Super Slick

Helicopters loom large in how people picture the Vietnam War: the Hueys coming in hot out of the rising sun in Apocalypse Now, the air assault at Ia Drang in We Were Soldiers, a chopper over green rice paddies with a teenage door gunner on the .50-cal, a slick dropping into a landing zone swirling with purple smoke. Most people can only imagine it. Tom Feigel lived it as a twenty-year-old crew chief on a Huey, and Super Slick is the story of his year in Vietnam.

Feigel grew up a typical post-World War II kid who wrestled in high school, had a steady girl and loved working on cars. Less than a year after leaving high school he was drafted into the army and assigned to aviation, and eventually to helicopters. In 1970 he arrived in Vietnam and began as a hangar rat, part of the ground crew maintaining the thirty Hueys of the 336th Assault Helicopter Company, the Warriors and Thunderbirds, which operated in the Mekong Delta and U Minh Forest of southern South Vietnam.

He soon volunteered for a flight mission to replace the rotors on a damaged helicopter, even though his mother had told him never to volunteer for anything. That led to his becoming crew chief on an old transport slick called Warrior 28. Before long he and the crew asked the company for permission to refit their ship for thicker, more dangerous missions, and they ended up flying an up-gunned helicopter named Super Slick into more hazardous zones.

The memoir recounts the thick and thin of helicopter combat. It describes missions into hot landing zones, sometimes inserting and extracting Navy SEALs, flights into enemy-infested jungle and free-fire zones, and low-level reconnaissance. It also covers the routine hash and trash runs that carried supplies out to distant units and brought their refuse back, and nighttime operations where the trees were almost as dangerous as the enemy. The margins between life and death were razor-thin. The crews loved the work and hated it, were proud of it, and never wanted to do it again. The book aims to put the reader as close as possible to the inside of a Huey, with the radio chatter, the thrum of the rotors and the pounding of the door guns.