Apache Country - Cw5 Craig J Houser

This is a book about survival. It is a book about a 21 year old Army Scout pilot shot down during the Vietnam War on a Scout mission well inside North Vietnamese controlled territory in Cambodia.

He along with his two crew members, his Observer and his Door Gunner, were shot down on 10 March 1971.

They were hit by a B-40 Rocket Propelled Grenade or an SA-7 missile. The pilot, WO1 Craig (Jeff) Houser immediately lost engine power and then realized he had no cyclic control. The burning aircraft passed over a river and crashed into the trees above the riverbank, exploded on impact, and then fell into the river and sank.

He never saw his two crew members: Observer SP4 Robert T. Kiser or Door Gunner Sgt. Curtis R. Smoot again. After almost drowning, Houser managed to somehow get out of the wreckage of the aircraft on the bottom of the river and swim to the river bank.

This was then the beginning of what turned out to be four days of Escape and Evasion. He was burned and blinded (totally blinded in one eye and loss of most of his vision in the other) by the crash. Most of his survival equipment was now on the bottom of the river. He had no food, no medicine, and no water. It was now the dry season in this area of Southeast Asia and other than the river he crashed in, all the intermittent streams and creeks were dried up.

First he had to keep from being captured, that was the primary goal.

It is absolutely a true story of survival against all odds.