Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Patience liked the cactus. She put it in a pot and set it in the window. I was happy she liked little things.

Saturday morning we drove fifty miles to Fort Worth. We did this almost every Saturday: got a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and ate it in a park. Went to the Fort Worth zoo and watched caged animals stare back, nutty and distracted. (We once saw a woman strenuously making faces at a gorilla, trying to get its attention. After watching her awhile, the gorilla gave her four bored claps and turned away.) Jack really liked the zoo. We rode in a miniature train that made him laugh. Patience rode the merry-go-round. Dinner was usually at Jimmy Dips, a Chinese place. We were on the road to Mineral Wells by nine or ten. Every Saturday, almost.

Sundays were quiet. I read, or worked on short stories. I wrote stories and thought of having them published someday. This Sunday I sat in a chair in the bedroom, reading. Suddenly my heart leapt and jerked. I sprang up, threw the book on the floor, and breathed out hard. I felt like I was dying.

“Patience,” I hollered, “I must be having a heart attack.” She rushed me to Beach Army Hospital, Jack in the back of the car. I took deep breaths with my face next to the air conditioner vents.

I explained what had happened. The flight surgeon felt my pulse and smiled. Funny stuff? “No,” he said, “you’ve been hyperventilating.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re accumulating more oxygen than you need because you’re breathing wrong.’’

“Breathing wrong?” Been breathing for twenty-five years.

“Tension, maybe,” the doctor said. “Next time you feel like this, try breathing in and out of a paper bag. That’ll increase your carbon dioxide level and the feeling will go away.”

Simple stuff. Drink myself to sleep at night and breathe out of paper bag to make it through the day. Could be worse: just met a classmate, Wavey Sharp, best-looking guy in our class, but not anymore; his face was burned away in Vietnam.

Hughes trainers were falling out of the sky and no one knew why. Only helicopters with instructors were crashing; solo students weren’t going down. No clues. The ships were found, what was left of them, pointing straight down. Veteran instructor pilots and their students suddenly dove to the ground and ended up as wet stuff in the wreckage. A guy in the flight unit who found one of these mangled messes cried about it.

An IP radioed while crashing. In the few seconds he had left on the planet he said that if you push the cyclic stick forward in autorotation, the Hughes’s nose tucked down and the controls didn’t work—

A few weeks later, a test pilot at the Hughes factory in Culver City, California, took a Hughes up very high and tried duplicating the condition. The dead guy was right. The Hughes tucked and stayed there, straining like a dowsing rod to reach the ground. The Hughes test pilot (wearing a parachute) tried using the opposite control—pushed the cyclic forward. Worked. The Hughes came out of the dive, taking fifteen hundred feet to recover. They sent the word back to us: don’t let your students push the cyclic forward in autorotation, and demonstrate the recovery to all Hughes instructors. Hoots in our Hiller flight room. Autorotations were done at five hundred feet, Pete. See it now: Peter Pilot pulls out of dive a thousand feet underground. Comical stuff.

My flight commander told me I had been selected to cross-train into the Hughes. I will fly a regular student load and learn Hughes in my off time. An honor, he said; he respected my flying skill.

Methods of Instruction again. Lineberry was gone. To Vietnam. A warrant officer pro-instructor took me out and tried to impress on me how nifty this little piece-of-shit helicopter was. Showed me the seven rubber belts that connected the engine to the transmission; claimed the system could operate even when only two belts were left. I nodded. We flew. Hughes buzzed a lot, but it was very maneuverable. I had trouble with the pedals. The tail rotor was too small and it was hard to move the tail around in strong wind. There was very little inertia in the lightweight main rotors, which made autorotations snappier, less forgiving of small errors than the Hiller. Pro-instructor climbed to three thousand feet and said, “You’re supposed to see this.” He cut the power and nudged the cyclic forward. Whap! Little shit dumped over on its nose. My goofy, friendly Hiller would never do that. (You can stop a Hiller on its tail during autorotation, slide backward, and then dump the nose down, accelerate, and get to where you’re going—something you might have to do if you’re already on top of the best spot to land, which you cannot do in a Hughes.) “Recovery is simple,” pro-instructor said as we hurtled out of sky. “Just give the cyclic forward pressure, wait until the nose starts to come back up, and then resume normal control.” He did that and the Hughes came out of kamikaze landing approach. Fun, but academic.