I got my driver’s license at 15. I started my first job the following day. I’ve been working ever since. The epiphany that I could turn my time and toil into stuff—mostly guns—was transformational.
Some of those jobs sucked pretty bad. Others were frankly awesome. The best of the lot involved flying helicopters for Uncle Sam.
Friends describe me the luckiest man alive. That’s not hyperbole. God has been inexplicably good to me. That weird good fortune followed me throughout the military.
It is really expensive to train you to fly a helicopter. As a result, the Army typically puts you in one machine and leaves you there. I got to fly four. Flying an OH-58 Aeroscout single-pilot with the doors off was an E-ticket ride. However, as a card-carrying young stupid male, that can be a dangerous space indeed.
Ambrosia—Food of the Gods
I hopped an OH-58 to Ada, Oklahoma, not because there was some pressing tactical reason to be there. This was a training flight. I could have flown most anyplace I could reach on a bag of gas. I picked Ada because Big Bob’s Ribs was right down the road from the tiny little aerodrome. If you were paying taxes back in 1993, legit, thanks for that.
Big Bob’s was a whole building chock full of diabetes and heart disease. A bit shopworn yet sporting the most amazing grub, Bob’s exemplified everything that was righteous and wholesome about our great country. If America was a restaurant, it would be Bob’s.
Lunch was sublime as always. However, it was also a bit messy and a somewhat rough on the gut. As I dragged my stuffed carcass out of the place, I ponied up an extra quarter for a Charm’s Blow Pop to cleanse my palate. This I stuffed into the shoulder pocket of my flight suit.
Homeward Bound
I lit up the airplane and was headed back to Fort Sill in short order. I’d guess I was doing maybe 110 knots at perhaps a thousand feet. The air was cool, and so was I. Eventually I retrieved my Blow Pop.
The Blow Pop is nature’s perfect candy. Once you suck the solidified sugar off the thing, there remains a healthy slug of top-quality bubble gum. I discarded the stick into the slipstream (it was biodegradable) and lost myself in my reverie. In short order, I had pulled my mike boom out a bit and was happily blowing bubbles.
I had a decent bubble cooking when an unexpected crosswind zipped in from the side. The big sticky sphere burst unexpectedly, encasing my mike boom in tenacious gelatinous goo. A fair bit of it ended up on my face. Now I was in a bit of a spot.
Sticky Stuff
Fort Sill is the home of the field artillery, and it was looming large in the distance. My home base was what the Federal Aviation Administration refers to as a Restricted Area and for good reason.
Artillery rounds crisscrossed that space 24/7. To get home, I had to call up approach control and gain clearance into the restricted area. Failure to do so would run me afoul of the FAA and also put my cohabiting in the same space with all of those high explosive projectiles.
I meekly hit my transmit button, “Fort Sill approach control, this is Army copter 12345, how copy, over?”
Nothing. I tried another couple of times and got nothing back then, either. With each passing second, I had less go juice in the fuel tank. This was rapidly becoming not awesome.
Pilot Stuff
Some modern combat aircraft will almost fly themselves. The OH-58 was nothing like that. The 58 was more like a 3-dimensional motorcycle. You had to fly the machine constantly, or it would roll inverted and kill you.
With this in mind, I cinched down the collective friction, pinched the cyclic between my knees, and clawed madly at my gum-covered microphone. As I did so, the zippy little aircraft gradually tried to turn upside down.
Once my scout rolled far enough to make me nervous, I returned my attention to the flight controls and got things straightened out.
It took three or four iterations before I got enough gum off of my mike to be heard by the radar guys. By then I had bubble gum on my nose, in my eyebrows, all over my flight helmet, and coating my Nomex gloves. However, I could now communicate, albeit not terribly well.
The Promised Land
I got clearance across the impact area and into the airfield without difficulty. I shut down the airplane and expeditiously retreated to address my self-inflicted wounds. With my face liberally coated in gum, I looked a bit like a human pencil eraser.
The following day I reported to the Central Issue Facility and requested a fresh set of flight gloves. The pair I turned in looked like they had been dipped in Pepto Bismol. The long-suffering supply NCO inquired as to how they had gotten into this sordid state. I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. Had I been rightfully killed, I can only imagine what the accident investigators might have concluded.
