OPERATION FREQUENT WIND

The plan to take the Afghan translators out of Afghanistan to a safe place via an airlift is for me an uneasy echo of what happened at the end of the Vietnam War, when a similar plan was in place to take South Vietnamese who had assisted the U.S. military to safety. Some people may recall a series of unfortunate decisions meant that the planned airlift never happened. I vividly recall watching the fall of Saigon on network television. It was a shock; the United States didn’t lose wars. Not like that.

 All of the remaining American staff were safely rescued. But thousands of South Vietnamese who were dependent on us were on the brink of being abandoned. Of course, I hope we do better this time, but we’ll have to wait and see. However, the Taliban is moving quickly to overrun the country. Here’s hoping history does not repeat itself.

 It wasn’t until decades later when I was researching the fall of Saigon for my book Man with No Yesterdays that I learned of the remarkable effort to rescue as many of our South Vietnamese friends as we possibly could.

 Vietnam was called “the helicopter war” for good reason. This remarkable aircraft ferried our fighting men to battles, extracted them from battlefields, dropped supplies to remote outposts, provided transportation of medical personnel and for the wounded to field hospitals. Many brave men died piloting the crafts. Many door gunners died. Helicopter pilots sometimes performed remarkably heroic feats.

 Thanks to the marvels of the internet, while researching this book I found news coverage from the CBC and so watched exactly what my character Jake Cameron saw. Since I had learned more about the importance of helicopters in the kind of warfare we encountered in Vietnam, seeing those scenes of the aircraft being ditched into the ocean I found even more disturbing and tragic. It became almost an analogy of the war itself: all the valiant fighting and loss of life ─ to what end?

 When searching for a photo to include in an addendum to the book I came across Dr. Bertram Zarins’ remarkable picture of a chopper dying in the South China Sea after ferrying refugees from Saigon to the waiting ships of Task Force 76. There was not room on the ships for the many helicopters that had been pressed into use for the escape of additional South Vietnamese.

 The original plan of an airlift by fixed wing aircraft, which would have rescued many more, was thwarted by the speed of the North Vietnamese Army’s march on Saigon. The use of helicopters, the last resort for attempting evacuation, became Operation Frequent Wind. The Marine helicopter pilots flew back and forth for almost twenty-four hours straight and ended up saving nearly 6,000 South Vietnamese.

 One more example of personal valor by our magnificent military. 

Photo courtesy of Dr. Bertram Zarins