More detail on this person: Steve and I were in the same company in Vietnam, and we flew
Chinooks for C Co, 159th ASHB, 101st Airborne Div. When we each came home, we ended up in the
same unit a Ft Hood as instrument instructor pilots. I believe that was A Co, 227th AVN Bn, !st Cav
Div. This information was last updated 05/18/2016
Please send additions or corrections to: HQ@vhpa.org VHPA Headquarters
Return to the Helicopter Pilot DAT name list
Return to VHPA web site
Date posted on this site:
01/11/2025
Copyright © 1998 - 2024 Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association
As IP's, we did relatively little in the way of field maneuvers, as compared to the other companies
in the battalion, but we had to go "camp out" as we used to call it from time to time. Steve was
short in the Army, as he had applied for the LAPD as a helicopter pilot, and he had been accepted.
He was doing his last few days before leaving the Army and going to Los Angeles.
Our company was part of an exercise, which may have been the Gallant Hand 1973 operation
mentioned in the entry. I don't remember a name. We were to make a combat assault in front of an
area on Ft Hood that they called Black Mountain. They had set up bleachers out there, and we
sometimes did shows" for dignitaries when they visited Ft Hood. On this day the Secretary of
Defense was going to be there. We practiced the CA the day before, and worked on the timing with all
of the other gunships, tanks, artillery and so forth. We had a flight of six UH-1's.
On the day Steve was killed, he was flying with CW2 William Charles Woodard, Jr. We called him
"Woody" of course. As we got ready to go out to our staging area near Black Mountain, we got word
that the whole area was socked in. As the weather around the airfield at Ft Hood proper was clear,
we were surprised, but thought that meant we would scrub the CA for the show. Instead we were told
that we were going to move the CA to another area just north of the Ft Hood cantonment area called
Lone Mountain. That is close to Anderson Mountain, but Lone Mountain is where the midair occurred.
We were told that there would not be any gunships or tanks or artillery at the new location.
I don't remember who was leading the flight, but he went and got a briefing, then came back to tell
us that Lone Mountain was a long narrow mountain with a saddle between two peaks that was wide
enough to accommodate only two aircraft at a time. We would go in with three flights of two
aircraft, drop off our pax, circle around and come back in to pick them up again and leave. We went
out there and practiced doing this twice. Steve and Woody, and me and the CW3 maintenance guy
flying with me (I don't remember his name anymore), were the last two aircraft in the flight, Yellow
5 and Yellow 6.
Because we didn't get much practice flying formation as IP's, we swapped off flying lead and wing
while we practiced this CA. Steve and Woody flew lead dropping the troops off, and I flew lead when
we went in to pick them up. As I said, we practiced this twice for timing, waited a few minutes and
then went in to do it for the show".
Drop off went smoothly. We flew off to the north and out of sight, then swapped lead and wing and
went back in to pick them up again. I called Yellow 5 & 6 in", the troops jumped on, and I called
Yellow 5 & 6 out and we left. About thirty seconds after takeoff, my crew chief got on the intercom
and said "Sir, an aircraft just blew up in midair back behind us!" I called Yellow 6 and told them I
was going to make a slow right turn because an aircraft had blown up behind us.
Yellow 6 didn't answer.
I called them again as I finished the turn and looked down to see a UH-1 inverted and crashed below
me, and something else burning about fifty yards away from the Huey. I knew then why Yellow 6 was
not answering me.
I landed between the Huey and the burning thing, which turned out to be an OH-58. My crew chief
jumped out with a fire extinguisher and put out a flaming body that was laying a few feet away from
where we landed. Within a few seconds, four troops came running towards us carrying another soldier
with them. They threw him on a seat in back, my crew chief jumped on top of him to hold him inside,
and we flew him to Darnell Army Hospital on Ft Hood.
After dropping off the injured soldier, we flew back to the crash site and helped the soldiers who
were pulling bodies out of the wreckage. The crew chief flying with Steve and Woody, Jim Vogt,
survived but had severe head injuries. Steve and Woody were killed when they hit the ground. Troops
on the ground who witnessed the midair told us that the Kiowa just flew up the side of the hill and
smashed into the bottom of the Huey as we took off from the saddle.
So you can see that a "blinding rainstorm" had nothing to do with the accident. The weather was
clear enough around Lone Mountain to fly the CA without problems. The only rainstorm may have been
around Black Mountain. The only "blindness" involved was changing the show location at the last
minute, and I've always guessed that no one bothered to notify the unit that was operating in the
area that we were coming.
I read a notation that said that the flight leader observed the Kiowa but did not inform anyone else
in the flight that it was in the area. That is news to me, as I never heard that story after the
accident. The fact that no one told us about other traffic in the area is certainly correct. We had
seen no other aircraft anywhere near Lone Mountain during the practice runs or the flight in to drop
off the troops for the real thing. The fact that nobody on my aircraft saw the Kiowa means that it
was hugging the side of the mountain and flying up from underneath us as we took off, just as the
troops on the ground told us later.
As you can see, this accident affected me, and I remember it well even after all these years. You
see, the Secretary of Defense cancelled his visit to Ft Hood that day.
From: Ben Brown, CW2, US Army, 1969 - 1974