Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
7:07 | No GPS, you had to find them with rough map coordinates and a radio beacon. Medevac pilot Jack Tragis had a reputation for getting in and out quick on his evacuations so you better be ready. He went down in a chopper seven times. The most memorable of those incidents was the time he spent the night in a rice paddy with a full load of patients.
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He wanted to join the Army from as far back as he could remember. As a small child, Jack Tragis experienced some of the drama of the home front in World War II. Both his parents served and, when he was eighteen, it was his turn. First up, a year in the infantry on the Korean DMZ.
After a year on the Korean DMZ, Jack Tragis became a Drill Instructor. He was now a sergeant and he got it in his head that he would like to be an officer. He put in for OCS but his company commander said he wasn't going to approve that. He had a better idea.
Jack Tragis had tangled with anti-war protestors while he was finishing his degree. It only hardened his resolve to get his commission as an Army officer. When he found out that it was as a Medical Service officer, he was stunned. Determined to get it changed, a chance encounter made him decide to take it.
It was a struggle for Jack Tragis to pass the flight physical but with a waiver and a little help from a friend, he managed. Then, it was a year of moving his family to various flight schools which he knew was leading up to a tour in Vietnam.
Jack Tragis said goodbye to his wife, which was rough, and flew off to Vietnam. He was a Medical Service officer and a helicopter pilot so he was going to have plenty to do. He became the operations officer of a Dustoff unit down in the Delta which was great. It meant that he was based at a Navy facility and the Navy knew how to fight a war.
He was in charge of the Delta Dustoff unit but Jack Tragis was green. His CO was also a pilot and began to show him the ropes of evacuating casualties, sometimes under fire. There were other good pilots who had been flying in country for a while and he began to learn what they don't teach in flight school.
Jack Tragis supervised the pilots at the 82nd Medical Detachment but he had limited experience himself and was still flying in the right seat. He became an aircraft commander much sooner than he would have except one day he had a pilot announce that he was quitting.
Medevac pilot Jack Tragis was coming in to pick up some casualties. He was landing at night on a boat that was one among many in the Mekong Delta. Could you maybe pop some smoke? It was a long tour and when he got home, all he wanted was to be left alone with his family.
If you're going to war, commit to winning it. Don't play around with people's lives. That's the plea of Jack Tragis, a helicopter pilot who saved a lot of people in Vietnam. During the ill-fated Operation Lam Son 719, he learned an important lesson; that Medevac pilots must be prepared to fly other kinds of missions.
