The Marines called the -34D "the Dog," because of its "D" designation and its lowly, do-any-job utility (and maybe because its official name, "Seahorse," would just seem wrong coming out of a Marine's mouth). It flew every mission there was to fly. Recalls Sifuentes: "One day you'd fly day medevacs, the next day you'd fly area reconnaissance, then resupply—pick up water, ammo, food, take it out to the troops and bring back personnel, or VIP chase."

The -34 was the last of the piston-engine helicopters, and it had a complicated power train. A nine-cylinder Wright 1820 radial in the nose was connected to the rotor by a drive shaft that passed through the cockpit and took a 90-degree turn to reach the rotor gearbox. The Dog wasn't fast. It traveled at about 100 mph. So chasing the 125-mph UH-1 Huey, the air taxi of the VIPs, wasn't easy. Sifuentes says Dog pilots often had to ask the lead pilot to slow down. "Look, I'm 90 knots back here," he recalls saying over and over, "and I've got the collective up to my armpit. I've got as much power as I can pull. Would you please slow down?"

Like the larger helicopter that replaced it, the Dog dropped off Marine recon teams into dangerous territory. Says Sifuentes: "And they'd get in trouble, and they'd call us up and say, 'We need an extract. We need an extract.' And you'd get up there and start talking to them on the radio to find out where they are. And when they were whispering to you, you knew they were in trouble. The enemy was close enough to hear them."

Sifuentes felt relatively safe in the Dog. "Even when you were taking fire going into and out of a zone, you had that big old engine in front of you," he says. "And the little bugger always got me home
Some background from an old "Dog" operater !!