aviation crews are different um rank is superfluous uh everybody is has a specific mission crew chief door gunner co-pilot aircraft commander everybody has a specific mission but nobody can do that one mission by themselves it takes all of us working together as a team and i don’t care if i’m a captain and you’re a spec four crew chief i’m no better than you are and if it wasn’t for you i couldn’t be flying this airplane same with the door gunner that’s a lesson you learn out of it you learn a lot about team you learn about personal courage you learn about personal responsibility you’ll learn uh a certain sense of tenacity you can’t be lazy you you’ve their dedication’s got to be there and that’s what i experienced with these guys in vietnam every one of them there was no lacquered every one of them even the guys in the maintenance hangar that didn’t fly those missions with us and many of them would jump in to fly a mission just to get out there and do it but even to the clerk that wrote the awards up there was such a sense of dedication and camaraderie that i have never experienced in my entire life since then never in my 20 years in uniform and the 13 years that i was fortunate to serve as a civilian with the with the office of the secretary of defense nothing nothing will ever compare to what i experienced especially in lam son 719 even the command-and-control north missions though they were hairy though they had some twists and turns i would have never expected and and and we lost two crew on commanding control north missions uh that’s that’s horrible that uh but nothing compares with lamson 719 and i think that’s that’s where the what we now see is air assault that’s where it was born it was born there we had to think on our feet we did things that weren’t written down we had to think on our feet and uh i mean like coming to the ten foot hover versus putting your skids on the ground how do you learn that you learn it from experience um just just things i guess they’re being learned today uh and more as they teach our assault at fort campbell today but my god that was i went to a reunion at fort campbell several years back and the guys are all flying blackhawks now then they looked at us like we were war ii pilots 5b29 with the low tech all this and they were captivated by the stories that we could tell um you know if it wasn’t for gps i couldn’t drive my car from point a to point b but up in the air i could shoot a vector and i could say pop smoke and identify the smoke and knew exactly where i was going uh just things you learn probably one of the awards i’m most proud of is an army accommodation medal and i got that from battalion commander we inserted his soldiers into the aishah valley um this was after uh after 719 and it had been a long day for them and uh son it was start sun was starting to sit and i get a call from and and i something six like and i answered the phone and he says could you take a war more mission i said well yes sir sure sure we can i did call ops because they’re expecting us he said well i want to treat my troops to ice cream and they’ve got ice cream and burmite cans on our log pad back at eagle i said not a problem sir and we flew an ice cream mission in there and he awarded his troops for their hard work and i got an argument for that i bet you that ice cream tasted good yeah yeah and uh after that i uh went with lantern and lz many times i’d get out of the cockpit i always wore spit shine boots i i i was dressed right dressed right in front the whole time i always wore spit shine boots but i made her my goal i was going to get out of that damn cockpit and i’d say okay peter apology got it co-pilot and i’d help the troops unload supplies off the ship and i i want to think they appreciated that now here’s a aviation captain getting out of cockpit and he’s doing sweat work that’s what i learned in vietnam
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