If you want to understand courage in Vietnam, look at the men who flew the helicopters, because they went to the exact places everyone else was trying to get away from.
That war invented a new way to fight, the air assault. Instead of marching to the battle, whole rifle companies climbed into Hueys and flew there, and got dropped straight into a clearing in the jungle called a landing zone. The trouble was you rarely knew if the LZ was cold or hot until you were already committed to it, low and slow, with a full load of infantry. Cold meant an empty field. Hot meant a treeline full of machine guns waiting for you to fill the sky in front of them.
Look at that photo and notice they are flying in tight formation, almost wingtip to wingtip. That was on purpose, to pack as many troops onto the ground in the same few seconds as possible, so the enemy could not chop them up one aircraft at a time. But it came at a terrible price. A pilot in that formation could not jink, could not dive, could not take a single evasive move when the tracers came up at him, because breaking formation meant slamming his rotor into the ship beside him and killing two crews instead of one. So the rule was brutal and simple. Hot LZ or not, you hold your line, you keep going in, and you set it down. A lot of pilots died doing exactly that, flying straight and level into fire they were not allowed to dodge.
The troop ships were called slicks, and a slick had no real weapons of its own beyond two door gunners hanging out the sides, so gunship Hueys flew escort, rolling in with rockets and miniguns to hose down the treeline while the slicks unloaded. Half the time the slicks did not even fully land. They flared a few feet off the grass while the grunts jumped, because a helicopter sitting still on the ground is just a big target waiting to be hit.
Then there was the worst job of all, medevac. They called it Dustoff. A Dustoff crew flew an unarmed Huey with a big red cross on the nose, which to a North Vietnamese gunner was less a warning than a bullseye. When a man got hit, they flew back into the same hot LZ everyone else had just fought to escape, and they hovered in the open over it, holding still in the sky while the whole treeline shot at them, and they did not leave until the wounded were aboard. A Dustoff crewman had about a one in three chance of being killed or wounded before his tour was up. More than a thousand of them were.
The spirit of it lives in one man, Major Charles Kelly, the one they called the Father of Dustoff. His rule was no compromise, no hesitation, fly the mission now, and the patient always came first, American, South Vietnamese, even a wounded enemy. On July 1, 1964, Kelly came into a hot zone for wounded and the fire was so heavy the ground troops kept screaming at him to pull out. He answered, calm as anything, "When I have your wounded." A second later a single bullet killed him. He would not leave.
The infantry had a saying about the sound of those rotors coming over the trees. To a man bleeding in the dirt, it was the most beautiful sound in the world, because it meant somebody was flying into hell on purpose to come and get him.
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