Aircraft

Pleiku's 71st Evac was still a functioning hospital in 1971, but it had become a small-scale operation by the time I and my mates arrived. All in all, we Signal folks thought the medical operation a mysterious and wonderful thing; we shared the complex but had little interaction with the professional staff, and less with the patients. Here's one of those patients out catching some rays as he recovers from his injuries. I remember this as a unique event; it was pretty rare for us to see the evacuees except as they arrived or left the complex. We did see, and admire, the Medevac crews. This chopper's crew is on-board and the chopper's ready to leave on another rescue. The scenery beyond the helicopter pad is the Pleiku Airbase. Camera: Minolta SR-T 101 Revision 12/8/05: Replaced the original photo with a far better scan. Hadn't previously noticed that the rotor was turning....

Got up early one morning to shoot pix of the choppers at sunrise. (It's likely, actually, that I'd just gotten off-shift. Mostly worked from 6pm to 7am....) Pleiku, Republic of Vietnam, 1971.

A spur of the moment shot of the State Police helicopter over Michigan's State Secondary Complex, near Dimondale. She'd just launched from the State Police Academy. Had I known the bird was going to show up right then, the camera would definitely have been set up differently. But there she was, so I shot with what I had. Another version here .

A different version of a photo I posted a couple weeks ago. A Michigan State Police helicopter, just in the air from a launch at the State Police Academy.

This is the photo I was looking for the other day when I discovered the picture of the pool .... OK, here's the thing. Lynda Van Devanter, who wrote a book about her Vietnam year, Home Before Morning , served in the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku in 1969 and 1970 (71st Evac photo link from Steve Streeper's site ). I lived in the 71st complex for most of 1971, but worked elsewhere. Shortly before my arrival, the facility was downgraded from a major field hospital to a relatively small detachment. ( This chopper was part of that operation .) Since the medicos were using only a few of the buildings, the army repurposed several of the abandoned wards as barracks, and moved parts of the 43rd Signal Battalion into them. My unit, called Signal Support Detachment Pleiku, lived in what had been Wards 1 & 2; other Signal folks lived elsewhere in the complex. Anyway, I spent a year in the place. Like many vets, I bought a good camera while I was overseas, and (of course) took pictures. Many of those have been posted to Flickr. Fast forward to 2007. The Vietnam Veterans of America , an organization Van Devanter had helped establish, was publishing a magazine to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the dedication of The Wall . The issue included an excerpt from her book, and two of my Flickr photos were among the illustrations ( here and here ). I told about the experience on my blog . Finally got around to reading Van's entire book last week. It's painful, and it's wonderful.

My favorite airplane . At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Photo taken on an extremely hot day in 1995.