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From: Bill Pecknold
Date: 3/11/2003
Time: 6:43:33 PM
Remote Name: 65.203.60.198
I also want to mention that my pilot and I were the last ones to leave Can Tho Army Air Field. It was my last day of duty in the nam and it was late afternoon and were finished and heading back to Can Tho. I had my helmet head set switched to music. I was heading home. The helicopter started to make a sudden sharp right turn. I sat up and started flicking my switches to talk with my pilot. I asked were are we going? He said that a Air America helicopter was down and we were going to rescure the crew. Ok, maybe I'm not going home! When we reached the site the chopper was in a ditch with some pretty large and small holes in the tail boom. I'm not exactly sure if the damage was caused by mortar or by the skids hitting a trip wire but I do know that the shrapnel caused the tail rotor to fail thus the helicopter spun around and landed in a ditch on its side. We got the crew out of there. We then headed back to the unit The pilot was in radio contact and found out that everyone had already gone to Siagon. When we land we had always run the engine rpm down and hold it for 2 minutes and then shut down. This time as soon as we hit the ground the pilot shut the engine off and we jumped out of the chopper with the blades still spinning. We left the log book. I saw a south vietnamese towing one of our helicopters with a small motorcycle. I asked "where's he going with that helicopter"? My pilot said to the Black Market.