In One Day He Flew 51 Wounded to Safety Through Gunfire and Mines Earning Him the Medal of Honor

if you were shot in the jungle of vietnam your survival chances were greater than if you were in a crash on a highway in america that's how effective that helicopter was in that war i was born in phillips south dakota and raised pretty much in the state of washington my father served with darby's rangers in world war ii in north africa sicily in italy i had an uncle that was in the navy in world war ii and the rest of them were just periodic here and there all my children served in one way or another well when i came out of high school i went to an all boys catholic high school and i had several scholarship offers to play football at different universities around the northwest but at the time i was stalking this foxy chick and she was going to university uh that jesuit university that did not have a football team so rather than lose her i decided that i would go to the same university she went to and when i got there i found out they had rotc and it was mandatory and i hated it i did not like the idea that they could force me to wear a uniform and say sir to these kids around the campus and so i didn't do well and in fact they booted me out they told me to go to uh summer camp one summer and i decided i would go to alaska instead and so i went to alaska to earn some money to go back to school and then i married the foxy chick and so she talked me into said you need to go back and finish rotc and they actually took me back a great great leader there a guy named major snyder he said we'll give you a second chance brady and so they took me back into rotc and i was commissioned and went into the military did my basic training here my first assignment was in berlin germany of course i remember most the fact that i was there before the wall and i was there during the wall when they built the wall and after the wall the most amazing thing about it was that before the wall there was free access to all the sectors of berlin there were four different sectors of berlin the east was controlled by the russians in the east germans the west was controlled by the french the british and the americans free passage one day we woke up and there was barbed wire across the city that was the 13th of august 1961 and all of a sudden they started to build a wall around their own people and i'm a young second lieutenant platoon leader and they're shooting their own people off the wall and my medics are cleaning up the mess and this is when i first confronted communism we had a babysitter who was engaged to be married to a gentleman in the east she never saw him again our maid parents were in the east and she was not allowed to go to their funeral so that woke me up before that i had no idea of what communism was how evil it was or anything about it and it just kind of woke me up and i still had no aspirations of making the military career but i served with some great soldiers in vietnam norm schwarzkopf my commander was a guy named fred wine later became chief of staff the united states army and they were really extraordinary individuals and i thought geez it might not be bad to grow up and be like one of those guys so i went then from there they sent me to flight school and i incurred an obligation so kind of kept me in the military i did my initial training at camp walters texas which is where they trained helicopter pilots it didn't it's kind of an accident that i actually got to flight school they didn't know what to do with me i was kind of between assignments and so they sent me to flight school difficult to get in in those days really and uh i loved it because i got extra pay for being in flight school and uh the problem though was that my my ip thought i was dangerous and it wasn't didn't look like i was going to graduate in fact the day that i was supposed to solo he got out and he said i'll give you one chance and he put another ip in with me and he took me around the flight pattern just one time and he says okay you can solo so i was within a few minutes of busting out a flight school i was not a natural he thought i was dangerous but i did really enjoy it in those days the helicopters required both feet both hands and a wrist you had a motorcycle grip in your left hand and the power lever was in your left hand every time you moved one limb or your wrist you had to move all the other three so it was kind of like a harmony uh and you had to be very very well coordinated in those days to fly that kind of a helicopter and so i would say that that simple coordination physical coordination was very important and also your eyes were very important your vision was very very important and so i was blessed with good vision i had reasonable coordination once i caught on to it but it took me a little while to catch on to the various movements required to fly a helicopter including the motorcycle grip now the bad thing about that was it's the it was backwards from a motorcycle so when you added power in a helicopter you turned it one way and when you added power and a motorcycle you turned it the other way so i pretty much fell off every motorcycle i tried to drive after i started flying helicopters the development of a helicopter ambulance on the battlefield initially started in burma in world war ii but it was not in any way effective or efficient or uh sophisticated then they went to korea where they had the mash type helicopters with the pods and they would put the patient in that pod outside the helicopter where they couldn't treat him or monitor his condition and route to the hospital some of the patients would wake up in that pod and they thought they were in a coffin and it cost caused them a little problem now by vietnam we had the huey which was the it was like coming out of the helicopters before the huey was like going from model a to a rolls-royce it was a beautiful machine you could treat the patient in route the problem was we didn't know yet how to handle it on the battlefield and so initially in vietnam our mission was simply americans there were 16 000 of them in 1964 and that was it even though most of the casualties in those days were being suffered suffered by the vietnamese people and so uh we had a commander a guy named charles kelly who was an incredible soldier probably the greatest individual soldier i've ever known veteran of world war ii kind of an erasable irishman he was court-martialed three times in world war ii almost died in one battle but he came to vietnam to command this unit they decided still well general stillwell decided he would use our helicopters for ash and trash and then when there was a patient he'd put a red cross on it kelly said no no you can't do that now you got a major going up against a general both of them world war ii veterans kelly did not back down our mission was in doubt uh until the day kelly was killed and when he was killed that changed everything it took his life he went in to pick up an american they came under fire they told him get out he said when i have you're wounded and boom he took one bullet through the open door right through the heart killed him on the spot he froze destroyed the helicopter they dragged him out doctor was on board broke the doctor's leg and the rest of them were hurt too bad so i was on my way down there when we heard he was done and in fact i replaced him as commander of that unit that day that night i slept in his bunk in fact i went into that area where he had been killed a few minutes after he was shot to get the patients that he was killed trying to get i got him out although we got shot up on the first approach but we did get him out and the american who we went to pick up walked to the aircraft with an r r bag in his hand he wasn't urgent or anything else so but it didn't matter kelly would have gone after him anyhow by the way his dying words when i have your wounded set the standard for dust off to this day and you will not find one dust-off pilot anywhere in the world helicopter ambulance pilot who does not use those words as his motto to this day as i said i took over his detachment that that day that he was killed and moved my stuff into his room and the battalion commander called me in that day and he said to me he said you know i knew somebody was going to get killed the way you people were flying he said but i didn't think it would be kelly i thought it would be one of the younger pilots because all of us were inexperienced right out of flight school and so i said no we're not going to change a thing we're going to keep on flying the same way he taught us because we don't know any other way and then when i left he gave me he actually gave me the bullet that killed kelly i have it to this day i offered it to the family but they didn't take it they may in the future but in any event uh that's it we kept flying the way we we've always flown and and because we didn't know any other way and kelly taught us and as i said he set the example and his moral courage saved dust off and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives as a result one man one man made an incredible difference the survival rate because of kelly in vietnam if you were shot in the jungle of vietnam your survival chances were greater than if you were in a crash on a highway in america that's how effective that helicopter was in that war when i came back in 1967 much had changed there was about 500 000 americans in country and they were killing that many every week so the worst part of it was that we were in the mountains in tough terrain and i had 12 well i had 11 other pilots most of them had graduated from flight school on the same day there was no checkout there was no nothing when they got to vietnam and we got our helicopters they started flying combat so in this case most of our patients were americans and we had to deal with weather and we had to deal with mountains and we had to deal with pilots who were totally inexperienced i was the only experienced pilot me and the one other pilot had i had a year of combat experience and he had a year in vietnam some of it was flying we were based at chulai which is about 20 minutes south of da nang which is a big city in the northern part of south vietnam in those days we had a 40-man detachment we had six helicopters and to give you an idea of the workload and you can do kind of do the numbers on this but in a nine and a half month period with three flyable aircraft we had an aircraft shot up by enemy about every four or five days 117 percent of aircraft were shot up every month in that 40-man detachment there were 26 purple hearts that means 26 people were wounded out of the 40-man detachment that nine and a half month period period despite all those adversities we carried over 21 000 patients that was more than were carried by helicopter in the entire korean war and as just one unit all the other dust-off units were doing the same thing thousands and thousands of patients saving thousands and thousands of lives i was scared to death of the weather uh and the mountains and the fact that they were going to start killing our pilots because we were losing more pilots to accidents at night and in weather than the enemy was killing so i got a call one day from a young trooper who was on a mountaintop and he'd been bitten by a snake in in the afternoon the clouds would come down over the mountains about halfway down so complete zero visibility underneath it clear visibility but in order to get to the kid on the mountain top we had to go into the clouds no radar control no let down facilities no nothing and so i came into the clouds knowing i could fall out into the valley and i would be visual but i didn't have any idea how i was going to get that kid out in the meantime i'm praying like crazy to asking the good lord to show me how to do it the crew is nervous they're screaming at me on the ground he's going into convulsions dust off please please i told him we got to try it one more time so we went back around back up the mountain into the soup and i was blown sidewards that was the breath of god and i looked out my window i was looking for a hole in the jungle i thought we were going to crash and i could see the tip of the rotor blade and i could see the top of the trees so guess what i knew i was right side up so i turned that thing sidewards up the mountain into the area got the kid got him to the hospital and i think he lived that was a technique from that moment on low valley fog afternoon buildup two reference points sidewards and you can get in they can't stop us and so the day of the medal of honor action they called me because it was one of those missions and they knew i could fly the fog was perfect perfect protection from the enemy because he could not see more than 20 feet in that stuff now on one of the missions we went and we flew right over the top of him and whole an nba unit was laying in the mud right under us but he we were only about 15 20 feet off the ground but he couldn't see us or until we got there he could see us and before he could do anything we were gone so it was perfect perfect protection you just had to know how to do it and so i went into that area and picked those vietnamese up and it was not a problem they had 70 patients in another location also under low valley fog and so we went out there and we got all them out using the same technique they tried to follow me in but they didn't know how to do it and so i had to go get them all by myself and the other missions were just routine missions where we went in to get patients and we got our aircraft damaged by enemy fire the most important thing is that they're ready when you get there that the medic on the ground has done the most he can for them stop the bleeding protect the wound treat for shock in essence what you do is you make sure he's getting one thing air and you protect what he's got of the other thing blood and then you get him on the helicopter and then our medic goes to work on him and and does more work on him and he's going to be he's going to be in the hospital in 15 minutes he's going to be in an operating room and and from the time a guy was shot in our area until we had him in operating room the average time was 33 minutes so no matter what condition he could be a double amputee he could be anything and if he wasn't already dead the chances were 99 that he was going to live because we were going to have an operating room very very quickly most of the time the automatic weapons were 30 caliber the one that really worried you uh was quad 50s and we got hit with quad 50s one night and it blew the top off the helicopter a 50 caliber was the roughest thing we didn't have to go up against missiles thank god uh but 30 caliber we knew pretty much knew that 2000 feet put us out of range of 30 30 caliber or 762 or whatever the enemy had and then 3000 feet would put us out of range of 50 caliber although we had guys flying flying along at night in the black at night and have a pilot around come up through the bottom of the helicopter and hit shoot one of the pilots we went into the area and we got shot up but we didn't know how bad the aircraft was damaged so we jumped out of the area we went up to altitude checked it out the instruments were good the aircraft was seemed to be flying good and so we went back in and we got the patients when we got back to the base they found out that the controls were partially shot away so we had to they were just hanging on by the skin of our teeth so but anyhow we had to get another helicopter and then we went out again the interesting thing about the minefield was we were not on that mission another dustoff aircraft had that mission and as we were coming over the top there was a lot of traffic about wounded in the minefield everybody was apparently dead or wounded and a mine went off beside the helicopter it was sitting on the ground the dust off and it left the area and so i saw where that helicopter was sitting i knew just about exactly where it's skid marks were so i knew that if i could hit those skid marks i wouldn't set off a mine when i landed two things landing one if you if you land on a mine or it's command detonated that's a problem but the other thing was the rotor when you change power the downdraft can set off a mine so i hit the sky i hit the spot right on the mark things are going good nobody will move my my medic and crew chief i turned to him and i said go get him and they jumped out of that helicopter and they started dragging people to the helicopter through the minefield nobody would help him nobody would move and so on one of the trips they set off a mine blew him up in the air filled the aircraft with shrapnel lights came on they landed they had a patient on a litter and i think he took most of the shrapnel from the mine although some people think it was command detonated i don't know uh but in any event they got up they got the rest of the patients loaded got them on the aircraft we took them to the hospital including my two crew members who were wounded and then we had to go get another helicopter i got a call from westmoreland's office one day and he said congratulations there's a major scott congratulations you're going to get the medal of honor now i had already gotten my second distinguished service cross which is second highest award and i had a ceremony and everything i didn't think anything about the medal of honor but what they did is they upgrade it was an interim award well they processed the metal monitor took two years to process it and so i was i was completely surprised but the beautiful thing was that you got to bring your family and i got to bring a lot of my friends to the white house for the ceremony and that was great the thing i remember was that i was just really kind of embarrassed because when i stood up there at the guys there were three other guys with me i thought what's going on here you know everybody the people in my unit every other pilot except for the weather missions every other pilot in that unit did the same thing i did got shot down as many times as i did carried as many patients as i did almost because i had a year on them and and so i was just just a little bit embarrassed the most interesting thing about the whole ceremony was that president nixon said before the ceremony he said you know that the medal of honor society is meeting at the shamrock hotel in houston texas we didn't know what the medal of honor society was and he said well those are the living recipients of the medal at that time there was like 400 of them they went back to the boxer rebellion and uh would you like to go to the because now tomorrow after this ceremony you will be members of that society and we said sure how will we get there he says take air force one so he put us on his airplane which was not air force one when he wasn't on it but so we went down there we walked into that crowd and there was bob hope and dinah shore and scooter burke and eddie rickenbacker and jimmy doodle and commando kelly and joe foss and all these incredible heroes from as far back as i said the boxer rebellion the indian wars and here we are four young troopers and they're all out there to greet us and uh it was just a great experience i think service is is the thing that stands out and i think that uh i was a i was a reluctant soldier god knows i didn't want anything to do with the uniform or the military or anything about it and had i not gone to berlin had i not been forced to join the military had i not had to do things that i didn't want to do and would have never done if it was up to me the lesson was that i wouldn't trade a minute of it it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me and i think that young people today need to have that same opportunity to serve their country to do something for somebody else besides themselves which is what military service is all about soldiers they believe that life has no meaning unless it's lived for the benefit of future generations that's what it's all about that's why they protect america it's not for just for them it's for future generations and so everybody should have a little bit of that in them i think and the one place to get it is in the military where they train in grain and make you believe that and so that's what that's the way you live your life as a soldier

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 589,255

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal

Id: 3HSBJLD76ak

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021