A Caribou assignment is a death sentence, and everyone knew it—well, at least according to the Caribou pilots who’d been passengers on the C-141 I’d been assigned to when I completed pilot training. It was 1969, and I recalled these pilots’ grim warnings as I stood in line at the personnel office on base in Charleston, South Carolina, with orders to deploy to Viet Nam as the USAF’s newest Caribou pilot.
I’d been in Charleston just short of a year, having completed USAF undergraduate pilot training at Laredo AFB, Texas, in 1968. Air Force regulations stipulated that a pilot could not be ordered to a combat zone until he’d been assigned to a non-combat location for at least a year, and I intended to insist that the rules be observed to the letter. The best I could hope for was to be issued new orders a few days or weeks later, but that might give me a shot at a different, less perilous assignment.
As I waited my turn, brooding over my fate, I overheard a tense conversation between the personnel staffer behind the counter and a pilot who had come to complain about his helicopter post. It seems that seven assignments had come down that week—six to helicopters and one to the Caribou—and that most of the assignments for the past several weeks had been to helicopter duty. True or not, most pilots believed that once relegated to a helicopter, there was no going back to fixed-wing aircraft. I had joined the Air Force and incurred a six-year commitment to rack up the training and experience I needed for an airline job. More to the point, I considered helicopters to be far more dangerous than Caribous. I ducked out of line and left without talking to anyone.
A week later, I was in Caribou training at Sewart AFB, Tennessee. It’s safe to say I was the only member of my class who felt lucky to be there.
De Havilland C-7A, Caribou
