[Ben Hecks]

Last evening, we saw In the Shadow of the Blade, the documentary about the flight of a restored Huey (number 091) around the U.S. At each stop, they organized a gathering of Vietnam vets and families and recorded their reactions. I highly recommend the film - it's really well done but it gets a little blurry at times.

[BeAllYouCanBe]

Ben,

I have seen parts of the film. While it does show how some veterans were overwhelmed emotionally to see the Huey, I am not too impressed by the idea that flying around the USA and landing - here and there — is all that impressive. (As for me I’m not getting into a 40 year-old helicopter with 2,000 moving parts because I know how those parts operate and I know that mechanical failure increases pretty fast with age.)

The current vintage of helicopter warfare uses many of the tactics we first used in Vietnam. This story is an example and the knowledge has been passed to further generations of Army Aviators. I also know that they call the current helicopters “crash-hawks” and we don’t really know if this unplanned landing was because of enemy fire or bad luck.