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Helicopter restoration helps heal battle scars of ex-Marine

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | martin.evans@newsday.com

9:42 PM EDT, May 25, 2008

It had flown in combat in Vietnam, its floorboards occasionally awash with the blood of wounded and dying soldiers.

When the war ended, it lay in an Arizona boneyard for abandoned aircraft, discarded and forgotten after eight years of service.

Today, it has been resurrected, painstakingly rebuilt in a North Fork potato barn by the hands of dedicated men with their own histories of service in Vietnam. It is now flying again. As they have redeemed the chopper, these veterans say their project has helped them reclaim their own war stories and renewed old friendships. In the process, it helped some of the men come to terms with the past and dispel emotions that had long plagued them.

Appropriately on a Memorial Day holiday weekend, the Sikorsky UH-34 Seahorse helicopter is serving as a museum to the Vietnam War and as a memorial to the living and the dead. It has been on display in a number of parks in the region and is scheduled to be on display from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale.

"It kept me occupied, kept my mind focused," said Alan Weiss, 60, of Cutchogue, who in 2001 organized a restoration project for the helicopter as a memorial to those who fought during the Vietnam War.

"I had been suffering from flashbacks about things about the war that bothered me, had trouble sleeping, was irritable and short-tempered," said Weiss, who before the project began had sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at the Northport VA Medical Center. "My doctor said to me that working on it was probably the best thing I could have done for myself."

Repairing a warbird

At the beginning of what sounded like an impossible task to rebuild the chopper and fly it again, Weiss enlisted the help of dozens of fellow Vietnam veterans. The men put in some 20,000 hours of labor, raised $300,000 in donations and endured hundreds of weekends away from their families.

To honor his wife, Beverly, Weiss had the name "Gracious Lady Bev" painted near the cockpit, a small acknowledgment of all the nights and weekends spent away from her.

Weiss found the carcass of the chopper in a scrap yard in Cochise, Ariz., paid $2,500 to claim it and another $8,000 to have it hauled to an empty potato barn in Jamesport, not far from Weiss' home in Cutchogue. It needed pretty much everything -- windows, rotor blades, an engine, a transmission, tires, hundreds of yards of electrical wiring, and patches where bullets had pierced its hull.

The farm's owner, Stanley Zaweski, took one look at Weiss' battered prize and thought the task of rebuilding it was surely hopeless, wondering out loud where he would find a hole big enough to bury it.

"He never thought we would finish it," Weiss said.

Of all the seemingly impossible tasks, finding parts for an aircraft that had not been produced since 1970 was among the most daunting. Weiss enlisted the support of fellow Vietnam-era aviation mechanics, some of whom came for days at a time from as far away as California. They'd work in the barn, swapping Vietnam stories -- hear again how it felt to fly home and be met by protesters throwing tomatoes at them, or even spitting on them in airports.

"I never experienced it myself, but I know others who did," said John Sondgeroth, 62, of East Marion, who flew helicopters in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. "We weren't welcomed with ticker tape."

After work, they'd share a communal barbecue behind the barn, aging warriors of what to them seemed like America's forgotten war. Those who came from out of town often slept in tents, their old squadron flag flying above them. Pride kept them going.

Bit by bit, they rebuilt the aircraft, poring over old manuals with an intensity that sometimes resulted in near-monastic silence in the bar.

John L. Griffin, 74, of Southampton, was among the first of Weiss' volunteers to work on the project. He never served in Vietnam but lost friends to air accidents while he was training as a pilot in North Carolina as a recovery specialist for NASA's Mercury space program. He declined to talk about the men who were lost, saying the memories remain painful.

"I got the satisfaction to contributing what I could for a flying memorial for all services, not just the Vietnam War," Griffin said of his work on the restoration project. "If you take it seriously, and feel those who didn't make it did something worthwhile, it is a tribute to them."

This chopper was built by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. in Stratford, Conn. and was put into service by the U.S. Marines on Oct. 28, 1963. It came from a line of piston-driven helicopters introduced in 1954. The UH-34 model was so trusted in combat that troops asked for it by name when more technologically advanced turbine helicopters were grounded.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the phrase "Give me a Hus," came over Marine radios so frequently that it came to connote a special favor, according to Lt. Col. William Fails, author of "Marines and Helicopters, 1962-1973."