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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4501713, member: 289"] Some more adventures of "The Zonk": Larry got to know Jimmy Goodrich from his fishing and hunting expeditions in Florida. His day job was with the security division at Kennedy Space Center. “He started inviting me to the Saturn rocket launches, (which powered the Apollo missions), and introduced me to some of his astronaut friends, including Neil Armstrong. I took my boys up for one of those liftoffs. You might say our vantage point was way too close. Goodrich drove us past the official viewing stands and parked hit truck about two miles from the launch pad for a close-up look at the most powerful rocket developed in the history of mankind. As the Saturn V blasted off on May 18 with its Apollo 10 crew. I could physically see the aftershock – a massive tidal wave of distorted air, heat and bugs – blowing toward us. As it approached, rapidly, the continuous vibration and rumble of the rocket engines was deafening. “Hold onto your hats!”, Goodrich yelled as a powerful shock wave rocked us. When it all ended. I asked: Are we allowed to be this close?” “Not really….”, Goodrich said.” In early 1971, Larry accompanied a bunch of NFL players to Vietnam to try to ‘entertain’ the troops. It was a six-week visit. They didn’t do a Bob Hope-type show and didn’t go to where Bob Hope went. Larry had been given a deferment because he was married with two kids. Now he got to meet the guys who weren’t deferred. He flew from Florida to California, then to Alaska, Hawaii and then down to Vietnam. He’d always been fascinated with Alaska and in a brief stopover, fell in love with the place, (see the next story). In Vietnam, “The USO divided us into small groups of two or three and then assigned us to the Rescue Corps – the brave medics who pull injured soldiers out of combat. Most mornings the medivacs would fly us out and drop us off at firebases along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These encampments were located on mountains whose tops had been cleared to install gun emplacements…These mountaintop firebases were in the middle of nowhere. They were guarded by about 100 soldiers – and they were damp sure a target. Guerilla forces shot off mortars at night, trying to blow up the bases. Everyone, including those of us on the USO tour, were assigned to small bunkers. “Get in this hole right here”, a soldier casually told us, pointing to a foxhole. “If anything starts happening, jump in and we’ll come find you.” After hopping from one firebase to another and meeting the troops, the time came to leave. The vehicle used was a small ‘spotter plane’. “The spotters planes typically fly low over the treetops looking for snipers. The engine was loud as hell. We were flying along, and the pilot was on the radio talking to the air traffic controller at the landing strip on the outskirts of Da Nang. It was a tiny airport where spotter planes refueled. As we were approaching the landing strip, I looked out my window and saw a tiny piece of the wing break off the plane. “Hey!”, I said to the pilot, “there’s metal flying off the….”. Before I could finish my sentence, he banked the plane hard left and began a series of evasive maneuvers trying to get the plane to the other side of the airstrip. My fingers dug into the dash of that cockpit while our pilot was on the radio using a code for sniper fire – but I didn’t need to understand the code to figure that out. The snipers were shooting at our gas tank – located right beside my seat. The base got a Cobra gunship airborne right away. Our pilot relayed the sniper’s location. “We see them”, the Cobra pilot replied. The snipers had been flushed from the trees and were now running across the open grass field. We were circling the landing strip and saw them. “What are your orders?” the Cobra pilot radioed. “Smoke ‘em!” came the command. “There’s at 8 O’clock!” our pilot said. I could see two tearing through the field. When the Cobra’s guns opened up, everything around them turned to smoke. He incinerated them, blew them to pieces.” After the spotter plane finally landed, the pilot told Larry: “I want to show you something.” He pointed to this flashlight to the underside of the plane’s right wing, illuminating two slug holes. They missed the fuel tank by about an inch. “That’s how close you came to dying. If he’d shot a half a heartbeat to the left, the bullet would have hit the gas tank and we wouldn’t have known what hit us.” In 1997 Larry co-produced a TV show called “North to Alaska”, patterned after Curt Gowdy’s “The American Sportsman”, with his “life and business partner, Audrey Bradshaw”. In September 2005, they went to Umnak Island in the Aleutians to fish for river salmon, hunt caribou and do some saltwater fishing. The weather and seas proved too rough for the latter. “Instead, we surf-fished for salmon.” “On our final day on Umnak, the morning sky was blue and the seas were flat. Our guide and the boat captain both agreed we could head out on our caribou hunt before the bad weather returned. So, we boarded the 28-foot Augusta D and motored to a bay at the foot of a volcano in a remote region where caribou roamed. We anchored and made a few trips in the small, inflatable Zodiac until we were all ferried ashore.” Audrey and Larry set off with a guide and a two-man film crew. “We stalked and finally bagged the caribou we were after. Hunting laws in Alaska are strict and specific. In general, you must transfer all the meat from the field before transporting head and antlers. This helps keep the trophy hunters reigned in. After the meat was harvested, hauled down the mountain, loaded into the Zodiac and transported back to the boat, our guide insisted on going back up the mountain, on his own, to retrieve the caribou head and antlers. I tried to talk him out of it because the weather was really kicking up. “No, I’ll be back down before you’re all loaded up. Just run back in and get me.” We continued shuttling back and forth to the Augusta D. On one of those trips with John and all of his camera equipment, I was standing knee-deep in the rocky bar, pushing him off the shore, timing the now-breaking waves. The water was churning and damn near freezing, too. My hunting gear was soaked through by now and felt heavy as lead, but I managed to throw myself into the Zodiac.” (Keep in mind Larry would have been 58 years old at the time.) “Our trip back to the boat was a rough one. We were all finally back on the boat but couldn’t leave without our guide. The wind was howling now and there were whitecaps on the bay. I grabbed my binoculars to try and locate our guide on the mountain, but he was nowhere in sight. The weather was getting worse by the minute. We couldn’t just sit and wait. Rich and I decided to go back ashore to search for him. The water was even rougher this time. We were being tossed all over the Zodiac. We couldn’t beach in the same spot but managed to find a relatively protected place to land. It was now late afternoon. Rich waited in the Zodiac while I set out in search of our missing guide. I finally found him up on the mountain, sitting down, the caribou head by his side. He was having trouble breathing and said he just couldn’t go any further, I helped him to his feet and grabbed the caribou head. It’d be a difficult task to get both of them down the mountain. But the guide noticed something. A stream. “We could jump in and slide down the mountain”, he said. I wasn’t crazy about the idea but what the hell – I was already soaking wet…We jumped in and did a toboggan run. I held onto the caribou head as we bounced off the rocks and then plunged into a five-foot-deep pool at the bottom. I’d had enough. I called the captain and suggested we camp on the beach. I’d rather be rescued on the shore than drown in the ocean. “No”, he said “Come on back. We’ll go out and take a look.” I wasn’t sure what “take a look” meant but Rich and I got the caribou head and the guide into the Zodiac. This small inflatable wasn’t meant to haul three men and the heavy load of antlers. We almost capsized getting back to the Augusta D. But somehow, some way, we stayed afloat, beating our way through the wind and waves. The weather was severe by now. In good weather, the trip back to Umnak would take an hour or so. Our captain was staying close to the shoreline of this secluded volcanic island. With the mountains blocking the wind, the waters were fairly manageable. We were slowly making headway, but we were cold, wet and miserable. And now it was dark. As we approached the cove in Nikolai Bay and moved past the protection of the mountains, the gale force winds hit us hard. There was no way the captain could navigate the rough waves and high winds to reach the village.” He radioed ahead and was advised “You have to – somehow – submarine your way through the waves” Village residents, (there were 32), drove down to the beach and throned their car headlines on to try to guide the boat. “We made another attempt to punch through the breakwaters, but again the waves again the wave tossed us hard backward. On the third attempt, we were all thrown to the floor and almost capsized. If that happened, we were all dead. Audrey urged the captain not to try that again. He agreed. We just didn’t have enough power to bust into the safety of the cove. He suggested we head for Anangula Island where we’d anchor on the leeward side and wait out the storm. At least we had a plan. Instead of fighting an angry sea, we’d motor with the wind and ride the waves to reach safe harbor. But we underestimated the power of the growing squall. We blew right past the little island. Our only choice now was to drift with the wind and the current.” The captain was reluctant to call the Coast Guard because he’d have to agree to abandon the ship. “But the storm was escalating: dying at sea was becoming a prospect and I think he knew it.” So, he finally gave in. But the Coast Guard was busy that night and it would take hours for them to send a helicopter out. “As the darkness enveloped us, the winds really started howling and every wave seemed bigger than the last. Somewhere cresting over us and we were being thrown to the floor. The Augusta D was being tossed like a cork. Our engines were operational, but we didn’t have enough power to control our course. All the captain could do was attempt to point the bow through the waves at an angle and hope the waves didn’t completely swamp us as we rose and fell…I felt like hypothermia was setting in. I’d been soaked to the bone three times that day. The frigid air and biting wind made me feel like I was turning blue.” They maintained radio contact with Umnak until the voice on the other end said, “It looks like, the way you’re tracking, we’re going to lose radio contact.” That meant that “we were drifting farther and farther away from the islands. We were tracking toward Russia. If we did lose touch, no one would know where to search for us.” Scott, [The voice on the other end], “primed us on what to do if we ended up in the water…You guys should start thinking about getting into your survival gear. If you end up in the water, stay together, lock arms and turn on the locator lights on the suits.” We were shoulder-to-shoulder inside the small cabin. If the boat had capsized, no survival suit was going to keep us alive.” They managed to stay afloat through a night of pounding waves. The storm finally dies down in mid-morning. A C-130 prop plane appeared and made radio contact. “Help is on its way. A helicopter rescue team be here in an hour or two.” They were told to “clear the aft deck and lower our antennae. Next he ticked off what we could bring (ourselves) and what we couldn’t (everything else). We’d have to leave our camera equipment, gear, rifles – you name it.” [I guess that would include the caribou head.] “But I did manage to stuff the two Betacam tapes from our Umnak expedition into my survival suit.” The promised helicopter showed up by noon. A Coast Guard swimmer was teeing up to drop into the boat and help us get into the basket that would lift us, one by one, into the helicopter. The wind was still whipping and the boat was bobbing all over the place. As the swimmer came down the line, and was swinging back and forth above the boat, I ran out to the deck to try and grab him. “Get back!” he yelled. I went back into the cabin and watched as he kept swinging like a pendulum. With the boat rocking back and forth, he was trying to time his movement with our motion. When he was low enough and directly over us, he released his harness. He dropped about 10 feet and bounced when he hit the deck. He jumped up, looked at me and asked, “How are you doing?” I said “How am I doing? How are you doing?” The swimmer “slapped a locator light on the side of the boat in reply and asked, “Who’s first?” He got them all into the helicopter. “Now with no captain at the helm to steady the boat, the helicopter hoist operator had a hellava time dropping the rescue cable into our swimmer’s arms.” He offered to “jump into the rough sea to make it easier. But she [the helicopter pilot] insisted on one more attempt and finally reeled him up. As we flew toward civilization, I watched the Augusta D and the beacon that tracked its location, disappear. For 17 nerve-racking hours, we’d ridden out the storm.“ The swimmer got a football out of a bag and asked Larry to autograph it, which he did. “Thanks for hauling my ass out of the Bering Sea, Larry Csonka”. (If you think Larry had a rough day, how about the caribou?) One more item before going back to reading the book: Larry first broke his nose when he was kicked by a cow at age 11. “I bled for my nose a little but didn’t think much of it. Yet from then on, I got most of my air though my mouth.” In the second regular season game in 1971, the Dolphins were playing the Bills and Larry go hit in the face by a flying elbow and broke it again. “The karate chop moved my nose to the right side. When I ran to the sidelines, Dr. Virgin looked at it and said, “This is going to hurt”. While our trainer, Bob Lundy, held my head, Dr. Virgin grabbed my nose with his hands and pulled my septum straight. Then he produced two stainless steel rods. “This is going to hurt, too”, he said as he shoved them up my nose. I heard a crunch as the rods opened my nasal passages. When he pulled them out, it felt like my brain was attached to the rods. The blood started flowing. Next, he soaked a wad of gauze with something medicinal and stuffed it up my nose. It stopped the bleeding and it deadened the pain a bit, too. I went back into the game. In 1984, he finally went to an ear, nose and throat man. After examining the X-rays “Your nose is a wreck” Turns out my nasal passages were almost completely blocked. I had 10% airflow on one side, 15% on the other. “How did you breathe wearing a mouthpiece?“ Truth is, I always cut the sides off my mouthpieces so I could get air into my lungs. The ENT operated. He lifted my nose off my face, bored out the nasal passages and put my nose back into place. After six weeks of recovery, I took my first unobstructed breath through my nose since 1957.” It's not easy being Larry Csonka. [/QUOTE]

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