I
did business with O.B. and Max in the early 70s. Traveled to Danang
and Quang tri several times on their airline and also used their
"charter cargo" services from time to time. In the last
two year or so before "liberation" I was one of the only
Americans to have a tarmac pass that allowed me to drive across the
runways between the military and civilian sides of Tan Son
Nhat (a little brown triangle on the windshield). I still bump into
people who remember my yellow pinto on the airstrip (there were 2 yellow
pintos in Saigon. There was never any question in local circles
about the owner. There were areas on the military side of the
airfield considered super sensitive. The VNAF were always having
problems with ICCS observers attempting to gain access. One
afternoon I was stopped on the way out by a security guard. He
called his commander by handheld radio, and I distinctly heard him receive
instructions to detain anyone in an ICCS jeep. He turned to me to
tell me that I was under arrest, and I asked him in Vietnamese whether my
yellow pinto really looked like an ICCS jeep. Then I drove out while
he was standing there with his mouth open (maybe he was shocked that a
round-eye would speak
to him with a Central Vietnamese accent).
I took trips in the AA Volpar from time to time and also shipped supplies
out to Danang and Can Tho on AA aircraft (c123, c46, &C47). My
greatest challenge was to figure out how to fit cargo onto C47s and C46s
without paying for the entire mission (my bosses didn't know how to spell
"share," but the AA guys helped me. My most memorable
visit to the AA office in TSN
came in late 74 or early 75, when I was charged with arranging to fly a
funeral group (including body in casket) up to Pleiku. When our
aircraft (I think it was a C123) arrived at Tan Son Nhat, however, it had
on board a very large generator brought down from Pleiku or Danang.
The generator was too large for the AA forklift. So we couldn't load
our group. The tarmac was very hot, which didn't improve the smell
of the casket, and we were in near panic about how to unload the
generator. The pilot actually volunteered to take off and jettison
cargo in the air, but I finally managed to sweet-talk some Vietnamese Air
Force guys into lending us their super forklift, and we were able to get
the deceased and the bereaved out of town before the casket became a
public health menace.
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