Word: rucker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Viet Nam veteran stationed at the Army's main pilot-training center, Fort Rucker, I am one of those Army chopper jockeys feeling the "pilot pinch" [April 14] -in the paycheck. The Army can afford up to $245-a-month hazardous-duty pay for commissioned officers, but the maximum it can muster for its growing corps of warrant-officer pilots is $165 a month. My present hazardous-duty pay as a chief warrant is a whopping $115, compared with the $180 a captain with equal time in service would draw flying the same aircraft on the same mission with...
Over the tall green pines of south eastern Alabama, singly and in forma tions of seven, the ungainly olive-drab helicopters swoop and buzz like dragonflies. Night and day they churn above the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker. They blast the wire-grass country with rockets, machine-gun slugs and grenades. They execute intricate maneuvers high in the sky and inches off the ground, turning once-tranquil skies into some of the world's most congested airspace...
Sense of Mission. Actual helicopter work starts at Wolters with an elementary 16-week course, after which the trainees-who must wear their peaked caps backwards until their first solo-are ready for an advanced 16-week course at Rucker. There they study and practice gunnery, formation flight, night operations, navigation, camouflage methods, jungle survival and base security. Nearly all the new pilots go to Viet Nam directly after graduation...
...faculty at Wolters and Rucker consists increasingly of gung-ho Viet Nam veterans who imbue their students with the sense of mission that marks their units in the war zone. "The heli copter has done a great job," one gunship pilot tells his students. "If the chopper hadn't been in Viet Nam, that place would have been long gone by now." The close-cropped heads of warrant officer candidates nod enthusiastically. Says Major General John Tolson, commander of the Army Aviation Center: "They don't seem to find what they want in college. They just want...
...students, who are to return by air Saturday afternoon, will attend a demonstration of vertical envelopment techniques while at Ft. Rucker...