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Reunion Highlights 

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VHPA 2001 Reunion

101st Abn Association Reunion

Reunions of 2002

Lancers at the 2003 Reunion

More Photos from the 101st Reunion

2000

Submitted by Tom McGee

At the Air Show

Misc Pictures

 Info from the VHCMA Reunion 

Hi Dave,

The reunion in Charlotte was one of those "Heart Warming" moments you always
remember. There was somewhere around 300-400 guys there. It was like a big
family reunion, I got to meet a lot of people that I talk to on the networks
I belong to (VHFCN and Heli-vets, I'm on the first one). Seemed like no
matter what table or room I stopped at there was someone I knew. I met a
scout pilot and his gunner that discovered that they only live 8 miles apart
for 30 years and didn't know it. We laughed, we cried, and we promised to
meet again in Louisville, KY next year. The attendance was held down because
the VHPA was having thier's in DC on the 4th. Seems like that was the really
big show. They had over two thousand there and had a spot in the annual
parade. Complete with a flyby and the whole thing. There was some talk about
trying to combine them both at a common location next year.


I'm trying to get an album loaded into my FreeDrive, when that happens I'll
let you know. I think you can still see my files there. If not I'll take
care of that too.

Thanks for getting my email address straight, I'll get to the chat room some
night.

If your going to post this as a reunion report I have to add a few
lines.

The most important thing that happened at the reunion was this. I have
always felt the my greatest shame was not remembering the names that went
with the faces in my own photo album. On Friday night after the pool party,
Woody Hulsey and I sat down with his old address book and put a name with
every face. It removed a great weight from by shoulders. For the folks that
haven't been to one of these reunions, please take the time, spend the money
and go. We're losing people at an alarming rate, soon some of these people
won't be there to greet you. The cancer rate is frightening and we're not
getting any younger.

OK enough of this. I did get some pictures up on my FreeDrive, I think you
can still see them. If not I'm going to let Gary Bowman know and will put it
on the list for anyone that might be interested in a bunch of old gray
headed Helicopter Veterans.



Steve Plyman,
Life Member VHCMA
Lancer507 CE 71
Gomer50

 From the VHPA Reunion 

Sent in by Steve Crimm:

We recently completed the 17th Vietnam Helicopter Pilots reunion, held every
year over the 4 July week. This year the reunion was in DC and it was memorable. In great part because we had a wreath laying ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At that ceremony, Mr. Joe Galloway, author of "We Were Young Once, And Brave" honored us, and all helicopter pilots and crewmembers who flew in combat, with these words.

Remarks prepared for delivery Sunday July 2, 2000, 0905hrs. at VHPA
Memorial at The
 Wall:

Is there anyone here today who does not thrill to the sound of those Huey
blades?? That familiar whop-whop-whop is the soundtrack of our war......the
lullaby of our younger days. To someone who spent his time in Nam with the
grunts I have got to tell you that that noise was always a great comfort. It
meant someone was coming to help.....someone was coming to get our
wounded......someone was coming to bring us water and ammo......someone was
coming to take our dead brothers home.....someone was coming to give us a
ride out of hell. Even today when I hear it I stop.....catch my
breath.....and think back to those days......

I love you guys as only an Infantryman can love you. No matter how bad
things were....if we called you came. Down through the green tracers and
other visible signs of a real bad day off to a bad start. I would like to
quote to you from a letter Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote his friend
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War: "I knew wherever I was
that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come---if
alive." That was always in our minds and that is how we thought of you. To
us you seemed beyond brave and fearless.....that you would come to us in the
middle of battle in those flimsy thin-skinned crates.....and in the storm of
fire you would sit up there behind that plexiglass seeming so patient and so
calm and so vulnerable.....waiting for the off-loading and the on-loading.
We thought you were God's own lunatics.....and we loved you. Still do.

We are gathered here this morning to appreciate the lives and honor the
memory of 2,209 helicopter pilots and 2,704 helicopter crewmen who were
killed while doing their duty in the Republic of Vietnam between May 30,
1961, and May 15, 1975. Theirs are some of the names among the 58,220 on
this precious Wall. So many good men.....so many good friends.

Before I come here I always remind myself of what another good
friend...Captain B.T. Collins.... who is now gone....liked to say at
gatherings like this:

No whining and no crying! We are the fortunate ones! We survived.....when so
many better men gave up their precious lives for us. We owe them a sacred
debt.....to live each day to its fullest....trying to make this world a
better place for our having lived and their having died.

So we come here today to remember them.....and to celebrate their lives and
their deeds. I like to come here at dawn......or around midnight.......when
things are so quiet you can hear their voices. What they are saying.....when
you listen hard enough......is this: We are at peace; so should you
be.......so should you be.

I would like to close by reading you from something written by a World War I
poet named Lawrence Binyon:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them.....nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!

God bless all our absent friends......and God bless you.

 Remarks prepared for delivery Monday July 3, 2000, at the Vietnam
 Helicopter Pilots Association dinner and reunion in Washington, D.C.:

 Thank you Goldie for that introduction......and thanks to all of you for
 giving me the honor to speaking to you. I have got to tell you that
 looking out across this assemblage I must confess: I haven't seen this
 many bad boys collected in one location since the last time I visited
 Leavenworth Prison.

 When I first learned that I would be doing this gig I asked an aviator
 buddy of mine what else I needed to know......and he said, well, most of
 you would be bringing your wives along.......that half of you were so damn
 deaf that you couldn't hear a word of what I was saying.....the other half
 would be so damn drunk you couldn't understand what I was saying.....so I
 might just as well talk to the ladies......

 I have waited years to be able to share this story with so august a group
 of aviator veterans as this: A few years ago I was at a large official
 dinner and I was seated next to a nice lady who was the wife of a two-star
 general. I knew the lady had two college-age daughters and I also knew
 that one of them had been dating a Cavalry lieutenant.......so I thought
 to make some polite conversation and I offered her my condolences at her
 daughter's choice of companionship. "Oh No!" the general's wife said. "He
 is a fine young man. Nothing wrong with him......and at least he isn't a
 goddam aviator!"

 I just wanted you to know that your successors in the bizness continue to
 win friends and influence people in high places.

 Before I go along any further in this thing I need to ask you some
 questions:

 --Is there anyone here who flew with the 1st Cavalry Division? The 229th?
 The 227th? How about the old 119th out of Holloway? Any Marine pilots who
 flew them old CH-34 Shuddering Shithouses???
 Now I know I am among close friends......
 I know that old Ray Burns from Ganado, Texas, is here.....and I have got
 to tell you a story about me and Ray that goes back to October of 1965.
 Plei Me SF Camp was under siege by a regiment of North Vietnamese
 regulars. I was trying to get in there.....like a fool......but after an
 A1E and a B57 Canberra and one Huey had been shot down they declared it a
 No-Fly Zone. So I was stomping up and down the flight line at Holloway
 cussing......when I ran across Ray. He asked what the problem was and I
 told him. He allowed as
 how he had been wanting to get a look at that situation and would give me
 a ride......
 I still have a picture I shot out the open door of Ray's Huey. We are
 doing a kind of corkscrew descent and the triangular berms and wire of the
 camp below fill that doorway.....along with the puffs of smoke from the
 impacting mortar rounds inside the camp. Hell.....I can scare myself bad
 just looking at that photo.

 Well old Ray drops on in and I jump out....and the Yards boil out of the
 trenches and toss a bunch of wounded in the door and Ray is pulling
 pitch.....grinning......and giving me the bird. When the noise is gone
 this sergeant major runs up: Sir, I don't know who you are but Major
 Beckwith wants to see you right away. I ask which one is the major and I
 am informed he is the very big guy over there jumping up and down on his
 hat. I go over slowly. The dialogue goes something like this: Who the hell
 are you? A reporter. Son, I need everything in the goddam world from food
 and ammo to water....to medevac......to reinforcements.....and I wouldn't
 mind a bottle of Jim
 Beam.......but what I do not need is a goddam reporter. And what has the
 Army in its wisdom delivered to me? Well....I got news for you.....you
 ain't a reporter no more; you are my new corner machine gunner."

 Ray.....I want to thank you for that ride.......wasn't for you and Chuck
 Oualline I wouldn't have had half as much fun in Vietnam.

 Hell.....every story anyone has about Vietnam starts and ends with a
 helicopter......you guys were simply fantastic. Thank you all. Thank you
 for every thing....large and small.

 Now I guess I got to get down to bizness. All of you know that I have
 spent most of the last forty years hanging out with the Infantry.....a
 choice some folks view as perverse if not totally insane. But there was
 always method in my madness: With the Infantry things happen close enough
 that I can see what's happening.....and slowly enough most times that even
 I can understand what I'm seeing.

 There's just this one little downside to my long experience with the
 Infantry: During that time I have personally been
 bombed.....rocketed.....strafed.....and napalmed by the U.S. Air
 Force.....U.S. Navy......U.S. Marines.....and U.S. Army Aviation......as
 well as by the air forces of South Vietnam.....Laos......Sri
 Lanka......India......and Pakistan.

 Now I don't consider myself an inconsiderable target.....and wasn't even
 back when I could fit comfortably behind a palm tree......but here I
 am....running my mouth.....nothing hurt beyond my dignity. Don't get me
 wrong; I don't hold any grudges against those gallant winged warriors. But
 ever since the first time they attacked me and missed.....I have never
 ever used the words "surgical bombing strike" in any story I ever wrote.

 I had the chance to say some good things about all of you at the Memorial
 Service at The Wall on Sunday. I meant every word of that.....and more.
 You chopper guys were our heroes in Vietnam. You were our rides....but you
 were much much more than that. We were always either cussing you for
 hauling our butts into deep kimchi.....or ready to kiss you for hauling us
 out of it. I have a feeling that without you and your birds that would
 have been a much shorter and far more brutish war.

 You were our heroes, though, first last and always. You saved us from
 having to walk to work every day. You brought in our food and ammo and
 water.....and sometimes even a marmite can full of hot chow. To this day I
 think the finest meal I ever ate was a canteen cup full of hot split pea
 soup that a Huey delivered to a hilltop in the dry paddies of the Bong Son
 Plain in January of 1966. For a moment there I thought if the Army could
 get a hot meal out to an Infantry company on patrol maybe.....just
 maybe.....we could win the damn war. Oh well.

 I think often of all that you did for us.....all that you meant to us: You
 came for our wounded. You came to get our dead brothers. You came....when
 the fight was over.....to give us a ride home from hell. There isn't a
 former Grunt alive who doesn't freeze for a moment and feel the hair rise
 on the back of his neck when he hears the whup whup whup of those
 helicopter blades.

 What I want to say now is just between us.....because America still
 doesn't get it.....still doesn't know the truth, and the truth is: You are
 the cream of the crop of our generation.....the best and finest of an
 entire generation of Americans. You are the ones who answered when you
 were called to serve.....You are the ones who fought bravely and endured a
 terrible war in a terrible place. You are the ones for whom the words
 duty.....honor.....country have real meaning because you have lived those
 words and the meaning behind those words. You are my brothers in
 arms....and I am not ashamed to say that I love you. I would not trade one
 of you for a whole trainload of instant Canadians.....or a whole boatload
 of Rhodes Scholars bound for England......or a whole campus full of guys
 who turned up for their draft physicals wearing panty hose.

 On behalf of a country that too easily forgets the true cost of
 war.....and who pays that price....I say Thank you for your service! On
 behalf of the people of our country who didn't have good sense enough to
 separate the war they hated from the young warriors they sent to fight
 that war.....I say we are sorry. We owe you all a very large
 apology.....and a debt of gratitude that we can never adequately repay.
 For myself and all my buddies in the Infantry I say: Thanks for all the
 rides in and out....especially the rides out.

 It is great to see you all gathered here for this reunion. A friend of
 mine, Mike Norman, a former Marine grunt....wrote a wonderful book called
 These Good Men about his quest to find and reunite with all the survivors
 of his platoon from Vietnam. He thought long and deep about why we gather
 as we have done this evening and he explained it thusly:

 I now know why men who have been to war yearn to reunite. Not to tell
 stories or look at old pictures. Not to laugh or weep. Comrades gather
 because they long to be with the men who once acted their best.....men who
 suffered and sacrificed.....who were stripped raw......right down to their
 humanity.

 I did not pick these men. They were delivered by fate and the military.
 But I know them in a way I know no other men. I have never given anyone
 such trust. They were willing to guard something more precious than my
 life. They would have carried my reputation.....the memory of me. It was
 part of the bargain we all made.....the reason we were so willing to die
 for one another.

 As long as I have memory I will think of them all.....every day. I am sure
 that when I leave this world....my last thought will be of my family and
 my comrades.......such good men.

 I'm going to shut up now and let us all get down to the real business of
 drinking and lying.....er.....telling war stories.

 Thank you. I salute you. I remember you. I will teach my sons the stories
 and legends about you. And I will warn my daughters never ever to go out
 with aviators......
 Good evening. God bless......


And some pictures from Andy Archer:

Explanation: The City of Washington DC asked the group to be in the 4th of July Parade down Constitution Ave. They allow 250 members of a group to be part of their parade. When told we are about 1500 and wanted all to march, they allow us to. 2500 members. friends, wives and kids marched that day behind the banner. It was a good parade.

 Report of the 101st Association Reunion 

Well another reunion of the 101^st Airborne Association has come and gone. It was great to see so many of the Lancers in attendance this year. Most of our group set up camp at the Econo Lodge in Hopkinsville, KY where we did the majority of our visiting and swapping our TINS stories. Those present for the reunion were:

Russ and Dorothy Balisok

Dan and Cheryl Busby

Dan Bush

Paul and Margaret Cole

Randy Gilliam

Tom and Judi McGee

Mike(Ben) and Judy Monroe

David Mussey

Paul and Dot Phillips

Paul and Barbara Rosenbaum and Daughter

Ken Webb and Dad

Gary and Kathy Whitty

And

Steve Smith a Redskin Brother .

The one sad note of our reunion was the early departure of the Busby family due to the passing of Danny’s mother. Our hearts go out to them in their time of sorrow and may God bless them.

I cannot begin to express the feelings and good time that we all had at the reunion. The Association went all out to make our stay there as good as possible. As with all large group meetings there were some bugs in the organization but they pale compared to the time we all had together. And the active division put on a good show for all as well. It was a pleasure to meet and talk with many of the Division’s new young troops. There was a good exchange of stories and experiences shared amongst both generations of 101^st soldiers.

Two aircraft bird tail numbers saw their full permanent crews present. Bird 645's crew of Russ Balisok AC, Paul Phillips CE and Benny Monroe DG had made their first visit in 31 years. And my bird 653 got Randy Gilliam DG and me CE together with Tom McGee AC after the same period. For Randy and me it was a special occasion as we have been in contact over the past nine years already.

For those who don’t know, Benny Monroe started with the Lancers in 1969 as a door gunner and them moved on to become a crew chief when he extended in Vietnam. Garry Whitty is one of the AC’s that Benny crewed for. Benny was a Lancer for two years.

While the 1969 year group was well represented, others from 1970 and 1971 were there also seeing old friends from their time period. And we all made many new friends of Lancer brothers who had served different tours. It was a great personal pleasure to meet those Lancers that I had not served with before, although I feel as I’ve known everyone for a long time. The Lancer Listbot has given me the opportunity to get to know all who are connected and has enabled me to forge many new friendships. Guys like Paul Cole, Paul Rosenbaum, Ken Webb, Gary Whitty, Steve Smith and Dan Bush who I’ve had email communications, in the past, but have never met I could finally put faces to their names. It would be great to put more faces to all the other names that I know. I hope to see many more of you at future reunions of the 101^st Association. Next year’s reunion will be held in San Antonio, TX, keep your eye on the web site for updates about that reunion.

And of course, I can not leave out the Ladies. Many Lancer wives attended the reunion with their husbands and it was an extreme pleasure for me to meet them all. I wish to express a special thank you to all the Ladies for the support they have given to their husbands and the Lancer Group. Ladies, you are all a special group and have very fortunate husbands and families. Thank you again from all of the Lancers.

Here are some of the photos I took during the reunion:

(Left click on images for full view)

Around the Lancer AO in Hopkinsville

Paul and Dot Phillips sitting with Randy Gilliam	Paul and Barbara Rosenbaum (L), Mike and Judi Monroe (R)	Gary Whitty and Margaret Cole	Paul and Dot Phillips with Steve Smith	Paul Cole and Mike Monroe	Our friends from the 3/187th Inf Tom McGall (L) and Mike Rocklen (R)

At the WK&T Chapter BBQ

Unit Dinner Night

(We were invited to join 2/17th Cav at Logan's Restaurant)

Dot and Paul Phillips	Mike and Judi Monroe	Steve Smith and Paul Rosenbaum	Barbara and Reyna Rosenbaum	Tom and Judi McGee	Russ and Dorothy Balisok

At the 101st Association Memorial Dinner

Judi and Tom McGee	Paul and Dot Phillips	Gary and Kathy Whitty	Steve Smith, Gary Whitty and David Mussey	Russ and Dorothy Balisok	Barbara, Paul and Reyna Rosenbaum

We also had a small Lancer meeting to discuss some issues and projects. More of that will appear in the Newsletter. A special thank you to Curtis Smith for the use of his large Lancer Logo sign of which we used to mark the Lancer AO during the reunion. And thanks to Gary Whitty for the Lancer calling cards and Lancer picture CD. As well, thanks to Ken Webb for his pictures. Most of all, a big THANK YOU to all the Lancers who could and did make the reunion.

Again, hope to see many more of you next year in San Antonio.

God Bless and best to all,

David Mussey

Lancer 653 CE

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