End of the Trail TACP

submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson


I got to Hue on my second tour around April of 1972. I had originally been slated for an O-1 assignment in IV Corps but that was canceled when the South Vietnamese took over all operations in IV Corps. Then the North Vietnamese came south through the DMZ. This became known as the Easter Invasion. The VNMD was deployed from Saigon to Hue and they wanted an ALO. It was my turn in the barrel and I arrived at Hue on 15 April 1972.
The Trail TACP was at Quang Tri at the time. The ALO at the Trail TACP was a guy named Major Dave Brookbank, I believe. Soon Quang Tri was overrun. The Trail TACP was evacuated to Hue and assigned to the VNMD. The Trail TACP had a tough time at Quang Tri and they were the last troops out. They left by helicopter just as the NVA were coming over the wall. The details of their ordeal at Quang Tri is another story, and it is best told by Dave Brookbank. He was there. I wasn’t.
There were no FAC aircraft at the airfield in the Hue Citadel, and the Trail FACs flew out of DaNang. After a month or so the VNMD moved from the Citadel airfield into the Imperial Palace at Hue, an interesting place. Later they moved to a small fishing village north of Hue called Huong Dien. The VNMD rented a school building complex and stayed there until the war ended in January of 1973. I don’t remember all of the many call signs of the FACs we controlled. I do remember Covey and Bilk.
They were for the most part O-2s and OV-10s from DaNang. Most airstrikes went in at Quang Tri and areas to the north. Most of my flying time was in UH-1s, a revolting development to say the least.
The only flying machines at Hue Citadel while I was there were some VNAF UH-1s. They were in and out, and we had no control over them.
When the war ended we were ordered to leave our two radio Jeeps and associated equipment for the South Vietnamese. That included everything except for codebooks and scrambling stuff, which I turned in at DaNang.
The crash of an OV-10 on 29 June 1972 was one of the sad things of significance to occur while I was at Huong Dien. The radio operator informed me that an OV-10 had been hit by an SA-7 and was headed south toward our position. I went outside and, sure enough, there he came, trailing a little smoke from the left engine. The left main gear was hanging down but not locked.
Shortly afterwards, the pilot, Captain Steven A. Bennett, Covey 87, informed the Trail TACP that he was going to ditch in the shallow water just off the beach about a mile from our position. I got on the radio and advised him to try a belly landing on the hard sand just next to the water, as I believed a water landing in the OV-10 was a bad idea. I also advised him that I was sure the dangling main gear would fold back into it’s normal up position and that we could be there in five minutes at most. (I had instructed in OV-10s at Hurlburt Field prior to returning to Vietnam and had been through the OV-10 ground school at the North American Aviation plant in Columbus Ohio, so I was very sure that ditching was a bad idea. He decided to ditch anyway and the rest is history. He hit his head on the gun-sight and was killed on impact. The back-seater, an NGO, was thrown free and survived.
You might ask why the crew did not eject. The answer was deadly simple. The back-seater’s chute had been shredded by the blast of the SA-7’s warhead. He couldn’t eject, and the pilot didn’t want to leave him holding the bag.
Some SCUBA divers from the USS Blue Ridge recovered his body the next day. I flew with his body to DaNang immediately after the recovery. Captain Bennett was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. What else is there to say?