I don't know what I was doing by telling her all this stuff. Maybe I wanted her to know I was doing something useful, who Knows that was 38 years ago.

December 30, 1966

Hi home, my time has really been limited lately I haven’t had time to even eat. All the letters I’ve written in the past few days have been written while we were landed and waiting for someone. We flew nine hours yesterday and I had to work 3 hours last night pulling an intermediate inspection.. I had to do it in the dark because the infantry camp that I was staying at over night was under fire all night, and I was right next to the bunkers. There were flares. We went on a hot combat assault where all the ships landed in a rice patty at the same time, 10 ships. All were firing on the way in, I saw three men in the field running toward some bushes and trees, so I put two hundred rounds at them and they all hit the ground, one at a time. I can’t really say that I killed them, but I doubt like hell that I missed at 100 feet high, on short final to the LZ at 35 knots with 200 tracers. They were laying there the last I saw them. It didn’t bother me at all, I don’t know why, but it didn’t, it did bother me when I carried five of our own men who were killed up on a mountain, we put three in bags and two in the ship that weren’t even wrapped up. One had a hole in the side of his head that was as big as a baseball, he seemed to stare at me all the way back to the med vac pad, we were cleaning blood out of the ship for three days. We brought in four prisoners that were all shot up, one without a leg, we also carried 10 of our own men that were wounded, we had five that were seriously wounded on top of a mountain and we couldn’t get to them for three days because the clouds were too thick, we tried day and night in weather where we couldn’t even see the end of the blades in front of you. We hovered right up the side of the mountain and still couldn’t make it, tried coming down through the clouds, but it was all a little too hairy with all those damn mountains right there below you. We even tried at night but that proved almost fatal. By the time we did get them out, five were dead and one more had reached the serious stage. The other fifteen wounded made it about 100 yard down the mountain to another LZ that wasn’t in the clouds. The bad thing about it is that ever since then that LZ has been clear of the clouds and we have been able to go in and out with ease. Those guys luck just ran out. Today we went into the real tight LZ and didn’t quite make it, we hit a tree or two and went on through the LZ without stopping, we landed in a clear area down the mountain and checked the blades, they were all chopped up so we flew it back to the camp and now I’m going to change both blades tonight. Well its morning now and I only got one blade changed, worked into the am, we will change the other one this morning. I got two magazines from Pug , I received cookies from the Summers and candy from someone, five pounds and I think it was your friend Barbara. Jannie has sent me a lot of stuff. I got a package from Hawaii with nuts and things in it. Liz sent me a bible, I don’t know what else, I am going to have to go to work on my ship