Arthur Cheek, a Raleigh native who now lives in Weaverville after a life of globetrotting, flew harrowing missions all over Vietnam, rescuing downed pilots, dropping off supplies and ferrying people to secret jobs in dangerous places.
That wouldn't be odd except for one thing: He was a civilian, flying for a civilian company on missions that, in some cases, he still can't, or won't, talk about.
"Let's see, how can I say this?" he said in a telephone interview. "We were inserting employees of USAID."
The airline he worked for did indeed fly people and supplies for the U.S. Agency for International Development. But much of its work was for another federal agency, one that secretly owned the airline.
Even now, more than three decades after Air America's cover as the CIA's aviation wing was blown, former employees of the company are still discreet, either from force of habit or because that's the way the CIA still wants it.
The stories they can tell, though - and few people have more interesting yarns than Air America folks - are being told and told again this week at the Hilton North Raleigh/Midtown. The Air America Association's annual convention, which runs through Sunday, is expected to draw 250 former Air America workers and members of their families.
Air America operated from 1950 through 1976, mostly in Southeast Asia. Its end came not coincidentally about the same time as North Vietnam won the war.
That well-known photo of a helicopter on a Saigon rooftop loading passengers just before the city fell? It wasn't, as many have said, a military chopper on the U.S. Embassy roof loading up the last diplomats. It was an Air America Huey on an apartment building that housed CIA employees.
The company's motto was "Anything, anytime, anywhere, professionally." Among other things, it flew food and weapons to the Hmong tribes that were fighting on the U.S. side, dropped CIA operatives into the jungle to work with locals, flew electronic eavesdropping missions and rescued downed air crews.
It also flew legitimate airline passengers and freight, living the corporate equivalent of a dual life. Indeed, some workers knew little or nothing about the secret side, said John Melton, a former Air America executive who lives in Chapel Hill.
The pay was great, particularly for the pilots, who had a reputation for living hard and flying harder.
"They were living right on the edge, and I don't think too many people saved money up, they just lived to the hilt every day," Melton said.
Still, they were always professional in the cockpit, and sometimes their skill and bravery are forgotten in all the talk of drinking and intrigue, Melton said.
"It was probably some of the toughest flying in the world, with minimal or no navigation aids, weather situations, smoke from all the slash-and-burn farming for part of the year, and people shooting at you," he said.
'A normal childhood'
U.S. troops in Vietnam typically served a one-year tour of duty. Air America, though, was a civilian employer, so many of its workers stayed for years. The length of time that many worked and lived together and the intensity of the job forged bonds that have held the association together.
"People were together for long periods, and in a situation no one else could really understand," Melton said. "Some flew upcountry for 13 years out of Laos and Thailand, and every single flight there was a chance they wouldn't come back."
Many brought their families over from the United States, or married locals.
There were so many families at Air America's Asian headquarters at Udon Thani, Thailand, that there was a K-12 school for all the expatriate children, said Allyson Porter of Chapel Hill, whose stepfather, Jack Porter, was a mechanic who kept the aircraft flying and patched up all those bullet holes.
Her family lived in Thailand about six years, leaving when she was 14.
"It was a normal childhood, in my mind," she said. "I was the kid floating around in the monsoon on a raft made of styrofoam bomb crates, or riding my bike to the end of the runway to watch the F4's, and being in awe of that blast of wind rushing past me."
Porter said that as a child, she didn't know about Air America's ties with the CIA, but it was clear that it had something to do with the war and the U.S. military.
"There was all this security to get on the base, and the car traffic on the base would stop when a shot-up plane was coming in because you never knew where they would land," she said.
Much of the event this week is private, but if you happen to stumble into the bar at the Hilton, you might hear some of the stories. Many are polished to a high sheen by the retelling, but moving the conference around the country and making it easier for new people to come often brings in fresh perspectives, Porter said.
The tales that the Air America employees will swap aren't all romantic derring-do and a few whiskeys too many at the Purple Porpoise or Hotel Constellation in Ventiane, Laos. More than 230 pilots and crew members were killed, and many of the tales have harsh endings.
Cheek tells one about the day he and his crew were sent to find the crew of a downed transport plane in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. When he found the wreckage, he put his Huey helicopter into a hover a few feet above it, trying to see the crew.
They had been alive minutes earlier, talking on the radio. But U.S. ground forces trying to reach them had been driven away by heavy gunfire, and Cheek wasn't about to set down until he could figure out whether the Viet Cong had beat him to the wreck.
Suddenly he got his answer: a dark object soared up and bounced off his windshield. It was a hand grenade.
He got on the radio and talked the pilots of three F-100 jets that were passing nearby after a bombing mission into making several passes with their 20 mm cannons at the Viet Cong before he set his helicopter down.
There were still Viet Cong around the wrecked plane, and there was some shooting, he said without offering details.
He and his crew then found the U.S. pilot and Chinese co-pilot; both had been executed with shots to the head. The plane's third crewmember was never found, he said.
Times past
It was a harrowing day, and now Cheek figures that all those years since, living in the villa in Saigon, working in Saudi Arabia and flying to Beirut for a lark whenever he felt like it, of flying all over the U.S., they are all parts of a long and good life that easily might never have happened.
Cheek is 69 now. Lately, he said, he hasn't been feeling well, and the doctors want to take a good look at him soon because they think maybe something big has gone wrong.
"That's OK, though," he said. "I left that rice paddy when I was 25 years old, and I figure every day since then has been on someone else's time."
