8 ms·

A South Vietnamese Air Force Officer and a Crazy Carrier Landing (2015)

241 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

pilom 8y ago
Vietnamese people fleeing their country for helping the US in the Vietnam war: immediately brought to the US in helicopters and aircraft carriers and given refugee status. Iraqi people fleeing Iraq because they helped us: forced to stay in Iraq for >8 years while paperwork is done and then denied. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/607/didnt-we-solve-this-one https://www.thisamericanlife.org/607/didnt-we-solve-this-one
- zapita 8y ago
  Don't worry, they're making their way to Vietnamese refugees too: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-enter-the-fray-in-yet-another-heavy-handed-1536161234-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-enter-the-fray-in-yet-a...
  - mc32 8y ago
    Don’t forget how current gov Brown wanted to block the settling of legal Vietnamese refugees in California in the fist place back in ‘75... He felt it a little strange at the time...
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      California basically already made all of the mistakes around immigration that the rest of the U.S. is currently making. We just did it from the 70s (the 1870s) through the early 2000s. That's how we know they're mistakes.
- cm2187 8y ago
  There is a small difference. The US was retreating to a hostile enemy in Vietnam. Iraq is left in the hands of a US backed regime. When the talibans take over Afghanistan, that will be a better analogy.
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
    A US-backed sectarian regime which has been persecuting a segment of its population...
alain_gilbert 8y ago
A South Vietnamese UH-1H being pushed overboard to make room for a Cessna O-1 landing. (U.S. Navy/released) Why don't they just fly the helicopter and bring it back once the plane is landed ?!
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Lack of fuel?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Alupis 8y ago
  > Chambers ordered all available hands to the flight deck, regardless of rank, to assist in moving any aircraft parked on the deck to a different spot, clearing a long strip for Lee to land on. Any helo that couldn’t be moved in a safe and timely manner was to be pushed over the side of the deck after a quick gear strip. An estimated $10 million worth of South Vietnamese UH-1Hs were thus stripped and jettisoned from the flight deck. When five more South Vietnamese Hueys landed on the deck during the mad dash to clear the deck, their occupants were hustled into the ship and their helos met the same fate as the others. Seems there wasn't time or resources to get them all into the air quickly enough.
  - infecto 8y ago
    More importantly there was no use to the equipment. South Vietnam fell. There is no where for this equipment to go.
    - netsharc 8y ago
      This is an odd logic, isn't it? The country that owned the chopper practically ceased to exist, it doesn't mean the equipment is no good...
      - slededit 8y ago
travisjungroth 8y ago
I think there may not have been a better airplane for landing on a carrier than a Bird Dog. Those things have amazing landing performance. With the tanks empty, it might not even have been overloaded. What I don't get is why they couldn't make radio contact. There are standard emergency frequencies (121.5, 243) that the pilot should have known about and the ship tried to contact them on.
- aaron695 8y ago
  Panic is one obvious answer. Which leads to lack of training. https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/with-every-splashdown-nasa-embraces-the-legacy-of-gus-grissom/%3famp=1 https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016... Also why wasn't he made to ditch instead. I'd like to know if that was the right decision? Destroying $5 million helicopters in a war zone kills people and an amateur landing on a ship must be very risky for them and crew. [edit] A better example of long term panic is the "stuck accelerator" issue that in some cases lasted 20+ mins. People have claimed the brakes also failed, but when checked later there were no issues.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  A wild guess: given the airplane's role as a spotter, it only had radio for communicating with troops in the field, and that was on different bands?
  - tokai 8y ago
    Or they threw the radio out to save weight.
    - cestith 8y ago
      Or, like the helicopters on deck in the story, any useful equipment that could quickly be stripped during retreat and evacuation was already gone.
    - baddox 8y ago
      That seems unlikely given that he knew his only chance was landing on a carrier or ditching close to a ship. Also, I don’t know if that airplane had an easily removable radios.
EB66 8y ago
For those curious, here's a recent photo of Lawrence Chambers and Buang-Ly pictured together at a 2014 commemoration of the event: http://www.navyhistory.org/2014/04/the-opportunity-to-make-history-vietnam-war-heros-flight-to-freedom-remembered/ http://www.navyhistory.org/2014/04/the-opportunity-to-make-h...
krallja 8y ago
I just visited the Midway in San Diego this spring. The ship has been turned into a museum, and the Bird Dog is one of the first exhibits you can see. It’s an amazing vessel, with lots of awesome and terrible stories to tell. Veteran crew are always aboard to answer questions about the ship and their service. HNers might especially like the CIC and other information handling rooms — they’re configured like they were during Operation Desert Storm.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  The Midway is definitely the best in the country, but if the west coast is too far of a trek there are similar museums within decommissioned aircraft carriers in Mobile, AL (USS Alabama) and Charleston, SC (USS Yorktown) that I'd recommend. Each has interesting histories and exhibits, and veterans in attendance.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Also Intrepid in NYC, or do you not recommend that for some reason? I enjoyed when I went, but that was over 20 years ago now. They've had a major restoration and put one of the Concordes on display since then.
    - lakkal 8y ago
      And the space shuttle Enterprise is there now.
    - jstarfish 8y ago
      Havent been in 20 years either! For all I knew it wasnt there anymore :)
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    USS Alabama is totally worth a visit, but it is a battleship, not carrier.
    - larrydag 8y ago
swingline-747 8y ago
Not on a moving/bobbing/weaving/zigging/zagging carrier, but here's Alaskans doing what they do best... taking off and landing in ~3m / 10 ft. https://youtu.be/f7u1jzjFL8s https://youtu.be/f7u1jzjFL8s And here's a "helicopter" plane that plants it in 0 ft... doesn't even need a runway. :D https://youtu.be/HJJI3kPZ0-I https://youtu.be/HJJI3kPZ0-I
- delinka 8y ago
  And without all that wind?
  - VectorLock 8y ago
    Longer than 0 ft. ;)
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
Contrast the carrier Captain's behavior with that of our current Secretary of Defense (when he was a Marine General) when he was asked to aid Green Berets in Afghanistan after they were hit by friendly fire. First the Captain: Captain Chambers’ actions could have very well had him court-martialled and killed off his career in the Navy, and he was well aware of that. Even still, he put his livelihood on the line and took the necessary actions to save the Lee family. Then the Marine General[1]: "He was indecisive and betrayed his duty to us, leaving my men to die during the golden hour when he could have reached us," [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/former-special-forces-officer-gen-mad-dog-mattis-left-my-n691211 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/former-special-forces-...
- ams6110 8y ago
  Marines do not leave Marines behind. The Army are on their own.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  > Other witnesses quoted Mattis saying that he didn’t want to send a rescue mission into an uncertain situation If the rescue mission went sideways ,we may be sitting here asking why mattis was so stupid as to risk his men's lives on a mission with basically no chance of success.
komali2 8y ago
>By the end of the war in Vietnam, a fairly sizable number of Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (the South) officers and senior enlisted soldiers/airmen, as well as their families, were marked for death. Their civilian peers in the South were especially fearful of reprisal from the invading North Vietnamese Army for supporting and harboring ranking RVNMF personnel, who were often unceremoniously dragged out from their houses and shot in the streets, their bodies left to rot as both a warning to anyone who wouldn’t give up RVNMF troops and to the soldiers themselves that their demise was imminent. War absolutely disgusts me, but the Vietnamese war in particular was a horror show. My grandpa tells me stories that make me want to vomit. Study the history as much as I'd like, I will never understand how "start killing people" becomes a valid solution.
- refurb 8y ago
  I’d say “start killing people” is a great solution when other people are trying to kill you (e.g. WW2, Korean War).
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Self defense is easy. So too is violence in defense of others. What becomes harder, particularly in modern war, is killing people who are no immediate threat: the enemy asleep in their barracks. Harder still is killing people working in something like a munitions factory, the people who build things that other people might one day threaten you with. You cannot rely on emotional crutch of self defense in such tenuous circumstances.
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      Israelis, US Army and many other would like to disagree about the hardships of killing people who are not an immediate threat. I don't think some Israeli fighter/bomber pilot can't sleep because he killed some iranian nuclear engineers, or construction workers. Same would go for any US drone pilot - often, to get 1 important target, tens of civilians are killed/wounded too. It ain't clear on the screen who is who, so plenty of room for the doubts. I am sure some of them have PSTD or are depressed, but many others sleep well at night, feeling they do serve their country well. Humans have strong need to feel OK with themselves, and if the reality doesn't support this, then they twist/ignore some parts of it to make it better.
RoutinePlayer 8y ago
I just can't believe Buang-Ly doesn't have his own Wikipedia article.
dang 8y ago
This reminded me of an even crazier, and quite moving, story that appeared here a few years ago. It's so similar that at first I thought the stories must be the same, but they're not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462885
- obituary_latte 8y ago
  Man, what a great 3 hour rabbit hole that just led me down. The linked video about the USS Kirk was amazing. Thanks for the link.
stickfigure 8y ago
It seems worthwhile pointing out the comment at the bottom: ----- I’d like to point out that a lot of our young men are currently attempting to do the exact same thing as was described above for the Afghani translators who served with the US Army even at tremendous risk to their lives. They have sponsored them for visas since their lives, and those of their families, are increasingly at risk back in Afghanistan because of their work with the US. Many of these Afghani and Iraqi translators saved US American soldier lives, and made it possible for the our soldiers to work with the local populations when this was critical. Unfortunately, even as American soldiers are working hard to bring their translators they worked with, along with their families, to the US, they’re running into a lot of red tape back in the US, even though we’ve only filled a fraction of the visas that Congress allotted for Iraqis and Afghans who served with the US Army and other branches. See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/afghan-translators-risked-lives-deserve-us-immigration-visas-column/1204853002/* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/afghan-tra...
- chriselles 8y ago
  I’ve had some personal experience with this. Having worked in Afghanistan in 2012-2014 and employing interpreters daily that we shifted between government and military programs, a few of our interpreters got caught outside of parameters for visas because we shifted them between programs. We’ve managed to get all of our long-term male interpreters out of the country legally. The biggest problem was getting our female interpreters out of the country legally. Our female interpreters were, on average, far better than the male interpreters. Further hindered by cultural differences making it exceptionally difficult to get family permission to allow female interpreters to move overseas without male family leadership, as well as a continuing paycheck to the family that was all that prevented them from getting involuntarily married off. We managed to get 2 of 3 female interpreters legally overseas, the 3rd is still employed in various NGO programs providing good income for the family, stalling on getting married off.
- cslarson 8y ago
  I know it's not your comment but for others benefit who might not know - people of Afghanistan are Afghan, not Afghani. One afghani, or af, is the unit of currency there. The confusion may come because people of stan-suffix countries do use the stani, like Pakistani. Anyway it's pervasive mistake in us media.

241 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

Vietnamese people fleeing their country for helping the US in the Vietnam war: immediately brought to the US in helicopters and aircraft carriers and given refugee status. Iraqi people fleeing Iraq because they helped us: forced to stay in Iraq for >8 years while paperwork is done and then denied. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/607/didnt-we-solve-this-one https://www.thisamericanlife.org/607/didnt-we-solve-this-one

zapita 8y ago
Don't worry, they're making their way to Vietnamese refugees too: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-enter-the-fray-in-yet-another-heavy-handed-1536161234-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-enter-the-fray-in-yet-a...
- mc32 8y ago
  Don’t forget how current gov Brown wanted to block the settling of legal Vietnamese refugees in California in the fist place back in ‘75... He felt it a little strange at the time...
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    California basically already made all of the mistakes around immigration that the rest of the U.S. is currently making. We just did it from the 70s (the 1870s) through the early 2000s. That's how we know they're mistakes.
cm2187 8y ago
There is a small difference. The US was retreating to a hostile enemy in Vietnam. Iraq is left in the hands of a US backed regime. When the talibans take over Afghanistan, that will be a better analogy.
- Cyph0n 8y ago
  A US-backed sectarian regime which has been persecuting a segment of its population...

alain_gilbert 8y ago

A South Vietnamese UH-1H being pushed overboard to make room for a Cessna O-1 landing. (U.S. Navy/released) Why don't they just fly the helicopter and bring it back once the plane is landed ?!

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Lack of fuel?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Alupis 8y ago
> Chambers ordered all available hands to the flight deck, regardless of rank, to assist in moving any aircraft parked on the deck to a different spot, clearing a long strip for Lee to land on. Any helo that couldn’t be moved in a safe and timely manner was to be pushed over the side of the deck after a quick gear strip. An estimated $10 million worth of South Vietnamese UH-1Hs were thus stripped and jettisoned from the flight deck. When five more South Vietnamese Hueys landed on the deck during the mad dash to clear the deck, their occupants were hustled into the ship and their helos met the same fate as the others. Seems there wasn't time or resources to get them all into the air quickly enough.
- infecto 8y ago
  More importantly there was no use to the equipment. South Vietnam fell. There is no where for this equipment to go.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    This is an odd logic, isn't it? The country that owned the chopper practically ceased to exist, it doesn't mean the equipment is no good...
    - slededit 8y ago

travisjungroth 8y ago

I think there may not have been a better airplane for landing on a carrier than a Bird Dog. Those things have amazing landing performance. With the tanks empty, it might not even have been overloaded. What I don't get is why they couldn't make radio contact. There are standard emergency frequencies (121.5, 243) that the pilot should have known about and the ship tried to contact them on.

aaron695 8y ago
Panic is one obvious answer. Which leads to lack of training. https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/with-every-splashdown-nasa-embraces-the-legacy-of-gus-grissom/%3famp=1 https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016... Also why wasn't he made to ditch instead. I'd like to know if that was the right decision? Destroying $5 million helicopters in a war zone kills people and an amateur landing on a ship must be very risky for them and crew. [edit] A better example of long term panic is the "stuck accelerator" issue that in some cases lasted 20+ mins. People have claimed the brakes also failed, but when checked later there were no issues.
mannykannot 8y ago
A wild guess: given the airplane's role as a spotter, it only had radio for communicating with troops in the field, and that was on different bands?
- tokai 8y ago
  Or they threw the radio out to save weight.
  - cestith 8y ago
    Or, like the helicopters on deck in the story, any useful equipment that could quickly be stripped during retreat and evacuation was already gone.
  - baddox 8y ago
    That seems unlikely given that he knew his only chance was landing on a carrier or ditching close to a ship. Also, I don’t know if that airplane had an easily removable radios.

EB66 8y ago

For those curious, here's a recent photo of Lawrence Chambers and Buang-Ly pictured together at a 2014 commemoration of the event: http://www.navyhistory.org/2014/04/the-opportunity-to-make-history-vietnam-war-heros-flight-to-freedom-remembered/ http://www.navyhistory.org/2014/04/the-opportunity-to-make-h...

krallja 8y ago

I just visited the Midway in San Diego this spring. The ship has been turned into a museum, and the Bird Dog is one of the first exhibits you can see. It’s an amazing vessel, with lots of awesome and terrible stories to tell. Veteran crew are always aboard to answer questions about the ship and their service. HNers might especially like the CIC and other information handling rooms — they’re configured like they were during Operation Desert Storm.

jstarfish 8y ago
The Midway is definitely the best in the country, but if the west coast is too far of a trek there are similar museums within decommissioned aircraft carriers in Mobile, AL (USS Alabama) and Charleston, SC (USS Yorktown) that I'd recommend. Each has interesting histories and exhibits, and veterans in attendance.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Also Intrepid in NYC, or do you not recommend that for some reason? I enjoyed when I went, but that was over 20 years ago now. They've had a major restoration and put one of the Concordes on display since then.
  - lakkal 8y ago
    And the space shuttle Enterprise is there now.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    Havent been in 20 years either! For all I knew it wasnt there anymore :)
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  USS Alabama is totally worth a visit, but it is a battleship, not carrier.
  - larrydag 8y ago

swingline-747 8y ago

Not on a moving/bobbing/weaving/zigging/zagging carrier, but here's Alaskans doing what they do best... taking off and landing in ~3m / 10 ft. https://youtu.be/f7u1jzjFL8s https://youtu.be/f7u1jzjFL8s And here's a "helicopter" plane that plants it in 0 ft... doesn't even need a runway. :D https://youtu.be/HJJI3kPZ0-I https://youtu.be/HJJI3kPZ0-I

delinka 8y ago
And without all that wind?
- VectorLock 8y ago
  Longer than 0 ft. ;)

PhantomGremlin 8y ago

Contrast the carrier Captain's behavior with that of our current Secretary of Defense (when he was a Marine General) when he was asked to aid Green Berets in Afghanistan after they were hit by friendly fire. First the Captain: Captain Chambers’ actions could have very well had him court-martialled and killed off his career in the Navy, and he was well aware of that. Even still, he put his livelihood on the line and took the necessary actions to save the Lee family. Then the Marine General[1]: "He was indecisive and betrayed his duty to us, leaving my men to die during the golden hour when he could have reached us," [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/former-special-forces-officer-gen-mad-dog-mattis-left-my-n691211 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/former-special-forces-...

ams6110 8y ago
Marines do not leave Marines behind. The Army are on their own.
oh_sigh 8y ago
> Other witnesses quoted Mattis saying that he didn’t want to send a rescue mission into an uncertain situation If the rescue mission went sideways ,we may be sitting here asking why mattis was so stupid as to risk his men's lives on a mission with basically no chance of success.

komali2 8y ago

>By the end of the war in Vietnam, a fairly sizable number of Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (the South) officers and senior enlisted soldiers/airmen, as well as their families, were marked for death. Their civilian peers in the South were especially fearful of reprisal from the invading North Vietnamese Army for supporting and harboring ranking RVNMF personnel, who were often unceremoniously dragged out from their houses and shot in the streets, their bodies left to rot as both a warning to anyone who wouldn’t give up RVNMF troops and to the soldiers themselves that their demise was imminent. War absolutely disgusts me, but the Vietnamese war in particular was a horror show. My grandpa tells me stories that make me want to vomit. Study the history as much as I'd like, I will never understand how "start killing people" becomes a valid solution.

refurb 8y ago
I’d say “start killing people” is a great solution when other people are trying to kill you (e.g. WW2, Korean War).
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Self defense is easy. So too is violence in defense of others. What becomes harder, particularly in modern war, is killing people who are no immediate threat: the enemy asleep in their barracks. Harder still is killing people working in something like a munitions factory, the people who build things that other people might one day threaten you with. You cannot rely on emotional crutch of self defense in such tenuous circumstances.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    Israelis, US Army and many other would like to disagree about the hardships of killing people who are not an immediate threat. I don't think some Israeli fighter/bomber pilot can't sleep because he killed some iranian nuclear engineers, or construction workers. Same would go for any US drone pilot - often, to get 1 important target, tens of civilians are killed/wounded too. It ain't clear on the screen who is who, so plenty of room for the doubts. I am sure some of them have PSTD or are depressed, but many others sleep well at night, feeling they do serve their country well. Humans have strong need to feel OK with themselves, and if the reality doesn't support this, then they twist/ignore some parts of it to make it better.

RoutinePlayer 8y ago

I just can't believe Buang-Ly doesn't have his own Wikipedia article.

dang 8y ago

This reminded me of an even crazier, and quite moving, story that appeared here a few years ago. It's so similar that at first I thought the stories must be the same, but they're not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462885

obituary_latte 8y ago
Man, what a great 3 hour rabbit hole that just led me down. The linked video about the USS Kirk was amazing. Thanks for the link.

stickfigure 8y ago

It seems worthwhile pointing out the comment at the bottom: ----- I’d like to point out that a lot of our young men are currently attempting to do the exact same thing as was described above for the Afghani translators who served with the US Army even at tremendous risk to their lives. They have sponsored them for visas since their lives, and those of their families, are increasingly at risk back in Afghanistan because of their work with the US. Many of these Afghani and Iraqi translators saved US American soldier lives, and made it possible for the our soldiers to work with the local populations when this was critical. Unfortunately, even as American soldiers are working hard to bring their translators they worked with, along with their families, to the US, they’re running into a lot of red tape back in the US, even though we’ve only filled a fraction of the visas that Congress allotted for Iraqis and Afghans who served with the US Army and other branches. See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/afghan-translators-risked-lives-deserve-us-immigration-visas-column/1204853002/* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/afghan-tra...

chriselles 8y ago
I’ve had some personal experience with this. Having worked in Afghanistan in 2012-2014 and employing interpreters daily that we shifted between government and military programs, a few of our interpreters got caught outside of parameters for visas because we shifted them between programs. We’ve managed to get all of our long-term male interpreters out of the country legally. The biggest problem was getting our female interpreters out of the country legally. Our female interpreters were, on average, far better than the male interpreters. Further hindered by cultural differences making it exceptionally difficult to get family permission to allow female interpreters to move overseas without male family leadership, as well as a continuing paycheck to the family that was all that prevented them from getting involuntarily married off. We managed to get 2 of 3 female interpreters legally overseas, the 3rd is still employed in various NGO programs providing good income for the family, stalling on getting married off.
cslarson 8y ago
I know it's not your comment but for others benefit who might not know - people of Afghanistan are Afghan, not Afghani. One afghani, or af, is the unit of currency there. The confusion may come because people of stan-suffix countries do use the stani, like Pakistani. Anyway it's pervasive mistake in us media.