As best I recall, Ace was my Scout transition IP and all I remember was the whole affair is that it did not last more than a day or so before I was officially declared sufficiently brain dead enough to qualify to be a scout pilot. I was then assigned to fly trail scout with a lead scout named Ed Serrano. Prior to actually flying trail, I had to fly as the Scout door gunner for a few days under Ed's tutor to get acclimated to low level flight tactics and familiarization with how to interpret the terrain at low level. The first day of this, as I will always recall, two went out in our ship and four came back....Ed, me, RALPH & Barf. This was truly an early forerunner of the later defoliation missions and I was duly anointed as the "Up-Chucker of the month". On the third and last day of my scout training flights with Ed, a very interesting thing happened. We were scouting somewhere (don't recall where) and had wounded a possible VC when he and another fellow had ran from us and jumped into a small canal attempting to escape. After a few minutes of scouting, Ed spotted the wounded one hiding beneath some thick grass at the waters edge and proceeded to hover directly over him using his rotor wash to blow the grass aside. Ed had positioned my side of the chopper to the VC's front and instructed me to motion to the VC to come to us. Well after a considerable time of coaxing and motioning him to us with my 45 in my hand, he crawled up the bank and proceeded to us at which time ED eased our ship to the ground. The VC appeared to be our age and had been shot through the thigh but the wound did not appear very severe as I recall. Anyway as the VC approached, I asked ED what his intentions were since we were out in the middle of no where. He told me that we were going to fly him out and back to an ARVN camp nearby and for me to motion the VC on over to my side of the chopper and have him stand on the skid outside my door and hold on.  My first thought was that Ed was just playing with my head until I realized after a minute he was dead serious. What Ed did not appreciate however, was the fact that neither the VC nor I were of equal enthusiasm as he in this idea. However, after a period of time of Ed screaming at me to hurry my efforts to coax our prisoner aboard, I was finally somehow successful through a miserable effort of sign language and threatening voice inflection, to convince our catch to cooperate. I'm sure that he well suspected that if he did not then he'd been shot otherwise. Naturally, as you well know, once he was standing on the skid and holding on to the door frame surround, he and I were literally eye ball to eye ball. To say that I was somewhat nervous at that point would be an understatement and as a precaution to stymie any thoughts on his part as to possibly attempting to come into the cockpit on us, I jammed my left foot up against the console thus blocking the door opening as I continued to cover him with my 45 service automatic. Once Ed had determined all was in order, he picked up slowly, checked everything out and then proceeded to the ARVN camp while I in turn began a prayer vigil that our very unhappy passenger did not do something Stupid. As we proceeded on our way, I realized that my helmet's sun visor was in the down position and was glad in that it allowed me to maintain a close watch on our evil eyed passenger without his knowing precisely where I was looking. As the minutes passed, I noticed the look of extreme hatred and fear in our captives eyes begin to somewhat abate and mentally attributed it to the fact that he had probably come to the realization that we were not going to push him off as he, I'm sure, had initially supposed. I did notice also however that his gaze had shifted from my face to something else and I slowly turned my eyes to follow the direction of his stare. What I saw was that the manner in which I was holding my pistol with my right hand resting atop my right thigh, the barrel of the pistol was pointing directly into the inside face of the thigh of my elevated left leg. Realizing my stupidity but not wishing to obviously draw attention to it, I turned again and looked back into the prisoner's face while I ever so slowly made the proper adjustment. As I was doing this however, a thin smile spread across our passenger's face, which immediately required me to smile in boyish embarrassment in return. We deposited our passenger without incident a few minutes later with the ARVN and as they escorted him away he turned and looked back at me and gave me the ever so slightest Grin. I returned the Grin and also gave him a "thumbs up" gesture wishing him best of luck. I then grinned at ED who had started the whole affair but had not the slightest idea what all the grinning was about. I never told him either.