Vietnam chopper specialists reunite 53 years after service

When his deployment in Vietnam was drawing to a close, helicopter mechanic Mike Finch was made an offer he could have refused — sign on to stay five more months in the war zone and then when he returned stateside, he would be free of the Army.

“It’s a chance you take,” said Finch, a helicopter mechanic who agreed to stay on. After awhile, he began flying as a crew member on one of the Huey gunships at night, giving support to ground troops.

“We’d get a call and go out and give them cover,” he explained. “One night, we got a call to go out on mission, and they said there were about a thousand VC (Viet Cong) there and I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ It was after I extended, and I was wondering if that was a smart move! But we made it back.”

Finch, 74, visited Ellijay last weekend with his wife, Kate, and stayed with a fellow helicopter mechanic in Vietnam, Harold Henson and his wife Bessie. Both men were deployed with Bravo Company, 25th Aviation Battalion of the 2nd Brigade and worked in the same hangar. The unit was known as the “Diamondhead” because of the battalion’s origination in Hawaii; battalion headquarters was at Cu Chi. Each was asked how they came to join the Army. 

Henson, 75, graduated from Gilmer High School in 1966 and worked some local jobs, including at Hampton Mills. He married Bessie Lowman in August of 1969, graduated from Pickens Tech with a machinist degree the next month, and was drafted in October.

“Six young men from Gilmer County — Jimmy Cantrell, Elijah Davis, Mike Davis, Alvin Reece, Tony Whitaker and myself — all went to the military induction station in Atlanta together, then to Fort Benning together and to the same company together,” he noted. “Then we went to the same platoon and all six of us were in the same 12-man squad. That was about unheard of at the time, and I’ve never heard of it since. They called us the Ellijay gang.”

Finch, from Buffalo, N.Y., had worked in heating and air and graduated Morrisville College on a one-year technical course in that field. He got a draft notice two months later, and arrived in Vietnam in January 1970 after chopper school at Fort Rucker, Ala.

“I’ve been a mechanic all my life, from the age of 12 years old,” he said. “I scored high on my mechanics mobility (part of the aptitude test) just like Harold did.”

Henson came to Vietnam five months later after helicopter mechanics school at Fort Eustis, Va.

Risky work

Henson said when the aircraft he flew in to Vietnam landed at Cam Ranh Bay, they sat on the tarmac for 20 minutes before deboarding.

“I thought I was going to suffocate it was so hot,” he said.

Finch and Henson worked in the same open-ended helicopter hangar, with five or six mechanics, a technical inspector and a parts-room soldier. Normally, there were three helicopters in each hangar, they pointed out.

“Sometimes we would fly out to where a helicopter broke down, and we would work on it so they could fly it out with a Chinook from another company,” said Finch.

They were asked if working on a helicopter in a combat zone was risky.

“It usually was wherever they got shot down because it was in a hostile area,” said Henson. “One evening, we were about getting ready to eat supper when the first sergeant said, ‘Henson, you and Wells take a tail rotor off this aircraft and take it to where we got one down in the bush. We gotta try to get it out before dark — I’ll run get you two pilots.’ We got the tail rotor off and took a ladder with us. He motioned to me and said, ‘Get out of there before dark. If you have to leave there, bring the crew with you.’”

Normally, the choppers flew at around 1,500 feet, but when they climbed to 5,000 feet Henson knew something was up.

“Come to find out, the Chinook was in a Michelin rubber plantation, 31,000 acres,” he said. “We went in — and I reckon they didn’t know what was in that plantation — and the pilot banked a hard right and we went down going round and round like a corkscrew. It was probably some kind of intelligence (outpost), I don’t know, but I’ve never seen as many claymore mines and (razor) wire around a place (for protection). Those rubber trees were so thick you couldn’t see 10 feet into them. The captain flying the helicopter was watching for us while we worked, and the other crew was watching the whole time. I knew it was a dangerous situation, but it took us awhile to put it on.”

The pilot, who was a captain, told Henson he was going to strap into the cockpit and be ready to hit the switch and run the engine up for takeoff when they were finished.

“We got it on and I walked over there and said, ‘Captain Gibbs, we’re ready to go,’” he recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s get out of here’ and I’ll never forget the way his eyes looked straight ahead because by the time we were getting out of there, it was getting plumb dark and he knew we could get hit. But we got back and everything was fine.”

Finch said sometimes if the aircraft was shot up badly they would send him to the scene with a low-bed trailer to haul it in, or in worst-case scenarios, the bird would be blown up to keep the technology and weaponry that couldn’t be detached out of enemy hands. Sometimes a larger helicopter would lift out a smaller one.

One time Henson said he and another mechanic worked on a helicopter that had to be operational that day — and they got finished at 10:30 p.m.

“The pilot said, ‘Boys, let’s go fly this thing (to test it),’” said Henson. “We’d been working all day, and I was hot and miserable and just wanted to get some water. He said, ‘We won’t put the guns on, we’ll hurry and have it ready to go in the morning.’ We got up to about 1,500 feet and I thought, ‘This ain’t too bad’ because it was cool up there.

“Wells (the fellow mechanic) was sitting in what they called the ‘hellhole’ where the gunner sits, but we didn’t have a gun on it — he just had a .45 (pistol) strapped on his leg. All of a sudden Wells hollers out, ‘We’re taking fire at 9 o’clock (direction) underneath us!’ The pilot turned the lights off and it looked like those green tracer rounds was coming up through the rotor blades. I’ve heard people tell when they got in a bad situation like that they thought of their wife, but I didn’t have time to think of anything!”

The pilot was desperate to know where all the rounds were coming from so he could fly evasively.

“I saw the rounds were coming in around 8 to 10 feet behind the tail rotor,” Henson continued. “So I was holding on to the M-60 (machine gun) mount with one hand and looking back trying to see the rounds. About 30 to 40 seconds passed before we could get away from it, but I betcha it was 30 to 40 (enemy soldiers) firing at us. It all happened so fast — it was just solid tracers coming at us.

“I never asked the pilot what his ‘plan B’ was. I’m sure he had something in mind if we’d took a round, but I sure didn’t want to go down right there and us not even armed! That’s about the worst thing I was in.”

A heavy responsibility

Finch said the crew “all got along as a family, and we respected each other.”

They were asked how they felt about the work they did in their hangar.

“When you’re working on a helicopter, you think about that every day,” replied Finch. “That’s why they have a T.I. (technical inspector) going right behind you to inspect your work. It’s very crucial.”

During one 30-day period, Henson said he was working nearly day and night and hardly ever got over two hours of sleep a day.

“I was going over my work a second time just to make sure it was right, even with the T.I. coming behind me,” he said. “I was so tired I was hallucinating at times, and knowing the lives of that pilot and crew were in your hands was nerve-racking.”

There were lighter moments, such as the time their unit and thousands of other soldiers got to see the Bob Hope Show on Christmas Day in 1970. It was after their group moved to Long Binh near Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

“That’s where the ‘freedom bird’ took you home,” noted Finch.

On getting together

The two men lost touch for 50 years until one of their former compatriots in Alabama shared Henson’s phone number with Finch. Three years ago — a half century since they had last seen each other in 1971 — they began talking. This past weekend was the first time they’ve seen each other since Vietnam. How did it go after 53 years?`

“It’s been great,” Finch said with a big smile.

“We’ve picked back up right where we left off,” added Henson. “We’ve talked solid the whole time!”

Henson shared one last story of when the enemy was trying to “come through the wire” at their base one night.

“We called for the Cobras to hit ‘em, and they had to shoot so close to us in the dark I thought I was going to be killed,” he said.

Bessie Henson remarked, “I don’t have words to explain how I felt when he came home except that God does answer prayers.”

“I prayed and prayed,” she shared. “Our families, churches and co-workers were all praying. The Lord took care of him. Harold said God is the same on the other side of the world as he is here in Gilmer County.”