Bring Me Back Alive: A Memoir of Adventure, Luck, and Terror in the Air

Young men dream about flying and the mastery of complex machines and imagine fanciful tales of heroics in high performance aircraft. Most of us know deep down inside that those fanciful tales will likely never happen. But sometimes they do. These 30+ stories (as unbelievable as some of them appear) actually happened. They cover a six year period during the Vietnam War era and conclude with a stunning year in Jolly Green Giant Rescue Helicopters. A major character in the chapters on Rescue Helicopters is a PJ (para-jumper) CMSGT Duane Hackney. Duane is still by far the most decorated Airman in the History of the US Air Force with seventy individual citations for valor in combat. Duane and I flew together on many missions and each was convinced that the other was the luckiest person we knew. Our luck encompassed garnering 80% of the truly exciting missions during that year as well as extracting ourselves from impossible situations. In one of the last chapters I recount an incident where a giant wave totally submerged our helicopter while we were floating on the open ocean during a rescue mission — yet we survived and flew it back. I have never met another rescue pilot who believes that we could have survived such an encounter.