Hamfist Over the Trail by G E Nolly Read Free Book Online

mirror, survival knife (bigger than the one the white mice had taken from me), matches, compass and blood chit.
    The blood chit was a silk scarf with Vietnamese writing on it, advising anyone who found a downed airman that they would receive a reward if they would help him return to friendly forces. It was a holdover from World War II, when the aviators of the Flying Tigers would have their blood chits sewn into their flight jackets. Back then, the writing was in Chinese.
    Next, we received the standard Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and 18 rounds of ammunition. The service weapon was accurate, and the .38 was a good self-defense round, but I wasn't really a fan of having only six rounds before needing to reload. And reloading a revolver in the dark, or when injured, would be a real challenge. We also received an AR-15 automatic rifle. It was similar to the M-16, but had a telescoping stock, which made it much more compact. It fired the same round as the M-16, the deadly high velocity .223, took the same magazine, and had the same blistering high rate of fire in automatic mode.
    Finally, we had our back-pack parachutes. This would be my first exposure to flying the O-2 wearing a parachute, and my instructor took extra time to explain the bailout procedure and the process for jettisoning the right entry door in an emergency. He even went into great detail on how to, hopefully, avoid hitting the rear propeller after bailing out. The procedure, he admitted, probably wouldn't always work as advertised.
    Some of the exercises we performed were pretty easy, some not so much. Flying the airplane was really a piece of cake. With both engines in line with the fuselage, called centerline thrust, engine-out maneuvering was really easy. And the airplane flew so slow, basically 120 knots, it was easy to project ahead. I had pretty much mastered the aircraft by the time I left Hurlburt, so the flying part was no big deal.
    Navigation was different. Unlike the Florida panhandle, there were precious few roads in this area marked on the charts. And, also unlike Florida, where it was sea level pretty much everywhere, the terrain elevation around Phan Rang varied immensely. The only way to determine terrain elevation was to read the notations on the contour lines on the chart showing elevation in meters. The accuracy and safety of the fighter aircraft we would be controlling in real airstrikes would depend upon me providing the exact elevation, in feet, of the target.
    To determine the elevation of the target, in feet, I would need to multiply the elevation in meters by three, then add ten percent. It doesn't sound so hard to do this in your head at groundspeed zero, but it's a different story altogether trying to do it in an airplane that's being tossed around by thermal air currents rising from the hot jungle floor, clearing the skies for other aircraft, reading the tiny print on the aeronautical chart, listening to up to three communications radios and watching for enemy ground fire. I started out doing pretty badly, but eventually got the hang of it.
    We had a training flight every day, lasting about three hours, and then pretty much had the rest of the day off. Usually, we'd all get together at the Officers Club after the day's flying. The O'Club was situated on a hill, and had a great veranda overlooking the runway. For the brief time we were going to be at Phan Rang, we decided, we'd all get together at the O'Club every day at dinner time and sit on the veranda, drink beer and grade the landings of the F-100s that were coming back from combat missions.
    The F-100 jocks, we found out, weren't even active duty pilots. They were from the Colorado Air National Guard, and had been called up for duty in Vietnam. I could visualize it: one day they're having dinner with their families in Denver, the next day they're flying halfway around the world to go to war. All of a sudden, I had a lot more respect for Air National Guard troops.
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