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nvmike

Viet Nam 1967 Jumps

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(edited)

My Vietnamese barber jumped with this club. He was a paratrooper in the RVN Army (ARVN). Their training included freefall as well as S/L.  He never made any combat zone jumps but says that there were a few ops where they parachuted into safe-ish LZs. All his SPC jumps were made from H 34 helos, no fixed wing jumps. 

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Sheridan Peterson, considered by some to be a viable DB Cooper candidate, also jumped with the SPC. His book, The Idiot's Frightful Laughter, is available on Amazon and is worth buying just for the SPC content alone. It's straight out of Apocalypse Now. Coppola should have included it in his movie. Even more bizarre than the war zone surfing he did include. 

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I was an SSPC safety officer in 1969.  Still have the USPA card. We made a few jumps at Ap Don from a DC3 rented from Continental Airlines. During one jump I could hear an M-60 being fired.  During another an F-4 strafed something about a quarter mile across the little river that ran by the DZ.  Nothing more exciting than that.  Twice the VN Army team jumped with us. The village kids field packed for us, and several Vietnamese women from the village catered food.  VN Army troops hauled us back to TSN airbase in brand new stake bed trucks. There were 9 jumpers at the time & I had trained 4 of them (I think) & put them out on static line in the Club's surplus rigs.  I had to train a few so we could afford the DC3.  U.S. Armed forces TV featured us & filmed from the plane.  They just showed up one morning.  Scared me because I was a Seabee E-4 & hadn't asked permission from any American military sources, just the Vietnamese Army.  No one challenged us.

 

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