ART WORK BY: Joe Kline Aviation Art Can be purchased at: |
DUSTOFF |
This page was last updated on: September 9, 2002
Joe Kline Aviation Art |
Silence The death-like silence fills the air You lie in the bush, you think of your cares Did you send off the letter to the girl back home Telling her she is free to go out and roam You felt so alone when you got her letter Knowing without hope, your fight will be better The zinging of artillery cracks through the night Sending a chill through your being with terrible fright You scramble from your safety calling out to your brothers The silence grows cold as you see them fallen together You race from one to the other with precision It is then you haphazardly made that decision You pick up the first buddy running for the zone If you can get them there, you know they will be flown Medevac arrives as you get the last of the four Loading them in....you fall back from the door You are hit, young soldier, the bullet rips your flesh Under heavy fire they lift off with a whoooosh You lie there wondering if they would come after you Your just a young man, Dear God, with much left to do The drumming of blades whipping thru the night air You close your eyes, not having a single care. ~SK~ Copyright ©2002 011402 |
MEDEVAC Records produced by the various U.S. Army air ambulance units in Vietnam show that the Medical Department's new aeromedical evacuation system performed beyond all expectation. Although figures are lacking for some phases of the system's work, enough reports have survived to permit an assessment of what it accomplished. It is, possible both to describe the number and types of patients transported and to compare the risks of air ambulance missions with those of other helicopter missions in the Vietnam War. Air ambulances transported most of the Army's sick, injured, and wounded who required rapid movement to a medical facility, and also many Vietnamese civilian and military casualties. From May 1962 through March 1973 the ambulances moved between 850,000 and 900,000 allied military personnel and Vietnamese civilians. Statistics also confirm the impression that the air ambulance pilots and crewmen stood a high chance of being injured, wounded, or killed in their one-year tour. About 1,400 Army commissioned and warrant officers served as air ambulance pilots in the war. Theirs was one of the most dangerous types of aviation in that ten-year struggle. About forty aviators (both commanders and pilots) were killed by hostile fire or crashes induced by hostile fire. Another 180 were wounded or injured as a result of hostile fire. Furthermore, forty-eight were killed and about two hundred injured as a result of nonhostile crashes, many at night and in bad weather on evacuation missions. Therefore, slightly more than a third of the aviators became casualties in their work, and the crew chiefs and medical corpsmen who accompanied them suffered similarly. The danger of their work was further borne out by the high rate of air ambulance loss to hostile fire: 3.3 times that of all other forms of helicopter missions in the Vietnam War. Even compared to the loss rate for nonmedical helicopters on combat missions it was 1.5 times as high. Warrant officer aviators, who occasionally arrived in South Vietnam without medical training or an assignment to a unit, were sometimes warned that air ambulance work was a good way to get killed. One air ambulance operation, the hoist mission, added greatly to these dangers. Although hoist missions were rarely flown, one out of every ten enemy hits on the air ambulances occurred on such occasions. Standard missions averaged an enemy hit only once every 311 trips, but hoist missions averaged an enemy hit once every 44 trips, making them seven times as dangerous as the standard mission. That some 8,000 aeromedical hoist missions were flown during the war further testifies to the bravery of the air ambulance pilots and crewmen. Information from the US ARMY MEDICAL HISTORY |
ART WORK BY: Joe Kline Aviation Art Can be purchased at: |
Original Sound was from 27 seconds of actual DUSTOFF communication, aeromedical evacuation, Viet Nam. Contributed by Armond "Si" Simmons. Original sound has been reformated and edited |
