‘GOD WAS WITH ME, ALWAYS’ Heneveld’s stories from Vietnam

U.S. Army Capt. (Ret.) George Heneveld looks at the wall of his office—or his “man cave” as he calls it—filled with corvettes and memories from his days as a pilot for the 25th Aviation Battalion, where he piloted C-Model Hueys and AH-1 Cobras.

“I was platoon leader and I was supposed to have 26 aviators under me—officers and warrant officers—to fly and I never had more than 23,” Heneveld said. “I lost nine of them in one year.”

When it came to his favorite vehicle to fly, he said “of course” he preferred the AH-1 Cobra.

“It held 76 rockets and each rocket is like a 105(mm) round going off and it had dual miniguns in the front or dual 40 millimeters or one of each and you had some firepower,” Heneveld said.

On the wall is a box frame holding the medals he earned in his one year, over 700 mission tour of Vietnam from 1969-1970.

“You take 1,136 hours (the amount flew in Vietnam) and divided it by an hour and a half—since most missions I was only out that long—and its over 700 missions,” Heneveld said. “I never realized I had done that many until I sat down and thought about it.”

One of those medals is a Distinguished Flying Cross.

He received that medal after protecting a fire support base located in the middle of a rice patty field.

“The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) attacked it—well this is at night—and I was in a Charlie Model and they attacked the 53-man fire support base,” Heneveld said. “We had five batteries of artillery firing, we had two sets of gun teams shooting—they had 20 or 30 50 calibers and shot down two jets that night—and I came home with a lot of holes that night. That’s the time we got the DFC.”

Next he talks about the mission that led to receiving his Silver Star.

“The fire support bases were put about one or two klicks from the Cambodian border and the ninth NVA were in the Cambodian border and those are the ones who came across and tried to destroy it,” Heneveld said.

He explained that there were three 50-caliber anti-aircraft guns with protective “doughnut holes” shooting at him and his fire team. The doughnut holes allowed for 360-degree protection and to let the weapon swivel 360 degrees. However, this set of anti-aircraft guns were placed on the edge of the tree line.

“When I got on station and they started shooting at us, I said, ‘Well, we’ll just hide behind the trees,’” Heneveld said. “The 50s couldn’t hit us because of the trees. So we just went along the woods where they were at, right above the trees and just,” he said mimicking the sound of a minigun firing, “mowed them down. We killed about 600 of them—I guess something like that—but there’s 600 guys trying to get a 54-man support base. We saved that fire support base, we saved all those guys.”

Heneveld turned to the desk in his office and pulled out a scrapbook of his time in Vietnam. He reminisced about lost comrades and the people he trained. He showed the picture of an Agent Orange sprayer and himself as a young aviator.

He stopped on a picture of a group of soldiers playing in a makeshift pool.

“This was before I got there but the engineers came over and dug a swimming pool,” Heneveld said. “They filled it up with aviation bladders that weren’t any good and glued them together to make a swimming pool,” he said chuckling at the memory. “We had a problem later, it got messy. So we contacted a couple of swimming pool places in the states saying, ‘Hey you can take it off your taxes,’ and all those sorts of things. So they sent us the filters and the machines and everything for the swimming pool.”

He stopped at the picture of Company B’s hooch in Chu Chi, Vietnam. The company was known as the Littlebears and one night their mascot, a sun bear, got loose in camp and got drunk off whiskey bottles in the company commander’s hooch, who had left for the day for the meeting.

“He was drunker than crap,” Heneveld said laughing. “We have all these telephone poles all over Chu Chi—they’re about 30 or 40 feet (high)—and the bear climbs on top of one. (The Littlebears’) command sergeant major comes over here and calls an E6 over and says, ‘Get up and get that bear down!’ So he’s climbing this pole and he gets about from here to there to the bear, and it barfs all over him,” Heneveld said bursting into laughter, tears in his eyes. “You’ve never seen so many guys laugh, it was so funny.”

When Heneveld got to the photo of his own hooch, he talked about a scary night.

“That’s animal boxes full of sand (under the hooch) and it saved me one night,” Heneveld said. “A rocket came in and exploded and it was so powerful it went through the sand boxes and into my pillow. I still have a piece of shrapnel in my pillow. It was something else.”

Heneveld credits his safety in this incident and throughout his tour of Vietnam to one being, God.

“God was with me, always,” Heneveld said.