Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Bruce mckentee. He served twenty one years in uniform, and he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War, where he flew Cobra attack helicopters. He was also shot down by an enemy SA seven heat seeking missile and barely escaped with his life in nineteen seventy two. We'll hear that story and how he was rescued in great detail in today's podcast.
We'll also learn all about the cobras and what types of missions he was flying over Vietnam. Bruce mckentye was born into an army family, and he says his path from being the son of an officer to an ROTC cadet to becoming a career Army officer seemed natural from a very early age.
I was born into the Army. My father was a World War Two, Korean War, and Vietnam veteran. He served thirty one years in the field artillery. I grew up in the military environment and enjoyed it. I went to high school. I went to school all over the United States, and I went to high school in France. So that's a pretty good start in life. Go to high school
in Paris, France. How many people can do that. I went to college at Texas A and University, and I went there strictly to obtain a commission in the United States Army. I was planning to be a career officer ever since high school. So I completed Texas A and M in nineteen seventy graduated, and I went to went into my Officer Basic course. I was a Field Artillery officer on active duty, but I was also obligated to go to flight school because I went through the ROTWC flight program at Texas.
A and M.
In January of nineteen seventy one, I went to my Officer Basic course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, completed that. I had four months to wait until I could go to flight school. So I was an OCAs tack officer and the local officer candidate school battalion and as a tack officer until I went to flight school, and I think
it started in April of nineteen seventy one. Went to Fort Walters, Texas, where I went through ULSER Primary Helicopter School, in the THH fifty five helicopter, and I really enjoyed that because I went to school in Texas, I felt like I was right at home. So that was a
four month course, I believe. Once we completed that, we went to Fort Rucker, Alabama for our advanced helicopter training, which we did instrument training, we did contact training, and to learn how to fly the UH one helicopter, which was the basic workhorse of the army.
Mckentie completed flight school in April of nineteen seventy two, and soon he was off to Vietnam as an attack helicopter pilot, specifically in cobras.
It's an H one G Cobra attack helicopter made by bel Helicopter was made and made and fielid into the Army in nineteen sixty seven. Was built strictly as an attack helicopter. He was the first helicopter to be built just as an attack helicopter. Tandem seating front and back seat, fully closed canopy just like a jet a fighter jet had air conditioning. Because it was a closed canopy, that was a nice feature Vietnam.
It's only three feet wide. The fuse launch. It was a very unique helicopter.
I decided that if I was going to go to Vietnam and get shot at, I wanted to be in something that could shoot back, and this could do the job.
McKenty just explained a bit at the end of that last response why he loved flying the Cobra so much, the weaponry, and he told us quite a bit more about the power the Cobra could unleash upon an enemy.
Well special about it as it had a lot of weapons on it. There were multiple configurations that you could put on that aircraft, from the two point seven to five inch fold in fen Areo rocket at seven point six two millimeter miniguns at a forty milimeter grenade launcher automatic. I forget the rate of fire for the forty millimeters, but it was it was something like four hundred rounds a minute or something, and the miniguns were two thousand
or four thousand rounds per minute you could fire. And the rockets they went on the rocket pods and the wing stores, and you had eighteen shot rocket pods and seven shot rocket pods, so you had indoor pods and you were which were normally the heavier pods, which were the eighteen shot rocket pods and M two hundred I think it was called, and then they had M one five eight pods, which were the seven shot rocket pods on the outboard.
Mkenty also says the Cobra had good speed and could stay in the air for quite a while before needing to refuel.
The top speed was about one hundred and eighty miles an hour in the one hundred and eighty.
Knots nautica miles per hour.
The fuel range was about two and a half hours, and we normally, you know, flew for about two hours two hours fifteen minutes before we returned to the station for fuel.
By the time McKenty went to Vietnam, much of the American public and especially people his age, had soured on the war effort, but McKenty says he was laser focused on training and getting ready for the duty that he knew would be coming.
Well, I went to a military school, Texas Stadem, although it's not a military academy, at a pretty strong military school, just like the Citadel and VMI.
So everybody's pretty gung ho.
Military were very patriotic, and we did what our president.
Told us to do.
So I had no doubt that once I completed helicopter training and I was going to Vietnam, although most of my class de duct out of Vietnam, because it was at that point in the Vietnam that they were starting to stand down the military divisions and ground troops and sending them home.
In fact, when I arrived.
In Vietnam, there were a very very few ground troops there.
When he arrived in Vietnam, McKenty became very aware of certain things that were very different than they were back home. From the climate, to the enemy threats, to the general condition of the country. He immediately knew he was in a whole new world.
What impressed me it was very very hot, It was very very human. He broke out into a sweat as soon as you got off the airplane. We're all in our lightweight tw uniforms, and it was instant sweat as soon as you walked down the ramp.
What really stuck with me was riding in.
We got on a bus to ride to a processing center, and as your driver down the bus had had like a wire on the on the windows. It was like a chain link fence on all the windows. So and I've tried to figure.
Out what that was all about.
And the guy goes to grenades, so grenades don't get in the bus and go off, they hit the screen and bounce out. So that plus, when we got into a civilian part of the country, all the structures that I could see there were so many just old tin roofs and they were arrested, and just pieces of metal that don't even match covering the tops of the rous and I was just amazed.
I mean, my father spent a couple of tours in Europe.
I went to high school in France and never saw anything like that, so that was quite shocking.
Mkenty didn't go up in the Cobra immediately, he says, for a short time. Other duties took up his time.
I actually stayed they called it Camp Alpha, which is right there in Saigon, and stayed there a couple of days until they decided which unit that I was going to. I don't know how they made those decisions. All he knew was I was a cob rated commissioned officer and so they were limited. I couldn't go to just any helicopter unit. I had to go like an aerial field arty unit or to an air cavalry unit. Where they had Cobra helicopters. So I just sat there and waited.
I wanted to go to the first calve. I ended up in the first calve, so I was very happy.
When it was time to fly. Mkenty says he was very confident in his skills, but was keenly aware he had never used them in combat, so he learned everything he could from the more experienced pilots.
No, I was focused on learning my job.
I was I knew how to fly the alicopter and did really know how to perform the mission of an air cavalry troop. So I concentrated on trying to learn from the experienced The aircraft commander that I was flying with cover is a two person helicopter. You have an aircraft commander who is a rated pilot in the back seat. He flies the aircraft and controls the winging, stores all
the rocket firing. Then you have a front seat who was also a rated pilot, and he has controls up there that he could fly the aircraft, and he can yes switches that he could take over, and he could fire rockets that he could fire machine gun in forty millimeter either see could do that, but the aircraft commander sat in the back, and he's the guy that has all the experience. He's been there probably in country five or six months already, and he's now the aircraft commander.
And I'm a pilot.
I'm a pilot copilot gunner, and so I learned from him the mission of the air cavalry and how to navigate across that strange land. I mean a lot of jungle of bryce patties and mountains or pretty diverse terrain to learn how to navigate around. And I learned how to when we were out in free fire areas. You know, we'd do some target practice on trees or something, just learning the fire better when we weren't actually looking for the bad guys.
That's retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Bruce McEntee. He's also a Vietnam veteran who was wounded twice while serving as a Cobra attack helicopter pilot. One of those times he was also shot down. That story and the dramatic rescue that followed are straight ahead. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumba's. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and Cobra Attack helicopter pilot Bruce mckentie, who now begins the story of how he was shot down over Vietnam in nineteen seventy two.
That day I was flying with Bobby Reinhardt. He was a CW two experience. He's probably about seven or eight years older than I am and had probably about tener.
Eleven years of the army.
The other helicopter was combated by CW two Bob Minette. We call him Buffalo Bob, and one of my best friends to this day. He was on his second tour. He was also one of the instructor pilots of the Cobra. Very experienced, and I had a lot of flights with him. And his front seat was First Lieutenant Danny Buddha, another new guy like me, right out of flight school, first tour in Vietnam, and then Wally Wall He was a City of B two and he he was an experienced
helicopter pilot and he was on his second tour. He was flying the six Alpha, which is their scout helicopter. So and George Hewlett was the troop commander, and First Lieutenant Jefferies was the.
Co pilot for the.
Command and Control ship and they we all took off. We were flying in the Razorback Mountains, which was in between the city of Tannin in the Tetan province and in the Cambodian border.
Up around the parents.
Beat kind of low mountainous, not big high mountains there a couple thousand feet first of all, the C and C ship gets up around four thousand feet where he could get sight.
Of the whole area.
We're flying altitude. When I first got in country, we were flying right on top of the trees because we didn't have IR suppression kits, and they had lost a lot of cobras in the months of the Eastern Offensive of nineteen seventy two. He'd lost a lot of cobra helicopters to SA seven he seeking missiles. So when I got there, they were retrofitting all the aircraft with IR
suppression kits so we could fly at altitude. Did most of my flying before this right on top of the tree tops at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, flying circles around a little bird in the middle, trying to protect him and to react if he got shot at. We'd been flying at altitude for several months, but it was still uneasy because the clouds were low, with the cloud through about two thousand feet. We were flying at about eighteen hundred feet below that, which is put you
in the range for SA seven heat seeking missile. It also puts you in range for all their heavier anti aircraft weapons, the fifty one caliber twenty three millimeter. We're just out of range, so there's small arms, just the rifles or AK forty seven. Buffalo. Bob goes flies down, but they call trolling. He goes down in his cobra and he just tools goes through it about one hundred miles an hour or one hundred knots on top of the trees, the trolling to see if there's any bad
guys down there. He didn't take any fire, so he came back up and he put the little bird on the trees. So he's just going down there and make sure we're not putting the little bird into hornet's nest.
The little birds stand on the bottom, and we get into a racetrack pattern where we're flying about one hundred and eighty degrees out from each other at about eighteen hundred feet in a big circular pattern, and so that both the aircraft could keep an eye on a little bird command and control ship because of the cloud cover. He's flying at the same altitude we are, except he's
flying a bigger circle around us. We're flying around and around, and I'm waiting for something to happen because I'd bet at this position before the first time I got shot. It was just a weird, eerie feeling that day. It comes with being close to the cambody in border. When you're flying on a mission in Vietnam at that time, there are no good guys on the ground. When you get shot down, you're in bad trouble if your immediate guys are flying with can't come and get you. So
it's kind of spooky. Cambodia is spooky. It's like you can't see the border, but you could feel it.
You get and we were.
Flying close to the border. But our mission is to protect that little bird, so and as the co pilot gunner, I'm supposed to be taking notes on whatever he's finding down there. So I got straight on doing that, but I still have this weird feeling in the back of my head. We had BET up for fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, and all of a sudden.
Silence. We were complete. I have to tell you I don't talk.
About this often retired US Army lieutenant colonel and Cobra Attack helicopter pilot Bruce mckentee. You'll hear the rest of his incredible story in just a moment. This is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Bruce McKenty. He's also a Vietnam veteran. He flew Cobra Attack helicopters over Vietnam and narrowly survived being shot down by an enemy SA seven heat seeking missile in nineteen seventy two.
McKenty now picks up the story right after his Cobra was hit.
We had.
Absolute silence, which was just areas because part of that there was a lot of rotorblade noise and a lot of injined noise, and a lot of communication traffic on three different radios because the little bird was reported a lot of activity, and that you know, little one band trails we saw yesterday or the day before were now you know, jeep tracks or something, you know, vehicle tracks bent that there were people coming across the border, and that's why we were up there on the border to
find out if they were coming back.
And because Adlock the.
Easter Offensive of seventy two, you know, started in like March April of seventy two and ended the end of June, beginning of July, and I got there in July. We weren't sure if it was complete, if they were done, so we knew there were a lot of bad guys on the other side of the border trying to get across. It was eerie because all that noise went away and all of a sudden, it's.
Like, what's going on?
Uh, Well, we knew it was called on. I mean, we got hit and we didn't know with what we knew it was big because the aircraft shook and the UH and we could see the flames outside the canopy. The aircraft was on fire and we caught uh fire immediately. We lost our engine immediately, we lost uh A not on the engine, electrical you know, hydraulics, we lost everything. We couldn't even talk to each other. We had to yell back and forth in the canopy and UH Bobby,
being experienced UH pilot you know, entered all the rotation. Uh, yelling back and forth. You know, we don't have hydraulics. Hydraulic reservoir which is about eighteen inches behind his head. On the other side of a thin firewall exploded, burned into the cockpit with us. The cockpit started filling with smoke.
And fumes and fire.
The fire came started to commit. Bobby's screaming that he's burning. I can't see Bobby. He's back behind me. We have a instrument console in between us. So he says, help me get on the controls and so I but they slide away, grabbed by little short controls I have in the front, and we are trying to slow the aircraft down. We were doing about one hundred and twenty knots when we got hit. Airspeed for all rotation is eighty nuts.
We're trying to slow this thing down. We're heading towards the only clearing that we could see as an arc light, scarred terrain in the middle of the jungle where they dropped one hundred and eight five hundred pound bombs. That's what our arc light consists of from B fifty two's so we could see that. So that's the only place that we could see where there might be a flat terrain for us to land. So we're now fighting trying to get control of the aircraft, but we're also fighting
trying to breathe. We can't breathe. It is talk, it is we're coughing our gutsa. So we're at about fifteen hundred feet fourteen hundred feet and I said, you know, we need air. I opened my front I left canopy. You know, I supposed to open him above sixty nns or it's gonna rip off. I don't care, you know, I'm I need fresh air. All that did was feed the fire, and the fire just enveloped both of us. The entire cockit was covered, was in flame. And I
was gonna jump. I was gonna undo my seatbelt and jump, and I said, I'm going I'm jumping. Bobby opened his canopy and as soon as he opened his canopy, it's on the back right, it created a cross draft of one hundred not win and it just took all the fire and all the smoke right out the back and we buckle up. So we decided to buckle back up, and we're going to ride this.
Puppy in.
So now we can breathe. We're not getting burned anymore. Bobby got burned bad. But we now have to get control of this aircraft to get it on the ground. We're headed in the right direction. We're still trying to slow this thing down. We do we were doing in excess of a one hundred knots and we need to get it back to eighty. And the bad thing is
at the very bottom. We need to pull back on that cyclic some more, to do a little flare action to slow down from doing eighty knots to you know, something like thirty or forty knots before we can touch down and cushion with our collective. And we are just straining with all of our might to slow this thing down. We finally can feel that we're slowing it down, but we don't We're not going to have anything at the bottom, so we have really no control of where we're gonna
set this thing down. We're just heading for that park Lake area and hope we don't hit trees.
I just remember at the very.
Bottom, I remember, I mean we're fifty feet and we're still traveling fast and I don't know, forty miles fifty miles an hour, maybe faster, I don't know, but we were going in fast, and we're pulling on both controls, both of us, as hard as we can to try to get at the slow down. Otherwise we figured it's going to be in said death if we hit at seventy or eighty miles an hour. And what do we hit. We don't know. We're going to hit wherever we hit
because we don't have that control. We're pulling with all of our might, and then all of a sudden, the ground is right there. I let go of the controls at that point and did this just try to cover my face, and that's all I remember.
I was knocked unconscious.
As McKenty said earlier, there weren't any good guys on the ground except the ones he flew in with, and they are exactly why he's here today to tell his story because, as McKenty explains here, his fellow pilot was a hero that day and moved him away from enemy forces in the nick of time.
Everything I I'll tell you now is what was told to me later by Bobby and Buffalo, Bob and Wally, who were flying the other two aircraft, the Little Bird and the other Cobra, which they told me later because they were out the cobra and the little bird.
We're out flying and.
Shooting the bad guys who were trying to come.
And get us.
Bobby tells me later that he's out of the aircraft and he's.
Going with Bruce, and there's no Bruce.
When our aircraft hit we apparently the skids spread flatten. It hit the ground, bounced upside down, cut the tail boom off with the rotor, and landed upside down. I assume I was knocked out when we initially hit the ground. So Bobby gets out and there's no Bruce, and he looks back at the aircraft and sees me hanging upside down, covered in. My face is covered in blood.
So he assumes I'm dead.
But he's not going to leave my body there to burn, so he came back.
Now we're on fire.
We have a full load of ammunition rockets forty millimeters in minigan, so we're upside down there in the fire. Where it was on the top, now it's on the bottom and it's burning up towards all that ammunition. Bobby comes down and cuts me out of my seat, drags me out of the aircraft, and he was I don't know if he was going to drag me all the way back to the rescue after aircraft or what he was going to do. But I started to come too and moaning and groaning. Then he goes, oh, you're alive.
So he stops and he picks me up and he so I'm standing there all of a sudden, and everything else is still not totally there. I just know that I'm running and Bobby's dragging me. I fall, Bobby picks me up, We run some more. We could hear the helicopter rescue helicopter. We could hear the rotor blades of the engine, but we couldn't see it. We had jungle, not real big thick jungle, but we had jungle trees.
And we took the right path, I guess, because all of a sudden we busted out into a little clearing and there's George Hewlett in his uh one h sitting there waiting for us, and we were so happy. So we run over the aircraft and we climb on board the cour chief. He gut her and pulls of some onboard. The first thing I did was run up.
And give Georgie a big hug and I.
Started smoking on the first time I got wounded in Vietnam, and so I grabbed a cigarette and I first had a little cigarette.
They took off the other cobra with Buffalo.
I think they fired up some rockets on our arcob to make sure it burned up and blew up, and we did hear some stuff cooking off as we were running away from it. I'm glad Bobby came back and got me when he did, because it'd been much longer I'd have probably gotten caught and all that, so pretty
traumatic day. They flew us back to like Hay where we were standing on over and another aircraft took us down to We switched into another hue and they flew us down to Sagon where the third Field He hospital is and which is where we got taken care of.
Bruce McKenty recovered from his burns quite a bit sooner than Bobby Reinhardt, the pilot who saved him. He then took some scheduled time off back in the States, but after McKenty told his story to his father, who was still an active duty Army officer at Fort Hood, his dad made sure Bruce got more medical tests and an X ray showed he did, in fact have a fractured skull. He was still fit to serve, including as a headquarters company commander back in Vietnam, but he would not fly
in Vietnam again. In reflecting upon his career, Mkenty says he is most proud of the leadership roles he held and the people he helped to influence.
That was very, very proud of my ability to command. I enjoyed commanding. I had the headquarters company in Vietnam. Later on had the a battery, third seventeen Field Artillery in an artillery assignment in Germany. For two and a half years. As a major, I was a commander for the Headquarters United States Army. What a title? Headquarters for the United States Army. I owned all the soldiers in
the Pentagon. So I enjoyed command. I'm very proud that and hoped that I influenced a lot of younger officers and that listed people to follow on my footsteps and become career military. I know that there was some field artillery spec fors ephors that they came to flight school
because of Mata. I was an aviator in an artillery unit and they would talk to me about flying, and two of them came to flight school later on, and I bumped into one of them as a young warrant officer when I was at In fact, it was a Thanksgiving dinner at Fort Myer, Virginia, and bumped into him there. He was there with his family. He was from DC. So that was that was it. I hope that I inspired others to do well, to serve their country and to make this a great country it is.
That's retired US Army Colonel Bruce mckentie. He served twenty one years in uniform and he's also a Vietnam veteran flying Cobra attack helicopters. He was shot down by an enemy SA seven missile in nineteen seventy two. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American
Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on faceboo, book, and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and special features, and of course please subscribe to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles