Fight or flight

AS a child, Tom Baca fell in love with a programme on TV called Whirlybirds, a US series about helicopter pilots. “I thought that would be a good thing to do when I grew up,” he says.

Which is why he was to be found at the controls of a Bell UH-1 – a Huey as the machines were known – in Vietnam on a daring and dangerous mission to rescue 100 or so trapped soldiers coming under fire from the Vietcong.

Documentary series Helicopter Warfare takes Baca, along with fellow pilots Larry Liss and Jack Swickard, back to Vietnam 40 years after the incident.

Baca was eager to take off, joining the army and flight school at 17. Liss, on the other hand, responded to a shortage of pilots and was put through a rapid training programme.

He was, he cheerfully admits, a bad pilot to begin with as he couldn’t hover. He was “fine in the air but not 20ft from the ground”. Within nine months, he’d gone from hopeless rookie to maverick ace.

Swickard was flying combat missions just two weeks after completing training.

It was, as he puts it, “pretty quick from flight school to fright school”. But fighting from the air was a better way to fight a war than on the ground in the mud and the leeches.

For all their bravado, the fact is that one in every 18 pilots never made it home. A helicopter pilot in Vietnam was twice as likely to be killed in combat as an ordinary soldier.

Baca and Liss were on duty one Sunday, flying an army chaplain around. Then the call came in that a group of soldiers in the jungle needed rescuing after being ambushed and outnumbered by Vietcong soldiers.

Despite being in an unarmed VIP helicopter not meant for combat, they flew off to the rescue.

The troops were pinned down in dense jungle, with bamboo trees and thick vegetation.

The only way to land the helicopter, they realised, was to use its rotor blades to cut through 40ft of bamboo.

Several trips were needed to pick up all the soldiers, who came under fire as they tried to board the chopper. The odds of getting back safely were reduced each trip they made. Returning to pick up more men seemed like suicide but the alternative was to abandon colleagues to certain death.

NOT for the Brown family a luxurious sun, sea and sand holiday.

They like to spend their holidays on an SAS-style survival course in Scotland.

It’s unlikely the Maybes from Essex will share their enthusiasm, as they like partying hard in Lanzarote with all the smoking, eating fast food and boozing that involves.

Holiday Showdown makes each family sample the other’s very different style of getting away from it all.

The Maybes don’t take to their new basic environment. They struggle to build a shelter, to sleep outdoors in freezing temperatures and to come to terms with what’s called “the long-drop toilet” (which puts me off my tea just imagining it).

Then it’s the turn of the Browns to try to enjoy themselves on a package holiday to Lanzarote, where daughter Lucy is introduced to a whole new world of makeup and boys. And not a long-drop toilet in sight.