Stuntman! by Hal Needham

Author:Hal Needham [Needham, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316122856
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

The Vietnam War was in full swing, and Uncle Sam needed me again—this time for my stuntman skills. The air force was looking for someone to make an escape and evasion film, which would show pilots what to do in the event they were shot down. I thought I’d be a good candidate and went to the USAF office in a building on Lookout Mountain, near Universal. I was hired on the spot, partly because it was a very physical job, and also because the director thought I looked like a colonel.

I was flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. In the film I would play a colonel who was shot down, captured, and interrogated. While being transferred by the enemy guards to a POW compound, the guards and I would come under attack by U.S. fighter planes, which gave me a chance to escape and be rescued. Colonel Sloan, the officer in charge of the shoot, drove me to and from the location every day in a military jeep. I sat in the back, Sloan drove, and the director rode shotgun.

On location I met a tribe of Negritos. There are hundreds of stories of how they harassed the Japanese during World War II. One legend claimed they could sneak up on a Japanese soldier on guard duty and mark the heel of his boot without the guard knowing anyone was nearby. Another said they could slip into Japanese barracks and slit the throat of every other man as they slept without being caught. I guess you could say they were pretty stealthy.

The air force hired the Negritos to train the U.S. pilots how to avoid being captured. Here’s how it worked. The air force would gather all the Negrito men in the village so they couldn’t see where in the jungle the pilots were being dropped off. They had to evade capture by the Negritos all night and radio to a pick-up chopper the next morning to complete their training. The air force believed that if the pilots could evade the Negritos, they could evade anyone, as 70 percent of the pilots were caught, sometimes more than once. The pilots claimed they would be camouflaged, sitting by a tree, when a hand tapped them on the shoulder and a voice would say “Chit.” A chit was a token issued to pilots, who in turn gave them to the Negrito that found them in the jungle. It was their pay, redeemable at the base PX.

Being a country boy, I had my doubts that these superstealthy people could catch me. I told the sergeant in charge my thinking, and he said try it, you’ll see. I told Colonel Sloan I wanted one night to join the pilots evading the Negritos. I was wearing a flight suit and carrying the radio I used in the movie, and I knew the call sign for the choppers, so why not? He told me to forget it. So I did—but only until the next night the pilots were scheduled to evade.

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