"BAD  AIR DAY"
 With Rick Waite and
Observer /Gunner Bill Hanegmon
By Tony Spletestoser

    An S&D [Search and Destroy] mission south in the Pain of Reeds. I remember that it was the 28th of December 1970. Why do I remember that day and date? Easy, anytime someone has a bad day, the date kind of sticks in your mind.

    We were working out of the staging field at Moc Hoa, up near the Cambodian border. Most of the day had been rather uneventful. At about 1600 we were nearing the southern edge of the Plain of Reeds about 10 klicks from junction of canals that we called the "Wagon wheel," when we began to see lots of fresh activity. Fresh trails through the reeds in the water, sampans parked up under some brush and some bunkers and hootches under the taller shrubs and trees. Hanegmon yelled out, "Break left, break left, I've got a man running"! I immediately broke left as Hane gmon began to fire his M-60 at the highly mobile target.

    Suddenly there was aloud explosion in a tree outside my door on the right side and everything went black. I could hear Hanegmon yelling, "I've got the aircraft, I've got the Aircraft. I was temporarily fucked up and finally realized that my flight helmet was on 90 degrees to the direction it was supposed to be. I had jerked my head away from the explosion so fast, that my head had turned inside the helmet causing me to be looking into the Headset! As I straightened the Helmet I could hear Hanegmon talking to the C&C ship telling them that I was hit and that he was flying the Aircraft.

        Blood was flying allover the place in our cockpit. It seemed to be coming from my face or head. I immediately started putting my fingers all over my face trying to find a hole and having very little luck. In the meantime I could hear the C&C ship vectoring Hanegmon to a RFPF compound about three klicks from where we had been shot up. I leaned back in the seat, blood still coming from someplace on my face. I'd given up trying to find the hole and had planned on just waiting 'til we got on the ground.

    Bill stayed low-level and was lining up to set the Loach down on a road between two rice paddies, just to the side of the RFPF compound, to land perpendicular to the Road.

    I realized that everything was going wrong at the same time and we were were lucky to be still flying. No problem if it was the best chance at that time.
    We were on about a 30 ft short short final.

    I heard the engine just suddenly stop. I put my hands and feet on the controls with Hanegmon, but found that my pedals on my side were completely shot away. Hanegmon managed to keep the tail behind us. Which is no easy task at low speed. But we were too low and too slow to do a decent autorotation.

    In any case I think that Hanegmon did good with what he had to work with.

    We pulled in all the pitch we had, but it was not enough! We did manage to land on the road but, because we had nothing to slow down our forward airspeed, we skidded right off the road and into a rice paddy on our nose. We had main rotor blade strikes on the rice paddy water and then a blade over flexed and severed the tail boom. The paddy was deep right there beside the road and water was rushing in
quickly. We both got out of our harnesses and swam back to the road. Once there, I tried to stand up, but then I felt the pain and went right back down again. One of our slick crew Chiefs loaded me up on his back and carried me over to his slick, where they began to check me out. Everyone was looking for a hole in my head because of all the blood on my face and helmet. Then fmally I noticed a nice neat hole through my boot. I had been shot in the foot, that's why it hurt. I was taken to a field hospital patched up and was flying again in three weeks.

    Our Loach had taken 13 hits from small arms fIfe. There had been a hit in the oil cooler which had caused the engine overheat and quit. The trail aircraft confirmed that there had been an explosion outside my door just before a hail of tracers came up at us. We figured out that it must have been one of those home-brewed bamboo bladed anti-helicopter claymores that Charlie had set in a tree and my rotor downwash had set it off. Frags from them tend to cone-up. Somehow the frags missed the Loach and my rotor disk.

    All that blood in the cockpit was caused when I jerked my head around; the edge of the helmet hit my nose and gave me a serious nosebleed. With the doors off the Loach, the blood escaping from my nose, was being whipped about the cockpit by the wind.
Our Loach was hurt bad enough that it got to go home, but we didn't. I was never so happy in my life about any one thing more than the fact that I had taken the time to teach Hanegmon how to fly. To make a recovery at low-level when your pilot was incapacitated. Unbelievable! He clearly saved both our butts that day.

    I doubt there were many like Hanegmon. He seemed to be able to do it all. He had it together then and he's still got it together now. ...Hope you get to meet him some day!
Editing by: Don callison