Comments for TINS!* HUMINT and TECHINT and tracers -- oh, my!

TINS!* HUMINT and TECHINT and tracers -- oh, my!

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:28:45 -0600

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...

Comment from BillT on 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:37:55 -0600

...what was the benefit of these patrols when they would fire at helicopters and give away their position...

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.

Comment from BillT on 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:14:14 -0600

MAD works because a sub cruising 200 feet below the surface in water 500 or more feet deep is isolated from other magnetic sources -- it's 300+ feet away from anything else with a magnetic field, so it's an anomaly. MAD is sensitive enough to detect the variation, but it's range is pretty limited.

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.

Comment from DoesNotMatter on 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:33:16 -0600

Actually that makes me wonder: Submarines can be detected by magnetic anomaly detection (MAD).
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...

Comment from Dad on 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:33:02 -0600

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.

Comment from BillT on 2008-07-19

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:54:32 -0600

We usually just found small concentrations but that day we hit a base camp, NVA and VC, so it was well-defended. We figured they were probably rehearsing for an attack on a couple of mud forts to the south or east.

It was messy.

Comment from DoesNotMatter on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:48:35 -0600

That approach would have also caught positions not trying to bag themselves a helicopter. I. e. I dunno, forward supply depots, observation posts or large "reserve" positions established either to exploit a gap in american lines or strike suddenly in a coordinated manner (A proto Tet so to say).

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.

Comment from Ymarsakar on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:36:14 -0600

Bill, what was the benefit of these patrols when they would fire at helicopters and give away their position, anyways?

Comment from ry on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:02:58 -0600

I didn't think things were that sensitive back in the day.

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)

Comment from R Jewell on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:46:31 -0600

Excellent account, Bill. Flying low and slow though, not all losses came to enemy fire. C/158AH lost our first crew after coming incountry on just such a sniffer mission.

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.

Comment from BillT on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:31:42 -0600

What did they use in purple smokes that made them smell like a hookers' convention?

Comment from Jason on 2008-07-18

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:18:09 -0600

I have an old Chem Corps buddy who flew people-sniffer missions in Nam also, great fun. The people-sniffer (will have to look up the official nomenclature) was developed by the Edgewood Arsenal gang because Nam was boring, no chemical warfare, so they focused on colored smoke grenades, napalm and other incendiaries (M101A1 FLASH), and herbicides (in addition to the sniffer). All the uncontroversial things...