Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:55 | It was an emotional scene as Paul Curs said goodbye to his family and boarded the airliner for Vietnam. Before he could get to his assignment as a forward air controller in Vietnam, he had to undergo survival training in the Philippines. He found a successful way to elude the tribesmen who were paid to search for him.
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Both his parents encouraged him to serve, so Paul Curs chose VMI for higher learning and a route into flight school. Like everyone, he wanted to fly fighters but chose to fly as a forward air controller in Vietnam as a stepping stone to the fast jets.
The base at Pleiku was so high up in the mountains that the Cessna O-2 had performance issues. Forward air controller Paul Curs flew that aircraft in support of missions on and around the Ho Chi Minh trail. The first time he flew over Laos, there were so many bomb craters he thought it looked like the surface of the moon.
Forward air controller Paul Curs usually flew with someone else in the other seat. He had a captain who was nearing his rotation date on a couple of missions and the guys decided to give him a little surprise as a sendoff.
The Viet Cong would fire some small rockets into the air base every now and then, just for harassment. Paul Curs recalls the startling scene of airmen watching the barrage in a very nonchalant manner. Once he found a dud sticking up out of the ground.
Paul Curs didn't realize the extent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail until he began flying missions over it. He was a forward air controller, or FAC, and his little Cessna had no real armament, yet he flew right into the anti-aircraft fire to coordinate attacks. The goal was to interdict men, weapons and supplies coming down the trail.
Some commanders flew combat missions along with everybody else and some didn't. You can guess which ones got the respect of the pilots. Paul Curs was a FAC pilot flying out of Pleiku and he recalls when the tactics officer tried out a new tactic. It didn't go over too well.
Halfway through his tour, FAC pilot Paul Curs began flying missions for MACV SOG, the Studies and Observations Group. It sounded innocuous but what they did was insert Green Beret teams into the jungle to cause havoc with the enemy. They were the bravest warriors he had ever seen.
FAC pilot Paul Curs was flying in support of a Green Beret mission. The weather was bad and he couldn't always see the ground. Just about when it was time for him to return to base and another pilot to take over the mission, he got a frantic call from a team member on the ground. His actions over the next half hour would bring him the Silver Star. Part 1 of 2.
The Green Beret was alone and under fire in a bomb crater with FAC pilot Paul Curs circling overhead in his little Cessna. He couldn't call for fighter support because of heavy cloud cover but he had the Willy Peter white phosphorus rockets he used to mark targets. And he was a deadeye shot with them. Part 2 of 2.
FAC pilot Paul Curs usually worked with Air Force fighters but one day he was working with some Navy A-7s. He wouldn't clear any pilot to go ahead and attack unless the pilot could see him. That way there would be no mid-air collision. He received that assurance so he gave the go ahead. It was nearly the last thing he ever did.
He thought he had been promised an assignment to fly fighters after a tour as a forward air controller, but Paul Curs found out that it was less than a promise. As he boarded a flight in Spokane to head home, a belligerent passenger wanted to fight. A returning Green Beret nearly gave him what he wanted.
No one would talk to him about it. Pilots from earlier wars wouldn't give him the time of day. It was a stigma that Vietnam veteran Paul Curs could not shake. He was one of the guys who "lost" the war and, on top of that, he was having bad dreams.
Paul Curs has been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial three times. Each one has been an emotional experience, including the time he pointed to a panel at random and got a chilling surprise.
Shortly after arriving in Vietnam, FAC pilot Paul Curs came to a sobering realization about the war. It became his goal to make sure as many of his comrades as possible went home safely. The absurdity of the war was made clear when he reported that he sighted a tank. There are no tanks there, came the reply.
For Vietnam veteran Paul Curs, his experiences and stories are shared in the memory of his VMI classmate John William Kennedy, who did not make it back from that war.
