Chapter 2 Excerpt

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A mustachioed mannequin would greet you in the middle of the museum. It was clad in a gray, Army-issued full-body flight suit. A gray flight helmet enveloped its head, a black strap hung from its chin, and its eyes were shaded with aviator sunglasses. Clipped to its left breast pocket were two black-and-white photographs. The name of the mannequin – and the man in the photos – was Dick Thompson, one of the museum’s volunteer tour guides.

Spend 10 minutes listening to Dick Thompson, and his light-hearted, carefree spirit will lull you into a sense of security. His calm makes you calm. You can hear the shrug of nonchalance in his voice when he ends his stories, often speaking some variation of “It all seemed to work out.” And you quickly get the sense that he would make any situation work for him. It’s a useful quality to have if you spend two tours flying in a war zone, like Dick did in Vietnam.

“I’ve never been afraid, ever,” he said, with a serious face and an earnest tone. “I’ve thought about why that is, and I have no clue. That’s my personality, I guess. It has nothing to do with Vietnam.”

Dick was born on September 17, 1939, the day the Soviet Union invaded Poland at the onset of World War II. No one in his family had military experience, but he joined the ROTC program when he enrolled at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. It seemed like a good deal: the $25 that he received from the program paid for his room. After he graduated with a B.S. in civil engineering in 1961, Dick moved to Pittsburgh to work at a shipbuilding company. However, through his ROTC arrangement, he had to fulfill a two-year obligation as a reserve officer. And in February 1962, the Army called. He was sent to basic officers class at Fort Lewis in Texas to learn about nuclear weapons. It was the thick of the Cold War, after all.

Then, the Army sent Dick back to Pittsburgh to work on its Nike Hercules missile project. The U.S. government in 1958 began building sites near numerous cities that stored surface-to-air missiles, which could be armed with nuclear warheads, if needed.* Dick’s work supported this Cold War effort, and it was there in Pittsburgh that he saw a sign advertising Army aviation. The ad sparked one of the most important decisions of his life: Pursue a civil engineering career designing bridges and dams after his ROTC obligation expired? Or follow the dreams that the poster stirred up? In the end, the skies called to him.

“What you’re never supposed to do in the military is volunteer, but I did,” Dick said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve always wanted to fly. It looked neat. Just my nature. It fit. So my wife and I talked about it, and I volunteered.”

And so in 1963, Dick opted to enter flight school and accept the three-year Army obligation that came with it. At that point, America’s involvement in Vietnam was minimal. However, that would change at the tail end of his three-year commitment. In 1966, the U.S. government gave Dick his orders. He became part of a massive military build-up in Vietnam. In March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, the first combat troops to arrive.* By the end of 1966, 385,000 American soldiers were there.*  

Dick had been flying fixed-wing planes on assignment in Germany, part of a three-year obligation after flight school. But his new assignment in Southeast Asia forced him to leave behind the aerial jaunts to Paris, London, and Copenhagen, as well as the memorable night flights in which he would sometimes land in a farmer’s field, with bean bags and small flashlights guiding him to the ground. Now he was off to Vietnam, and, having been out of the American news cycle, he knew little about what he was getting into. 

“I had no clue,” Dick said. “I didn’t know what it was. I had no idea why we were there.”

When he arrived, the stench was the first thing that caught his attention. It smelled of poor sanitation and war.

“The water is beautiful, especially when you’re flying over it,” Dick said. “Now, I wouldn’t want to be in it.” 

And he didn’t have to, because he was assigned to be a flight maintenance officer, working within a military intelligence unit. To prepare, he spent three months at multi-engine school at Fort Rucker in Alabama, learning to fly a new type of plane and upgrading his clearance so that he could work with classified material.  

In Vietnam, Dick had no complaints about his set-up. Because of his role in intel, he lived in a hotel with a bar in the city of Can Tho in the Mekong Delta region. It was located in a protected zone with its own armed guards, South Vietnamese officers known as “White Mice” because of their white uniforms. Their presence allowed Dick to walk the city streets, eating fish dishes featuring prawns and lobster. He found the Vietnamese people whom he met kind, which made him scratch his head.

“It didn’t make much sense to me,” Dick said. “The people were nice. The food was good. And they called it war. I said, ‘OK, this is not what I read about in World War II and Korea.’”

But reminders of war did sometimes pierce the protected bubble. One time, a mortar hit his hotel and blew off the roof. He hid under his Army-issued cot until he thought it was safe. Dick carried a sidearm with him everywhere and slept with his weapons.  

He didn’t sleep much, however. He was usually on a mission in the air. He flew more than 1,000 hours that year, all day, seven days a week.  

His main job was flying with a team that plotted the locations of the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). To map an accurate position, they needed to identify three distinct radio frequencies. So for five hours at a time, they scanned an area’s known frequencies and listened for VC or NVA morse code. The operators in the back of the plane deciphered the taps and patterns. They didn’t translate the actual messages; they merely determined their source. Once a code was found, verified, and marked on a map by the co-pilot, the pilot would guide the plane to that spot. The process would be repeated again and again, until the location had been triangulated. It took about five minutes to complete. Many teams were in the air gathering the same kind of locational intelligence, and all of it was fed into the American headquarters in Saigon. The information painted the bigger picture of VC or NVA troop movements and helped leaders plan strategy.  

Sometimes, the VC or NVA would start shooting at the plane from the ground, because they knew they were being mapped, and the team would only record one point on the triangle before fleeing.

“We picked up bullet holes every once in a while,” Dick said. “No one ever got killed or hurt. But you heard the sound [of bullets] every time you went out. How you hear it, I have no idea over the engine sound and with our headsets on.”

Though extremely important, the job could feel monotonous. Occasionally, something unusual broke the tedium, such as one quiet night in the Fall of 1967 while hovering over an area called Parrot’s Beak in southeast Cambodia. In fact, it was so quiet that Dick hung his helmet on a dangling hook and took a nap. He and his team were flying a Queen Air transport, a special aircraft that housed more sophisticated navigational technology. It was customary for the pilot and co-pilot to take turns napping when working in these planes. It was midnight after all, so Dick seized the chance to rest and gave complete control of the plane to the man next to him.

“All of a sudden, the operator in the back [gets our attention] , and he’s hearing things he’s never heard,” Dick said. “He’s all excited, and I look over at my pilot, and he’s asleep, too. And we’re going due north, and I have no clue how long it was that he was asleep. And the operator starts saying, ‘Oh man, I’m going to get a medal for all these new units I’m identifying.’”

The team should have never ventured that far into Cambodia. It took about 20 minutes to correct their course.

“That was a little different,” Dick said, with his signature nonchalance.

As the napping pilot story highlights, flying in a war zone is many hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror, or by unexpected flashes of humor. For Dick, he was flying up to six hours at a time, sometimes two missions each day.

“It was all routine,” he said. “You get briefings, you do your job, you take care of it, you debrief, and you continue. With 1,200-plus combat hours, I don’t remember 99% of what I did in the air. But if something comes along to break the boredom, you remember it.”

Another late-night mission by Dick and his team jostled them out of their routine. They were working the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, hovering over the thick jungle terrain of the U Minh Forest near the tip of South Vietnam in a small, single-engine plane.

“I remember looking over to the other pilot and saying, ‘If anything happens to us here, they’re not going to find us,’” Dick said.

The operator in the back of the plane was monitoring radio frequencies for chatter. He tracked down an odd transmission, on a channel that wasn’t used very often, and he shared the finding with Dick and the co-pilot. A man’s voice was mumbling in English. Dick started asking questions.

“Who are you? Why are you on this frequency?” he asked.

The mystery man replied: “What do you mean ‘on your frequency?’”

“Well, where are ya?” Dick shot back.

“I’m a taxi dispatcher in Chicago,” the man said.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Dick said. “You want to know where I’m talking to you from?”

“Why?” the dispatcher asked.

“Well, we’re in Vietnam on a night mission,” Dick answered.

The two men continued their chat for about 15 minutes, possibly angering some impatient taxi customers. After all, it was the middle of the day in Illinois.

During another break from the monotony, Dick sought out his own adventure, in the form of an unlikely beer run. In 1967, the naval ship storing beer was blown up in Saigon Harbor, and it sparked a shortage of the beverage that inflated its price throughout South Vietnam, much to the dismay of many American troops, including Dick. He had to do something to fix this.

As it turns out, his platoon sergeant was a man who knew how to track down and get his hands on things.  

“We can get some beer in Saigon,” he told Dick one day. “I’ve got some contacts.”

“Well, I’ve got an airplane,” Dick replied.

As part of his job as a maintenance officer, Dick would repair cargo planes, which meant emptying them first of all electronic gear. He happened to have a vacant cargo plane in the hangar at that moment, just waiting to store an abundance of lager.

The determined duo departed and flew an hour-and-a-half north. When they touched down in Saigon, the sergeant with the connections disappeared. In short order, he returned with the goods – pallets of beer he and Dick piled into the back of the plane.

“I don’t know how he got all the beer,” Dick said. “Never asked. Didn’t care.”

But would he be able to get the packed plane in the air?

“The old adage is that if you can close the door on it, you can get it off the ground,” Dick said. “But we were really, really loaded, overloaded.

He started steering the plane down the 10,000-foot commercial runway in Saigon, and said to himself: “Eh, we’ll get it off the ground”.

Dick needed 8,000 feet of the runway to lift off. He did it. Barely.

Once airborne, the duo had to contend with the plane’s low altitude and slow speed, a result of its heavy cargo. This obviously made them a prime target for the enemy. Sure enough, bullets soon started hitting the underside of the fuselage.

“Everyone was taking pot shots at us. The [American soldiers] were probably taking pot shots at us, who knows. The shots were hitting the beer, and my sergeant was yelling, ‘Dammit, Dick, get this thing higher.’ It was the beer he was p-ed off about. He didn’t care about the bullet holes in the plane, because he knew we could fix those.”

The duo weathered the hail of gunfire, and Dick managed to land successfully. They celebrated by quickly consuming some of their cargo.

“It was worth the trip,” Dick said.

Dick’s first tour ended in January 1968, just as the Tet Offensive started. As the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prepared for their surprise attack, Dick and his intelligence team were recording an increase in morse-code traffic from the VC and NVA. They extended their hours and worked around the clock. He isn’t sure why the U.S. intelligence community was surprised by Tet.

“They didn’t have a feel for the magnitude of it,” Dick said. “When we were getting probed, they thought it was a little harassment. It was not like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get overrun.’ I could have been out of the loop on that, too. Maybe the intel folks knew it and didn’t tell me down at the maintenance line. At our level, we were just data collectors.”

When Dick returned to the U.S., he was still under obligation to the Army. In fact, a pilot’s term of service was typically extended at that time because of the dire need for pilots, Dick said. As it turned out, the Army sent him to aviation school to learn to fly helicopters, an assignment he liked.

“You gotta remember, pilots are nuts,” Dick said. “You can entice them to do anything if you tell them they get to fly a different airplane.”

And so Dick spent 1968 stateside in training, first at advanced maintenance school in Fort Eustis in Virginia, then at helicopter school in Fort Rucker, Alabama. Dick’s wife, Barbara, insisted that she and their two daughters accompany him on this odyssey. However, the only housing they could find in Alabama was a trailer.

“It was like living in a bowling alley,” Dick said with a smile.

It was during this period that he paid a visit to Washington, D.C. to see his detailer, an Army counselor of sorts who would give him his orders for his second tour in Vietnam. Dick had a request that he knew was a long shot: ‘Transfer me out of the intelligence unit.’ But to Dick’s surprise, the detailer listened and offered him an option: ‘I’ll give you command of an aviation maintenance unit, and when you come back to the States, you need to go get your Master’s.’ 

“It sounded like a pretty good deal,” Dick said.  

In April 1968, he returned to Vietnam, this time to the city of Qui Nhon on the coast of the South China Sea. There, he commanded the 79th transportation company, overseeing 500 people who performed heavy aircraft maintenance, such as patching bullet holes, fixing engines, and repairing hydraulics.  

After six months, he moved to group headquarters in Saigon, where he became a head maintenance officer. Dick didn’t fly nearly as much as his first tour, but he did pilot Huey helicopters on combat support missions. His team’s job was to recover downed aircraft and bring them back to the maintenance shop, where they would be rebuilt and sent back into battle.

“It was all work and no bullshit,” Dick said. “The troops worked 24/7, and we could repair anything.”

During lulls, some of the crew made prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs for local orphanages and leper colonies.

“I think they were trying to stay busy, and they liked to use their talents,” Dick said. “I think if you’d ask anybody in the support business – maintenance, supply, transportation – most would say, ‘Oh yeah, we supported an orphanage or leper colony or local hospital.’ To a unit, everybody had somebody they were supporting.”

Dick left Vietnam for good in April 1969. He didn’t fly on a commercial airline on his return trip to the U.S. Instead, he escorted cargo – including pallets of body bags – on a military plane that landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. So he bypassed potential anti-war protests. In fact – interestingly – Dick bypassed the entire political and social upheaval in 1960s America. He was either in Europe, in Asia, or learning on a military base or college campus.  

“Everything was changing, and I was not a part of it,” Dick said. “I was in the middle of it, but I was so far in the middle of it, it made no sense. It all went over my head. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m not oriented that way, too. But I think about that a lot.”

When he returned from Vietnam after Tour #2, Dick and his family settled in Tucson, Arizona for his master’s coursework in aerospace. The transition was challenging for Barbara and their daughters, as they had to invite Dick back into their lives.

“You’re used to living by yourself and making decisions that only involve you,” Dick said. “And your wife has been doing the same thing. It’s a give-and-take and you better give more than you take. It took a while, but it worked out.”

After earning his master’s from the University of Arizona in 1972, Dick became a maintenance test pilot at Fort Eustis in Virginia, and then was given command of a unit.

“That’s where I could see that my time in the service was going to be shortened,” he said. “You had to have commands at the senior level for advancement. Good folks, but you’re a people-pusher, a kindergarten cop. The mission was secondary. Training and checking the boxes was primary.”

Luckily, in the early 1980s, Dick was assigned a job at the Pentagon, designing and engineering future models of American military aircraft. The position melded all of his skills, his education, and his experiences in Vietnam, and Dick loved the work. However, he turned down another offer to command, which is “the kiss of death if you’re in the military,” he said. If he took the assignment, it would have been the end of his marriage, and that was not worth it for Dick. However, he remained at the Pentagon for another five years in development. He spent the rest of his career doing contractor work.

When Dick looks back on his career, he isn’t so interested in parsing the lessons that America and the world should learn from the Vietnam War. For example, he turned off the recent Ken Burns documentary on the conflict. It told a story he didn’t recognize, he said.

“It was all about the politics behind Vietnam, which I didn’t know, because I wasn’t here [in America] and never saw the news,” Dick said.

Dick also refuses to second-guess the strategy and decisions made by the U.S. government during the war.

“That’s above my pay grade,” he said. “The only thing I know is that the people I worked with and myself did what we could, at our level, and I don’t think it was lost at our level.”

Even in retirement, Dick has never ventured far from flying. When students toured the Ruckersville museum after it opened in 2009, Dick was the go-to guide for its fleet of planes. He especially enjoyed escorting guests into the cockpit of the Huey helicopter that was parked in a grassy field in front of the museum. Dick had flown the Huey model during his second tour in Vietnam, and there was a special twinkle in his eye 50 years later when teaching students how to steer it.

And in that moment, when the teenagers’ curiosity was fixed on the proud Vietnam pilot, the power of LaMountain’s museum shined through. Fifty years prior, an American public was quick to suppress the war in its collective memory, but Dick and his fellow veterans at the museum were the stewards of those memories, breathing life into stories seldom told out in the open. When Dick returned from Vietnam and settled back into civilian life, he read the room and believed his own family wasn’t interested in hearing much about his Vietnam experience.

“I got the impression that they were glad I was back and that was that, ‘let’s get on with life’,” Dick said.

LaMountain’s museum allowed Dick an outlet for those untold, bottled-up experiences. And what a series of stories he has to tell us. Some harrowing. Some light-hearted. All in service to a purpose greater than self.