Bruce Nesmith - An abbreviated account of our Lancer beginnings

In days of yore when giants walked the earth………

The First days of the Lancers as I saw them.

I joined the Army to get my choice of schools rather than wait for the draft and take my chances on my test scores and the Army’s needs. I had always wanted to fly, had used my summer job money to take flying lessons at the local airport and was well on my way to having my private pilot’s license. When the time came, I told the NCO at the assignments desk in the induction center that I wanted a chance to fly and he practically wet himself to find someone willing to volunteer for a 67N20 MOS, Huey Maintenance Technician slot by telling me that it was my best chance at flight duty. He didn’t tell me or didn’t know that I was a highly unlikely candidate for a crew chief slot as I was a lanky 6 ft. 6 in. tall and wore glasses, and he definitely didn’t tell me what the casualty rate was for huey flight crews.

After basic training, I spent four months at Ft. Eustis VA going through the Huey schools and then the Cobra schools. I was a brand-new graduate of the Huey and Cobra maintenance programs at FT. Eustis (which was a good thing and I didn’t know it), was a SPC 5 on the strength of graduating both schools at or near the top of my class and had been in the Army for a grand total of 7 months and had a brother with the 1^st Cav. in Vietnam. Then I was left to cool my heels as a casual in the training company until the Army found a slot for me due to unofficial Army policy at the time.

The Army had a practice at the time of not sending brothers to Vietnam at the same time and my younger brother David was serving with the 1^st Cav., so I wasn’t eligible for an involuntary assignment to Vietnam. I spent six weeks in the training company as CQ and casual labor until I was desperate and went to the assignments office to see if I could find someplace somewhere to go. The possibilities for non-Vietnam duty anywhere in the world were very limited due to the massive influx of troops returning from Vietnam and serving out the last of their hitches in various stateside units. There was only one unit that met the Army’s requirements, the Army’s unofficial personnel policy and my desire to have a chance to fly. There was a new aviation battalion forming at Ft. Carson, Colorado for deployment to Vietnam after the completion of buildup and training. The estimated deployment date was for early 1969 which would have been about the time that David was to return to the states. Colorado sounded plenty exotic to me and it would get me off of CQ duty, so I had them cut my orders and then ……

I may need to explain a little before moving on. A Vietnam era Huey aviation company was designed as a stand-alone unit that was self-supporting up to the depot maintenance level. That meant that a company had two flight platoons of ten aircraft each. It had a large maintenance section capable of working three shifts, seven days a week. There were avionic sections, radio repair sections, engine shops, transmission shops, sheet metal shops, armories, supply rooms and ammo dumps for all of the above, a motor pool with everything from the CO’s jeep to a fuel truck to the generators that provided our power, a mess hall, a general supply room for uniforms and personal equipment, and you name it. A company consisted of the Aviation Company itself and a maintenance detachment. We were B Company 158^th AHB and the 168^th Transportation Detachment. The total head count for each company and attached maintenance detachment was close to 250 people not including door gunners when we reached our full strength. An Assault Helicopter Battalion consisted of a Headquarters Company, three Huey slick companies with attached maintenance detachments, and a gun company with 16 Cobras with an attached maintenance detachment. A battalion had over 1,100 people in it.

Once upon a time

in the mountains of Colorado on a fairly quiet Army post just outside Colorado Springs, a brand-new Army aviation unit was born and told that its destiny was to be deployed to Vietnam after training. When I joined the unit (B Co. 22 something or another Aviation Battalion Temporary) in July of 1968 there were less than 30 other personnel in the company. We were housed in two old “temporary” WWII wooden barracks and an orderly room building with an attached empty supply room.

Ft. Carson was the home post for the 5^th Mechanized Infantry Division at the time and most of the units on post were part of the 5^th Mech. in one way or another. The only helicopters at Ft. Carson belonged to the post commander until we arrived. The MP’s and the Colorado Springs Police learned to hate our Screaming Eagle patches with a passion before we were through with Ft. Carson and Colorado Springs, and everyone learned to hate the sound of our Hueys. The Air Force at NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain had to make a permanent exception for us as we couldn’t seem to stay out of their NO-FLY zone, but that’s a whole series of other stories

Our temporary company commander was 1^st Lt. John Scarlett who was fresh out of OCS and flight school, and our 1^st Sgt Corbett Estep was the only long service man in the company. He was a WWII vet, had served in the Korean War and knew every shifty Senior NCO trick in the book and several that hadn’t been catalogued yet. “Top” Estep welcomed me into the company and when he looked over my records and found out that I could type, went into an ecstatic fit right in the orderly room. He put his fat arm over my shoulder and wanted to know if I would like to be a supply sergeant. I replied that no, I really wanted to be a crew chief. After considerable intense negotiation, the decision was made that I would be his supply sergeant and set up the supply room until such time as a real supply sergeant was assigned and in return, he would make sure that I got one of the crew chief slots in the company. That is how I wound up as probably the only 6 ft 6 in Huey crew chief who wore glasses in the Army.

We continued to fill up with people rapidly and relocated a couple of times to larger areas in the process. Sometime in July we were informed that we were now the 158^th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 101^st Airborne Division (Airmobile) and were issued Screaming Eagle patches for our uniforms. The usual parades and speeches were made which didn’t mean a whole lot to most of us other than that we were now part of the legendary 101^st Airborne Division and got to wear a cool patch of our shoulder. About the same time, we got our first official Company Commander, Major Tommy Thornton. Major Thornton was a career Transportation officer who like most of our pilots had about 200 hours of rotary wing stick time. The majority of our pilots were fresh out of flight school and the majority of our enlisted personnel were straight out of their advanced training schools. In other words, very few of us other than the senior enlisted personnel and senior officers knew anything about how the real Army operated and most of them had never served in an aviation unit. You should understand that this was the “during the draft, Vietnam buildup Army” and that Army Aviation as it is now was being invented on the fly by 19- and 20-year old’s who had been in the service for a year or less.

Around the same time that we were re-designated as the 158^th AHB, the companies chose unit names or unit call signs. This was done in an arcane and secret process that I haven’t ever understood. There have been a number of stories put forth for the choice of the name “Lancers” but to this day I think the story most likely to be true is this one. The company’s warrant officers and Lieutenants were addicted to a particular brand of cheap wine that came in cute stone bottles and the name was chosen when during one of their drunken planning sessions, one of the warrants lifted the bottle over his head, pointed to the logo and said, “We’re the Lancers”. The patch wasn’t designed until much later after we were in Vietnam (another story for a later day). Three of our companies A (Ghostriders), B (Lancers) and D (Redskins) and the headquarters company trained at Ft. Carson so we had close to 900 personnel on post. C Company (Phoenix) trained at Ft. Riley and joined up with the battalion in Vietnam.

We received our aircraft about the first of September 1968 when 56 Hueys and simulated Cobras were unleashed on the surrounding countryside. The Lancers got twenty brand new H model Hueys right off the production line. Since all of the pilots were right out of school, everyone except the platoon leaders was assigned to an aircraft in alphabetical order as were the crew chiefs. Aircraft 67-17648 got WO1 David R. Smith, WO1 Ben Sutton, and SPC 5 Bruce Nesmith as a crew. “Doc” Smith got to be AC as “sm” came before “su”. Everyone drew flight gear and away we went…. formation flying, cross country flying, night flying, simulated assaults, touch and goes, anything to get the maximum hours possible every week. In between flying, the CE’s learned how to pull daily and weekly maintenance, the pilots learned how to preflight for real and the maintenance sections learned how to pull monthly and unscheduled maintenance. In our spare time, we had escape and evasion training exercises and field training exercises. I’ve never been sure that learning to stay out of the prickly pear and how to put up a squad tent in the snow applied to Vietnam but the Army has mysterious ways.

In that same mysterious manner, the Army decided that our training was complete in December, and we proceeded to load out all of our equipment for shipment to the west coast and our helicopters were flown to the pier in Long Beach CA. The stories of our equipment load out and the flight to the west coast have to be told separately. I wasn’t part of the west coast trip but it has become legendary in its own right. Someone else will have to fill in that part. Our equipment load out was irregular to say the least and I’m probably the only person left who knows even part of that story which I will tell at a later date. Suffice it to say that we had twice the regulation number of Conex containers that the shipping documents called for. Once our equipment and aircraft were gone, we were at loose ends. Boy, were we at loose ends!

There was one company formation a day at 7:00 AM where heads were counted…. or accounted for and then we were turned loose on the world until the next morning. We got a two-week pre-deployment leave in December that got us home for Christmas, and then another two-week pre-deployment leave in late January at the request of the Ft. Carson post commander who was getting tired of us screwing up his nice relationships with the citizens of Colorado Springs. The MP’s ran a regular bus from the strip in Colorado Springs to our battalion area. More stories that need to be told at some point. We finally shipped out on February 18^th, 1969.

Everyone in the company threw one last three-day party before we boarded the buses that day and we were all either still hung over or in a number of cases still drunk. When the buses passed through the post gates, every window had a bare ass hanging out of it as the MPs on duty got the largest serial mooning that may have ever taken place. At the airbase, we were supposed to debark the buses and walk-in single file past the commanding general of Ft. Carson and salute him on the way to the plane. This was going fairly well considering our condition, when one of our crew chiefs fixated on all of the stars and medals on the general and marched directly up to him, saluted; fell forward and vomited all over him. We rescued the CE and got him hustled onto the plane, and the general left in a huff. Thus, ended our stay at Ft. Carson.

Any of my partners in crime at Ft. Carson are welcome to make comments and corrections as they see fit and to tell their own version of our not so humble beginnings

The list of our original aircraft tail numbers and replacement aircraft tail numbers and a lot of other early Lancer information can be found at the Lancer website. WWW.thelancers.org.

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