The New Centaur Commander - 1972
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When I got to Vietnam (where) I knew they had a GS15 at Headquarters that was authorized an OH-58 with pilot and I tried to get that position but there was such a shortage of pilots in country I was sent to the 12th AVN Gp and on to the 4th Calvary as a UH-1 pilot. I was one of the older pilots in our unit because of my prior service and my break in service. Since I didn’t drink, at night I always volunteered for the “fire-fly” missions to fly around our compound to watch out for Charlie trying to sneak into the compound. That was in addition to my daily missions in support of our infantry platoon.
My hours added up fast. I was always training my crew chief to fly in case I got wounded while I was out flying without a copilot. We were so short of pilots that we could not get all of our helicopters off at one time. The gun ships were always fully manned and the insertion ships were fully manned, but the mail runs and ash and trash runs were usually solo pilots. When we got notice our new commander, MAJ John Spencer, 
was at headquarters to be picked up I volunteered to go and get him. He was a Caribou pilot that had forty hours UH-1 transition time and on to the Nam to get his command time. He was a major and a cool dude. On the way back to Lhe Khe I lost the transmission oil pump sump seal and started pumping my transmission fluid overboard under 2000 psi pressure. I called mayday on the unit operational frequency and they bounced Cobras as covering birds until they could get maintenance out to me. Now I was over the Iron Triangle when I called mayday. We never, never owned that terrain.
I rolled the ship up on its side so I could lose altitude and descend at the same time because I was afraid of transmission seizure. When I hit the ground my crew chief and gunner jumped out to secure a perimeter and the new CO started to unbuckle to get out. I yelled: “Keep your God damn seat while I make an emergency shut down.” After I got it shut down, I explained to him that if we had had a transmission seizure the rotor blades would have pulled the transmission to the left front and could have whacked his head off if he was in that quadrant. We then got out and got some weapons that I kept on board and helped with the defensive perimeter until maintenance flew in. They fixed my bird and I flew the maintenance bird with the new commander back to our unit.
Because I was out so much with the commander, I never got my own call sign. I was always Centaur 6A. The CO was always 6.