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15 Greyhound provided military transportation for the trip to Fort Wolters. The buses departed Polk early on Monday, March 18, for the six-hour drive across western Louisiana and eastern Texas. We stopped somewhere east of Dallas and were provided a contract lunch at a Holiday Inn. It was a vast improvement over what we had become used to at Polk. Two hours after lunch, we turned off U.S. Highway 180 under the arch that marked our entrance to Fort Wolters, Texas, and the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter Center in Mineral Wells. Wolters began life in 1921 as a training camp for the Fifty-sixth Cavalry Brigade of the Texas National Guard. In October of 1940, the seventy-five hundred-acre camp was leased to the War Department and became an Infantry Replacement Training Center. The camp was officially turned over to the Army on March 22, 1941, and became the largest Infantry Replacement Training Center in the nation. Following the end of World War II, the flag was lowered for the last time on August 15, 1946. After the war, Wolters was purchased by a group of local businessmen and converted into a thriving industrial center. For the next five years it operated as Camp Wolters Enterprises, Inc. Early in 1951, the Air Force was looking for a home base for the aviation engineers and the camp was reactivated as Wolters Air Force Base. In March of 1956 the Secretary of the Army, Wilbur M. Bruckner, visited the base with a group of Defense Department and Army officials for an inspection of the facilities . The wheels were in motion and on July 1, 1956, control of the base was transferred to the Army to embark on its new mission: training helicopter pilots. On September 26 of that year, the Primary Helicopter School became an official U.S. Army School and the first class reported for training on November 26. There were thirty-five students, all warrant officers. They graduated on April 27, 1957. In 1957, the center had a fleet of 125 helicopters to meet its training requirements . Chapter 3 Sir Candidate On June 1, 1963, the installation was redesignated as Fort Wolters, thus becoming a permanent military installation. Soon after, it was designated the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter Center. To meet the growing demand for pilots necessitated by our involvement in Vietnam, several expansion programs took place and besides the main heliport on the fort, Downing Army Heliport was built adjacent to the Mineral Wells Airport. Downing had parking space for three hundred helicopters, but still the demand outgrew the facilities. In January of 1968, Dempsey Army Heliport was constructed on a plateau west of Mineral Wells. It accommodated a further five hundred aircraft bringing the total training fleet to more than eleven hundred helicopters. The twenty-week curriculum that I was going to follow was that of the Warrant Officer Rotary Wing Aviator Course (WORWAC). Originally, the curriculum was set up so that the first four weeks were the WOC Indoctrination Training Course, or Officer Development classes. As the Army became more comfortable with the entire curriculum, the first four weeks became known as pre-flight; primary helicopter training without a helicopter! For a week after arriving at Wolters, I was what was known as a “snowbird.” Snowbirds came in various forms. Some were candidates who had either not started flight school yet or had graduated and were awaiting transport to one of the advanced flight training schools. Others had washed out and were awaiting reassignment. Still more were setbacks in need of additional training. The liberties we were afforded compared with Polk were a real culture shock. We could actually leave the company area to go to the Post Exchange or WOC Club almost at will. One of my first visits was to the bookstore to buy some stationery with the school crest and a picture of a helicopter on it. I couldn’t wait to write home. Wolters used three different types of helicopters: the Hughes TH-55A Osage, the Hiller TH-23 Raven, and the Bell TH-13 Sioux. Which one you flew depended upon one thing . . . how tall you were. I knew so much about helicopters upon my arrival, I bought stationery with a TH-23 on it and told my folks it was a TH-55! It wasn’t until two weeks after our arrival at Wolters that we were assigned to training...

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