U.S. Army veteran survived Huey crash in Vietnam
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — Joe Garst grew up on a small Kansas farm and went on to become a specialist in the U.S. Army. He worked as a mechanic and a crew chief on Huey helicopters during the height of the Vietnam War. He even walked away from a Huey crash.
Garst graduated from Bennington High School, north of Salina, in 1966. He attended Hutchinson Community College for a semester and then went to work for Beechcraft Aircraft in Salina.
Garst was drafted into the U.S. Army in August 1967.
“Well, I knew it was going to happen because, you know, it was just a fact of life at that point in time. I knew that for several years we had like 500,000 troops in Vietnam per year, and I knew that I wasn’t going to college, and I wasn’t married. So, I knew that I had nothing to keep them from drafting me, so I knew I was gonna get drafted, and I was OK with that,” said Garst.
Garst was sent to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training.
“And after there, they didn’t even let me march at graduation. The MOS and I signed up for helicopter maintenance 67N20, was so critical that they flew me on an airplane straight to Fort Eustis, Virginia, for my team advanced training, which was helicopter repair,” said Garst.
There, he learned everything about the Huey.
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“They had over 7,000 Hueys in Vietnam, and of that 7,000, they lost 3,300,” he explained. “But they were the workhorse, you know. They flew in. They flew with troops in and out. They went in medevacs and picked up the wounded and got them out. Command and control, and they flew supplies in too.”
After a brief stop at Hunter Army Air Force Base in Georgia, Garst was given orders and sent to Vietnam. His destination was Camp Evans, 20 miles south of the DMZ.
“Camp Evans was by Hue. And I don’t know if you remember the year before I went over there was when the North Vietnamese came down. They took away Phu Bai and DaNang, and we had to then push them back out. That was our Tet Offensive,” he said.
Then in December 1968, all of the 1st Cavalry Division was sent down the east coast of South Vietnam and up the Mekong River in LSTs to Saigon. Garst was on his way to Phu Loi, where he fixed everything on Hueys and performed 100-hour inspections. Inspections were followed by test flights.
He and a couple of other mechanics had just completed an inspection of his Colonel’s Huey, and they were invited to ride along for the test flight.
Garst said he sat on the left back side of the Huey in the crew chief’s seat for the test flight. At 12,000 feet, the helicopter began diving. Then, it went into auto-rotation.
“So, I look up, and the whole instrument panel lit up. The engine had flamed out,” he said.
Not only did the engine flame out, but the hydraulics also stopped working. Garst and the other four aboard braced for impact in a dry rice patty field. The chopper crashed sideways and rolled. The main rotors snapped, and the Huey broke into two pieces.
“And when it rolled over, I bounced off the gun mount. Well, when it straightened back up, you know, it kind of dazed me. I’m back up, and when it stopped, you know, it was completely destroyed,” said Garst.
All five aboard walked away from the crash. Another chopper flew in about 15 minutes later and picked them up.
Garst had one other close call when his Huey narrowly avoided a B-52 strike.
“We did a 180 and headed the other way, and before we could even get 30 seconds out, bombs were falling. They just shook the crap out of us,” he said.
Garst left Vietnam in late August 1969. After spending several months at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and at a NATO base in Germany, he was ordered to go to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for processing out of the Army.
Garst returned home and went back to work for Beechcraft in Salina. In 1979, he graduated with a business degree from Marymount College.
In 1985, Salina stopped building airplanes. So, Garst transferred to Wichita to work on the Beechcraft Starship composite program. He was promoted to senior engineer, and in 2010, he retired after 43-plus years.
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“So, that’s basically what a farm boy that started out farming and went to the military and how it fast-tracked me in supervision and ended up an engineering fellow. I think it was a great career. And I loved my tour of duty,” said Garst.
In 2018, Garst tracked down the crew, pilots, and mechanics who were involved in the Huey crash in 1969. He also contributes to the National Huey History Museum in Peru, Indiana.
Garst lives in Augusta.
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