Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:21 | Like so many returning veterans, Dan McMahon put Vietnam behind him and returned to college. Once he figured out that he didn't really want to be a teacher, he returned to flying for a satisfying career. Just don't put Gimme Shelter on the juke box.
Keywords : Dan McMahon helicopter (chopper) pilot Vietnam US Department of Energy (DOE) Reserve National Guard Gimme Shelter
Dan McMahon had heard stories from relatives about the service and he had no qualms about joining. He left for a tour in Vietnam with a helicopter maintenance unit and it was there that he caught someone's eye.
Dan McMahon's first Vietnam tour was a walk in the park. He maintained helicopters and, except for the occasional rocket attack, he saw no combat.
It was miserable at Fort Wolters with the heat and the mosquitos, but Dan McMahon was learning to fly and that made it bearable. When he moved to the next phase at Hunter Field, the training got more serious and he realized he had to be a soldier, not just an aviator.
For Dan McMahon, it was very difficult to leave a wife and young child and go off to Vietnam. On the other hand, he was young and stupid enough to believe it would be a big adventure.
When he got to Bien Hoa, Dan McMahon found some of the nastiest living conditions that he'd yet seen in the Army. The Chinook pilot flew down in the Delta for a while but then he was reassigned to a unit supporting Korean troops. That was an eye opener.
Chinook pilot Dan McMahon hated to hear it when there was a Tac-E, a tactical emergency. That meant he would probably be flying howitzers to a fire base in the middle of the night with ground fire coming up to meet him. When some aircraft had mysterious explosions, they looked for some maintenance issue, but what they discovered was a new enemy weapon.
For Chinook pilot Dan McMahon, Vietnamization meant that he had to fly with co-pilots that he could not understand, which meant that all crew coordination was gone. This contributed to the chaos during a crash landing in which he managed to get the aircraft safely down.
