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The information below was taken from a site from the Air Force wrote in honor of Bill Pitsenbarger who gave his all
for us as we battled that tremendous battle called "Operation Abilene" during Easter, April 10, 11 & 12, 1966 in
South Vietnam. You’re with God bro. Written by Master Sgt. Pat McKenna.
Flying on almost 300 rescue missions in Vietnam, Airman 1st Class Bill Pitsenbarger flirted with death almost daily
during the war, cheating the Grim Reaper more times than Evil Knievel. The 21-year-old Air Force pararescueman
had ducked barrages of bullets and flurries of flak more times than he cared to remember while spiriting to safety
downed airmen and wounded soldiers. More than a few GIs owed their very lives to the man friends called “Pits.
�
Despite the danger, Pitsenbarger loved the Air Force and his job, which was to save lives. His commander, Maj.
Maurice Kessler, called him “One of a special breed. Alert and always ready to go on any mission.� Another
rescue pilot, Capt. Dale Potter, said Pits was a “young eager kid who was always ready to go, and always
willing to get into the thick of the action where he could be the most useful.�
Pitsenbarger’s parents, William and Irene, noticed Bill had a voracious appetite for adventure at a young age.
When Bill played “Follow the Leader,� he’d dare his playmates to catch him as he tiptoed around the
ledges of the highest building or scrambled up the tallest tree in his neighborhood in Piqua, Ohio, a wide place in
the road near Dayton.
“Nothing scared him,� his father said, “not even Vietnam.� When Bill was a junior in high school, he
tried to enlist in the Army as a Green Beret, but his parents refused to give their permission. Then, after he
graduated from high school, an Air Force recruiter turned Pitsenbarger’s ear, and on New Year’s Eve 1962,
the young stock boy at the local Kroger’s supermarket was on a train bound for San Antonio and Air Force boot
camp.
“He didn’t tell us he was leaving until that night. But what can you do?� William said. “At least he
knew what he wanted to do.� After completing pararescue training, which was barely four months long in the
early 1960s, Bill returned home a changed man. He seemed more confident, more self-assured.
“I could tell he was different. He wasn’t a kid anymore,� William said. “He thought he could do
anything, anytime, anywhere if he only put his mind to it. And I never really worried about what he did until he went to
Vietnam. I told Bill it’d kill his mother if she found out, so I didn’t tell her for the longest time.� Bill
received orders in 1965 to report to Detachment 6, 38th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron at Bien Hoa Air Base
near Saigon. His unit was composed of five aircrews that flew three HH-43F Kaman Huskie helicopters, which had
twin rotors that made it look like an upside-down eggbeater.
With his unassuming and fun-loving personality, the tall, lanky lad from Ohio quickly became one of the most
popular guys on base. After duty hours, Pitsenbarger didn’t hole up in his hooch or drink his sorrows away in
the club. Instead, he spent his spare time honing his medical skills in the 93rd MASH hospital’s emergency
room.
“Bill never complained and never wrote a word about the conditions, but I know it must’ve been miserable
over there,� William said. “As far as he was concerned, he was having a good time.�
On March 7, 1966, Pitsenbarger’s crew dusted off to rescue a South Vietnamese soldier who lost his foot in an
old minefield. Nobody could figure out how to extract the wounded soldier without tripping the unstable mines. Pits
piped up, saying, “No problem, just lower me down on the penetrator, I’ll straddle the guy, pick him up, and
then you can lift me up.�
Simple, right? But everybody, including Pitsenbarger, knew the helicopter’s violent prop wash could trigger the
mines, setting them off like tumbling dominoes, but Bill remained resolute. And he was successful. For his
courage, Pitsenbarger earned the Airman’s Medal that day as well as Vietnam’s Medal of Military Merit and
the Gallantry Cross with Bronze Palm.
“We often argued about who’d ‘go in’ on missions like this. All of us PJs had a strong desire to save
lives … that’s what we lived for. But Bill had a triple dose of that,� said now retired Chief Master Sgt. Dave
Milsten, who was the ranking pararescueman in Bill’s unit.
A little more than a month later, on April 11 at 3:07 p.m., the Joint Rescue Center dispatched two Huskies from
Detachment 6 to extract a half-dozen or more Army casualties pinned down in a battle near Cam My, a few miles
east of Saigon. Within a half-hour, “Pedro 97,� a crew of four, including then-Staff Sgt. Milsten, and “Pedro
73,� with Pitsenbarger aboard, arrived on scene. Purple smoke swirled up from a sea of lush green jungle
marking the extraction point. The choppers came into a hover over a hole in the triple-canopy jungle with trees
reaching up to 150-feet high.
Below, a fierce firestorm raged. More than 400 battle-hardened Vietcong regulars had their teeth into less than 150
troopers from the 1st U.S. Infantry Division, Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment’s Charlie Company. The
soldiers from the famed “Big Red One� had circled the wagons as the enemy surrounded them and blitzed
them from all sides.
With no room to land, the choppers lowered their 210-foot long hoists into the thick of it to extract the wounded. The
two helicopters whisked off three casualties to a field hospital at Binh Ba about 8 miles away from the fighting.
While Milsten’s Pedro 97 refueled on the ground, Pedro 73 returned to the battle zone.
Looking down, Pitsenbarger could see the soldiers struggling with the winch line and having trouble loading the
wounded on the Stokes litter, a wire-mesh stretcher. He volunteered to go down and help and the pilot reluctantly
consented. On Pitsenbarger’s descent, a chorus of crisscrossing bullets sang in the air.
First Lt. Johnny Libs, a Charlie Company platoon leader, told his machine gunner that the “guy coming out of the
helicopter from above, in an Air Force uniform, must be out of his mind to leave his not-so-safe helicopter for the
inferno on the ground.�
Said Libs, “We were in the fight of our lives, and I just couldn’t understand why anybody would put himself in
this grave danger if he didn’t have to.� On the ground, Pitsenbarger treated and prepped the wounded for
evacuation, and instructed others on how to load the casualties on the litter. The airman had managed to get six
more soldiers to safety when Pedro 73 took a dozen .30 caliber rounds, one of which hit the fuel valve, jamming the
throttle wide open. With the engine screaming on max power, the helicopter lurched out of the jungle and the pilot
made a high-speed, running landing at Binh Ba.
But Pitsenbarger remained behind. With heavy mortar and small-arms fire, the helicopters couldn’t return to
rescue the rescuer.
“He knew the score pretty well, and he’d been fired at quite a bit before,� said then Airman 1st Class
Harry O’Beirne, a pararescueman born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. “He knew the chance he was taking,
and it wasn’t a case of going in there blindly.�
The enemy had a stranglehold on Charlie Company, and slowly began tightening the noose. For the next hour and
a half, Pitsenbarger attended to wounded soldiers, hacking splints out of snarled vines, building improvised
stretchers out of saplings, and even climbing a tree to retrieve the Stokes litter that Pedro 73 jettisoned after it was
hit. Throughout this time, Pitsenbarger dodged a downpour of lead raining on the jungle.
Many of the young soldiers quickly squandered their ammo, firing wildly on full-automatic and raking shadows in the
jungle. Pitsenbarger scrambled around the injured and dead, collecting their weapons and ammunition and then
redistributing them to men still able to fight.
Army 1st Lt. Martin Kroah, a squad leader, said, “At times, the small arms fire would be so intense that it was
deafening, and all a person could do was get as close to the ground as possible and pray. It was on those
occasions I saw Airman Pitsenbarger moving around and pulling wounded men out of the line of fire and then
bandaging their wounds. My own platoon medic, who was later killed, was totally ineffective. He was frozen with
fear, unable to move. The firing was so intense that a fire team leader in my platoon curled up in a fetal position and
sobbed uncontrollably. He had been in combat in both World War II and Korea.�
Another soldier, Sgt. Fred C. Navarro, a squad leader, saw Pitsenbarger take cover beside him and selectively
return fire. After 15 minutes, the soldier heard his rifle go silent. Before even looking, Navarro knew the airman was
dead. Of the original 134 men in Charlie Company, 106 either were killed or wounded in action.
“It is not very often when a ‘grunt’ infantryman goes outside his circle to welcome an outsider, but Bill is
one of us,� Libs said. “I felt at the time, and still do, that Bill Pitsenbarger is one of the bravest men I have
ever known.�
The following morning, O’Beirne arrived to pull out the wounded and discovered a bloodbath. To reach the
casualties, he had to step over his fallen countrymen. An Army captain approached him and said, “I’m sorry
about your buddy. He’s over there.� Bill, his best friend and the guy who slept in the bunk underneath him,
had been shot four times, a rifle clutched in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
“A poncho was covering Pits, and I remember getting very angry, just mad as hell,� said O’Beirne, who is
now a retired Army lieutenant colonel. “Then I got called out on another mission and didn’t have time to
grieve. But back at the unit, Bill’s death was a real kick in the head. Pits’ death made us realize we werenâ
€™t invincible.â€�
Although Pitsenbarger didn’t escape that hellhole alive, nine other men did, thanks to the courage and devotion
to duty of a 21-year-old airman, a former supermarket stock boy from Piqua, Ohio. For his bravery, the Air Force
awarded Bill Pitsenbarger its second highest award - the Air Force Cross, becoming the first enlisted airman to
receive the medal.
“Bill was an ordinary guy with extraordinary courage and determination,� said William, his father. “I’m
very proud of him. And I’d like to think if you took any PJ in the Air Force and put him in the same situation, theyâ
€™d do the same thing. They’re special people.â€� And they live by a special code, one that often demands
they risk everything, pledging “These Things We Do That Others May Live.�
for us as we battled that tremendous battle called "Operation Abilene" during Easter, April 10, 11 & 12, 1966 in
South Vietnam. You’re with God bro. Written by Master Sgt. Pat McKenna.
Flying on almost 300 rescue missions in Vietnam, Airman 1st Class Bill Pitsenbarger flirted with death almost daily
during the war, cheating the Grim Reaper more times than Evil Knievel. The 21-year-old Air Force pararescueman
had ducked barrages of bullets and flurries of flak more times than he cared to remember while spiriting to safety
downed airmen and wounded soldiers. More than a few GIs owed their very lives to the man friends called “Pits.
�
Despite the danger, Pitsenbarger loved the Air Force and his job, which was to save lives. His commander, Maj.
Maurice Kessler, called him “One of a special breed. Alert and always ready to go on any mission.� Another
rescue pilot, Capt. Dale Potter, said Pits was a “young eager kid who was always ready to go, and always
willing to get into the thick of the action where he could be the most useful.�
Pitsenbarger’s parents, William and Irene, noticed Bill had a voracious appetite for adventure at a young age.
When Bill played “Follow the Leader,� he’d dare his playmates to catch him as he tiptoed around the
ledges of the highest building or scrambled up the tallest tree in his neighborhood in Piqua, Ohio, a wide place in
the road near Dayton.
“Nothing scared him,� his father said, “not even Vietnam.� When Bill was a junior in high school, he
tried to enlist in the Army as a Green Beret, but his parents refused to give their permission. Then, after he
graduated from high school, an Air Force recruiter turned Pitsenbarger’s ear, and on New Year’s Eve 1962,
the young stock boy at the local Kroger’s supermarket was on a train bound for San Antonio and Air Force boot
camp.
“He didn’t tell us he was leaving until that night. But what can you do?� William said. “At least he
knew what he wanted to do.� After completing pararescue training, which was barely four months long in the
early 1960s, Bill returned home a changed man. He seemed more confident, more self-assured.
“I could tell he was different. He wasn’t a kid anymore,� William said. “He thought he could do
anything, anytime, anywhere if he only put his mind to it. And I never really worried about what he did until he went to
Vietnam. I told Bill it’d kill his mother if she found out, so I didn’t tell her for the longest time.� Bill
received orders in 1965 to report to Detachment 6, 38th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron at Bien Hoa Air Base
near Saigon. His unit was composed of five aircrews that flew three HH-43F Kaman Huskie helicopters, which had
twin rotors that made it look like an upside-down eggbeater.
With his unassuming and fun-loving personality, the tall, lanky lad from Ohio quickly became one of the most
popular guys on base. After duty hours, Pitsenbarger didn’t hole up in his hooch or drink his sorrows away in
the club. Instead, he spent his spare time honing his medical skills in the 93rd MASH hospital’s emergency
room.
“Bill never complained and never wrote a word about the conditions, but I know it must’ve been miserable
over there,� William said. “As far as he was concerned, he was having a good time.�
On March 7, 1966, Pitsenbarger’s crew dusted off to rescue a South Vietnamese soldier who lost his foot in an
old minefield. Nobody could figure out how to extract the wounded soldier without tripping the unstable mines. Pits
piped up, saying, “No problem, just lower me down on the penetrator, I’ll straddle the guy, pick him up, and
then you can lift me up.�
Simple, right? But everybody, including Pitsenbarger, knew the helicopter’s violent prop wash could trigger the
mines, setting them off like tumbling dominoes, but Bill remained resolute. And he was successful. For his
courage, Pitsenbarger earned the Airman’s Medal that day as well as Vietnam’s Medal of Military Merit and
the Gallantry Cross with Bronze Palm.
“We often argued about who’d ‘go in’ on missions like this. All of us PJs had a strong desire to save
lives … that’s what we lived for. But Bill had a triple dose of that,� said now retired Chief Master Sgt. Dave
Milsten, who was the ranking pararescueman in Bill’s unit.
A little more than a month later, on April 11 at 3:07 p.m., the Joint Rescue Center dispatched two Huskies from
Detachment 6 to extract a half-dozen or more Army casualties pinned down in a battle near Cam My, a few miles
east of Saigon. Within a half-hour, “Pedro 97,� a crew of four, including then-Staff Sgt. Milsten, and “Pedro
73,� with Pitsenbarger aboard, arrived on scene. Purple smoke swirled up from a sea of lush green jungle
marking the extraction point. The choppers came into a hover over a hole in the triple-canopy jungle with trees
reaching up to 150-feet high.
Below, a fierce firestorm raged. More than 400 battle-hardened Vietcong regulars had their teeth into less than 150
troopers from the 1st U.S. Infantry Division, Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment’s Charlie Company. The
soldiers from the famed “Big Red One� had circled the wagons as the enemy surrounded them and blitzed
them from all sides.
With no room to land, the choppers lowered their 210-foot long hoists into the thick of it to extract the wounded. The
two helicopters whisked off three casualties to a field hospital at Binh Ba about 8 miles away from the fighting.
While Milsten’s Pedro 97 refueled on the ground, Pedro 73 returned to the battle zone.
Looking down, Pitsenbarger could see the soldiers struggling with the winch line and having trouble loading the
wounded on the Stokes litter, a wire-mesh stretcher. He volunteered to go down and help and the pilot reluctantly
consented. On Pitsenbarger’s descent, a chorus of crisscrossing bullets sang in the air.
First Lt. Johnny Libs, a Charlie Company platoon leader, told his machine gunner that the “guy coming out of the
helicopter from above, in an Air Force uniform, must be out of his mind to leave his not-so-safe helicopter for the
inferno on the ground.�
Said Libs, “We were in the fight of our lives, and I just couldn’t understand why anybody would put himself in
this grave danger if he didn’t have to.� On the ground, Pitsenbarger treated and prepped the wounded for
evacuation, and instructed others on how to load the casualties on the litter. The airman had managed to get six
more soldiers to safety when Pedro 73 took a dozen .30 caliber rounds, one of which hit the fuel valve, jamming the
throttle wide open. With the engine screaming on max power, the helicopter lurched out of the jungle and the pilot
made a high-speed, running landing at Binh Ba.
But Pitsenbarger remained behind. With heavy mortar and small-arms fire, the helicopters couldn’t return to
rescue the rescuer.
“He knew the score pretty well, and he’d been fired at quite a bit before,� said then Airman 1st Class
Harry O’Beirne, a pararescueman born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. “He knew the chance he was taking,
and it wasn’t a case of going in there blindly.�
The enemy had a stranglehold on Charlie Company, and slowly began tightening the noose. For the next hour and
a half, Pitsenbarger attended to wounded soldiers, hacking splints out of snarled vines, building improvised
stretchers out of saplings, and even climbing a tree to retrieve the Stokes litter that Pedro 73 jettisoned after it was
hit. Throughout this time, Pitsenbarger dodged a downpour of lead raining on the jungle.
Many of the young soldiers quickly squandered their ammo, firing wildly on full-automatic and raking shadows in the
jungle. Pitsenbarger scrambled around the injured and dead, collecting their weapons and ammunition and then
redistributing them to men still able to fight.
Army 1st Lt. Martin Kroah, a squad leader, said, “At times, the small arms fire would be so intense that it was
deafening, and all a person could do was get as close to the ground as possible and pray. It was on those
occasions I saw Airman Pitsenbarger moving around and pulling wounded men out of the line of fire and then
bandaging their wounds. My own platoon medic, who was later killed, was totally ineffective. He was frozen with
fear, unable to move. The firing was so intense that a fire team leader in my platoon curled up in a fetal position and
sobbed uncontrollably. He had been in combat in both World War II and Korea.�
Another soldier, Sgt. Fred C. Navarro, a squad leader, saw Pitsenbarger take cover beside him and selectively
return fire. After 15 minutes, the soldier heard his rifle go silent. Before even looking, Navarro knew the airman was
dead. Of the original 134 men in Charlie Company, 106 either were killed or wounded in action.
“It is not very often when a ‘grunt’ infantryman goes outside his circle to welcome an outsider, but Bill is
one of us,� Libs said. “I felt at the time, and still do, that Bill Pitsenbarger is one of the bravest men I have
ever known.�
The following morning, O’Beirne arrived to pull out the wounded and discovered a bloodbath. To reach the
casualties, he had to step over his fallen countrymen. An Army captain approached him and said, “I’m sorry
about your buddy. He’s over there.� Bill, his best friend and the guy who slept in the bunk underneath him,
had been shot four times, a rifle clutched in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
“A poncho was covering Pits, and I remember getting very angry, just mad as hell,� said O’Beirne, who is
now a retired Army lieutenant colonel. “Then I got called out on another mission and didn’t have time to
grieve. But back at the unit, Bill’s death was a real kick in the head. Pits’ death made us realize we werenâ
€™t invincible.â€�
Although Pitsenbarger didn’t escape that hellhole alive, nine other men did, thanks to the courage and devotion
to duty of a 21-year-old airman, a former supermarket stock boy from Piqua, Ohio. For his bravery, the Air Force
awarded Bill Pitsenbarger its second highest award - the Air Force Cross, becoming the first enlisted airman to
receive the medal.
“Bill was an ordinary guy with extraordinary courage and determination,� said William, his father. “I’m
very proud of him. And I’d like to think if you took any PJ in the Air Force and put him in the same situation, theyâ
€™d do the same thing. They’re special people.â€� And they live by a special code, one that often demands
they risk everything, pledging “These Things We Do That Others May Live.�
| Bill Pitsenbarger's Final Mission |