TINS! Hit The Mattresses...

I got some pretty nice comments on the post of a couple of days ago

*waving hi to AFSis*

including a poser with a vid link from XBradTC and a memory-jogger from frequent commenter and brother Viet Vet R Jewell

That TINS wouldn't be something like this would it.......?

 CLICK HERE and scroll to the middle of the page.
 

I knew *exactly* what I’d see. The parts that got the most stress on faithful old Hubert were at the crosstube attaching points on the skids -- especially if you hooked a piece of PSP during takeoff. And, since Sarge B admitted (in a moment of weakness) that he liked TINS! -- Happy Birthday, B!

Right about noon of one of the days that all ran together in early December, ’69, Copperhead 36 called in to say that he and his playmate (I’ll call him 33 because it probably wasn’t) were inbound from Moc Hoa and they had a slight problem. While they were at the rearm pad, Chawles-Baby began walking mortar rounds toward them, and, rather than hang around to observe firsthand what would happen when an 82mm landed on top of two tons of rounds, rockets, and flares, they decided to return to Can Tho for lunch. They were so enthused about getting outta Dodge that 33 hooked his right skid on the PSP just as he was pulling an armful of pitch and stomping full left pedal *before* he broke ground.

*snap* *keee-rack* *tuuuuuuuunnnnnnggggg*

The bad news was, right skid broke loose at the forward attaching point and was hanging by the aft attaching point, oriented down and right.

The good news was, it was still attached and hadn’t gone up into the rotor system.

The bad news was, it was still attached. Ever try to land a Charlie-model Huey on one skid? In a revetment?

Recall, if you will, that the guys who built the sandbag padding for 803 in R Jewell’s pix did so in the middle of a nice open area. Our revetments were walled enclosures open at front and rear, wide enough for a Hubert’s fuselage and gun pylons – and that’s it. And, since pretty much everybody else was out combating the atheistic hordes of godless Commies roaming the neighborhood, the task of coming up with something that a gunship with only one skid could land on (and that would be sturdy enough to keep it from rolling -- the revetment had *walls*, remember?) fell to the only folks still in the area: Six (our CO), the Company Clerk, the Supply Officer and the New Kid.

*sigh*

How'd you guess who the New Kid was?

Six realized there weren’t enough of us to start filling sandbags for a hasty berm – we needed something with a soft covering that wouldn’t crunch the belly and rupture the fuel tank, but was tough enough to withstand the weight of the aircraft and solid enough to keep it upright. Aha! A dozen US Army™ mattresses oughta do it! For those of you who have never been introduced to an official Gummint Issue mattress, think of a futon stuffed with wood shavings and rebar. We slept on cots and propped the mattresses against the cots for protection from mortar fragments until we could nip into the bunkers.

And there were just enough of us to haul a dozen mattresses out to a revetment, create a small wall sloping inward (the belly of the beast is rounded) with two folded mattresses to support the gun pylon to help keep the helicopter from rolling and

Oh. That dangling skid.

Okay,” said Six. “Here’s the plan.”

Just in time. Here they came.

We waved 36 to a revetment farther down the flight line, halted 33 twenty feet from the revetment (and at a fifteen-foot hover) and the four of us twisted the skid off the remaining attaching point. I was just ready to say, “Geez, that was easy enough,” when Six pointed to our mattress bulwark, twenty feet away and rippling in 33’s rotorwash. “We’re gonna have to hold ‘em down ‘til he gets there.” Okay, for the benefit of those who are nuance-impaired, what he just said was, “We’re gonna have to flop on those mattresses to keep them in place while five tons of metal hovers over us and then starts to land. On top of us.”

Which is exactly what we did.

The good news was, our weight kept the mattresses from flopping while 33 hovered in.

The bad news was, we realized there wasn’t enough room for all of us to scramble out from beneath him when he started to settle onto the mattresses. And us.

The good news was, one tall gangly not overly bright intrepid individual figured he could keep enough of the mattresses in place for long enough to let the others pop out and still have time to roll out to the side himself just before 33 *did* settle onto the pile (Hey, they tell you in ossifer school, don’t ever ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself, and if this situation ever arose again, I wanted an out: “Okay, your turn…”). The others showed their appreciation by motioning 33 to settle g-e-n-t-l-y and then hollering, “He’s three inches above you -- get the %$#@! outta there!”

The good news is, I found I could ease up the side of the sloped mattresses and just use my right arm to keep the ones directly under 33 from flailing.

The bad news is, I almost forgot my right arm was still *under* the belly when 33 settled.

The other bad news is, when I scrambled up and over at Warp Five, I slammed against the revetment wall and dropped face-up between the wall of revetment (steel) and the wall of mattress (wood shavings, rebar) -- and the mattresses started to *compress*.

Cool. Not.

Three-three’s crewchief was watching the whole thing -- rather laconically, to my mind -- from the crew well above me and I could see him mouth the words, “Yeah, if we roll any further, we’ll squash him, but the blades should clear the top of the revetment.”

Wellsir, they *didn’t* roll any further. The mattress wall shifted a tad, but the extra padding under the pylon kept 33 upright, even after engine shutdown. *And* it only took two guys to tug me out from between the revetment and the mattresses. When he was yanking on my leg, Six said, “You know, if they *had* rolled and smacked the blades, do you have any idea what would’ve happened to you?”

I said, “Yeah -- I’d be tucked here under the mattresses watching blade chunks hitting all the guys standing around watching the tranny fall on me.”

Heh. The start of a beautiful friendship…