the airport.
I was right, I could see the many Navy ships in the harbor. At my very low altitude, just under a three hundred foot heavy cloud cover, I had to dodge around their masts and antennas. I could see the south end of the field- my fuel gauges said zero but with no electrical power there was no telling how many minutes I had remaining. With no radios and no lights I couldn’t call the tower and they may not have seen me. With no options I just went ahead and landed on the west taxiway and made the first turn off into the Air America ramp.
I was relieved that I had made it and understood that luck had once again played a big part in my education. I had no business not landing someplace for fuel. There were a lot of options along the way and, in that weather, to cut things so close was stupid. I never did it again. It was raining like hell and I got soaked getting out of the aircraft with my bag and into the ops office.
The station manager, a kind of harried and impatient type wanted me to load up, fuel up and fly a few late afternoon missions. I told him for the second time that there was no electrical system. Either he was a dumb as he looked or didn’t listen- he said, “so what- you can fly it anyway, you just flew in here didn’t you?” He had a point- I told him that the door wasn’t locked and he had my permission- load if up and fly it himself. He elected to remain on the ground as did I.
That day Frank took off to the North, probably right about the same time when the base manager and I were arguing. He turned a little right, climbing into the soup. Minutes latter, he disappeared from this life with all his passengers. The aircraft was found the next day where it had been flown at two hundred miles per hour straight into the rocks of Monkey Mountain. We never did learn why Frank did this- probably just some kind of vertigo or lapse in situational awareness. If he had remained VFR and stayed under the weather like the Beech that had passed in front of me he might likely have made the flight without incident.
Back in Saigon Jason and I had both moved out of the crew zoo and rented homes of our own. I was sharing my place with an old friend, Glenn Van Ingen, who, as I write, is living the life or Reilly in Hawaii. Of course Reilly is bound to come home some time and disrupt Van’s island paradise.
One day Jason came over and said that he had a “terrible problem” and would I please help him. “Sure, what’s the deal?” Well, he explained, his wife was coming to visit- I said Jason, I thought she was already here. He said, ”Rabbet, that ain’t mah wife, that’s Brenda.” I knew Brenda, I thought she was his wife. He had moved into the private house from the crew house because she had flown in to be with him. In those days, Vietnam wasn’t a hard ship post and a lot of the pilots had their families with them.
Jason’s real world wife had called and given him twenty-four hours notice that she was coming to visit. She didn’t know about Brenda but Brenda certainly knew about her. Jason asked if Brenda could stay with us and pretend she was my girl friend. This was easy, Brenda was lovely and this seemed like it might work. We all spent the rest of the day making sure that everything that Brenda owned was out of Jason’s place.
Mrs. Broussard showed up at Tan Se Nuit the next morning and Jason brought her home. The bear was there - he had forgotten to tell her about the little honey bear. That wasn’t all- Cynthia was there too. Cynthia, who’s that? Charlie, one of our stranger pilots, was Cynthia’s owner. She was a twelve foot 100 lb python who used to travel with Captain Charlie in his big flight kit between the seats in the Twin Beech. She had been with Charlie for years and was altogether a lovely snake with a gentle disposition. Charlie had a two week stint up-country and had asked Jason to take her until he got back. Cynthia was easy to keep, a rat every two weeks from the cage Charlie left and she slept under Jason’s bed or the closet floor.
Mrs. Broussard wasn’t impressed with our neighborhood. The drive to Chi Lang from the airport was pretty horrible for the uninitiated. The Mrs. had never been outside of her little state of Louisiana and the chaotic traffic, noise, filth, smells nasty little people, unbelievably crowded streets, all combined to make her regret her decision to visit her dear husband. This was before she got to the house.
Once inside, after traveling for more than thirty hours, she wanted a bath. Immediately she started bitching with considerable volume that there wasn’t a bath tub. Even if there had been there wasn’t any hot water. I had hot water, but I bought electric heater made for this and hooked it into the plumbing- Jason didn’t.
The Missus, according to Jason, came out of the cold shower and was sitting very unhappily on the bed drying her hair with the towel covering her eyes. This was the very moment the bear choose to rub up against her bare legs. The scream could be heard all over the neighborhood- louder even than poor Dan’s had been. Jason finally got her calmed down but not before he had to bring the bear over to my place too.
Later that night the end came. The Missus got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat down on the john, turned on the light, opened her eyes and saw Cynthia curled up in the shower. This time the screaming when on for thirty minutes- nothing Jason could say calmed her down in the slightest. He had to get a cab and go with her to a downtown hotel. The next morning he took her back to the airport where she caught a flight to Bangkok on the first departing aircraft out of this horrible country.
Brenda moved back in and fed the badly terrified little bear a whole jar of blueberry jelly which the little tyke adored more than anything. For weeks, smelling something only he could smell, he would hold the then long thoroughly empty jar in his little paws and rolling on his back with his long purple bear tongue, happily lick the inside of the glass jar for hours. With profuse thanks Brenda also gave Cynthia an extra fat rat for which she was also quite grateful. Sadly, one day the honey bear crawled through the porch screen, up the nearest telephone pole and began gnawing on one of the many wires. Unfortunately, the one he picked carried 250 Volts. Jason never did buy another bear.
CHAPTER 10
THEY’RE SHOOTING AT ME
“Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death”
— Major Robert S. Johnson, USAAF
I landed behind the wrecked Air America C-46. It was shot to pieces when it flew a wide square pattern into Victor 40, Tham Ke. The property just to the south of this aircraft was a free fire zone and we all knew it- This was Charlie country and the zipper heads were laying into anyone and anything that entered it.
The hapless Captain still flew way south of the airport and, when he was down to 1000’ turning final, the gooks opened up. The C-46 is indeed a big fat target but it doesn’t have many areas that are particularly sensitive to bullets. This is a good thing as there were likely a thousand holes in it when one engine finally caught fire. They landed and skidded off to the side at the North west end of the PSP runway.
Amazingly, no one was hurt. There were a bunch of Vietnamese Chief’s of Police on board who were there to attend some kind of meeting. They gave the dumb Captain a metal and he was their hero. I walked across the ramp to see the beat up aircraft. It hadn’t burned but it did have a bunch of holes. While walking out on the ramp, I heard what sounded like a bullet ricocheting off the metal runway. It was a bullet! The little bastards were shooting at me. I ran like hell and