A lifetime of risk-taking

There was a moment — no, 12 seconds — that Earl C. “Chuck” Carlson knew his life was pretty much over. He was test-driving a reworked Bell Helicopter, UH 1 B, often called a Huey, in the blackness of an early morning in the middle of nowhere when the chopper’s power went out.

He was packing 16 rockets and 16,000 rounds ammunition. Crash-landing would have created a horrific fireball. Jumping out was not an option.

“You would get cut up like a sausage,” Carlson said.

He had to quickly review the drill.

“The procedure was, at 3,000-4,000 feet, if your engine is cut to zero, you just hang there, dead still,” Carlson said. “You start falling and flatten the [propeller] blades out and they turn into a wing. You do 360-degree turns to the right, and then to the left.  At a rate of 320 feet a minute you still have control.”

It worked.

“We landed like a feather.”

His dizzying dance with death was not his first brush with the world beyond.

Carlson, who is 79 on Oct. 16, has visited Korea once, Vietnam twice and most of Asia and Europe — but not on a tourist visa. He has been protecting the United States and defending its honor.

For a Depression baby growing up on a Winter Haven chicken farm to serving in two conflicts and ending up as a major in the Army in charge of briefing European military brass and VIPs, this life has been one brisk roller-coaster ride.

But the fear of death and destruction did not stop when, after 20 years, he retired from the service.

He then taught language arts to eighth-graders for 20 years.

Carlson was born in a citrus grove of backwoods central Florida in 1929. His was not an easy childhood. There was no running water or electricity. The boys — Carlson and his brother, 4 years older — had to cut firewood for winter heating. He did homework by flashlight.

He had it rough, he said. But it was also blessedly freeing. He had acres of groves and woods to explore; he swam the two miles across Lake Eloise (that is the one that hosts Cypress Gardens theme park) when he was 8; he had his first gun at 9.

Like so many in those days, his father went bankrupt several times, Carlson said. The family operated a chicken ranch, which also had pheasant, duck and other fowl. But times were tough, and the family became caretakers of a neighboring citrus grove, “but we got kicked off and moved to a slum.”

A smallish guy in a school populated by migrant workers, Carlson got used to being beaten up — physically and psychologically.

This led to an inferior feeling that continued well into to adulthood.

He said he made good grades in school, which was not really “cool” back then, but recalled there were only textbooks available to read. When he was transferred to a downtown school, his ambition took hold. He started reading — voraciously; 48 books in sixth grade.

He graduated from high school in 1947 with a dismal view of the world as his cloak.

“I had no status, no job, no future and no vision,” he said. “I was 18 years old, and I was already a failure. What a mindset. There were no jobs in Winter Haven. I had to do something.”

He took his savings from his high school packing plant jobs to enroll in a business school to learn accounting, but bookkeeping was not fulfilling. He did wear his one coat and his one tie to his $35-a-week job. His mother was proud.

A year later, on a lark, he took a summer camp trip with the National Guard, but soon realized that “being a private in the Army wasn’t appealing as a career.”

On the way home, when the bus stopped at University Avenue and 13th Street in Gainesville, Carlson simply got out and started his new life. He went directly to Anderson Hall, which at that point was the administration building of the University of Florida, and visited a counselor who was on his lunch break. An hour later, the hick kid with $50 to his name and a limited vocabulary (which is hardly a description these days) was a cafeteria worker, enrolled in college and on his way to a collegiate political and military career.

He attended a party that offered free food and beverages. It turned out to be a political party, and during a lull in the events, Carlson — who had only a semester of high school public speaking under his belt — got up to talk. He was promptly nominated as president of his class.

He got involved in college. He got scholarships. He was somebody.

“I thought it was just a dream, just a charade,” Carlson said. “But these people seriously didn’t care who my parents were, or where I lived.”

Girls started taking interest. One of those was Barbara, now his wife of 54 years.

The whirlwind of fate began to unfurl.

After graduating UF with a degree in liberal sciences in 1952, he volunteered for the Armed Forces. In order to avoid the rigmarole of basic training, he did what all good Florida boys could expect: He underwent survival training in Alaska, where he experienced snow-cave camping and Northern lights, and then spent some time 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland.

His first active-duty gig was in Korea, and then Japan, as a commanding officer of a small airfield where he learned how to fly a helicopter.

When he came back to the states, he was assigned to an air-unit base near Las Vegas. One of his assignments was to fly under the cloud of a nuclear explosion at the proving ground in Nevada to test how much radiation people could take.

“That ticked me off,” Carlson said. “I got out of active duty and left the service and became an insurance salesman. But I wasn’t happy.”

Because of Barbara’s asthma the couple moved to Denver in 1957.

“I worked in sales for Dictaphone but still wasn’t happy; you can’t be doing something you don’t like.”

In the early 1960s, he was called back up for active duty in the special forces during the buildup of the Vietnam conflict and became head of maintenance for one of the first helicopter units to barge into the former civil war between the north and south.

Some missions certainly stand out.

Carlson was with some other officers on the balcony of the Mayflower Hotel in Saigon when suddenly fireworks erupted — but they were not fireworks.

It was the sound of rockets and machine guns. It was the night Ngo Dinh Diem, the embattled Catholic president of the Buddhist nation, was assassinated — some say by supporters of the United States.

It was Nov. 2, 1963.

Three weeks later, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

“Diem’s wife said it was fair retribution,” Carlson said.

His flotilla was again ordered aground.

Another notable period was the Tet Offensive, which was a linchpin of the war. Lasting from just after midnight Jan. 30 to Sept. 23, 1968, the surge by North Vietnamese (Vietcong) into the south sparked American outrage by its intensity and surprise-attack tactics.

Tet is the spring festival, the start of the lunar year. It is a festive time marked by traditional cleaning, cooking and glee, very much like Thanksgiving/Christmas or Hanukkah.

There was supposed to be a three-day cease-fire across the land; it was widely broadcast that it would be so.

But the Vietcong did not honor the cease-fire, and hundreds of villages, provincial capitals and allied military bases were taken by surprise. It was a hard time for the thousands of U.S. personnel based in the country, Carlson said.

He had 68 “birds” under his command, and endured an annoying colonel continually asking him to reposition his defenses, which he refused. Several months later, the two ended up playing tennis together at night.

He spent his final three years serving as a briefing officer for the military in Europe, which he described as being the most stressful part of his career.

“When I finally got my eyeglasses, they weren’t all these pink ovals,” Carlson said. “I could see all this brass [one was former President Dwight Eisenhower’s son] I was talking to. I totally lost my place [in his speech].”

Before he retired from the military, Carlson served as an associate professor with the ROTC at the University of Florida for three years, starting in 1971.

Not finished yet, he embarked on a second career of teaching language arts at Fort Clarke Middle School for 20 years. In between, he earned a master’s from Boston University and a doctorate degree from UF in language arts.

For four years before he finally retired, he was general manager of Heat Pipe Technology, a high-tech firm based in Gainesville that was founded by Vietnamese Khanh Dinh, whom Carlson said was hunkered down near the Imperial Palace when the Ngo Dinh Diem assassination took place. They were two blocks apart.

Much of his military service was in Asia, including Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines, and the Carlson home reflects this with pieces of art and statuary.

“It was quite the experience, and the travels and learning all the cultures was very enlightening,” he said.

He and Barbara have two sons and a daughter, all graduates of Buccholz High School. Debbie, the oldest, is currently the principal of a school for U.S. dependents in Okinawa. Guy started his own advertising agency in Gainesville and youngest son Bob was recently appointed commander of the Emergency Relief Command. His job is to respond to emergencies world-wide at the behest of the President.

There are also number grandchildren

Carlon’s hobbies now center on writing and on gardening, and he is well-known for his prowess with the dozens of camellias surrounding their acre-large Kenwood home.

Oh — He no longer feels inferior. §