Monkey Mountain is a 2789-foot peak on a peninsula some 20 miles northeast of DaNang Air Base, Vietnam. Its official name is Son Tra mountain. It was to beocme my grave, but something intervened.

It was 1969. I was an Air Force pilot on my first assignment, flying the O-2A Skymaster aircraft as a Forward Air Controller (FAC). I was about eight months into my 12-month tour of duty, and had finally been selected to perform Functional Check Flight (FCF) missions when I wasn’t flying combat missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos.

Tha FCF is a required test flight required whenever major maintenance is performed on the airplane to make sure it is airworthy. As an FCF pilot, I would flight-check every major airplane system, including engine shutdown and restart, propeller feathering, weapons system (rocket pod) operation, landing gear and flap operation, and avionics reliability. It was a great way to really learn about airplane systems, and, as a young pilot, I got the feeling that, flying FCFs, I was a “grown up” pilot.

Other than money, flying time is the greatest reward a new pilot can get, and FCF duty provided it in spades. Instead of the 4-hour combat sorties, I would typically get five or six one-hour FCF flights in a day. It was a great additional duty.

On this particular day, I was scheduled for FCF duty but the DaNang weather was lousy, really lousy. Performng an FCF required VFR (clear skies) weather. It looked like the missions would be canceled, but I prevailed upon my Operations Officer to let me launch and fly out to the east, over the South China Sea, where perhaps the weather would be better. In any case, I could always get an instrument approach back to DaNang.

He let me launch.

On takeoff, at about 200 feet, I was in the clouds. I started an immediate turn to head east and went onto instruments. I had always been a good instrument pilot – in fact, I had gotten a perfect score on my Instrument check ride in T-38s a year earlier in pilot training. And now I was flying in real instrument conditions, just like the big boys!

I was at about 2000 feet altitude when – I have no idea why – I looked out the front windscreen. At that very instant the jungle – THE JUNGLE – rushed directly at me!

Let me digress. When I was in pilot training, I was a voracious reader of every flying magazine I could get my hands on. In one of these magazines I had read about the so-called “box canyon maneuver”, a last-ditch flight profile when you’re in a box canyon and don’t have the performance either to out-climb the hills or have the required room to perform a 180-degree turn. The maneuver involved abruptly raising the nose of the airplane, unloading to zero-Gs, and stomping on a rudder to abruptly turn 180 degrees. It was essential, of course, to be totally unloaded, so the airplane could not stall or, worse, spin.

I’d practiced the maneuver quite a few times in the O-2A on my daytime flights (most of my FAC missions were at night), and got to where I could perform it almost without thought.

Now, with the jungle rushing at me at perhaps 120 knots, I performed my box canyon maneuver, totally in instrument conditions.

And somehow I was still flying, with my heading indicator now showing 270 degrees. After my heart rate got back from the stratosphere, I tried to figure out what had happened. I checked my flight instruments. ALL my flight instruments, including my standby “whisky” compass. And I figured out what had happened.

My heading indicator had precessed and, on an indicated heading off 090, I had slowly turned to a heading of north, headed right for Monkey Mountain. Once I had figured out what the problem was, I abandoned the FCF, flew back to DaNang to get a gyro-out Ground Controlled Approach (GCA), and (perhaps) changed my underwear.

I remember it like yesterday. I’ve had a lot of exciting close calls in combat, but I’ve never lost sight of the fact that I’ve been living on borrowed time for almost 50 years. And I thank God every day.