I was assigned to A-106 Ba To a/k/a Strider Insole (SE I Corps) as Team XO for my first three months in country…a real piss and vinegar FNG I was…one bright sunny afternoon right after lunch an 0-1 flies in…some sh*t hot Zoomie, could have been Sizemore, wanders in and asks if anyone wants to take a ride and view the countryside…of course nubie me jumped at the chance…now the 0-1 for the uninitiated is one basic flying machine…wing over, multiple willy pete rockets on each wing ( no M-60 MG that I remember) pilot in front and me right behind bobsled like…most intimate indeed. We take off all’s well flying around great views nice cool breeze…then he says to me over the intercom do see that? …of course I see nothing next thing that Zoomie Pecker-Wood does a nose/wing over or whatever you guys call it and I’m looking straight down at the back of his head and the ground rushing up to meet us…he poops off a couple of rockets at the suspected target we take some small arms fire… evasive action follows and I’m about to blow my recently ingested lunch all over the back of his head…fortunately God was on my/our side…just in time he pulls out of the dive and the resulting g-forces ends my travail… wisely for me I never flew on an 0-1 again…I’m a fast study that way. Best

Gee, you were over there EXACTLY the same time I was, it seems and “Stanly Looker” was call sign for all of 67-68 for Thong (sp?) Duc SF camp just west of DaNang, IIRC. Only one I really remember, although “Macon Weapon” sounds vaguely familiar. I always liked the name (not call-sign) of that SF A Camp south of DaNang in Thua Tien province we called “the mechanical whore”–Tien Phuc.

BTW, did you ever run into a Capt. MACV advisor (for a while, at least) to the Mike Force named Bud Dent? And the dedicated I-Corps FAC assigned to you SF guys was an AF Capt named Richard Sizemore, IIRC–flew the O-1 with the M-60 on top of the wing in support of you guys.

“Stanley Looker, Stanley Looker,
come up Stanley Looker.” Over.

I was in law school when it hit the fan in 1973…the nightly news was increasingly alarming…I knew my guys, or those that had survived, were in the thick of it and then it all came down… and the predicted horror commenced. I knew the CIDG and particulary the Mike Force, as creations of the SF/CIA, would be in for some special attention…and I assume they were.

Its been forty-one years since I left and thirty-six years since the fall and seldom does a day go by that I don’t think about one or another of my little brown brothers, as they were then, in fun times and bad, now frozen in the way back.

It was my singular honor to have known them. Best