I began my career as an S-3 "Viking" Plane Captain, inspecting and keeping S-3A BuNo 159747 ready to fly at all times. I spent a year working on the flight deck at night while we sailed the Indian Ocean aboard USS Eisenhower. During that year, we visited Singapore, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and not much else - we were at sea for 251 days that year, with at-sea periods of 93 days and 155 days without a port call. I learned to fly in SH-3 "Sea King" helicopters in my off duty hours.
The Navy sent me to AW (aviation submarine hunter) school in 1981, to learn how to hunt submarines and fly in various types of aircraft. I was the first student to challenge the course, completing the 14 week school in 4 weeks with a 90.22 average. The school command advanced me to the rank of AW-3 and recommended me for the next promotion cycle. I went from E-3 to E-5 in a year.
I volunteered for isolated duty and was assigned to the staff of Patrol Wing One on Diego Garcia in the center of the Indian Ocean. We flew missions against the Soviets all around the IO and into Africa and Ceylon. On my first mission in a P-3, we watched as the Soviets de-orbited a BOR-4 miniature spaceplane which landed in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. Seeing this small craft come down into the ocean was like science fiction; I knew I was seeing something that no one back home would ever see. To picture it, think of a Space Shuttle, only 15 feet long. Google it - it was really cool!
I visited Mogadishu & Berbera Somalia, Djibouti, Oman, and a few other places no one ever heard of back then. Part of my job on "Dodge" was to brief and debrief flight crews going out to locate Soviet Naval units (warships, subs and the occasional Communist cruise ship), including their rare aircraft carriers and "Papa 046", a Charlie II-class guided-missile nuclear submarine that sank after we chased it around for half a year. I spent quite a bit of time chasing Soviet submarines but my favorite thing was to engage their aircraft carriers and helicopters. My job allowed me to do that on several occasions.
In 1983, on the ground in Mogadishu, I found an unattended Soviet helicopter and comprehensibly robbed it. I brought back every part that wasn’t bolted down and quite a few that were. We bolted back to our island home - home free. Everyone treated me differently after that.
I returned to San Diego and learned how to crew the aging SH-2F "Sea Sprite", a wonderful helicopter that became my favorite toy. It was built by an odd man whose factory turned out electric guitars, cymbals, and Navy helicopters. The 1950s-era helo was used for rescue, anti-submarine, and radar picket duties. I excelled at these missions and won quite a few awards. For the next couple years, I was assigned to HSL-33 at NAS North Island (San Diego) and ran its intelligence library. I taught Soviet tactics and threat recognition to pilots and aircrews. “Next slide. This is a Kynda-class guided missile cruiser. See the two masts, two missile launchers, two guidance radars? Two of everything. That’s a Kynda.” We had a rhyme for every enemy ship, a trick to remember their names in the heat of a mission.
Our squadron sent small groups of sailors and aircrews out on Frigates and Destroyers, even the battleship USS New Jersey, on cruises all over the world. I was eager to deploy and made several short cruises during 1984 aboard USS Hepburn. Due to heavy drug use on that ship, most of the fleet called her the “Hash-burn.” Every ship in the Navy had a similar derogatory nickname, a habit probably dating back to pre-history.
During 1985, I was assigned to the USS Kirk as senior crewman on two SH-2F detachments, Det 3J and 3K (one relieved the other; I was left onboard as a replacement for a flyer that quit his job in fear of our aging helicopter and its propensity for crashing).
Detachments from HSL 33 "Seasnakes", HSL 35 "Magicians", and HSL 37 "Lamplighters" spent the 1980s cycling through forward deployments to Atsugi Japan. When not assigned to escorting the USS Midway, these frigate-embarked SH-2F detachments occasionally were sent into the northern Pacific, Sea of Japan. On rarer occasions, into the Sea of Ohkotsk, a bathtub to the north of Japan that was bordered on all sides by Soviet Russia and formerly Japanese islands (the Kurilski Ostrovka) that it took as reparations for WWII. The Soviets met us at the door in all three of those places, but they looked at the Sea of O as “their” lake and any time a US vessel went in there, we were harassed vigorously.
Outside the Kurile Island chain, the Soviets sortied a wide variety of aircraft to investigate encroaching US Navy units such as ours. The usual Tu-95 Bears thundering overhead were familiar to everyone, but we also met Tu-16 Badgers, Be-12 Mail amphibious seaplanes, and during one exciting afternoon, a force of forty eight Tu-22 Blinders and Backfires coming out of Central Asia. These were supersonic bombers that carried tactical and nuclear missiles and were intended to strike the US in time of war.
Once inside the Sea of O, just about everything in the Soviet aerial arsenal came out to harass and investigate us, including the very rare Mi-14 "Haze" (only time I saw them). Fighters took turns trying to intimidate and scare off our 30 year old helicopter. On the same day, we'd get gravity-laced messages from "Sky King" announcing that "Suhkois are off the deck inbound from Ostrov Iterup." and "MiGs are active. Heads up." The MiGs were modern swing wing MiG-23 interceptors – the Sukhois were Su-15 “Flagons” from the same unit that shot down the Korean KAL 007 airliner, two years earlier.
One call always got our attention - "Rotary wing aircraft are inbound from the mainland." That meant Mi-24D “Hind” gunships were coming out to intercept us. Our encounters with Hinds were limited to when we were in the Sea of O. Always a pair; one high and 1/2 mile behind us, and one co-sharing our airspace. They came close enough we could hear them over the sound of our own helicopter. We could feel the vibration of their rotors through our own airframe. As an intimidation tool, they brought their Hinds right up next to us, closer than we flew to wingmen; on two occasions, they forced us to break away to avoid a collision as they just kept on coming at us.
We flew with either a "spook" (intelligence specialist) or a dedicated photographer; the onboard spook was there to monitor radio traffic between the Soviet aircrews and ground control, to tell us when we had gone too far (either geographically or metiphorically). Often it was a white faced plea - "We need to get out of here!" Every time we flew a mission, the spooks were waiting, at the edge of the flight deck for us to shut down so they could take away our video tapes and film. After a while, they accepted my work enough that we didn’t have to take a photographer with us.
We flew two five-hour cycles using whatever daylight was available. Due to the risk of collision and the absence of any SAR (rescue) effort if we went down, there were no night flights. That meant we were really hopping during the day. Once we launched, the Soviets sent someone out to intercept.
It became apparent that they were sending one airman out frequently - whichever Hind was assigned "close escort" to us, almost every day, the forward / gunner's cockpit was crewed by a pleasant man we (for obvious reasons) called Ivan. Ivan had a broad black mustache and a ready smile. He was like the neighbor that waved at us from over the hedge each day. The hedge was open space between two combat helicopters flying along less than 100 feet apart.
Judging by things they did, it was clear we were not seen as any sort of threat and after the initial period of aggression, the Hind crews played with us. Our landing gear malfunctioned routinely due to the cold temps (-10 to -40F) so we left them down and pinned when it was at its coldest. OAT (Outside Air Temperature) simply didn't register and we joked that we needed an OAT gauge that measured in Kelvin. When the Commie Rat Bastards realized that the Yankee Air Pirates couldn't raise and lower their gear, they flew alongside of us with big smiles, cycling their gear up and down. Russians were used to cold, and made sure their equipment was unfazed by it.
Other times, the crewmen in the cargo stations put signs up in the windows with our call numbers on them. In this balmy period of the Cold War, they came right out and played games with us, like a well-armed cat slapping around an unarmed mouse. We frequently raced them, either starting from a hover or from a 'flying start'. The only contest we ever won was hovering - often, the Hinds could only manage to hold a slow creep and it was clear they were too heavily loaded to actually hover in place. They loved giving high speed displays, blasting past us with a 50 mph speed advantage over our tired Sea Sprite.
After weeks of watching us end our flights by flying approaches to our ship with recognizable 'gates' (at a certain distance from the ship, we would fly a particular altitude – as we got closer, the altitude was stepped down in stages which we called ‘gates’), our "high escort" broke away from following us one day and made several _perfect_ approaches to our ship, as if it intended to land. After the first, the flight deck crew realized we might have a "Red October" situation on our hands, so they hurriedly made a sign in Russian saying, "Go ahead and land!" (This is why you need Spooks on your ship - to make posters.) We made a video tape of the event - sadly, CDR Fondren now has the only copy. The plan was to allow the Hind to land, quickly cut off its blades and tail pylon, then shut the hangar over the top of it. That wouldn't leave any room for our trusty old POS “Sea Sprite”, so we were told that if push came to shove, we were to ditch alongside the ship. Seriously. I wasn't looking forward to a dunking in the 29-degree Sea of O.
That ended that sea tour and I left the beautiful solitude of life underway; I was selected to work for Admiral Rich at COMASWWINGPAC, a command staff in charge of 22 squadrons, back at North Island in San Diego. I served as the aircrew representative for all West Coast "Sea Sprite" squadrons. My best success was pushing through fleet introduction of the HEEDS or Helicopter Emergency Escape Device. With this little air bottle, victims of a crashed helicopter that find themselves underwater in a sinking helicopter have the precious gift of an extra five minutes of life to use while escaping the wreck. If I had been able to do it years earlier, at least some of the 31 friends I lost in Naval Aviation mishaps might have survived. I succeeded too late to help my own friends, but in later years, dozens of airmen got that extra chance.
My swan song was a twilight tour as an instructor at SWATS, a Navy war college for ship-sinking airmen. "Sea-based Weapons and Advanced Tactics School" was one of the first to fully incorporate computers into training aircrews. We taught folks the tactics for using Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Mk 46 torpedoes, and bombs. I was one of three enlisted instructors (among 25 officers) and I had a blast, developing my own classes, teaching up to 60 officers and enlisted aircrewmen at a time.
I was getting Letters of Appreciation and Letters of Commendation from squadrons about every other week and was picked as “Sailor of the Month” and Quarter eight times in my last fourteen months in the service. In 1988, I was selected as “Sailor of the Year” for all of the squadrons and shore units assigned to Admiral Adams' command. I competed against 33 other “Sailors of the Year” (representing over 7,000 other sailors) to earn the honor. It was my high-water mark in life.
At the same time, I was self-destructing on a personal level. Thirty one of my comrades died in training accidents and operational flights during my career. Following the crash and deaths of two close friends and the loss of my girlfriend, Christine Cardenas, to a drunk driver, I couldn't focus on my job and made terrible choices. By the New Year 1990, the Navy and all of its opportunities and wonderful experiences were behind me.
These days, I raise my children in a world that rapidly forgot what we did during the Cold War. The rise of terrorism and the shooting wars that followed have made our sacrifices dim memories, even for those of us that lived them.
RIP Mike Ampong, Bill Martinie, Billy Quinn, Ron Lipshutz, Lt Miller, LT Cooper, LCDR Carlson, the crew of VP-1 Crew 8, Kevin Newbill, B-14 (his name was so long we just called him B-14, even after he hung himself), and the rest of you that I accidentally out-lived. I wish I could say you didn't all die in vain - I have a hard time convincing myself of it at times.
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Gordon Permann
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