Transcript
One night, one of the compounds attached to a village was attacked by Viet Cong. They had a name, I forget what they call them now, and then after the Viet Cong have done their attack they run, okay, they just bolt. Now it's dark. So we weren't too sure which way they'd gone. But I got sent out to do low level flying at night over the Long Hai mountains under flares.
Now, these flares were a big canister, tossed out of the back of a, in this case, it was out of the back of a Pilatus Porter. They were a million and a half candle power and they were suspended under a parachute, had about a four-metre diameter, okay? And it would float down and supposedly go all the way to the ground before the flare would extinguish and, unfortunately, there were a few duds, they were going out at a higher altitude.
Anyhow, so you'd be flying, I'm talking 50 feet above the mountains on a dark, moonless night working under flares [to] see if we can find any of these guys. They'd probably find us and shoot us if we had, but anyhow, it went dark a few times. Totally. Now, you've suddenly got to go from bright light onto instruments and fly on instruments to save the day. Well, this particular time that it went dark and ahead of me was a bit of a sparkle, which for a moment I thought was tracer bullets being fired at me, and I banked violently left and in a split second realised I was banking towards the mountain and I banked violently right, away from it. And I heard a thud. It was a bit like a ‘thump' and I thought, "Oh, what's that? Have I taken a round somewhere?"
There was no vibration in the helicopter. All the instruments were fine and I thought, "Well, I think I better, go back to base." which I did. It turns out, the sparkle I saw was not tracer, it was one of these dud flares burning out and I actually flicked the parachute off the main rotor system of the Sioux. So I shouldn't be here. It flicked off the main rotor blades and it tipped the tail rotor blades and bent a strike tab at 90 degrees and I'm still here to talk about it, which is nothing short of a miracle.
