Walter's Story of His Closest Brush with Death - to date

Last June I was at Walter's when he told me the story of what he believes to be the closest he had ever come to death. He was assigned the duty of escorting a South Vietnamese general as he was viewing the troops. According to Walter the General only looked at the troops and nothing more. I asked Walter how he communicated with the General. He said the General spoke some English and French fluently. Walter spoke, or more understood, some French.

They were in a helicopter leaving one location where American troops were located. In the helicopter were two aviators (Walter's words, I call them pilots), two "kids" with guns at the doors, the General, and Walter. As the helicopter rises, once they get above 1,500 feet, the doors can be closed because the gunfire from the ground can't hit the helicopter. That is unless they have bigger guns, which they almost never had. This time just as they were above 1,500 feet and closed the door, they were hit by gunfire. He said it sounds like gravel being thrown at and hitting the metal sides of the helicopter. The rotors were damaged and the helicopter started an immediate fall. The pilot told Walter to feel the control stick, which was shaking violently. Walter said he thought they were going to die because he had witnessed many helicopters that were in this very situation explode upon impact. Thankfully the pilot was able to set the helicopter down in a rice paddy. He came down hard and took a hop forward. As the helicopter hit, Walter grabbed the General by the shirt and yanked him out of the door of the helicopter, rolled, and jumped up and ran to the hill over the rice paddy. He said the General didn't know what was going on because he could not understand all of the excited talk inside of the helicopter. As soon as the helicopter came to rest, the two gunners grabbed the guns and followed Walter and the General to the hill to fire upon whoever was firing on them.

I asked him how they got out of there. He said that the Marines came to the rescue. Almost immediately Marine helicopters appeared. The Army helicopters soon arrived and picked up the General. Walter and the two gunners stayed with the helicopter until the Army crane helicopter came to pick up the one that had been damaged.

Walter said we were lucky as hell that day. I sure am glad that he was the one to be able to tell me that story.

I have a few other stories that I wrote drafts of some months ago that I will be publishing now. I want anyone who wants to know about Walter to be able to read them.