Every day we would send 2 CH-46's and 2 gunships either UH-1's Hueys from HML-167 or AH-1's Cobras from HML-367 to Baldy to support the 7th Marines. You'd stand by there for anything that came up. See Photo Archive photo #212 taken over Ross after the attack in Jan.1970, and #4202 UH-1 from 167 at Baldy.

Thank You Allyn, any other photos of FSB Ross attack?

Allyn,

Thank you for that believe me!

Are there more photos of the FSB Ross attack?
I need pictures for a claim I am submitting this friday.

'69thru'70

Yea '69thru'70, I'm glad all those hueys were there too. I guess all we on the '34's,46's, and '53's were just a drean everyone of us had. Boy if it wasn't for the huey, we would have lost the war before we stalemated, and pulled out. Yep, the huey was the only Chopper over there, and it won the war all by itself. Glad you made it back. But, the '46 was the best troop Bird the Marines had there. Did more too.

Reply to John

John, thanks for your post and glad you made it back alive too.

go easy and write anytime

Pat B. USMC
Co A 1/7

'46s

Phrog Phlyers Phorever!

We flew the big and slow CH-53A over there. I had the job of starboard gunner with M2 .50 cal. FSB Baldy was a frequent stop. 7th Marines and
1st Marines were constant customers of ours.

When I look back I wonder how in the heck I managed to get out of there intact. Yes we were nuts...but we were and still are Marine Helicopter Crews and will do what ever it takes to support the guy on the ground.

We dont get thank you letters very often but when they do come it really means a lot.

I sincerely thank you.

Reunion stuff..

are you kiddn me?
I can't thank you guys enough and meant every word I typed below.

I'll tell ya bud, I never have been able to go yet but If I was ever going to attend a military reunion of folks that were doing a job in Nam for Co A 1/7 or who serviced Ross and the ground troops in that area I would much prefer to go to one full of helicopter crews so I could finally get to shake a few hands and actually talk to you guys to express my appreciation.

I'd probably be the only USMC grunt walking around there but I'd be having the blast of my life.

cheers,
PB

Thank You Marine

:)I have to say it's hard to stay humble when you come across stuff like this, this type of appreciation has been expressed throughout the years, yet I am always in awe of what so many of you young Marines went through with little if any recognition, the Corps is a special deal, appreciate being a small part of it...Louie the"rat" O'Neil

USMC-69thru70-vietnam;25673 wrote: I finally found the right place to say what I wanted to say to you guys but never got the chance to while serving in nam.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WHAT YOU DID FOR US IN NAM!
and if you had a problem seeing those word because most of you are as old as me know.. here ya go, I'll say it again.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WHAT YOU DID FOR US IN NAM!

Some of you pilots were either out of your mind nuts or under strict orders not to return until you have completed your mission, I have no clue which, but while I was in nam 69 thru 70 Co A 1st Bn 7th Marines 1st Marine Division I watched you guys come in to areas I was in and pick up our wounded and dead marines while we were still getting hit big time.

pouring rain.. visability almost '0' or less than 50 feet / viet cong shootn at you from all over the place.. mortars going out toward the gooks from us and mortars coming in on top of us.. it just didn't seem to matter to you.

You were there with one mission in mind and you were not leaving until you had completed your task... It didn't seem to matter if enemy rounds were hittn your choppers from all directions. I have no idea why your choppers did not just blow up or fly out of control with the amount of hits you guys took but you some how managed to houver over head of us.. kick butt on the gooks / pick up our people and get the he#$ outa there without crashing?

man I'll tell ya..
people talk about medal of honors.
Anybody who was part of the huey crews that flew rescue and support missions for ground forces in nam should have got medal of honors for sure.

Those of you where were there and are now reading this story can chuckle in your seat but also know you are one lucky son of a btchs to be home alive cuz it wasn't funny nor pretty when you were over there, that's for sure.

Heck, just approaching our areas you were sitting ducks up there in the air yet you still came in to help us?

Not sure if you guys ever saw it in our eyes as you were there saving our butts because we never got to talk to you 'directly' and ANY of those moments but you guys were 'our' 'Gods' over there.

Nothing in the entire world made us more relaxed during a fire fight then when we saw a couple 3 hueys popping up over a hill to help us out in a fire fight.

Especially if we were taking hit bad.

I mean we use to say to each other that I swear these guys are flying underground or something because you'd pop up out of 'no' where sometimes blastn away right over our heads, just kickn butt like a mother for us.

I'm not going to bore you to death here with my appreciation post but myself and a ton of other guys from 1/7 owe our lives to you guys time and time again.

I never stayed close to our radio guy on the ground because 'that' was not a good place to hang out during a fire fight so I never knew if you guys were called in to assist us or not so when you popped up over a hill firing away at the gooks it was like a frikn movie to all us on the ground.

You never heard the cheers or crys out of 'thank God!' man the hueys are here, but I assure everyone of you who frequent this board and were there supporting the ground troops in nam that if we on the ground had the opportunity to talk to you in the choppers at the time you came out of 'nowhere' to bale us out of a crunch I'm telling ya you would have heard non stop thanks from everyone of us.

so please dont take this post as just another thank you from a line co. marine ok..

I say this with sincerity to all who supported us during combat.
You guys are the bravest people "I never got to know"
I am so happy to have found this forum here knowing that those of you here were 'those' guys over there.

Thank you so much from my house to yours..again and again!

and if any of you from my time in nam / 69 thru 70 who operated in or around the area of FSB Ross during Jan 6th 7th attack on Ross are ever up in my neck of the woods / Warwick, Rhode Island / please look me up so I can get ya a cup of coffee and have the honor of shaking your hand.

Do you know that while I am not a centimental type person, as I write these words to you I have to hold back my emotions thinking of how many of my friends you guys saved over there during and after the firefights were over.

One of you guys actually flew me to Da Nang hospital after the Jan 6th 7th FSB Ross attack and when I was gettn out of the chopper I tried so hard to get the attention of the guys on board to say thank you but there was never any time for that sort a shi$. As we all knew, it was all business over there no matter what mission you were on at the moment and I understood that so nothing more than a quick wave of 'thanks' was all we could do then 'off you went' on yet another honorable mission kickn butt or pickn up more downed marines.

So I say this from my heart.
God bless you guys!
Every one of you for what you do
Without your presence in nam
myself and many others would not be here today!

Pat Bonanno
Warwick, Rhode Island

Thank You

I have to say it's hard to stay humble when you come across stuff like this, this type of appreciation has been expressed throughout the years, yet I am always in awe of what so many of you young Marines went through with little if any recognition, the Corps is a special deal, appreciate being a small part of it...Louie the "rat" O'Neil VMO-2 67/68
Thanks again for your kind words especially in LARGE print

You are more than welcome Lou!

I'll say it again and again.

Thank you very much for what you guys did for us on the ground!
Maybe I'll bump into you some day and get a chance to shake your hand.

later!

Pat B. USMC

Pat, sign up with the association and make it to Reno for the reunion. You'll be able to meet a lot of helo crewmen, and you might even run into some guys you went through boot camp with.

no way Jose!

I can hear it already..
I can hear you guys laughing like hel$ but I do not do good on anything that is elivated more than 5 foot off the ground.

going to Reno would require me to fly on a very long flight. 😮

not happening on my end.

I will be more than happy to drive there if I hit the lottery or drive somewhere closer but just can't dig up the ole guts to get on that flight.

I was a ground grunt and you were a air grunt. 😀
big difference.

hope you understand.

Pat, I added your thoughtful comments to the "Free Fire Zone" section of our website, reserved for comments such as yours..

https://www.popasmoke.com/freefire.html

Thank you again for taking the time to send your thoughts to the POPASMOKE Marines.

Grunt

USMC-69thru70-vietnam;25711 wrote: I can hear it already..
I can hear you guys laughing like hel$ but I do not do good on anything that is elivated more than 5 foot off the ground.

going to Reno would require me to fly on a very long flight. 😮

not happening on my end.

I will be more than happy to drive there if I hit the lottery or drive somewhere closer but just can't dig up the ole guts to get on that flight.

I was a ground grunt and you were a air grunt. 😀
big difference.

hope you understand.

Don't be ashamed of being a Marine GRUNT. It now has became a great title to have. If it wasn't for our favorite GRUNTs, there would be no need for the remainder of the Marine Corps. - We are all brothers no matter what your main function is. We would come if we were able, - sometimes higher authority would say "hold on". Most likely, many crewmembers would know what they were going to fly into and go puke it all up, put on their flight equipment, climb into their aircraft, and fly off into the battle. The Letters M-A-R-I-N-E-S painted on the side of the aircraft would let you know that our Grunts were not alone in the battle. Semper Fi brother.:D

It was the flying part that got me.. not the grunt part.

..what I was saying was that I hated flying..

I never minded being a grunt at all.

sorry, I must not have gotten my wording screwed up.

and Beddoe,

do appreciate your moving my post over there.

I'll have to go check it out.

PB

We in the chopper community have only one purpose in life and that's to support the "Marine Grunt" on the ground. No matter what it takes, we'll be there.

to chopper drivers from nam

I always wondered..

is it true that your chances of surviving a chopper crash are much better than an airplane crash?

I was under the impression that if the engine dies the chopper props are still spinning so as to slow the crash down as long as the chopper is going straight down bottom first.

is that so or is that a myth?

Next, I wanted to let you guys know that when we were picked out in the bush or off a mountain top for regular evacuation or an emergency situation I know for a fact that they guys you picked up along with myself felt very safe the second we were pulling up and away from the areas we were leaving from.

this all may sound like hogwash to you guys but you guys were the most appreciated things in nam aside from mail and chocolate chip cookie crumbs sent from home.

The cookies all started out good but by the time they reached us they were nothing but smashed crumbs. 🙂

Never once did I witness a chopper going down in a crash..
Seen em smoking like hell looking like they were going to crash but somehow just kept on flying away from me till they were finally out of site.

I can remember a time when we were on top of some terrible hill I call 'death hill' to this day because of the number of marines we lost on patrol off this hill.

We were sent there to look for underground hospitals that were supposed to be in that area. Only thing was there was only one way off this stupid hill.

3 sides of the hill were shear rock ledge almost straight down.

1 path was all we had to descend on our patrols when looking for the hospitals.

Everytime we left out on a patrol we got ambushed and lost a couple 3 guys.. EVERY SINGLE TIME OUT.

So after about a week of this crap somebody in the higher ups must have said the heck with it.. and scheduled us to be picked up.

Only problem was it was monsoon and the cloud cover was screwing things up for you guys. Guess you couldn't see enough of the land below to judge a safe landing or something but it took 4 days of multiple attempts daily for you to finally touch down and get us out of that he#$ hole.

We were getting hit at night with occasional chicom grenades and shot at intermittently with ak 47's.

At first we figured they were just trying to keep us from going on patrols and felt they wouldn't bother hittn us if we just stayed on top of the mountain and stopped patroling but not so..

in the middle of the night / pouring asS raing these little (beepers) would climb right up the side of the rock ledege and hit us with chicom grenades when we'd least expect it.

We couldn't figure out how in the heck they were able to climb up these shear rock / straight down cliffs / but amazingly they did it.

so finally, on the 4th or 5th day we heard your choppers above yet again.

as with the other days they were so close I felt like I could reach up and touch one of em..

The clouds were so thick and rain dropping heavy again so we all figured, NOPE / ain't nobody going to attempt a landing in this kinda stuff and figured we'd be hearing the beautiful sound of your engines drifting farther and farther away yet again but that didn't happen this time.

not sure if you guys were told not to come back without us or what.. we have no clue cuz like I said in an earlier post, we never did get to talk to you guys. You were just the silient (martians from out of space) look alikes all dressed in your fancy kick butt looking uniforms with wires, headsets and mics attached all over the place, totally focused on precisely what you had to do at any given moment.

so next thing we knew we just couldn't believe it..

down thru this almost 0% visability comes the legs first then the bottom of a huey! There was only room for one at a time so this guy just about touches down and a heap load of guys dive into the chopper and off he goes..

2 seconds later another one drops down / makes his pick and screws.

the next one drops down thru the muck and as soon as he does the door gunner starts shootn like a mother just above our heads into the surrounding hill side while at the same time he's trying to motion to me to look where he's pointing, so I spin around and see a what appears to be a couple 3 gooks with AK's not far away but actually running towards our position looking like they're wanting to get close enough to actually take down the chopper so I slap this guy's arm who was on my right and spin him around and we open up on these 3 nut head gooks with balls as big as basket balls or all drugged up, I have no clue but there they were doing their thing at least for a second anyway..

We wasted em, jumped on the chopper and took off. I really don't know what happened to the rest of the guys that were on that hill after we left because there were only about 10 left when I took off and never saw any of them return back at the base that day.

The USMC was always picking me up from one location and dropping me somewhere new all the time so I figured they must have needed those guys to go elsewhere. One was a radio guy, one was a LT. and I the rest were either Sgts. or below..

We were lifted out tons of times in situations like this during my time in nam which is why you see me repeating myself over and over again here at the forum about how much you guys were appreciated.

..just can't thank yas enough!

later,
Pat Bonanno USMC

Pop-a-flare

they call this popasmoke - but I remember more than a few times when whatever hilltop we wanted was in the clouds and we would circle looking for a flare. The trick then was to try and hold that spot and drop in, talk about eye strain and pucker factor. But I think one of the hairest times I remember was in the rain when we stayed below cloud cover and raced up a narrow ass valley (it seemed in slow motion at the time) and I kept thinking a gook would drop a frag on us. When we got out of it I climbed in between the pilots and said "Did you see how close we were to the hills on both sides?" The pilot, a Lt. Draper, was pressed as far back into the armor sided seats as he could get and said "I couldn't see out side from in here" He remains my favorite of favorites.

Pat when the engines fail and you have enough altitude the helicopter can autorotate. Without altitude and failed engines you drop like a rock.

drop like a rock

makes sense to me..

I can understand what you're saying with altitude the blades may spin to slow down that sudden stop at the bottom.

Thanks for answering my question.

From altitude you reverse the blade pitch (Collective down) and the air going through the blades at reverse pitch makes them windmill. Prior to striking the ground you pull up on the collective and slow your decent. It may be a harder than normal landing but it is controllable.

That sounds interesting as heck..

wish I could have flown one of those Huey's or Cobras man they were pretty sharp looking.

next time I get a chance I am going to a museum somewhere and sit in one just to see what you guys were seeing when you were upfront.

my son in law came by my house once with a miniature remote model helicopter.

I could get it off the ground and houver for a bit but when I went to go forward I just kept ramming it into the wall.

after a few of those crashes he immediately took it away from me.

I hope my daughter divorces him now. ho ho 😎

Pat I was in a CH-46 squadron, the big twin (Tandem) rotor helicopters in Nam. We pulled you guys out of a lot of $hit sandwiches too!

That's for sure! and well apreciated it too.

NICE Pic!
The 46's were super but kinda to big an ugly of a chopper though compared to the beuteeful looking Huey.. ho ho!