Sunday July 2, 2000:
The VHPA Memorial at The Wall
By Joe L. Galloway
Is there anyone here today who does not thrill to the sound
of those Huey blades?? That familiar whop-whop-whop is the
soundtrack of our war the lullaby of our younger days. To
someone who spent his time in Nam with the grunts I have got
to tell you that that noise was always a great comfort.
It meant someone was coming to help ..someone was coming to
get our wounded someone was coming to bring us water and
ammo someone was coming to take our dead brothers home
..someone was coming to give us a ride out of hell. Even today
when I hear it I stop ..catch my breath ..and think back to
those days.
I love you guys as only an Infantryman can love you. No
matter how bad things were, if we called you came. Down
through the green tracers and other visible signs of a real bad
day off to a bad start. I would like to quote to you from a
letter Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote his friend Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War: "I knew
wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight
place you would come---if alive."
That was always in our minds and that is how we thought of
you. To us you seemed beyond brave and fearless ..that you
would come to us in the middle of battle in those flimsy
thin-skinned crates ..and in the storm of fire you would sit up
there behind that plexiglass seeming so patient and so calm
and so vulnerable ..waiting for the off-loading and the
on-loading. We thought you were God's own lunatics ..and we
loved you. Still do.
We are gathered here this morning to appreciate the lives and
honor the memory of 2,209 helicopter pilots and 2,704
helicopter crewmen who were killed while doing their duty in
the Republic of Vietnam between May 30, 1961, and May 15,
1975. Theirs are some of the names among the 58,220 on this
precious Wall. So many good men ..so many good friends.
Before I come here I always remind myself of what another
good friend Captain B.T. Collins, who is now gone, liked to say
at gatherings like this:
No whining and no crying! We are the fortunate ones! We
survived ..when so many better men gave up their precious
lives for us. We owe them a sacred debt ..to live each day to
its fullest, trying to make this world a better place for our
having lived and their having died.
So we come here today to remember them ..and to celebrate
their lives and their deeds. I like to come here at dawn or
around midnight, when things are so quiet you can hear their
voices. What they are saying ..when you listen hard enough is
this: We are at peace; so should you be, so should you be.
I would like to close by reading you from something written
by a World War I poet named Lawrence Binyon:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them ..nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!
God bless all our absent friends and God bless you.
Joe L. Galloway July 2, 2000
at the VHPA memorial at The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall