More detail on this person: John Hanson War
Service Remarks, By Marshall Hawkins, September
26, 2005
I am here today to tell you some facts you may not
know. John Hanson is a hero, not only to his
family and friends but to his nation.
How do I know? I played ball with John in High
School. He was a year older than I and went off to
college and I didn't see him again until a couple
of years later in Officer Candidate School.
Although we were at different stages of training,
we helped each other with that very difficult
course. I was commissioned and assigned to an
Artillery outfit there at Ft. Sill. Sure enough, 3
or 4 months later, 2LT John M. Hanson reported to
the same unit. I don't recall exactly how long he
stayed there before he reported for flight school
but it was quite a while before I followed him to
flight school. I didn't see him again until
several years later when he shows up at the
Reserve unit I was in, looking for a job flying
helicopters. I hired him on the spot. I flew quite
often with John and during these times became
much closer than we had ever been.
John never spoke much about his service,
particularly to those who would have been overly
concerned or those that just wouldn't understand.
Even with those of us sharing common
experiences, he would rather talk about other
aviators and how gutsy they were than to talk
about his own experiences.
Army aviators, as a group, were the craziest bunch
of guys in the whole armed services during the
Vietnam period. Most of these guys, fresh out of
high school, went through nine months of flight
school, one month leave and then straight to
Vietnam. Suddenly they are put in charge of high
dollar machines and people and tasked with the
huge responsibility of providing support to people
on the ground whose very lives depended upon this
support.
Even without the War, it would have been tough
staying alive. Not only was there the technical
problems of flying the machine in hot, thin air,
balancing fuel and ammunition weight loads to
make sure you could get to the AO and still have
enough ammo to do the job but you also had
mountains and triple canopy jungle to contend
with.
Charley didn't hang out much in easy-to-reach
places. They liked the mountains with the cover
provided by the jungle where they could see and
hear you but you couldn't do the same.
The weather was a nightmare also. It would change
up in those mountains real quickly. What would
start off to be a clear, sunny day would suddenly
become a severe thunderstorm with updrafts and
downdrafts of biblical proportions or fog banks
from the ground all the way to heaven and no place
to land, even if you wanted to.
Oh did I mention, people were also shooting at
you?
Yep, these boys became men overnight. John was
probably a 21 year old First Lieutenant when he
went over and came home a 22 year old Captain.
And not just your normal 22 year old. His
experiences made him mature far beyond his
years.
But back to Army aviators in general.
It took a special breed of soldier to fly
helicopters in a combat zone. Some took on an air
of invincibility, figuring that there was no way
of hiding from the "bullet with your name on it"
so why worry. Others of us, John included,
recognizing that there were a lot of bullets out
there addressed "To Whom It May Concern" and
went about our business of getting the job done
without the Snoopy scarf or the handle-barred
mustache.
But get the job done, we did. Some call it
"Mission Accomplishment", some call it
"Professionalism" but in all my long years in the
service I have never met a more professional group
of young men than those Vietnam era Army
Aviators. They got the job done.
But this sense of "Mission Accomplishment" didn't
come without a price.
Some facts:
Out of the 8,744,000 that served in uniform during
the Vietnam War, 3,403,100 served in SE Asia. Of
those, 2,594,000 actually served in country.
Another source estimates that 40,000 pilots and
probably a like number of crewmembers served in
Vietnam which represents only 3% of the total
people serving there. Yet, of the 58,148 who died
during the war, 4,906 (or 8.44%) were Army
Aviators and crewmembers. A far greater ratio than
most other branches or services.
The Infantry, by far the largest group represented
on the Wall (18,465 or 32%) had considerably more
people in the field than Army Aviation and without
diminishing their sacrifices, I believe Army
Aviation can legitimately take its place up there
with the Infantry in Those Who Gave All.
Vietnam was a Helicopter War. The Infantry would
experience long periods of inactivity followed by
anywhere from 3 minutes to a week of stark terror
but in every instance, there was a helicopter in
the air anytime a bullet was fired in anger. We
took them in, we provided protective fires and we
got them out. That was our job.
John was a professional. He did his job. But one
thing about the Vietnam era pilot and I suspect
guided John is his closing days, is that he dealt
with his mortality a long time ago. He wasn't
afraid of death. He only wanted to postpone it for
as long as he could. From the day he boarded that
airplane at Danang and it rose above small arms
range, John figured that he had dodged another
bullet and every day from that day forward was a
gift from God. He knew that the "bullet with his
name on it" would catch up with him eventually but
when it did, he would go down with as much dignity
as he could muster and he could look back with no
regrets.
John is a hero. I don't know what kind of awards
and decorations he received from his tour in
Vietnam, whether or not he was properly recognized
for his service at the time but I do know what he
did there, just by virtue of his job description,
and can tell you that he served his country in a
manner that most others can not even imagine. He
is a hero in any sense of the word.
This information was last updated 05/18/2016
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Date posted on this site: 03/10/2024
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