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Experiences of a 68th AHC Pilot

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The Introduction

by Kathy Hufford

My name is Kathy Hufford and I am a rising senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last fall, I enrolled in a course dealing with the connections between poetry and photography. As a final project, our professor asked us to design a photography archive to make the other students think, to send a message, and to represent every angle of the topic we chose. I took the opportunity to examine my father’s experience as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam , something I had always been intensely curious about but was not discussed much in depth in our household. I was very proud of the completed project, a book of photos and quotes from my father (the introduction follows), and the effect it had on the other students in my class. They asked me questions and seemed genuinely interested… one guy even read through the entire book, reacting to each story and asking me about them later. I decided to present the project to my father as a Christmas present to show my great respect for his experience. I hope you may enjoy and learn from a glimpse into the life of a young helicopter pilot’s life in Vietnam .

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There are countless archives of the Vietnam War. Some focus on the many atrocities performed by all countries involved, others on the effect the war had on civilians, and still others on the anti-war movement here in the United States . For my final project, I decided to put together an archive dealing with the American soldier’s experience in Vietnam . The focus of my archive dealt generally with the experience of the helicopter pilot in this time period and specifically with the experiences my own father had in Vietnam . Many Vietnam veterans, my father included, share a common bond that can never fully be explained to civilians or even their own family members. This project is in part my attempt to understand the person my father was during that time period and how the events shaped the man I know today as well as my own life and personality. The format of the archive is a set of photos taken from my father’s first tour to Vietnam during 1967 and 1968 and quotes from my father grouped together as both a book and a Power Point presentation.

When I told my father what I had decided to do for my final project, he gave me a list of books to read, and specifically said that I must read We Were Soldiers Once... and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway. As soon as I started to read the book, I realized it was something special and a segment from the prologue jumped out at me and became the basis of my presentation and the quotes given to me by my father. Moore writes:

In time our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices discounted, and both our sanity and out suitability for life in polite American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and ribbons.

We rebuilt our lives, found jobs or professions, married, raised families, and waited patiently for America to come to its senses. As the years passed we searched each other out and found that the half- remembered pride of service was shared by those who had shared everything else with us. With them, and only with them, could we talk about what had really happened over there—what we had seen, what we had done, what we had survived.

We knew what Vietnam had been like, and how we looked and acted and talked and smelled. No one in America did. Hollywood got it wrong every damned time, whetting twisted political knives on the bones of our dead brothers.

So once, just this once: This is how it all began, what it was really like, what it meant to us, and what we meant to each other...

There has always been a large gap between the man I know as my father and the man that he was during Vietnam . It is a time that he rarely speaks about, unless to relate a comical story when his old Army buddies are over for dinner. This project enabled me to look into his photography collection, and through the use of his quotes, his own memories, of that time and discover just what that man I never met was like.

I decided to put this archive together in the form of a book of photographs and quotes. I printed out the photographs I picked from my father’s collection on their own sheets of paper, as large as possible. The only corrections I made to these photos were some standard cleaning and removal of dust spots. My father looked at each photograph I picked and wrote a couple of corresponding paragraphs. In these paragraphs, my father rambles, uses some strong language, and puts together some of the worst grammatical structures I’ve ever seen. (This is just how my father is... he was never a very good English language student). I edited these paragraphs very slightly for grammar. I wanted to leave the language, leave the politically incorrect opinions, and leave everything that makes my father my father. I began the book with a picture of my father when he was very young. I wanted my audience to see my father as he was before he went off to war and was forever changed. I ended this book of sorts with my favorite photograph of my father: he sits in the pilot’s seat of a Huey gunship, with the gun sight pulled down close to his eyes, looks over to his side and glances at the camera just like “John Wayne in a flight suit,” as he would say. This photo shows my father in the midst of war and change. The last words of the book belong to a poem I wrote about this photograph as I went off to college. In my first room away from home, this photo sat on my window ledge and in a way, kept me safe. The poem talks about the man in this photograph, who suffered a death of a sorts, because I met the man that my father became when he returned from his two tours in Vietnam, not the young kid that went off to face some of life’s most evil challenges.

I chose to order the photographs and the corresponding quotes from my father chronologically. This method remains the most true to his experience and the situation. I chose the pictures that represented the broadest span of my father’s experience in Vietnam : the pictures he took of Vietnamese children, of Vietnamese POWs, of pilots eating C-rations, of landing zones, of his hooch, of his side-arms, and of the beautiful countryside. He had several pictures of an USO show and his R&R trip to Tokyo , but I felt that these photographs did not represent Vietnam specifically. These events were breaks from the daily grind and experience in Vietnam . I also used a collection of photographs taken by Larry Burrows, probably the most amazing photo-journalist of the Vietnam era, as inspiration. In fact, many of my father’s photographs corresponded to photographs Burrows also took. This shows how universal some of the experiences of the U.S. soldiers were in country. I am extremely proud of the photo archive I have put together. The choice of photographs and quotes from my father show the good parts about him and the bad parts about him. What went right with our soldiers in Vietnam and what went wrong. They show the atrocities both sides committed and the beauty of the country. There are few issues as complex as the war in Vietnam . I feel that people my age are best shown the facts by showing them photographs and eyewitness accounts. After that, they can make up their own minds about what happened. I hope I have made my father proud as well. I hope I have not done what Hollywood has done. I believe I have set out as much of the truth as possible for my peers to view… and that is the best I can do.

Bibliography of Research and Presentation Materials:

--photographs and quotes from my father, Col. Kent V. Hufford (Ret.).

-- Were Soldiers Once... and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway, on the subject of combat in Vietnam (I would highly recommend students in the class read this if they have any free time).

-- Chickenhawk by Robert Mason, on the subject of the helicopter pilot in Vietnam .

-- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, on the subject of how America became involved in Vietnam and the early policies of the American government regarding the war in Vietnam .

- Larry Burrows: Vietnam with an introduction by David Halberstam, photo archive of the pictures Larry Burrows took in Vietnam , arguably the best photos taken of the situation in that country.

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Author Kathy Hufford. Copyright © 2004 68thahc.com. All rights reserved. Revised: June 29, 2012 .

Author Kathy Hufford.
Copyright © 2004 68thahc.com. All rights reserved.
Revised: June 29, 2012 .