Helicopter Wars | Vietnam Firefight! | Season 1 Episode 2 | Full Episode

the helicopter came of age in vietnam with one invincible machine becoming the symbol of that wall the huey it was the war horse of the airborne cavalry and medevac companies for many young men flying these famous helicopters it was a short-lived adventure a helicopter pilot in vietnam was twice as likely to be killed in combat as an ordinary soldier some missions were so dangerous it was best not to think too much about the odds i often tell people it would have taken more guts not to go than to go the rotors were over the outer perimeter 40 years on these pilots relive the most traumatic mission of their lives [Music] again and again they flew back in to rescue over 100 soldiers caught in the crossfire of an ambush i just said to myself i'm going to get shot in the back then i said i'm going to get shot in the back and i'm going to live and i'm going to be a paraplegic i mean all this stuff is going through my head [Music] vietnam 1967. tom bartler and jack zwickard are pilots in their early twenties as a keen amateur cameraman tom's unique record of their war is shown here for the first time they've been flying huey's in combat missions for less than a year [Music] but by vietnam standards their season virtues on may 14 1967 they would set off on one of the most epic rescue missions of the entire vietnam war tom does this make you homesick surely does it's good aircraft yeah it's even got the armor in it doesn't it yeah it's got the armor just like we had in vietnam hop in see how you jump up there okay 40 years on the vietnam veterans inspect an old friend a huey still in service with the national guard in santa fe we used to navigate remember just a map in her lap and that's right going like hell really fast low and it's it's basically just exactly like it was you know it's basic cueing not quite as old as we are but yeah pushing it tom parker's co-pilot on the mission that fateful day was larry less is that lori less yeah i've been called in to sit down we called your wife last night she set you up huh she said she said i'm sorry okay long time dang i saw you walking up and i said that's larry holy cow he looks a little you age better than i am yeah right right this is amazing i haven't seen you since what 69 17 1970 probably i got out in april 70. okay yeah i fell in love with a program on television called whirlybirds and i just used to watch that all the time and i always thought that would be a good thing to do when i grow up so i joined the army at age 17 and subsequently they selected me for flight school [Music] we were on the czech german border during a snowstorm and this one day this guy came in in a ue and he put down his window and he had short sleeves and he was drinking a cup of coffee and i was freezing my butt off and he just looked at me and he said you're such a jerk he used other ones i'm trying to keep it clean you're such a jerk and i looked like like why he said look at you you're freezing your ass off it's snowing it's sleeting i'm here i'm nice and warm and he said man you should you should sign up for helicopter train so the next day at the officers club there was a sign that says we're looking for a helicopter pilot so i said take me within four days i was in the states going through flight school [Music] with the desperate shortage of pilots the army has devised a rapid flight training program four months primary instruction at fort walters followed by advanced training at fort rucker when i went to uh the primary helicopter school the first five hours that we got as an instruction was learning how to hover that's the first thing you had to do you didn't have to be real good at it but that's how you landed and you took off in a helicopter at flying school they learned how helicopters are able to perform this extraordinary feat in a fixed wing aircraft the rapid flow of air over the wings generates lift when the plane travels forward fast enough in a helicopter its wings rotate as the rotor blades spin through the air they generate lift even when the helicopter is not moving forward [Music] but stationary flying or hovering is much harder than it looks the pilot must make constant adjustments with both hands and feet to keep the helicopter steady while my whole class was able to take a helicopter after a couple hours and pick it up to a hover i was already in the ninth hour and still couldn't hover and you have to solo in 10 hours so i couldn't hover so now i'm beginning to panic because if you don't get through flight school then you go you're back on the ground again and i was really scared i always had a pretty good control touch and i could pretty much get the aircraft to do anything i wanted it to do without moving the cyclic control much more than the size of a silver dollar cyclic is like the stick in a fixed wing aircraft moving the cyclic changes the angle of the main rotor blade individually to make the helicopter roll to the side or point up and down the left hand controls the collective lever this moves the helicopter vertically up or down by altering the pitch of the blades collectively the foot pedals change the pitch of the tail rotor this alters the direction the helicopter is pointing a bit like a rudder there were some pilots that had a poor control touch that moved that cyclic around a lot and what happened when you did that was you would dump lift out of the rotor system out of the rotor disc so the better your control touch the better performance you could get out of the aircraft they gave me a civilian instructor who flew around with me now in the air was fine i just when i got within 20 feet of the ground i couldn't control the helicopter so he got out and said you're not going to solo i said you have to let me solo he said you're not going to sell him i said you have to let me solo i'll make it he said no you'll die i said i'll make it. so he said fine go ahead and he walked away and i put my helmet on and i went to pick the helicopter up to a hover except i had wrapped the cord around my neck so my head went back like this so i had to lay the helicopter back down again i straightened it out the tower said are you okay are you okay and i just turned off the radio and i just took a deep breath i picked it up and the helicopter was like like this like this but i got it off the first time i came around you have to do it three times i actually made it that was feeling kind of good the second time i came around it got really bad the third time i came around i was hedge hopping like like this i got the last edge and put the helicopter down and like shut it down and ran out of the helicopter i didn't even take it off the runway [Music] so i had solo [Music] out of 84 i think it was ranked 82. so i was really bad all the way through i was a bad pilot after eight months of training the pilots graduate to flying the army's principal helicopter in vietnam the bell uh-1 nicknamed huey when we got to the huey the first time we were all in awe and we always had that picture in front of us during our primary training at fort walters that boy that's what we really want to do we want to fly the huey that is it that was state of the art that was the that was the aircraft you wanted to fly here's the tactical instrument ticket yeah i have one just like that license to kill yourself that's right do you know what mine said on the back my instructor pilot said remember you are the worst pilot we have ever put through the program you will surely kill yourself flying please don't worry about getting shot that was on the back that's what was handed to me but he was right yes he was telling me don't get arrogant within two weeks of finishing flying they're off to fly huey's in combat assault missions in vietnam that's exactly what he thought the rookie pilots would be lucky to survive six months you know it was pretty quick from flight school to freight school fresh out of flight school the new pilots arriving in vietnam come to a divided country their role is to fly hueys from their bases in south vietnam in the war against communist north vietnam the combat assault helicopter companies use these powerful and robust machines to insert troops on the ground [Music] if you were going to be in a war flying turned out to be a much better way to fight it than being on the ground with the mud and the leeches [Applause] [Music] we lived in a villa in downtown benoit so i commuted to the war each day to this way this was not even a road 40 years on tom larry and jack returned to benoit a small town where they were stationed just outside saigon that's the second field force headquarters building right there okay okay that's where i live my second remember when i took the picture off of the balcony i was shooting down on that road right there okay okay wow things change in 40 years something we had long days when we came back at the end of the day we were tired and we'd go back to the villa and we'd get a little bit drunk you know and and then we we knew we had to get up early the next morning and go fly again one in every 18 helicopter pilots never made it home but as the survivors clocked up thousands of hours of flying in less than a year it did not take long for them to become battle-hardened in nine months larry liss went from being a hopeless rookie to a maverick ace who was prepared to put his neck on the line to save others one day he was flying an unarmed vip huey when he saw another helicopter crash land despite his own helicopter being totally unequipped for combat larry's instinct was to fly in and save the crew from capture by the vietcong we got in really quick everybody jumped in we beat it out of there and everybody's yelling and screaming for joy you know and we landed them and i shut the aircraft down we didn't take any hits or anything like that aircraft a couple hours later i was in front of my commander who basically chewed me out for going and pulling these people out i couldn't understand why he was so upset he was upset because i disobeyed a direct order and written orders and i said okay but we saved these people and he couldn't hear it he couldn't hear us so basically he said if you ever do it again i'm gonna i'll get you thrown out of the army only a week later it's easter sunday and larry lisa's future in the army is about to be in even greater jeopardy his flying buddy tom barker has just 12 days to go before his tour of duty is over so the last thing he wants is trouble from above they were taking it kind of easy on me and not uh not flying me too hard so easter sunday they said well you go out and fly the staff chaplain with captain liz and so we did there was like a call could you fly with tombaka because nobody's around to fly everybody's like taking off on sunday and i said sure i'll go sunday's fine you know milk run they call them milk runs right [Music] i had a vip aircraft it was a basic huey and uh i had a couple of individuals that wanted to fly with us that day in addition to the chaplain just to see the country [Music] they didn't know what they were getting into that day and of course we didn't either as larry and tom wait for the chaplain they're told of a group of soldiers out in the jungle who need rescuing a company of some 100 south vietnamese troops led by u.s special forces has been raiding the communist supply lines from the north along the infamous ho chi minh trail their mission has gone badly wrong ambushed by the north vietnamese army they're hopelessly outnumbered and radioed for help another huey race to the rescue on board special forces medic jim dog flying over the scene he was horrified by what he saw out of the huey door it was really really dense cover and there were some tall trees there and i don't know how they were going to try to set that thing down but in the meantime they were going to drop me down on a rope just as jim was about to launch himself out of the door the tail rotor clipped a branch when he hit the tree the the helicopter really started to buck and i thought we were just crashing looking at the ground trying to figure out which way you're going to run when you hit the ground try to watch with if you can see any of the fire if you can see any of the flashes you want to see what you can so that you're not running toward it the guy flying it moved us up and away and sat down on a highway maybe a kilometer from where we were he put the helicopter down there because he said it was going to crash otherwise after a quick inspection of the badly damaged tail rotor the pilot risks flying the huey back to camp despite his narrow escape jim darp is determined to go back to save the people left behind he approaches the only other helicopter at khao song bay tom and larry's unarmed vip huey the first thought was like oh goody they're like come on let's go and the second thought was this is bad because this is not my helicopter there's no guns i don't remember ever flying in an aircraft without guns so this was um you feel nude somehow but i didn't give it a second thought i should have but i did we were the only helicopter there and they needed our help and you know we were not we were not going to say no i mean we weren't going to say no once again larry liss finds himself in an unarmed vip helicopter not meant for combat you'll be accompanying tom to a landing zone where more than 30 soldiers have already died foreign my remembrance of this thing was we knew exactly where we had to go and we flew at altitude for a little bit then we got right down on the deck and we didn't know that we were going to run into bamboo when we did as they approach the landing zone they fly low keeping the fuselage along the trail and the road is just above the tall trees on either side generally they'll come down two three four feet off the ground and you just jump the hell out that's the normal way to insert in this particular case there was no lz there was just this really heavy vegetation we looked down and we couldn't see the troops because of the bamboo and the thick vegetation and they said oh you're right over us right now can you land and larry and i are looking at all this stuff and saying well we can cry [Music] the situation is desperate but glimpsing a very narrow opening in the bamboo tom and larry decide the only way of getting down is to create their own landing zone they're going to have to use the rotor blades to cut through 40 feet of bamboo it's an action that could easily lead to disaster even in the famously robust hue i had a sense that we could cut the bamboo i didn't know how long the blades would last but there was no other way to do it the only other way was to leave and that was you had him you had to take the shot tom takes the controls and descends into the battle the blades start to slice through the canopy we started down through the bamboo and it wasn't real thick but i mean it was damaging the blades and it was pretty noisy going down through that we were a lawnmower basically is what we were doing the huey's rotor blades have a strong leading edge of stainless steel the rest is an aluminium honeycomb wrapped in a layer of thin steel this bamboo is tough a lump ripped out of the edge will unbalance the whole rotor system damage to the underside of the blade would ruin the aerodynamic surface and cause the huey to fall out of the sky i did some temporary duty at the bell helicopter plan as a production test pilot and i used to love to walk through the factories i know that one of the most important employees of bell helicopter was a little guy that went along in the blade shop and tapped on the blades to make sure that there were no voids in the honeycomb structure i knew that as long as i didn't damage the stainless steel leading edge i'd be in good shape yet tom's main concern is his machine's achilles heel the delicate tail rotor there was just no room you got to understand this trail we were landing on was just about wide enough for the fuselage of that huey to go down into my margin of error on knocking that tail rotor off was maybe about a 20 degree 15 or 20 degree turn in either direction it was that narrow had we lost that tail rotor we lost the aircraft both pilots keep their hands on the controls in case one of them is shot that's something you learned but i never really did i mean every mission i ever flew every combat mission i ever threw i kind of stayed close but i don't remember ever staying that close because that was real that was like really that was a little too close and either one of us could have gotten it either one of us as soon as they touch down the first wounded are loaded tom larry and jim face a shocking scene you saw people taking rounds on the ground uh there were people that were trying to move toward the helicopter that didn't make it it was probably the most intense combat that i was ever in directly exposed to small arms i was scared four decades later the crews returned to the landing zone it looks as challenging today as it did then this is what it was but the whole road was like this yeah there was a lot of bamboo with a diameter about like this and some of it might have been a little bit thicker it could have been yeah it could have been like like the edges up there like the edges up here it was definitely you know like that hanging over the road yeah and i mean you could hear you could hear the rotor blades chopping through that right it was just like a buzz saw and uh sound like a weed whacker yeah weed whacker yeah it was amazing because they were the end of the perimeter they were laying here and laying here and the enemy forces were no more than 25 yards yeah and either you could see them shrinking shrinking the perimeter so it's like on both sides they pick up six casualties other wounded are pinned down by the north vietnamese after three minutes under intense fire tom and larry decide they have to lift off [Music] tom pulls the helicopter straight up over 40 feet of vegetation he needs to follow the track he came in on so he spins the helicopter around and heads back to the camp [Applause] in the back jim's focusing on his seriously wounded patients it's a lot easier to focus when you have wounded because you're not focusing on what's going on around you which is the scary stuff one guy got hit in the upper shoulder and i was worried that a subclavian artery might have been cut and i was so i'm focused on that and i'm not afraid anymore on the 15-minute ride back to khao song bay tom and larry receive another desperate radio message those left behind are completely pinned down by an ever-larger north vietnamese force the entire company of over 100 men now needs rescuing to save them all the pilots will have to make several trips back to an increasingly hot landing zone so you don't have a chance to play it out on the first time because you because you don't know how bad it is the second time around you know how bad it is and then you know the possibility of a continuous existence the the odds are shrinking dramatically it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the the perimeter has to shrink and ultimately you have to be left with no perimeter and ultimately you have to be left with little or no odds the pilots face a bleak decision to return seems virtually suicidal yet not to return means abandoning their comrades to almost certain death this is vanguard one on guard is there anyone up on this frequency tom calls for backup on the emergency channel for any aircraft in the area that might be able to help suddenly he hears a familiar voice this is thunderbird five outfits warrant officer grade one jack swickett is from tom's former unit the 118th he's also from tom's hometown albuquerque i knew jack was a very good pilot so i was very glad that he was there jack touches down on the dirt strip at kausong bay tom quickly fills him in on the dire situation at the landing zone they work out a plan to go back and i said well i've got two machine guns i said why don't i lead in and he said well that's great i often tell people it would have taken more guts not to go than to go i just could not turn down uh people who were in trouble who we might have a chance of pulling out flying that day with jack is al croteau an avionics engineer out to see vietnam from the air on his day off from ground duties i was expecting to be sitting back there with my camera and taking pictures at every spot that we landed and having just a great calm wonderful sunday i knew al had not really come on a mission to get in the middle of a fight i said al you don't have to go in with us if you don't want to and he said no i'm i'm going in with you i trusted jack i had all the confidence in the world in jack's ability so i was going for the ride whatever came up came up i had that was it no fear let's go but after the first time in tom has some serious concerns about the state of his helicopter i kind of looked up at the blades and i kind of went i wonder if i really want to look at those i wonder if i need to shut this thing down and take a look at those but we didn't have time they take off with jack in the lead [Music] they hurtle low through the trees along the narrow trail to the landing zone we were able to drop the fuselage of the aircraft over the road a little bit under the tree line and keep the rotors above the tree line we went as fast as we could trying to maintain the element of surprise we didn't want them to hear us coming so if we were low they wouldn't hear us until the last minute [Music] often in combat assaults hueys fly in a staggered formation with overlapping rotors but down at tree level this isn't possible jack and tom are forced to fly one behind the other this brings its own dangers a lot of times when you landed in a formation into an lz and the aircraft were fairly close together formation you would get rotor wash off of the aircraft behind you and that would um push the tailbone one way or the other and you just correct with the appropriate pedal to keep the aircraft aligned with the direction you wanted to land in [Music] you know a huey makes a lot of noise particularly when it's about 30 feet above you it's shuttering you're hearing the engine noise you're hearing the blades whacking and i was hoping it would throw off the aim of anybody who might be tempted to fire at us with bullets all around al returns fire immediately but his door gun jams he takes out his handgun the 45 automatic pistol is a useless gesture and i realized that when i fired the last of the nine rounds so you know i put it back in those i said this is stupid just as tom did before jack has to chop his own space through the bamboo for a landing zone he carves his own 48-foot circle i had never done it before i had nicked a few leaves in earlier operations but i had never consciously lowered the aircraft down through trees cutting my way down we kept it very very still did not want to hit larger branches and we had to didn't want to hit the wider part of the bamboo which is very very strong i didn't know how much that rotor blade was going to take as the blades hit the bamboo tom knows the blade structure and aerodynamics will be seriously compromised [Music] we could hear the blades whistling right after we landed now both helicopters have made it down onto the trail but there is panic on the ground people started handing me bodies and these were vietnamese soldiers who had been shot and we started loading them into the helicopter [Applause] and i looked down and there was this one vietnamese soldier who unfortunately had lost his head and i said to myself well i need a rifle or something to protect myself if the helicopter goes down so i grabbed the carbine wiped his brains off of the carbine and i felt a little bit more secure that if we went down at least i had something that i could use to defend myself tom and jack signaled to each other to lift off at the moment i turned it into a game which is i think how i handled the possibility of dying i said to myself okay if we can get in and out then the score is 15 to nothing you know we pulled 15 people out they got nobody then we came in for the second pass if we get in and out the score is 30 to nothing we're winning and i also said to myself okay if i die now so the score is 30 to one not good that i'm dead but it's it's not a bad account so i'm smiling about it now but somehow it gave it put me in a game it had me be more aggressive time and again the pilots returned to rescue the trapped soldiers each trip in as we're going in i'm trying to figure out how much damage i had taken on the main rotor blades how much fuel i had on the aircraft how many people could i take out my job is to take care of the wounded so what i did is i went to the hospital and then for the rest of the day they just continued to bring in wounded [Music] it's the fifth run into the landing zone the confines of the approach path have repeatedly forced the pilot into the same narrow funnel they've made themselves easy and predictable targets for the north vietnamese i gotta tell you we were all stressed i mean this was difficult each time we took people out and came back to get more there were less less troops on the ground to defend the landing zone the defense perimeter made by the ambushed company is now so close it's underneath the sweep of the rotor blades for those scrambling to get onto the helicopters there's no place to hide at one point soldiers who had been on board or climbing aboard if they came across a body i saw him throw it off to the side we didn't put any any of the dead on board that was room for the living we needed to keep them alive were just amazed they were shooting people getting on the aircraft but they weren't shooting us and we were just waiting we just thought oh it's just any second amid the flying bullets larry leaves tom at the controls and jumps out people were struggling to get on and we would have had to come back again and i got out and i shoved three or four people on and i just said to myself i'm gonna get shot in the back you know and then i said i'm gonna get shot in the back and i'm gonna live and i'm gonna be a paraplegic i mean all this stuff is going through my head i mean he's got an infantry background special forces background and so you know he was hard charging guy and he he got out with his uh ar-15 uh i think that's what you were carrying car 15 yeah 15. and he was out there uh fighting and i was just sitting there waiting to die and holding on to controls and you told me there were bullets flying by me and i didn't until you told me that i said i don't remember the bullets flying by i just remember throwing people on and i'm pushing people off i don't remember anything else yeah i saw a few get hit on the aircraft and that's especially on ours yeah you had several hit on the back of yours yeah yeah and that's why i don't understand why they didn't get us because the doors were open they were shooting them in the back of the aircraft because they were aiming at us yeah and and uh think about it right now they were aiming at it you know everybody you watch movies like people shoot once and they get the person no that's not real not real you know people are shaking but why didn't they disable the aircraft i'm sure they try you know i didn't i mean i don't think there's one round for what i have i think it was too dense i think it was too dense that's why but i also think they did not want to disable one of those helicopters on the ground because then there would be lots of people there really fast i just think we were lucky really when you are pulling people out of a hot situation and you are the last aircraft to go in most of the folks are going to jump on board your aircraft i had to push people off the helicopter because we would have been overweight and if we had added people we would have crashed it was simple mathematics jack's helicopter has the extra weight of machine guns and ammunition larry and tom's totally unarmed helicopter is lighter and so can take more people on board on the last trip out i think i had 22 on the aircraft there was at least one on atlantic gear skid because that's the only place he could get and larry list was actually holding on to him for part of that trip back i reached out and held these guys by like this part these south vietnamese guys i was holding them and you could see in their eyes that they were elated that they got out and they were scared to death that they would fall off but they hung on they hung on it was like really it was great that's the most i ever carried on a huey was 22 people and i mean they wouldn't all even fit inside that's why larry was holding on to a few but then we were worried that if i got shot how can i get all the controls you know he had to be on a control so uh once once the fellas on the skids were you know they were situated where they could hold on to stuff larry got back on the controls which is you know good a huey overloaded with 22 men cannot go straight up to take off it needs a runway just like a regular aeroplane this is known as a running takeoff this demonstration shows how the helicopter skims the ground as it gains speed more air moves through the rotor disc and the blades become more efficient helping lift the aircraft into the sky the point at which the aircraft starts to fly is known as translational lift it would take oh i would i would have to say at least 50 yards we could get into transitional lift about over there maybe just another 10 or 15 feet beyond you might bounce the skids a few times but once we hit there the aircraft started to come up if if you didn't fly the aircraft correctly you could lose that translational lift and drop it and drop back down into the into the trees so you had to have a really good control touch we had already come out of the lc yeah so you were able to hit the spot we had cut which gave you some clearing right for your resistance yeah you didn't have a lot of rpm left yeah no that's right you can almost see the rotor blades right because you dragged the rpm down so much yeah it was like oh my god you know i was i was really sweating getting out of that last time because i didn't know we were going to be able to do it and it would not have been good to have to stay but well yeah because we had to come back a sixth time to pull you guys out low on fuel with damaged blades and overloaded the fifth trip has to be their last jack lifts off first as we were taking off i looked down and in one of these circular pits there was one vietnamese soldier holding the ground and i said to myself oh my god i've left someone behind to this day that's all i can see is this one individual standing his ground and protecting our lives and we're leaving him there and i've never forgotten that later intelligence revealed the massive size of the enemy force they'd faced this was a whole hell of a lot more than a platoon or even a company it was they later identified it as probably a battalion of the 273rd regiment the battalion 5 600 guys they bring the survivors back to khao sang bay now the adrenaline rush wears off they have hardly a moment to take stock of what has just happened when i checked my weapons they were empty and to this day i i don't remember firing i mean i know i did i might have done i might have fired him when i got out of the aircraft but i don't remember firing they were just empty despite being perilously low on fuel they're anxious to head home to benoit before nightfall unaware of the full extent of damage the bamboo has inflicted on their rotor blades my remembrance of the helicopter was it was really shuddering there's no doubt that had we shut the aircraft down we'd have seen the damage on the blades and we would not have tried to fly it when those blades are spinning you can't see those blades you know you can't see the damage it's done when their commanding officer finds out their reputations may be as damaged as the blades [Music] it seemed like it took forever to get back because we're waiting for the low fuel light to come on and fortunately that blade just kept turning and it kept lifting and it was noisy and it was whistling but it was doing its job we get the low fuel light during the [Music] shutdown [Music] that's that's the mission day there 10.7 hours i don't remember flying that much that day but i guess we did yeah you know uh absolutely yeah i can remember the time of day we got back because when i landed it was just beyond dusk it was starting to turn dark right and i got out of the aircraft and i went to inspect the rotors and it was too dark to see them without a flashlight ours it looked like a giant cat had taken it and scraped the cupboard off and underneath was the honeycomb okay so all along the rotor blades it looked like some big monster yeah that aircraft was a mess that evening as the senior ranking officer in the mission larry is called into the second field force headquarters a major reminds him of the standing orders not to fly vip aircraft into combat situations he demands to know how larry broke his helicopter he just absolutely freaked out on me rather than a commander saying way to go and by the way we'll get your helicopter fixed it was you you know larry list you're a dirtbag you don't follow orders you're not that he said to me you're not the kind of officer we want in the army he's just yelling and screaming at me and i smiled i did something and he pushed me and i went flying over a chair and in those days i think it was a big mistake to push me because i bounced back up and punched him and then all these staff people jumped in and pulled us apart and uh then the general came on the scene i'm not going to accept charges and the general said it was a bad thing that you did disobeying a direct order it was a great thing that you did disobeying a direct daughter very good he said look what you guys did was exceptional extraordinary in one of the most heroic helicopter missions of the vietnam war tom larry jack and al rescued over 100 people they pushed the huey to the limit they put their own lives on the line and they survived for al croteau meeting tom and larry for the first time since they flew that last mission on easter sunday 1967 gives him the chance to lay one last ghost to rest [Music] i am just so happy that i got a chance to meet larry and tom but i'm even more thrilled with the fact that you picked up that one last soldier i had worried about that one last soldier for 40 years right and finally you put it to rest right that you did save him and yeah i want to thank you for that so much you're welcome there was nobody alive when we left okay i don't really believe i knew what a thing we had pulled off until after i got back and um people were talking about it at the bar before i even got to the bar and i said hmm it must have been great you know or must have been something that i can be proud of and then i went home two weeks later and i went looking for girls yes i found one and i'm still married to her [Music] [Music] i actually did not know i was going to get an award for it until i got back to the united states and i was told that i was being given the distinguished flying cross for that mission and i got a soldier's medal too but the dfc is the one that was really important to me for their heroism along with tom jack and larry were also awarded the distinguished flying cross and al the air medal [Music] do you

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Id: n8fwkAuM1fI

Length: 50min 10sec (3010 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021