How Helicopters Got Those Famous Names
On Warriors’ Wings: Army Vietnam War Helicopters and the Native Americans they were Named to Honor. David Napoliello. Global Collective Publishers. 448 pages. $34.95
By Scott Gourley, Contributing Editor
At the confluence of aviation technology, individual heroism and more than 300 years of Native American experience, On Warriors’ Wings: Army Vietnam War Helicopters and the Native Americans they were Named to Honor provides a unique perspective on the U.S. Army’s relationship with helicopters.
The book’s underlying theme is the Army’s practice of naming its helicopters after great Native American tribes or warrior chiefs, with a primary time frame focusing on the Vietnam War. Specific platforms covered include the 11 helicopters with Native American names that were used in that conflict: OH-13 Sioux, OH-23 Raven, CH-19 Chickasaw, CH-21 Shawnee, CH-37 Mojave, CH-34 Choctaw, UH-1 Iroquois, CH-47 Chinook, CH-54 Tarhe, OH-58 Kiowa and OH-6 Cayuse.
The Army did not provide a Native American name for the AH-1 Cobra, so it is not included in this volume.
Author David Napoliello credits the application of Native American tribal names to aviation visionary Maj. Gen. Hamilton Howze, who in the mid- to late 1950s reportedly “found the names suggested by the aircraft manufacturers to be without character.” At his suggestion, the Army renamed the Bell H-13, already in service since 1948, as the Sioux.
Napoliello’s meticulous research extends beyond platform numbers and fleet information to copyright and trademark filings, revealing that formal registration actions were not taken on three Vietnam-era helicopters: the Cayuse, Tarhe and Kiowa. Additionally, he notes the post-Vietnam UH-60 Black Hawk originally was registered for trademark as “Blackhawk” in 1973, but that was amended to “Black Hawk” five years later.
Woven throughout the book are historical vignettes taken from hundreds of years of the Native American “war experience,” with the author summarizing that “it is collectively accepted that America’s Native Indians were a proud people who were aggressive and cunning in their warrior skills and the defense of their land and people.”
Chapters detail how the 11 named helicopters were employed, primarily during the Vietnam War but also in the years before and after. Additionally, each of the chapters includes a look at these tribes’ experiences over the past three centuries.
In addition to his extensive research, Napoliello ties certain elements to his personal experiences, as well as imbuing some of the platforms with near-spiritual characteristics.
With the UH-1 Iroquois, also known as the Huey, for example, he asserts, “There is not a Vietnam War veteran, friend, or foe, alive today who does not instantly respond to the rhythmic thumping of the Huey. It transports him back five decades or more to a time of anticipation, fear, promise, or hope.”
The narrative then shifts to stories of Native Americans who fought in that war. It is estimated that more than 42,000 served in Vietnam, with approximately 37,800 who were volunteers. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has the names of 232 Native Americans, with 19 of those warriors perishing in aerial operations.
An epilogue brings readers through the past few decades of Army helicopter efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, including the AH-56 Cheyenne, UH-60 Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache, RAH-66 Comanche, UH-72 Lakota and ARH-70 Arapaho.
Multiple appendices, including characteristics and performance of different helicopter models, add further value to this excellent reference.
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Spouse Shares Trials of Army Marriage
The Wives: A Memoir. Simone Gorrindo. Scout Press (An Imprint of Simon & Schuster). 416 pages. $29.99
By Terri Barnes
When reading memoirs of other military spouses, I rarely look for what we have in common. That’s easy. Instead, I’d rather explore how spouses differ and what binds us together despite our differences. This made The Wives: A Memoir, by Simone Gorrindo, a particularly rewarding read.
The Wives is the author’s story of landing as a newlywed in a strange and possibly hostile environment—Army life—and her relationships with other Army wives who initially seem equally strange.
I was born into a military family, so oddities like commissaries are part of the landscape of my life. I can’t remember the first time I saw one. When Gorrindo saw a commissary for the first time, she described its “brutalist” architecture. Of course, she’s right, which makes me realize that much of military life that seems normal to me can also be brutal, as Gorrindo’s story reveals. There is value in seeing familiar terrain through someone else’s eyes.
Each military spouse approaches this challenging terrain from a different place and meets the challenge in a different way. Gorrindo’s memoir beautifully illustrates that there is no boilerplate description for life as a military spouse. There are no five—or 500—easy steps to make it work or to get through it alive and whole. The primary survival technique, as this book demonstrates, is initiative.
“Most wives did it on their own, with a little help from the informal network of support we found in each other,” Gorrindo writes. “The men had the architecture of the Army to hold them up wherever they were, and the women were the home they returned to. The wives, on the other hand, were left to erect their own scaffoldings.”
As Gorrindo relates, this is true whether spouses depend on neighbors, friends from book club or Bible study, or more formally on a family readiness group or spouse club. These and other scaffolds in military life are mostly initiated and maintained by spouses, for spouses.
Initiative also is required to navigate military marriage, and Gorrindo is gutsy and honest about the toll that deployments and Army culture took on hers. She owns her missteps and misconceptions, and reveals the positive steps she and her husband took to reconcile the ways they were changed by their separate experiences during deployments and training rotations.
Although Gorrindo’s book is centered on her personal experience, the author is adept at recreating those who lived military life alongside her, including her husband, Andrew. Her intimate portrayal allows the reader into their relationship, revealing the deep commitment that keeps them tenaciously clinging to a difficult way of life—and each other.
Her renderings—too fully dimensional to be called descriptions—of the wives who show up unfailingly and sacrificially for one another at the best and worst of times will inspire readers to be that kind of friend. The kind who can say, as “Rachel” does in the book, “Life is not necessarily easier together, but it is better.”
Military spouses with little in common often come together with a desire to make life better, even when they can’t make it easier. That’s what the women in The Wives offer each other in the compelling story Gorrindo offers her readers.
Terri Barnes is a military spouse, a book editor and the author of Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life, based on her column in Stars and Stripes.
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Soldiers, Leaders Recall the Invasion of Normandy
When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. Garrett Graff. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. 608 pages. $35
By Col. Cole Kingseed, U.S. Army retired
As the world recently marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day, journalist Garrett Graff captures the human dimension of one of the most pivotal days in Western civilization in When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. Drawing from 700 voices pulled from extensive oral history projects at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and the Imperial War Museum in the U.K., Graff has compiled a masterful collection of over 5,000 personal stories from combatants and participants to provide a more personal and comprehensive story of D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Graff is a distinguished journalist, award-winning author and television commentator who has spent two decades covering politics, technology and national security. His works include The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Watergate: A New History.
The first third of When the Sea Came Alive is dominated by historical figures like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, American Gens. Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, and the senior officers of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The remainder of Graff’s narrative revolves around ordinary men who found themselves thrust into the cataclysmic horror of war. Paying tribute to all the combatants of D-Day, Graff reminds his readers that “the greatest names … as it turns out, are the ones you don’t know.”
What separates When the Sea Came Alive from Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day, June 6, 1944 and Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II is the sheer number of veterans’ voices Graff has compiled to tell his story. Interspersing the veterans’ reminiscences with his own narrative, Graff succeeds in his quest “to broaden the understanding of D-Day itself, and to acknowledge the full scope of the event’s complexities and nuances.”
The descriptions of the carnage on Omaha Beach are riveting. First Lt. Ray Nance noted that “of our six assault boat sections, we lost #5 at sea. Another one, #2, [had] thirty-two men on—not one single person is known to have survived.” Pvt. Harold Baumgarten recalled, “I was weaponless, surrounded by dead buddies, and the pillbox on the right was shooting up the sand around me.” Staff Sgt. Harry Bare remembered, “As ranking non-com, I tried to get my men off the boat, and make it somehow to get under the cliff. God, it was awful. It was absolutely terrible.”
Perhaps the most engrossing section of Graff’s narrative is the section entitled “The End of D-Day.” Said German Maj. Hans von Luck, who opposed British Maj. John Howard’s coup de main operation at Pegasus Bridge, “The ‘second front’ had been established. Even the bravest and most experienced troops could no longer win this war.” Capt. Joe Dawson of the 1st Infantry Division noted, in a letter to his sister back home, “We’re on the final road now, and it shouldn’t be too long before we manage to finish the job.” D-Day was the beginning of the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. Eleven months later, Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered, and the European war was over.
To those soldiers who survived that first day of the invasion, Graff concludes, “June 7 marked the start of the rest of their lives—lives forever altered by the events of D-Day.” We are in Graff’s debt for making these events more accessible to the American public.
Col. Cole Kingseed, U.S. Army retired, a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, is a writer and consultant. He holds a doctorate in history from Ohio State University.
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Memorials Pay Tribute to WWI Sacrifices
100 Cities, 100 Memorials: Restoration, Recognition & Remembrance. Jennifer Wingate. Pritzker Military Museum & Library. 232 pages. $50
By Edward Lengel
Two or three decades ago, World War I was routinely dismissed as an insignificant episode in U.S. history. To be sure, the conflict’s diplomatic and political consequences were acknowledged. Militarily and socially, though, the war seemed of no particular moment. Surely the U.S. had entered the conflict too late, after the outcome had been decided; just in time to fire a few potshots at the fleeing Germans before the doughboys returned home to frolic into the Roaring ’20s.
Such, anyway, was the common discourse until the approach of the war’s centennial brought it back—however vaguely and transiently—to the public consciousness.
The evidence for World War I’s significant, even profound, influence on the U.S. and American society has nevertheless always been tangible. American memorials to the war and its fallen are common, if not ubiquitous. Practically every city and most towns have a statue or at least a plaque of some kind. So do universities and a multitude of organizations, civilian and military. Each memorial is expressive of some degree of pride, pathos and occasionally, outright grief. Many memorials remained sites of community commemoration and remembrance for decades. Over the years, however, they fell into varying degrees of neglect and decay as World War I faded from the national consciousness.
The World War One Centennial Commission performed many important tasks in and around the years 2017–18, but one of the noblest was the 100 Cities/100 Memorials initiative. In partnership with the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and other organizations and individuals, the commission worked to help promote the rededication and restoration of memorials across the country. The work was complex.
While some projects were straightforward enough, entailing merely the refurbishment of bronze plaques containing rolls of honor, in other cases, sites were repurposed to address inequities arising from segregation, provide access to the disabled, and facilitate public commemorations and other events. Other projects involved tree-planting and landscaping. In each case, the goal was to ensure that these memorials should never again fall into neglect, but remain visible and relevant for generations to come.
This attractive book, 100 Cities, 100 Memorials: Restoration, Recognition & Remembrance, arranged by region and then by state, presents each project in turn. Included are short narrative summaries, with historical and full-color contemporary illustrations showcasing the importance of each project. They range from the seemingly obscure—individual gravesites and memorial plaques—to the massive, such as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Chicago’s Soldier Field.
Perusing the entries, one cannot help but be impressed by the sheer variety of memorials to American participation in the war and by the artistic inspiration that entered into each. Also evident is the hard work and expertise that went into refurbishing and, in some cases, repurposing each memorial.
There’s something here not just for military historians, but for historians of art and architecture, and indeed readers of all backgrounds. Author Jennifer Wingate’s text is enlightening, and the illustrations, historical and contemporary, are of high quality. This book provides a fitting testament to the World War One Centennial Commission’s work in restoring these historic places to a proper role in the American public sphere.
At the same time, it elicits World War I’s significance in the formation of the modern United States. While the conflict’s importance may not always have been recognized nationally, it transformed individuals, families and communities, with ripple effects continuing to the present day.
Edward Lengel is a historian and battlefield tour leader. He is the author of 14 books, including To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 and Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.