NEW VIDEOS

Dan McMahon

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For Dan McMahon, it was very difficult to leave a wife and young child and go off to Vietnam. On the other hand, he was young and stupid enough to believe it would be a big adventure. (1:39)

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When he got to Bien Hoa, Dan McMahon found some of the nastiest living conditions that he'd yet seen in the Army. The Chinook pilot flew down in the Delta for a while but then he was reassigned to a unit supporting Korean troops. That was an eye opener. (4:56)

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Chinook pilot Dan McMahon hated to hear it when there was a Tac-E, a tactical emergency. That meant he would probably be flying howitzers to a fire base in the middle of the night with ground fire coming up to meet him. When some aircraft had mysterious explosions, they looked for some maintenance issue, but what they discovered was a new enemy weapon. (5:07)

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For Chinook pilot Dan McMahon, Vietnamization meant that he had to fly with co-pilots that he could not understand, which meant that all crew coordination was gone. This contributed to the chaos during a crash landing in which he managed to get the aircraft safely down. (4:49)

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Like so many returning veterans, Dan McMahon put Vietnam behind him and returned to college. Once he figured out that he didn't really want to be a teacher, he returned to flying for a satisfying career. Just don't put Gimme Shelter on the juke box. (5:21)

Tom Agnew

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Tom Agnew was an Army brat who always wanted to be a soldier and a hero. When it was his term to serve, Uncle Sam decided he would be a medic. He was apolitical, so it didn't bother him that he may go to war in Vietnam. He would be going to try and save lives. (3:48)

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Can I cut the mustard? Tom Agnew was apprehensive on the way to Vietnam and wondering if he was up to the task. He was assigned as a medic in a helicopter evacuation unit, known as Dustoff. On one of his first missions, he learned not to triage the wounded too quickly. (Caution: coarse language.) (4:51)

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You could get a lot of ground fire when you were going in to land at a hot LZ. Medic Tom Agnew remembers a lot of them, especially the one which he departed dangling from the end of a cable. While he was out there, a tracer round went by his head and made him angry, so he took out his pistol and fired back, which must have greatly amused his antagonist. (4:34)

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After a huge typhoon devastated Chu Lai, Tom Agnew was sent to a different Dustoff unit at Da Nang. The job was the same, medical evacuation. This late in the war, it was more often ARVN troops. (6:10)

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Something good can still come out of a bad war. Modern EMS was borne from lessons learned in Vietnam by combat medics such as Tom Agnew. He passed on those lessons while training emergency medical personnel in his postwar career. First he had to deal with protestors and a tendency to hit the deck when he heard a loud noise. (6:13)