Please follow this link to hear an eyewitness description of the crash site where five US Army soldiers were killed when their chopper was shot down by enemy gunfire.

American Base Camp on the Vietnam/Cambodian Border 1970

In the spring of 1970, when Nixon sent troops across the Cambodian border, in what was called the Cambodian Incursion, he asked for photo documentation of ammunition cashes to appease congressional critics.  Just back from R&R in Hawaii where I had gotten married only a week before, I received a call from military headquarters asking that all available photographers be sent into Cambodia.  My motion picture news team was covering a story on a Navy ship in the South China Sea, keeping busy while I was on R&R, so without giving it a second thought (after just getting married) I got on a plane for Pleiku and then a chopper to a base camp near the Cambodian border.

Once in Cambodia, there wasn’t much to see.  At the site of an ammunition cache American troops who had been there for days, had already left.  The weapons cache was about to be reduced to rubble.  After photographing the explosions from the air we moved on.

Late in the afternoon of the last day covering the Cambodian incursion as a still photographer I boarded a Chinook helicopter for the flight back to Pleiku.  Also aboard the chopper were an Associated Press reporter, AP photographer Henri Huet, and an Army platoon.  On our way back to Pleiku our Chinook made an unscheduled landing in a desolate area of small trees and shrubs a few miles outside of Pleiku.  As we circled the landing site I couldn’t see any lights and didn’t understand why we were landing.  The platoon was told to form a defensive perimeter around the Chinook.  The AP reporter, Henri Huet and myself were told to walk forward to where a helicopter had crashed, a distance of about 200 feet.  The chopper engine was white hot and glowing in the twilight.  It was bright enough to illuminate the crash scene.  From my observation this ship could never have flown again.  Certainly the engine was not operable.  (My account is contrary to the official report of the downing of Helicopter UH-1D tail number 65-10079, GhostRiders 079.  The report states, “The helicopter made a Forced Landing. Aircraft was capable of one time flight.”)

I don’t remember removing anyone from inside the chopper.  The bodies were spilled out and laying on the ground near the wreckage.  I immediately noticed several aluminum 35mm film canisters scattered on the ground.  I also found a badly dented 35mm camera.  On the second trip back to the chopper I noticed that the soldiers who perished were wearing the same unit patch that I wore—221st Signal Company.  I knew who they were.  I had last seen them only three days earlier in Pleiku on the day we left for Cambodia.  In addition to the four crew members from the 189th Assault Helicopter Company, the five US Army combat photographers were, Larry Clayton Young; Christopher J. Childs, III; Ronald Sidney Lowe; Douglas John Itri; and Raymond Louis Paradis.  The photographers were on their way back to Pleiku after covering the Cambodian incursion.  I had last seen them boarding a Deuce and a Half in front of the 221st Signal Company detachment office in Pleiku three days earlier.

We had gathered outside the detachment office for the ride to the Pleiku airstrip.  Seeing little space on the Deuce and a Half and not recognizing any of the men, I boarded a Jeep with SP5 James Beck, who I knew from when I was assigned to the Pleiku detachment.

While covering the Cambodian incursion, the five 221 Signal Company photographers were given priority access to a chopper by a high ranking unit commander.

A brief description of the crash can be found at the 221st Website, “On May 9, 1970 five 221st combat photographers were killed in the downing of a UH-1D Huey of the 189th Assault Helicopter Company, GhostRiders 079. The shootdown occurred near Pleiku as the men were taking part in the Cambodian incursion then underway. The exact circumstances may never be known but it is evident that the chopper was flying low enough to be hit by enemy small arms fire.”  An alternative description of the crash circulating at the time claimed that the NVA had recently placed radar controlled anti-aircraft guns in the area.  The incident was reported erroneously in the book Vietnam:  Images from Combat Photographers (Starwood Publishing, 1991) it read, “During the Cambodian invasion, the 221st was badly shaken by the loss of an entire five-man team.  Someone sent them into a hot LZ on the first wave of an assault, and their helicopter went down with no survivors.”  Arriving just a few minutes after the crash, I can say that the area was not under fire.  I saw no evidence of small arms fire and there was no blood.  Blunt impact killed the occupants of GhostRiders 079.

After picking up the remains and again boarding the Chinook, the AP reporter asked me questions about the men from my unit.  After answering his questions those of us sitting at the rear of the chopper near the fallen soldiers were silent until we arrived at the 71 Medevac Hospital in Pleiku.  After the bodies were taken off the Chinook by hospital personnel the AP reporter, Henri Huet, and myself walked a few hundred yards to the nearby Army compound where the II Corps Press Camp was located.  When we got to the press camp the AP reporter immediately filled his story with the AP Saigon news bureau from a telephone on the back wall in the lobby.  Back home, my wife heard about the crash on the CBS evening news—five Army combat photographers perish in a crash on their way back from covering the Cambodian incursion.  She was only put at ease the next morning when I called her from a public telephone at the Pleiku airbase.  A few days later in Long Binh I turned in the 35 mm camera found at the crash site to the 221st supply sergeant.  A tribute to the photographers lost that day on GhostRiders 079 can be found at the 221st Signal Company Website http://221stsignalcompany.webplus.net/page16.html

A few days later, back in Saigon, I met up with Henri Huet.  I gave him a 35mm negative that I took of him helping recover the bodies.  (The only picture taken at the crash site.)  Tragically, Huet was killed when his helicopter was shot down covering South Vietnam’s invasion of southern Laos in 1971.  Three additional civilian photographers lost their lives in that crash—Larry Burrows of Life Magazine; Kent Potter a UPI photographer; and Keisaburo Shimamoto on assignment for Newsweek Magazine.  The story of their ill-fated flight into Laos and the recovery of their remains some thirty-five years later, can be found in Lost Over Laos, by Richard Pyle and Horst Fass.  See Google Books to download the online copy:  https://books.google.com/books/about/Lost_Over_Laos.html?id=0PP5plSDbPwC