From Vietnam to Afghanistan: A Vermont Guard member’s lifetime of service

Colchester, Vt. – “At midnight it was time to move,” said retired U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Pete Ferrell, recalling a night in Afghanistan.

He gripped the handle of one of the four corners of a field stretcher carrying a wounded Soldier. A tray of medical equipment on the Soldier’s chest chirped as it monitored vital signs and sustained him. The team of four Soldiers locked step, carrying the patient onto a plane bound for a higher level of care.

As the plane transporting the wounded Soldier took off, Ferrell found himself on the same runway at Bagram Airfield where the deployment began months earlier. There at the feet of the towering Hindu Kush mountain range, four decades and nearly 3,000 miles stood between him and the jungles he hovered over in a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter in Vietnam, during his first combat tour.

In 2010, at age 62, Ferrell secured an age waiver and volunteered for the deployment to Afghanistan with the Vermont Army National Guard’s 86th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Mountain).

“He always seeks something bigger than himself to be part of, that’s just who Pete is,” said U.S. Army Maj. Beth Carrier, a physician assistant with the New Hampshire Army National Guard who deployed with Ferrell to Bosnia in 1999 when she was a flight medic. “I can only hope that somewhere in my life that I am a fraction as good of a human as he is.”

For many, it’s hard to imagine that the Vietnam veteran who flew over 250 combat hours as a Huey crew chief and survived being shot down in Laos felt he owed more.

“I never got wounded or had PTSD. I was still capable, and I felt I still had to do more,” said Ferrell. When he arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 1970 as helicopter mechanic he was assigned to the night maintenance shift in a hangar. It was far from the excitement of flying he had imagined as a child in Braintree, Massachusetts, watching planes take off and land at the airport and flying his own model aircraft.

So, he went to his platoon sergeant and asked for a flight platoon assignment.A few days later, the platoon sergeant told him to shadow another Soldier who showed him how to do daily maintenance on a Huey.

“Then he says, ‘OK that one’s yours,’” said Ferrell. From then on, the 22-year-old specialist was now in charge of his own helicopter. “We learned a lot about maintenance in training, but overseeing a whole aircraft was a lot of responsibility.”

But along with the added responsibility, he also got his childhood wish.

“When the aircraft flew, you went with it,” he said.Ferrell said he mostly flew “ash and trash missions” – lift missions that could include transporting anything from troops to supplies to mail.

However, about three months before his tour ended, his unit was selected for Operation Lam 719, a highly contested two-month offensive where they flew South Vietnamese troops into southeastern Laos. The objective was to disrupt North Vietnam’s military supply network on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Ferrell said he knew this mission was not routine; the danger felt so imminent that he prayed.

“I started out saying the 23rd Psalm when we took off on the first three sorties, and by the fourth one I must have gotten too comfortable,” he said. “One pilot said to the other, ‘Stay tight to this hill,’ and he no sooner said that and the windshield for the aircraft was blown out.”

The aircraft crashed, but Ferrell and the rest of the crew survived.

“Somebody started yelling, ‘Come on, come on!’" he said, adding that another aircraft had landed nearby and they all started running to it. “I grabbed my M16 and started tromping through the jungle, and we all got on the other aircraft and flew out.”

It wasn’t until Ferrell was on the plane flying home from Vietnam with a ream of military records that he realized he had received 10 Air Medals for his combat flight hours, one with a valor device for the mission on which he was shot down.

He finished his active-duty service in 1973 and settled into civilian life. He married Deb, the woman he exchanged letters with throughout the war, and moved to Vermont where they had their first son.

Then in 1981 he heard a familiar sound and looked up in the Vermont sky and saw Hueys overhead. Ferrell said he knew he had to track them down. He found them in a hangar in Burlington, Vermont, at a Vermont Army Guard aviation unit.

“I walked in and there were 12 Hueys there and it was like a homecoming. I was home again,” he said. Ferrell met with a flight platoon sergeant who assuaged his fears that if he joined the Guard he might end up sweeping floors rather than maintaining and flying aircraft.

And with that, Ferrell re-enlisted and was back working on Hueys.

In 1998 the unit transitioned to the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and assumed a medevac mission. Ferrell was hesitant about learning a new aircraft and mission. That was until he teamed up with Carrier, then a 20-year-old specialist so passionate about her role as a flight medic that she inspired him.

“She taught me that it was all about saving lives, and there’s no better mission than that,” he said.

Ferrell didn’t come around right away though, Carrier said, adding he refused to do medical training and insisted his job as the crew chief didn’t require it. However, he changed his tune after they medevaced a Soldier with severe appendicitis – their first real-world patient in Bosnia.

After the mission, Ferrell told Carrier that her ability to help the Soldier had captivated him, but he admitted he felt helpless to assist.

“He completely did a 180 on the entire idea of not touching a patient. It was a 100% adjustment of his thought process,” she said. “From then on, he wanted to do all he could, asking ‘What can I do? What can I learn? What can you teach me so I can help you?’”

In turn, he used his knowledge of the aircraft to help her set her medical gear up to deliver care more expediently. These were lessons she would take with her when their careers parted ways, and she deployed to Iraq and later when she was commissioned as an officer and went on to study medicine.

But the two remained close. Ferrell was even the “man of honor” at her wedding, which required him to don a raspberry pink shirt for the occasion.

“I always knew with him I was well protected. On the hoist he could drop me on a dime. I always knew that the aircraft that we were on was the safest that it could possibly be. That was because of Pete's work ethic,” she said. When Ferrell returned from the Bosnia deployment, personnel moves in the aviation unit led him to move on from aviation. Eventually, he was assigned to the headquarters of the 86th IBCT (MTN), which led to his Afghanistan deployment.

When Ferrell told his wife and sons about volunteering for the deployment, he said they were the only people in his family who didn’t think he was crazy.

“It’s just a part of who he is, and it’s how they [his sons] always knew their father,” said his wife. “So, it was just, he’s going to be gone for a while, but he’ll be back and we will, as we say, improvise, adapt, and overcome.”

When he arrived in Afghanistan his daily duties at the headquarters company kept him mostly at Bagram, but as he had throughout his career, Ferrell felt he still had more to give.

One night he stumbled upon it while sitting in the base’s operations center. A major from another section told him he had a mission at the airfield. Ferrell’s interest was piqued. It turned out that the officer had inadvertently found Ferrell another medevac mission; transferring wounded patients from the field hospital onto aircraft bound to take them to facilities with higher levels of care.

“You know like Beth had taught me, saving lives is the greatest mission there is, and that is what it was,” he said. He began to stop at the hospital every day after his shift to ask if volunteers were needed that night but never mentioned his side quests to anybody in his unit until years later. He continued the late-night missions until he returned home from Afghanistan just before Christmas 2010.

By then, he was 63 years old, three years past the standard mandatory retirement age, and finally retired from the military in 2011 with 33 years of service.

“You get home from Vietnam, you realize how many men were lost and how many were wounded, and you think ‘why me? Why did I survive,’” he said. “You figure out that there is a plan here, so you have to go with it. You take it as the blessing that you were saved for a reason. I can look back now and say that this is where God was pointing me.”

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