Chapter 29

In reading the last chapter over I think I’ve left the impression that things were pretty safe for us donut dollies. Yes, it was hot, uncomfortable and primitive, not to mention dirty. Dust would get kicked up off of the bare ground in any kind of breeze at all, and with helicopters flying off the pad a short distance away there was often a swirling wind blowing even if everything else was calm.

Most of the time it was reasonably safe. But there really was a war on outside the front door of the canteen, and there was no denying it. Artillery could go off at any hour, day or night; sometimes it was heavy. Occasionally there was incoming mortar fire, and that would send us to a bunker out behind the hooch, and the sandbagged walls of the building were there for a purpose that we could never forget. Helicopter traffic was frequent as close to the pad as we were, and it was not uncommon to see an ambulance helicopter, universally called a “dustoff,” heading into the smaller pad of the aid station. After dark, a plane usually circled overhead dropping parachute flares so the perimeter guards could see if someone was trying to sneak past the barbed-wire fence of the place. Those were all ugly realities and our job was to help our guys to forget about them for a while, or at least get them out of the fronts of their minds.

We SRAOs usually didn’t get directly involved with those kinds of things, but there were times. Several times – I forget how many, but they were not frequent – an alert would be sounded and we would have to go hide in the bunker, and a couple of times we were there all night. Every now and then we would be scheduled to go out to an isolated detachment or fire base, and it would get cancelled in the last minutes because of action going on there. It was all part of the life we led.

But every now and then things would get out of hand.

While we tried to make our clubmobile runs in groups of two or three, sometimes we couldn’t do it since we were always short staffed – we never made it up to our full complement all the time I was there. Especially for smaller places, it was not unusual for us to go out by ourselves, accompanied by a helicopter crew or something. It was usually an easy day for the helicopter crews, so they rotated the duty around as something of a day off. The helicopters were usually UH-1s, which were commonly referred to as “Hueys;” the unarmed ones we almost always flew in were referred to as “slicks.” There were other types we flew in from time to time. We got to know several of the crews of the slicks pretty well, and sometimes we’d rope them into being part of our acts with perhaps as much as two minutes of rehearsal.

One day about halfway through my tour, I was out on a single run to some fire base or another, and was flying back in a slick with three crew members. It had been pretty much a normal day, and I was sitting in the back with the crew chief, a big Spec/5 nicknamed Moose. He was familiar with this since he’d made these runs several times before; so was the pilot, a First Lieutenant we called Chuck. The copilot was new to me, a Warrant Officer 2 who had been introduced to me as Dave; he was pretty new in-country.

Moose and I had talked a little bit about nothing in particular, but we didn’t talk much because it was very noisy in there. We had no hint of a warning whatsoever when there was a big explosion up in the cockpit.

It was heart-stopping; I had no idea what was happening except that we were in big trouble.

I glanced up at the cockpit; Chuck was all slumped over and bloody. The Huey was lurching and squirming around so wildly there was no chance to get up there and do any first aid, and besides it was clear that we were going down fast. “Hang on!” Moose yelled, and I was already hanging on with everything I had. I was dead sure this was the end of the road for me; my bright idea to come to Vietnam would end like this, although that thought only flashed through my mind for an instant. There wasn’t going to be any way out of this unless there was a lightning flash . . .

After an instant or two I realized that while we were going down, we weren’t exactly falling. Dave was still alive and trying to fly the crippled slick. I could see he was hurt and bloody, but there was no telling if it was his blood or Chuck’s. Then over the intercom I could hear Dave’s voice calling weakly over the radio: “Mayday, mayday, mayday, going down eight klicks south of Phan Loc.”

He kept calling, and outside the open door of the Huey I could see the forest below coming up fast. It was clear that Dave had marginal control at best and the slick was gyrating all over the place. I heard Dave yell into the intercom, “Hang on! Going in!” and then there was a crash, with pieces of helicopter and trees and who knows what flying all over the place.

Then we came to a stop, and there was relative silence. We had survived it! Somehow, just through pure luck the Huey had hit between two trees, and the branches softened the blow a little. We hit the ground hard, but not too hard to survive.

There were a few seconds of shock before I heard Moose say, “Holy shit! We made it!”

I think my heart was going too fast and my adrenaline was pumping too hard to say much of anything but “Holy shit” myself. But within a few seconds Moose and I had pulled ourselves together enough to worm our way through the wreckage of the mangled Huey to see what we could do for Chuck and Dave.

There was to be no helping Chuck; we could clearly see he was dead. Whatever had hit us had hit right next to his seat, and he was a bloody mess. Dave wasn’t much better off; he was clearly hurt badly, and his legs were especially torn up. He was just barely conscious, and how he had ever been able to get the bird on the ground with what little control he had was a mystery to me – but he’d done it, which was what counted.

Without much discussion Moose and I agreed that we had to get Dave out of his seat so we could do what first aid we could for him. It was not easy, but we managed to somehow get him out on the ground. We didn’t have much we could do for first aid, but I went to work on him with what I could find, trying to stop a couple of obvious bleeders. I wasn’t even thinking far enough ahead to wonder how we were going to get out of this mess when I heard the thud-thud-thud of helicopter rotor blades not far away. “Maybe help has arrived,” I heard Moose say.

There was a little portable emergency radio clipped to the harness Dave wore, and we could hear someone calling on it. “Are you guys down and all right?”

Moose took the radio and said, “A chopper just passed close to us. We’re down but the bird is wrecked. Chuck is dead and Dave is hurt bad. The dolly and I are OK.”

“Can’t see where you guys are,” the voice replied. “Any way you can pop some smoke for us?”

“Give me a minute,” Moose replied and got back into the wrecked helicopter, emerging with a smoke grenade and his M-16. He walked a few feet away, pulled the pin on the grenade, and immediately the forest began to fill with yellow smoke. “Just popped a yellow,” he called.

“Ah, there you are,” we heard after a moment. “How did you manage to get a Huey in there, anyway?”

“Sheer damn luck,” Moose replied. “We missed a big tree by inches.”

I looked around, and he was right. If we’d hit the tree squarely at the speed we were going the slick would have been in very small pieces, and so would we.

“No way I can get to you there,” we heard in reply. “There’s a hole in the forest a couple hundred meters west of you. Do you think you can make it to it?”

“Shouldn’t be any problem, except that I’ll have to carry Dave,” Moose replied. “It’s gonna take a few minutes, though.”

“Make it as quick as you can.”

“Which way is west?” Moose asked.

“Just head a little to the right of the sun. That ought to be close enough.”

I don’t want to say I had Dave’s bleeding under control, but right at the moment it wasn’t as bad as it had been. “You think it’s going to be all right if I get him in a fireman’s carry?” Moose asked.

“It’ll have to work.”

Moose scooped up Dave and got him into position, looked around for the sun, and started walking toward it. I had a few things in the chopper but nothing I couldn’t lose, so I grabbed Moose’s M-16 and hurried to get in front of him so I could scout the path. “JoJo, do you know how to shoot that thing if you need to?” he asked as he struggled with Dave’s unconscious body.

“I shot one a while back,” I told him. There was no way I could tell him that it had been in Germany over fifty years in Joe’s past. Right at the moment I wasn’t quite sure I believed it myself.

I had to hurry to keep ahead of Moose. Fortunately the forest floor was pretty open, so that made it easier. I tried to keep my eyes open for punji sticks or other booby traps, but I’m not sure I would have recognized any if I’d seen them.

In a few minutes we could see the opening in front of us. From what little I could see it wasn’t much of an opening; it didn’t seem like there was any way there was enough room for a Huey’s rotor disc, and from the many times I had ridden on them I knew how big that was. “We better hold up here for a moment,” Moose said. Somehow hanging onto Dave, he took the radio and called, “Getting close.”

“Stay back in the trees,” we heard from the radio. “Get behind something and stay down.”

“Just how in the hell does he plan on getting a dustoff in there?” I asked Moose. “It’s way too small.”

“He’ll manage,” Moose smiled. “That’s Chainsaw Dombrowski. I could tell by his voice.”

I began to relax a little. Chainsaw was something of a legend at Phan Loc at that time. It was said that if there was any way he could get a dustoff to someone needing his help, he would – and he did.

With a nickname like “Chainsaw” you would have expected that he would be some big, hulking lumberjack who picked his teeth with a double-bitted axe. But no. When I met him in the canteen after this incident he proved to be a little tiny squirt of a guy, smaller than I was. The legend was that he’d had to stuff half a deck of cards into the heels of each of his socks to make the minimum height, and he was so full of water he ran the risk of bursting his stomach and his bladder to make the minimum weight. But there were a lot of men – and at least one woman, me – who were very glad he hadn’t wanted to dodge the draft.

He was an absolute magician with a Huey, and it didn’t hurt that he had, as people said on occasion, “stainless steel balls and a golden horseshoe stuffed right straight up his ass.” He was only a Warrant Officer 2 like Dave, but his skill and his courage were so great that he had been made a command pilot early on.

In the next few seconds he demonstrated why they called him “Chainsaw.” This wasn’t the first time he’d pulled this stunt, but maybe the fourteenth. The first time he’d done it he’d been bitched out by his CO; the second time he got called a crazy bastard, but after the third time he got his nickname out of pure respect. He got the dustoff with the red cross painted against a white background into a hover right over the too-small opening, then eased off on the pitch to settle down into it. As the tree branches got close, he chopped the opening he needed with his rotor blades; limbs and branches flew all over the place. I got my head down behind a tree, and I was hit by a couple of small branches, nothing serious.

As soon as the storm of debris settled down, Moose got up, still carrying Dave, and started for the chopper (one that had just lived up to its nickname.) I was right behind him, still carrying Moose’s rifle, and watched as a couple guys piled out of the back of the dustoff and came running toward us. They grabbed Dave from Moose without breaking stride and headed back toward Chainsaw’s dustoff, which was still in a low hover close to the ground. They all but threw Dave aboard, and then rough hands reached for Moose and me to drag us inside. We had just barely gotten aboard when Chainsaw pulled pitch, and we were up and away.

It was only minutes to the helicopter pad at the aid station, and there were men waiting with a gurney for us. They took only a couple minutes to evaluate Dave, and the decision was made that he needed a little more attention than he could get at the local band-aid station. Moose and I had gotten out by that time, and then Chainsaw and the dustoff were off carrying Dave to a real hospital.

Moose and I got looked over at the aid station, where they decided that while we had a couple of scratches and bruises each, we were little the worse for wear. Someone gave me a ride back to the canteen, where I collapsed on my bunk, literally shaking and exhausted as the adrenaline shock wore off me. Someone, I think it was Sharon, handed me a rather stiff and full glass of vodka and strawberry Kool-Aid, and I have never had a better-tasting drink in my life.

It was Red Cross policy – and my personal policy – to not get closely involved with the men we dealt with. I had shaken the hands of numerous men over the months I had been there, and had often given hugs, but in all my time in Vietnam I only kissed five men. All of them were the next night in the canteen, where there was one of the largest crowds I recalled. The men were Chainsaw, the three men of his crew, and Moose. I would have kissed Dave if he hadn’t been in a hospital somewhere.

They deserved it.

Being a SRAO in Vietnam was stressful for many reasons, and almost dying in a helicopter crash wasn’t exactly beyond the norm. After all, we were trying to relieve a little stress in others by being there, and sometimes it accumulated on our shoulders as well.

We were given the opportunity to take an out-of-country rest and relaxation tour every quarter. I only managed four of them, mostly because we were busy and so shorthanded, but I enjoyed them. I went to Bangkok once, Singapore once, and Sydney twice. Each time I always felt a little guilty about it since there were things I really ought to be doing back at Phan Loc, and my being gone meant that one of the other girls would have to take up the slack for me.

Singapore was interesting, although it was before it turned into the rich place it was to become in following decades. Bangkok was actually more interesting. A lot of the guys took their R&Rs there, mostly because it rightly had the reputation of being the sex capital of the Far East, and that reputation has only increased in recent years. Actually, there were other interesting things there too and I concentrated on those.

My real relaxing R&Rs were in Sydney. While it was possible to rent a hotel room and explore the town, Sharon had some friends there she had known for years, and the invitation was always extended to go and stay with them for a while. The couple, Harry and Lucy Porter, actually lived near Manley Beach in a neat resort-style home where there always seemed to be room for one more. They had a son, Leon, who was about fourteen; he took me to the beach on several occasions so I could be exposed to surfing.

It was good to just kick back in a friendly family atmosphere and decompress from the day-to-day stress at Phan Loc. It turned out I had lost quite a bit of weight, not that I had it to lose, and Lucy did her best to put some back on me.

My second visit with the Porters came about six months later. Once again their hospitality was great, but I was a little more used to Phan Loc then and not quite as stressed. The suggestion was made that we do an auto tour of several days in their Holden, just so I could get a feeling for what the country was like outside of Sydney. We looked at Canberra, the capital, and were driving south from there on our second day out when Harry spoke up. “Joan, you’ve told us about some of your mountain climbing adventures. How would you like to climb the highest mountain in Australia?”

“I hate to say it, but I think I’m a little out of shape for serious climbing.”

“You ought to be able to handle this,” he smiled. A few minutes later he pulled to the side of the road; we got out and followed a well-groomed path perhaps a couple of hundred yards to a nearby hilltop. “Here we are,” he said. “It’s not quite Mont Blanc, is it?”

Climbing Mount Kosciuszko became harder in later years when they closed the auto road that ran over a pass near the summit and turned it into a hiking/biking trail; it then became about a five-kilometer hike. It was still the toughest summit I managed between Cat’s and my summer out west and going back to Chamonix nearly a year later.

At that, Cat one-upped me a few weeks later when she took an R&R in Tokyo, and climbed Mount Fuji while she was there. That was a much longer climb and it took her all day.

Cat couldn’t go with me on the R&Rs – we were so shorthanded at Phan Loc that only one of us could be gone at a time. It was strange to be thousands of miles away from my best friend after as close as we had gotten.

While I enjoyed being with the Porters in Australia very much, I knew it could only be a break and I would have to be back at Phan Loc all too soon. Within a few days, I was back on a jet heading back to the familiarity of the hooch at Phan Loc.

As time went on, first Mary went home, then Brenda. Two new girls came to Phan Loc to replace them and we became friends as well. Sharon took a long home leave for two months, and another Red Cross career worker temporarily replaced her for a while. She was not the leader that Sharon was, and concentrated more on the emergency family service part of the mission, something we SRAOs didn’t have much to do with, but she let us run the canteen and the clubmobiles just as if Sharon were there. It worked out pretty well.

Cat and I had a definite ending date to our tours, but at times we weren’t very aware of it. I never counted down the days like almost everyone else in Vietnam. Though the job was frequently hard and frustrating, there was a part of me that felt as if that was where I was really supposed to be at that point, and I admit to feeling a real sense of mission about it.

I think Cat felt much the same way about it too. On several occasions we discussed the idea of just dumping the program in Switzerland, and staying where we were needed. I think it was Sharon who talked us out of that idea. “There’s a reason they keep the tours down to a year or so. I’m a career professional, and while I like this job, I don’t have quite the day-to-day contact that you girls have, and I’m trained to handle the stress. You aren’t, and I think the organization is failing you in not giving you some of that training. Kittycat, JoJo, this place is changing you, and it will change you in ways you won’t understand until you’ve been away from it longer than taking an R&R trip. When you get back to the real world, you’re not going to look at things the same way you once did. It may take you a while to realize that. Besides, the year you’re planning in Europe will give you a whole different view of things you wouldn’t even get in the States. It’s not something you should bypass.”

Looking back at it now, I think Sharon was right. Fifteen months proved to be enough, and it really was time to go home and on to other things. Still, I have to admit that I wore sunglasses on most of the final clubmobile runs I made, mostly to hide the tears in my eyes. How would my guys be able to get along without me? How would I be able to get along without them?

Every now and then over the next couple of years, Cat or I would turn to the other one, sometimes with no warning, and ask, “I wonder how our guys are getting along?” We didn’t have to ask which guys, even though we knew that most of the guys we remembered were already back in the States and hopefully recovering from being in Vietnam themselves.

Finally, almost reluctantly, August 10, 1969 came upon us. I know both of us faced it with mixed emotions – happy to be leaving the place and going home, then go on to other things, of course, but knowing we would be missing the feeling that we were doing something useful and good for the men we cared for. It may not have been much in the great scheme of things, but it had been something, and something more than most girls our age would have considered. Unlike so many in those days, we had shown that we cared.

As the jet climbed out of Tan Son Nhut on the way to Tokyo and home, we knew we had done something we would never regret, and could never be recaptured.