‘Moments of sheer terror’

SOAP LAKE — War is hell, it’s often said, and soldiers who get hurt or killed in action are rightly honored for their courage and sacrifice. But recently the U.S. Congress honored another group whose courage sometimes goes unnoticed. 

Operation Dustoff, the collective name for the medical teams who evacuated the wounded from the battlefields of Vietnam in helicopters, was honored in September with the Congressional Gold Medal. One of those men was Glenn Knight, who now lives in the Lakewood area of Soap Lake. 

“A Dustoff crew was made up of two pilots, a crew chief and a medic,” Knight said. “I was a medic.” 

When he was called up, Knight said, his father, who had been a medic in World War II, had some sage advice for him. 

“Son, in this man’s army, there’s one thing you don’t want to be, and that’s a medic,” Knight’s dad told him. 

“Well, when you’re drafted, you don’t get to choose,” Knight went on. “They give you a battery of tests and say ‘This is what you’re gong to be.’” 

Knight trained in North Carolina for about three months, he said, and then he and five other young men were picked out of a line and sent off to Vietnam. 

“Our commanding officer had been a Dustoff pilot in Vietnam before,” Knight said. “When he described our work, he said it would be hours and hours of routine flying with moments of sheer terror. And that was not a bad description.” 

Knight was stationed from 1968 to 1969 at Chu Lai, on the Vietnamese coast just south of Da Nang.  

“Our detachment had six helicopters, and they require so much maintenance that usually there were only four that were flyable,” Knight said. “So we would get a call, and we would fly out to pick up the wounded. Sometimes there was no more combat going on and sometimes there was obvious combat going on. But our philosophy was, if men on the ground were willing to get up and help load the helicopter, we were willing to fly in.” 

The Dustoff crews’ danger was nothing to sneeze at. Helicopter evacuation was a fairly new thing during the Vietnam War, according to the Congressional resolution awarding the medal. Dustoff crews had about an hour in which to get a patient from the field into surgery, so they had to get in, land, load up and get out fast. Many battles in Vietnam were fought at night, and in mountainous terrain, so the pilots had to find a landing spot in total darkness on uneven ground, all while being shot at. Dustoff aircraft were shot down more than three times as often as other military craft, and a member of a Dustoff crew had a one-in-three chance of being wounded or killed.  

“I was one of the fortunate ones,” Knight said. “The Huey helicopter was an incredible thing. It could fly when people would say there’s no way you should be flying. We would occasionally come back from a mission and find the helicopter so shot up that it couldn’t be flown any longer and had to go down for maintenance.” 

Knight estimated that he flew about 600 missions in the 10 1/2 months he was in Vietnam. All told, Dustoff crews evacuated over 900,000 wounded American and Allied soldiers, civilians and the occasional enemy soldier. 

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor Congress can give, according to the House of Representatives Archives. Congress is honoring the Dustoff crews with it rather than a military medal because all the former Dustoff soldiers are civilians now, Knight explained. The medal dates back to the American Revolution, according to the archive; its first recipient was George Washington. To date, 186 Congressional Gold Medals have been awarded. As honorees, Knight and his fellow Dustoff soldiers join such august company as John Paul Jones, Ulysses S. Grant, Charles Lindbergh, St. Theresa of Calcutta and the officers and men of the Byrd Antarctic expedition. 

One gold medal will be cast and put on display at Fort Sam Houston, which is the home of medic training for the Army, Knight said. It’s still in the design phase and should be ready in 12-15 months, he said. Additional bronze copies will be available for the Dustoff veterans to purchase. 

After he got out of the Army, Knight went to work as an orderly in an operating room, then trained as a surgical technician, and finally became a physician’s assistant. He retired after 20 years as a PA, a much less harrowing career than the one he started with in 1968. 

“(Operation Dustoff) was the most dangerous, and most fulfilling, job I ever had,” he said. 

    A young Glenn Knight serving as a medic aboard an Operation Dustoff helicopter. Knight flew about 600 missions over Vietnam, rescuing wounded soldiers.