Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:46 | Doug Moore grew up in Arkansas with no family history of being in the military. While in college he was enrolled in the ROTC program and went to training as soon as he graduated. He went to flight school at Fort Rucker, then to Fort Wolters for helicopter training, and was instructed to go to Vietnam shortly after. His trip over to the foreign country was incredibly rough for a number of reasons, and it turned into a month's worth of time getting there.
Keywords : army ROTC(Reserve Officers' Training Corps) college training flight school helicopter school Vietnam Arkansas Virginia Fort Rucker Alabama Fort Wolters fixed wing aircraft Texas Fort Bragg Medevac(Medical Evacuation) South Carolina Needles CA Montagnard South Vietnamese San Antonio TX McChord Air Force Base Hawaii Japan Wayne Simmons Bill Hughes Tom Christy
After a month of painful travel, Doug Moore and his medevac team finally made it over to Vietnam. There he had a lot of interactions with the Vietnamese officers and people, and quickly caught on to the behavior of the North Vietnamese Army. The north invaded a lot of small towns and convoys and stole all their resources. It was Moore's job to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield by flying them away by helicopter.
While flying medevac missions, Moore was shot at a great deal as his team was in the air. He talks about two times he and his helicopter were hit, one of those times his helmet was hit and it was right by his left eye, and he thought he had been blinded from it. He spent five days in the hospital as a result.
Moore talks about a specific mission where he and his team had to go in and help pull as many imprisoned people out of the Prisoner of War camps as possible. This was almost immediately after he got out of the hospital for his injury, but Moore wasn't phased by it at all.
Doug Moore talks about meeting his future wife, Debby, in Vietnam all those years ago. Although they met when they were still young, they would not pursue a romantic relationship until later in life when they reconnected forty five years later at the Vietnam Women's Memorial on Veterans Day.
