A Friend of the Family

Lieutenant Felsenthal standing in front of an OV-10 (a lightly armed two-seat observation aircraft) at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base (NKP) in 1970 or 1971. I was serving as an intelligence officer (i.e., one of the "chairborne" troops), but in my spare time I was able to fly as a back-seater with the Forward Air Controllers (FACs) whom I worked with. I flew 31 such missions over northern Laos between September 1970 and June 1971.

As any pilot can tell you, getting it off the ground can be one of the hardest parts. (One day when I was at NKP I was in the back seat of Gary Yarger's OV-10 [Nail 45, I think], and it seemed like kind of a long takeoff roll. After clearing with the tower he said to me "You may have noticed that this airplane didn't exactly leap into the air." "Yeah," I replied. "I was getting a little worried." "I was getting a lot worried," he said. "I came very close to punching both of us out [i.e., ejecting both of us, which he could do from the front seat]".)