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thedrifter
06-14-05, 06:25 AM
Marines mark copter's 40th birthday
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July 17, 2004
ANDREW DEGRANDPRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF

Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon, in a letter to a retired Marine master sergeant, former President Gerald R. Ford recounted America's frantic withdrawal from Vietnam.

"April 1975," Ford wrote, "was indeed the cruelest month."

With the city - and its U.S. embassy - poised to be overrun by the advancing North Vietnamese army, Ford ordered the evacuation. Thousands of American troops, diplomats and civilians needed to get out. Along with countless refugees, the remaining Americans crowded onto the embassy's rooftop.

And they waited.

Marine Corps CH-46 helicopters rescued nearly 7,000 people in all - including then-U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin - from that rooftop between April 29 and 30, 1975. Operation Frequent Wind lasted almost 20 hours.

That scenario and dozens of others were remembered Friday when Marine aviators past and present gathered inside a hanger at New River Air Station to mark the CH-46's 40th anniversary.

"This is a hell of a day," Lt. Gen. Michael A. Hough, the Marine Corps' deputy commandant for aviation told the crowd. "Who'd have thought 40 years ago that we'd be standing here celebrating the birth of a legend."

Hough was joined by other Marine brass, including Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, the Corps' former deputy commandant for aviation who retired in 2001, and Lt. Col. Mitchell A. Bauman, who oversees the CH-46 program.

Navy and Marine pilots these days know the helicopters as H-46 series Sea Knights. Looking to replace its piston-engine models, the Marine Corps in 1961 chose Boeing/Vertol to build a new twin-turbine assault helicopter, one capable of transporting troops and cargo.

Working from the older aircrafts' basic configuration, Boeing/Vertol equipped the prototype with an ability to take off from and land in the water. It flew for the first time in August 1962. The Marine Corps inducted CH-46 into a fleet nearly two years later.

Marines at the time wanted the helicopter for "medium-lift requirements" in Vietnam. Since 1967, Marine Corps Sea Knights have flown more than 1.7 million combat and peacetime missions - from Beirut and Bosnia to Iraq and Afghanistan. In all, 524 "Phrogs" were made when production ended in 1971.

Hough called it the Marines' centerpiece of technology and ingenuity. Others know it simply as the Corps' trustiest workhorse.

During those last frenzied hours in Saigon, then Capt. Gerry Berry flew his CH-46 consecutively for 18.3 hours, ferrying South Vietnamese refugees and Americans off the embassy rooftop.

Berry was the pilot who finally plucked Ambassador Martin, one of the last U.S. officials to leave Vietnam, from the embassy on April 30.

"It's got to be the most reliable (aircraft) in the history of the Marine Corps," Berry, who retired a colonel, said Thursday. "It's up there with the C-130 (Hercules) in terms of longevity."

Nonetheless, the military's plan now calls for phasing out the CH-46 during the next decade and replacing with the up-and-coming V-22, known more widely as the Osprey. Test flights on the controversial aircraft resumed in April 2002, having been grounded for more than a year following two crashes that killed 23 Marines.

For some who currently man the Sea Knights, like 22-year-old Lance Cpl. Joel Farrenn, a crew chief with Marine Aircraft Group 42, Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 774 based in Norfolk, Va., the planned transition is met with some skepticism. For Farrenn, newer doesn't necessarily mean better.

"I just trust the 46 more than the V-22," he said. "Its mission capabilities just aren't the same - (the Osprey is not designed) to fly into hot zones."

Farren's crew flew the CH-46 that Berry piloted in April 1975 from Norfolk to New River Air Station specifically for Thursday's ceremony. Although its skeleton has been patched to erase any indication of Berry's harrowing 18 hours over Saigon, the chopper still bears the same Vietnam-era green camouflage - a tribute to Operation Frequent Wind. Its sparse interior and stale aroma elicits images of the masses who clamored to climb aboard almost 30 years ago.

"Being on a bird that's so old and still working is just an amazing thing," Farrenn said.

In Ford's letter to Master Sgt. Colin Broussard, the former president bemoaned the predicament he faced as North Vietnamese forces shelled airport runways in Saigon and prayed that no future American commander-in-chief will ever face a similar dilemma.

"We did the best we could," Ford wrote. "History will judge whether we could have done better. One thing, however, is beyond question - the heroism of the Marines who guarded the embassy during its darkest hours, and of those brave helicopter pilots, who flew non-stop missions for 18 hours, dodging sniper fire to land on an embassy roof illuminated by nothing more than a slide projector."

Ellie

radio relay
06-14-05, 08:17 AM
It's the bird I flew on, more than any other, in Vietnam.

I'd have said that you were nuts, if you'd told me that Marines would still be flying them into battle forty years later.

Same goes for the CH-53.