Super Slick

Helicopters loom large in how we picture the Vietnam War. Kilgore’s birds coming in hot (and Wagnerian) out of the rising sun in Apocalypse Now. The infantry/helicopter assault at Ia Drang in the climax of We Were Soldiers. A chopper flying over green rice paddies, with a teenaged door gunner manning a .50-cal. A slick dropping into an LZ whirling with purple smoke. We can only imagine it. Tom Feigel lived it, as a twenty-year-old crew chief in a Huey. Super Slick is the story of his year in Vietnam.

Tom Feigel grew up a typical post-World War II kid who wrestled in high school, had a steady girl, and loved working on cars—and then everything changed. Less than a year out of high school, he was drafted into the army and assigned to aviation, ultimately to helicopters. In Vietnam in 1970, he first worked as a “hangar rat,” part of the ground crew responsible for maintaining the thirty Hueys—the Warriors and Thunderbirds—of the 336th Assault Helicopter Company, which operated in southern South Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta and U Minh Forest. In short order, Feigel volunteered (his mother had told him not to volunteer for anything) for a flight mission to replace the rotors of a damaged chopper—which led to his becoming a crew chief on an old transport slick called Warrior 28. Before long, he and 28’s crew asked the company for permission to re-outfit their ship for thicker, more dangerous missions—and they ended up flying an up-gunned helicopter named Super Slick, tasked with similar missions but into more dangerous zones.

Feigel’s memoir recounts the thick and thin of helicopter combat in Vietnam. Heart-pumping missions into hot landing zones (sometimes inserting and extracting Navy SEALs). Adrenaline-fueled flights into enemy-infested jungles and free-fire zones. Low-level reconnaissance. “Hash and trash” runs to deliver supplies to far-flung units and take out their refuse. Terrifying nighttime operations where trees posed nearly as much danger as the enemy. Razor-thin margins between life and death. It was dangerous; it was thrilling. The crews loved it; the crews hated it. They were proud of it. And they never wanted to do it again. Super Slick is close as you can get to being inside a Huey—to hearing the radio chatter, feeling the thrum of the rotors, the pounding of the door guns.