I was a flight engineer crewing Army CH-47s in Korea. We were scheduled for a night instrument flight, which in a Chinook means several hours of abject boredom for the crew members. (The radar controllers are working us, all the enlisted crew gets to do is sit in the back in the dark and make sure we’re not leaking all the hydraulic fluid out onto the deck..:)

My crew chief started barfing around 3pm and went to see the flight doc. Food poisoning. Drat. That nights mission was shaping up to be incredibly boring (with another crew member on board, at least you can throw things at each other or whatever..). As we were completing the pre-flight brief, my girlfriend Jenny, a female soldier who worked at our battalion HQ, walked into our flight ops area and asked if she could tag along on our mission (I sort of got the idea that maybe my crew chief’s illness wasn’t really food poisoning..) as a passenger. The AC didn’t object, so I put her on the manifest, got her some hearing protection and headed for the aircraft. After we’d been flying for 30 minutes or so, I put Jen into a “monkey harness” so she could walk around the cabin freely in flight. She started getting a little amorous (try smooching your girlfriend while you’re wearing an SPH-4 helmet and she’s wearing a set of David Clarks. It ain’t easy!) while I was clearing a turn, and the next thing I know my flight suit is unzipped and she’s going down on me. I’m trying to get her BDU uniform off without taking her out of the monkey harness (a nearly impossible task) so I opted to just unbuttoning her shirt for access to her breasts and pulling her trousers down around her boots.

For most of the flight thus far, we’d been at about 4000 feet, working the radar pattern. After a little foreplay, I locked the troop commander’s seat in the up position and leaning her across it, started going at it from behind. I then keyed the intercom and asked the pilots if we could ascend to “Five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet..” One said “sure, chief…” while the other said “Why five thousand and..?” Suddenly they both realized what I was asking and turned in their seats to look into the back of the aircraft. Well, Jen’s head was about a foot behind their seats, so there I am, grinning like the village idiot, banging away to beat the band, and she’s completely oblivious because she’s got her eyes closed! The pilots started cursing me out, because they were up front, flying, and I was in the back getting my ashes hauled. But, laughing at my fortune, they called Osan Approach and got the clearance for 5500 feet.

Later, I put my sling load pad on the ramp, and we got busy in the missionary position with her head hanging off the open ramp almost six thousand feet above South Korea (yes, we both had our gunner’s harnesses on.. talk about “bondage!”) And boy, she was a screamer, but so was the aft transmission. I knew there was a reason I didn’t plug her into the intercom..:)