Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sometimes drop napalm on innocent civilians, the slow-cruising Hueys can spot ground fire in the landing zone and move in to neutralize it with discriminating fire that spares noncombatants. "If we kill one woman or a child on a mission and 90 Viet Cong," says one Huey pilot, "then that mission is a failure...
Scared Princess. The chopper pilots credit Slavich for the outstanding success of the Hueys, call their outfit "Slavich's People." Son of a retired San Francisco Democratic ward politician, Slavich served as a Marine Corps enlisted man after World War II, became an Army officer after graduation from the University of San Francisco in 1951. He won a combat infantryman's badge in Korea, became a pilot in 1955, took command of the U.T.T. Company last November. Slavich runs an easygoing outfit at his base at the edge of Saigon airport. Like tourists, some pilots tote cameras...
...economic ruin. Inflation is out of control; banknotes in circulation have doubled in the past year, and the U.S. dollar, officially pegged at 45 rupiahs, now gets 1,500 rupiahs on the black market. A good sarong costs a worker three months' pay, and one Indonesian airline pilot has complained that he can make ends meet only by smuggling in cameras from Hong Kong. Government-subsidized schoolbooks are too expensive for some students. There are periodic rice shortages, and production of rubber, copra, and tin on expropriated Dutch estates has declined sharply under the management of fumbling government bureaucrats...
Cooper was all but born in a pilot's seat. A native of Oklahoma, his father was a lawyer, a county judge from Shawnee-and an amateur pilot. Gordo sat in his father's lap during voyages in an old Command-Aire biplane, took the stick himself by the time he was six. As a teenager, he worked odd jobs around the Shawnee airport to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer. He was inspired, in part, by stories his father told about two famed acquaintances, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Gordo soloed "officially...
...college R.O.T.C. commission for an Air Force lieutenant's bar in 1949. He flew F-84s and F-86s with a fighter-bomber group in Munich for four years, earned an aeronautical engineering degree at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, qualified for the rugged test-pilot duty at the pioneering Edwards Air Force Base in California-home of the world's highest, fastest jet, the X-15. A few years before his selection as an astronaut, Cooper took a friendly flight with another future Mercury spaceman, Gus Grissom. The two crashed a T-33 trainer...