Herman “Butch” Peace was nineteen years old and, by his own admission, mostly thinking about girls when he enlisted in the Army. He didn’t have a plan for the war — he had a plan to fly helicopters, because it sounded like a cool thing to do. Nine months later, after flight school he calls “the most wonderful nine months of my life,” he was a Huey pilot headed for Vietnam, following in the footsteps of his father, who had survived being shot down over France as a ball turret gunner on a B-17 the day after D-Day.
What follows in this episode of Ask a Vet is a conversation that moves between the mundane and the unbearable, often in the same breath. Butch talks about C-rations and hot sauce mailed from Louisiana, about a fellow pilot who married a woman he’d known for 36 hours and is still married to her today, about lieutenants nicknamed “Grumpy” and “Sleepy.” And then, without warning, the conversation turns — to a midair collision he watched happen feet away from his own aircraft, to a sling-load accident that killed four volunteers hauling a teeter-totter to an orphanage, to the radio going dead silent after a loss no one could say out loud. That whiplash, between camaraderie and catastrophe, is the truest thing about the episode.
Butch’s story doesn’t end when he comes home. After Vietnam, he kept flying — offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, then training Iranian pilots for Bell Helicopter International during the final year of the Shah’s reign, watching a country come apart around him until the flying stopped altogether. It’s the kind of detail that could be its own documentary, and Butch tells it with the same understated, almost bemused tone he uses for everything else in his life — like a man who has simply seen a lot and is still trying to make sense of some of it.
Maybe the most surprising turn is the one that came last: art. Butch had wanted to be a painter since he was a kid, but always believed you had to be “born with it.” It wasn’t until he picked up a secondhand book on an offshore oil rig — one that told him flatly that becoming an artist takes ten thousand mistakes and a teacher — that something clicked. He saved his money, moved to France, and spent five years training as a classical realist. Today he’s a working portrait painter, married, and, at 77, a first-time published author with One Year: Or the Rest of Your Life — a memoir he wrote not to relive the war, but to see if he could still string together sentences worth remembering.
This episode is a portrait of a full life lived at full speed — and a reminder that the year that changes you doesn’t have to be the only thing that defines you. You can find Butch’s book, One Year: Or the Rest of Your Life, linked below, and see his paintings at hlpeace.com.
📖 Book: https://www.amazon.com/ONE-YEAR-Vietnam-Helicopter-Pilots-ebook/dp/B0FXPD6Z7K?ref_=ast_author_mpb 🎨 Art: https://hlpeace.com/