Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Dustoff medevac teams that saved thousands in Vietnam

“Dustoff coming” was the message that rang out on the radio and that wounded soldiers in Vietnam most wanted to hear.

The message using the call sign “Dustoff” meant that an unarmed UH-1 “Huey” air ambulance helicopter with a red cross painted on its nose would come and get them, no matter the weather, no matter if the landing zone was “hot”, no matter if there was a landing zone – some 8,000 gliding hoists were made during the war.

To honor those who participated in more than 496,000 Army medevac missions from May 1962 to March 1973, the House last week passed the Congressional Gold Medal for Vietnam War Dustoff Crews Act.

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The bipartisan bill to award the highest honor Congress can bestow was sponsored in the House by Reps. Derek Kilmer, D-Washington, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington. The Senate passed the bill in May, which will now go to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.

The bill states that Dustoff crews, consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, crew chief and combat medic, performed “rapid medical evacuation and transport of nearly 900,000 American, South Vietnamese and other allied sick and wounded personnel, as well as wounded enemy personnel” during 11 years of operations in Vietnam.

The aim was to transport the wounded from the battlefield to a field hospital within the “golden hour”, which greatly increased the chances of survival.

Thanks to the Dustoff missions, “we were able to see patients much more quickly than ever before in a war zone, where you couldn’t rely on ambulances to get you through bad roads and muddy hills,” said Dr. Michael Mittelmann, a surgeon at the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang, in an oral history for the Vietnam Center and the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University.

Newcomers to Dustoff units were immediately briefed on what was expected of them in their missions: “No hesitation. No reservations. No compromise. You get the wounded out,” said retired Lt. Col. Steve Vermillion, a Dustoff pilot who flew 1,452 missions and recovered 2,217 casualties.

In a video call, Vermillion, 76, of Altadena, Calif., now president of the Vietnam Dustoff Association, recalled his first mission in Vietnam in January 1969, when he had to hover the UH-1 Huey while it was under fire. “It was a tank hoist” of two seriously wounded soldiers, he said. “It was controlled chaos.”

The red crosses painted on the unarmed helicopters signifying a medical mission offered little protection from anti-aircraft fire from the North Vietnamese army or the Viet Cong, said former Dustoff crew chief Gary Hagen, 72, of Medford, Ore.

“We picked up a lot of guys and we got shot down a lot, almost every time we went back and forth,” Hagen said at a recent news conference with Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon.

Of the approximately 3,400 Dustoff crew members who served in the Vietnam War, 211 were killed in action and 925 were wounded, retired Lt. Col. Chris Seidor, 77, of Barkhamsted, Conn., a pilot who flew Dustoff missions out of Binh Thuy in Vietnam, said in a phone call.

The dedication of the Dustoff crews during the rescue mission was epitomized by Major Charles Kelly, who commanded the 57th Medical Detachment and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor.

On July 1, 1964, Kelly “displayed exceptional courage, strong determination and complete disregard for his own personal safety while participating in an air medical mission to evacuate wounded soldiers from an area under heavy attack by hostile forces,” the DSC citation states.

Ground commanders repeatedly told Kelly he was in grave danger and urged him to take off and leave the area, but Kelly refused: “Not without the wounded,” he said. Kelly managed to take the wounded aboard “moments before he was mortally wounded by enemy fire,” according to the minutes.

Army Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, cited Kelly as an example of “the greatness of the human spirit” and highlighted his “not without the wounded” response as an inspiration to all combat troops.

General Creighton Abrams, who succeeded Westmoreland as commander in chief in Vietnam, said of Dustoff’s crews that “courage beyond the call of duty was sort of routine for them” and “it meant a lot to every man who served there. Whether he was wounded or not, he knew Dustoff was there.”

Todd Mikolop, an attorney at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP who helped the Vietnam Dustoff Association rally support for the Congressional Gold Medal, said in a video call that during the lobbying, he heard from several veterans wounded in Vietnam, “When I heard the Huey coming, I knew I was going to be okay.”

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