RAF Chinook - Salisbury Plain Training Area.

I flew in a chinook once and in Wartime . I was scared to death while landing at a base called War Horse in Iraq. The automatic chaff and flares deployed on landing and I thought we were being fired at buy a stinger missile. The sensors on the helicopter could be set off by a laser pointer or by a heat Source on the ground. With flown from a base just north of Baghdad to the base I was going to in the middle of the night and I thought I was dead when the stuff went off. This was back in early December 2004.

Ahhh CTO1. I remember at Pensacola (In A-school) walking out behind the barracks one day, where the old dilapidated runways are, remember them? Even then, late 80's, they were broken up by time and neglect, but I remember thinking to myself that I could feel the history there, the spirits of the prop planes that probably used that small runway.

And then, of course, there's the time I flew a Chinook to the Big E and then took the Greyhound to the Phils because my brother died.

Flew doorgunner on them a couple times in Vietnam PO1 William "Chip" Nagel. My twin brother was Infantry in Nam. He was medevacced out due to a severe asthma attack running up and down the mountains. Shortly after he was shipped to a hospital in Japan, his whole platoon was shot down in a Chinook. In all probability he would have been on that bird had he not been medevacced. How whole platoon was killed along with crew. He was with Company A, 1/327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. I believe it was the second worst helicopter accident of the Vietnam War.