5 Min read

True story

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My car and a helicopter got in a fight. Who do you think won?*

First a bit of context. West Point hosted an admissions conference for its Field Force–graduates and volunteers who identify and assist candidates in the application process. I had parked my car in the Hotel Thayer lot which is adjacent to Buffalo Soldier Field. This historic grassy area was where the members of the all-black 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments taught cadets horsemanship in the early 1900s; today it also happens to be–can you guess–a landing zone.

Heading to Bartlett Hall for the last brief of the day, I lingered around the Army branch displays set up on the concrete apron around the Plain. My stomach was full from lunch at Washington Hall and the heat felt good on my arms. Bartlett houses the chemistry and physics departments, which include core courses for future Army officers skilled in the deployment of munitions and holding ground.

Sending rounds down range and blowing things up are evident in the Army colors which are Black, Gray, and Gold because they represent the components of gun powder: charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. Straggling in to the auditorium, I walked towards the officer-in-charge who was walking towards me. Uh oh.

My pulse quickened. What did I do wrong? Flashback to cadet days.

“Is your car parked here?” he said. “At the hotel?” He told me about the helicopter incident and shared a photo to confirm it was my car.

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“Yes. Why yes it is,” I said. That’s my blue Mini there by the–ahem–fallen branches.

“It’s the least damaged,” he assured me.

Barely scratched, it appeared anyway, in the photo, a branch clipping the passenger-side rear fender and bumper. I thought of the aviator I had met on the Plain the day before.

The other vehicles and the motorcycle had felt the direct blow of the downed branches. I was lucky.

By the time I got to the lot, the debris had been cleaned up. The tree’s bark was stripped clean, a stretch of sapwood about two feet in length looked like a gaping flesh wound. The motorcycle nearby had a flyer with very large font, taped to its gas tank.

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It’s worth noting that I did NOT have such a flyer taped anywhere to my car. I talked to the hotel staff and guards at the security check-in by the Thayer Gate entrance. None had ever seen the likes of it. The Military Police sergeant completed the report on my car and said it was a first.

Friends who were career aviators shared insight when I told them that my car and a helicopter got in a fight.

“That was between a car and a tree to be fair,” Bob wrote. It’s a kind of karma that my car was barely scathed, because I work with former Army aviators in support of special operations. The scratches might come out with a good clean and buff.

The damage was done by a Chinook, or MH 47G, a heavy-lift assault helicopter. The hotel valet heard the helicopter coming in and captured it on video, a close landing and shredding of the tree top. The video has chunks of debris shooting up to the top of the hill where the hotel is situated. Another aviator said that it was likely “a little bit of wind /downwash.”

Another said it reminded him of the maneuver in Korea days which was called a saman and that “somehow we always damage the entire crop, not just the field we hovered over.” The closest I could find to this reference was samang.

In Korean literature, the word “samang” (사망) is used to denote “death” or “demise.” It is derived from the Sino-Korean word sǐwáng (死亡), which also means “death” or “deceased.” This term is often used in a formal or journalistic context to describe death in a respectful manner, as opposed to more colloquial terms like “jukda” (죽다), which simply means “to die” and might be considered less polite in formal writing or media reports. [Perplexity AI generated response to prompt]

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A respectful term and a formal, journalistic derivation of death for media reports. Does English have such a euphemism for death, in one word?

Who knows if the term has any relevance. Korea was the first real helicopter war and it’s clear that aircraft caused damage, saman or samang. One thing is true in military aviation. There’s no going into the fight without making contact with the ground, with trees, or with others.

Army Aviation has changed the nature of warfare and the battlefield, from troop insertion and transport, reconnaissance, medical evacuation, to air assault missions under the cover of darkness. There’s no training without risk.

The pilot and the crew remain in my prayers because this is one exercise of many exercises, and of many missions conducted with little notice, at low altitudes, at high speeds, and in extreme conditions. And, unlike this situation, without the public learning of the mission for decades, when declassified.

So, who won? The owners of the adjacent vehicles most certainly did not. The Military Police who took my report said the pilots and incident are under investigation.

I got in the car and left for home the next day, not sure I would have noticed anything amiss had I not been informed. My Mini Cooper lived to drive another day.

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FOOTNOTE

*I use the pronoun, who, because it personifies the vehicles in the fight and it’s fun. Which do you think won? by contrast does not have the umph factor, the bravado befitting a brawl, as in, Who do you think won?

*The podcast is available on Spotify and other major platforms, again. Spotify’s transition to Riverside Studio involves learning a new dashboard, which for me means always learning with less emphasis on ‘a bit of fun.’ More patience required and more functionality. Look forward to reading TreeHouseLetter for listeners on the move. Thank you for reading and thank you for listening.

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