Richard Smith Part I

In the second person:

Hi, my name is Richard Smith and I have an interesting story to share with you.
It was back in 1972. I was just 29 years old.
I was in the country of Laos and was flying on a C - 47 transport tail number 430. Captain Bannerman was at the controls.
We were doing an aerial resupply mission during the battle for skyline ridge. There were 27,000 North Vietnamese regulars trying to take the skyline ridge area of Long Chin valley. Our supplies that we were carrying were  called “hard rice” which was code for high explosives or ammunitions of any kind that were being called for. We picked up the airdrop in Thailand.
We were coming north of the Mekong River flying just south of the “plain to Jars”.  We were at 8 000 feet, I was sitting sideways in the seat looking out a window to my left when the 23 millimeter anti- aircraft round came up right between my feet right between my knees and exploded right above my head level! It was less than a foot away from the high explosives supply we were carrying! It was as if there was an invisible shield between me and the explosion! The explosion took out the plane’s hydraulic system and immediately red hydraulic fluid started spraying down from the overhead. The explosion went upward and my first thought was the airplane's bleeding. It's what your mind does in quick reaction.  I got up and moved right away, like that was a bad place to sit. We broke off the approach to the drop zone and we started heading back. We had to assess the damage.

We knew that we had lost the ability to use our flaps the landing gear and the brakes because they were all hydraulically operated. We were going to land at Vincennes. We were not sure that the landing gear would stay down on landing and if the landing gear collapsed, we could ignite sparks and gas, or it could ignite the explosives so we decided to jettison the cargo alongside the runway. We dropped the cargo swung back around and dropped the landing gear. It stayed down and we made a safe landing. I can't explain how come I didn't get hurt. I just can't explain it! I never received a scratch. Most everybody I share this story with agree that it is unbelievable and in a sense, it is, but there's more to my story. This is the first incident of several that happened to me while I was overseas. Stories that are unbelievable and are just hard to explain.

I want to back up to my early childhood. Before I was five years old I had pneumonia five times, in the hospital or sick most of my childhood. Against the odds, I survived. Finally, I graduated from high school and joined the army. I wanted to be a paratrooper.  
Then maybe I thought, I would be a man and I could make it in this world.

I made it through basic training and through advanced training. They shipped me off to the 82nd airborne division. I then went through jump school at Fort Bragg North Carolina and made my five jumps. I thought, this is it I've done what I wanted to do.  Now I just must finish my hitch in the Army and then off I go with the rest of my life. Before very long they recruited me to be a parachute rigger. I had just finished jump school so I said okay, sounds like fun to learn how to pack parachutes and make airdrops dropping supplies and stuff in Vietnam.

So I went off to jump rigger school in fort Lee Virginia.  I wasn't back more than a month when I was transferred into the Fifth Special Forces the Green Berets in Fort Bragg.

Just down the road from my 82nd Airborne division. Soon I was on a plane headed for Vietnam.  In Nam I was doing a lot of parachute drops of supplies for the special forces. When it came time for a team to do a parachute jump, I would go in with the parachutes and get them all rigged up. I ended up making several jumps myself.  I’m the guy that checks them, makes sure that they get their shoots on correctly. I carried a camera with me. I take the camera when I make a parachute jump so when get out and the parachutes open I can pull the camera out and shoot pictures. I would pick up all the shoots, bring them back to base and repack them and get ready for the next mission whatever that happens to be. The very first unexplainable thing, that to this day nobody can figure out what or how it happened was at an airfield during the monsoon. During monsoon season you could just about set your watch, every day at four o'clock a storm front would come in.  A wall of clouds just as flat as a piece of paper and extending up twenty to thirty thousand feet would come right over you and of course when it hit it started raining cats and dogs and it would rain for twenty to thirty minutes and then it would be over. On this one day we had covered everything up, it was like five minutes to four, we'd all headed for cover. There was two of us, me and Albert Griffith. He was a big guy and I was a little guy. I probably weighed 125 at that time and he was probably close to 200. The two of us were standing just inside the opening of a command post tent with a 10-foot-wide opening and maybe 25 feet deep. Inside this was a field office. It had telephones and radios and all kinds of gear there was a desk, chairs, filing cabinets and a bunk where I was scheduled to spend the night in case an emergency call came in. I would be the first one to jump out of the bunk and go find the right packages that needed to be dropped. Ordinance or whatever needed to go out, I would start that process. Then the when the pilot got there we'd be ready to go.

Well, as I was standing there inside the opening of the tent, Griffith was right next to me on my right. We were watching the storm front come in and there was always a little wind gust ahead of it. The wind gusts would blow the leaves around and maybe flap the tent flaps a little but never amounted to much. On this particular day as I was watching the storm front coming in across the field, out of the corner of my eye I saw Griffith's feet come up in the air about the height of my shoulder. Both of his feet up in the air and I turned to look to see what is going on and as I turned to look, he was flying backwards into where the tent was. It was like the tent had exploded! Like a bomb went off. The tent went flying up into the air along with all the furniture, the desk, the chairs and the filing cabinet, which had all kinds of secret documents in it. Supplies, and all these papers were just flying through the air. Just a huge cloud of stuff was tumbling across the grass. Griffith landed probably 30 feet off into the grass. He was badly skinned up. The metal bunk that I was supposed to spend the night on, was gone. As I turned and looked everything was gone, except the mattress and it didn't even blow my hat off. I was standing there like I was watching a movie or something. Everything was blown away, but I wasn't touched. Not a scratch, and not only that, I had brought a small shortwave radio that I was going to listen to that night and set it on that mattress that was on the bunk.

The mattress looked like somebody had come in and folded the mattress over that radio and set it down on the ground and took the bunk, which was made of steel and blew it away. The mattress was still laying there, me and my stuff were not touched. While I had been doing a lot of airdrops, I had also worked with a company called Air America. I had flown on a few of their planes. While I was still in country, they recruited me to join their company when I got out of the service. As soon as I rotated back to the states, I called up their headquarters, which was in Washington DC. Air America at the time was a CIA operation. It was quite a secret. They knew all about me when I gave them my service number. They told me how to get my passport in one day. They checked everything out and had me on an airplane within three days.

I was headed overseas and ended up in Laos. Now I’m with Air America, I’m in the country of Laos, primarily working along the Ho Chi Minh trail, watching what supplies are going down into south Vietnam. Essentially, I’m doing the exact same thing I did in  Vietnam but now working for Air America and getting paid a lot better.

I ended up working with Air America for five years. Doing this up to 180 hours a month at times. The very first thing that happened to me in the country of Laos was on a cargo plane, a C-123. We were carrying aviation fuel. This gasoline was in 55-gallon steel drums. The cargo plane was a wide body so we could roll these steel drums in and stand them up on end. We fit them as tight together as possible so we could get 32 drums on the airplane. We were headed to a place where we could land and off load. This aviation gas would be used by helicopters that were working from a main base out to the different teams that were out in the field, so they needed this fuel. It was 115 to 145 octanes. This is very volatile fuel.

We were flying for about an hour and a half, it was all socked in. There were clouds below us but the captain remembered that we passed a hole in the clouds about five minutes back. We circled back and down through the hole and came underneath the clouds so we can land. When we take off we'll just punch up through the clouds no big deal this was pretty much routine. It wasn't a big deal, so I was sitting in the back waiting for the gear to go down. It's usually the first sign that we're close and we're getting ready to land.  We had dropped down through the hole and now we were just clipping over the top of these ridges. I was kind of kicked back and I was looking up at the ceiling and suddenly I started seeing holes appear in the ceiling of the plane. Little spots of light.
All this happened really fast and immediately I recognized these are bullet holes.

All the noise of the airplane and the headset I couldn't hear the gunfire going off but I can hear the sound of a bullet punching through the metal of the of the ceiling in the airplane. I got on the horn right away to the pilots. We're taking ground fire and then they were hearing it up there too. Everybody was recognizing what was going on.

Immediately they applied power and we started climbing back up through the clouds. We had all these bullet holes in the airplane, and I was busy checking for oil leaks and any fires or anything else back there. Checking everything even checking the tires because we're heading back to the base and hoping for a safe landing and to try to figure out what kind of damage was done to the airplane. As I was sitting there looking up at all the bullet holes in the ceiling, I realized something!  How those bullets came up through the floor in between those cans of gas!  That's a very tight space if you can imagine. Lining up a bunch of cans as tight as you can get them together, the bullets had to come up through the spaces between the cans. None of them hit the cans of gas. That thought made my knees started getting a little wobbly and I thought boy this is really a close one. We called ahead and they had the fire trucks lining up the runway and as we touched down. We didn't know if we were going to have brakes or if we were going to blow a tire or what. It would have been very serious with all that gas on board. We could have had a big explosion. Nothing happened! It was unexplainable and unbelievable.

But there's more. Now, if you think those were something, the stories get even more wild and unusual and I'm going to tell you about them next week. Hang on. Get tighten your seat. There's some really good stuff coming.