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The base, silent just 30 minutes earlier, suddenly filled with the sounds of men running and shouting.

But to the combat helicopter crews on the base, a break in the weather meant search-and-destroy, resupply and medivac missions could resume. We took advantage of the temporary halt in the rain, a respite for us. A few members of the rescue crew joined me on top of the bunker.

The unrelenting rain of the late monsoon season had stopped falling. Patrick Christain/Getty Imagesįifty-five years ago, not long after Christmas, not long after I arrived in Vietnam, I stood on top of a sandbag bunker just 50 feet from the edge of a runway on a combat air base eight miles outside of Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam. The second wave of combat helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division fly over an RTO and his commander on an isolated landing zone during Operation Pershing, a search and destroy mission on the Bong Son Plain and An Lao Valley of South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War.