Another example of the 34’s archaic complexity: The main rotorhead, about the size of a Stetson hatbox, has 84 grease nipples, every one of which has to be lubed before a flight. Today, the turbine equivalent of the H-34’s 1,525-horsepower piston engine weighs about 25 percent of what the iron-mongered original did and fits nicely up above the cabin. This left a boxy, unobstructed area for a cabin behind and below the cockpit. Sikorsky’s solution was to stick the engine out in a big schnoz of a nose, with its crankshaft tilted back and the driveshaft angled up and aft, passing between the flight crew seats to the transmission and rotor hub at about a 45-degree angle.

But that would have pretty much filled the cabin. The obvious place to put its big air-cooled radial engine would have been in the very center of the helicopter, right under the rotors and with the vertical driveshaft connected directly to them. The H-34 (Sikorsky model number S-58) was derived from the H-19 (S-55), a late-1940s Sikorsky design that pioneered a unique engine configuration.

The H-34 family marked the end of the era of piston engine military helicopter design, an era that was coffin-nailed shut by humming, vibration-free turbine engines, sophisticated and durable rotor systems, and unimaginably light and reliable materials and devices. “We used to occasionally see the UH-34s at Marble Mountain, but I thought those old radial engines were totally obsolete,” he says. Though Moriarty served three combat tours in Vietnam, he wasn’t an H-34 pilot-wasn’t a pilot at all, wasn’t even an officer. There’s a small puddle of red hydraulic fluid on the cabin floor, and even an inert M-60 machine gun on a swivel mount in the main door. The cabin is cluttered with toolboxes and spares, and the slightly askew clamshell nose doors are held together with a bungee cord just as they would have been during the war. It has been restored to the condition of one of the hard-working UH-34Ds that flew in Vietnam, just as it might have looked parked on the HMM-362 (HMM means Helicopters, Marine, Medium) “Ugly Angels” squadron ramp at Soc Trang, or “Marble Mountain,” the helicopter strip at Da Nang. He takes his YL-42-in GI phonetics, “Yankee Lima 42,” the call sign of an actual helicopter that had a fatal crash-to airshows all over the country. Moriarty loves the Marine Corps enough to have spent an unspeakable amount of his own money restoring the 40-year-old UH-34D so that he can operate it as a living, breathing, shuddering, fluttering, flying Marine memorial. “I sue big companies that cheat people,” he says with in-your-face pride. Its owner is James Moriarty, a dogged, wealthy Houston lawyer. The Dog I met is one of two still flying in a coat of flat Marine green. Because it was the D model of the Sikorsky H-34, the UH-34D came by its nickname honestly. Marines use the phonetic alphabet in radio communication, replacing letters with words, and in the Korean War, well before today’s NATO-compatible alfa, bravo, charlie, delta for A, B, C, D, they used able, baker, charlie, dog. Not because it flew like one but because you’ll never get a Marine to call any weapon by the name the Corps gives it. Its official name was the Sea Horse, but they called the big helo the Dog.

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