This is an OV-10 Bronco. I flew back seat in this plane over Laos for one month taking photos. The problem was that everyone who rides in that seat gets air sick and I was no exception. I managed to hide it well in my own little barf bag so no one ever knew. I flew every other day for one month as part of my temporary assignment. We would go down and I would take a picture and then we would go up and I would throw up and so on. The pilots taught me and other photographers how to fly in this plane because if anything ever happened to them they wanted us to be able to fly back to base. That was pretty cool except when they decided to teach me barrel rolls. I could never understand how they could sit up front and have lunch and coffee and enjoy themselves while I was getting sick in the back.

One day I had the 'stick' and was flying back to base and saw the pilot up front having lunch. I decided to impress him with some stuff I had learned and excecuted a couple perfect barrel roles (he had told me I didn't have to fly right back and could play around if I wanted.) He said, "That was pretty good....here let me show you something else!" He proceeded to do some kind of stunt flying any county fair would have been proud of and I filled up all my barf bags that day.

Several times these planes got shot down over the trail. In fact, one month before a pilot and photographer had been shot down. I had been to survival training in the Phillipines before coming to Vietnam, but that was a long way from something actually happening. We were shot at a few times, but never close. These pilots were looking for triple A sites and it was not the smartest thing in the world to shoot at them and let them know where you were.