<strong>1LT Jerry "Crackpot" Browers (and crew) - providing air cover from UH-1 Huey</strong><br/><br/>Pity the poor kid in the copilot's seat.  Twenty four hours off the plane and he's flying a combat mission into a firebase under siege with a guy the other pilots call "Crackpot", a name he's warned not to use to his face.  The kid, Joe-something, was all of 23 years old and looked all of 13.  The birth control glasses he wore didn't help.  He figured this is why he got stuck flying with Lt. Browers.  Little did he know it was because everyone else refused to fly with him.<br/><br/>"Sure he seems a little strange" the Major had said.  A<em>little</em>strange?  That's like calling the Pacific a little ocean.  "But after you been here a while, you'll see we're all strange in some way.  Don't worry, Browers is a top notch pilot.  Won a Legion of Merit and a couple of DFC's.  Used to fly some general around.  It's just how he copes."<br/><br/>------------------<br/><br/>Jerry looked over at the new guy and smiled.  "Junior, I'm feelin' some very positive energy flowing off of you."  Huh?  He sounded drunk.  Or stoned.  Or both. Should he report this to the Major?  A little late for that as they were already in the helicopter and the blades were spinning.  "Very positive indeed.  I can tell you are a<em>very beautiful person</em>on the inside.  I bet you were a truly wonderful person in a previous life."  Then Jerry pulled off a glove and held his bare hand up to the new guy's face, closed his eyes, and hummed.  On replacing the glove, he pulled back on the collective and gave the engine some throttle, and they were airborne.  "I think I'll call you Snowflake.  That's an old Indian word that means ... a flake of snow."   Then he smiled at Snowflake.  "Trust me, it's a<em>very positive name</em>."<br/><br/>----------------<br/><br/>A few minutes later, and they were approaching Khe Sanh.  The kid was a bundle of nerves.  Not from flying with Lt Browers, whose piloting skills seemed to be adequate, but because it was his first combat mission.  Granted, they hadn't been shot at yet, but he knew it was coming any second now.<br/><br/>"Do you feel that?" Jerry piped in while appearing to take some sort of evasive action.  The kid hadn't felt a thing out of the ordinary, but then he figured fear was clouding his perceptions of what was going on around him.<br/><br/>"Feel what, Sir?"<br/><br/>"Vibrations.  Bad vibrations."<br/><br/>The kid hadn't felt a thing, but was pouring over the gauges and instruments and finding nothing out of normal limits.  "All the gauges look okay, Sir."<br/><br/>"No, Snowflake.  Bad Vibes.  Down there."  He was pointing down to the ground.  "You fly, I gotta get some pictures of this." With that, he reached down into his flight bag and brought out a camera.  "Give me some pitch and yaw, Snowflake, but not too much, I don't wanna fall out.  That would result in some very bad karma for both of us, but especially for me." And with that, the pilot in command climbed over the seat and back to one of the side doors of his Huey to take some pictures of the ground below, his intercom unhooked so that any communications now would have to be<span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: comic sans ms;"> <span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;">shouted</span> </span>.<br/><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: comic sans ms;"> <span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;">"Get on the horn and tell them grunts down there they got a big patch of ground to their northeast that don't look right, and tell 'em I'm picking up some very negative energy from that area.  They look like really beautiful people and I don't wanna see 'em get hurt." </span> </span><br/><br/>------<br/><br/>It would take the kid a minute to figure out what frequency and call signs to use.<br/><br/>"Sierra six alfa three four, this is .. uh.. November two oscar one two."<br/><br/>"Alfa three four, you got what looks like a big clear patch of ground about a hundred yards to your northwest... uh, I mean north<em>east</em>.  I dunno, it just looks.. strange."  Hardly the professional polished pilot's voice he had practiced in flight school.  "About a football field?  Kinda looks like, I dunno, a bunch of broken glass?  Anyway, my pilot says he's getting...."  No, he couldn't say it.  "Well, he's been doing this a while and.. says he got a bad feeling."<br/><br/>It wasn't exactly textbook radio procedure, but hopefully it got the message across.  A few seconds later, Jerry was crawling back into his seat and plugged into the intercom.  "Smile, Snowflake" Jerry threw up the camera to his eye to snap an up-close picture of his new copilot, the unexpected flash blinding him momentarily.  "It's for my scrapbook.  I'm keeping a scrapbook, you know.  I'm calling it..." paused to think... "Jerry's Scrapbook."  With that he took over the controls of the aircraft and resumed flying cover for those beautiful souls below.