uh boom once we completed fleet pre-flight training we entered primary flight training at any one time in 1968 there were 10 flight companies in session you ended up you you get to pick well you i guess you draw what kind of helicopter you’re gonna fly now you’re told okay you get you’re told and you get the th-55 love that aircraft looks like uh uh looks like kind of a dragonfly looking yeah it’s the uh it was bought the army bought them right off the shelf from hughes aircraft and in the civilian world it’s a huge 300 uh you started the engine up and then you engaged the clutch which engaged eight rubber bands that started turning the main rotor and uh so we got that going for us yeah i got them before but the thing had a ton of power and down here in texas in the summer the oh-13s and the 23s the other two training aircraft they could barely get off the ground th55 would spring off the ground so it was just a great little aircraft to fly i loved it awesome um about two months into our flight training we returned from the flight line and we were told to get in company formation right away once all 275 of us were assembled as we’d have had about 75 drop out of the class at this point our company commander came forward and addressed the class one of our fellow classmates crashed that day and was killed that was something none of us had considered at this point in our training his death would not be the last either another student and his flight instructor were killed in a mid-air collision with another aircraft flown by someone from another class how there weren’t a lot more merit midair collisions always amazed me a little bit of a wake-up call well it was you know you had roughly around 1200 aircraft at eight o’clock in the morning leaving and coming back in at 11 o’clock and then leaving again at 1 o’clock and coming back at five o’clock and most of them were flown by students so you know the students had anywhere from 10 hours to 50 hours or let’s say you got up yeah you got 100 hours total while you’re in flight school early flight school first stage there so you had a lot of inexperience out there running around in not that big of an area and why we didn’t have a lot more air midairs i have no idea the the one student the first student that we lost he flew into a cloud and we hadn’t had any weather instrument training yet at that point well he went in the cloud and people that saw him he came out upside down he was inverted and uh you just don’t invert in a helicopter it doesn’t work so that he got killed that way and then the other one was a student an instructor and another aircraft slammed into them we lost them there those are the only two that i knew about there were others that that did happen in other flight classes but we were kind of fortunate we started out with 350 we graduated i think one 150 somewhere in that neighborhood there get done with that it’s on to advanced flight training um this was i i kind of had to there’s there’s a good leadership lesson here that i wanted to jump into it says we’re approaching the end of our instrument training when we return to the barracks from the flight line the night prior to the meteor meteorology exam mr clinton wasn’t happy with the condition of the barracks and had gone on a rampage aided by a bottle of jack daniels beds were overturned wall locker contents were fl were lying on the floor the fire hose was spraying water and the contents of everyone’s foot lockers were everywhere except in the foot lockers he was on a tirade one cadet was singled out mr clinton was berating him evidently the cadet was responsible for his five o’clock shadow mr clinton told the cadet to get into the push-up position once there he placed a razor on the floor in front of him and told him to shave the cadet looked scared and i was mad i had had enough of mr clinton’s crap with all respect for his rank that i could muster i stepped forward and gotten clinton’s face sir you’ve been drinking and you are drunk if you do not leave this minute i am going straight to the company commander and have him resolve this situation now leave i shouted there was dead silence mr clinton just stood there and glared at me with his bloodshot eyes everyone was watching finally he laughed turned and staggered out of the barracks everyone including me sighed with relief we spent most of the night getting the barracks back in order and no one had an opportunity to study for the weather exam it showed the next day the exam was in the morning when we returned to the barracks after flying in the afternoon we were immediately informed by the company first sergeant that we were all restricted to the barracks until further notice and i was to report to the company commander’s office when i arrived the senior officer from the weather committee was present as well i was told to sit down cadet corey do you know why i’ve restricted the company and called you here the company commander asked like i was some clairvoyant and i could read his mind this was the first time i had ever spoken to the man again dad’s words of wisdom came to mind no sir i replied knowing this wasn’t the time to be a smart ass it appears cadet corey that most of your class failed the weather exam we need to know why he stated oh [ __ ] most of the class which includes me too again as class leader it was my fault didn’t you study for the exam last night asked the weather committee instructor who didn’t look happy why did i suspect that [ __ ] rolled downhill here and it was coming right at me however i was seeing a u-turn for this [ __ ] storm no sir we did not study last night we had a party instead i replied their eyes bulged and i thought both men were going to drop dead from heart attacks you did what gag the company commander you had a party the night before the most one of the most important exams in this course do you realize by by having a party and failing that exam you could all fail flight school and be sent to infantry immediately yes sir i replied and let them stew on this revelation now the weather instructor had a grin on his face as he turned to the company commander well i guess the problem wasn’t with the instruction but with the discipline of these cadets i was beginning to see what was going on here somewhere above their level the [ __ ] had hit the fan and someone high up was looking for somewhere to lay the blame the army needed helicopter pilots at this point had spent considerable money training 80 cadets the army couldn’t afford to wash out 80 cadets at one time the company commander wasn’t looking too good right about now cadet corey why in the hell would you have a party the night before a major exam sir we had no choice i answered sheepishly i was beginning to enjoy this i had been around the military long enough to know when people would have stayed a panic over something that had gone terribly wrong oh dad you taught me well what the hell do you mean you had no choice the company commander sir when we returned from flightline last night mr clinton had torn apart the barracks to include turning on the fire hose and told us to get the mess cleaned up before morning we had a barracks cleaning party to get it squared away and that took until midnight light out lights out was at 2200 but we worked on stuff until dark until we had it taken care of only the married men had a chance to study last night you’re dismissed cadet corey and there you go so you you you then up you know you go to the company commander then you end up with a battalion commander and the school commandant and the school commandant finally uh you end up all assembled the battalion commander comes out i am lieutenant colonel barlow your battalion commander i have not met most of you and normally do not meet cadets until graduation however because of this incident i have met some of you and thought i should meet all of you what you have experienced is not typical of the treatment of cadets changes have been made the first being that you have a new company commander major kid or will be your company commander for the remainder of your training mr clinton sergeant first class [ __ ] will no longer be your tax either major kidder and he turns it over the uh to back up a little bit our class got a bad rap the first the very first day we showed up me and another guy we had flown into savannah the night before so we had a 1200 hour report him and i got there at about 11 so we we report on time the rest of the guys they all flew in on a flight that was supposed to land at eight o’clock in the morning but didn’t because of the weather so they all showed up an hour late so that set clinton off and for eight weeks we never got a pass to get off the base where every other class had blanket passes on the weekends and so clinton and and the man had had a drinking problem and this wasn’t the first incident with him but this is the one that broke camel’s back uh when he when he went through that that weather exam as as i said in the book you couldn’t afford to flunk 79 guys right now somebody was going to go ballistic over this so it worked its way up and thank god and we got to the brigade commander’s office and they asked me they said why do you think mr clinton did that and i said well sir because he was drunk well the three of them looked at me like do you know what you just said you accused an officer of this well i was a little bit older than most cadets i joined the army i was 21 the day i came in and all the other classmates they were 19 20 year olds and been around the military all my life i had an idea how things worked so i was i was going to play my trump card and that’s and that’s where i played the trump card was with the brigade commander you know over the next couple of days they called in every day they call in three guys and they’d ask them the same questions and and everybody backed my my comments up so uh we got mr clinton got rid of mr clinton got this rid of sergeant [ __ ] and i use the name sergeant [ __ ] uh i never heard the guy ever speak he had he had tattoos covering them everywhere before tattoos were popular and so i don’t know anything about the man outside of he never said anything so i figured it was more but then after that we we went into our advanced training uh huey transition was the following monday morning and things went along really well after that with the unit major kid him it was a he was a great guy how did you like that huey when you started flying it oh i loved it i still love the huey to this day the huey’s a fantastic aircraft had plenty of power even the delta models had plenty of power they were forgiving they were just they were a dream to fly and they still are it’s isn’t it great well i guess it’s not too crazy i mean i joined the navy in 1990 and we still had huey’s and they’re still huey’s right now uh the army’s put all layers in museums what about the marine corps uh the marine corps has got a different huey they got a big beefed up one okay muscular things twin engines and i’m not sure if it’s got four rotor blades or just two but uh they’ve got a beefed up huey uh that’s much much bigger than the army’s ever wore so it’s great aircraft i mean why wouldn’t still be using today i don’t know i mean we got the blackhawks now yeah they’re way bigger than i mean they’re way smaller than a blackhawk though oh yeah yeah yeah tiny we could get uh we could get six combat troops uh besides the crew crew four aboard and had power to you know to do things and stuff like that the blackhawk when we assaulted into iraq uh back during desert storm uh there was 15 guys in my aircraft with me and uh my rto is my and i had one squad of infantrymen with me when we went in so much more power much more a much faster aircraft and it was an aircraft the blackhawk i was on the the test bed for they were designed in case we went into war with iran and that’s that’s really what we were looking at for an aircraft they could get the altitude uh the mountainous out mount altitude around iran uh to replace the huey and the blackhawk was the the choice over it they were two there was a boeing put a proposal up for the utas and then sikorsky put a proposal up for the utas it was called utas at that time uh utility tactical transport system and uh sikorsky is the one that won so and it seems like when you look at the the huey it’s like a freaking 1969 muscle car just in terms of hey that’s the engine there’s you know you see the the the uh aircraft now the helicopters there’s so many computer parts too it’s like when you open up the the hood of a car nowadays you don’t know what the hell’s in there right it’s all you can’t you can’t fix any of it with a wrench but you look at you look at the huey who’s the guy crewing the huey the guy was eight 19 years old maybe 20 and he was the crew chief and what those kids did with those engines was just amazing they’d work on them and you know i was a pilot and the most dangerous thing you could do is let the pilot up there around the engine my crew chief wouldn’t dare do that but these kids they really maintain those things well what what they couldn’t do at the operator level at the crew chief level they went into the the maintenance level which is right there with our unit and they were all 19 and 20 year olds doing the sheet metal work and the electronics i took a bullet through the through the wiring bundle one day and the wiring bundle was about that thick and it was maybe 35-40 white wires in there and i saw a kid sit down and sit there and put each one of those wires back properly to each one of them to get that get the communications and the electronics all working uh it to me it was a bunch of spaghetti so um let’s fast forward a little bit let’s get to let’s get to vietnam um
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