Three Quickies

Larry Bradshaw

by Roger Ek, Seawolf 25

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 had to high tail it.

During the rainy season we had a lot of electrical problems. Intervalometers that controlled our rockets were particularly troublesome. It was pouring rain at Binh Thuy as a gunship came in. The whole crew ran for the hangar and the pilot wrote up the intervalometer on the gripe sheet. An AT went out, turned the battery switch "on", put the armed switch "on", selected "pairs" and fired a pair of live rockets right through the laundry. The same incident was repeated at "Solid Anchor" when the fins of a rocket clipped off a pair of socks hanging from the springs under a top bunk in the barracks.

The det at "Solid Anchor" (Det 9?) had a gunner named Eltman who had fantastic hearing. He would say "mail", and after a while everybody else would hear a Chinook coming with the mail. One night he heard a mortar leave the tube over a half a mile away and casually said "incoming" at the door of the hootch. He was flattened by the whole Det heading for the bunker.

Recent War Stories

by Marty Twite Capt. USN (RET) C.O. 4/70-4/71
by Roger Ek, Seawolf 25
by Reprinted with permission , "Naval Aviation News" August 1968
by Roger Ek, Seawolf 25
by Bill Rutledge
by AECS W. R. Rutledge
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