THE VIETNAM WAR: MOBILITY, SACRIFICE, BROTHERHOOD, AND SURVIVAL

In the South Pacific, the infantryman experienced forty days of combat in four years. The troops in Vietnam fought for two hundred and forty days in one year. The difference was the helicopter. It carried men to the fight, but it also brought death and pain in its wake.

One in ten men who served in Vietnam became a casualty. Of the 2.7 million who went there, more than 58,000 died, and over 300,000 were wounded. But those wounds were different — amputations, crippling injuries — three times as many as in the last war. Seventy-five thousand men came home disabled. The MEDEVAC and Dust Off helicopters flew over half a million missions, carrying almost a million casualties. Half of them were our own.

The airlift brought the wounded to care fast. Within an hour, the injured were in the hands of doctors. Less than one percent died if they made it past the first day. The chopper was both the hand of death and the gift of life. It brought us to the fight but also took the wounded away.

The enemy knew the sound of those rotors. They knew we were coming from five miles out, waiting to ambush. But we had our orders, and we went. We moved into the crucible of a war run by men far away from the killing fields, men who cared little for what they sent us to do. For what, I ask? What was it all for…