Only the dead have seen the end of war

by philg

“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” noted George Santayana. Perhaps this should be updated to “only the broke have seen the end of war”. In “Can we afford endless war?”, Steve Chapman notes that the real dollar cost of our Afghanistan and Iraq wars now exceed Korea and Vietnam combined.

[The scale of the Vietnam War was much larger in many ways than our current wars. The 12,000 helicopters used in Vietnam (around 7,000 of them crashed, with more than 5,000 destroyed completely) revolutionized the combat experience (source). In Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly 130 helicopters have been lost during our decade of war.]

3 thoughts on “Only the dead have seen the end of war”

  1. Regarding the helo losses, I can just imagine that the fairly barren and dry middle eastern expanses, sandy dry river valleys, etc are rather nicer to autorotate into as opposed to Vietnam’s extensive triple-canopy jungle. The pretty much defacto use of twin turboshaft mills these days probably does not hurt the odds either.

    In the early days of Vietnam nearly all the helicopters were piston singles; H-21, UH-34, H-13 and OH-23. Of course I suppose that the AAA environment was not quite so bad at that point.

  2. My father was a helicopter pilot during the Viet Nam war. He never talked about it, but I did remember a time that he was in the hospital for a while when I was very young.

    When I pressed him about the incident recently, he told me he had been shot down seven times, twice behind enemy lines. One time he crashed when the tail rotor was shot out and that was when he was in the hospital.

    To me getting “shot down” meant you crashed, but (except for that one time) he was able to land safely after getting hit and then get picked up by another helicopter and flown back to the base.

    So, statistically speaking, it’s not so bad to get shot down in a helicopter.

  3. Michael: your father was very lucky; nearly 10% of American fatalities were helicopter crews. (http://www.vhpa.org/heliloss.pdf)

    I can’t find exact figures easily, but I would expect a lot less than 10% of those serving in Vietnam were in the business of flying helicopters.

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