From: Ed (mojoedd@bellsouth.net)
Date: Thu Jun 30 2005 - 18:27:41 PDT
Trying this one for Royce. Hope it goes through, it's a great read!!
Ed
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [MV] OT: Viet Nam Vets in Iraq
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:05:09 -0500
From: Royce C Hayes <rc_hayes1@juno.com>
To: mojoedd@bellsouth.net
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:37:10 -0400 Ed <mojoedd@bellsouth.net
<mailto:mojoedd@bellsouth.net>> writes:
> Hi Royce,
>
> Send it to me, even if I can't post it for you I'd love to read it!
>
> Ed
USA Today
June 21, 2005
Pg. 1
Vietnam Vets In Iraq See 'Entirely Different War'
By Steven Komarow, USA Today
TIKRIT, Iraq — Before dawn, the pilots digest their intelligence
briefing with coffee. The sun rises as they start preflight checks.
Just after 7:30, they start rotors turning on their UH-60A Black Hawk,
and ease it smoothly into the desert sky.
Chief Warrant Officers DeWayne Browning and Randy Weatherhead will
take off and land a dozen times this hot day, ferrying infantry troops
battling Iraq's insurgents in the Sunni Muslim heartland that Saddam
Hussein calls home.
Only if those young troops look closely, past the jumble of struts and
wires and into the obstructive flight helmets, will they notice
something odd: Browning's gray, nearly white moustache and telltale
furrows on Weatherhead's face.
Browning, 56, of Paradise, Calif., and Weatherhead, 57, of Elk Grove,
Calif., are grandfathers. They first flew combat missions in Vietnam,
before most of the soldiers in the current Army were born. They and
others their age are here with the National Guard's 42nd Infantry
Division, which includes some of the oldest soldiers to serve in
combat for the modern U.S. Army. Few soldiers or officers in the
military, other than the service's top generals, are as old.
If there are parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, these graying
soldiers and the other Vietnam veterans serving here offer a unique
perspective. They say they are more optimistic this time: They see a
clearer mission than in Vietnam, a more supportive public back home
and an Iraqi population that seems to be growing friendlier toward
Americans.
"In Vietnam, I don't think the local population ever understood that
we were just there to help them," says Chief Warrant Officer James
Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., who flew UH-1H Hueys in Vietnam from
February 1969 to February 1970. And the Vietcong and North Vietnamese
were a tougher, more tenacious enemy, he says. Instead of setting off
bombs outside the base, they'd be inside.
"I knew we were going to lose Vietnam the day I walked off the plane,"
says Miles, who returned home this month after nearly a year in Iraq.
Not this time. "There's no doubt in my mind that this was the right
thing to do," he says.
The Army says it's impossible to know exactly how many Vietnam
veterans are serving in Iraq, and there might be only a few dozen.
Most of them came to Iraq last winter with the 42nd Infantry, a
National Guard division headquartered in Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
Of the Vietnam veterans still in uniform, most are in the Guard. They
once were the backbone of that part-time force, but today fewer than
20,000 remain in uniform from the Vietnam era, a
definition that also includes many who never actually served in that
theater, according to the National Guard Bureau. Of those, many are
ineligible for service in Iraq, including those within two years of
the mandatory retirement at age 60.
'No such thing as a POW'
The Vietnam vets here share their insights and experience with the
younger troops. And they're learning some new tricks, too.
"I wish that I could take some of the things that I've learned (and)
... take them back in time to that 20-year-old kid flying in Vietnam,"
Browning says.
"There was a lot more action in Vietnam than there is here," says
Chief Warrant Officer Herbert Dargue, 57, of Brookhaven, N.Y. But the
danger in Iraq is higher for those who are shot down but
survive. "There's no such thing as a POW," he says, referring to the
terrorists' penchant for executing Westerners.
The enemy in Iraq has "absolutely no value" for life, Dargue says, who
flew Huey helicopters in Vietnam from June 1968 to June 1969.
Miles says the biggest difference he saw was that, over time, Iraqi
civilians grew more positive toward U.S. forces. He says he saw more
people smiling and waving near his base here than there were 10 months
ago when he arrived.
1st Sgt. Patrick Olechny, 52, of Marydel, Del., an attack
helicopter crew chief and door gunner in Vietnam from March 1971 to
February 1972, says the most important difference to him is the
attitude of the American public.
"Vietnam was an entirely different war than this one," he says. The
basic job of flying helicopters is the same, but the overall
mission now is clear when it wasn't then. "We thought in Vietnam we
were doing the right thing, and in the end it didn't seem that way,"
he says.
Now, "the people in the United States respect what the soldiers are
doing," says Olechny, who still fills in at the door gunner
position when he can get away from his administrative duties.
Browning, recently back from two weeks of R&R in the USA, says he was
overwhelmed by the reception he got stateside: More than a hundred
people met the airplane to help the soldiers and wish them well. "I
can't tell you what, as a Vietnam vet, that means to me," he said.
Old guys in a new Army
For the Vietnam veterans, this is not a trip down memory lane, though
there's the occasional reminder of old times.
The U.S. Army that took them to Vietnam was bigger, younger and
virtually all male. The few women were mostly limited to medical or
administrative jobs.
The draft gave the Army masses of ground troops. At its peak the
Vietnam War had more than three times as many on the ground as the
roughly 140,000 in Iraq today.
The new Army that these vets serve in is all volunteer. There are
women in uniform all around, as pilots, MPs, mechanics and nearly all
other jobs except for infantry and armor units.
Most of the pilots learned their craft in the Huey, the iconic
helicopter of the Vietnam War. They now fly its successor, the UH-60
Black Hawk.
The Black Hawk, although much larger, is designed for similar
missions, including transporting ground troops and providing
medevac missions for wounded troops. Its design was based on
lessons learned in Vietnam, Weatherhead says.
The two-engine Black Hawk is less prone to crashes than the old Hueys,
and if it does go down it better protects passengers and crew.
Pilots also benefit from electronic assists, including GPS
satellite guidance, for staying on course. However, Iraq's frequent
dust storms penetrate sensitive parts, resulting in more
maintenance headaches, Weatherhead says.
Flight planning is more thorough and time-consuming now. In
Vietnam, helicopters were still relatively new to war. Flight
procedures were less formal. A pilot would look at the assignment
board in the morning and plan his mission almost on his own.
Now, it takes a team, and the Black Hawks always travel in pairs for
safety.
These veterans generally applaud the changes, even if they say in some
ways helicopter operations are more cumbersome with
bureaucracy. And they especially welcome technology such as the
Internet. In Vietnam, pen on paper through the U.S. mail was their
main link to home.
But several of them quickly added that there is something they miss:
the chance to blow off steam the way they used to at the end of the
day. They may be eligible for AARP membership, but the Army still
tells them they can't have a beer here.
Worries about offending political and cultural sensitivities have
"gone overboard in my opinion," says Chief Warrant Officer Robert
Frist, 54, of Auburn, N.Y., who was in the Army during the Vietnam era
but wasn't sent there.
A vanishing breed
A good place to find the veterans in Iraq is in the helicopter units.
There's far less opportunity to fly like that in civilian life, so the
soldiers who love it stay on as long as they can. But even there, few
remain.
"We're getting to be a rare breed," says Dargue, who flies
corporate helicopters in civilian life and wishes he could fly more in
Iraq and spend less time on his staff job at the 42nd Division
headquarters in Tikrit. "I'm not crazy about sitting behind a desk."
While they're eager to fly, these pilots don't see themselves as
trying to relive their sometimes wild and hard-charging youths.
"With 36 years of perspective, I look at this one a whole lot
differently than I look at that one," says Weatherhead, whose
daughter, Sgt. Jennifer Tommasi, 30, is on her second tour in Iraq as
an Army medic. Compared to Vietnam, "this is probably more
difficult. In the big picture, this is probably more important," he says.
"I'm more aware of the historical context here. I'm more aware of the
political context," he says. "There, I was a 20-year-old flying
helicopters and having a grand time."
"I'm not even sure I want to talk about some of the things we did
then," Browning says. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for
rescuing the crew of another helicopter that had been shot down by
enemy fire that also soon forced his own Huey to land.
In Iraq, one of his proudest activities is volunteer work at a nearby
children's home.
Iraq probably will be the last chance for these older veterans to
mentor the younger ones on combat missions.
"Hopefully, we're role models for them and we do some mentorship,"
Browning says. What does he think of the younger pilots? "They're
good, they're really good," he says.
Warrant Officer Jessica Howey, 29, of San Diego, who finished
flight school in 2002, says she's learning every day from the older
guys. Weatherhead is her instructor pilot and has schooled her on the
changes made over the years. She sounds amazed at how the
pilots then would dash to their aircraft and rush off to fight. "They
just went." It was very different from the elaborate
preflight planning of today. Now it takes hours, sometimes days, to
prepare for a mission.
"They have a different mind-set," says Chief Warrant Officer James
Dunn, 39, of Manassas, Va., probably because "they got shot at on
every mission," something he says doesn't happen often in Iraq.
Chief Warrant Officer Ron Serafinowicz, 56, of Gilbert, Ariz., flew
Hueys in Vietnam from June 1970 to June 1971. He says that being shot
at, and seeing the results of weapons on others, changes a soldier's
attitude. "Us old guys, we've seen that before," he says. "It's not an
adventure to us like it was when we were young."
The last cattle drive
Col. Larry Wilson, a flight surgeon, says he's on the watch for
hypertension, cardiac disease and other maladies of age that would
ground the older vets. Mostly they're "a pretty healthy bunch" whose
problems rarely exceed "telling dirty old men stories," he says. He
also says the Vietnam veterans in Iraq have a good impact on the
younger soldiers.
Weatherhead and Browning didn't know each other in Vietnam but have
flown together for 20 years in the California National Guard since
then. In Iraq, their careers have come full circle and their
cockpit banter sometimes drifts into warm nostalgia.
On the aircraft intercom, the two men remain perfectionists, taking
turns at the controls and discussing their own flying technique. They
note improvements in technique that could be made by the other Black
Hawk, piloted by one of the younger crews.
Weatherhead and Browning liken this deployment to the last cattle
drive of a couple of cowboys. They call each other Gus and Woodrow,
from Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, the retired Texas Rangers who
lead a cattle drive in Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer
Prize-winning Western novel. They talk about baking biscuits and the
annoyances of getting older.
"Gus, this is hard on the old butt," Browning says.
"Yeah, my tailbone is killing me right now," Weatherhead says. On this
day, there are a couple of reminders of Vietnam. One of the Iraqi
marshlands near the Tigris River looks a lot like the Mekong Delta,
Weatherhead says. They watch as the other helicopter swoops slowly
over a village to drop candy and toys for the kids, as they once did
in Vietnam.
"Well, Augustus," Browning says. "It's a good day to be flying."
Copyright 2005 USA Today
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