Aviation Excerpts From The Book : Medal of Honor
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579652409/qid=1072856458/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-9376715-4569516
This week's issue of Aviation Week includes excerpts from the Book "Medal of Honor". I'm posting part of the contents from Aviation Week, if you like it go buy the book. -
IA DRANG VALLEY, SOUTH VIETNAM, 1965
ED W. FREEMAN
CAPTAIN, U.S. ARMY Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)
BY THE TIME THE KOREAN WAR BROKE OUT, Ed Freeman was a master sergeant in the Army Engineers, but he fought in Korea as an infantryman. He took part in the bloody battle of Pork Chop Hill and was given a battlefield commission, which had the added advantage of making him eligible to fly, a dream of his since childhood. But flight school turned him down because of his height: At six foot four, he was "too tall" (a nickname that followed him throughout his military career). In 1955, however, the height limit was raised, and Freeman was able to enroll.
He began flying fixed-wing aircraft, then switched to helicopters. By 1965, when he was sent to Vietnam, he had thousands of hours' flying time in choppers. He was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), second in command of a sixteen-helicopter unit responsible for carrying infantrymen into battle. On November 14, 1965, Freeman's helicopters carried a battalion into the Ia Drang Valley for what became the first major confrontation between large forces of the American and North Vietnamese armies.
Back at base, Freeman and the other pilots received word that the GIs they had dropped off were taking heavy casualties and running low on supplies. In fact, the fighting was so fierce that medevac helicopters refused to pick up the wounded. When the commander of the helicopter unit asked for volunteers to fly into the battle zone, Freeman alone stepped forward. He was joined by his commander, and the two of them began several hours of flights into the contested area. Because their small emergency-landing zone was just one hundred yards away from the heaviest fighting, their unarmed and lightly armored helicopters took several hits. In all, Freeman carried out fourteen separate rescue missions, bringing in water and ammunition to the besieged soldiers and taking back dozens of wounded, some of whom wouldn't have survived if they hadn't been evacuated.
Freeman left Vietnam in 1966 and retired from the Army the following year. He flew helicopters another twenty years for the Department of the Interior, herding wild horses, fighting fires, and performing animal censuses. Then he retired altogether.
In the aftermath of the Ia Drang battle, his commanding officer, wanting to recognize Freeman's valor, proposed him for the Medal of Honor. But the two-year statute of limitations on these kinds of recommendations had passed, and no action was taken. Congress did away with that statute in 1995, and Freeman was finally awarded the medal by President George W. Bush on July 16, 2001.
Freeman was back at the White House a few months later for the premiere of We Were Soldiers, a 2002 feature film that depicted his role in the Ia Drang battle. As he was filing out of the small White House theater, the president approached him, saluted, and shook his hand. "Good job, Too Tall," he said.
BIOGRAPHY
BORN
November 20, 1927
Neely, Mississippi
ENTERED SERVICE
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
BRANCH
U.S. Army
DUTY
Vietnam War
CURRENT RESIDENCE
Idaho -
BISMARCK SEA, WESTERN PACIFIC, 1944
NATHAN G. GORDON
LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE, U.S. NAVY Commander of Catalina patrol plane
NATHAN GORDON HAD PRACTICED LAW FOR TWO YEARS when he decided to enlist in the Navy in 1941. He had always wanted to fly, and he figured that it would be more interesting to see the war he was sure the United States would become involved in from the air than on the ground.
At the end of training, young aviators had some say in the kinds of aircraft they wanted to fly. Many of Gordon's buddies chose the glamorous fighter planes, but he preferred the ungainly PBY patrol planes. He joined a squadron in Norfolk, Virginia, and later went to the Caribbean, where he flew a Catalina PBY on night missions searching for the German U-boats preying on Allied convoys. Then he was sent to Hawaii, Midway, and Perth, Australia, before being ordered to Samarai, a small island off the southeastern tip of New Guinea, from which he flew bombing and torpedo missions against Japanese merchant shipping in the Bismarck Sea.
On February 15, 1944, a large force of American bombers attacked the strongly defended Japanese air-field at Kavieng, New Ireland, a stepping-stone to the Admiralty Islands. In the daylong battle, several were hit by antiaircraft fire. When they could, the pilots circled back and went down in Kavieng Harbor to avoid crashing in enemy-held territory, and the PBYs went to their rescue.
Over the radio Gordon heard that a B-25 had gone down and flew to the position where he was told the crew had ditched. Seeing the yellow dye marker in the water, he made a risky landing in fifteen-foot swells, hitting with such force that his plane popped rivets and developed several cracks. He found wreckage, including a deflated life raft, but no survivors, and after taxiing for several minutes to make sure that no one was still alive, he got the plane airborne again.
Shortly afterward, Gordon was guided to another downed bomber by a B-25 that had just finished its bombing run. This time he saw six American fliers, several of them badly injured, in a life raft. He made another difficult landing, and while his crew tried to plug the leaks in the plane, he taxied toward the raft as Japanese artillery on shore opened fire. After several abortive attempts to reach the airmen in the rolling seas, Gordon had to cut the engines and stop, making the plane a sitting target--only its erratic bobbing in the waves prevented the PBY from being hit by Japanese guns. Finally, he got the airmen aboard, restarted the engines, and positioned the plane for takeoff by forcing the nose up to keep from being capsized by the high swells.
Just as he was airborne, he received a call about another downed B-25, this one much closer to shore. To rescue the crew, he would have to fly directly over enemy guns at three hundred feet and land close to them. His crew pulled in another three American fliers as fire from the enemy shore batteries bracketed his plane.
Gordon got airborne again and was headed for home when he received yet another call. He made another risky landing and picked up six more airmen. After the last rescue, with the plane leaking badly as he crashed through the high waves on takeoff, he managed to return to base with his precious cargo of fifteen airmen.
Several months later, Gordon found out he was to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Great! he thought.
I guess that means I'll get to go back to Washington. Instead, he was ordered to Brisbane, Australia, where Admiral Thomas Kincaid, the senior U.S. Naval officer on General Douglas MacArthur's staff, presented the medal to him on July 13, 1944. Later that same day, he was in the air again, flying a fifteen-hour patrol.
BIOGRAPHY
BORN
January 14, 1916, Morrilton, Arkansas
ENTERED SERVICE Arkansas
BRANCH U.S. Navy
DUTY World War II
CURRENT RESIDENCE Arizona -
KIEN TUONG PROVINCE, SOUTH VIETNAM, 1969
MICHAEL J. NOVOSEL
CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER, U.S. ARMY 82nd Medical Detachment, 45th Medical Company, 68th Medical Group
MICHAEL NOVOSEL'S MILITARY CAREER COVERED THREE WARS. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps ten months before Pearl Harbor, completed the Aviation Cadet program, and by 1945 was a captain flying B-29 bombers in the air campaign against the Japanese. He was a test pilot until 1950, when he was forced to leave the service as a result of a postwar reduction in force. He joined the Air Force Reserve, served in the Korean War, attended the Air Command and Staff School, and left the service again in 1953. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve in 1955. In 1963, he was working as a commercial pilot and was deeply affected by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He recalled Kennedy's appeal to patriotic sacrifice and decided to go back on active duty and serve in Vietnam. He was forty-two.
Since the Air Force was overstrength in its senior grades, it wouldn't accept him--but Novosel had qualified to fly helicopters when he was a civilian, and the Army accepted him. He had to give up his rank as a lieutenant colonel, becoming a chief warrant officer with the elite Special Forces aviation section. He served his first tour in Vietnam flying a medevac helicopter ("dustoff" ) with the 283rd Medical Detachment.
His first tour ended in 1967, and Novosel was ready to return to civilian life, but his separation physical showed he had glaucoma, a condition that disqualified him from all flying, both military and civilian. He pulled strings to get a military waiver and went back to Vietnam for a second tour. This time he was with the 82nd Medical Detachment, again as a dustoff pilot.
Novosel's mission on the morning of October 2, 1969, was to evacuate a group of South Vietnamese soldiers surrounded by the enemy near the Cambodian border, with all of their ammunition expended and radio communication lost. Novosel entered the battle area alone, without air cover or fire support. He flew at low altitudes under constant enemy fire, maneuvering to attract the attention of the wounded soldiers and to get them to assemble for evacuation. As he skimmed over the ground, his medic and crew chief yanked the wounded men on board. He left the battle area three times to take the wounded to medical care and to refuel. Returning again toward dark, he spotted a South Vietnamese soldier near an enemy bunker. As he maneuvered his helicopter backward to reach the man as quickly as possible, an enemy soldier emptied his AK-47 directly at Novosel. Bullets caused the windshield to disintegrate, fragments hit him in the leg and hand, and a bullet glanced off the sole of his boot; he momentarily lost control of the helicopter, then recovered and lifted off under continuous enemy fire. Novosel saved twenty-nine South Vietnamese soldiers that day. (In his two tours of duty in Vietnam, he rescued more than five thousand wounded.)
Novosel's eldest son, Michael Jr., a recent graduate of Army flight school, arrived in Vietnam in early 1970 and managed to get assigned to his father's unit. They were the only father and son aviators ever to be assigned to the same unit, fly combat missions as pilot and copilot, and rescue each other when downed by enemy fire.
Novosel completed his tour in March 1970. The following spring, he was notified that General Creighton Abrams had recommended him for the Medal of Honor. The presentation was delayed until later in the year so that Michael Jr. could finish his tour and be present at the White House, where President Richard Nixon put the medal around the forty-eight-year-old Novosel's neck on June 15, 1971.
BIOGRAPHY
BORN
September 3, 1922
Etna, Pennsylvania
ENTERED SERVICE
Kenner, Louisiana
BRANCH
U.S. Army
DUTY
Vietnam War
CURRENT RESIDENCE
Alabama -
yeah, i've got d book at home.
stories in there are quite inspirational. but d medal's history itself is also pretty interesting.
actually i think u'll kinda notice that some of the actions of those men cannot be repeated under today's circumstances, especially with more stringent rules and regulations. -
Also it cannot be repeated because the enemy now have far superior guidance system on their surface to air weapons.Originally posted by laser51088:yeah, i've got d book at home.
stories in there are quite inspirational. but d medal's history itself is also pretty interesting.
actually i think u'll kinda notice that some of the actions of those men cannot be repeated under today's circumstances, especially with more stringent rules and regulations.
Your UH1 or PBY will be blown out of the sky.