Centaur Flight Helmets
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Gary Schmidt Cobra Crew Chief served 3 tours with the Centaurs. He was inspired by the original Flight Helmets page and decided to restore his. Being a master helicopter Modeler he was able to build the missing helmet microphone from spare parts.
Richard Parrish: I had already shipped a footlocker and an aluminum box full of items home. But when I went down to CampnAlpha at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon to catch my flight home, I was still wearing my flight suit and flight jacket. I didn’t have any civilian clothes with me except for a pair of blue jeans rolled up in my helmet bag with my flight helmet.
While stationed at Long Binh, those of us who were pilots in F Troop had given our flight helmets to one guy who took them to Vung Tau and got them painted and lacquered over a two- or three-day period while he was “socializing with the natives.” Then he brought all our helmets back.
When you went through Tan Son Nhut, at departure the air police searched your bag to make sure you weren’t taking home weapons or anything like that. This air policeman stopped me and said that I was not authorized to leave with flight gear, meaning my flight jacket and my helmet. He was going to confiscate them. So I told him, “Airman, I’ll tell you what, you just sign a hand receipt for those.” He asked, “A hand receipt, what’s that?” I replied, “That’s just a receipt that says you took them from me and now they’re in your possession, because when I get back to Fort Hood, Texas, and they intend to charge me for the loss of my flight jacket and my flight helmet, I’m going to have your name that they can send a bill to instead of me.” He looked at me really hard, and then he handed me back my helmet and my flight jacket, and I got on the plane with them. That’s how I got my helmet home. "