R Jewell sniffed the TINS! I promised in the comments and thereby simplified my intro considerably –
"sniff a good TINS"......."sniff" .......as in "sniffer"......an apparatus installed in a UH-1 back in the day. You go flying around the countryside slow and low and it could supposedly pick up the scent of Victor Charles. Definitely not a fun mission.....
Which piqued ry’s curiosity (Hah. What *doesn’t*?) –
Though, I gotta wonder how such a gas chromotography apparatus would work. With all the air turbulance and stuff(vapors, exhaust) from the helo that'd have to be accounted for somehow. I wonder what the detection regime for Hoc Nam is? was it like a paper for a specific molecule or was it more like a gas chromatograph that gave you a signal in the cockpit? Sorry, chemistry flashback. Was it in tight to the aircraft or towed? That would indicate method of action and sate my curiosity quite a bit.
By “Hoc Nam” I presume you mean “nuoc mam” – which is a delicacy made from fish stuck in a cast iron pot and left out in the sun for a couple of weeks. We didn’t need a Sniffer to find *that*, even from 1,500 feet…
Oh-tay. A People Sniffer was a suitcase-sized gas chromatograph triggered by ammonia that mounted just behind the pilots’ armored seats. The molecular collectors were two longish tubes mounted on either side of the aircraft and wire-stabilized. When you had any kind of forward airspeed, the booms swept through clean air, because the rotorwash vectors and the blade vortices swept – ummmm, I see the glazed looks, so I’ll skip the aerodynamics – and because the engine was mounted to the rear and aft of the cargo compartment, no exhaust gases got to the collectors unless you were flying backwards.
Why ammonia? Because human sweat and urine contains ammonia. Find the ammonia and you find the humans, even hiding under triple canopy jungle, right? So, the premise was that, by flying low and slow over the verdant foliage, the Sniffer would register any concentration of ammonia molecules, thus enabling us to tag the bad guys skulking beneath all three canopies by picking up their B.O. and the aroma from their slit trenches.
Except the whiz kids who came up with that idea didn't know that *monkeys* sweat, too, and *everything* that lives in the jungle pees. A lot.
Most pilots flew Sniffer or defoliation missions at about ninety knots, just above the treetops, because it was as fast as you could fly and still get effective results *and* you had the airspeed to git outta Dodge when the guys fifty feet beneath you started getting annoyed. I took the opposite tack – I flew in the treetops at sixty knots because my crewchief and gunner could get a better look at what was moving underneath and to the sides *and* since the baddies were trained to lead helicopters flying at ninety knots, I figured that gave me room to bail laterally when they erected the tracer wall where I would have been if I were flying at ninety knots. Most of the time, it worked.
Our Sniffer babysitter was an Army advisor we knew as “Rice-Paddy Daddy” because he was even older than I was – had to have been twenty-five, at least. We’d pick him up at the MACV compound in Bac Lieu or the airstrip at Ca Mau, he’d brief us on the area to sweep and off we’d go with a light fire team of Copperheads in trail. When Sniffer registered an ammonia concentration, R-P Daddy would evaluate it and either announce “hot spot” or ”prob’ly monkeys” and we’d dot our tac map with a grease pencil so he could play Connect the Dots while we refueled and see if there was anything worth further investigation. Got the whole visual? On this particular morning, we were sweeping the U Minh Forest west of Ca Mau…
I was weaving through the aerial valleys formed by the lower treetops to avoid flying in a predictable path at about sixty-five knots and the Copperheads were hanging back a little further than normal so they could keep up their own speed by weaving to my rear in free cruise. Rice-Paddy Daddy was staring at the Sniffer, occasionally saying “hot spot” over the intercom. About fifteen minutes into the mission – just long enough for the boredom to kick in – three things happened simultaneously: R-P Daddy hollered, “Hot spot! Hot spot! Holy sh*t, hot-hot-hot spot!”, the green tracer wall erupted through the trees where we would have been if I’d been flying at ninety knots, and Copperhead Lead hollered “In hot with rockets!”
And I caught a couple of peripheral rounds through the nose of the aircraft. Okay, so *four* things happened simultaneously -- and while all that was going on, I yanked hard right, dove for the deck and boogied away from the action at a hundred and twenty knots.
Okay, okay, so *five* things happened simultaneously…
I told the Copperheads I was clear and we’d meet at Ca Mau to count noses and bullet holes. They beat me there -- and I had a good five-klick head start.
The nice thing about a Sniffer mission was that it was always really, really *short*...
Well, since none of the bullet holes were closer than a foot to anything really important, R-P Daddy took the map back to the Ca Mau TOC to get some artillery cranked up while we opened our 4-ounce cans of lunch. It didn’t bother me one teensy bit that I got Ham and Limas.
See, ry? You can get good information from TECHINT, but in order to make it actionable, you need HUMINT, too -- even though, at that point in time, us HUMs were primarily concerned with getting out of the aerial impact area INTact...
‘Nother TINS! later on the same subject, but it's not as funny…
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© Original Content 2003-2011 John Donovan
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All rights reserved. © other material retained by owners and used by permission or excerpted under "Fair Use"
Copied and pasted here is Phoenix 6's recollection of 15 April 69, somewhere in the A Shau Valley.
-I did not visit the site of the accident--however if memory serves me right, Mortensen and Warnick, with Dunbar as crew chief were on a first light sniffer mission flying at tree top level against the rising sun. They apparently flew into a dead tree which I suppose would not be visible in the glare of the sun against the wind shield.
Sniffer operators were also killed.....a Major Lovsnes and Cpt Young, if my research is correct. I remember being surprised at the rank of the operators.....wish I knew more about that aspect.
I'm two for Two at guessing Bill's upcoming TINS.......time for me to retire with a perfect record.
Sure, amines make sense. I was thinking much more difficult though. Like a detecable molecule that would say Vietnamese people.
I forget what the red fish sauce is called, but man is it nasty. Back in OC there wasn't a cafeteria that didn't have a little pot of the stuff on every table. That and the red chilli sauce(typically with a picture of a rooster on the bottle for some reason0. people drown their pho in both, but I don't touch the stuff.
Your right, I forgot that the airflow isn't necessarily straight down. Lift is from the pressure differential from top to bottom of the rotor, and that's variable pitch (so you can have the bird 'pulled' forward by the lift from the spinning blade), so something forward could be far enough away from rotor induced air flow to not foul the sensor. See, all I needed was a hint. (oh, look, something shinny)
Trouble is you usually find find position which have no interest instaying hidden and later they'll probably know that a heli means detection anyways.
It was messy.
This was a memory jog. My first six months in Vietnan I was the "Targets" officer in II FF Hq responsible for targeting B-53 strikes. One of the assets available to me was the 29th Chem Det.
equipped with the "sniffer" Most mornings the sniffer operator & I flew (with reluctant helo crews) over areas of III Corps tactical zone that other intel sources indicated were "hot". We did get a lot of false positives, but we also got shot at a lot (and occasionally hit). I had the last laugh though -two Vs of three B-52s and 60 tons of bonbs. I even had the opportunity to interview the few of the survivors of those strikes later in the III Corps PW enclosure. The sniffer was an imperfect but valuable tool.
From an airplane, I dunno how high up, but let's say 1 mile, a fifth of that being water. Shouldn't that also work with insurgents in a jungle ? I mean, a city is out on account of all the pipes, cars and whatever. But in a jungle the only metal would be near persons, and persons in a jungle where there shouldn't be persons would be targets...
Try the same thing over dry ground and you'll pick up magnetic variations in the bedrock before you'll pick up refined metal -- there's just too much "background noise" from the earth itself.
First of all, we weren't looking for just fire team or squad-sized elements -- we were looking for elements that were company-sized and larger. Usually a *lot* larger.
Secondly, we had to have a pretty good idea where they were, say within a five-miles, or so -- we didn't just go out looking to see what we would or wouldn't find.
Third, the larger elements would be more apt to shoot because they had more assets -- and in a base camp, they'd have at least six heavy machineguns set up in mutually-protective firing positions.
Fourth, the NVA awarded an "I'm a Hero" medal to anybody who shot down a helicopter, which carried a lot of prestige and (I was told) would exempt the wearer from a lot of the more onerous details in a base camp, and that made a lot of them pretty eager to get one.
Fifth, they *knew* that a single slick with a gunship escort meant they were going to get hammered if they were discovered, so they didn't have anything to lose by shooting us down -- and, if we crashed into their position, so much better for them, because that meant the artillery wouldn't shoot until somebody in *another* helicopter scouted the area to confirm the crew was dead, which gave them time to pack before they unassed the area or went down into the third layer of tunnels.