The Old 283rd Dustoff out of Nha Trang, Viet Nam

Five blocks west and one block north of me sits the local hospital's heliport. Here being so "stuck in the sticks", helicopter ambulances fly low over my house frequently, at all hours. Scarcely one passes o'erhead that doesn't flash me back to memories of the 283rd Dustoff crew that serviced Camp McDermott , just outside Nha Trang, in 1970 and 1971. While I have written of my misadventures of suturing and maybe mentioned that my primary duty there was working in a small ward helping GI's ward off the terrors of drug addiction and insanity, I haven't said much about the "secret duty" of the corpsmen of the 575th Medical Detachment. Occasionally, in the middle of the night , a call would come in, not to us per se, but to the helicopter crew that kept a Dustoff chopper parked on the heliport adjacent to our Quonset hut that was the dispensary. They usually had a full crew on hand, but sometimes , in that crazy place...the medic had wandered off in pursuit of pleasures of varied nature. So they came to the dispensary and asked for volunteers. Someone always volunteered. The whirling machine took off and always returned , sometimes with alarming quickness. The medics that went with the helicopter crews many times had had no experience in these endeavors. The "typical" flight roared off to a place where a firefight had taken place , and frequently was still going on. The medic was given a helmet so he could hear the talk from the pilot to the ground . A combination of smoke grenades and flares showed the pilot where the LZ was . The trick was landing that machine, picking up the wounded soldiers and getting airborne and moving quickly. We had an outstanding pilot, a warrant officer named B. A short squat man who looked more like a farmhand than a pilot, this man could FLY that sucker!!!! I got so I would volunteer to fly with him whenever I could...that way I would get my share of flying done and not get stuck with some of the newer men being rotated in to fly the helicopters. How many pilots could you expect to survive with when frequently the helicopter blade made contact with the jungle canopy at the edges of the clearings we had to land in!! For me, W.O. B was the ONLY one!! The man was an amazing pilot! What would the medic on a Dustoff op do? Mostly, get familiar with compress bandages and iv bottles. The iv bottles were of utmost importance; if we were out of plasma we would use blood "volume expanders", which was just fluid to maintain blood pressure . Usually, the wounded men would be in Cam Ranh , delivered expertly by Mister B or counterpart , alive, and hopefully destined to live, within twenty minutes or so. Amazing! Like I said, this was not my regular job, and the flights are mainly just a blur in my mind, as everything happened so FAST! While Mister B flew at what seemed like extremely high altitudes after picking up the wounded , the 40 mile ride back to Nha Trang from Cam Ranh was flown very low...right along the coast just above the beach line. I seems like when we left Cam Ranh it took only fifteen minutes to get back to the Quonset hut in Nha Trang. Mister B wasn't only a helicopter ambulance man. I do remember with great clarity the time he told us of when he flew gunships and in a battle from the air to the ground he and his men killed a great many Vietnamese soldiers. I don't believe I had ever sat like that in a calm setting and heard a man tell so matter-of-factly how he and his crew mates killed so many men so rapidly. It kind of stunned me, and the coolness of his demeanor while telling us still is fresh in my mind. I was 21. Mr. B was 24. I still have a little knife with the insignia of the 283rd Dustoff on it....

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