Do You Want an Airplane or Not?
submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson
The following paragraphs are rather disjointed; they appear chronologically as I remember them. Some of the topics I describe are already well known to you, but I don’t know who else will read this document, so please bear with me:
I served in Vietnam from Oct 66 to Oct 67. Upon arriving, my first and only directive while in country, was to check out as a Forward Air Controller at Binh Thuy in IV Corps, several miles west of Can Tho. After that, I was a squadron maintenance officer working for Maj Roy Voda. Shortly thereafter, Roy transferred to the Group, the 504th I think, and I was designated chief of maintenance of the TASS. The mission to me and others was simple: inspect and repair airplanes that periodically returned to the MOB (main operating base) Bien Hoa for scheduled inspections. The Cessna O-1 was a very elementary airplane. Because of its simplicity, it was very easy to maintain in the field. Follow – on airplanes like the O-2 and OV-10 were more complex. But were they better than the O-1, mission wise? I’m not so sure.
There was also another part of the mission that we imposed upon ourselves. That was to resurrect damaged O-1s from the USAF, US Army, Marines, and ARVN that had been dropped from the roles because they had been considered beyond repair in the field. Those repair actions we performed, as you well know, were actually depot level work for which we never had authorization. The results of those actions being that the 19 TASS put 13 additional airplanes back into service that might not have otherwise occurred. Actually, the number was 15 airplanes, but we had lost 2 during the year. We gave several of them to other TASS units. After the airplanes from other branches were made serviceable, they would be painted in USAF light gray. I would make up phony serial and tail numbers for them. What the records section did about those “phantom” airplanes I never did know, nor cared. Everyone knew what we were doing all the way up the chain of command to 7th AF. I never heard one complaint, however. There are many laws against taking property from the government, but apparently there are no laws against giving back usable property to the government. And if 19 TASS Maintenance said they were serviceable, they were deemed serviceable by all concerned!
If you’ll recall, those who flew the O-1 were issued flack jackets and survival vests. We were told about flack pants. I never saw any nor did anyone else. Therefore, all of us did the same thing: upon arrival at the airplane we’d take off the flack jacket, fold it in half, and place it on the seat – apparently we cared more for our testicles and other associated organs than we did for our heart, brains, and other important parts.
That paragraph reminds me of an unpleasant happening to a Capt White, a FAC who operated out of Phuoc Vinh, some 40 miles north of Bien Hoa. He was flying a FAC mission with a radio operator in the back seat. Capt White caught a round through the seat that penetrated his body, hitting many of his organs. The radio operator took the controls and crash landed the airplane. The damaged airplane was airlifted back to Bien Hoa. (I should add here that I almost always used the U.S. Army to recover damaged airplanes; the 19 year old Army warrant officer helicopter pilots and crew did a much better job of recovering damaged airplanes than USAF officer helicopter pilots.) Why? Who knows...I just dealt with things that worked the best. Read the story titled “Sidewinder 14’s last FAC mission” in this Section.
Anyway, after the Capt White incident, whose damaged aircraft sat outside my office, began to smell very badly from decomposing blood that had pooled in the bottom of the fuselage. Capt White was a very big man, 6’5” and heavy, i.e. he had lost a lot of blood. I decided then to have 3⁄4” steel plates installed under all of the O-1 seats. There was an old Warrant Officer assigned to the TASS as an advisor. His name escapes me, but he reminded me, in a fatherly manner, that such a modification would have to receive AFR 57-4 approval before it could be instituted. In response, I invited him to take a ride with me over the “Iron Triangle”. He declined. Having been in Flight Test at WPAFB prior to my Vietnam assignment, I well knew that such 57-4 approval might take years. I therefore directed that the steel plates be installed anyway. They were. The warrant officer was shipped out. I had asked our commander, Johnny Jones, to see to it. He did.
About LtC Johnny J. Jones: Like his predecessor Albert King, he was a superb pilot. That’s a rare quality for many commanders I’d served under before or since. He was also totally mission oriented i.e. “give me airplanes to do the mission at any cost.” After talking to his contemporaries later on, I found that Johnny Jones was a WWII war hero. He flew P-47’s during the invasions of France and Germany. His plane was shot down in Germany by a flak tower. He crashed into a building where the wings, aft fuselage, and engine were torn off. The German workers inside the building took him out of the cockpit and proceeded to break every major bone in his body as well as knock out all of his teeth. There wasn’t much left of Johnny, but strangely, the Germans threw his body beside a road. By chance, a truck carrying allied aircrew prisoners, who had bailed out of their damaged bombers, picked him up. His bones were reset by fellow POWs without anesthetic. None of those POW’s involved had any medical training. The severe and ongoing pain made him crazy to a degree throughout the rest of his life. Believe me, after that, he was immune to fear from any threat thereafter. When we would fly into a target area, enemy gunners would obviously aim at him and oftentimes hit me since I was flying on his wing. When he asked me to fly in formation with him going into a target area, I did, but I didn’t like it. I recall flying over Chu Chi and noticing an Army O-1 in their boneyard. I landed and asked about it. Apparently, a rocket attack had shredded the airplane so it had been towed to the disposition area. I asked the sergeant in charge what he wanted for the airplane. He said “We want a hootch”. A hootch is basically a single level barracks with a roof and mosquito netting on the sides. They’re obviously much cooler than a tent. I asked Johnny Jones to get access to one. He did, and our maintenance people disassembled it at Bien Hoa, loaded it on a truck, and drove it to Chu Chi.
The Army was happy with the hootch, and gave me the airplane. They insisted, however, that the “ARMY” designation on the sides of the fuselage be blanked out. I did so with tape, (red or green) duct tape, as we now know it. Johnny Jones flew it to Bien Hoa. We scab patched all of the shrapnel holes (44 going in, 44 going out) and replaced the engine with an O-470-15 engine with a controllable pitched prop. That made the airplane faster. We even installed a special cushioned seat from an office chair. As usual, we had the airplane painted USAF gray with JJJ on the cowling. That was the airplane he used throughout the remainder of his tour as far as I know. Even the Group Commander, a bird colonel, used it as well.
Lt Stan Johnson, our other maintenance officer, often times would take a pickup truck with a load of chains down to the docks in Saigon where he would trade the chains for connexes. That was the reason we had so many connexes. Stan even came back with an Army 6x6 truck which we kept as a 19th TASS vehicle. In fact, that was the truck we used to haul the hootch to Chu Chi.
I used to traffic heavily in plywood. Base Supply seemed to have endless supplies of plywood as well as chains. The Army loved to get plywood, but never seemed to have any. Most Army personnel lived in tents. They wanted AF type hootches that were a lot cooler than tents. Their depot in Saigon had huge quantities of O-1 parts to include major assemblies like wings, empennages, engines, etc. Therefore, a lot of plywood bought a lot of O-1 parts for the TASS.
Strangely, no one ever asked why we used so much plywood and so many chains.
In conversation with Bob Green two weeks ago, he said he remembered me as sort of a renegade. I suppose I was. My commanders were of the WW II era i.e. they wanted operational airplanes at any cost, to hell with regulations. Thanks many times over to you maintenance men in the TASS, that’s what they got.
Larry Reynolds wrote recently and mentioned that he and I flew a black airplane to Cam Ranh Bay. The only black airplane I can remember was a Cessna 182 parked on the back line near the front of one of our hangars. I’d heard that it had been confiscated by the VNAV because it had been involved in a smuggling operation. It was faster than an O-1 and had a bigger cabin, better to haul parts. I tried several times to confiscate it for our use. I never succeeded. There was also a Grumman F-8 Bear Cat on a pedestal at the main gate to Bien Hoa. It had been left by the French in the “50s. I knew the commercial value of the airplane. Again, I tried to gain access to it and failed.
Larry sent me a picture of the 19 TASS maintenance staff taken in 1966. I recognized most of the personnel, except that the NCO to the left of Joe Lesko was not SMSgt Marshall, who was an E-8, but instead an E-9, who was also someone I knew, but can’t recall his name.
I retired after 33 years with USAF and five years with the Dept of State in S. America. I’ve demonstrated airplanes for foreign military sales in the Philippines, Jordan, and other countries throughout my career. I’ve concluded that flying airplanes is usually easy; fixing them is not always so. I can’t express my appreciation enough to those who repair them.
Best wishes,
Rod Macaulay, 2008
Editor’s Note: The following was added by Rod when replying to a Bob Green email.
1. To Bob: You have my approval to publish material in any documents that I might send you. I’ve seen most of the TASS documentation available on the web. It appears that a lot of that information has been toned down, which indicates to me that it has been somewhat sanitized, probably for feminine and juvenile readership. However, a lot of bad things happened in Vietnam as you well know. Sometimes, I’ll mention them. I’ll leave it up to you to edit out what’s appropriate and what is not.
2. Examples: Flying from Bien Hoa to Tay Ninh City, I noticed a U.S. Army U-6 sitting on a road with its engine idling. A U-6 is commonly known as a DeHavilland Beaver. Returning, I saw the same scenario. Curious as to why, I laned on the road, got out of my airplane and saw that the pilot was obviously dead from a bullet hole through his head. The left window had a hole appropriate to a shot fired from the outside, with a trajectory parallel to the wing surface i.e. fired from a person on the ground. The U.S. Army had had a series of “scragg” incidents whereby an officer or NCO was murdered on the field of battle by a subordinate. Whether that was the case or not, I’ll never know. I reported the matter to Chu Chi, a U.S. Army facility nearby.
Later on, I was flying from Tay Ninh West, a new U.S. base, obviously west of Tay Ninh City, south to Tan An in IV Corps. To do so, I crossed the “Parrots Beak.” The “Parrots Beak” was an indenture from Cambodia into the western boundary of Vietnam. Almost immediately, I was buzzed by a MiG-15. Having flown jet airplanes prior to Vietnam, I knew I was a “dead duck” if he came back around and fired. I then headed due east to the border at 110 knots IAS. I never saw the MiG again. Further, I never found confirmation that Cambodia had any jet airplanes.
3. I flew north to Song Be for the first time during my tour. I could see a small town on the crest of a hill, but couldn’t see the airstrip. I used the radio asking for assistance. A voice came back saying “See the road through the middle of the town?” “Roger” I replied. Voice said “That’s the runway!” I then contemplated the situation, thinking that maybe I was being set-up. Shortly afterwards, however, I saw a C-123 taking off from the road through the town. I then landed and did what I was supposed to do.
That’s all for now, regards, Rod Macaulay