Another Place - Episode 18

Another Place Another Time

Book One

Ben Cavanaugh

Episode Eighteen

My name is Ben Cavanaugh. I’m the commanding officer of the 240th Assault Helicopter Company, better known as the Greyhounds. The Greyhounds are unique in a number ways. For starters, the Greyhounds are only one of two National Guard units serving in Vietnam, and of the two, we are the only one that volunteered. There are many men and women in Vietnam, who volunteered to serve, but we are the only unit that volunteered, and we volunteered to a man. Our home base is Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama. We’ve been in Vietnam for over a year now, assigned to the 214th Combat Aviation Battalion, based at Camp Bearcat, the headquarters of the 9th Infantry Division. The Battalion’s primary responsibility is flying support for the 9th.

The second unique point about the Greyhounds is the name itself. In Vietnam, aviation units pick a name for their company, design a logo, and paint it on each of their choppers. When we arrived in country, the battalion had named itself “The Cougars” and the commanding officer’s Huey had a cougar’s head painted on the nose.

There were only two companies in the battalion when we arrived. One of them, a Chinook company, called themselves “The Pachyderms.” The Pachyderms had a crew chief who was a great artist and he painted the head of a charging elephant on the nose of each of the company’s Chinooks. The other company named themselves “The Boomerangs.” They claimed to have picked that name because boomerangs always come back. However, rumor had it they chose it because they didn’t have an artist, and anyone could paint a boomerang on a helicopter.

Since our unit had been together a long time, I decided to make it a group decision. I’m not sure that it was a group decision, since the name chosen was the one suggested by the First Sergeant who, in most ways, had more power in the company than I did. Immediately after we selected Greyhound as our name, we determined that no one in the company could draw a Greyhound, much less paint one on the side and nose of a helicopter.

That’s when the First Sergeant came up with a fantastic idea. He wrote the CEO of The Greyhound Corporation and told him our predicament. To make a long story short, The Greyhound Corporation adopted us and supplied us with enough of their Greyhound Bus decals for each of our choppers. With a small Greyhound decal on the nose of each helicopter and a larger one on each side, the unit was identifiable, which, I think, went a long way toward making us legends, or at least notorious. The Greyhound Corporation even designed a special sign for our orderly room. It read, “Go Greyhound and leave the flying to us.”

The Greyhound Corporation featured us in an issue of their monthly magazine. AP and UPI picked up the article, and it appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country. The publicity further increased our notoriety and produced packages of food and letters from all over the country.

Our primary job is ferrying 9th Division troops to and from the field, missions simply called insertions and extractions. We’d spent the morning I’m writing about inserting two companies of infantry into a Landing Zone thirty miles south of Bearcat. Just before noon, we finished and were clear of assignments for the rest of the day.

We had fourteen choppers committed to the operation: four heavily armed Hueys, called gunships, and ten slicks, lightly armed, stripped-down Hueys for transporting troops. Anxious to get back to Bearcat, I violated a couple of basic navigational rules. The first rule was, unless actively involved in a ground operation, aircraft must maintain at least 1,500 feet of altitude when flying in Vietnam. The second rule was, when flying cross-country use charts and navigational aids, never follow the course of a river.

We were flying just off the surface of the Saigon River at something over 100 knots. I suppose it was dangerous, but not as dangerous as it might seem, and besides, it was fun. At one hundred knots, the sound of our engines was behind us, so it was next to impossible for the Viet Cong to ambush us, since we’d be on top of them before they could fire a single shot. On the other hand, there was a real danger of flying into a River Patrol Boat or some other watercraft. I was flying the lead ship. The rest of the flight was behind me in V formation when we rounded one of the tightest bends in the river.

My focus on the surface of the river saved us from a collision, not with a ship, but with the strangest airplane, I’d ever seen. The pear-shaped aircraft was about forty feet long from nose to tail. It had short, stubby delta wings and a tall slender rudder. The entire fuselage was metal with no visible windscreen or windows. It was facing toward us, hovering about ten feet above the surface of the river with a pipe or hose extended into the water.

I only had a second to look, because it was blocking our path, and avoiding a collision with it was my immediate priority. I screamed into my microphone, “UP!” And the entire flight jumped off the surface of the river. Since I was closest to the aircraft, I gained the least amount of altitude before clearing it. Later my door gunner told me he could have stepped out onto it, as we passed over.

As soon as I realized that we had avoided hitting the aircraft, I put my gunship in a tight left hand turn. I had to know what I had almost collided with. As I came out of the turn, I saw the pipe withdraw into the belly of the aircraft, and it began to rise straight up. I opened the throttle and dropped nearer to the surface of the river hoping to gain enough speed to get a closer look before it was gone. The aircraft rose less than a hundred feet and began to wobble and lose altitude. It fell about twenty feet, before it regained some forward motion and began moving toward the shore. It was still losing altitude at an alarming rate.

There was a break in the tree line directly ahead of the aircraft, but I wasn’t sure it could reach it. Somehow, it managed to clear the rise at the edge of the river with me and the rest of the Greyhounds in hot pursuit. We followed it through the break in the trees. It came to a skidding halt in the middle of a large rice paddy, surrounded by a half dozen other rice paddies. There was no house in the area and no one was working in any of the rice paddies. I guessed they belonged to a nearby hamlet.

We landed in an open area next to the rice paddy where the aircraft had come to rest. I ordered everyone to hold at a flight idle until I could check it out. My crew chief and I walked toward the aircraft. There was no sign of smoke or flames, and it didn’t appear damaged in any way. As we neared it, a hatch opened in the roof and a man climbed out. He was average height with blond hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a single-piece flight suit made of a shiny silver material. He looked like everyone’s idea of the all-American boy. He confirmed that assessment by flashing a wide grin, waving, and calling out, “Hi, thanks for stopping.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just waved back.

He climbed down from what I assumed to be an escape hatch by using steps so neatly built into the fuselage that they weren’t visible from a few feet away. He came directly to me, extended his hand, and said, “I’m Charlie Evans. I hope I didn’t scare you back there.”

“I’m Ben Cavanaugh,” I laughed, “and, frankly, I didn’t have enough time to be scared.”

We both laughed, and he turned toward his aircraft.

“Ben, I’m in a big mess here, and I could use your help.”

“If we can help, we will,” I said. “What’s the matter with it?”

“Before I tell you that, I’ve got to tell you that this is an experimental aircraft, top secret, and all of that.”

“I can see that.”

“What I’m getting at is, neither you nor any of your men can talk about anything you see or anything we do.”

At no time did I think Charlie was an enemy. It never crossed my mind to report the incident - not in the moment that he told me the aircraft was top secret, and certainly not after he explained who he was and where he was from.

“I understand,” I said, “and you can be sure that we’ll never mention the incident. Besides, we were violating a couple of rules by flying low and over the river. So we couldn’t say anything, if we wanted to.”

I didn’t have the authority to tell Charlie that we would keep his secret. I’m bound, as an Army officer, to report unusual incidents, but a minor infraction of regulations was of no concern to me. I just told Charlie that so he would feel safer about taking me into his confidence.

There is something far more important to me than following Army regulations to the letter. That something is the reason that I am a National Guard officer, rather than a regular Army officer. That something is an ingrained belief in doing what my father called the right thing. I don’t mean that in the normal sense of right versus wrong. I mean simply doing what you know is the right thing at any given moment. My commitment to the right thing is unwavering, even though in the world of politics and bureaucracies, it hasn’t served me very well.

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