War Stories

Operation “Born Free” started out with a bang, but ended in a whimper. Not everything worked successfully in Vietnam. The fiasco eventually became known as The Great Chicken Chase. The Binh Thuy Wolves must have thought the skipper has visited Ben Xe Moi once too often when he directed the Dets to practice chasing birds. That’s right, he directed that our guys practice chasing birds! Any birds! Anytime! Just get used to it. Why? No reason given at that time. Meanwhile, there was a pigeon living the good life on the roof of the COMNAVFORV Headquarters in Saigon. A sailor …

Have you ever been eavesdropping at the bar (in the soda shop) while a Truth teller of Unquestionable Repute weaves his word tapestry in a manner which should be spellbinding the audience? But there is a glimmer of skepticism from at least one of the listeners. He (she) has heard enough sea stories (lines) in his (her) time to KNOW that there may be some damage being done to the strictest definition of TRUTH as the story unfolds. The skeptic does not yet have enough sea time to have learned that there is usually a little truth in each of …

Seawolf dets really had to scrape to get by. It so happened that Det 3 at Ben Luc needed an outhouse, and there was a perfectly good four holer at Vung Tau. Now, an old B-Model wouldn’t lift much, but many Seawolf pilots had experience in VERTREP, the resupply of ships at sea by helicopter. So the Det 3 guys calculated that with a 25 knot wind and a stripped down B-model, they could sling load the Vung Tau four holer. Our heros arrived at Vung Tau at dawn on a windy day. The crewman casually strolled over to the …

Most of the time, he serves as a Seawolf in Vietnam, flying a heavily armed UH1B Iroquois(Huey) in support of Navy river patrol boats(PBR’s) in the Mekong Delta. His job has been to prevent the movement of supplies along the 6000 waterways and canals that crisscross the delta. He also makes reconnaissance and surveillance flights. But LCDR Martin also wears another hat: the tall black topper usually associated with magicians. Often, after completing a mission against the Viet Cong. the amiable Navy pilot teams up with PBR crewmen on the river to give a magic show. The PBR’s pull into …

I have pictures of the smoker. It was an L-Model with a ring of nozzles that sprayed smoke oil into the exhaust. It sure made a lot of smoke. The Vietnamese supply boats running to Phnom Phen were getting shot up badly by the VC. They told the locals that we were going to use poison gas. Pete Navone and I flew the smoker up the Mekong in Cambodia beside a convoy and they never took a round. It worked twice, but the VC in Cambodia quickly realized that the smoke was harmless. The next time we tried it we …