Viet Nam rescue

[727Sky]

There are many stories like this but few are ever told.

[Mystic Wanderer]

Wow! Absolutely awesome!   

I salute these brave pilots. I'm sure there are few like those left today. 

[Ninurta]

There are many stories like this but few are ever told.

I was thinking about that the night before last. Inside every war, there are hundreds or thousands of "microwars", firefights and actions that get lost in the grand scheme, and go entirely unremembered by anyone but the participants. it's been that way for centuries, millennia. That adds up to a lot of them. 

Everyone knows of the Battle of Kadesh, alleged to be the first major battle on Earth, when Raamses invaded Canaan. What no one knows is that about the same time, or maybe a little before, there was also a major conflict in northern Germany, of equal or greater proportions, and no one knows why, or the history of it. All we have is hundreds of scattered bodies and discarded equipment around what was then a bridge on a major road network. No one knows who fought it, or why they did, just that a lot of folks died fighting it. Both were a part of the Bronze Age Collapse of civilization, but one is recorded and the other just mystery.

In Denmark, I think it is, there is a battlefield on the edge of what was a lake, from the early Iron Age. No one knows who fought there, or why. The skeletons and discarded axes and truncheons are mute, but there.

During the viking wars in England, history records the St. Brice's Day massacre, when the king ordered the execution of all Danes in England, Remains of that action have been found in Cambridge, and we have the proclamation ordering it... but, before that, on Ridgeway Hill in Devon in southern England, we have 54 headless viking bodies, and 51 heads to go with them, meaning 3 of those viking heads went elsewhere. No one knows the story of that action, and all the bodies can tell us is that it was an execution. History does not record the why, or the who, of who perpetrated it. All of the executed were killed by decapitation from the front. They were staring their executioners in the eye when they died... but no one knows their story. No one knows what happened to those 3 missing heads, who took them, or why just 3 were taken... or who those heads belonged to.

History and the archaeological record are replete with such unexplained battles. 1000 years from now, our generations will be no different, and no one will know the stories of heroic actions in the moment. Other battles will be recorded, and those records will be the only evidence they ever happened. Sometimes, it's just a strange unexplainable world, and the only luck is the luck of the draw.

This action had to be hairy. Every load of people rescued left fewer on the ground to defend the LZ, and consequently the enemy could tighten the perimeter even more, so every successive run had to be getting hairier and hairier. It compounded things that that there was about a battalion of NVA Regulars against about a company of Ruff Puffs led by a handful of Sneaky Petes. It's men like these that provide a glimmer of hope that the human race may not go extinct. I am glad their story was told in this case.

.

[guohua]

Mr. G. here.

Those Huey Pilots and door gunners were ALWYS there for us anytime we needed help. They have now as they did then, ALL MY RESPECT! 

[Bally002]

Mr. G. here.

Those Huey Pilots and door gunners were ALWYS there for us anytime we needed help. They have now as they did then, ALL MY RESPECT! 

Can't add much to this having been an armourer/weapons bloke myself in the Fleet Air Arm. (Iroquois) 

My respect back to you for your service.

Kind regards,

Bally:)