Tennessee Waltz
Tennessee Waltz
It took me twenty-seven years to make it from Alabama to the Vietnam Memorial,
"The Wall," in Washington, DC. It wasn't the distance that kept me
away. Anyone can drive from my place to The Wall in twelve hours. In fact, I came within a hundred yards of
completing the trip, not once but twice. The first time was the day after my
District Manager and my wife fired me. Twelve hours later, I was sitting on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial looking at The Wall. I don't know how long I sat
there. After a while I got up, walked back to my old pickup, and drove home.
Ten years later, I came home from the mill where I work. It isn’t much of a job,
but I haven't had much ambition in a longtime. I walked up to my cabin and
called Jimbo, my old blue tick hound and the only friend I had in the world. He
didn’t answer. I walked around back and saw him curled up in his rocking
chair. I knew he was dead. I pulled his battered quilt over his haunches,
turned and headed back to my truck. I drove straight through and ten hours
later, as the rising sun woke Washington, I was once again sitting on the steps
below Abraham Lincoln.
I looked across the expanse of grass and through the trees separating me from The Wall and cried
for a while. Then I went back to my
truck and drove home. I wrapped Jimbo in his quilt and buried him on the side
of Lookout Mountain. Yesterday, with no trauma to prompt it, I drove back to
the Wall. I walked along the sidewalk across from the Lincoln Memorial, glanced
at Abe, gave him a little salute and kept walking. I knew I would make it this
time.
The sun had been up less than twenty minutes.
The helicopters, mostly Hueys, were already making their regular runs
back and forth from places I didn’t know, to the White House. It was fitting
that Hueys would be flying on the day I finally made to The Wall, for I’d spent
almost three years flying Hueys in Vietnam.
I didn’t fly a shiny, leather upholstered, well-insulated model like those that
flew over The Wall on their VIP sorties. I flew stripped down, patched, dirt
and bloodstained models. In the language of my time, I was a “Slick Driver.” A
slick was a stripped down Huey, without doors. A simple steel frame, nylon bench ran its width. A slick had a crew of four – pilot, copilot, crew chief and a door gunner. Our primary
job was transporting troops in, and hopefully out, of isolated landing zones.
I flew thousands of missions, sometimes a hundred or more in a day. In three
successive tours in Vietnam, all with the Nomads, I lost many friends, including two copilots, four door gunners, a crew chief, a company commander, a
platoon leader and countless others… and I lost The Tennessee Waltz.
The Tennessee Waltz was the toughest loss. The Waltz wasn't a man. Tennessee Waltz
was a helicopter crewed by four men and a dog. That’s right, a dog. JoJo was his name.
And even though the army doesn’t know it, JoJo’s name is on The Wall with the
rest of the crew of The Waltz, exactly where it should be.
The Nomads weren’t always called the Nomads. Aviation units in the states
aren’t allowed to adopt a nickname, or non-standard helicopter markings, individual
headgear, or any number of other things that units in Vietnam did. When the
Nomads arrived in Vietnam in 1966, they were C Company of the 225th Aviation
Battalion, just another helicopter outfit in a place suddenly overrun with
helicopter companies.
In their first eight months in Vietnam, they were reassigned to the 181st
Aviation Battalion, then the 217th and finally the 335th. They went from one
end of the country to the other before they finally stuck in the Delta with the
335th. By that time, helicopter units all over Vietnam were coming up with names
for themselves. After three in country moves in eight months, and by unanimous
vote, the men of C Company renamed themselves The Nomads. Within hours of the
vote they realized they had a problem. No one knew what a Nomad looked like,
much less how to paint one on the front of a Huey.
Other companies in Vietnam had names like Nighthawk, Robin Hood, Boomerang and
Greyhound. Those companies had no problem coming up with a logo and painting it
on the nose of their ships. The Greyhounds didn’t have to paint a thing. They
asked the Greyhound Corporation for help and received decals for each of their
helicopters. Finally, Major Simmons, the Nomad’s Company Commander threw up his
hands and said, “Ok, each crew can paint a mascot or name of the front of their
Huey.” As an afterthought he added, “Just try to keep it semi-tasteful.”
You can imagine the results of that directive. The Aussies, stationed next to
us, began to call us the HNW Combat Aviation Company. They explained that HNW
stood for “half naked women.” That was the general trend until Captain Ed
McKinney appeared on the flight line with the outline of the state of Tennessee
painted in dark red on the nose of his Gunship. Inside the distinctive outline
of the state, lettered in bright red were two words, “Tennessee Waltz.”
Ed, his copilot, Roy Gill, door gunner Sam Heredia and crew chief Carl Green
were already legends in the company. No matter how hot the situation everyone
knew that you could count on them to take the heat off. That’s the job of a
gunship crew, protecting the slicks while we loaded or unloaded troops.
With Tennessee Waltz painted on the nose of their ship, they became even bigger
legends. Now both sides could easily identify them. 9th Division and 5th
Special Forces began to ask for Tennessee Waltz when they knew the landing
zones were going to be hot.
The entire crew of Tennessee Waltz volunteered for a second tour in Vietnam with the stipulation they could continue to fly together. At the end of their second tour,
they signed up for a third. By that time, they lived together, sharing a
four-man tent near the flight line. It was unheard-of for enlisted men and
officers to live together, but it just seemed natural for the crew of Tennessee
Waltz to do it.
About halfway through their first tour, a dog joined Tennessee Waltz. The way I
heard it, they were covering the extraction of a Special Forces Team one
afternoon. The slicks pulled the A Team out just ahead of a company of Viet
Cong who were in hot pursuit. With the slicks safely way, Captain McKinney made
one more pass over the empty landing zone. That’s when Sergeant Green, The
Waltz’s crew chief spotted the dog heading for the center of the LZ with VC hot
on his heels. Green shouted over the intercom, “Captain, there’s a dog in the
LZ and it looks like he could use a dust off.”
Captain Ed McKinney loved dogs more than he loved most men. He didn’t hesitate,
pressing the intercom transmit button as he swung The Waltz back toward the
landing zone, “Get him on quick, Carl, Charlie is about to own this place.”
The dog ran into the middle of the LZ and stopped like he knew that he was
about to be dusted off and it happened every day of his life. As soon as Ed
put the skids on the ground the dog ran for the gunship. He jumped from ten
feet out, and Carl caught him in midair. Both of them went down in the middle
of the Huey. Sam screamed into the intercom, “He’s on, Sir. GO!”
Tennessee Waltz sprang into the air like it had been shot from a gun. None too
soon either, as rockets and mortars suddenly rained down on the LZ. Carl named
the mutt, JoJo. He said that when the pint-sized, black mongrel barked, it
sounded like he was saying “JoJo, JoJo.” After he explained it, you could
almost hear it.
Carl and Sam made a harness for JoJo. When they flew he was tethered onto the
bench beside Carl. When Carl was hanging out on the skid firing his M60 machine
gun, JoJo sat on the bench taking in the action like it was nothing at all.
That dog was one of the coolest heads under fire that I have ever seen.
With almost three tours complete, I guess the men and the dog of Tennessee
Waltz knew they were on borrowed time, but they didn’t talk about it nor did they
become more conservative. If anything, passing time made them even more daring. They
went up against overwhelming odds over and over, and they won. The legend of
Tennessee Waltz continued to grow. I guess that’s the way legends work.
Late one September afternoon, I was flying back from Vung Tau. I had made a run
down to pick up some engine parts, and, of course, as many cases of chocolate
milk as my crew chief and door gunner could scrounge. We were halfway back to
our base camp, enjoying the quiet afternoon when our battalion radio channel
came to life.
“Any ship near LZ Tall Tree, we have a gunship down, over.”
I hit my radio transmit button, “HQ, Nomad 5, we are less than ten clicks from
Tall Tree, over.”
“Roger, Nomad 5, 9th Division reports that one of our guns took a direct hit
and is down at the edge of the LZ, can you check it out?”
I had already banked into a steep right turn when my copilot responded, “We’re
on the way.”
Nose down, throttle wide open we were screaming toward Tall Tree within seconds
when we got the second message, “Nomad 5, it’s Tennessee Waltz that’s down.”
I couldn’t speak. I just clicked my transmit button twice to acknowledge that
I’d received the message.
We saw the smoke two or three minutes before we were over the crash. There was
nothing we could do. The gunship was scattered over a one-hundred yard swath
through the middle of the LZ. The only part big enough to identify was the nose
cone, facing up. I pulled a tight circle around it and we saw in bright red
lettering, “Tennessee Waltz.”
I continued to circle. That was stupid, but I guess I was in shock. Four of my
best friends and the greatest little dog I have ever known… all gone, just like
that. I came back into the moment when heavy automatic weapon fire ripped into
the bottom of my Huey. The control column tried to shake itself out of my hands,
and half my gauges bottomed out while the other half flew into the red.
I knew I couldn’t put down in the LZ. I turned in the general direction of our
camp while Red Nixon, my copilot, began screaming "Mayday" followed by our coordinates. Theo
Smith, my door gunner, and Jimmy Wilson, the crew chief, were throwing out
engine parts and chocolate milk as I fought to keep the Huey in the air. Two
miles later the engine flamed out and I slammed it down in a rice paddy. Jimmy and
Theo pulled their machine guns as Red and I flipped switches, shutting down
what power was left in the slick. The last message from headquarters came
through as Jimmy opened my door and began to help me out of the cramped
cockpit.
“Nomad 5, hang on, guns are on the way, but it’ll be at least fifteen minutes
before they get to you.”
Jimmy and I groaned at the same time. We knew there was no way we would last
fifteen minutes against a battalion sized unit of VC. We set up the two M60s on
the dike of the paddy. Our only other weapons were the thirty-eight caliber
pistols that Red and I carried.
We lay on the dikes facing the direction of the crashed Tennessee Waltz. We
could hear the Viet Cong charging toward us making no effort to cover the sound
of their advance. They had obviously monitored our radio transmissions and knew we had no immediate help coming.
The first wave of them broke out of the jungle a half mile in front of us and began plunging through the
tall grass toward the feeble dike we were huddled behind. Jimmy and Theo opened
fire. The VC kept coming. I screamed, “Cease-fire, save your ammo,” I’d heard
that in a couple of John Wayne movies. It was a pretty dumb thing to say since
they were less than a hundred yards from us and closing fast.
The silence after the M60s stopped firing was uncanny. Suddenly, it was
shattered by the unmistakable sound of a fast moving Huey. The VC heard it too,
but they were too far from the jungle to hide. The gunship flying at treetop
level appeared over the jungle then dropped to the top of the grass, flying
full-out less than ten feet off the deck. It must have been traveling at a
hundred and thirty knots or better. It was on top of the VC in seconds, twin Gatling
guns blazing, and door gunner and crew chief each with a foot out on the skids
firing M60s.
The first gun run was over in seconds. When the Huey flashed past us, I
saw JoJo sitting on the crew chief’s bench as calm as if he was taking an
evening stroll through the company area. Sergeant Green switched the M60 to his
left hand and saluted as they passed. I returned his salute as best I could
from my prone position.
The gunship made a tight turn and came back for another pass. This time we were
looking right at the nose of the ship, at Tennessee Waltz. The second pass
wasn’t necessary. It was mostly for show and we did enjoy the show. The gunship
continued its course and was quickly lost to our eyes and then our ears. Ten
minutes later, two gunships and a slick from the Greyhounds picked us up. We
didn’t report that Tennessee Waltz saved our lives. In fact, we never even
talked about it among ourselves. I guess we figured that talking about it would
probably take away from it somehow.
The Nomad Company Clerk loved JoJo better than anyone except the crewmen of The
Tennessee Waltz. A couple of weeks later, he told me when he sent in the casualty report
he sent in five names. He added Corporal JoJo Green to the list. I didn’t
believe him until yesterday, when I finally made it to the wall. I looked up at
panel 68, row 7, and read, CPT Ed McKinney, CW2 Roy Gill, SP4 Sam Heredia, SP5
Carl Green, CPL JoJo Green.
I couldn’t help it. I cried, actually I bawled, then reached out and ran my
fingers over the names and shook like a scrub oak in a gale. I don’t know how
long I stood like that. Finally, there were no tears left. With head bowed, I
started back toward my pickup. I heard the sound of a Huey passing over, but I
didn’t pay any attention. I’d been hearing them all morning. Then a little kid
shouted, “Mommy, Mommy, look at the funny helicopter.”
I looked up just as a B Model Huey gunship flew slow and low over the mall. It
was dirty and patched, armed with twin Gatling guns and two M60 machine guns.
It made a tight turn over the reflecting pond and headed toward me. In the
early morning light I saw on the nose, “Tennessee Waltz.” As it passed, I saw
JoJo sitting on the crew chief’s seat. Carl was standing in the doorway, his
dark helmet visor was lowered, but I knew it was him. He grinned and saluted. I
snapped to attention as best I could and returned the salute. Then they were
gone.
I felt a tug on my pant leg and looked down. The five-year-old who had first
spotted The Waltz was looking up at me. “Do you know that dog, Mister?”
I couldn’t talk but I managed to nod. He
stared at me for a few seconds and asked, “How about the men? Do you know the
men, Mister?”
It took me a while to get it out. Finally, I managed to say, “Yes. Yes, I know
them well. They are my best friends.”
His mother gave me a funny look, snatched the boy up and hurried away. I leaned
against the wall, closed my eyes, and heard Lacy J. Dalton singing:
“I was waltzing with my darling to the
Tennessee Waltz.
I remember the night and the
Tennessee Waltz.
Now I know just how much I have lost…”