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David Mitchell
Continued
I was given my first mission on a late afternoon. We almost NEVER began a mission other than mornings and I think this was a last minute call that would be simple and easy. Or so I thought.
I was to take the Troop up to neaarby Moc Hoa ("muck wha") and help some Colonel insert some troops in a fairly routine drop location. Simple enough. Even with a full bird Colonel giving me directions from my back seat. We somehow managed to drop them on the wrong side of a treeline, and he started yelling his head off at me over the intercom.
As we were atemptig to turn around and re-locate them it had turned dark and we experienced something I had never had before - a hydraulics failure. This is like loosing your power steering, only you are airborne and you can't just pull over and stop. It's simply scary as hell!
So we headed back to the little airfiled at Moc Hoa and me and my co-pilot (forget who) had to (both) stand on our pedals with our backs pushing against our seats and both of us using both hands to wrestle with both "cyclics" and "collectives" to try to guide the ship into a curving descent.
The Colonel kept on raging and started yelling about calling for our "court martial". He simply would not shut up! And his asistant, a young Captain would add a nasty comment or two now and then.
I finally had had enough and sqeeezed my microphone button and yelled something like, "Colonel", when we get down on the ground you can do whatever you want with us, but right now were having a hydralics failure and I want you to shut the hell up and pray we make it down alive."
With that he finally shut up. We then had to call our other ships on the ground and asked them to get some flashlights out on the end of the runway (Moc Hoa had no lights).We had to fight our way around in a large semi-circle to make our aproacch to the little airfiled.
We got it down somehow and the Colonel had completely calmed down. We had to end the mission and leave two ships (one of the gunships also had some sort of mechanical problem) and take the guys home.
There is a much worse part of this story that I will have to omit. This was my first time as AMC. There would be other challenging episodes
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