Gunship Rendezvous

One night we had stayed a little too long in the target area down in IV Corps, and it was apparent that we would need to stop for fuel on the way back to CRB. Our routing took us close to Bien Thuy, so we decided to stop there rather than go into Saigon. As we neared the airfield we called the tower for landing clearance and were told to follow the C-130 turning final. We were searching the night skies near the airfield for the other aircraft when we saw something incredible: the C-130 was still about a mile from the runway and he had just turned-on his landing lights.

The runway at Bien Thuy ran south from the banks of a river and it was common knowledge that the area to the north of the river was 'Indian Country', especially at night, but apparently this crew had not been briefed. Before we could key the microphone to shout a warning, the jungle beneath the big plane erupted into a bright display of muzzle flashes and tracers. The landing lights went out in a hurry, either extinguished or shot-out, and we heard the pilot declare he had been hit and had lost an engine. We saw the stricken C-130 land and roll-out, clearing the runway at the end, but there had been no further radio transmissions from the aircraft. The tower cleared us to land, and when we touched down on the steel matting the plane started to skid like a car on ice. The runway was awash with jet fuel. When we finally got stopped and turned onto the taxiway we could see the darkened C-130, all four engines stopped and JP pouring from numerous holes through the wings.

When we pulled into the transient ramp area we saw that we were in good company: an AC-47 "Puff" was parked next to an AC-119 "Shadow". As the fuel truck worked its way towards our plane, the crews mingled on the ramp, going from one plane to the other looking at each other's stuff. We later learned that the aircraft sitting at the end of the runway surrounded by fire trucks was an AC-130, an early model of the "Specter" gunship. It would have been a rare opportunity to gather together crews from all the gunships operating in SEA but her crew apparently didn't feel like socializing that night. - Story submitted by Capt. Ron Whittiker.