Dead Men Flying

• First Edition (January 2010)
• Paperback: ISBN 978-0-557-26239-7 — $21.95
  • Perfect bound, full-color wrap-around cover
• Hardcover: ISBN 978-0-557-26724-8 — $36.95
  •  Blue linen cover with title stamped in gold on spine, full-color dust jacket
• 292 6 × 9 inch pages
• 39 photos

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

By John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Book Critic

Maj. Gen. Patrick H. Brady of Sumner can remember that 1969 day as if were yesterday. He was awaiting the White House ceremony when President Richard M. Nixon would present him with the country's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, and a senior officer turned to him with unsolicited advice.
     "He told me that what was about to happen was the most significant thing that would happen to me or anyone in my family for generations," Brady recalls. "I thought what was that guy talking about. I didn't believe it then. I don't believe it now."
     The passing years have convinced Brady that having all six of his children finish their college educations was far more significant than his receiving the Medal of Honor for combat actions as a helicopter pilot flying medical evacuations in Vietnam. Education, now that was something lasting, something truly affecting generations.
     "I don't think combat," he says, "is one of the great challenges in life."
     Scratch below the surface of a true hero and this is what one encounters more often than not: a matter-of-factness about what was accomplished. I was just doing my duty. Others were doing similar things. They could just as easily have received the honor.
     Brady has seen that attitude time and again when Medal of Honor recipients have gathered for their annual reunions, most recently a month ago in Branson, Mo. The recipients seldom swap tales of their combat exploits. Braggadocio is definitely not a welcome trait. Humility is the imperative when Medal of Honor recipients meet, as is humor, as is love of country.
     "This is just a great bunch of guys, but incredible patriots," Brady says. "I was president of the Medal of Honor Society and we may not agree on a lot of things, but we all share a great love of country. We would do anything for our country. We've got Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, every mix of that you can imagine, but what we Medal of Honor recipients have in common is an intense love of our country. We would die for it."
     That has seldom been more apparent than in the pages of a powerful new coffee-table book, "Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty" (Artisan, 251 pages, $40). This Veterans Day gift to the country features artful black-and-white portraits of 116 Medal of Honor recipients by photographer Nick Del Calzo and straight-ahead prose accounts of each recipient's combat actions by author Peter Collier.
     Many accounts in the book are harrowing, all these true-life stories of soldiers and sailors and aviators who performed feats of self-sacrifice unfathomable to most civilians. Heroes who single-handedly charged machine gun nests. Heroes who threw their bodies atop hand grenades to protect their buddies. Heroes who continued fighting despite the gravest of injuries, the loss of an eye, intestines suddenly exposed, bullets or pieces of shrapnel painfully lodged in the thigh or the hip or the back. Heroes who simply refused to quit, no matter what.
     Brady demonstrated that repeatedly in the actions during one hectic day in 1968 that led to the Medal of Honor. He volunteered to rescue two badly wounded South Vietnamese soldiers in fog-bound enemy territory after other rescue attempts had failed. He succeeded, then soon departed on another foul-weather mission that required five flights over an hour to rescue 39 GIs.
     Other rescue missions followed, including one that was almost aborted when a mine explosion ripped a hole in his chopper and caused every warning light on the control panel to flash. Brady still managed to coax the chopper into the air, returned to base with a half-dozen gravely wounded soldiers, picked up another chopper and continued his work. By the end of the day, he had rescued 51 warriors from the battlefield, helping save many of their lives, and all this was accomplished in medevac choppers that were riddled with an astounding 400 bullet holes.
     Recounting what resulted in the Medal of Honor is a mandatory part of life as a recipient, whether in school assemblies, Rotary gatherings, media interviews. Brady has done that more times than he can count, sometimes twice in a single day, but the story seldom varies, nor his response to the inevitable questions of how he could have done what he did in the intense heat of battle.
     Brady's plain-spoken yet eloquent responses provide a mix of context and insight. He emphasizes that what he did as a major on that Medal of Honor day was "not remarkable in any way" from what he did in the 2,000 to 3,000 medevac missions that he flew during two tours of duty in Vietnam. Oh, there was "a little weather" that day, plus someone also happened to write down what he had done, but otherwise it was just another day of trying to save as many lives as he possibly could, which was always his motivation.
     "We were saving lives and nothing is more exhilarating; you couldn't not do it," he says. "If someone was hurt somewhere, you had to find a way to get into there. It was as if it was a friend of yours, or a loved one, or you out there yourself. That made the missions easy. And my faith was the substitute for fear. I never experienced fear, I always focused on the mission. I figured that if I got killed, there was not a better way to die. But my focus was on the mission."
     The 67-year-old graduate of O'Dea High School and Seattle University likens his combat flying experience to that of professional athletes in competition. It was as though he was in a "zone" where everything extraneous was banished from thought, his total focus on assessing the situation and figuring what steps to take:
     "Guys on the ground there. In this particular type of terrain. Guys with these kinds of casualties, needing this kind of care. Enemy located here or there. Using this kind of weapons. Put all those things in mind and it's as if there is a highway right out of the sky that will take you into there. Visualize the approach, then execute."
     Everything, though, did not always go according to plan. Terrain played tricks, weather intruded, enemy fire proved impossible to evade. Brady readily admits there were times when he "messed up," times when he had 30 to 40 of his choppers shot up, had some of his crew members wounded, or was wounded himself, although not seriously.
     "God blessed me," Brady stresses. "I was very, very lucky. But I just think that I was hard to kill, since I was so careful to plan and execute approaches into an area."
     Brady remembers being at the White House Medal of Honor ceremony and being "embarrassed, knowing what I did and knowing what so many other guys did." He had other obstacles to surmount in passing years. The medal definitely opened doors, provided opportunities, yet also created huge expectations, particularly among civilians.
     "One of the negatives of being a Medal of Honor recipient is that people attribute something to you that's simply not there," Brady explains. "People think you're a Superman. They have expectations of you that you can only fulfill if you went back into combat."
     Brady never saw combat after Vietnam. He stayed in the service and rose to the rank of major general. His six children (three sons, three daughters) all served in uniform as well, including two sons who were graduates of West Point, although none of the Brady offspring pursued the military as a career.
     Brady returned to the place he grew up after he retired from active duty, buying a house with some acreage outside Sumner where he lives with his wife, Nancy. He devotes himself to continuing his decades of research for a memoir of his service in Vietnam, the kind of story that he believes just has not been told about the war, especially all the humanitarian efforts of soldiers there.
     He also has served for seven years as the chairman of the board of the Citizens Flag Alliance, the broad-based initiative to pass a constitutional amendment that will allow Congress to pass laws to prohibit desecration of the flag. Brady finds it hard to suppress his outrage that the Supreme Court allowed flag burning as a form of free speech. "They were out of line," he says.
     Veterans Day has always had meaning for Brady, but never more so than this year. His youngest child, 23-year-old daughter Meghan, another Seattle University graduate, is serving as an Army medical service corps officer in Baghdad. Suddenly, the Medal of Honor recipient's perspective has been turned upside down, from combat warrior to combat waiter at home.
     "I can tell you I've gained a new appreciation for the families of veterans," Brady says. "I have never gone through anything like having my last daughter over there in the Iraq War. It's far, far more difficult than being there yourself. ... No doubt she'll turn out just fine. I'm confident she's going to make it and they'll start rotating out of the war zone in a year, like we did in Vietnam.
     "But everything about Veterans Day has changed since the terrorists. Why they hate us as they do is something I don't understand. We have to find a way to fight these people. To fight these folks will require a lot of ingenuity. But we'll get it done, as America always does. And I'm so glad my daughter is contributing."

• Introduction
• Part One: Semi-War
• Meeting the Man
• A Flying Christmas Tree
• Red Clay, Rabies and Titty Mountain
• Lethal Patients
• The Big Grandmother of Medicine
• Death Spiral
• WHAM
• Duty in the Pearl of the Orient
• Ghost Riders in the Sky
• Portable Red Crosses
• Geneva, the Dead and Preventative Medicine
• A Traitor in the 57th
• The Genius of a Mad Man
• An Atheist Is My Co-Pilot
• Two Unlucky Irishmen
• When I Have Your Wounded
• The Kelly Way
• Kelly’s Krazies
• Between His Ankles
• Lesser Nobles and Butterfly Balls
• I Gotta Get Out of This Place
• Part Two: Preparations for War
• The Flying Red Ass Hole
• The Golden Winged 54th
• Part Three: War
• Where the Hell is Chu Lai?
• An AO from Hell
• Opening Week
• October: Man-Made Stars and An Epiphany
• November: The Fog is Lifted
• Another Epiphany
• December: Doldrums
• Father Don’s Air Medal
• January: New Year, New Life
• 6 January: The Feast of the Epiphany
• TET: America’s Greatest Victory in Viet Nam
• February
• March: My Lai and Operational Definition
• April: The Man Without a Face
• May: Mayhem
• Viet Nam Golgotha
• Where is the Worm?
• June and Amazing Stats
• July: A Wedding, a Medal and My Last Mission
• Dust Off Déjà Vu
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors