TheyвЂ™re going to pay for this break in the rain.вЂќ When heвЂ™d finished, the staff sergeant looked at each of us and said, вЂњPeople are getting killed out there. We jumped from the top of the bunker, gathered around and listened to his orders. My unit NCO (non-commissioned officer), the crew chief of our rescue team, beckoned to us. The chaos and cacophony ended quickly, as the helicopters, fully armed, door gunners dangling their feet in the air, lifted off, gathered in formation and disappeared. The whine of the single-jet-engine Huey helicopters built to a loud, screaming crescendo, contrasting with the belch and pop of the conventional piston engines mounted on the front of aging CH-34 helicopters, relics from the Korean era. The base, silent just 30 minutes earlier, suddenly filled with the sounds of men running and shouting. But to the combat helicopter crews on the base, a break in the weather meant search-and-destroy, resupply and medivac missions could resume. We took advantage of the temporary halt in the rain, a respite for us.

A few members of the rescue crew joined me on top of the bunker. The unrelenting rain of the late monsoon season had stopped falling. Patrick Christain/Getty ImagesДЇifty-five years ago, not long after Christmas, not long after I arrived in Vietnam, I stood on top of a sandbag bunker just 50 feet from the edge of a runway on a combat air base eight miles outside of Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam. The second wave of combat helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division fly over an RTO and his commander on an isolated landing zone during Operation Pershing, a search and destroy mission on the Bong Son Plain and An Lao Valley of South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War.

Men of war editor