Without Warning by Jed Hart

Author:Jed Hart [Hart, Jed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feather Knight Books
Published: 2020-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

I thought about where to start. I had spent 1969 flying Hueys with the 135th Assault Helicopter Company of the US Army to which the Australian Navy supplied half the men. Our Commanding Officer was US Army, and the 2IC was Australian. There were Aussie pilots, maintenance engineers and admin staff throughout the company, about fifty all told.

You might have thought there would be a clash of cultures, but that didn't happen. No one cared where we came from.

We had all arrived at a strange new world called “The war in Vietnam” with its own laws and customs. We were targets. Like rabbits in a spotlight, mosquitos circling a bug zapper, lambs to the slaughter. It became our business to help each other out; no telling when you'd be the one shot down, relying on the trail aircraft to follow you to the ground and save your arse from being shot full of holes.

The US Army needed helicopter pilots. Some of them would be career officers, but the majority would be short-term recruits, feeding a voracious war machine. That machine's appetite would wane someday and throw all the short termers onto the civilian market.

The GI Bill was there for retraining, or they would chase low paid flying jobs in the Gulf of Mexico. Some guys never left Asia and went on to fly heli-rig aircraft in the emerging oil boom. Those that saved money and went home did okay with this strategy, but the high rollers developed bad habits, and some never went back.

There was no percentage in the US Army providing the short-term pilots with a single flying lesson more than they absolutely needed. The Army instructors drummed in the basics of starting up, shutting down and flying formation. That worked, and the finer points could be learned on the job. No need for instrument ratings, low level navigation skills, drilling in emergency procedures and the like. All of that would happen in-country, and the emergencies would be real. That was the best incentive to pay attention and learn fast.

These FNG's came to us all rosy-cheeked and scared, and we put them in the right-hand seat and called them Peter Pilots. The old hands took bets on how long it would take guys to be shot up the first time, “losing their cherry” we said. Everything was a joke, even the killing was the subject of black humour because if you took everything seriously and really thought about what you did each day, the load would be too heavy. Peter Pilots were FNG's—Fucking New Guys—as in “Goddamn it, I'm flying with an FNG again.”

But the system coped with guys like that. There was a place in the flight for followers as well as leaders. Every FNG built up his hours as a Peter Pilot alongside an experienced aircraft commander. For the first three months in-country, FNGs were told what to do.

Once the new pilots were ready, they got command of their own helicopters. The sharpest of them, we trained to lead the flight.

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