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Mike Leonard

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On his first tour of Vietnam, pilot Mike Leonard lived in relative luxury in Saigon, enjoying barbecues and water skiing. His second tour was shaping up to be very different. This time he was flying a Cessna Bird Dog as a forward air controller at a forward operating base. (5:55)

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Bird Dog Pilot Mike Leonard wound up in a small village near the Cambodian border. It was a tight knit group of pilots and the head of the unit would take new guys up for an orientation flight. On one of these, they got a little too close to the border and the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft batteries. (8:39)

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Long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of stark terror. That was the life of a forward air controller flying in a small Cessna over Vietnam. FAC Mike Leonard describes these missions and the array of communications gear he used for different purposes. He also describes what it was like to coordinate a defoliation mission. (6:02)

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Forward air controller Mike Leonard went up to Ban Me Thuot to help out for a few days. The first night, as he settled in with a cold beer, the radio crackled with pleas for help from a nearby special forces camp. They were under siege. Part 1 of 3. (7:28)

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You couldn't call in jet fighters to help the besieged camp because of the cloud cover. Forward air controller Mike Leonard was in the air trying to help the Americans below. Two helicopter gunships made it to the action and the pilots proceeded to ignore his instructions. When one was shot down, he used his smoke rockets as weapons and even leaned out the window of the Cessna and fired his carbine. Part 2 of 3. (7:31)

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It had been a long fight and the Bird Dog had been in the air past it's rated aloft time. Pilot Mike Leonard used every trick he knew to nurse the plane home. He had been at an action in which a downed helicopter crew had been rescued and, decades later, he got a surprising phone call that, once again, brought the incident to the forefront. Part 3 of 3. (7:40)

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Air Force pilot and FAC Mike Leonard offers his thoughts on the debate over the justification of the Vietnam war. His experiences in his combat tours, especially one incident in which he helped rescue some downed airmen, led him to write his book, An American Combat Bird Dog Pilot: From the Battlefield of Vietnam and Beyond. (5:19)

Mike McCormick

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Mike McCormick always wanted to be a soldier and an officer, but after two years of college, he became restless and left school for a job with the FBI. The lure of the military was strong, though, and he returned to the ROTC program at Western Kentucky University. (4:08)

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His first duty station was in Hawaii with the 125th Signal Battalion. After 16 months there, Mike McCormick took a troop ship to Vietnam, which kind of ruined the cruise as a vacation choice for him. He was stationed at Cu Chi, famed for its Viet Cong tunnels. (4:52)

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At a certain point during his first tour of Vietnam, Mike McCormick reached two years of duty in the signal field and was sent to military intelligence. Despite a lack of formal training, he ran the counterintelligence branch and their first order of business was the vetting of all the Vietnamese workers on base. (6:54)