Cheating Death In The Jungles Of Vietnam

The bullets came through, one hit my side, one hit me in the arm. Engine failure is pretty imminent. So we stay there to try to get the wounded. The risk is that the aircraft will crash on the friendly troops. That was Art Jacobs, retired Army helicopter pilot talking about the moment.

His chopper was shot down over Vietnam, as his team was attempting to rescue fellow soldiers. Jacob served in both Korea and Vietnam, where he repeatedly volunteered to be on the front lines to serve his country and its campaign to push back against communist aggression. For this memorial day episode, we sit down in studio with Jacob to discuss what he experienced during his lengthy service for the country, and what he is doing now to continue to support

his brothers and arms. I'm daily wire executive editor John Bicley with Georgia Howell, this is a special memorial day edition of one in wire. Joining us now in studio is Art Jacobs and Army helicopter pilot who flew rescue missions during some of the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam War, or thank you so much for joining

us. My pleasure. So you had experience, obviously, as a helicopter pilot, MetaVac, in particular, in Vietnam. Maybe let's start there.

“So how did you get there, how long was your service during that campaign?”

Well, I spent seven years in the Army.

My first year was in Korea, and then I applied for flight school, got accepted, and as it

got toward the end of flight school, they asked for volunteers to fly air rescue. I thought, all of that chaos and all of that controversy, even that that would be something constructive, something good to do. The Vietnam War wasn't going on when I volunteered. My mother and father were heading toward the divorce, there was no real money or encouragement.

I was the oldest of four. All the dads on our street or World War II, their younger brothers, were our uncles who were served in Korea. I believe what John Kennedy had said, we're going to fight communism, we're going to fight aggression that was the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, we just felt like it was

our turn. Plus, without the money or college, I wanted to do my duty serve and use the GI bill to go to school afterward. And then after I was in, it's when Vietnam wound up, and I applied for flight school. I didn't have a college degree, but the Army was interesting, it was a real meritocracy.

If you had some initiative and you did well on the test scores, you could get commissioned and free it a career. We launched this quickly as possible, because we knew that somebody was wounded and hoping

“someone would come, so that's what drove us really was to get there and get the wounded”

back to some medical facility as quickly as possible. The Korean War, a lot of people kind of forget it or gloss over and jump over it and get right into Vietnam. And did you find where some of the differences between those two conflicts first hand?

Well, I will always believe, I mean, we were well-intentioned.

I mean, there was a fledgling democracy, yes, they were inept and corrupt to some extent. But I'll always believe we could have created another South Korea, the goal was admirable, but the strategy and the tactics were flawed. Red of book by Barbara Tuckerman, she want to pull its surprise for non-fiction, she wrote 1914 about the origins of World War 1.

And she said, "We made one fundamental mistake and Vietnam this time we were the red coats." And it's George Santiago said that those who don't understand their history are condemned to repeat it. We had commanded the air, we had commanded the sea, if we'd have forced them to fight conventionally, we could have cordoned off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and starve the 20 to 30,000, be it

Kong, it were in the South, the South Vietnamese could have handled them. And we've could have done conventional battle against the North.

“While you were serving in it, did you feel where the criticisms mounting at that time?”

And the ranks, or did you guys, were you just focused on your mission for that day? In 1968, morale was still high, you know, even after the Tetoffensive. I mean, the enemy dedicated some 80,000 troops to the Tetoffensive and lost half of them.

I mean, it was a military disaster for them, but there's always more than one level,

politically at home, what was being broadcast, you know, in surgeons that were on the embassy grounds, is if we had, you know, somehow lost. Yeah, I think that the political side of it is largely what's focused on, of course.

You said that drove you, how many missions did you go on?

I lost count. I mean, one of my regrets was not keeping a journal each day, the number of missions, the number of wounded, what we saw, we were just working so hard, you know, flying all at the time, you'd come back and just want to rest and recuperate. You said there were broadcasts that were pretty negative and it brought down morale, obviously

at home.

“Did that kind of trickle in through the grapevine of, I mean, enlisted men?”

How did that affect you guys over in Asia? Only later in the year, I mean, we read the military newspaper stars and stripes, and they were pretty positive and, you know, pretty objective. I mean, they reported the casualties, but we didn't, we didn't see what people were seeing at home the way the media was portraying, you know, the war.

Now, you were eventually wounded, as I understand it. Yes. He tells what happened there, how were you wounded when did that take place?

Well, the first time I was wounded was an April of '68, and ironically, it was the first

day I'd been promoted, the aircraft commander, and we went into a rice paddy to pick up the wounded. For a very last moment, the guys on the ground said, "Go around, go around," and we saw the traitors, and I was shot, so we didn't get the wounded out that day, so I went to the hospital and recuperated, sent me to a convulence and center and then back to duty.

Then in July, the mission came in that morning, there were troops in the mountains that were surrounded. They had a number of wounded and dead, and it was a voice mission.

“It was no place to land, you have to come to a hover over the tops of the trees, hundred”

feet tall, lower cable, so you're pretty vulnerable, and we took fire immediately. My copilot was hit, my door counter was, was hit, seriously wounded, and warning lights came on, so we had a band in the mission. We made an emergency landing back at the base, and got another helicopter. A helicopter's in Vietnam are like the horses in the cavalry in the wild west, you know,

as long as you're okay, it just jumped in another one, and exactly we went back out, and this time we lowered the cable, and a wounded guy was coming up, and just as he got to the skids, I turned to look, and to make sure he was inside the aircraft, and the enemy opened up again. In fact, they shot him, and blood sprayed up into the cockpit.

It was warning lights came on, and again, we had to leave and make emergency landing. They had a moratorium, then, no more rescue attempts. The ground unit was either going to have to move to a safe location, or they were going to have to insert other units to relieve them, about an hour and a half later, that the Battalion Commander for the unit came over and said, "She, my boys need help."

Will you go, and Mike Manning Officer was there, and he said, "No, you don't have to, you know, you've seen enough, but to me, those board guys were pretty bad shape." And I said, "It only makes sense for me to go." I know exactly what the top of that tree looks like, no one else should go. So we went out, and came to a hover, lowered the cable, and again, they opened up.

The bullets came through, one hit my side, one hit me in the arm, and warning lights came on. And one of the warning lights was pretty serious, it's called engine chip detector, means that engine failure is pretty imminent. So if we stay there to try to get the wounded, the risk is that the aircraft will crash

on the friendly troops. I didn't want to do that.

But the problem is, if you leave, and the engine quits, you're probably going to land,

you know, where the bad guys are. So I didn't want to crash on any friendly people, so we left 20 seconds later, the engine quits, you know, down we went, took us a while, but we got rescued. This time my wounds were a little bit more serious, so I was evacuated to a hospital in Japan in Yokama, where I spent a month, but then back to Vietnam to finish my tour.

If you weren't wounded seriously, you'd be sent to a convulence and center in Vietnam. A little bit more seriously than that, it might be the Philippines or Japan, more seriously than that all the way back to Hawaii, and if it was even more serious than that, you went back to the States and you weren't back, you weren't coming back, yeah.

“So you said you had 20 seconds until the engine failed, what happened?”

Where were you and how far were you in the air when that happened? Can you just explain what happens when your engine fails over the jungle?

When helicopter engine quits, you go into what's called auto rotation. The engine RPM needle goes to zero, but the rotor RPM will maintain itself through the momentum, plus when you start to descend, it's like windmills, and you've stored up enough energy, and there's an airspeed that's called minimum rate of descent, and it'll be the slowest descent, not that it's slow, but it's the slowest one at that airspeed,

and then there's another one where it's maximum rate of glide. So between those two air speeds, you're making judgments, or you might put the aircraft or how far you can go, and there was no place to land, so we just tried doing minimum rate of descent and make it as soft as crash as possible. But there's enough energy in the blades to increase the pitch at the last moment, which

will take a big bite of air and slow you down, and then you just sort of, you know, waffle into the ground, but fortunately we weren't high, nobody was really injured, and the crash, we just came down through the edge of the trees. That's amazing.

“Did you have to hold off the enemy on the ground?”

Momentarily, you know, they wrote up that citation, but I think the guys in the rear are like to add a little drama, we just did our duty. How long were you out there before someone came to rescue you? About an hour and a half, so it was pretty quick. This is a very fast moving situation all around, it sounds like.

Yes. But, you know, we made an emergency radio call, people knew what had happened, so they were out there looking for it pretty quickly. Were you spooked from that, did it affect you mentally when you went back into action? No.

And when I first got to Vietnam, you know, you're afraid, you know, I get killed. But our mission was to me so powerful, I mean, I had the best job in Vietnam.

“I was most afraid of, you know, screwing up or letting somebody down, then anything else?”

Amazing. To give us a sense of time, so what years was, were you in Vietnam?

I got there at the beginning of 1968, so I served all of 1968, and then there's always

a silver lining when I was in a hospital in Japan, this major, this green beret major showed up at the foot of my bed and he had a piece of paper and he said, "I understand you flew rescue missions, yes sir. At night in the mountains across the border, you're rescued people." And you've seen some action because you're here, I said yes, sir. He says, "Well, you're my guy at the special forces, so are now allowed to recruit their own organic pilots."

And he said, "You're going back to Vietnam, but you'll get orders for the 10 special forces groups." So when I came back to the state, they were at Fort Devons, so I spent two years with them, which was just fantastic. But that tour was finishing. I mean, I was owned by the special forces unit, but I was still Army aviation. And so Army aviation called

up and said, "It's time for you to go back to Vietnam." So the second time I flew

a cobra, I flew a gunship. Again, ironic, it was, it was safer to go out and shoot people

“that I was to try and rescue them. How old were you during this period of time?”

21. So is it 1971 that you-- 1971 was the second tour, the second tour. Okay. So it was a couple of years older, you know, growing man. Okay, so you're second tour in 1971. And this, you're on the offensive. Walk us through that. What happened during that time, and then when did you officially leave the military? Well, the dead events was pretty big. We had about 500,000 troops in Vietnam. But by the time I got back in 1971, it was about half

that number. But Nixon had the Vietnamization Program, which was the lay ocean invasion, codenamed, Lamson, 719, where the South Vietnamese would do all of the fighting. They would go west on Highway 9 to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But all the aviation assets would be Americans, and we would support them from the air. It was a different war in South Vietnam. There were a lot of small arms, AK-47, 50 cow. But on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they had

pretty sophisticated an aircraft, 23mm, 37mm. We lost more helicopters than that eight-week operation than we had in the whole previous year in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese, for

the first couple of days, made great progress, you know. But as soon as the North Vietnamese

counter-attack, these people were banding their weapons and moving back east, the target

in Thailand. And they flew one helicopter out there and put some South Vietnamese on the ground

“for about a half an hour to say that they had accomplished the objective, and then they flew”

back. And then the South Vietnamese were in Pell Mill Retreat. In fact, on one of the last days, if we didn't have a target that we're going after, sometimes we would just expend our fuel for targets of opportunity. And I called back to the main base and I said, "I've got 12 vehicles heading east. Do you want me to cover them?" And the commander said, "Wait, came back." He said, "My counterpart says we have no more vehicles." I said, "I'm looking

at 12 vehicles heading east on Highway 9. Do you want me to cover them?" We have no vehicles.

I got a little closer and I said, "I have 12 tanks coming east." He said, "They're not ours." So this was an entirely different war in the broad daylight tanks in the open. You would have rarely have seen that in South Vietnam, where it was guerrilla warfare and everybody hiding in the trees. So that was, you know, that was kind of shocking to see, but that was the, just about the end of the lambson operation. So you really could see the shift from the top down on the sort

of attitude. Yes. We were not allowed to fire unless we got permission. And that took a long time. We adopted the informal policy. We'll fire it if fired upon. And if someone on the radio said, wait, I'll get permission. Some of the radio would get really crackly and we wouldn't be able to hear anymore and we wouldn't engage anyway." So you finished your seven years. You did experience as I understood it's a PTSD from what went on in the combat arena. Tell us about that if you

want to talk about it. Years later, I was still pumped up for a while. In a way, I thought I was, you know, seven years behind my contemporary suit, you know, didn't serve in the military. But I couldn't have been more mistaken. I went back to school as the 25-year-old freshman and three and a half years later at a bachelor's degree in a master's degree, 3.7, president of the fraternity, you know, played on the football team. I was married to an army nurse at the time and she had difficulty

“understanding that I think. But I wanted to do all the things that I didn't get to do at the”

20. So I was pretty driven. And in the business world, I found that I could outcompede. I could out discipline. I could outwork. I could out hustle. My contemporaries. I joined a company and got promoted four times in six years. So I was actually ahead of the game. In 1975, when I was finishing my MBA, recruiters were coming on campus and a lot of them were the presidents and CEOs of companies. And you know, submit a profile in the student union and that gets reviewed and then they would,

you know, sign you up for interviews. And what I didn't fully realize at the CEOs in 1975, a lot of them were veterans, even from World War II. My resume was golden. So I was pretty high-functioning. And I think it wasn't until I started going back to the reading and that it started to, you know, manifest itself. I realized that, you know, I could be pretty quick tempered, irritable, and not unforgiving, but small things would irritate me. If people were talking about silly things,

it would just bother the hell out of me. They had no idea. What was real? I was focused on punctuality. I would get, you know, really mad when someone wasn't on time. It was not just discardious or

“unprofessional, but that's how you screw up a mission if you're not paying attention. So things”

like that. But I have to thank the VA because they were, they were great. Last couple of years going through some of their programs, you know, having me put things in perspective. I used to wear these decorations to remind myself that I served in my duty. And about a dozen years ago, I realized that I really wear them to remind me of my friends. Who did it? Sorry. It's emotional, but at the same time, it's therapeutic, I think, to talk about it. Did you, did you feel guilt

and sometimes there's like survivors guilt? Oh, sure. Yeah. Like on that third mission, I, you know, I,

it's a calculated risk. A dead crew can't rescue anybody, but I always wondered if those guys

knew that we tried our hardest. And we had to leave people. Did you, do you think some of your drive was that you felt like, since you lived, you needed to maximize what your potential was and it, you owed it to them or something? Sure. I mean, after Vietnam, every day it was kind of like gravy, you know, and why not see what you're capable of, why not, you know, try your hardest, do your best,

“make a difference, make a contribution. I think that's what guided me. The times I got promoted,”

the president of ice presidents said, look, you weren't the most qualified for the position, but you were willing to move and we knew you'd run through a wall force. What was it like coming back? And, I mean, I think of people like Jane Fonda and others that were in John Kerry. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there was a lot of discouragement. Like, I don't know if you'll edit this,

but I call him Jane Kerry. So, what was that like coming back and facing that as a second stage?

Betrayal, you know, these, these people on their, their pulpit with the little ideas to what was really, I doubt if either one of them ever interviewed, both people who, you know, left Vietnam with shirts on their backs, you know, and rest all of everything pirates, who had seen people floating, you know, down rivers, people disappearing, people going to re-education camps, people being executed. The Vietnamese had come here for the most part,

you know, they've done, you know, a wonderful job, you know, recognizing the opportunities and

“and freedom that we have. There, you know, I think the, the political dismissive approach to”

Vietnam is, this was a waste, et cetera, but for somebody that was that put your life on the line,

saw friends go down, how do you perceive it personally? Was this something of value, and it really mattered to you, or does that, or does that sort of political perspective, the Jane found a perspective? Does it influence at all? How do you look at it? Well, I, I guess I just dismiss what they have to say. I, my, my friends and I knew what we were doing to help the Vietnamese, 97% of the people who served in Vietnam are honorably discharged.

70% say they would do it again, even though the, the outcome, 84% were proud they've served. That's good. That's encouraging to hear. Is there anything that you'd like to share lessons that you've learned from your experience that you'd like to pass on to some of the younger listeners?

“Well, don't go to work quickly, but if you must go to war, go quickly, give the commanders a”

concrete objective, and, and let them win. I think we have a leadership now, the lessons that abides by that kind of mentality. It is refreshing to, to see the, the purging of the military with this DEI and woke nonsense. The Chinese don't give a crap about your pronouns. They're training to kill Americans. You started off talking about the meritocracy and the return to that. Yes. I have we've seen anecdotally, and it does seem like it's having a major effect on morale

of the troops, and it's really good. I think so at least based upon the people I talked to, and the ones that are still serving. I'm in the Army Aviation Association of America, and they have a chapter of it, Fort Campbell, that I'm a member of. It's for anybody that's a veteran as well. And up at Fort Campbell, these are people in the 160 at the guys that fly those special missions. And it's encouraging and wonderful to see the capabilities and the motivation that the

these people have, you know, honorable. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us. Really special. Thank you, and I apologize for my, my emotions. It's, it's still, you know, there, there are times like, you know, did that really happen to me? Was that a movie I saw? And yet it could have been two weeks ago? I can't imagine, and I do, we appreciate your heroism, and just being willing to speak about it, really appreciate, it means a lot to us in our audience. Oh, thank you. My honor. I do it again.

That was retired Army helicopter pilot, Art Jacobs, and this has been a special Memorial Day episode of Morning Wire.