Centaurs pulled a lot of duty at Dau Tieng. We will use this page to begin listing those memories. When one of the memories gets expanded to a War Story then it will be summarized here and linked to it's own page. Also see CounterMortar Standby
Tom Fleming: The troop LRRPed a lot out of Dau Tieng. Several missions were memorable. On one CPT Vinson was supporting another unit right off the runway and took a round through the floor seemingly missing everything. I told the crew chief to open up the inspection panels and let’s have a look and guess what the push pull rod for the collective was shot in half on the AC controls. It was laying through the frame hole in such a way that if they had made a right turn it would have pulled through and dropped down behind the frame keeping the helicopter in a right turn until it crashed. After Vinson’s helicopter was hit he only made left turns into the runway. One lucky fellow that day. I don’t remember the tail number or the crew chief’s name.
Another time we got into a fire fight up there when I was service platoon leader and we shot up all of Dau Tieng’s rockets. I got on the horn back to Chu Chi and told operations the situation and that we needed amo quick. Well about :45 min later a CH-47 showed up loaded with rockets loose on the floor and crates of 40mm and 7.62. I guess no one told them that the rocket motors might not function well after being stacked out of their box and bounced around let alone the possibility that static electricity might set one off. At any rate we didn’t run out of rockets nor have an incident and we replenished Dau Tieng’s Ammo point.
We spent a good bit of time at Dau Tieng in Jan 1968 in support of 3rd Brigade. Good mission, (Rear Area security) but we almost got a whole bunch of us killed when 1st & 25th Div Arty opened up with a time on target of all available in a strike zone of an Arc Light as we were on short final with the 35 element and had the LT Scts down low as well as two gun teams over the strike zone. How we got everyone clear I’ll never know. I laced into the Brigade CDR and when he asked us to go back in when the artillery finished I told him I didn’t have a pilot that was flyable let alone a helicopter. No one told the Fire Support Coordinator that we were assigned the BDA by the BDE S-3 Maj Brown. Tom
Pat Eastes: I remember sitting on the john one morning when somebody who didn't like us ripped off a magazine or two of AK, which whizzed through the top of the crapper. Didn't take me long to finish.
Tom has vivid memories of several of us nearly getting killed by an Arc Light, and I remember very well that happening to me, but it must not have been the same one, because Bruce Karn says he was flying with me, and he didn't come in country until June of 68 according to his video. Maybe there were two incidents. At any rate, my recall was that of watching one stick of 500 pounders going in, waiting a few minutes and then starting a descent to do a BDA, when a second stick went in, waaayyy to close for comfort. I made a violent right turn, had the collective pulled as high as it would go, and somebody in the back (Karn says it was him) started yelling "RPM,RPM!!", so I glanced inside the cockpit to see the RPM warning light glowing bright, and the tach down to about 6000 and falling. Brilliant aviator that I was, I put the collective down and got the RPM back. Scared the crap right out of me. We narrowly avoided becoming part of the landscape on that one.
We were at Dau Tieng for the Christmas 'truce', which ended at 1700 on Christmas day, I believe. At 1705, we were a light fire team, I think with light scouts, along the Saigon River not far from DT, and we destroyed several sampans that Chuck was using to resupply his troops.
Takeoffs at DT were also, as you no doubt remember, somewhat of an adventure. Northbound, the runway went downhill and then back up, ending at a rubber plantation, and you had to get that loaded Charlie model going well enough to avoid going into the rubber trees. We are here to talk about it, so we must have passed the test.
We were always instructed to not overfly the RazorBacks to the west of DT because the VC had 51s there that were not friendly. I don't know why we didn't go kill them, but I wasn't in charge.
Just a few memories of DT.