Remembering Maj. Zimmerman and Lt. Taylor

by S.C.Jones and John Connor

Have you ever ridden high on adrenaline? Have you ever had a good day come down fast around you on the shear reality of finding out you’ve lost a friend? I bet you know the feeling.

Back in January of 1969, I flew in the Lift section of A Troop's "Silver Spurs". I had been in-country for all of two months and riding high on the notion that I was in the best damn outfit in Nam. Didn’t we know it...

I’d seen enough action then to know it was no police action the Spurs were involved in. This was war. I had seen my in-country check pilot shot down days after my check ride, my CO shot down in the first week and feared dead, and my buddy from flight school shot down and missing for hours. In that short time I also saw the loss of a few good men. Each took its own toll on my growing awareness of this war, but the death of Maj. Zimmerman and Lt. Taylor brought it all home to me.

Over the winter of 68-69 I got to know Lt. Taylor as well as I knew any other man in our outfit. I remember he was dedicated to our mission and took his flying responsibilities very seriously. He was considered by some to be the best scout pilot in our unit. He was an excellent scout with a very good record and was one of the more professional officers. I never had the opportunity to fly with Mr. Taylor, but I did play cards with him on a few occasions. Seems to me he won a fair share of the time. I remember on several occasions he would fold up his cards and beg off another hand because he had an early morning flight to attend to...and that took precedence over any winning hand. If I had been a scout pilot then, I would have patterned myself after Lt. Taylor. I’d have been proud to be like him.

DAVID EARL TAYLOR
[John Connor's collection]

The Vietnam Helicopter Pilot Association 1997 Membership Directory lists this for Taylor and Zimmerman:

1LT Taylor, David Earl
KIA 01/20/69
AR A/3/17 CAV Class: 67-20
How died: Helicopter fire. OH-6A, #66-07872

MAJ Zimmerman, Richard King
KIA 01/20/69
AR A/3/17 CAV Class 62-10 Former member of 174 AHC transferred to 1/9 CAV. Huffaker classmate at Wolters 62-10, OH-6A, #66-07872

They were flying in the Iron Triangle and took small arms fire. It was thought that a round hit an incendiary grenade in their ship. I was not in the air at the time of their crash so I will refrain from telling more from my perspective, however I would like to relate what John Connor told me these many years later. John was on station that day and had a first hand account of the events.

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On the day they were killed we were working in a new AO that included the Iron Triangle for the first time. The Scout Platoon Leader and myself were flying together to check out the new AO as the scout part of the hunter/killer team. Lt. Taylor and Maj. Zimmerman came into the area at altitude and let us know they were joining us for a while to look the area over.

They joined us at low level for a while and then said they were going back to altitude to look the rest of the AO over before going to Cu Chi for a briefing.

We continued working low level on various plotted target areas without finding much in the way of fresh signs, however we saw a lot of older trails, bunkers and such. We were scheduled to do a BDA (bomb damage assessment) on a B-52 strike and started to pull up to altitude to move to that area when our gun ship asked what the smoke was from where we just pulled up.

We did a 180 degree turn to see what they were talking about and not far behind us was the typical smoke column of a downed ship burning. We went back to low level and started circling at a distance since ammo and grenades were cooking off and we couldn't get too close. We also were looking for anything that might have brought it down.

We spotted one rotor blade a little distance away and then a piece of metal that had our troop emblem (the inverted triangle with a yellow bar across it except the yellow bar wasn't painted yet) and I knew it was the standby ship that Lt. Taylor and Maj. Zimmerman had taken that morning.

The gunnies put out the radio calls by then and we were getting some reaction forces in from Cu Chi. They swept and secured the area and started searching. They found a lot of spider holes and tunnel entrances but no enemy troops. They started pumping smoke and tear gas into the tunnels and it came up all over a huge area.

There wasn't much of anything to recover from the ship after the fire and explosions. The people on the ground theorized that they had come back into the area without us or the gunship knowing it and when they came down to low level a gook popped out of a hole and sprayed them with automatic fire.

I don't recall the theory of an incendiary grenade being hit and causing the fire but it's as good as any. We usually carried them as well as sometimes carrying WP grenades. A Loach seldom burns when shot down so something had to set it off.

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Thank you John. I remember that morning well as I had the day off flying duty and it was a welcome chance to relax. I don’t remember if I had my noon meal of if it was even at the Red Dog saloon, our Officers club, where I first heard of the events unfolding that day. I do remember that a ripple went through our unit and took on an ever more frightening tone. I was placed on stand-by and was told to gather up my flight gear and preflight an aircraft. All available men were placed on ready or taken to the area of operations.

As I recall now, we never took off. The event was over and we never made contact with the enemy. The bitter feeling of losing two key people in our unit, and Mr. Taylor’s absence in the next door down from me remained for some time. He had been a Scout pilot for five or six months before moving into Operations. At the time he was killed he was the Troop Operations officer.

I didn’t know Maj. Zimmerman very well then. He was still too new to our unit and I hadn’t come into his acquaintance just then. I remember thinking he displayed eagerness, yet inexperience. He also had the misfortune to arrive at our unit when we were in a high level of combat experience and involved in several major operations. Maj. Zimmerman had been in command of the troop for about five weeks when he was killed and had succeeded quite well in replacing Maj. Jenks who had been a highly successful and admired commander.

Please see the fine history that Roger has done on these pages to appreciate this time.

No other position in the Vietnam war required more skill, more daring, or more instant decisions than that of a scout pilot. Often times the only thing that kept him alive was his quickness and his ability to react totally in an instant in time, no thought to anything other than merging machine and mind. Survival depended on it. It was the actions of being a scout that brought about their demise the day they went down.

A few months later I was transferred to the 2/17th Cav and flew north to join up with them. Four months later I, myself, was shot down in scouts and returned home to the States.

The memory of Zimmerman and Taylor returns every now and then. When it does, I pause and remember those who gave their all. In passing memory of Richard Zimmerman and David Taylor I am reminded of how each of us put forth his best effort to free another people in a far land. We served with pride and honor, and in doing that we kept America’s hopes alive for the future. The memory of Zimmerman and Taylor will live on.

 

Maj. Zimmerman - Courtesy of John Briggs, Spur 18