Inventing Air Assault and Air Mobile Operations -- Hans Halberstadt
The US Army's 8th Transportation Company deployed to Viet Nam the hard way, by ship, in 1961...four years before most Americans think the war in Southeast Asia kicked off. For those of us who were part of the 8th during the first couple of years, it was an interesting time and an interesting place, a lot like the Adventures of Terry and the Pirates, but with real bullets and real blood.
That was almost fifty years ago now. While a lot of things have changed in the wide, wonderful world of warfare, a great many of the things that the 8th Trans and her sister company, the 57th, did for the first time are still being done today. Those Army aviators -- and some Marines, too -- of half a century ago essentially invented air mobility, and they did it on the spot, under fire.
The ideas for air-mobility and air-assault missions based on the helicopter were initially formed during the Korean war ten years earlier, in the early 1950s, but had to wait for practical aircraft to be fielded. The H-19, H-34, H-57, and H-21 were the first practical US military helicopters and were soon followed by the UH-1 and CH-46 and -47. And while the Army had some ideas about what the helicopter could do in battle, it was up to the 8th and 57th Transportation Companies to work out, for the first time, how to use helicopters effectively in combat.
I was a bit player in this passion play, an 18-year-old PFC right out of Fort Rucker's helicopter mechanics' schools who arrived at Tan Son Nut airport in October 1962 and was then sent off to the 8th Trans at Qui Nhon. As it happened, I had a Rolliflex 120 camera and a good supply of film and, rather than attend to my duties as a helicopter door-gunner, I goofed off a bit more than I should by making photographs of our adventures.
I'm assembling this site to share with those in the aviation-geezer-warrior community one year in II Corps. All my photographs from that year will be posted on this site, and I would be happy to post those of others, as well as any recollections, lies, fibs, exaggerations, war stories, maps, menus, photographs of local maidens of the time, or pretty much anything else that seems to fit.