Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Read Online Free

one way or another. My people were from the mountains of Kentucky and there were some things the men always did. Going into the military was one of them.
    All my life I played among the dusty uniforms hanging in the closets and looked at the fading photographs of my dad and my uncles from their military times, war and peace. I played in their old “Ike” jackets from the 40’s and 50’s and treasured the spent cartridge cases and old unit patches they had given me. I had my “science cabinet” (an old china cabinet) full of these things and others, patches from various Army units, a Nazi party pin one of my uncles brought back from the war, a WWI Victory medal given to me by an old veteran neighbor, an empty ammo clip from an m-1 rifle, all displayed next to the buffalo skull I brought back from a visit to relatives in Oklahoma, plus the dead tarantula sent me in a match box by my Uncle Bill, a veteran of the war in the Pacific who lived in Texas.
    All my life, too, I saw the well-oiled and cleaned rifles and shotguns hanging on the walls of the houses in the Kentucky hollers (mountain valleys) of my childhood. No matter how poor the family, the weapons were always there along with pictures of the men in uniform. Few men were drafted out of the hollers because most enlisted when their war came. In fact, in Breathitt County during one of our wars, no one was drafted because all the men enlisted. Again, not from burning patriotism, although patriotic they were and still are—it was just what the men in their families had always done. The hardships of military service were often a rest from the reality of the true hardships of mountain life, coal mines and small farms. After all, in the military you always had clothes and food and a paycheck, small perhaps, but more than welfare.
    My then wife’s people were of the same mountain stock as mine; in fact, we were distant cousins. But for her, it was not so simple. At 18 her life as a woman had just begun. She was only now becoming adjusted to our life together and she saw clearly that it could end all too soon. One of our high school teachers even told us, as we sat in the cafeteria before I quit high school for the second and final time, that we would get married; I would then get drafted and would be killed in Vietnam. But running away never occurred to her either.
    The next day I drove our first new car, a blue ‘68 Mustang that my factory laborer’s job allowed us to buy, across the bridge from Newport over the Licking River to Covington, to the nearest recruiter’s office. The street the recruiting office was on had been the center of town—you could still see the streetcar tracks in between the cobbles laid down by the German immigrants—but in ‘68, Covington was fading fast. Empty storefronts displayed “for lease or sale” signs in the windows and the streets were not swept as often as they once had been. The litter of city trash sat in the curb and on the sidewalks and made everything feel even more rundown than it was.
    The recruiting office had once been a restaurant, but as the businesses that provided the customers for the lunch trade folded, the restaurant joined them. Where the tables and chairs of the diner had been, were the desks of the three service’s recruiters, Navy, Marines, and Army, all in a row. The tiles on the floor still spelled out the restaurant’s name. During the race riots of the year before, I had worked at a very similar restaurant, just down the street from the recruiter’s office. The restaurant’s owner hid guns throughout the place—a rifle and a shotgun in the kitchen and a pistol under the counter, and told me, “If they start breaking in, just grab the first gun you are close to and open up.” my plan was simpler—“they” break in the front, I am out the back and gone. It’s all “theirs.”
    When I walked in, the Army recruiter was talking to two other young men, which was fine—I didn’t want to talk to him