By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
PLEIKU, Viet Nam - The 17th
Aviation Company claimed the record for the largest Pacific aerial
deployment
of Army aircraft when it flew its 18 Caribous here from Fort Benning on
a trip
which covered 10,046 miles and took 16 days.
They did it with a single
spot of trouble (an engine went out on one plane), and with only slight
delays
because of bad weather. The trip took
them to Hamilton AFB, Calif., Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, Clark AFB,
Philippines
and finally to Pleiku where the 1st Cavalry Division aviation support
unit will
be stationed until some decision is made as to whether it will be based
at An
Khe or work from here.
Since arrival, the pilots and
crewmen have flown 1,700 miles hauling supplies for the soldiers at An
Khe and
on other missions. (They worked on a
24-hour basis recently airlifting Vietnamese soldiers to Kon Tum, for
example. They aren’t exclusively working
for the 1st
Cavalry Division when other jobs come up.)
Maj. Raymond D. Franklin,
commanding officer, made the trip in a C130 which was along as a flying
maintenance shop. He had just recovered
from a hospital stay. The CV2 Caribous
making the over-water voyage were loaded with three officers and two
enlisted
men each, making a total of 90 members of the company who are now
veterans of
seeing a lot of blue salt water go by under a Caribou wing. (One leg of the flight took 17 ˝ hours,
three
hours longer than the longest flight on the Atlantic route which has
gained
fame among Caribou enthusiasts as an endurance test.
The extra three hours added to the previous longest flight is
almost an unbelievable straw to put on a Caribou’s back, but the planes
all
made the flight from San Francisco to Hawaii without troubles.)
A single spell of bad
weather forced the flight to return to Wake after takeoff and to wait
there for
three days, but as one pilot put it “it was mostly just a long, hard
day.”
The first man to meet me at
Camp Holloway was Capt. George Nelson, who I had last seen at Fort
Benning and
who had extracted a promise that I would come around when the 17th got
here. Capt. Nelson took me in hand and
set me up in a bunk in a tin-roofed hootch where Maj. Franklin, Maj.
Gordon R.
Chapin, Maj. Hazen C. Schouman, Capt. Troy D. Cooper, Capt. Walter
Urbach,
Capt. Larry L. Welch and Lt. Charles R. Crescioni had already found a
home.
He also showed me a shower
and a shaving mirror. I had a week’s
growth of beard and a collection of red dust and rice paddy mud as well
as a
heavy load of fatigue by this time. When I had scraped down through to
the
depressingly real old face and had returned to the hootch, Lt.
Crescioni had
volunteered a pair of clean fatigues to replace my camouflage outfit.
“That tiger suit will still
bend, of course, but I thought maybe you might want somebody to hang it
out and
beat it,” the donor said.
I spent a joyous hour
investigating the wonderful Pleiku compound.
Tin roofs, screens, concrete slab floors with their coating of
red dust,
cracked sidewalks, a quonset hut which serves iced drinks and a dining
room
with waitresses who are always confused make a man just in from the
areas of
Viet Nam where the 1st Cavalry outfits usually reside feel as if he has
suddenly come to the big city. I spent
a long time toying with the menu at supper, for example.
It offered only one choice, roast beef, but
it was typed and you had to write out your order, like the process used
in
Pullman dining cars, and it made eating a lot more charming than
getting into a
line with a mess kit or simply opening up a can of C rations in the
brush.
There are also the sober
reminders here of what it means for a compound to be a veteran of the
“old” war
in Viet Nam, before the advent of powerful all-American units and their
operations which have apparently shaken the Viet Cong completely off
balance in
many areas where they used to have complete control.
The clock in the quonset hut
officer’s club is stopped at 11 minutes until 3 a.m. when a mortar
shell last
February shattered the electrical circuits.
Vietnamese workmen are just now laying new slab on the space
where
another building had stood when the mortar barrage landed here at Camp
Holloway. Some of the hootches have
concrete poured in a little flat plaque outside and bear the handprints
and
names of the occupants of those shelters which were hit by the Viet
Cong
explosives. (I found one dedicated to
Capt. Dale Michelson of the 92nd Aviation Company, who has finished his
tour
here and returned to the U.S., and who was in the raid last year.)
There is quite a bit of Viet Nam-style GI humor around the camp displayed in signs. The building which houses the often-out-of-order electrical generator identifies the area as “Malfunction Junction” for example. A red, white and blue sign in the officers club once proclaimed one of the most forthright anti-Communist slogans in the history of those mottos until gentler souls caused the unprintable but expressive two-word placard to be retired. The WCTU may be flattered to learn that a newspaper article has outlined that organization’s protest against the limited liquor supply in Viet Nam.