Jim Hooper - A Hundred Feet Over Hell: Flying With the Men of the 220th Recon Airplane Company Over I Corps and the DMZ, Vietnam 1968-1969

FLYING WITH THE MEN OF THE
220TH RECON AIRPLANE COMPANY OVER
I CORPS AND THE DMZ, VIETNAM 19681969

JIM HOOPER

To all the Catkillers, but especially Jim Hudson and Doc Clement, who, when visibility dropped below minimums and I saw no alternative to turning back, kept me firmly on course.

Whenever I talk to someone who was in Vietnam, and especially someone I knew over there and havent seen for thirty years or more, its amazing how time and distance evaporate and we get slammed right back into the feelings and thoughts we had then. Sometimes a smell or sound will rekindle it. One fine spring day several years ago, we had the office windows open at Fort Monroe and a Huey flew over with that distinctive wop-wop sound that we heard so much in Vietnam. No one else seemed to notice, but when I looked up from my desk, absorbing the memories that invaded the otherwise placid morning, I saw a colleague and fellow vet staring at the window. We exchanged a knowing smile, acknowledging an awareness that escaped everyone else in the room. It wasnt necessary to say anything, but we both knew what the sound of that helicopter had awakened in the other. And we knew that it could not be explained to anyone who was not there.

Glenn Strange, Catkiller 2

First published in 2009 by Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing Company,
400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

Copyright 2009, 2010 by Jim Hooper
Hardcover edition published in 2009. Digital edition 2010.

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Digital edition: 978-1-61673-971-3
Hardcover edition: 978-0-7603-3633-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hooper, Jim, 1944

A hundred feet over hell : flying with the men of the 220th Recon Airplane Company over I Corps and the DMZ, 19681969 / Jim Hooper.

p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7603-3633-5 (hb w/jkt)
ISBN-10: 0-7603-3633-4 (hb w/jkt)
1. Vietnam War, 19611975--Aerial operations, American. 2. Vietnam War, 19611975--Reconnaissance operations, American. 3. Vietnam War, 19611975--Personal narratives, American. 4. Air pilots, Military--United States. I. Title.

DS558.8.H65 2009
959.704348--dc22

2008044749

Maps by: Phil Schwartzberg, Meridian Mapping
Cover montage: Napalm strike photographed from a Catkiller Bird Dog, Don Long; Catkiller Bird Dog in flight, Charles Finch.
On the back cover: L-R: Glenn Strange, Russ Blanchard, Bud Bruton, Charlie Finch, John Herring, Dale Moore, Terry Scruggs, Bill Hooper, Doc Clement, Fred Willis, Roger Bounds. Charles Finch

Printed in the United States of America

SURROUNDED BY JETS, EXPLODING ARTILLERY, and enemy ground firea setting he already knew wellBill Hoopers luck finally ran out. His struggle to remain conscious, aided by the steady voice of another Catkiller flying alongside, lasted long enough to reach a dusty airstrip, where he was eased from the cockpit into a waiting helicopter and rushed to a marine surgical team. Two days later, the twenty-three-year-old army pilot began a journey halfway around the world to Fort Gordon, Georgia. Now, a little less than eleven months after he left for Vietnam, and with the second in a series of operations to rebuild his arm behind him, my brother was home on leave from the hospital.

But his mood baffled us. Rather than sharing our joy at his return, Bill was angry. Not because of the crippling wound received in an unpopular warhe accepted that as part of what he had signed on for. The anger came from being here. In a demonstration of uncompromising loyalty over logic, it was, he believed, a betrayal of the warrior family hed left behind. Held rigidly upright by the neck-to-waist cast, Bills physical injury was obvious. What could not be seen were other effects of almost daily combat. The happy-go-lucky teenager Id last seen four years earlier had metamorphosed into a mature and deadly serious man, unforgiving of error and curiously detached from everything around him.

Our mother, tearful and grateful for her youngest sons homecoming, had long since gone to bed; Bill and I remained at the kitchen table, a bottle of Jack Daniels close to hand. Outside, jasmine and orange blossoms sweetened the air, palms rustled, and the Anclote River flowed past our backyard to the Gulf of Mexico. But Florida was a foreign land, and the serenity of the night did nothing to soften his bitterness or the need to make me understand. He was still in Vietnam, the war too recent and raw to relate dispassionately. Pleas for help through his earphones. Sonic booms of heavy-caliber bullets slamming past him. Blare of piston engine straining through violent maneuvers. All this and more, far more, remained vivid. That was where he belonged.

Places and phrases that meant nothing to me ricocheted around the room: Dong Ha, Ben Hai, Tally Ho, dask, from my mark, cleared hot. Listening to the flood of words, I gradually realized that each represented part of a stage or a line from an ever-flexible script he knew by heart. Names of men I had never met tumbled out: Doc Clement, Sarge Means, Lee Harrison, Mike LaFromboise, and, the most repeated of all, Charlie Finch, all of them actors in a morality play based on duty, honor, and courage. Some had died, others finished their tours unscathed, the rest were still on that stage, where death was real and grief never feigned. These were the men against whom Bill measured himself; men who spoke the same language of the time and place; men who had shared the fear and exhilaration of combat with him. And here, tonight, his ties to them were stronger than to us.

They were the Catkillers of the U.S. Armys 220th Reconnaissance Airplane Company, based in Phu Bai, Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam. Flying 100-mile-per-hour Cessnas, vulnerable to every weapon in the enemys arsenal, they patrolled the most violently contested real estate on earth. Bullet and shrapnel holes in their tiny airplanes warranted little more than shrugs; maintenance crews riveted neat aluminum patches, and the next morning aircraft and boy pilots were again over the guns. As one commanding officer would write many years later: Those who flew these missions were unique: self-reliant, aggressive, determined, and tenacious. And because they were virtually on their own from takeoff to landing, it also required a personality bordering on controlled recklessness. It is little surprise that their combat record was viewed with wonder. Insiders called them the Myth Makers.

The stories and names I heard that night remained with me for twenty years, but it was only after learning for myself the meaning of fear under fire that I began to record them. Assignments as a freelance journalist to various post-Vietnam conflicts made the writing a slow process, with many pauses, detours, dead ends, and reversals. Among the early difficulties was finding those my brother had lost contact with after leaving the army. The miracle of the Internet led me to a surprised Sarge Means, who, understandably cautious about a writer claiming to be the brother of a cherished comrade, plugged me into the Catkiller network. The response was immediate, and over the next weeks Bills telephone burned hot as they relived moments forever branded into their memories. My suggestion that those moments might make a book was met with guarded consent. Eventually, backed up by military commendations, orders, logbooks, faded photographs, diaries, and letters to wives and parents, all found stored away in attics and garages, the first thumbnail sketches began to develop density, motion, and personality. And the more I saw and heard, the stronger my conviction that what they had done was extraordinary; to forget would be an injusticenot just to them, but the history of the Vietnam conflict.