Mike Bush
575magazine.com
The Roswell Sertoma Club presented Jack Swickard its 2009 Service to Mankind Award at its meeting Friday.
Doyle Howerton, a vice president of the club, said in presenting the award to Swickard that his contributions included service in his profession as a journalist, to his community and state as a volunteer, and to the nation as a distinguished helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War.
“More importantly, during those years in productivity he has been supported by and remained a devoted husband and father to his wife, Renee, and two children,” Howerton said.
“Our nation needs more people with the qualities of Sertoma’s 2009 nomination for the Service to Mankind Award — steady and unselfish devotion to family and community and dedicated national leadership under stress,” Howerton concluded.
Swickard was the pilot of one of two helicopters that rescued 126 South Vietnamese soldiers and one U.S. Special Forces advisor from an ambush at Cau Song Be, South Vietnam, in February 1967.
Swickard thanked the club for the award and said it was “a high point of my life.”
He noted 43 years have passed since the rescue.
“Life has changed in Vietnam, as it has in the United States, over these years,” he said. “That led me to speculate recently on what was the outcome four decades after that mission.”
He said the pilot of the other helicopter was Tom Baca of Albuquerque, twin brother of Jim Baca, former mayor of Albuquerque.
“Just by chance, two New Mexico guys showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Swickard said.
Ironically, the UH-1 “Huey” helicopters they were both flying were developed originally as medical evacuation helicopters, he said.
Swickard said he had done some math and figured that if the 126 men who were rescued from the ambush each had had two children, and their children had two children, that through four generations there could be 1,008 people on earth who would not have existed “if we hadn’t been at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Of course, that’s optimum,” he added. “Some, I’m sure, didn’t survive the war. They were killed in other operations.”
But he said he is sure the descendants of those rescued are scattered around the world.
“We run into Vietnamese, many Vietnamese, in Roswell,” he said.
Some of them, he said, may still live in the area, the site of a Special Forces camp, now a village called Chi Linh.
“I’m going back in October for my fourth time and I’m going to go to Chi Linh and see what I can find,” he said.
He noted his first trip to Vietnam was at U.S. government expense, in 1967. He has returned twice since then, taking his wife, Renee, with him.
“The last one we actually flew into Hanoi on the 29th of December and we came back on the 7th of January,” Swickard said.
“We found on that trip and on the previous trip, when we went to Saigon … we found without exception that the Vietnamese were very welcoming to Americans, but even more so if you had been a veteran of combat, a Vietnam War veteran,” he added.
Swickard’s first trip was to film a documentary on the rescue mission. The purpose of his second trip was to do research on two books. One is on the Cau Song Be rescue, and the reason he went to Vietnam to work on it is that he has a friend who lives there who was in the Viet Cong. This friend, Truc, is going to various veterans organizations in Vietnam and trying to find veterans of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) who were in the battle so their side can be included.
“He also agreed to co-author another one with me,” Swickard said. “We’re calling it, ‘Life in the Viet Cong.’”
He said there’s not much information available on how the Viet Cong soldier lived.
Truc had enlisted in the Vietnam People’s Army at age 18 and, before heading south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, had gone through a ceremony in which he had changed uniforms and become a member of the Viet Cong.
The last time the Swickards were in Vietnam, they looked up some of the senior police officers they had met when the officers were attending the International Law Enforcement Academy in Roswell.
“I might add that we don’t sometimes realize how high-ranking they are,” he said. “When we hooked up with them, one of them was the deputy head of training for all Vietnamese police and another one was deputy chief of Hanoi.”
Swickard said his return trips to Vietnam have allowed him to accomplish some things he never thought he would accomplish: “I was able to walk over land that was hostile, that I had flown over.
“Another one is that I would forge a working relationship with someone who was an avowed enemy. In fact, I can remember on this last trip talking about that 35 years ago we were trying to kill each other and now we are friends,” he said.