Jim Oliphant didn’t plan on going to war. The San Diego native was studying architecture at Arizona State when the draft caught up with him for the fourth time. After three deferments and stints considering the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, Jim finally enlisted and ended up at Fort Bliss for basic training, where he graduated number one in his class. A winding path through artillery officer school, helicopter mechanics training, and an unusually quick application to flight school eventually landed him exactly where he was meant to be: behind the controls of a CH-54 Flying Crane, the U.S. Army’s heavy-lift helicopter, in Vietnam in 1969.
Flight came naturally to Jim in a way he could never quite explain. At primary flight school in Fort Walters, Texas he soloed for six hours, breaking a record that had everyone on the bus stopping at the Holiday Inn to throw him in the pool. In Vietnam, he flew the Skycrane daily: moving 155mm howitzers, delivering fuel bladders to forward units, airlifting artillery shells, and clearing fire bases that still held French minefields from a previous war. He also served as operations officer for his company, carrying the quiet burden of assigning fellow pilots to missions he knew might get them killed. “You have to get the mission done,” he says simply. “That’s the first thing.”
The mission that defined his Vietnam service came without warning or explanation. A call from the Department of the Army sent Jim and his company commander to a bunker full of generals near the Laotian border, where they were briefed on an impossible task: deliver a running D-7 bulldozer to an 11,000-foot pinnacle overlooking the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where a trapped Special Forces unit had been under artillery fire for over a week. Multiple Hueys and a Chinook had already been lost trying to reach them. Jim spent hours burning fuel to get the crane light enough to attempt the lift, flew toward the pinnacle under fire from both sides, pulled the engine to 100% power…and still clipped the cliff face, ripping the fiberglass tips from his rotor blades. The mission appeared to be a failure. It wasn’t. The next morning, Jim received a memo: they had been a decoy all along. While he drew every gun toward the front of the pinnacle, a team of high-altitude paratroopers jumped in from 30,000 feet in the dark and walked the Special Forces unit out the back. All four crew members of Jim’s aircraft walked away. Jim was awarded the Bronze Star for an operation he didn’t even know the real purpose of until it was over.
After the Army released him in 1975, Jim spent a few months in the Arizona National Guard before quietly walking away from that too: flying himself home in an OH-58, parking it, getting in his car, and never going back. But not before he spent three days underground at Fort Huachuca commanding the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a classified NATO worldwide exercise — a role he stumbled into on what was supposed to be his last week in uniform. Jim’s advice to young people today is as direct as everything else about him: “Part of high school graduation should be basic training. You’ll never get that experience anyplace else.” At 79 years old, with a Bronze Star, a career’s worth of near-misses, and stories most people couldn’t imagine, he means every word.
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