coming down and start moving to where it was going to hit.
Once you had recovered the bundle, you had to recover the parachute and the cargo net the bundle was dropped in, then distribute the load among your carrying party (which might be just your team or it might be guerrillas), and sanitize the area so nobody could tell later that you had taken an airdrop there. This was all accomplished in the shortest possible time in order to avoid detection and compromise.
It was always interesting to find out what you were actually getting. Food, for instance, often came in the form of living animals. Sometimes you'd learn they had dropped a live animal when you heard moos coming from out of the sky. When that happened, you knew you had a problem. And if you had farm experience, you were grateful for it. Cows are never easy, and they aren't trained to jump out of airplanes; and if they hit the ground and broke a leg, you had a real problem. But even if they came down uninjured, they were often not gentle enough to be led off easily. Either way, they often started bellowing and making all kinds of noise, so you had to kill them right there, and then quarter the meat on the spot, so your carrying party could carry the edible parts and bury what you couldn't use.
Sometimes you might get a goat, a pig, or chickens. And on the whole, we preferred these to cows. They're easier to come by, relatively easy to handle, they don't weigh that much, and one person can usually carry them.
Eating out there in the woods was where I learned the value of hot sauce. Every Special Forces soldier carries a bottle of hot sauce in his rucksack. Once we got animals or birds back to camp and butchered them, well, you don't do the best job of cooking in the world out there, so a little hot sauce covers a lot of errors — Louisiana hot sauce, Texas Pete, or Tabasco — it sure helps the taste. It also helps regular rations, which we often had dropped in.
Of course, the A-Detachment part is not all there is to know about the resupply story. Let's look at it from the headquarters side:
Let's say we had a mission to resupply an A-Detachment in the field. The mission would go to the NCO who was the S-4 (logistics) of the C-Detachment to which the A-Detachment belonged. It was his job to put it all together. If it was a goat, pig, cow, or chickens, he had to go buy it from some farmer (funds were provided to pay for it), and he had to build a cage for it.
Among the other details he had to know would be the kind of airplane that would fly the mission, including most crucially the dimensions of its exit door, since you couldn't get anything in or out that was larger than the door. In other words, he had to take the size of the door into consideration in choosing an animal to air-drop and building a cage to contain it.
The NCO would then fly the mission, and he'd be the one who made the drop. While the pilot flew the course over the drop zone, the NCO had to put the animal, the cage, or the bundle out through the door at the right time to make it hit the drop zone that the A-Detachment had illuminated on the ground.
One time, while I was the S-3 of the C-Detachment, an A-Detachment had called in for resupply, and we had set up a drop that was to fly in on an Armv U-10 Helio Courier. The U-10 was a high-wing, single-engine turboprop that was both very rugged and a super-short-field airplane, which could take off and land in a matter of yards (every time you landed in one, you thought you'd crashed, because you hit the ground so hard). Though it was technically a four-place aircraft, we usually took out the rear seats to make room for cargo.
The night this resupply mission was to be flown, I decided I was going to go along to see how it went. When I got to the airfield, I found the supply sergeant there getting ready to load a crate full of white Leghorns — both chickens and roosters all mixed together — onto the U-10, and the crate was about twice as long as the inside dimensions of the aircraft. So about half of it was sticking out. In fact, so much was sticking out that the sergeant had to ride on top of the crate and the parachute all the way out to the drop to keep it from getting jerked out the door.
When we cranked up, feathers started flying. The force of the prop was blowing them off the chickens. But I didn't say anything; it was his show, not mine. And I kept quiet when we took off from the airport, although there was a cloud of feathers big enough to almost hide the plane.
From then on, things went pretty smoothly, and we went out and made a good drop.
The next morning, I went out to the swamp where the A-Detachment had their base camp area set up to check on how they were doing, and the first thing I saw was this one naked rooster, with a piece of heavy-duty cable looped around his leg, which was all they could find to tie him up with. The only feather on him was a tail feather sticking up, about three inches long, and it was broken.
When I asked them what in the world they were going to do with that rooster, they said, 'Well, we haven't decided yet, but we have decided one thing, and that is that he ought to live. Anything that went through that flight and lived deserves to survive for a while longer.'
Dealing with airdrops kept us busy, but we had a lot more to do when we had supplies delivered directly by aircraft. We had to know how to select and set up an airstrip, mark it, and then bring in an airplane at night. This was especially tough because we did all this totally on our own. We had no Air Force Combat controllers with us. We had only the members of our own detachment and the guerrillas, if we had guerrillas with us, to organize it. Then, when he came in, the pilot had to trust our judgment absolutely. He had never seen the airfield before. It was a blank to him.
In those days, we had several different kinds of aircraft available for this mission, all of them fixed-wing, because helicopters didn't have range enough for it. The Army had U-10s and Caribous, which were both capable of landing on dirt fields. But we also had available larger Air Force C- 123s and C-130s, which had to be landed on roads, and there were even a few C-47s still around. And from time to time, leased indigenous aircraft would be made available for covert operations.
What you'd do then is work out the length your airfield had to be, whether it was on a dirt field, a dirt road, or a paved road; you'd walk every inch of that length to make sure it wasn't too rough or rutted; and you'd get rid of rocks, power lines, and other obstacles. You'd check out the trees nearby and compute the approach glide path the plane would have to come in on, so it didn't hit any of them. You (and the guerrillas, if they were available) would then lay out flame pots so that the length of the runway was marked out. Once all that was taken care of, you'd radio in all the data associated with the airfield — its location, its dimensions, and so on — and your mission would be scheduled. That is, your headquarters would work out the particulars of the mission and get back to you with them, something like: 'The plane will be there on 23 June, at 0330,' which usually meant a window of five or ten minutes. 'And it will be approaching on a certain azimuth.'
When the window itself approached, you wouldn't have any radio communication with the pilot. He would land on your visual signal.
About the time the pilot was five minutes out, the flame pots would be lit. Meanwhile, whoever was running the airfield — officer or NCO — would take a flashlight with a colored filter on it (blue or green, usually — something pretty hard to see) and lie down on the approach end of the airstrip and wait.
The first thing the pilot would see was the flicker of the flame pots. When he saw those, he knew it was safe to land. That is, he knew not only where the field was and that you had laid it out, but that you had secured the area, and there was no enemy in the neighborhood. The next thing he'd see was the flashlight on the end of the runway, and he would then aim his left wheel at that light (because he was sitting in the left seat) and glide in about six feet above it. That meant that if you were the one holding the flashlight, you lay there absolutely still as he approached, seeming to come right at you, and stayed cool as several tons of airplane (if it was one of the big Air Force ones) lumbered in at man height over you. It was a hairy experience.
Once he had landed, we'd off-load the cargo and he would take on anything or anyone you had for him to bring out, and then he would turn around and take off in the opposite direction.
We practiced all that many times.
SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE-AND-EVASION
