Word: choppered
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...Bosnia. I was in the dirt, my face down, right along with O'Grady. I was crying with Captain Thomas Hanford when he flew over the Adriatic and heard O'Grady's radio signal. My heart was pounding along with Marine Sergeant Major Angel Castro's after the successful chopper rescue. I made the helicopter ride of a lifetime with Marines Paul Bruce and Michael Pevear. And finally, I too smelled the cypress and pine trees of the Dalmatian coast. It made me feel great. Joe Raymond Long Beach, California...
...April 29 to almost 8 a.m. on the 30th. Pilots flew for 10 to 15 hours straight; each trip took about 40 minutes in the air and 10 to 15 minutes on the ground loading up. Marine Captain Glynn Hodges landed at the embassy in midafternoon; his H-53 chopper was too big to perch on the roof, so it came down in the compound. "My troops couldn't believe the scene," says Hodges. "People were climbing fences. It was bedlam. We were afraid of the crowds. We had to wear gas masks, though we saw only smoke...
Though the first loads from the embassy were mostly Vietnamese, more and more Americans came out as the evacuation progressed. Snepp caught a chopper out at 9 p.m. on April 29. His description: "The roof of the embassy was a vision out of a nightmare. In the center of the dimly lit helo-pad, a CH-47 was already waiting for us, its engines setting up a roar like a primeval scream. The crew and controllers all wore what looked like oversized football helmets, and in the blinking under-light of the landing signals they reminded me of grotesque insects...
...flight out, Snepp saw "fiery stitching in the plastic window across from me" and realized it was ground fire. "The chopper groped for altitude as the motors wailed in protest. A small radar screen behind the pilot's seat began pulsing with a pale green glow, converting the navigator's face into a ghoulish mask. For three or four minutes the tracers continued reaching up for us, slowly burning out as they fell short ... I thought to myself, How absurd. To be shot down...
FRANK GIBNEY'S FIRST VISION OF Vietnam was postapocalyptic. "The ghosts of the war were everywhere," he recalls of his trip in March 1984. "The piles of Huey chopper parts at Tan Son Nhut airport, the musty bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. In Hanoi rats scurried through the hotel; the water was cold." There was an air of huddled secrecy. "You couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone. The people who could articulate the state of affairs were diplomats, themselves grasping at bits of information...