Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2015 by
CASEMATE PUBLISHERS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083
and
10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford, OX1 2EW
Copyright 2015 Robert F. Curtis
ISBN: 978-1-61200-329-0
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-330-6
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This is a war story of the Vietnam War without warfor a brief time. There is very little shooting in this war story. Almost all of the shooting was directed at no one at all. This war story is based on real events and set in real places. Everything in this war story actually happened. All the people portrayed are real, too. My descriptions of their personalities are as I remember them the way they were then. All the conversations in this story are fictional, since I cannot remember that far back, but they might have happened the way I wrote them. This is not a story of combat, although combat happened before it and after it. In this war story warriors saved people, instead of killing them or contributing to their deaths. There, you can start reading now.
This book is dedicated to the men of C Company, 159th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile): my friends and colleagues long time gone. The Air Medal Citation is a copy of mine, changed to show that all of the men who participated in the Typhoon Truce received the award for these actions.
PROLOGUE: RAIN UNENDING
W ars are suspended sometimes. Something intervenes and the war stops for a while. A holiday that both sides recognize might do it, as happened in the Christmas truce during early World War I, for example. Weather might do it, too, like it did during the Vietnam War in the fall of 1970. The latter was not a suspension on the scale of the WWI event, but still, it happened and the war stopped for three days. They never last, these suspensions, but life changes a bit for all the people involved while they are happening. Maybe the people change for the better, or maybe not, but, come what may, they dont forget what happened when their war stopped briefly.
In September and October 1970, in I Corps, the northern part of what was then South Vietnam, between Da Nang and the De-militarized Zone (DMZ), the monsoon came right on time. It was right on time, but the rain was far heavier than normal and far more intense than anyone expected, first because of a near miss by Category 5 Super Typhoon Joan. After smacking the Philippines, Joan took a right turn, passing to the east of Vietnam, but she was so big that she covered all the coastal lowlands in I Corps and on up into North Vietnam as she headed north to hammer China. Of course, it was raining in I Corps before Joan got there. The clouds had come in, low and dark as they always do, and for six weeks it rained non-stop. Before and after Joan, it rained, not a hard rain all the time, sometimes it was just a fine mist, but the rain never really stopped. As it fell, the water all over the coastal lowlands began to rise. Then, less than a week after Joan passed by, on October 25th, Super Typhoon Kate arrived.
Kate was a Category 4 storm, with top winds of 150 miles per hour. She nearly broke up as she was tearing apart the areas of the Philippines that Typhoon Joan had spared, but out over the open water of the Sulu Sea and then the South China Sea, Typhoon Kate built a lot of strength and a lot of rain. She hit the coast of South Vietnam near Da Nang. Kates northern quadrant, the worse part of the storm, hit the lowlands north of Da Nang and to the east of Hue City, the old imperial capital, leaving the people there faced with both war and natural disaster at the same time.
No one but the foreign warriors fighting throughout the country had the resources to help the people who lived in the lowlands there, but the war had to stop, at least for a while, for that to happen. And stop it did, but for the men who took their helicopters out into the unending rain it really made no difference. Perhaps no one would shoot at them for a while, but the everyday dangers they faced remained, magnified by the low clouds and poor visibility. War or no war, complicated mechanical things like helicopters break down. Obstacles, like antennas and their guy wires, designed to add stability, are still there, you just cant see them through the rain and fog. You get just as tired, maybe more so, as you do on normal missions when you have to constantly stay clear of the clouds that now come nearly to the ground. None of that really mattered. They went out to help anyway, because rescuing people was now their mission and the mission must be done.
CHAPTER ONE
THE MEN OF PLAYTEX AND LIFE IN VIETNAM
WALKING FISH
A fish just walked across the sidewalk in front of me, the tall, thin young man in the green flight suit and darker green rain jacket said as he came through the door of Playtexs Officers Club. The three men already there, all pilots, just laughed and shook their heads in disbelief. A walking fish, really
C Company, 159th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion (ASHB), 101st Aviation Group, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), was given the call sign Playtex in 1969, prior to leaving the United States for Vietnam. Their official motto was Support Extraordinaire, but naturally, given the name Playtex, their unofficial motto became, We give living support, echoing the womens underwear companys slogan. When C Company returned to the States after the war, the call sign was immediately changed from Playtex to the more politically correct Haulmark. Political correctness had not yet been invented in 1969, so they were Playtex. None of the pilots or enlisted men in this story knew how or why the call sign Playtex came to be, nor were they curious enough to find out.
At any given moment, there were between 35 and 45 officers assigned to Playtex, all of them aviators. Of those, perhaps 30 would be available for flying at any one time. The rest had just arrived, were checking out, were sick, lame, or lazy or were on R&R (rest and recuperation) in Australia or Taiwan or Thailand if they were single, or in Hawaii if they were married. There were 200 to 250 enlisted men and, like the officers, maybe 20% were off somewhere else and not available for duty. For the first month or so after you joined Playtex, you were a newbie, as in New Boy, whether you were a commissioned officer, a warrant officer, or an enlisted man. Second tour soldiers were not newbies; they already knew how to behave.
The oldest officer in Playtex was usually the CO (Commanding Officer), most often a major, but captains filled the job on occasion. The CO at the time when the floods came that October was a short, slim African American and the best commander many of the officers would ever have. He was the best because he trusted his officers to do their jobs, left them to do those jobs, and as long as they did their jobs properly, ran interference for them with the higher ups when necessary.
