Vietnam vet has an improbable reunion with his old helicopter
Kenmore man locates his old chopper 40 years after they flew together in combat
“I missed you.”
Those might sound like unusual words to say to a combat helicopter flown in Vietnam, but they were Art Cagney’s first words when he was reunited with the chopper that had carried him and its pilot through some of that war’s fiercest fighting.
“I was a 19-year-old kid, and the government handed me the keys to a $250,000 machine and said, ‘Here, take care of it. Wherever it goes, you go,’ ” Cagney said of his job as the copter’s crew chief and side-door gunner.
About 40 years later, he took a trip to Georgia last month after his wife, Bobbie, tracked the copter down to a military aviation museum.
Seeing the Light Observation Helicopter, or LOH, affectionately known by its serial number, 795, opened a previously locked door inside the Bronze Star recipient.
“I arrived for part of the Tet Offensive, a major action by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army to take over South Vietnam,” the 62-year-old Kenmore resident said. “It was a rude awakening.”
It was also frightening.
“A shot once came up through the fuel tanks and between my legs and out the roof. When it hit, it sounded like a ball-peen hammer,” said Cagney, who spent 13 months in Vietnam.
At least nine other times during his 1,300 hours above the tropical jungles, the chopper was struck by rifle fire.
During the battle of Hamburger Hill, Cagney stayed behind to make room for drinking water desperately needed by soldiers. Trip after trip, he loaded the copter with water, and when it returned, he unloaded the wounded and the dead.
The main mission of the two-member crew was to fly ahead of ground troops to make sure they were not walking into ambushes.
“You’d land and talk to them for a few minutes to coordinate where to scout, and I’d wind up with 50 letters from soldiers. They’d run up to me and hand me letters to mail home for them. I can still see all those young faces,” Cagney said, adding that he was certain they must have wondered whether the letters would arrive home before a “killed in action” notice.
It wasn’t only their young faces that were etched in his memory, but their friendliness when confronting great peril. More than 58,000 U. S. troops died in Vietnam.
“The funny thing is, I can still see them waving to us when we’d fly overhead,” he said.
Chopper 795 also landed a special place in Cagney’s war memories.
“Pilots liked the LOHs because they were fast, small targets, and most of all, they were very quiet. You could literally fly right on top of somebody before they knew you were there,” Cagney said. “You could hear a Huey, the main helicopter, coming from miles away.”
Even though the smaller helicopter was quieter because of its four blades, instead of two, and its compact engine, the enemy still heard it at night when it was flown in stealth missions to remote bases.
“As soon as we came over the ridgeline, the whole sky would turn white and green with tracers. They knew we were there but they couldn’t see us,” Cagney said.
Although he was frightened as an aviator, Cagney said, it was even more dangerous for the soldiers on the ground. One of the fortunate ones to make it back home, Cagney graduated from the University at Buffalo, became an industrial sales engineer and put his war experiences behind him — until a few years ago.
He and his wife and their grandchildren were at an air show in Niagara Falls when one of the exhibits caught his eye. It was an LOH, just like old 795.
Cagney realized the odds of it being the same copter were stacked against him, but he and his wife drew their grandchildren’s attention to it.
“We said, ‘That’s a helicopter like Grandpa had in Vietnam,’ ” Bobbie Cagney said.
Already busy preserving her husband’s war photo albums, Bobbie Cagney’s interest was stirred. The avid genealogist switched gears from digging into family roots to tracking down 795, which was made by Hughes Aircraft.
The chances that it had survived all these years were slim. The Army had purchased 1,430 and sent 800 to Vietnam. Half were lost to the war. The others were refurbished and given to Army National Guard units across the country.
But Bobbie Cagney kept digging. She finally located 795 at the Army Aviation Heritage Foundation and Flying Museum in Griffin, Ga., near Atlanta.
During the Clinton administration, the helicopters were declared surplus military equipment and given to law enforcement agencies. Museum officials informed her that after four years with the Homestead Police Department in Florida, it was auctioned and purchased by the museum, run by a group of aviation veterans.
And, as fate would have it, the LOH the Cagneys noticed at the Niagara Falls air show, was indeed 795.
Last month, the Cagneys traveled to Georgia and each went for a ride on 795, which had been rebuilt and flew better than in Vietnam because of the care devoted to it.
“It was like seeing a ghost,” Cagney told his wife. “I thought it had been made into beer cans a long time ago.”
His affection for the copter that had served him and other crews in Vietnam caused him to well up inside.
“I missed you,” he told 795.
Though her husband never shared much about his war experiences, Bobbie Cagney said, he recently confided in her.
“He says that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of the guys in Vietnam and what went on,” she said.
Providing him a measure of comfort is knowing that his old buddy 795 is still around.
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