J.T. McDaniel Official Website

When I arrived at Headquarters & Headquarters Company (HHC), 308th Combat Aviation Battalion, 1st Aviation Brigade, I couldn't hear a damned thing. I'd spent the whole flight up from Danang sitting on a nylon jumpseat at the rear of a CH-47 "Chinook" helicopter. This seat was directly under the right engine and transmission of the big twin-rotor helicopter, which always struck me as looking like an olive-drab school bus with rotors.

Believe me when I say that this is not the best place to sit in a Chinook. Between the scream of the engine and the whine of the transmission, about all I could hear after the 90-mile flight was a continuous whining tone in both ears.

After the helicopter departed, I managed to catch enough of what the sergeant who collected us had to say to get myself to the right tent to drop my gear, find the mess tent, and figure out where I'd be working. The real work would come in a couple of days, when I settled in at my desk and started to do the job I'd been sent to do. First, though, there was the normal in-processing and then, me still being only a Private First Class, several days of manual labor. New arrivals in any unit tend to catch the shit details and, in Viet Nam, that was literally true, since one of the jobs was burning the waste from the latrines.

I can't say I ever smelled napalm in the morning, but I sure did smell a lot of excrement burning in diesel fuel.

One of the first things I learned, once I'd arrived at the S-1 tent, where I'd be working, was that I wouldn't be a PFC much longer. I was being assigned to the 308th as Public Information NCO, and that slot called for an E-4, not an E-3. The next set of promotion orders would bump me up to Spec-4.

The Army doesn't have that rank any more. Now it's just Specialist, without the number, though the pay grade is still the same. There's only one specialist rank now, but in my day you started at Spec-4, which is the same pay grade as a corporal, and could go as high as Spec-7, which paid the same as a sergeant first class. At one time Specialist rank had gone as high as Spec-9, who drew the same pay as a sergeant major.

The problem with those old specialist grades was that, despite the pay grade involved, any actual non-commisioned officer—in the Army a corporal or higher—outranked any specialist. Consequently, a corporal could order around a Spec-9, and a man who'd been in the Army for 25 years and was drawing the same pay as as sergeant major generally wasn't all that happy being bossed around by a guy who'd been in boot camp six months earlier.

Most corporals, mind you, had enough common sense not to try anything like that. Senior specialists knew how to work the system and the consquences for the corporal could sometimes be interesting. In the Army, particularly in wartime, "interesting" is not how you want your life to be.

After I got settled into my quarters, which consisted of the lower bunk in an olive-drab metal double bunk set in a GP (for General Purpose) Medium tent shared with 15 other men, and finished my brief term of manual labor, I got down to my real job. This was mostly writing and forwarding hometown news releases, which were written up any time someone was promoted, received a medal, or did anything else we figured their hometown paper would care about. I didn't send them to the papers—I just wrote them up and sent them to the Brigade information office by way of 16th Group, which forwarded them to the Army's Hometown News Service. They sent them to the papers.

The rest of the job involved compiling a daily PIO report from items I wrote myself, and what I received from the information officers in the helicopter companies that made up the operational part of the battalion. HHC was mostly adminstrative, the Aviation Companies did the work, got shot at, and did most of the shooting back. Since Army helicopter pilots were mostly warrant officers, the company information officers were also, usually, warrant officers.

Warrant officer was one of those odd ranks, somewhere between a senior NCO and an actual commissioned officer. In essence, a warrant officer was a specialist—someone who knew how to do one thing extremely well. Where I was, that was generally flying a helicopter.

Once a week, I'd get to crank up the mimeograph machine and produce a battalion newspaper. It started out as the Black Adler Flyer—"Black Adler," meaning "black eagle," being the nickname of the battalion—and eventually turned into the Liftmaster Reporter when the 308th was officially absorbed into the 101st Airborne Division and became the 159th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion. We lost all the Huey companies in that change, keeping the Chinooks, and in the process went from being a general aviation unit to one specialized in hauling cargo and larger units than you could fit in a Huey.

Not all of the stories were particularly noteworthy. I remember when we did one on the promotion of the company mascot, Noah C. Dog (the "C" stood for Count), from K-8 to K-9. Another really good article, which the colonel shot down before it escaped, related the efforts of the battalion flight surgeon's team on a concerted vector control mission around HHC.

In Army talk, "vector control" means "bug killing." The story was written in the same manner as an after action report, complete with body counts, and a quote from the doctor stating that it was "better than doing nothing." It was a real quote, but the colonel evidently didn't entirely appreciate the humor so the story was pulled from that issue and I stuck something else in its place.

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Now, the way I got to the 308th was that I couldn't find a job. This was back when the United States still had the Draft, but before the draft lottery was started. After the lottery, you could pretty much tell if you were going to get called up by how high your number came up. If it was below 20 you could figure there was just no way in hell you were getting out of the Army short of enlisting in another branch first. If it was above 300 you were probably safe. Anywhere in between there was some doubt, but the higher the number the better your chances of staying a civilian.

But the lottery was a couple years off, and I had a 1A draft classification, which meant I stood an excellent chance of getting called up. Employers knew this, which made it a lot harder to find anything. In the end, since the Army would guarantee a service school if you enlisted—and you could almost count on winding up in the Infantry if you were drafted—I went down to the recruiting office and signed up. I was guaranteed a slot in an upcoming class at the Defense Information School, which could be expected to lead to an assignment as a Military Journalist.

DINFOS was located at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, just outside Indianapolis, and the general ambiance was more college campus than Army base. The other main functions of the base included the Army Finance Center, the publications warehouse for the Army's education system, and the Chaplain's School. The college-like atmosphere was somewhat prophetic, for when the Army closed down the base that's exactly what it became.

DINFOS was a Defense Department school, so the student body was a mixed bag of soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors. Likewise, the faculty came from all branches of the service. In ten weeks we got the equivalent of a four-year college course in journalism. The 1968 Tet Offensive was going on while we were there, and we were naturally interested in news of that. Most of us figured that was where we going next and most of us were right.

Curiously, a lot of the anxiety was of the "just don't end it before I get the chance to get over there and do something" variety. At the time it seemed unlikely the war would last much longer. I don't think any of us anticipated that the upper levels of the Defense Department would interpret the ability of the Viet Cong to put on any sort of offensive before being virtually wiped out as a sign that all hope was lost. It didn't matter that our side had won the battle, and won it decisively. The gang at the top gave up.

And, of course, a few weeks after graduation I found myself doing a week-long Viet Nam prep course at Fort Riley, Kansas, and then it was off to beautiful Southeast Asia for the next year. There were other places I would have prefered to go, sure, but when you're in the Army you go where they tell you.

Just what happened while I was there—well, there will be more here as time goes by.