VI

ETNAM

COMPANY COMMANDER

FOREWORD
This oral history transcript has been produced from an interview with
Colonel (Retired) Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., conducted by LTC (Retired)
Brent Bankus, as part of the Academic Year 2013 US Army War College/US
Army Military History Institutes Vietnam Company Commander Interviews
Program.
Users of this transcript should note that the original verbatim
transcription of the recorded interview has been edited to improve
coherence, continuity, and accuracy of factual data. No statement of opinion
or interpretation has been changed other than as cited above. The views
expressed in the final transcript are solely those of the interviewee and
interviewer. The US Army War College/US Army Military History Institute
assumes no responsibility for the opinions expressed, or for the general
historical accuracy of the contents of this transcript.
This transcript may be read, quoted, and cited in accordance with
common scholarly practices and the restrictions imposed by both the
interviewee and interviewer. It may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by
any means whatsoever, without first obtaining the written permission of the
Director, US Army Military History Institute, 950 Soldiers Drive, Carlisle,
Pennsylvania 17013.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

PROF AD
DOR: 01 NOV 1999
SPOUSE'S NAME: MARY E. LOVELACE
CHILDREN: AMY, 1971; LAURIE, 1976

Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., is the Director of the U.S. Army War College
Strategic Studies Institute and held the Douglas MacArthur Professor of Research
Chair at the U.S. Army War College. He earned a Juris Doctorate degree from
Widener University School of Law, a Master of Science degree in Business
Administration, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Embry Riddle Aeronautical
University. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Program in Social and
Behavioral Sciences, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and the
National War College.
Professor Lovelace was commissioned an infantry lieutenant in 1969. After
completing the U.S. Army Officer Rotary Wing Aviation Course, he was assigned as
an AH-1G Cobra Attack Helicopter Pilot and Section Leader in the 101st Airborne
Division in Phu Bai, Republic of Vietnam. Upon returning from Vietnam, he was
assigned as a Flight Platoon Commander in the 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg,
NC. Subsequent assignments included Company Commander and Battalion
Executive Officer, 3d Basic Combat Training Brigade, Fort Dix, NJ; Combat Skills
Flight Instructor and Section Commander, Lowe Division, Fort Rucker, AL; Assistant
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Professor and Professor of Military Science, Gannon University, Erie, PA;

Commander, C Company (Attack), 3d Aviation Brigade (Combat), 3d Infantry
Division, Schweinfurt, GE; Commander, 1st Battalion (Attack), 4th Brigade, 3d
Infantry Division, Giebelstadt, GE; Evaluation Officer, U.S. Army Operational Test
and Evaluation Agency, Falls Church, VA; Commander, 1st Battalion (Attack), 82d
Aviation Brigade, Fort Bragg, NC; and Deputy Director for Exercises, G-3, XVIII
Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, NC.
After graduating from the National War College, Professor Lovelace was assigned to
the Plans, Concepts, and Assessments Division and the Conventional War Plans
Division, J-7, Joint Staff where he collaborated in the development of documents
such as the National Security Strategy, National Military Strategy, the Joint Strategic
Capabilities Plan, the Joint Military Net Assessment, national security directives, and
presidential decision directives. He subsequently was appointed Director of Military
Requirements and Capabilities Management at the U.S. Army War College. Upon
his retirement from active duty as a Colonel, he became Chairman of the Strategic
Research Department of the Strategic Studies Institute until his appointment as the
Director.
His military awards and decorations include the Legion of Merit; Distinguished Flying
Cross; Bronze Star Medal; Defense Meritorious Service Medal; Meritorious Service
Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters; Air Medal with 27 Oak Leaf Clusters; Joint
Service Commendation Medal; Army Commendation Medal with three Oak Leaf
Clusters; Army Achievement Medal; Army Superior Unit Award; Army Good Conduct
Medal; National Defense Service Medal; Vietnam Service Medal; Armed Forces
Reserve Medal; Army Service Ribbon; Overseas Service Ribbon; Vietnam
Campaign Medal; Joint Meritorious Unit Award; Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with
Silver Star; Master Army Aviator Badge; Parachutist Badge; and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Identification Badge. He has published extensively in the areas of national security
and military strategy formulation, future military requirements and strategic planning
and is a member of the Pennsylvania Bar.

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Interview with Colonel Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., USA Retired

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Biosketch of Colonel Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., USA Retired

ii

Introduction and OCS

Flight School and Vietnam

Attack helicopter company, 101st Airborne Division

Missions

AH-1G Cobra

Pilot Training Program

Unit Morale

The TO&E

Flying the A Shau Valley

Existing in Two Worlds

11

Lam Son 719

13

Aircraft Armament

14

Perimeter Security

15

Flying a Lot

16

Advice to Commanders

20

PTSD

20

Sometimes You Need a Break

21

Appendix A Access Agreement

Colonel Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., USA Retired

Appendix B Biosketch
LTC Brent Bankus, USA Retired

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U.S. Army Military History Institute

VIETNAM COMPANY COMMANDER INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEWER: Brent Bankus
INTERVIEWEE: Colonel (Retired) Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.
[Begin Tape L-123, side one]
INTERVIEWER: This is 30 August 2013. I am Brent Bankus, I am the branch chief
for the Oral History Branch, U.S. Army Military History Institute. Today I am
interviewing Colonel (Retired), Professor Douglas Lovelace, Director of Strategic
Studies Institute. Sir, welcome and I thank you for participating in our Vietnam
Company Commander interview. Could you provide us with a little bit of background
on yourself and tell us what organization you served with in the Republic of
Vietnam?
COL LOVELACE: Yes. I was commissioned through OCS [Officer Candidate
School] in September 1969. I went to Flight School and graduated from Flight
School at Fort Rucker in October of 1970 and went from there to Hunter Army
Airfield where Cobra Hall was located at the time and transitioned into the AH-1G
Cobra aircraft. I arrived in Vietnam in January of 1971. I was assigned to the 101st
Airborne Division, the 101st Aviation Group, 101st Aviation Battalion and Delta
Company, which was the gunship company.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, what Corps area was that in? Or what was it in?
COL LOVELACE: It was in I Corps.
INTERVIEWER: In the Hue/ Phu Bai area?
COL LOVELACE: Yes, in the Hue/Phu Bai area, as they called it. We were actually
located in Phu Bai.

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INTERVIEWER: I see. During your tour, what did you consider your most
significant people problems? Kind of like by that time 1970/71, at least here in the
States you heard a lot of drug issues and those kinds of things.
COL LOVELACE: Drugs with the enlisted personnel was probably the most
significant issue. They seemed to be able to find all kinds of drugs and very pure
forms of heroin and that sort of thing. So yes we did a lot of health and welfare
inspections in the barracks. We found a lot of drugs and got treatment for a lot of
the soldiers. That was probably the most significant issue. Following right behind
that was perception on the part of mostly the enlisted soldiers, but by some of the
officers also, that they were on a mission that was no longer supported by the
American public; so, that drove the morale down. Of course driving morale down,
drove performance down.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, did you find, talking a little bit about the drug issue that the
soldiers that you mentioned you got treatment for, that they had experienced drug
experience prior to getting to Vietnam?
COL LOVELACE: I think in a lot of cases, maybe even a majority of the cases, no
they hadnt. Their introduction to drugs occurred in Vietnam.
INTERVIEWER: I see. Sir, how did you utilize your officers and NCOs
[noncommissioned officers] in the 101?
COL LOVELACE: An attack helicopter company is a little bit different than an
infantry company or an armor company, because your officers go forward and fight
and your enlisted stay back and support, which is almost the reverse of how it is in
most army combat organizations. In my section I had all warrant officers. At one
time I had another lieutenant, but it was all warrant officer aviators mostly, and we
were the tip of the spear. We went out and flew combat missions almost every
day. Enlisted personnel were assigned responsibility for each aircraft. There also
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were additional maintenance personnel and NCOs who rearmed the aircraft and
maintained it once we got back from missions at the end of each day. My interaction
was mostly with the officers leading the combat missions and flying missions. Only
when we got back to home base after flying the missions did we interact with the
enlisted personnel. As a result, the enlisted personnel functionally reacted to the
maintenance officer who stayed behind in the rear, more so than they did the
leadership and the platoon. I probably should mention that back then the captain
command level for aviation was at the platoon level, which was equivalent to a
company today; so, the commanders were called platoon commanders. Each
platoon had two sections, and I was the section leaders, although I became acting
platoon commander on two occasions when my platoon commanders were killed. In
a functional sense, while we were out on combat missions, our enlisted personnel
and NCOs were reacting to the orders from the maintenance officer.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, did you find that as far as maintenance and so on, that the
soldiers were competent when you went up for missions that you didnt break down
right away for maintenance reasons?
COL LOVELACE: It was kind of mixed, however all of them had been very well
trained. Some were dedicated to the mission. For example, my crew chief -- we
each had a dedicated aircraft and mine was 421 -- was an outstanding SP/4, Greg
Pile. He took one hundred percent personal pride in making sure that aircraft was
as flyable as it could possibly be. In fact, he would get extraordinarily irate when I
brought it back with bullet holes in it, which happened a few times. He would let me
know about it and accuse me of low level flying or doing something else that caused
the aircraft to get shot.
INTERVIEWER: The missions that you did go on sir, were they combined arms
where you would be in support of infantry battalion or so on or what were they
usually like?

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COL LOVELACE: There were basically two types of attack helicopter missions in
Vietnam. The first was what was called aerial field artillery or aerial rocket artillery.
That is not what we were in the gun company. In an attack helicopter or gun
company as we called it. We didnt do fire missions, as a rule. That was primarily
the mission of the aerial rocket artillery. They would get a target and it was just like
shooting an 8 inch or shooting our 175, they would get a target assignment and go
out and deliver ordnance on the target, normally from high altitudes using steep
dives to improve accuracy. Then they would go back home. Our job was to provide
fire support for the air assault or the air mobile operations as they were called back
then. Normally we would go out in a fire team of two: a fire team lead and a wing
man. We would escort the Hueys, or Slicks as we called them in and out of their
combat assaults. But from time to time we would also get emergency fire missions,
for example, if one of the Cav troops came across a .51 cal position or something
like that, and they needed emergency help, we would go out and shoot those targets
also. We flew relatively low level somewhere between 2000 and 1600 feet. We
used shallow dives and had a mix of armament; the aerial rocket artillery was only
rockets. For example, my aircraft had a 7.62 mm mini-gun, 40mm grenade
launcher, 2.75 rockets and a 20mm Vulcan cannon; so, we had a variety of weapons
because of the unpredictable nature of the gun escort mission.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, as a segue into it, what type of ship did you fly? It wasnt a
Huey, correct?
COL LOVELACE: No. It was an AH-1G, Cobra, which was the first model of Cobra
that was fielded in combat. Many different models of the Cobra followed that but
they all derived from the original G model.
INTERVIEWER: Did you find the aircraft easy to maneuver? How was it for a pilot?
COL LOVELACE: The G Model Cobra is probably the best flying helicopter that the
Army has ever bought. It is only 40 inches wide at the fuselage, not counting the
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wings, and is very maneuverable. It had what is called a 540 rotor system which
was a very rigid rotor allowing for a very wide flight envelope. It was training
intensive because of all the armament systems, it had a built in stability and control
augmentation system and a bunch of other things that the Huey didnt have. But it
flew very well.
INTERVIEWER: When you first got in country there did you have an opportunity,
was there anything that the 101st, the Aviation organization had set up for new pilots
such as yourself? In other words, they didnt just throw you into the cock pit and
say, Go to it. Did you have an orientation?
COL LOVELACE: Recall that Vietnam was an individual replacement system; so, in
every unit in Vietnam at any given time there was a certain level of experience and
expertise resident within the unit. So when the new guys would come in to the unit,
they would fly co pilot in the front seat with an experienced pilot who had been there
for maybe six or seven months or longer, until such time that they thought the new
pilot was competent to be aircraft commander. Then, you would move to the back
seat and you would get one of the new guys in your front seat. It was always an
internal turning or rotating of inexperienced people flying copilot-gunner in the front
seat and then the experienced pilot in the back seat. Progression to the back seat
depended on the individual and it depended on the circumstances. Normally you
would expect a pilot to fly as copilot for about six months and then fly as aircraft
commander for the remaining six months of a one year tour. Sometimes because of
increased personnel losses, such as in operation Lam Son 19, or because of the
competence of the individual, person you might get moved to the back seat earlier or
you might get moved to the back seat later.
INTERVIEWER: Sir did you find that as an effective way to keep the more
experienced people out front?

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COL LOVELACE: It worked extraordinarily well because you were always
transferring knowledge and experience from experienced people to inexperienced
people and as that transfer took place over many, many years in Vietnam, the level
of the knowledge that was transferred kept rising also. Every year an aircraft
commander would be better than the commander the year before because the
knowledge transfer kept accumulating. So the individual replacement system,
especially for an aviation unit where you are talking about individual proficiency
being a pretty high priority, the knowledge and experience transfer worked really
well.
INTERVIEWER: So in your organization the 101st did you find that there were a lot
or not too many pilots that had been there prior to?
COL LOVELACE: Seventy-five percent of the pilots were on their first tour, about 25
percent were second tour. A third tour pilot was very rare.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of morale did you have in your unit?
COL LOVELACE: It wasnt good. It wasnt good among the enlisted nor was it good
among the officers. The reason was by early 1971 most of the soldiers thought that
they had lost the support of the nation and they were doing what the army ordered
them to do. But at the same time, especially among the officers, many took pride in
knowing that they were doing the right thing-- what their country was asking them to
do--in spite of the reports of protest and various other things back home.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, with regards to the TO&E [table of organization and
equipment], do you feel that was adequate for you or did you have to go outside the
box and procure other things regardless of what the piece of equipment was to do
your mission?

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COL LOVELACE: The TO&E was adequate. Some of the creature comforts were
not very good. In Vietnam, like in a lot of places I suspect, there was always a lot of
horse trading going on to get a little bit thicker mattresses for your bunks or to get
maybe a small window unit air conditioner for your hooch. But as far as the
warfighting equipment, it was all good. We had everything we needed.
INTERVIEWER: At that time did you all fly night missions, did you have night vision
goggles?
COL LOVELACE: We didnt have goggles but we flew a lot of night missions.
INTERVIEWER: How did you maneuver through that? That sounds interesting.
COL LOVELACE: Before you could become an aircraft commander you had to
memorize your area of operations. When I say memorize, you had to know where
every draw was, where every sucker draw was, where it disappears, where the
mountains were, etc. I think some of us may have carried maps but none of us used
them because in order to become aircraft commander you had to memorize the area
of operations. I Corps is mountainous of course, so it is very dangerous flying at
night. In fact, when we had some of the attack units come up from the South to help
us out on Lam Son 719 we lost a lot of them in the mountains because they were not
used to mountain flying in I Corps. It was just tough flying. We flew with flares every
once in a while, but personally I never liked flares because inevitably you wouldnt
be able to get one eye closed in time and it would take away your night vision in both
eyes. The night flying was dicey but no goggles. It was all naked eye.
INTERVIEWER: That is interesting. Again, as you mentioned, I Corps was a fairly
mountainous area so you knew fairly well where the AA was going to come from?
True statement?

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COL LOVELACE: We knew where the hot areas were, but we would also get
surprised every once in a while.
INTERVIEWER: I was going to say, did they move around on you?
COL LOVELACE: Every once in a while. There was a road that went out from Phu
Bai to the A Shau Valley, and of course the A Shau Valley had a reputation for being
hot. We always thought it was hot when we out there but on the way out there were
a series of three or four fire support bases and one was called Fire Support Base
Veghel. It had long been abandoned but suddenly became how. I recall we all
joked about fighting the Veghel war that seemed to come out of nowhere. Before
that, we sometimes would fly weapons cold as we were flying over Vehgel, on our
way to the A Shau and wouldnt go weapons hot until we were close to the A Shau.
Then all of a sudden the NVA [North Vietnamese] decided that they were going to
move into the area of Vehgle so they could get close enough to us in Phu Bai to
range us with their 122 mm rockets. So they just came out of nowhere; it was so
unusual that we all joked about it.
INTERVIEWER: Now the place that you were talking about, Vehgle that was at the
mouth of the A Shau Valley, is that true?
COL LOVELACE: No, it was actually still on the Hue/Phu Bai side side of the
mountain range that you had to go over to get to the A Shau.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, tell me again a little bit about morale. To what extent were you
able to communicate with loved ones back home? Nowadays we talked about in the
desert, Iraq and Afghanistan you can call people back home over a cell phone. How
was it in those days?
COL LOVELACE: We had two ways to communicate verbally. One was with a
MARS [military affiliate radio system] call, which I am sure you have heard of. It is
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kind of a land line radio patch type of a situation, but the other is that there was a
bank of actual land lines that were cable calls that you could go sign up for and
stand in line for. Those were good calls because they were full-duplex and your
loved one didnt have to say over. Military people are used to saying over, but
when you are talking to your wife, your mother or somebody like that, they were not
used to it. You could probably get a MARS call maybe once a month. You could
almost never get a cable call and that irritated me. Part of what irritated me about
that was when you went over and stood in line to make a cable call, newspaper
reporters would be in line ahead of you calling their stories back home. Most of the
communication was by letters. Letters were extraordinarily important.
INTERVIEWER: Did the letters get to you fairly quickly? Did it take a few weeks?
COL LOVELACE: It took about ten days to two weeks. The letters and the care
packages were really important.
INTERVIEWER: The telephones you were talking about, were they located in your
area, the Hue/Phu Bai area or did you have to go down to Saigon or somewhere like
that?
COL LOVELACE: Yeah, they were at division headquarters if I recall correctly at
Camp Eagle, which was about a half hour ride in the truck.
INTERVIEWER: In the area of combat service support what kind of internal
communication did your troops use during fire missions?
COL LOVELACE: We had three radio frequencies. We used FM [frequently
modulated], Fox Mike as we called it for communicating with ground forces. They all
had FM radios. Air-to-air we used ultra high frequency [UHF] primarily and very high
frequency [VHF] as the secondary. Our communications back with our base
operations was always on UHF, primary, VHF secondary.
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INTERVIEWER: Did you find that the communications, the radios, as a matter of
speaking, that there were any issues as far as communicating with the ground?
Because as you know better than anyone, when you are in the middle of a fire fight,
you have to be able to talk to the ground troops; you have to be able to talk to the
command net and so on. Were there any problems with that in your view?
COL LOVELACE: Raising the ground units on FM was a problem from time to time.
You knew you had a fire mission and you wouldnt be able to raise them so
sometimes you would just look for the smoke. They would mark their position with
the smoke so you knew that is where you dont shoot in that area. In todays
standards that sounds really odd, but sometimes when you couldnt raise them, that
is all you could do. In a Cobra, unlike an OH-6, you cant just land and go talk to
them. You have to stay above the canopy and keep flying.
INTERVIEWER: I want to delve into that just a little bit, whether it is the movies or
whatever, the NVA or the VC [Viet Cong], they were always mimicked that to be able
to throw smoke out there. Did the ground troop call you? You might not have been
able to talk back to them, but they would say, I popped green smoke, or how did
you differentiate between ?
COL LOVELACE: If they said it that way then they said it wrong. In other words
they would call and we would say, Pop smoke. Then they would reply, Smoke
out, identify. Then we would call back and identify the color and they would confirm
and say something like enemy is 500 meters north of the smoke. That was the
correct way to do the smoke identification. The incorrect way is yellow smoke is
out. Then you could see four or five yellow smokes down there.
INTERVIEWER: So you knew something was hinkey?
COL LOVELACE: Right.
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INTERVIEWER: The Vietnam environment now because it is Southeast Asia, very

hot, did that have any impact on your aircraft? If so, how?
COL LOVELACE: Yes. The Cobras that we had then were mostly air conditioned
because a Cobra, unlike a Huey, is a closed canopy. You are in a greenhouse when
you are inside it. So it had an environmental control unit, as we called it. If the
environmental control unit didnt work or if you didnt have one, and some aircraft
didnt have them, then you had what was called forced air. Forced air was nothing
more than a ventilation system that scooped in the air from the outside and blew it
over you. However I can remember one particular day flying an aircraft with only
forced air when I have to open the canopy in flight and keep it open because I
literally passed out and came to from the heat. I probably only passed out for a few
seconds or so but it was hot in that thing. You would get hot. The Cobra was
especially a problem because you are in an enclosed canopy and you couldnt open
the doors like you could on a Huey. If you fly with the canopy cracked then you can
only fly 40 knots and then you are a sitting duck.
INTERVIEWER: If there was any, what other problems existed in your unit that were
peculiar to Vietnam?
COL LOVELACE: Unlike how I understand the state of affairs in units in combat
today where each evening or at least periodically you can reconnect with loved
ones, in Vietnam it was different. You actually compartmented. You had two
worlds. You had Vietnam and what we would refer to as going back to the world.
So you actually had two lives. One life was the life that you were living in Vietnam.
It consisted of all your buddies and all the people who you worked with there. That
was separate and completely distinct from this life that you left at home back in the
world. It was an odd environment. On a day to day basis you got your support from
your wing man and the people that you were flying with, the people that you

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socialize with at the end of the day. But in the long term, your support came from
your loved ones back home. That was kind of an interesting psychological situation.
INTERVIEWER: I know they had traveling road shows like Bob Hope. Did you ever
have the opportunity to go to any of those shows?
COL LOVELACE: We had a few things. We had what was called back then the
Donut Dollies. These were USO teams that would come by and literally bring donuts
and things like that. They would have some recorded music and that sort of thing.
We had the Bob Hope show or the beauty pageant, I cant recall which, come to us.
I never got to see it. But that is not exactly true; the reason I didnt get to see any of
them is because I got tagged to fly gun escort for them. So I could see them waving
from the Hueys, but that is about all I got to see. I think they came through twice in
the year I was there, but I didnt get to see them either time. They were mostly for
the enlisted soldiers any way.
INTERVIEWER: I was going to say how did that help, if any, did that help the
morale of the enlisted folks?
COL LOVELACE: No, I dont think so. It goes back to the compartmentation that I
mentioned before. As long as you were compartmented, and you knew that this was
your life, at least until you got to go home on leave or somewhere on an R&R [rest
and recuperation], then you could deal with it. But when somebody would inject a
dose of what the other life was like and then take it away from you a couple of hours
later, I think that did more harm than good.
INTERVIEWER: At that time sir, the tour in Vietnam was obviously a year, give or
take a month, did you also have the opportunity to take the mid tour and what was
that like?

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COL LOVELACE: That was in effect when I was there. We got to take two weeks
leave mid tour, which I did. It was great. But coming back was hard.
INTERVIEWER: What opportunities were available? What places could you go in
other words that were open to you?
COL LOVELACE: For the mid-tour two week leaves you could come all the way
back to the States, which I did. Some people would meet their spouses in Hawaii or
something like that. That was different than an R&R. An R&R was normally
between 3 and 7 days and there were specific R&R sites. I was sent on an
involuntary R&R at one time because my commander thought I needed a rest; so, I
went to Thailand for a week.
INTERVIEWER: Oh did you?
COL LOVELACE: Yes. When I got there I realized I was really, really tired. I didnt
realize how tired I was before that. The week helped out. So the R&R and the two
week leave are two separate things but you could normally only get one. You could
either take the two week leave or take an R&R. The favored R&R places where Tai
Pae, Australia, and Thailand. Those were probably the three favorite places that
people went to for R&R. The only reason I got an additional R&R is because of the
nature of some of the missions that we had been flying and a lot of us were being
run into the ground pretty hard.
INTERVIEWER: I was going to say were they mostly I remember when you talked
about what missions you did but were there any anti tank or did you have any of
those kinds of missions or were they just mostly like we talked about before?
COL LOVELACE: There was an operation that you are probably familiar with; I
know a lot of people are familiar with it. As a matter of fact General Berry wrote a
book about it. I was called Lam Son 719. In Lam Son 719 there was a fair amount
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of NVA armor involved. We would come across armor very infrequently other than
in that large operation, Lam Son 719. Of course when we did come across the
armor we had some armor piercing rounds in the Vulcan cannon that I had in my
aircraft. It might pierce a quarter inch of steel. Even though it didnt pierce the
tanks, when you bring it down on them with the Vulcan cannon and a bunch of
rockets and everything, it gets their attention. They are going to stop fighting. But
we did not encounter very much armor at all.
INTERVIEWER: In the area of supply and maintenance and given the fact that you
had such an intricate piece of equipment, did you have any problems in that area?
COL LOVELACE: There were some things that never got fixed. For example, I
dont think I ever flew a Cobra that had a functional fuel gauge. I know this sounds
kind of odd, but it was a real problem. If you were going to load a full load of
armament on a Cobra you couldnt fill it up with fuel because you couldnt get it off
the ground; it would be too heavy. You refueled the aircraft yourself by looking
inside the fuel port. Inside, where the fuel level probe goes down, there are a
number of rings on the probe, so we were taught which ring equated to how many
pounds of fuel. We always would fill up to 1100 pounds looking at the rings, then we
would restrict ourselves to an hour and a half flying. But even though the fuel gauge
didnt work, and it never did, your twenty minute light would work. That was a
requirement. When your 20 minute light came on you knew that you had 20 minutes
until you had to be on the ground. That was a perennial problem. The jamming of
the mini gun also was a perennial problem. Every mission before you would fire the
full drum of ammo, you would probably get a jam in the mini gun. But other than
that, the G-model was a good aircraft.
INTERVIEWER: Were there any work rounds like for the jam of the mini gun? I
would imagine that after awhile when you are flying you kind of get a real feel for
how far you are going so that when your 20 minute light comes on, you know it is
time to get out of there.
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COL LOVELACE: Right. You were always doing work arounds. For example,
when your mini gun jammed you still had the 40 mm grenade launcher up there that
you could use and you still had rockets that you could use. And in my case I had the
Vulcan cannon. The Vulcan cannon had two magazines on each side of the aircraft
and each carried 400 rounds. If you loaded both sides, you couldnt get the aircraft
off the ground so you normally only loaded one side. Four hundred rounds doesnt
sound like a lot but they were all 20 millimeter rounds and that is a lot.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, the rockets, what size were they? And in your minds eye were
they very effective or just kind of like a shot gun?
COL LOVELACE: No, the rockets were good. There were two sizes: 12 and 17
pounders, I believe: a sort of small rocket and a large rocket. We had different
warheads. We had high explosive, flechette, and smoke, but we never used smoke.
On my aircraft I filled the 7-shot rocket pod on the Vulcan side with flechettes and on
the other side I loaded high explosive fragmentary into a 7-shot pod and a 19-shot
pod. That gives you a wide variety of munitions..
INTERVIEWER: Back in the base camp, what were the general living conditions like
for your unit? You always hear about aviators had it good and so on.
[End Tape L-123, Side 1]
[Begin Tape L-123, Side 2]
INTERVIEWER: Continue sir.
COL LOVELACE: Basically we had it pretty good. A lot of people lived in tents with
sand floors or sometimes it was almost like a pallet type of flooring. We lived in
Quonset huts with a concrete floor. It was just one big Quonset hut when it was built
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but over time people took the rocket box material and made little walls and partitions.
We didnt have any running water but that was ok because we had a water tower
and we found a garden hose and ran that hose up to the tower and snaked it inside
the hooch. So we had a little sink. Of course our sump was just wherever the water
ran out outside. But it was pretty good. Quonset hut living was good compared to
everybody else.
INTERVIEWER: I was going to say in your area, did you have security around the
aircraft and around the base? And who supplied that?
COL LOVELACE: We had a large perimeter around the airfield. The engineers of
course put in all the claymore, the fugas and the wire and everything like that.
However individual units had responsibility for manning certain portions of the
perimeter. Our company had responsibility for manning a portion and being an
infantry officer, that was before aviation was a branch, I was assigned as the ready
reaction force commander for our section of the perimeter. We would go out and
reinforce the perimeter whenever there was a report of probing .
INTERVIEWER: Did the roster change? Did you have to pull from the unit a certain
number of folks to act as the ready reaction force? Was it a rotating roster?
COL LOVELACE: Kind of. Really, for the ready reaction force, we exempted crew
chiefs because of their critical mission in maintaining the aircraft. And we exempted
some maintenance personnel, so the ready reaction force consisted of the rearm
and refuel people. Sadly it also consisted of people that the platoon sergeant
thought that they could lose for a day without a problem. As a result the quality of
the ready reaction force left a little bit to be desired.
INTERVIEWER: I was going to say, what would you say was the most difficult
aspect of command that you encountered in your tour as a section leader?

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COL LOVELACE: Dealing with the somewhat indisciplined nature of aviation
warrant officers at that time. Once again, morale was low. A lot of them felt
betrayed by their own society. Some of them thought, I am going to do this job only
because they are making me do it. I dont have any other choice. So supervising
the warrant officers was a bit of a challenge. Not all of them, but some of them. The
other thing was dealing with the loss of air crews was a difficult also. It caused you
to not get too close to anybody.
INTERVIEWER: You hear that not only in todays operations but also if you have
any kind of interaction with those in past conflicts they will say the same thing. Sir,
what do you spend most of your time and effort on during your tour there?
COL LOVELACE: We flew a lot. You get an air medal for every 25 combat
missions you fly. I left with 27 air medals. We flew a lot because we were a gun
company and everybody always needed some help. Except for the monsoon
season you were probably up in the air every day.
INTERVIEWER: Now, the monsoons, that was the October time frame, is that
correct?
COL LOVELACE: I dont recall exactly when it was but for us it would last about a
month.
INTERVIEWER: What was a typical day like if there was one?
COL LOVELACE: You get up. Our hooches were quite a bit away from our
operations building so somebody would send a truck sometimes. Sometimes we
would walk to the Mess Hall and have breakfast, then go up to Ops, go to the ready
room and then, as the section leader, I would go over into Ops and get our missions
for the day. I would go to the mission briefing, take a look at the map. The map was
on the wall in Ops so everybody understood where we were going. Like I said,
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everybody memorized the area of operations so you didnt normally take a map with
you. Then we would go fly the missions, come back, fill out the after action report,
which is normally just how many KIA [killed in action] that you had for the day and
who you worked for. Then we would go back to the hooch and drink beer, play
cards and go to bed. The next day it would start all over again.
INTERVIEWER: Was there ever a time you were pulled out of one place and sent
to another while you were flying where you werent really cognizant of where you
were?
COL LOVELACE: No. You knew the AO [area of operations] like the back of your
hand. It was a big area of operations. From the coast to the A Shau was probably a
hundred miles. And from Marble Mountain on the south of I Corps down near Da
Nang, up to Dong Ha or near the DMZ [demilitarization zone] was probably 200
miles. So it was a big area of operation but when you are flying every day and at a
different location, you get to learn it very well.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, what was your greatest satisfaction and dissatisfaction during
your tour there? Satisfaction first.
COL LOVELACE: That I knew that I was doing a good job. And I knew that
somehow I had become a pretty good Cobra pilot that I was a fairly respected
section leader. I became acting platoon leader twice when we lost two air crews. I
had satisfaction that at least I knew, regardless of what was going on back home, I
knew that I was personally doing a good job.
INTERVIEWER: Any dissatisfactions?
COL LOVELACE: Dissatisfaction was when you came home, you almost had to
conceal the fact that you were a Vietnam vet to avoid ridicule. That was hard for a
lot of us. But there also was a bright side to that, a silver lining to that cloud. It
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caused the band of brothers to band together very tightly. We supported each
other, notwithstanding the lack of support from the overall society. And the lack of
support from the overall society was not a general rule, because there were a lot of
people who still supported the soldiers back then. But it became fashionable to say
that you didnt support the war and, therefore, the soldier.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, what was the senior leadership like? Were they very effective?
They didnt fly into an ambush. Can you talk a little bit about the senior leadership?
COL LOVELACE: The aviation companies back then were commanded by majors.
When I first got there the major commander that we had was pretty good but he
never flew. I think he flew one mission and the one mission that he flew while he
was there, I flew as his co pilot. I was an experienced aircraft commander at that
time but he wanted somebody to lean on if he needed to. So I always thought that
was kind of odd that he never flew. I think in aviation you lead in the air just like you
lead on the ground. The commander after him had some real ethical issues.
Actually he ended up being in prison for revealing classified information. He wanted
to come out of Vietnam with as many awards as he could get because he thought
that could increase his chances of staying in the army and being promoted and that
sort of thing. Then the last commander that I had, I had three, he was pretty good.
He went on to become a colonel and he retired as a colonel. It was a mixed bag.
We produced some officers during the Vietnam era that never should have been
commissioned. That one company commander I was telling you about, he was one
of them.
INTERVIEWER: I guess sometimes you have rotten apples anywhere you go.
COL LOVELACE: That is why I dont want to go into this in much detail, but this
particular one was just egregious to the extent that I said to myself, If I ever catch
up to this guy in rank, then I will go and have some words with him. He was a
lieutenant colonel down at Fort Rucker and I was a frocked lieutenant colonel going
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down for precommand to take over an Apache battalion. I had it on my calendar to
go see him as soon as my schedule would permit and that was when he got arrested
and court martialed.
INTERVIEWER: So you never had the opportunity to get together.
COL LOVELACE: Which was probably good.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, if you had it to do over again, what would you change?
Anything? Your tour in Southeast Asia?
COL LOVELACE: No. When I got there everybody told me to stay in the South
because if you go North where the 101st was you can be shot at. When they asked
me for my preference I told them I wanted to stay in the South, so they sent me to
the North. Now talking to other people who flew down around the Delta and that sort
of thing, compared to what we did in I Corps, I think if I got my wish it would have
been the wrong thing for me. The Army sent me to the right place. I dont think I
would change anything. Although I would also say that much of that wasnt due to
my planning, it was just stuff that happened.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything that you didnt get done that you would have liked
to have gotten done there?
COL LOVELACE: No. Nothing I can think of, however, in 1973 when we were
watching the masses of civilians fleeing Highway 1 through Hue, headed South
when the North Vietnamese were rolling through, that left you wishing that we had
somehow stayed there to complete the job.
INTERVIEWER: Understandable, having been there in the area. Sir, what advice
would you give to commanders who might find themselves in a similar situation?

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COL LOVELACE: Well an aviation unit is all about everyone relying on everyone
else. It is all about team work to the extent that you can build a good, coherent team
where people will literally risk their lives for you. In our unit we did have people like
that. That is your most important task as a leader, to build that type of unit cohesion
and to keep the morale up as high as you can. It was hard in Vietnam to keep
morale up. I remember we had a West Point officer, who was a platoon
commander. I remember walking up to the ready room with him. He was speaking
a lot of four letter words and he said, They can take my education, I want out. I
was thinking this is a West Point officer talking like that. But that was because his
morale had been damaged by the lack of support.
INTERVIEWER: Sir, that kind of winds it up. Is there anything else that you would
like to add that maybe we didnt cover as much as you wanted?
COL LOVELACE: No, I dont think so. Maybe just one thought. You hear a lot
about PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] from Vietnam. The nation went for
years denying that it existed. You look at people who stayed in the Army after
Vietnam, and there is no evidence, no trace of PTSD in most of them. I think the
reason is, that a lot of people during the Vietnam era, came in, did their two years, or
actually you could do one year and ten months and you would get an early out if you
went to Vietnam and came right back. But then when they jumped back out and
joined society, they left their support group so they were back in a society that didnt
value what they did, so it really affected them psychologically. If you take the people
like me, like Doug Campbell and others who stayed in, we had that continual support
group all the way through the period of time when you may have had some
difficulties. So the psychological issues never really set in.
INTERVIEWER: As you mentioned, there were several points in time, at least one,
where the commander said you needed a rest. So I can imagine that there are
times where you just need to back off and need a break from the action for awhile.

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COL LOVELACE: Exactly. And I can give you another example. We were flying
some missions that I cant talk about too much but they were called CCN missions.
They were highly stressful missions and we had a platoon commander--a great guy.
I admired him a lot. We were flying these missions for maybe a month at a time and
it was wearing on everybody. So we were up playing poker. He was in his little
room trying to sleep. He came out and he said to us, Turn the lights out and get to
bed. We said, OK. A couple of people were teasing him a little bit saying, Cant
you stay up with the rest of us? So he went back in his room and we stayed up still
making noise and playing poker. He came out and he said, If you dont turn those
lights out, I am going turn them out. So we said, Yeah, ok, we are going to go.
He walked back in his room, he came back out with his .38 and he shot the light out.
The next day he realized that he shouldnt have done that so he went to the
company commander and said, I need a rest. The company commander said, I
just need you for one more day. He went out that day and was shot down and
killed. This is the same company commander who sent me for a rest later on. So
maybe the company commander learned something from that. I didnt ask to be
grounded; Keith did. He knew that he was at the end of his rope. He was probably
Mr. Cobra at that time. He wrote the tactical manual for Cobras. But anyway, that is
just kind of a war story.
INTERVIEWER: Well, it has been a pleasure. We appreciate your time. Again, if
there is anything else that comes up that you havent thought of, we can always do
another follow on to this.
COL LOVELACE: It has been my pleasure to do this. If you ever would like to
follow up, I would be more than happy to. We just kind of hit the tops of the waves
but that is probably all you need.
[End interview]

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