Dave,

I don't know about flying but for being a crewchief it was all OJT. The last week of MOS we fired the M-60 from a tower and that was about it. I don't think we even broke the weapon down. Once I got to Nam I spent about six weeks in maintenance before I asked for flight duty. I was lucky because most of the guys in the platoon had just gone through the Battle of Dak To and Tet. I benefitted from all their knowledge. It took about two months to actually feel comfortable as a crewchief. Being a float was a big help because I had many teachers as far as A/Cs and gunners. I learned all the tricks. I was pretty good at the maintenance part of the ship because I was really into cars before I enlisted. That was the big thing. After that it was learning the gauges and radios and clearing the aircraft. Being eighteen years old helped because I never thought of what might happen to me.

Clearing your weapon in a hot landing zone was hell. That's why I kept my M-14 in the seat next to me. With the selector switch on it I never missed a beat. When I returned to the States I was an instructor at Ft. Eustis. I tried to cram what I had learned during my 18 months into that one week I had those kids. I did get into some trouble for not following the lesson plan. The jerk who wrote that never sat in the gun well of a Huey.

The only different in the ships Stateside were the pilots seats. They were the regular flight seats without the armor. In Nam we would have the battery of the ship in the side compartment. The factory placed them in the front nose compartment. Because of the armor seats we moved them so the ship wasn't nose heavy. Coming out of a hover-hole with a load and nosing the ship over was bad enough without the added weight of the battery. It seems to me they weighed about 80 pounds. Once you got your own ship and crew things worked great. The A/C crewchief and gunner were like brothers. The outsider was the peter-pilot but after a couple months they also fit in. It got to the point where we would go into a LZ and I would start to clear the ship and then Dana would continue just as I stopped talking. We never cut the other ones instructions off. The funny thing was that once you got into that type of rythm most of the guys in the platoon worked together like that. You trusted the gunner and he trusted you and the pilots knew if something happened you would be there to pull them out. To bad the rest of the world couldn't work that well together.