Helicopter Tour Quotes

Excellence in Western Fiction, is a member of the American Writers Hall of Fame and is a Pulitzer Prize nominee.   Vaughn is also a retired army officer, helicopter pilot with three tours in Vietnam. And received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart, The Bronze Star with three

One of Ronald Reagan’s fantasies as president was that he would take Mikhail Gorbachev on a tour of the United States so the Soviet leader could see how ordinary Americans lived. Reagan often talked about it. He imagined that he and Gorbachev would fly by helicopter over a working-class community, viewing a factory and its parking lot filled with cars and then circling over the pleasant neighborhood where the factory workers lived in homes “with lawns and backyards, perhaps with a second car or a boat in the driveway, not the concrete rabbit warrens I’d seen in Moscow.” The helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents “what they think of our system.” The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.

And then I see it. Azure Helicopter Tours. I drag Toraf to the landing pad. “What is that?” he asks suspiciously. “Um. It’s a helicopter.” “What does it do? Triton’s trident, it doesn’t fly does it? Emma? Emma wait!” He catches up to me and burps right in my ear. “Stop being a jerkface,” I tell him. “Whatever that is. You don’t care about me at all, do you?” “You came to me, remember? This is me helping you. Now be quiet while I buy tickets.” It’s a private ride, no other passengers to worry about. Plus, we’re not stealing anything. The helicopter can return to land with its pilot as soon as we’re done with our part of the mission. “Why do we need to fly? The water is right there.” He points to it longingly. I almost feel bad for him. Almost. But I don’t have time for pity. “Because I think these helicopters can still cover more distance faster than you can haul me. I’m trying to make up for all the time we spent at security in LAX.” “Humans are so weird,” he mutters again as I walk away. “You do everything backward.” Since this is a sightseeing flight, the pilot, Dan, a thick Hawaiian man with an even thicker accent, takes his time pointing out all the usual tourist stuff, like the fishing industry, the history of the coast, and other things I have no interest in at the moment. The view of the blue water and visible reefs, the chain of islands, and the rich culture would be breathtaking if I weren’t preoccupied with crashing a Syrena get-together. I can imagine spending time with Galen here. Exploring the reefs like no human could, playing with the tropical fish, and making Galen wear a lei. But I need to stay focused if I ever want a chance to do it.

The first time he’d cut off ears because he was there and it was being done, but that was it. He wasn’t one of those who once they were in all that lawlessness couldn’t wait to get going, the ones who weren’t too well put together or were pretty aggressive to start off with and only needed the slightest opportunity to go ape-shit. One guy in his unit, guy they called Big Man, he wasn’t there one or two days when he’d slashed some pregnant woman’s belly open. Farley was himself only beginning to get good at it at the end of his first tour. But the second time, in this unit where there are a lot of other guys who’d also come back and who hadn’t come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks, this second time, in with these guys who are always looking to be put out in front, ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives, he is ape-shit too. In a firefight, running from danger, blasting with guns, you can’t not be frightened, but you can go berserk and get the rush, and so the second time he goes berserk. The second time he fucking wreaks havoc. Living right out there on the edge, full throttle, the excitement and the fear, and there’s nothing in civilian life that can match it. Door gunning. They’re losing helicopters and they need door gunners. They ask at some point for door gunners and he jumps at it, he volunteers. Up there above the action, and everything looks small from above, and he just guns down huge. Whatever moves. Death and destruction, that is what door gunning is all about. With the added attraction that you don’t have to be down in the jungle the whole time. But then he comes home and it’s not better than the first time, it’s worse. Not like the guys in World War II: they had the ship, they got to relax, someone took care of them, asked them how they were. There’s no transition. One day he’s door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking, hears the cries, sees whole villages going up in flames, and the next day he’s back in the Berkshires. And now he really doesn’t belong, and, besides, he’s got fears now about things going over his head. He doesn’t want to be around other people, he can’t laugh or joke, he feels that he is no longer a part of their world, that he has seen and done things so outside what these people know about that he cannot connect to them and they cannot connect to him. They told him he could go home? How could he go home?

The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company) - Clip This Article on Location 970 | Added on Sunday, September 21, 2014 10:35:40 AM Many Veterans Adapt to a Strange World, One With Walls By DAVE PHILIPPS LOS ANGELES — For 30 years after Vietnam, Art Harmon’s address was a dry wash under the 210 freeway, where he tried to forget his tour as a 19-year-old helicopter gunner. “I couldn’t be around human beings anymore,” he said. “I didn’t feel at home anywhere.” Today Mr. Harmon has a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Sun Valley, thanks to what is being described as the largest campaign in history to stamp out homelessness among military veterans, who have constituted as much as a quarter of the nation’s homeless population. Since 2010, the Obama administration has spent $4 billion hiring thousands of staff workers, expanding social services and medical programs, and renting thousands of apartments, seeking to fulfill a pledge by Eric Shinseki, the former secretary of Veterans Affairs, to end veterans’ homelessness by the end

At some point during a celebrity tour of the ice fields, or first-growth forest — lately, the Amazon — he always phoned Holly in an agony of scab-picking, telling her that a respectable media would cover an issue on its merits, not because some overwrought self-involved actress had helicoptered in and aimed her affectations at the camera.

1Lt Charles Matteffs, platoon leader first platoon C/1-61. He was instrumental in keeping alive the 22 survivors of his trapped platoon and several helicopter crews on 12 Nov 1969 until they were rescued in the wee hours of 13 Nov 1969 by Captain Blunt and a volunteer patrol in Starr Valley. Also later in his tour, he became Scout Platoon Leader of 1-61 (courtesy Charles Matteffs).

this act is engraved in my mind deeper than any other experience in my two tours in Vietnam. A huge black enlisted man, clad only in shorts and boots, hands bigger than dinner plates, reached into my helicopter to pick up one of the dead white soldiers. He had tears streaming down his face and he tenderly cradled that dead soldier to his chest as he walked slowly from the aircraft to the medical station.

Lerner had never been happy with the 1951 stage show, his and Loewe’s entry between Brigadoon and My Fair Lady. He revised it a bit for the national tour, and now decided to give it a completely different storyline and some new numbers to match. The results might, at least, have been a bargain, as the whole thing takes place in and around a single spot, a gold-rush town in more or less everyday (if period) clothes. As opposed to the castles in Spain where Camelot did much of its filming, not to mention the gargoyles and falconry. However, anticipating the disaster-film cycle, Lerner wanted Paint Your Wagon’s mining town (“No-Name City. Population: Male”) to sink into the earth in a catastrophe finale. Worse, production built the place from scratch in the wilds of Oregon, with no nearby living quarters for cast and crew; they had to be trucked and helicoptered in and out each day in a long and pricey commute, greatly protracting the shooting schedule. Back as director again after Camelot, Joshua Logan fretted about all this, but Lerner didn’t care how much of Paramount’s money he spent. He even hired Camelot’s spendthrift designer, John Truscott. In the end, it would appear that no one knows exactly how much Paint Your Wagon cost, but there is no doubt that it lost a vast fortune. It deserved to. Cynically, Lerner took note of changing times and filled the film with a “youth now!” attitude and sexual freedom—refreshing if they didn’t feel so commercially opportunistic. But after all, Hair (1967) had happened. Was Broadway urging Hollywood to go hippie, too, or would Lerner have done this anyway?

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