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I’ve been enjoying some time off between contracts, luxuriating in the new house.

Since I can think of no close friends or family that share my love of aviation history, I drove myself down to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum down in McMinnville, about 40 miles Southwest of Portland.

It’s probably best known for housing the Spruce Goose, the enormous, wood-and-fabric seaplane built by Howard Hughes.  That’s only mildly interesting to me, as the museum also houses what I was really interested in - beautifully restored warbirds.

There is a replica of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane.  Here is an old bi-plane, showing the wooden struts normally covered by fabric.

What really got my interest on this visit, since I’ve read so much about their mission in Vietnam, was the F-105 Thunderchief, aka, the “Thud”.   (The huge grey wing over it belongs to the Spruce Goose).

These were originally designed in the 1950’s to fly supersonic into Russia and drop nuclear weapons.

When Vietnam came about, these planes were fitted with conventional bombs, and flown out of several bases in Thailand against heavily protected targets in North Vietnam.  The defenses there were state of the art radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), provided by the Soviets and Chinese.

Some of the F-105s were fitted with electronic counter-measures to jam the North Vietnamese defenses, known as “Wild Weasels”.   They carried an interesting weapon called a Shrike.  When the Vietnamese SAM batteries activated the radar-guidance for their missiles, a Shrike could home in on that signal and fly right down to the battery. That was really high-tech for the time, when there was no GPS, no JDAMs, and laser-guided bombs were still years away.

The bomb-dropping was very low-tech by today’s standards, and not too far improved from the techniques used in WWII.  The flights of Thuds would fly from Thailand, across Laos, and then drop down into the mountain valleys of North Vietnam, using the mountain ridges to hide them from radar.  If the weather was good, they’d continue on until they visually identified the target, pop up to get some height, roll-over and into a dive-bomb, drop their weapons, and afterburner their way out of the area.

They took such heavy losses, that instead of requiring them to serve a specific amount of time overseas, if they lived through 100 missions, they could go home.

Here are some shots of the cockpit of the Thunderchief.

Lastly, I’d just finished reading about P-38 Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater of WWII.   I believe this plane is restored to look like the one flown by the legendary Jerry Johnson, a triple-ace from Eugene, Oregon. (The book is called Jungle Ace and I highly recommend it).

Col. Johnson shot down 24 enemy aircraft in 265 combat missions.  After surviving all that, he was on his way home from Japan after the war to his wife  and child, when his aircraft was lost in severe weather, never having been found. The aircraft (I believe he was flying a B-24 home), had 5 parachutes for the 7 people aboard.  Johnson and his co-pilot stayed aboard while the other crewmen parachuted down to a beach they’d overflown.  Johnson had planned to turn around and make a crash landing on the sandy beach, but was never seen again.

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I was getting dressed at the gym, after an easy workout and soak in the spa, and a man sitting on the bench next to me noticed my pants.

“Those Army pants?” he asked.

He’s in his mid 60s, bald on top, seeming to take his time getting dressed.

“Yeah, BDUs. I love them.” This particular pair is the Army’s current desert digital camouflage, and judging from his stare, he’s never seen the pattern up close.

He shakes his head, “We just had plain old fatigues when I was in the Army, even though some units were just starting to wear camo”.

“What’d you do in the Army?”

“I flew helicopters.”

“Vietnam?” I ask. I mean, he’s the right age, hopefully it’s a good guess.

“Yup.”

“No kidding! What kind of mission did you fly?”

“Medevac.” (These days called casevac, casualty evacuation).

“Where in country?”

“II Corps.” He looks at me, aware I wasn’t even born when he flew there. But I nod knowingly, and ask “Pleiku?”

His eyes brighten, “Yup” and rattles off the names of a dozen or so camps in the II Corps region. Military jurisdiction in the war separated the small country of South Vietnam into 4 zones, called Corps. I Corps (pronounced “eye core”) bordered the Northern DMZ, the no-man’s zone between North and South.

“Huey?” I ask, though it’s a dumb question. At the time, it was the only helicopter that could realistically do medevac.

“Yup.”

“Charlie model?”

“No, H-model.”

“Ah, lots more horsepower.”

“Yeah, but we still had a lot of Charlie models being used as gunships, and they had a hard time getting off the ground fully loaded with their ammo cans.”

We got to talking in this vein, on the subject of horsepower, said that there were times where even the H models had a hard time getting airborne. He’d had to hover into a hole in the trees to get down to some LRRPs (pronounced “Lurps”, long range recon patrols), pulled pitch and the rotor RPM started dipping into the red zone, forcing him to set it back down before the whole ship fell. He made one of the men get off the helicopter until the last second, which the man was not too happy about, and then clawed his way out of the hole.

I mention having read that helicopters don’t get transitional lift (when they bite into undisturbed air) unless they’re moving in one direction. Every little detail like this I mention just lights up his face.

I ask if he still flies. He said after getting shot down 20 times, and living through it, he quit the Army after his tour, and flew for an Alaskan airline. In the mid 70s, he made an emergency landing at 200 knots, and somehow didn’t have a single broken bone in his body. He was sent to the hospital, where he had a stroke five hours later, paralyzing his left arm.

“That ended my flying career.”

I notice his left arm is positioned uselessly, swollen, and realize that’s why it was taking him so long. But he was all grins, saying he was a lucky son of a bitch to be alive after all that.

I ask if he’d ever thought of going back to visit Vietnam now. He says he’s been back 8 times, and that they love Americans, it’s a beautiful country and very cheap. Flying there is the expensive part.

He said he’d just fallen in love with Vietnamese culture, the food, the people, the country, and in his travels there has made a lot of friends from Hanoi to Saigon. Mentally, I thought it was interesting he still called it Saigon, since after the fall of South Vietnam, it was renamed Ho Chi Minh city. Perhaps calling it Saigon was a way to avoid thinking about the sad way that war ended.

He said he travels with a good friend he met there that speaks both English and Vietnamese, and who is somewhat of a celebrity in Vietnam for being a lounge singer. He mentioned the only thing that he didn’t like was that when they stayed in a town where the man’s family lived, they would come around every day for money. To them, we Americans are exceedingly wealthy, and should be willing to hand them money. He said it was all fine and good, but never once did they say thank you. It was just something they expected.

Now, I’m sure there are people out there who say, “oh yeah, I was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam”, who are completely full of shit. But this guy seemed genuine, and certainly had all the details right.

In the end, I figure he was wondering how I knew all this stuff, and I mentioned that I’ve read every memoir I can find written by aviators of any kind in the Vietnam war, including helicopter pilots and crew. I just even happened to have a book in my bag I pulled out, “Vietnam from the Treetops: A Forward Air Controller Reports” by John F. Flanagan.  “I just love reading about this stuff,” I say.

He asks if I’ve read “Chickenhawk”.

“Robert Mason, yup, that’s a good one.”  Probably the most well-known book written by a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. At least, that’s the one I see everywhere. It’s a good one, but certainly not my favorite.

He says he met Mason and his wife, who now go around the country to veteran’s hospitals, counseling soldiers with PTSD.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say, just to reaffirm I still know what he’s talking about.

“You in the Guard?” he asks.

I laugh. “No, these are my gardening pants. Tough as hell, rarely tear, I love them.”

I leave it at that, don’t want to tell a guy who is probably a true fucking hero, risked his life many times to pull wounded men out of hot LZs, why I didn’t join. Growing up under a hard-assed veteran, the military life was no place for me.

Hopefully, I’ll run across him later, maybe get him to tell me some of his stories.

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so, one thing did end up turning my day around for the better.

I decided to stop in at a local Thai restaurant to pick up some dinner. I sat down at the take-out counter, and plopped my book down. “Pak Six” by Lt.Col. G.I. Basel, an F-105 Thunderchief (”Thud”) pilot who flew out of Thailand to bomb targets in the route packs of North Vietnam in 1967. Route pack six contained Hanoi, the capitol of North Vietnam, and unquestionably the most heavily defended airspace in history.

Sure, I’ve read a few books of this sort. Ed Cobleigh’s “War for the Hell of it”, Jack Broughton’s “Thud Ridge”, Ed Rasimus’ “When Thunder Rolled”, Ken Bell’s “100 Missions North”, all written by F-105 pilots who tell the story first-hand.

The book is on the counter, face up, showing a painting of the author’s F-105 on fire after taking fire, climbing out into the skies above North Vietnam. (The pilot of this particular book was shot down before completing his 100 missions, was grievously wounded, but escaped capture and subsequent torture at the hands of very angry NVA forces).

A man in his early 60s walks in to pick up his order, immediately eyes the book, and says “F-105 Thunderchief”. My jaw drops and I turn to look at this guy. No glasses, and a keen, sharp-eyed focus to his clear blue eyes. Friendly looking guy.

Eyeing the picture, he reverently names the engine type, the unique kind of afterburner. He says he didn’t know there were books written by Thud pilots, and I happily name off the half-dozen I’ve read.

There is a look of nostalgia in his eyes while he talks about how beautiful and powerful those “birds” were, how tall they were. He even called it a “century series” fighter, a rarely-used designation for the 1950s era fighters, including the Thud, that were designed to fight the cold-war before Vietnam flared up.

“You fly?” I ventured.

“Yup,” he nods, “EC-135s and KC-135s.”

I’ve been in a KC-135, spent four hours aloft in one during an “incentive ride” when I was in rotc and still considering a career as an Air Force pilot (I know… how geeky can you get?)

“A tanker!” I say, and he beams a smile back at me. “Well, EC-135s, too. Ten years in the service.” I understood he implied long ago, too.

The KC-135 has been around a while, and they still fly them out of Portland International airport. Their job is to carry a scary amount of fuel, and pump it in mid-air to fighter jets while turning in a race-track pattern. I don’t know much about the EC-135, I think they’ve been retired. Both are militarized Boeing 707s. Some kind of airborne command post, probably replaced with a more current aircraft.

I cracked him up telling him about my “incentive ride” experience in a KC-135, sitting in a web-seat (the inside of a tanker is like an completely stripped-down airliner), as the pilots gunned the engines and we rolled for what seemed like FOREVER before rotating for take-off. “Won’t this thing ever get off the ground!!!”.

He laughed, and named the model number the engines probably were. He said the new engines the kc-135s are outfitted with now have power to spare.

I laid on my belly next to the boom operator as he passed fuel to a flight of F-16s over New Mexico. They flew over Oklahoma, and then down across Dallas, practicing solar naviation, back to Bergstrom AFB in Austin (which is now Austin’s commercial airport).

“You serve overseas?” I ask.

“Okinawa.”

I think for a minute. “Kadena?”. He corrects my pronunciation, and nods affirmatively. Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan.

“I wanted to fly so bad, I almost joined the air force,” I admit.

He raises his eyebrows and smiles, “that’s how they got me.”

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Did the Buddha have bad days now and then?

I must have dude-PMS today or something, waking up irritable today. I’m just going to stew in my crabby juices until I get home.

Then, I’m going to boot up my 360, climb into a jet or two, bore some holes in the virtual sky, replacing today’s frustrations with smoking craters of what was bothering me, and patting myself on the back for textbook approaches and greased touchdowns.

Come tomorrow, I’ll be glowing with happiness. Now THAT’s therapy.

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So, yes, the EARTH show at Rotture last Friday night was good. Somehow I was expecting dark, noisy guitar drones but it was totally different. Not quite sure how to describe it, I kept thinking of spaghetti western soundtracks in slow motion, like Ennio Morricone smoking opium. It was very slow, amniotic. It seemed that sometimes ten or fifteen seconds could pass between notes, steel guitar strings suspended in lingering vibration. Somehow, I stayed upright and awake, but the temptation to collapse into restful sleep was very strong.

I elected to enjoy a relatively non-productive weekend, aside from household chores. I spent probably three or four hours late Saturday night on “Over-G Fighters”, a Japanese flight-simulator for the xbox360, that while dry and technical, is satisfyingly realistic. Most of the time, I wasn’t shooting or bombing anything, just flying a landing pattern and practicing landings touch-and-go style, using speedbrakes to come to a stall a foot or less above the runway. I’d do about four or five landings until getting bingo on fuel, then landing for good and watching the replays to see what I could do better.

I know 99.9% of people would find it terribly boring, but I geek out when it comes to some things. And, of course, downtime can be just what the doctor ordered.

I saw The Most Beautiful Woman In All of Portland this weekend. Don’t know why I’m mentioning it, other than the image has been burned into my mind all weekend. She was beyond hotness, though she was that, but just unreal in her perfect form. Divine.

I would never want to talk to such a creature, or even hear her voice. It would ruin the vision.

Long, silky black hair, blue eyes, olive skin tone, light natural tan. Thoroughly fit, without being overly athletic. Perfect posture, unequaled poise and grace of motion. I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was startling, as if to see some exceedingly rare, beautiful creature of the jungle that is only seen once every few generations.

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