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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve dietrich who wrote (538089)	2/10/2004 12:55:02 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

In my experience, most of those ships were as gutsy as you'd want. One ship came into a hot landing for us and was taking multiple hits. I had one of the wounded guy's radio near me and I could hear the conversation between the pilot and the rto. The rto told him to lift off because we could all hear the bullets pinging off the chopper as he hovered with his skids resting just on the ground. The pilot told him slowly to "just keep loading those wounded boys on heah, we've got time." He took on 10 or more of our wounded and I thought the bird was going to break apart when he tried to lift off. It was shuddering with the effort and bullets were still pinging off of it. He finally got enough height to point it down the meadow and get up some speed. I was wounded but there was no way I was going to get on that bird. I don't know how he made it. Another time we were a firefight with some dead and one really badly wounded guy. We had no place to bring down a bird so we called for one to come in and drop a line. The NVA were in bunkers and we pulled back to where it was safe for the bird to hover but the pilot wouldn't come down. I watched him circle way up there for a long while as our guy was bleeding out. He finally came down but while our guy was being hoisted up he sagged and died. You know that when you see it. I came to the company with that guy and one of the others that died that day. I don't know if he'd have lived if he'd gotten blood, but I do know that was one too-scared to do his job, pilot. I think that was the exception because most of those pilots were daredevils of the highest degree and the medivac pilots were the most daring of all. You guys earned your 3-400 a month in pay and my grunts appreciated it.