Bob Codney, was without any doubt, the overall best pilot I ever flew with in Nam. I was lucky enough to meet up this ex-Marine, turned Army warrant officer, in 1967. He was, at the time, just a slick jockey, who had great dreams of flying gun ships everyday. He wouldn’t hesitate to climb back into my seat and take over my M-60, and let loose with a few thousand rounds; in fact, he loved doing that as much as he loved to fly helicopters around all day - perhaps, even more so. I guess he just liked to have the option to fight back when we were being fired upon.

This lead to the famous experiment I called “The Gun Slick”. My ship, old 576, was a slick ( because all she had were two mounted M-60s for the door gunners ). The normal use of slicks were for transporting troops into and out of LZs - sometimes, that was under some very heavy fire. Those combat assault missions would be followed up with drops of supplies and ammo and dust offs (medical evacuations) when needed. The old slick was an all around utility helicopter. It could be used to support the ground troops in a variety of ways. But that was exciting enough for Bob.

Bob, was always looking for ways to have more control of his fire power. That is when he invented the famous Tomahawk “Gun Slick”. It began as an idea he had about having both of his gunners holding their weapons fully forward and locked into place, so that when they were firing rounds, they would shot just off to each side of the nose of the ship. He then made several diving passes on an old deserted hooch, in the middle of the Iron Triangle. He would dive out of the sky with our guns blazing away, and both pointed forward. He would see where the rounds were hitting and he would use a grease pencil on his windshield to chart the pattern of how they hit. He then devised a grease penciled target site on his windshield, that he could line up with. When he gave us the command to fire, our rounds would hit the very target he had aimed at with his home made windshield sighting system.

His “Peter pilot” for all these innovations, was a young guy named Edward Ewing. Ed was a popular pilot with the crew-chiefs and would stay in the service and did several more tours of duty, including one with the infantry. Ed was still new in country and wasn’t sure what to make of Bob’s tactics but between the two of them, we had a system devised that made our little slick model huey, act just like a gunship - well, kind of. It still only had the fire power of two machine guns. To make it seem like more fire power and for better aiming, Bob had both of us door gunners load the ammo belts for each gun with solid tracers - instead of one for every 5 rounds - all of our rounds would be tracers. So, it appeared to be a blaze of explosive fire power coming from our slick when we would charge at someone. However, we never got any live target practices - and had to settle for dangerous encounters with palm trees and abandoned huts. But we killed a lot of them! 

The disappointment of this tale, is that after practicing every day for several weeks between missions in free fire zones and getting rather good at hitting our intended targets - Bob was assigned to the Gunslingers Platoon and so the idea died.

A couple of years ago, I heard from both of these old pilots. We exchanged email and some phone calls. It is funny that even after all these years, I can still see both of them in my mind, as these two very young aviators. In my memories they will also be just two young warriors.