. I wish they hadn't been assigned to the unit during DS, but accepted them. I'd rather of had two school trained UH-60 folks, a Flight Engineer & a Crew Chief as 160 SOAR does. This versus an Infantryman & a Crew Chief. The Army couldn't produce enough additional UH-1/UH-60 personnel for DS, to be used in UH-1/UH-60 units as D/gunners.

For me as a Plt. Sgt. of a UH-60 Plt. these guys didn't bring much to the table, after DS was over. They were still assigned to us up until late 92, early 93. You couldn't use them for aviation maint. since they didn't have the training & experience.

They made good gofers, they could do operator level maint. in the motorpool on trucks, grass cutters, tent/camo. folders, clean up folks.

They were good soldiers and would do what they were asked. I was glad to see them go back to their Infantry units and do what they were schooled & trained for.

Last unit I served with was the residue of 7/17th Cav, B troop up at Camp Holloway during the late summer and fall of '72. All the slicks had M2s on both sides. We weren't doing much in the way of CA's but we did take a lot of heavy fire at altitude. Fella can do some serious plinking with those beasties when shooting downhill. They worked fairly well in hot LZ's but you couldn't hang a lot of ammo on them because we didn't have feed chutes. 100 round cans, one at a time. Yeah, they shook the crap out of the airframe.
___________

I am perplexed that there seems to have been a change in subsequent generations of CE and gunners,and line Sargents in the VOLAR Army.

We, that meaning the composite generations that went thru the Vietnam war and invented airmobile operations, reinvented the US Cavalry, all the while stringing strokes of genius together with tape and baling wire, and all the while flying birds that were perpetually under armed, over weight and under armored, crewed by kids and gunners not trained for the job, somehow managed to mostly survive and keep our sense of humor, albeit somewhat twisted and assuredly not politically correct. Shockingly enough, we even managed to survive routinely intense anti-aircraft fire ranging from small arms to triple A and even heat seeking missiles. We also learned how to craft run-on sentences.

We have been apparently replaced by some that have no sense of history, respect for the sacrifices made, nor the absurd conditions and hazards that led to the planning for improved organizational structure, enhanced TO&E, and the second generation of troop transports and attack choppers which are in service today and which provide the newest generation of warriors greater capabilities and more safety than we ever imagined possible. Gosh, I'm really on a roll with this run-on chitt, hey?

All in all it's sad commentary on the state of affairs when someone can't recognize that a thread was started purely for a laugh, and feels compelled to pee down a fellow warrior's leg and pretend it's rain.

Well I missed that part, musta been that TN meter maid, I don't read his stuff.

As to RSVN and those of us that were there. We did what we had to, with what we had, and got the damn job done. We did not lose the war, Washington DC did.

The Seabee's did a bunch of stuff for us in the way of mods to fire power, it was one of them that came up with the idea of the "soup can" on the side of the receiver to keep the belt from binding. A little Scotch went a long ways in getting "engineering" help.