Super Slick

Helicopters loom large in how we picture the Vietnam War. Kilgore's birds coming in hot (and Wagnerian) out of the rising sun in Apocalypse Now. The infantry/helicopter assault at Ia Drang in the climax of We Were Soldiers. A chopper flying over green rice paddies, with a teenaged door gunner manning a .50-cal. A slick dropping into an LZ whirling with purple smoke. We can only imagine it. Tom Feigel lived it, as a twenty-year-old crew chief in a Huey. Super Slick is the story of his year in Vietnam. Tom Feigel grew up a typical post-World War II kid who wrestled in high school, had a steady girl, and loved working on cars-and then everything changed. Less than a year out of high school, he was drafted into the army and assigned to aviation, ultimately to helicopters. In Vietnam in 1970, he first worked as a "hangar rat," part of the ground crew responsible for maintaining the thirty Hueys-the Warriors and Thunderbirds-of the 336th Assault Helicopter Company, which operated in southern South Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta and U Minh Forest. In short order, Feigel volunteered (his mother had told him not to volunteer for anything) for a flight mission to replace the rotors of a damaged chopper-which led to his becoming a crew chief on an old transport slick called Warrior 28. Before long, he and 28's crew asked the company for permission to re-outfit their ship for thicker, more dangerous missions-and they ended up flying an up-gunned helicopter named Super Slick, tasked with similar missions but into more dangerous zones. Feigel's memoir recounts the thick and thin of helicopter combat in Vietnam. Heart-pumping missions into hot landing zones (sometimes inserting and extracting Navy SEALs). Adrenaline-fueled flights into enemy-infested jungles and free-fire zones. Low-level reconnaissance. "Hash and trash" runs to deliver supplies to far-flung units and take out their refuse. Terrifying nighttime operations where trees posed nearly as much danger as the enemy. Razor-thin margins between life and death. It was dangerous; it was thrilling. The crews loved it; the crews hated it. They were proud of it. And they never wanted to do it again. Super Slick is close as you can get to being inside a Huey-to hearing the radio chatter, feeling the thrum of the rotors, the pounding of the door guns.