Page 54 - Midas Touch

It had taken me two years of intense training at Naval Air Station,
Pensacola, Florida, to become a pilot. In April of 1971, I was finally
awarded Navy/Marine wings of gold. It was one of the proudest days of
my life. After graduation, I drove across the country to California to begin

advanced training at Camp Pendleton, a massive Marine Corps Base about
50 miles north of San Diego.

After graduation from flight school in Pensacola, most of my classmates
were assigned to transport-helicopter transition squadrons. Transport
pilots flew differently than gunship pilots like me. They flew much larger
helicopters such as the tandem rotor CH-46 Sea Knight and the CH-53 Sea
Stallion, which was often called the “Jolly Green Giant.” Only a few of us

were assigned to gunship school to fly Huey Guns and Huey Cobras.

The first pilots I encountered at Camp Pendleton had just returned from
Vietnam. They were different from my training instructor pilots in Florida.
Here, my gunship instructors were more serious, quieter, less polite, and
less forgiving. Even though I was technically a qualified Marine Corps
aviator, my new combat-veteran instructors treated me like I knew

nothing. From April to June, I was tested and pushed to take risks
performing maneuvers I swore should have been impossible. If a new pilot
made the cut, they added guns and rockets and a new phase of advanced
training would begin. If the pilots did not make the cut, they “flew a desk,”
which meant they were assigned an office job.

The movie Top Gun with Tom Cruise was filmed down the street from
Camp Pendleton at Miramar Naval Air Station, also north of San Diego,

although Top Gun, was too “Hollywood” at times, did depict the intensity
of air-to-air combat training, an environment where being a good pilot is
not good enough.

At Camp Pendleton, we were being trained for air-to-ground combat,
which meant we were being trained to fly at extremely low altitudes.
Rather than fight aircraft in the sky, we were training to fight men on the
ground. I learned that the survival rate of gunship pilots in Vietnam was

estimated to be 31 days and was declining as the enemy gained more
experience and more modern equipment. Training got pretty serious, fast.

Wake-Up Call