Tommy L. Waggoner

 

L-R Tommy Waggoner, Larry Midash, James "Spanky" Devine

This is a post I wrote in anticipation of my visit to a friends grave. We were almost to Lafayette Indiana when Millie and I came down with Covid. We had to canceled our visitation for now but I still plan on visiting someday.

Fifty odd years ago Tommy Waggoner and I spent our days hanging out the open doors of a Huey gunship. Up front we had a really capable aircraft commander, James “Spanky” Devine and a rotating series of co-pilots. During flight Tommy and I were doorgunners, we used infantry M-60 machine guns, they were hand held so we could shoot over or under the Armament pods on the sides of the helicopter, the pods held the rotating barreled machine guns and the tubes that held the aerial rockets with their high explosive warheads. On the ground Tommy was the Crewchief and was responsible for maintaining the aircraft, I was the aircraft armament repairman and took care of all the weapons systems on the aircraft. In reality we were a team and helped each other, often working late into the night and neither quitting until we were both done.

We fought together, we worked on our aircraft together, we drank together when our day was done and we rolled out of our bunks too early in the morning to do it all over again.

Doing it all over again was dedicated air support for the MACV-SOG launch site at Quan Loi in Vietnam. SOG was an acronym for Studies and Observations Group or Special Operations group depending on who was asking. 

Our launch site mostly covered the southern terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Cambodia was officially neutral in regards to the war and we weren’t supposed to be there, but neither were North Vietnamese. This made for some rather exciting times.

Our mission was inserting teams of basically mercenaries (lead by two army special forces men) into the Jungle’s of Cambodia. We then stood by for “if” and more often “when” they were discovered by the enemy. We would then scramble our aircraft and get them out. This was often easier said than done. 

This never crossed my mind when I was young and immortal but every time we scrambled for an extraction, we were going in shooting and there was a force on the ground that would be shooting back. No wonder we were such a tight knit group, well that, and we aviators lived in the compound with the SOG people, flew camouflaged helicopters, carried whatever personal weapons we wanted, and had very little Army supervision. (Our aviation company with all the NCO’s and officers was located on a different airfield) This is the world that Tommy and I lived in.

When our tour of duty was over, I was sent to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah Georgia, I became the Sargent in charge of the ground crew on an aerial gunnery range. It was part of a school to teach helicopter pilots how to fly and fire the weapons systems on the new Huey Cobra gunships. Tommy was sent to Fort Rucker in Alabama where he served out his military service as a helicopter mechanic.

Tommy, along with Pete “Tex” Dworazcyk and Steve Stroman, two of our friends from Vietnam drove up to Savannah and spent a weekend with me once. We all had a great time reminiscing, drinking and promising to stay in touch after our time in service was over. We didn’t, we all went our separate ways, I don’t know what happened, maybe we needed to forget, maybe we just went on with the business of chasing the American dream. I think if they had the internet back then things might have been different, maybe not.

I did try to find Tommy and Tex and Steve in the early days of the internet, but was unsuccessful. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I found out Tommy was gone. He died of cancer in 2001, he was only 48 years old.

I have wanted to visit his grave for a long time, I’m not sure why, I guess we went through so much together in war that I need to make this visit to his grave, to thank him for everything we did together, for being my friend and to say goodbye.