LOUIS KARL BREUER IV
LOUIS K BREUER IV
1W/47
REMEMBRANCES
A Teammate and Friend
It has been almost 50 years since I last saw Lou at Richardson High School. Having read the earlier remembrances posted by those who served with him in Viet Nam, I can say that he was as impressive on the football field as a teenager as he was on the battlefield as a man. We were Eagles on the football field. He was an Eagle at war. He is an Eagle for all time.
Fly high, Eagle, fly high.
Final Mission of U.S. Army helicopter AH-1G tail number 67-15718
Shot down by a SA-7 missile near An Loc. Crew included 1LT Louis K. Breuer IV (KIA) and CW2 Burdette D. Townsend Jr. Personal account of crew: I can't add much to it as I was in Saigon just returning from R & R the day Lt Brewer and MR Townsend were shot down. I can tell you that our unit F Troop 9th Cav added the Strella missile alert to our SOP after they were shot down. Some whiz kid in the ivory palace came up with this one. If we saw a missile launched at us we were supposed to do the following: depress the intercom switch and announce 'Strella, Strella, Strella, Missile, Missile, Missile and then give the clock direction it was coming from.' Now given that we were flying usually anywhere from treetop level to 1,500 feet and given that the missile could go about 1.5 Mach, it did not take a rocket scientist to figure we were not going to be able to get all that announcement out before we would be impacted by the missile. My AC, (Captain Bailey), told me and my gunner to just yell 'Missile,' and he could figure out the fact that it was a Strella and that it was coming from somewhere behind us. The Army quickly outfitted our slick with something that looked like a toilet bowl to the back section of our engine. It was a scoop like thing that vented our exhaust up into the main rotor. It was supposed to defuse the exhaust enough that the Strella could not get a lock on us. I don't know if it really worked or if it was just eye candy to help our morale. We really did not have any faith in it. We just did our job and hoped for the best. Losing 1LT Brewer was like losing the quarterback from the football team in the fourth quarter of the Superbowl. He was everybody's hero. He was physically a big man. It was told to me that he played college football for some school in Texas. He was out going and very likable. You have to remember I was a crew chief at the time and not an officer. We enlisted men looked at officers differently than they saw themselves. I didn't know any soldier who thought 1LT Brewer was the kind of guy to look down his nose at a man just because he was enlisted. He was well liked and admired throughout the whole unit. If he was flying cover for us with a heavy pink team, we knew he would put it on the line to protect us and on many occasions he did just that. After he was killed all of us felt a little more vulnerable. I did not know Mr. Townsend as well except to say he was a solid pilot. He was a quiet kind of guy, solid and reliable. He had brass ones and would watch your back when things were going bad. Submitted by “Bruce” [Taken from vhpa.org]
