First sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guiding a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue, Vietnam, April 1968.
The jungle never gave you a break. Not for the heat, not for the smell, not for the fact that you hadn’t eaten in days, and sure as hell not for the men bleeding out in the dirt. The First Sergeant stood in the clearing, arms stretched to the sky, like he was calling down some kind of salvation, but there wasn’t any of that hereโjust the ugly mechanical beat of the medevac, cutting through the thick, wet air, the promise of maybe getting out of this alive.










