Walter Cox grew up following the Navy…literally. Born in Price, Utah, he spent his childhood moving base to base as his father served: South Carolina, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland, Virginia. By the time he graduated from Norview High School in Norfolk in 1965, he’d lived in more states than most Americans visit in a lifetime. After serving a 27-month LDS mission in Mexico, he came back to BYU, got married, and spotted a poster on the wall of a draft registration office. It was a helicopter. That image never left him.
He enlisted in the Army in May 1969 with one goal: to fly. After surviving the heat and the drill sergeants of Fort Polk, Louisiana, he earned his wings at Fort Walters, Texas, learning in the bubble-nosed TH-55 trainer, doing autorotations from 100 feet, from two feet, and from a hover. He transitioned to Hueys at Fort Rucker and then trained on the AH-1 Cobra gunship at Fort Hunter, Georgia before receiving orders for Vietnam. He didn’t hesitate. He’d known this was coming since basic training.
At Camp Holloway in Pleiku, Walter flew first with the 7th/17th Air Cavalry as a Cobra pilot, call sign Undertaker, circling at 2,000 feet while Loach scouts skimmed the treetops below. He later switched to Huey slicks with Alpha 2/27 as “Chicken Man One-Four,” hauling ARVN troops, American advisors, and resupply loads to mountain fire bases. One afternoon, on approach to a village pickup, two B-40 rockets exploded in front of his aircraft. He rolled the Huey through a narrow gap in the trees and climbed out at nearly 100 knots. Nobody was killed. Days later, a bullet hole was found in his rotor head’s drag brace. He’d never known it was there. On another mission, Walter was sent to check a downed aircraft and found his friend Smitty dead, still in a crawling position, trying to get away from the fire. It was the first time he’d spoken about it in a long time.
Walter came home in 1971 and landed in Seattle. No crowd, no ceremony, no welcome. He went into the inactive reserves, tried unsuccessfully to become a Navy pilot, and quietly put Vietnam behind him for decades. He still deals with PTSD today, by his own admission mostly by pushing the memories out of the way. At the time of this recording, he was days away from his Honor Flight, a trip to Washington D.C. he’d been looking forward to for a long time. He called it a speedy trip. He said his best friend Dennis, a fellow pilot who flew Loaches, took a bullet and landed the helicopter himself, had passed away about five years prior from cancer. Walter still thinks about him. He still hears helicopters going over his house, and he still feels them in his chest.
Catch Walter’s full story — and every episode of Ask A Vet — on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen.