William H. Rees
Era: Vietnam
Military Branch: Air Force
This story was written by Lt. Col. Rees (Ret.)
“I was first an OV-10 pilot and assigned to the 20th TASS. It had three main operations, one in country (within SVN) and two out country (Southern Laos). The in-country operation supported U.S. Army combat units in the 1st (I) Corps (Eye Corps in our parlance, for the roman numeral 1), by maintaining small Forward Operating Locations (FOLs) with Army Divisions and maybe Brigades. The FOLs had Tactical Air Control Parties (TACPs) with radio-packed jeeps that would work with Battalions and Companies on the ground. The FOLs had varying numbers of O-2 FAC aircraft and FAC pilots that went where needed. I have forgotten their call sign and knew very few of their people even by sight. Their jobs had no overlap with mine. Out-country operations were based at Danang and an FOL at Pleiku, flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Southern Laos, and used the radio call sign “Covey.” The Danang guys used 300-series Covey numbers and we at Pleiku used 500-series numbers. My call sign was Covey 560. We covered the southernmost area in Laos, called VR (for Visual Reconnaissance) 7. Danang Coveys had VR6 to our North, and “Nail” FACs out of Nakon Phanom Air Base, Thailand had the Ho Chi Minh Trail areas North of that. The war areas of Laos West and North of the “Trail” region were “Raven” FAC country. FACs ran the air war in both SVN and Laos.
The bosses at 20th TASS Hq. wanted me to take over the Operations Officer (Ops Officer) job at the FOL at Pleiku. The Ops Officer manages and supervises all the aircrew and all flight and mission operations in a flying unit. On the plus side this seemed an honor and a career plum, for the FOL had 14 O-2s, 7 OV-10s, about 30 pilots and about 7 navigators, which made it a squadron-size operation, which would usually be run by a Major a couple of years senior to me. Having a squadron Ops Officer job on my record would likely help me get promoted. On the down side, the FOL was not officially a squadron, so I might not get official credit for the job (I didn’t). There was much worse, and the Hq. guys were seemingly frank about it. The job was vacant because the previous Ops Officer at Pleiku had requested transfer after only 3 weeks on the job and was now a straphanger back at Danang! The reason was given as a personality conflict with the FOL commander at Pleiku, who was said to be a bit difficult to get along with. Bad News! Hoooo Boyyy! Oh well, I thought myself something of a diplomat, and I thought, “No Guts, No Glory,” and an important job obviously needed to be done. I asked the staff, “OK, suppose I go up there and do my best and still get in trouble, will you guys promise to support me and back me up, all the way (meaning, not allow my career to be damaged because of accepting an impossible job.)? Answer - “Oh absolutely! Sure we will! You Bet! You can bet your life on it!” (I might have to.) I took the job, thinking, “Sure buddy, sure.”
That very night, after dinner, I began to understand what I had just done. We transients of the 20th TASS lived in tents on the squadron grounds, and there I encountered a Major, a navigator in flight suit, stone drunk and unable to get to his tent under his own power. I had to get a couple of 20th TASS enlisted guys (a serious embarrassment) to help me get him home. He could still talk. Turned out, he was a 20th TASS guy just down from Pleiku (supposedly at his own request), and on his way to a unit at Bien Hoa that did nothing but fly around Bien Hoa and Saigon at night watching for rocket launches and the muzzle flashes of mortars. He had a very sad story. The Covey aircrew at Pleiku who flew O-2s were in a state of near-rebellion, pilots and navigators. The commander (Lt. Col. Xxx) was ordering them to do the near impossible and insulting them when they seemed reluctant. The navigator had taken to strong drink and wanted out before they killed him.
The problem was partly a technical accident. OV-10 pilots were mostly experienced Captains and Majors but the OV-10 could not fly night missions because of its canopy, it caused reflections in the starlight scope used to see the ground at night and could not be opened in flight. The O-2s had to fly the night mission because the right window could be opened in flight and a right-seater could thus use the starlight scope. O-2 pilots were relatively inexperienced, mostly former co-pilots on transports or tankers, and mostly Lieutenants. Navigators rode the right seat and worked the starlight scope. They were senior Captains and Majors, mostly experienced on peaceful transport planes, who mostly had spent the past four to eight years in comfortable offices never dreaming for a moment that they might ever find themselves at night in mortal combat at low altitude over the AA guns along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a flimsy light-plane flown by a young pilot. All this contributed to the problem but was not the trigger.
The trigger was the combination of the monsoon (the rainy season), Col. Xxx’s attitude toward it and his young O-2 pilots, and the O-2 aircraft. There were huge thunderstorms day and night, especially along the crest of the mountains between SVN and Laos. The O-2 had an engine in front and another in the rear and needed both of them. Once an O-2 was over Laos, an engine failure would prevent it from crossing the mountains back to SVN. It might make it to Thailand under ideal conditions. Worse, the electrical system’s inverter (converted DC power to AC for the flight instruments) was under a removable panel in front of the windshield, and heavy rain could seep in and it short out, leaving the pilot with none of his electrical flight instruments and trying to get home through thunderstorms with a flashlight in his mouth and only the most basic flight instruments. Despite these difficulties, we were tasked to keep a plane over the Trail 24 hours a day at a time when the NVA were not moving. The rains had washed out their bridges and fords and the Trail was utterly impassable. So there was the question, “Why risk lives to prevent what the weather is already preventing.” So O-2 pilots started aborting night missions based only on forecasts of bad weather, and tottled off to quarters to enjoy a few cold beers, and this enraged Col. Xxx. (His rages came quick and were often near violent. The enlisted guys in the Ops office kept a little warning flag on the wall and changed its position up or down according to the Colonel’s mood of the day).
Col. Xxx, acting as his own Ops Officer after my predecessor bugged out, posted a regulation to the effect that no mission would be aborted because of a weather forecast, and missions would be flown if takeoff and landing minimums existed, and that any pilots who felt themselves unqualified to fly in such weather conditions should report themselves for further training (thus admitting incompetence). One of the most popular and competent O-2 pilots had recently lost an inverter and barely made it home after very harrowing difficulties. It was obvious to all that worse could easily happen to any of them, and this insulting regulation really, really ripped it! This all happened just a few days before I innocently agreed to take the job.
I hitched a ride to Pleiku in a O-2 and we flew through rain on the way. I noticed that in light rain only isolated droplets ran around the base of the windshield, but with a little more rain this became a continuous rivulet of water. This phenomena suggested a solution.
I met most of the aircrews that evening. The next day, I took briefings from my staff and made assignments. I organized ops into four flights, one for OV-10s, three for O-2s with a well-liked and competent Assistant Ops Officer (a Captain) over them. Two of the O-2 Flights were for VR (one for pilots and one for navigators) and one was for Prairie Fire (it supported Special Forces ground teams in Laos). The OV-10 Flight Commander was a Major a little junior to me so I made him also my direct assistant as Deputy Ops Officer. I then sat down with my Asst. Ops Officer for O-2s and got a thorough briefing on the morale and technical problems. By the next day, I had written a new regulation and got Col. Xxx to approve it, and posted it. It basically said that in view of the O-2 inverter vulnerability to water that flight in “heavy” rain was prohibited, and defined “heavy” rain as when a continuous rivulet of water ran around the base of the windshield. Thus, pilots couldn't abort before takeoff time based on weather forecasts, but had to abort if they couldn't avoid heavy rain at takeoff time or while airborne. That fixed the O-2 morale problem and fizzled the potential rebellion, immediately! It didn’t attack or change anything Col. Xxx had said in his regulation, and thus he could agree to it without losing face, but it gave the aircrews a clear way to do their job without unreasonable risk and showed them that I could handle the Col. Xxx problem for them. There were thereafter no significant morale problems with the aircrews.
I flew my first four combat flights from Pleiku in the right seat of an O-2, as a “tactical checkout” with an experienced pilot. These were area orientations and live air strike practice. My first air strike was with Navy A-7s and I noticed that they seemed to pull out pretty close to the ground. It turned out that the map I was using depicted terrain elevations in meters rather than in feet. All the maps I had previously used depicted elevations in feet and nobody told me these were different and it didn’t occur to me to check. Thus, I had told the A-7 pilots that the terrain was several hundred feet lower than it really was and could easily have killed one of them. Lesson - Trust nothing without confirming it!
My fifth flight was my first solo combat flight, and suddenly and totally unexpectedly I found myself the only person in the whole world who could help a team of men in trouble on the ground. I was on my way home, already well back into Vietnam, when I heard on the FM (an Army type radio we kept tuned to the channel for the Special Forces teams on the ground in Laos) a tense whisper, “Covey, this is Long Stride. Covey, come in.” We were briefed on the general location of the teams on the ground and I knew this one was in the tip of Cambodia a bit south of where Vietnam and Laos come together, which was farther south than they usually operated. The team leader was unable to contact the radio relay site the Army maintained in Southern Laos and was trying to make contact the only other way possible, through the Covey FAC that was nearly always flying somewhere within radio range, and I was him. The Long Stride team had only eight or ten men and was under attack deep in the heart of enemy territory and needed help fast.
I called his command post in Kontum and found that the Covey that normally supported Prairie Fire ops was on the ground; it would take a half hour or more for him to get to the scene. I could not legally control air strikes to help the team myself because I was not certified to work troops in contact. Then the solution to the problem presented itself; I spotted a pair of A-1 fighter-bombers a couple of miles to my west flying northbound. A-1 pilots at Pleiku (call sign Spad) could support troops in contact without a FAC and these two A-1s were fully armed and as yet probably had no specific target. I came up on Guard channel and called, “Spads west of Kontum headed northbound, come up channel 3xx.x.” They did. I told them what the problem was and asked if they’d like to fix it. They most certainly would! They fell in behind me and I homed on Long Stride’s radio and led them right to the spot. The Spads were talking to Long Stride and he popped yellow smoke and Spad lead called it and I said “Have at it guys, I’m going home.”
For me, for my first mission on my own, this was quite a deal. I logged almost six hours (it was the longest OV-10 mission I ever flew). I think everybody enters combat wondering if he will be equal to the challenges when they come. Now, after one mission, I already knew some of the answer. Responsibility for the lives of real people had been suddenly thrust upon me, and I had accepted it and used my head and made good decisions and things worked out well. I had been in little danger and done nothing heroic but had maybe saved the lives of some very good men. It was both a good feeling and a sobering experience.
Long Stride called again for help the very next day, and again only I could hear him. He was under attack again and this time he had wounded men. This time I would face danger, for there were low clouds and I would have to fly low up a narrow valley to get to the team. This was an area that had been packed with antiaircraft guns just a week or two before during a major battle. I had no idea what AA defences might still be in the valley, but I was badly needed and thus had no choice but to accept the risk and trust to God. The AA guns were gone, or at least I didn’t see anybody shoot at me. I found the team and flew around acting menacing till the A-1s arrived, then talked them down through a hole in the clouds, and as soon as they saw the team I bugged out. On the way home, I thought about my first week in combat and my first two missions and said to myself (I vividly remember my feelings and words), “Sure looks like this is going to be a long war.”
