Helicopter UH-1C 66-00517


Information on U.S. Army helicopter UH-1C tail number 66-00517
The Army purchased this helicopter 0766
Total flight hours at this point: 00000125
Date: 01/24/1967
Incident number: 67012424.KIA
Unit: A/2/20 ARA 1 CAV
South Vietnam
Original source(s) and document(s) from which the incident was created or updated: Defense Intelligence Agency Helicopter Loss database. Also: OPERA (Operations Report. )
Loss to Inventory

Crew Members:
P CPT HINGSTON WILLIAM E JR KIA
CE SP4 SMITH ROBERT HAROLD KIA
G PFC HERRERA JIMMIE ANDREW KIA
P 1LT BORGESON DAVID C RES


War Story:
We were on a fire mission for an infantry unit north of LZ Hammond. I don't remember the infantry unit. They were in the mountains in contact with the NVA. We were orbiting on one side of a mountain ridge and the infantry was on the other side. Communications was not good. We could not go higher because the clouds were sitting on top of the mountains. We flew over a dip in the mountain ridge to get on the other side. We started flying into a canyon and I said to Capt. Hingston that we should not fly into the canyon. He took control of the aircraft and we continued into the canyon. The last thing I remember was that we were in a right hand turn and the mountain ridge was on our left side. We were at tree top level. I remember coming down through the trees and we flared. I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke my first instinct was to get out of the ship. When I tried to move, I couldn't move my left leg. I thought maybe that I had broken my hip. I crawled out and I don't remember to much more. The infantry got to our position and I was evacuated to a hospital in Quinon. An officer from the infantry unit came to see some of his men in the hospital. He said that our helicopter flew over their position and then they heard an AK 47 open fire. We immediately went into the trees. They started moving towards our position. In the late afternoon, they were able to get a medivac for me, but everyone else had been killed in the impact. They called in a Chinook to lift out the aircraft because all 48 rockets were still on board plus the radios. The rockets looked like mushrooms, but none had exploded. The Chinook took so much hostile fire that they gave up on the evac for the night. The infantry had to sit on the downed bird for the night and they were not to happy about that. The next morning the Chinook came in and was able to lift out the aircraft and took it to LZ Hammond. Billie Woods was the AC of the other aircraft on our flight. He said he knew we were down, but didn't know where. They searched for us as long as possible and then returned to LZ Hammond. I don't think he realized that we had gone to the other side of the ridge from our original orbit. I was eventually moved to Okinawa for rehabilitation. As it turned out, I didn't break any bones. The doctors called it soft tissue damage. It took about six weeks before I was fairly mobile and could return to duty. From: Dave Borgeson April 2000

This record was last updated on 04/17/2000


This information is available on CD-ROM.

Additional information is available on KIAs at http://www.coffeltdatabase.org

Please send additions or corrections to: The VHPA Webmaster Gary Roush.

KIA statistics

Return to the KIA name list

Return to the KIA panel date index

Date posted on this site: 11/13/2023


Copyright © 1998 - 2023 Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association