by Robert B. Robeson

…I think I should say one word, too, a special word, about the

“Dust Offs”—the Med-Evacs. This was a great group of men.

All those who flew them, all those who did it. Courage above

and beyond the call of duty was sort of routine to them. It was

a daily thing, part of the way they lived. That’s the great part

and it meant so much to every last man who served there.

Whether he ever got hurt or not, he knew Dust Off was there.

—General Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., Army Chief of Staff

The recollection of that unbelievable medical evacuation mission on Saturday,

September 13, 1969—two days prior to my 27th birthday—flashed through my mind. I was standing bareheaded at “attention” under a scorching, early afternoon sun in Da Nang, South Vietnam in our unit area on the shore of scenic Da Nang Harbor. It was mid-March 1970. The aide for Col. D.W. Pratt (the U.S. Army 95th Evacuation Hospital commander) was reading the citation for a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), which our entire Dust Off crew had received.

The memory, alone, of the danger and drama surrounding that mission was enough to make me sweat even more than I already was. I’d been in-country barely two months, at that time, but had already seen more of war at 26 years of age than I cared to imagine.

Merely the process of getting the wounded aboard our aircraft often made Dust Off flying appear like some bizarre form of Russian roulette. Landing in a “hot” landing zone, where people you’ve never met are trying to kill you, can raise the curtain on a show every bit as intriguing and entertaining as the civil punishment of being stoned must have been in Biblical times. As John Keats so aptly stated, “Nothing ever becomes real ‘til it is experienced…”

That’s part of the reason why Chief Warrant Officer 2 (CW2) John Ball would mean so much to me. John (or “Eight-Ball,” his nickname) was one of our unit’s elder statesmen at 32 years of age. This former Marine-turned-Army-aviator had a favorite expression he used whenever things weren’t going well. “This is not good,” he’d growl. I soon discovered that this old soldier, of many military campaigns around the world, had a heart of marshmallow that he continually hid behind his tough exterior.

As operations officer and executive officer for the 236th Medical Detachment (Helicopter Ambulance) headquartered at Red Beach, I had scheduled myself to spend five days (September 10-14) as John’s copilot. He was an aircraft commander and also one of our unit’s instructor pilots. We’d be stationed at our field site aid station at Landing Zone (LZ) Baldy located 25 miles south of Da Nang along Highway 1, Vietnam’s main north-south highway. We gathered the rest of our crew—a medic and crew chief—and flew out to cover action that would keep us in the air over 31 hours, which included 12½ night hours, evacuating dead and wounded.

On September 11th, our supported infantry units were hit hard by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and we were in the air 11 hours that day and 10 hours on the 12th. We would slide out of the sky on mission after mission, picking up torn and broken bodies. They would often literally be thrown or dumped—in the heat of battle—twisted and bleeding into the cargo compartment of our UH-1H (Huey) helicopter. Here they remained for 15-30 minutes while our medic worked feverishly to keep them alive until the doctors and medical personnel at LZ Baldy could take over.

We had already flown over three hours before the sun came up on the 13th and had finally shut down hoping to snatch a few “Zs.” About mid-morning, another mission was called in. After only a momentary rest, we quickly scrambled and were in the air. Returning from that mission with a load of patients, a second urgent request was broadcast over our FM radio. It was another “hot,” insecure lz reportedly under heavy enemy fire. While I called for UH-1C helicopter gunship support from the “Firebirds,” who also flew out of Baldy, John landed and unloaded the patients. Then he lifted off again in the direction of four Americans who had been seriously wounded by small arms fire.

Between air-to-air and air-to-ground communications, I said my usual silent prayer for our safety and the safety of our patients. As this was going on, an eerie sensation crept over me. For some unexplainable reason, I intuitively sensed that I was about to be tested like I’d never been tested before.

As we approached the area of contact a few “klicks” (kilometers) southwest of LZ Center—a towering artillery base jutting nearly straight up hundreds of feet above the surrounding terrain—concentrated artillery fire could be seen bracketing a heavily wooded area. This was soon cut off so our two gunships could make gun runs on enemy positions before we went in. After their second pass, I called for smoke to mark where the ground troops wanted us to land.

Then John bottomed the collective control—which governs the pitch of the blades—with his left hand and we transitioned into a smooth, 4,000-foot-per-minute descent. As we fell out of the sky, John reminded me to stay close to my controls, something he’d never mentioned before.

John always flew with the force trim on. There was an on/off switch located between us, at the top of the pedestal beneath the instrument panel. With that switch on there was an artificial feel or force applied to the cyclic which held the cyclic stick in one position. You could move the cyclic against this force but, if you released pressure, the cyclic would return to its last trimmed position.

There was an intermittent force trim release button on the cyclic stick grip that if depressed and held, released the force trim. John trimmed the aircraft—through the use of the button on the cyclic stick—so that there was aft pressure on the cyclic at all times. This ensured that the nose of our bird would automatically rise should he be wounded or his hand come off the cyclic stick. When we were barreling along at nearly 140 miles per hour, a few feet above the ground, with people shooting at us, that extra split second of time was important. It could mean the difference between survival or becoming a messy Huey sandwich in a sewage-filled rice paddy or some hover-hole in the jungle.

Personally, I never flew with the force trim on because it caused me to lose my “touch” on the cyclic necessary to make many precise tactical maneuvers. But because John chose to do so, we’d all soon benefit from a special message that would manifest itself directly to my heart.

As we continued our rapid descent and began a straight-in, short final approach from the west for the lz, “Willie-Peter”—white phosphorous rockets—fired ahead of us by our gunships suddenly obscured the red smoke from the grenade the infantry troops had thrown out.

“You got the lz?” John asked over the intercom.

“Lost it,” I replied.

“Me, too.”

John grabbed a bunch of pitch with the collective in his left hand and began a tight, 360-degree cyclic climb to his left. With the bad guys reported to be so close to the wounded, making the ultimate misjudgment of landing to the wrong area could have been disastrous.

“Tango 2-4, this is Dusty,” I broadcast over our FM radio. “We lost your smoke because of the Willie Pete. If you could pop one more, we’ll attempt another approach. Over.”

“Negative on the smoke, Dusty. We’re all out down here.”

“This is not good,” John muttered over the intercom. After a moment of silence, he said, “Okay, we’ll drop our own smoke.”

Under heavy enemy fire, with Tango 2-4 guiding us visually, we tore across the landscape on two runs—50 feet above the lz tree line—as our crew chief dropped our own smoke grenades. On the second run, we finally hit our target. Then we circled back to land, this time dropping out of the sky like a bag of dirty clothes down a laundry chute.

There were tall trees along the edge of the lz, where our patients were located, that formed an inverted V. To get close to them in the least amount of time, John had to make an approach and position the nose of our aircraft in the tightest part of this V.

It was because the lz was so tight—we couldn’t turn around to go out the way we’d come in for fear of hitting someone or something with our tail rotor—that John made the decision he did. He decided to do a maximum performance takeoff up and over the tree line that was hiding the enemy force.

“I’m going up and over to get out of here, Bob,” John said over the intercom, above the intense ground battle being waged outside our Plexiglass windows.

As we topped the trees, at about 75 feet, AK-47s—Soviet assault rifles used by the NVA—and other automatic weapons hosed-us-down from just beneath and to both sides of the aircraft.

From that split second of time, for the next minute or so, everything seemed to occur in super slow motion.

“My God, we’re going to crash!” John suddenly yelled into his mike. “My cyclic’s been shot away!”

I immediately glanced over to see him sweeping his cyclic stick in wide circles around the cockpit…movements that should have made the aircraft spin in circles. But our bird was unaffected. As the Huey’s nose began a dive toward the trees, I instinctively grabbed my set of controls.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

This is it, I distinctly remember thinking, as enemy rounds continued tearing into the tender underbelly of our bird and just behind our heads. Today is the day I’m going to die. Then I couldn’t hear the automatic weapons anymore. We’d finally flown out of the enemy’s field of fire.

As soon as I grasped my cyclic, it was immediately evident that the force trim pressure no longer existed. I saw that the switch was on, but it had zero affect. A sixth sense, an inner whisper that I believe came from God, impressed me to be extremely careful and not move my cyclic more than necessary to stay out of the tops of the trees, which our skids were now brushing. I gently eased the cyclic toward me and we began a shallow ascent.

At that moment, the red rpm warning light on the instrument panel illuminated, accompanied by gut-wrenching shrieks in our flight helmets from the low-rpm audio warning. In rapid succession, the yellow master caution light at the top of the instrument panel was next to make an appearance. Glancing down at the emergency panel on the pedestal between us, I saw that the “Engine Oil” light was illuminated.

Dust Off pilots set normal engine rpm for our operations between 6,400-6,600 rpm. John and I always flew at 6,400 because it gave us 200 rpm to play with on hot descents, where it could quickly build and possibly over-speed the engine if we weren’t careful. Ours had bled off to nearly 5,800 rpm in seconds. I knew that if something didn’t happen in a hurry, our bird would soon have more characteristics of a crowbar than a crow.

We’d obviously been hit in the engine and oil lines, among other places. Although John had been grazed in his left leg by a round, he immediately reached over to the pedestal and placed the governor switch into the emergency position. This provided enough extra engine power to momentarily remain airborne while we assessed the damage and discussed our limited options.

We both realized that our engine was losing a lot of oil and could instantaneously seize. If it did, I’d have to autorotate, which meant descending on the energy in the blades alone, rather than the jet engine, to make a forced landing. This would mean I’d also have to make a dramatic movement with my cyclic stick at the bottom to flare and dissipate airspeed before touchdown, even if I found an open area. Otherwise, I’d have to make a tree landing. Cockpit complications were beginning to pile up like autumn leaves in a windstorm.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked John, as I slowly eased in pitch with my left hand, inched up to 500 feet AGL (above ground level), and attained a comfortable 80 knots of indicated airspeed.

“Just keep us in the air,” he answered quietly. “Just fly. Maybe we can find a place to put it down where we won’t hurt ourselves.”

If our engine failed, I wanted to make a running landing. LZ Ross lay straight ahead, six miles northwest of LZ Center and eleven miles southwest of LZ Baldy. Ross was located in relatively flat terrain and had a large open area where we often picked up patients. But this was nearly four to five minutes away.

“I’m gonna shoot for Ross.”

“Okay,” John said, “I’ll call Da Nang and have them get another bird out there to pick us up.”

“Sir,” Specialist Five Bill Bergman—our crew chief—broke in on the intercom, “we got our guns at four o’clock high. Looks like they’re following us in.”

John alerted the Firebirds to our dilemma and one of them edged close enough under our blades to confirm that we were leaking oil all over the sky. I did some silent praying en route, too. It was a brief mental quietude in the midst of chaos. Having been raised as a preacher’s kid gave me a wealth of insight and appreciation for this spiritual involvement. I thanked God for allowing us to reach our four patients and for getting us out of that miserable lz in one piece. Then I asked Him, if it was His will, to help me keep the rest of the pieces intact until we reached LZ Ross.

It was shortly after this prayer that I felt a wonderful, soothing sensation oozing throughout my body. I’d been sweating like a marathoner in the heat and stress of this life-and-death emergency. But at that precise moment, a cooling sense of well-being swept over me. I accepted it as a confirming sign from God that we were going to make it…hopefully, without hurting ourselves.

Heading into a slow, shallow, and straight-in, long final approach for the large open field at Ross, I could see our American flag on a tall flagpole to the north, atop a small ridge. It was gently fluttering in the light breeze. Old Glory had never looked so good to me as it did at that moment. I bounced our skids a couple of times on the uneven ground in a short running landing, but I didn’t hear anyone count or complain. When the ground run stopped…so did our Lycoming jet engine. All 1,100 horses expired at once. Simultaneously, John and I turned to look at each other. Neither of us said a word. We both realized what had just happened.

While John got out to evaluate the battle damage, I climbed down and stepped around to the open cargo door on my side of the aircraft where our patients were lying, to see how they were doing. Most of the cargo door windows had been shot up but, because Specialist Four Tom Franks—our medic—had kept everyone lying on the deck, none had been wounded again.

“Are you okay?” I asked, putting my hand on the shoulder of a black non-commissioned officer (NCO) who was struggling to sit up.

He reached up, took my hand between both of his, and squeezed hard. “You guys are somethin’ else,” he said, in a Southern accent. “Thanks, sir, for gettin’ us out.”

We transferred our patients and medic to one of the Firebird gunships and they lifted off for the aid station at Baldy.

Then John and I did a postflight inspection. We confirmed that all of the engine oil was gone. The last of it formed two small pools in the red clay beneath our aircraft. As we stood next to the tailboom, in the shadow of our downed bird, there was a long moment of silence. John looked over at me, gave a weak smile, cleared his throat, then stared into the distance.

“Somebody else was flying with us today,” he said quietly.

I just nodded my head. There could never be any doubt about that in my mind.

It was hours later before we knew “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would say. After our maintenance crew arrived and sling-loaded the bird back to Red Beach in Da Nang—hoisting it out beneath a large Chinook helicopter—one of them took me aside. He told me he’d reached up and merely touched my cyclic stick. It had broken off in his hand.

After removing the metal floor paneling and taking apart the control, he’d discovered that only a sliver of metal had been holding my cyclic in place. That’s why I couldn’t feel any force trim pressure against my hand. One of the bursts of automatic weapons fire from John’s side of the aircraft had completely severed his cyclic stick and had continued its flight beneath the floor panels to nearly take mine with it. If that piece of metal had not held until we reached LZ Ross, it’s likely that eight additional names would have joined the 58,000+ on our Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

That soft, inner voice had been right on target. To this day, I firmly believe God, or one of His guardian angels, warned me not to move my cyclic anymore than necessary and kept our wounded bird flying for over five minutes with little or no oil in the engine. If you believe in miracles, then you know this one was extraordinary. If you don’t believe such things occur…it doesn’t matter. You weren’t there and I was. It was a miracle. No other explanation suffices.

Postscript

I flew with John Ball for three more years at the 63rd Medical Detachment (Helicopter Ambulance) in Landstuhl, West Germany. He retired from the military after 20 years of service in 1974 and continued his aviation career in civilian life.

While logging with a helicopter in the Bitterroot National Forest near Medicine Hot Springs in Montana on April 19, 1979, a mechanical malfunction occurred that caused his aircraft to invert and crash. He died that day, at age 42, along with Thomas Hewitt, his 32-year-old copilot. Ironically, Hewitt was from La Grande, Oregon, the town where I’d graduated from high school.

I flew from Lincoln, Nebraska to his home in Portland, Oregon for the funeral on April 25, 1979. After all the times he had “carried” me in combat and in Europe, I was honored to be asked to help carry him to his final resting place on a magnificent mountainside in a picturesque area of Portland he loved.

Sometimes people come into our lives who leave giant footprints on our hearts and souls. That’s what John did with me. I will never forget him or our special friendship—both in and out of the cockpit—on three continents.

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Robert B. Robeson flew 987 medical evacuation missions in South Vietnam (1969-1970), evacuating 2,533 patients from both sides of the action. He had seven helicopters shot up by enemy fire and was twice shot down in one year.

His articles and short stories have been published more than 700 times in 250 newspapers and magazines in 130 countries. This includes the Reader’s Digest, Positive Living, Soldier of Fortune, Vietnam Combat, Official Karate, Frontier Airline Magazine, and Newsday, among others. He’s also a professional (life) member of the National Writers Association and the Military Writers Society of America.

Robeson retired from the U. S. Army as a lieutenant colonel, after 27½ years of military service on three continents. He still has it “in” for those people who shot at them that day.

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