Dick Van Allen made up his mind at age seven. A B-24 Liberator roared over his street in Willard, Ohio, low enough that it looked like it might clip the trees, and that was it. From that moment on, Dick had tunnel vision. He took chemistry and math in high school and college not because he loved them, because they were the fastest path to pilot training. He didn’t date seriously; he told himself he wouldn’t do either until he had his wings. He kept that promise. In 1959, after surviving engine failures over the Okefenokee Swamp, a mid-air near-collision in formation, and one of the most chaotic first jet flights on record — five minutes that ended with the aircraft running off the runway into a barrier — Dick Van Allen earned those wings.
What came next was a career path few people anticipate: helicopters. Dick and a classmate chose the H-43B turbine helicopter over a five-year backseat assignment in the B-47, flipping a coin to decide who went where. It turned out to be the right call. Dick would go on to fly five models of the Huey, accumulating over 6,500 hours in that aircraft alone, and would become one of the Air Force’s most experienced rescue pilots. He arrived in Vietnam in 1966 with the 20th Special Operations Squadron — the Green Hornets — flying armed Hueys on covert insertion missions. Within weeks he was transferred to combat search and rescue at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, where he discovered, on his very first night of alert, that he was the only qualified pilot on the entire base. He and one other pilot who arrived two days later flew virtually every mission for the next 80 days.
The stories Dick carries from those years are extraordinary in their detail and their weight. There was the night a C-141 crashed on takeoff — a spoiler switch not on the checklist, five men lost — and the hours that followed, hovering in a cloud of jet fuel and styrofoam packing material while burning flare parachutes drifted like hot air balloons in the dark above them. There was the mission where the valley held nineteen emergency beacons — seventeen of them enemy traps — and the rescues where they reached the pilot in time and the ones where they didn’t. There was the night, after eight scrambles, when Dick woke up already airborne, already at a hover, with no memory of the takeoff, his co-pilot equally blank. They had to ask the hoist operator where they’d been. They had covered a damaged F-4 for 35 minutes. ‘We knew if we didn’t go,’ Dick said, ‘nobody went. They didn’t get out.’
Dick Van Allen flew over 300 combat days in Vietnam, earned eight Air Medals, and came home without what he calls PTSD — though he says it simply: ‘You had no control. So we just did our job and figured we were bulletproof.’ After the Air Force, he commanded a MAST unit at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, responding to a 350-mile radius of civilian emergencies — including the catastrophic collapse of Teton Dam in 1976, where his unit was the only helicopter resource on scene for two full days. He estimates roughly 75 civilian rescues in total. In this episode of Ask A Vet, he shares all of it — methodically, warmly, and with the kind of clarity that only comes from someone who was truly paying attention every time his life depended on it.
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