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DEATH WAS MY CO-PILOT
FORWARD Vietnam for me was then, and remains today, a place long gone from this world. What it was no longer exists. Its present form is unrecognizable from its past.
I was with a group of young, and not so young, trainees the company called FNG's ('fucking new guys'). We were all highly competent pilots with considerable experience but, for the past few weeks we had been in training for something completely different from anything any of us had ever done. We were hired by a mysterious US Government contractor, actually the Central Intelligence Agency, to fly in Vietnam where most of the population wanted us dead. The company was called Air America. Back then, I guarantee, none of us ever heard of it. We were escorted through the arrival formalities and, not long after, began training in our assigned aircraft. Almost all of us wound up in the Pilatus Porter, a single engine aircraft with a distinctly unreliable engine. We would fly alone over hostile territory. Our aircraft had no auto-pilot, GPS didn't exist back then and the country had only 2 VOR's and a few unreliable ADF's with very limited ATC and virtually no weather or traffic separation. The aircraft we flew had no radar and it rained half the year. There were mountains, clouds, fog and 500 lb bombs falling from the skies. Thousands of nasty, heavily-armed, yellow midgets were everywhere just waiting for a chance to shoot you down, mutilate, torture and murder your sorry white ass if given the slightest chance. Welcome to hell!
Robert J. Firth
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In
1966 I climbed out of the big jet into a steamy colonial oriental town
built by the French using thousands of Vietnamese workers. The air
smelled like rotten cabbage mixed with dead fish. You could almost taste
the disintegrating organic material. Nothing seemed real.|
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