- Joined
- May 31, 2004
- Messages
- 356
- Points
- 53
What do we spend the taxpayers money on? In this case it was a typewriter size box carried aboard a slick by some headquarters type butterbar giving him an inflated dose of self importance. Then the pilot arrived with a weird grin on his face and looked at me like, "You ain't gonna believe this." I didn't.
The box the looey was holding sniffed the amount of ammonia present in the air as the helicopter flew at treetop level. Seriously. Unwashed bodies give off amounts of ammonia. Large numbers of unwashed bodies give off large amounts of ammonia. If we flew through the air with our magic box we could detect this ammonia and then call in artillery on the locations. There was also an infantry model, the XM-2, that looked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. It's probably still laying in a rice paddy somewhere.
After while these missions became routine and even gained a name, people sniffer flights. It involved said slick with said butterbar and said machine flying low level back and forth like mowing a lawn. Now because the slick was at low level, gunships must be present for protection, a low level slick is vulnerable. However, the only way the mission would work was for one gunship to be at about 1000 feet plotting the sniffer's course on a map and keeping him on course with the other gunship tailing the slick at about a mile. Gunship crews get nosebleeds at that altitude. As we chased each other through the sky searching for the elusive smell of ammonia, the butterbar would holler "HOTSPOT" every time the needle on the amount-of-ammonia-in-the-air guage hit a certain level. The gunship pilot with the map would make a mark on the map that would later be forwarded to the artillery. Give them something to do in their spare time, right you cannoncockers? We always felt a nagging need to apologize to the artillery for those maps.
Sniffer missions went from novel to the mundane until one day we were short of aircraft so we were loaned one from a sister company. Unfortunately, the aircraft came with a pilot who was not enamored with Duc Pho. In fact, he had heard all the horror stories about how difficult and dangerous an AO it was. News to us.
When he was told he would fly a sniffer mission, the hair on the back of his neck stood up to the point it shoved his helmet down his nose. He was terrified. But, being the trooper he was he loaded self important butterbar and mysterious box in back and took off. At the end of his first run he was five miles ahead of the gunship and gaining. Now the book says that a C model gunship can outrun a D model slick at the rate of about fifteen knots an hour. I bet the guys that wrote that book never saw this boy fly.
RW
The box the looey was holding sniffed the amount of ammonia present in the air as the helicopter flew at treetop level. Seriously. Unwashed bodies give off amounts of ammonia. Large numbers of unwashed bodies give off large amounts of ammonia. If we flew through the air with our magic box we could detect this ammonia and then call in artillery on the locations. There was also an infantry model, the XM-2, that looked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. It's probably still laying in a rice paddy somewhere.
After while these missions became routine and even gained a name, people sniffer flights. It involved said slick with said butterbar and said machine flying low level back and forth like mowing a lawn. Now because the slick was at low level, gunships must be present for protection, a low level slick is vulnerable. However, the only way the mission would work was for one gunship to be at about 1000 feet plotting the sniffer's course on a map and keeping him on course with the other gunship tailing the slick at about a mile. Gunship crews get nosebleeds at that altitude. As we chased each other through the sky searching for the elusive smell of ammonia, the butterbar would holler "HOTSPOT" every time the needle on the amount-of-ammonia-in-the-air guage hit a certain level. The gunship pilot with the map would make a mark on the map that would later be forwarded to the artillery. Give them something to do in their spare time, right you cannoncockers? We always felt a nagging need to apologize to the artillery for those maps.
Sniffer missions went from novel to the mundane until one day we were short of aircraft so we were loaned one from a sister company. Unfortunately, the aircraft came with a pilot who was not enamored with Duc Pho. In fact, he had heard all the horror stories about how difficult and dangerous an AO it was. News to us.
When he was told he would fly a sniffer mission, the hair on the back of his neck stood up to the point it shoved his helmet down his nose. He was terrified. But, being the trooper he was he loaded self important butterbar and mysterious box in back and took off. At the end of his first run he was five miles ahead of the gunship and gaining. Now the book says that a C model gunship can outrun a D model slick at the rate of about fifteen knots an hour. I bet the guys that wrote that book never saw this boy fly.
RW
