Transcript of Cheating Death In The Jungles Of Vietnam New

We went out and came to a hover, lowered the cable, and again they opened up. The bullets, you know, came through. One hit my side, one hit me in the arm. Engine failure is pretty imminent. So if we stay there to try to get the wounded, the risk is that 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.

Jacobs served in both Korea and Vietnam, where he repeatedly volunteered to be on the front lines to serve his country in its campaign to push back against communist aggression.

For this Memorial Day episode, we sit down in studio with Jacobs to discuss what he experienced during his lengthy service for the country and what he's doing now to continue to support his brothers in arms.

I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. This is a special Memorial Day edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now in studio is Art Jacobs, an Army helicopter helicopter pilot who flew rescue missions during some of the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam War. Art, thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure.

So you had experience, obviously, as a helicopter pilot, medevac 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 7 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 in 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 a divorce. There was no real money. Or encouragement. I was the oldest of 4. All the dads on our street were World War II. Their younger brothers were, you know, our uncles who served in Korea. I believed what John Kennedy had said, "We're gonna fight communism, we're gonna fight aggression." There 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 is 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 create a career. We launched as quickly as possible because we knew that somebody was wounded and hoping someone would come. So that's what 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 or jump over it and get right into Vietnam. What did you find were some of the differences between those two conflicts firsthand?

Well, I will always believe, I mean, we were well-intentioned. I mean, this 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. Yeah. The goal was admirable, but the strategy and the tactics were flawed. Read a book by Barbara Tuchman. She won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She wrote 1914 about the origins of World War I. And she said, we made one fundamental mistake in Vietnam. This time we were the redcoats. And as George Santayana said, that those who don't understand their history are condemned to repeat it. We had command of the air, we had command of the sea. If we'd have forced them to fight conventionally, we could have cordoned off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and starved the 20,000 to 30,000 Viet Cong that were in the South. The South Vietnamese could have handled them, and we could have done conventional battle against the North.

While you were serving in it, did you feel, were the criticisms mounting at that time in the ranks, or were you just focused on your mission for that day?

In 1968, morale was still high, even after the Tet Offensive. I mean, the enemy dedicated some 80,000 troops to the Tet Offensive 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, insurgents that were on the embassy grounds, as if we had somehow lost.

Yeah, I think that the political side of it is largely what's focused on, of course. The very human side. You guys were evacuating wounded soldiers, comrades in arms. You say 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 of 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 reported the casualties, but 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.

Can you tell us what happened there? How were you wounded? When did that take place?

Well, the first time I was wounded was in April of '68. And ironically, it was the first day I'd been promoted to aircraft commander. And we went into a rice paddy to pick up the wounded. And at the very last moment, the guys on the ground said, go around, go around. We saw the tracers 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 convalescence center and 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 hoist mission. There was no place to land. You have to come to a hover over the tops of the trees, 100 feet tall, lower cable. So you're pretty vulnerable. And we took fire immediately. My co-pilot was hit. My door gunner was hit, seriously wounded. And warning lights came on, so we had to abandon the mission. We made an emergency landing back at the base and got another helicopter. Helicopters in Vietnam were like the horses in the cavalry in the Wild West.

You know, as long as you were okay, get another one.

So you 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, you know, blood sprayed up into the cockpit. It was— warning lights came on and again we had to leave and make an 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, you know, relieve them. About an hour and a half later, the battalion commander for the unit came over and said, "Gee, my boys need help. Will you go?" And my commanding officer was there and he said, No, you don't have to. You've seen enough. But to me, those poor guys were in 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. Warning lights came on and one of the warning lights was pretty serious. It's called engine chip detector. It 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 that 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 quit. And, 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 Yokohama, 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 convalescent 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 know, You weren't coming back.

Yeah.

So you said you had 20 seconds until the engine failed. What happened?

Where were you?

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

Yeah. Well, we were trying to climb out. We might have been 500 to 700 feet above the jungle. When a helicopter engine quits, you go into what's called autorotation. 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 airspeeds, you're making judgments as to where 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, you know, make it as soft a 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 in the crash.

We just came down through the edge of the trees.

Amazing. Did you have to hold off the enemy on the ground?

Momentarily. You know, they, they wrote up that, that citation, but I think the guys in the rear like to add a little drama. We, you know, we, we just did our duty.

Yeah.

How long were you out there before someone came to rescue you?

About an hour and a half. Yeah. So it was pretty, pretty quick.

So this is a very fast-moving situation all around, it sounds like.

Yes. Yeah. But, you know, we made an emergency radio call. People knew what had happened, so they were out there looking for us pretty quickly.

Were you spooked from that? Did it affect you mentally when you went back into action?

No. I mean, when I first got to Vietnam, you know, you're afraid. Gee, you know, will I get killed? Sure. But our mission was, to me, so powerful. I mean, I had the best job. In Vietnam, um, I was most afraid of, you know, screwing up or letting somebody down than anything else.

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

Um, I got there the beginning of 1968, so I served all of 1968. And then, um, um, there's always a silver lining. When I was in the 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. Uh, at night in the mountains across the border, you rescued people and you've seen some action because you're here. I said, yes, sir. He says, well, you're my guy. The Special Forces 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 10th Special Forces Group." So when I came back to the States, and they were at Fort Devens, so I spent 2 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 safer to go out and shoot people than it 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.

Second tour, okay.

So I was a couple of years older, you know, grown man.

Okay, so your second tour, 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, um, the Tet Offensive 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 Laotian invasion, codenamed Lam Son 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 was a lot of small arms, AK-47,.50 cal. But on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they had— it was pretty sophisticated anti-aircraft, 23mm, 37mm. We lost more helicopters in that 8-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 counterattacked, These people were abandoning their weapons and moving back east. The target was to get to this town called Sapaung, which was halfway across Route 9 toward the Mekong River in Thailand. And they flew one helicopter out there and put some South Vietnamese on the ground for about half an hour to say that they had accomplished the objective, and then they flew back.

And then the South Vietnamese were in pell-mell retreat. In fact, on one of the last days, if we didn't have a target that we were 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, "This, 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?" He says, "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 that 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 kind of shocking to see, but that was just about the end of the Lam Son operation.

So you really could see the shift from the top down on the sort of attitude about the war.

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 if fired upon." And if someone on the radio said, "Wait, I'll get permission," somehow the radio would get really crackly and we wouldn't be able to hear anymore, and we would engage anyway.

So you finish your 7 years. You did experience, as I understand it, some PTSD from what went on in the combat arena. Tell us about that, if you're willing to talk about it.

Years later, I mean, I was still pumped up for a while. In a way, I thought I was 7 years behind my contemporaries who didn't serve in the military. But I couldn't have been more mistaken. I went back to school as a 25-year-old freshman, and 3.5 years later, I had a bachelor's degree and 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 20. So I was pretty driven. And in the business world, I found that I could outcompete, I could outdiscipline, I could outwork, I could outhustle my contemporaries. I joined a company, got promoted 4 times in 6 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 submit a profile in the student union and that gets reviewed and then they would sign you up for interviews. And what I didn't fully realize that the CEOs in 1975, a lot of them were veterans even from World War II.

I mean, my resume was golden. So I was pretty high functioning and I think it wasn't until I started going back to the reunions that it started to 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 discourteous 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 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, did my duty. And about a dozen years ago, I realize that I really wore them to remind me of my friends who didn't. Sorry. It's emotional. Yeah. But at the same time, it's therapeutic, I think, to talk about it.

Did you feel guilt? I know sometimes there's like survivor's guilt.

Oh, sure. Yeah. Like on that third mission, I, you know, I, we only got one guy out out of three missions and went down ourselves. There's a balance, you know, 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 feel like since you lived, you needed to maximize what your potential was and that you owed it to them or something?

Sure. I mean, after Vietnam, every day 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 and the vice president 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 for us." What was it like coming back?

And I mean, I think of people like Jane Fonda and others that were—

And John Kerry.

Yeah, John Kerry.

So I mean, there was a lot of discouragement.

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 people on their pulpit with little ideas to what was real. I doubt if either one of them ever interviewed the boat people who, you know, left Vietnam with the shirts on their backs, you know, and risked all of everything. Pirates who had seen people floating, you know, down rivers, people disappearing, people going to reeducation camps, people being executed. The Vietnamese that have come here, for the most part, you know, they've done, you know, a wonderful job, you know, recognizing the opportunities and freedom that we have.

There, you know, I think the political dismissive approach to Vietnam is this was a waste, etc. 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 sort of political perspective, the Jane Fonda perspective, does it influence at all how you look at it?

Well, I guess I just dismiss what they have to say. My friends and I knew what we were doing to help the Vietnamese. 97% of the people who served in Vietnam were honorably discharged. 70% say they would do it again, even knowing the outcome. 84% were proud they 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 war quickly, but if you must go to war, go quickly. Give the commanders a concrete objective and let them win.

I think we have a leadership now that listens, that abides by that kind of mentality.

It is so refreshing to see the purging of the military with this DEI and 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 with the troops, and it's really good to hear.

I think so, at least based upon the people I talk to and the ones that are still serving. I'm in the Army Aviation Association of America, and they have a chapter up at 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 160th, the guys that fly those special missions. And it's encouraging and wonderful to see the capabilities and the motivation that these people have, you know, the honorable Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us.

Really special.

Thank you. And I apologize for my emotions. It's still, you know, there are times, you know, did that really happen to me? Was that a movie I saw? And yet it could have been 2 weeks ago.

I can't imagine. And I do, we appreciate your heroism and just being willing to speak about it. Really appreciate it. It means a lot to us and our audience.

Oh, thank you. My honor. I'd do it again.

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