Blog
Army Aviator Charles Vehlow, principal figure in ‘Price,’ dead at 71
Posted by • July 11, 2017
Charles A. Vehlow, a principal character in The Price They Paid and a distinguished Vietnam war fighter who later directed development of the Army’s Apache helicopter gunship, died July 8, 2017, in Scottsdale, Arizona, after many years battling aggressive prostate cancer.
Vehlow, 71, was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a highly decorated Army aviator and an aeronautical engineer who devoted his civilian career to building better aircraft than the storied Cobra gunships he flew in Vietnam.
In events described in the book, he was his troop commander’s most trusted gunship pilot who led other Cobra crews and protected his commander, Major James T. Newman, in a series of daring missions to rescue downed flyers during the most intensive helicopter warfare ever.
Vehlow (l), Michael Sherrer (c), James Newman […] READ MORE
In Memory
Posted by • May 27, 2017
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, more popularly known simply as The Wall, bears the names of 58,318 Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Among them are 40 soldiers from a single air cavalry troop that arrived in 1968 to join the 101st Airborne Division and left among the last U.S. combat units to return home in early 1972.
C Troop, 2nd of the 17th Cavalry, spent most of its combat time in the mountainous, northern jungles of South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army stubbornly defended and maintained its critical supply routes to pursue the ground war in the South. In February and March of 1971, C Troop, nicknamed the Condors, crossed the western border into Laos in a joint U.S. and South Vietnamese offensive to cut the Ho Chi Minh […] READ MORE
Vietnam Helicopter Crews to be Honored at Arlington
Posted by • May 02, 2017
WASHINGTON–The Army has agreed to place a monument in Arlington National Cemetery honoring the memory of helicopter pilots and crews lost in the Vietnam War, capping a campaign by veterans of what is often called “the helicopter war.”
Veterans groups representing helicopter flight crews who served in Vietnam approached Congress for legislation mandating the memorial when they were turned down by then-Secretary of the Army John McHugh, but with bipartisan bills proceeding through both House and Senate, the Army agreed to negotiate a settlement with the vets.
Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Bob Hesselbein, who flew helicopters in Vietnam as a 19-year-old combat pilot, spearheaded the effort on behalf of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association and the Vietnam Helicopter Crew Member Association. He testified before Congress that at least 5,238 Americans, 9 percent […] READ MORE
How many died after Nixon “monkey-wrenched” peace talks?
Posted by • January 04, 2017
In the fall of 1968, as Americans turned against the far-away war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson desperately sought a peace agreement to stop the fighting before his war-scarred presidency was to end on January 20, 1969. Johnson already had reluctantly taken himself out of the race, and Richard Nixon, the Republican, was running against Johnson’s favored successor, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
There has long been speculation, fueled by growing bits of inconclusive evidence, that Nixon deliberately tried to sabotage the peace talks to prevent the Democrats from winning political points on the eve of the increasingly close November election. Nixon always denied he would do anything so dastardly.
Nearly a half century later comes John A. Farrell, a distinguished investigative reporter and prize-winning biographer, with documentary evidence practically from the candidate’s mouth, […] READ MORE
Rick “The Mayor” Daly, a gun pilot in Vietnam, dead at 69
Posted by • December 12, 2016
DALLAS, December 12, 2016–Richard Daly, an air cavalry gunship pilot in Vietnam who later flew commercial jets, died at his home in Dallas, his former comrades-in-arms reported.
Richard Daly at funeral of his former commander in 2009
Daly, who was no relation to the famed father-and-son mayors of Chicago named Richard Daley, was nicknamed “the Mayor” by his fellow pilots during the war. He lived alone in a Dallas apartment and had been in failing health from cancer in recent months, his friends said. He was 69. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he made his home in Texas for many years.
Daly was a captain in the Army serving with C Troop, 2/17 Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, when his Cobra helicopter gunship engaged in a dramatic battle with North Vietnamese ground troops […] READ MORE
Four black lives that mattered–and still do
Posted by • November 11, 2016
VETERANS DAY, 2016–They were a band of brothers, a tiny one, but proud.
The ranks of military aviation have remained overwhelmingly white for decades. With the exception of the famed fighter pilots of World War II known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a unique unit of black pilots in a segregated force, very few aviators in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines were nonwhite. That is still true.
“We were a band of brothers,” said Clyde Romero, one of four African-American helicopter pilots who served together in Vietnam as part of a distinguished, gung-ho air cavalry unit: C Troop, 2/17 Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division.
C Troop, known as the Condors, very likely was the only unit of its size in Vietnam with four black pilots.
There were some efforts to change that by recruiting more volunteers […] READ MORE
Vietnam vet finally gets to say good-bye to the friend he couldn’t save
Posted by • August 09, 2016
It took 46 years, but Ricky Miller finally went to say good-bye to the best friend he tried desperately to rescue in Vietnam. It wasn’t easy.
The first time he tried, about 25 years ago, he got as far as the little cemetery in Kentucky where he thought his friend was buried–but couldn’t get out of his car. The stress of the trip to visit his friend’s family was so intense that he developed Bell’s palsy a day or two afterward, and the paralysis of the facial muscles caused the left side of his face to sag dramatically for months.
He didn’t know until his return last week that the family members he saw on that first trip were related to a different soldier with a similar name, and Miller had never actually met any of […] READ MORE
New names on The Wall
Posted by • June 05, 2016
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund has added eight names to the shiny black granite panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, bringing the total of American servicemen and women listed as killed or missing in Southeast Asia during the war to 58,315. Nine of those identified on The Wall as missing in action were reclassified as killed, based on recovery and identification of their remains.
The fund, which raised the money and built The Wall, relies on the Department of Defense to update the casualty count once a year as new information is received and verified. When the Pentagon confirms that service members eventually died of wounds sustained during the Vietnam conflict, their names are engraved in a manner that makes them essentially identical in size and style to those carved in stone when the […] READ MORE
To Americans who died in ‘The Great War’
Posted by • May 28, 2016
Note: The following guest blog first appeared in the Northern Dutchess News in Dutchess County, New York. Story and photos by jim donick
They called it “The Great War” or, more optimistically, “The War to End All Wars.” It was only after we became embroiled in another one that it simply became known as “World War I.”
In Europe today—especially in the Champagne region and along the slopes of the Chemin des Dames, France, where so much of the butchery took place—they still call it “The Great War.”
Memorial Day had actually begun after the American Civil War, but was pretty much confined to North America. World War I changed it entirely. This was the very first conflict where so many young Americans were called up and sent away to a […] READ MORE
Surprise reunion
Posted by • May 09, 2016
ATLANTA, April 29, 2016–Bill Reeder was sitting at the authors’ table signing copies of his new memoir when he overheard someone telling one of the other authors nearby that he had done 6 1/2 years in Vietnam, an implausible length of time for even the most gung-ho American troops. Reeder’s attention perked up when he heard the man say his helicopter had been shot down in 1968 and he’d been held as a prisoner of war until 1973.
Reeder, the author of Through the Valley: My Captivity in Vietnam, wondered who at the huge Army Aviation trade show he was attending would claim to have been a Vietnam POW more than four decades ago. He looked up at the claimant standing a few feet away and almost shouted the word “Jim!” Their eyes locked; […] READ MORE
