I feel like I know Jack Heslin, even though we’ve only been e-mail buddies over the past 15 years.
He has run a website, The Battle of Kontum, on the North Vietnamese 1972 “Easter Offensive,” and I finally got my Vietnam memoir “Heroes to the End” written in 2015. It’s based on my Stars and Stripes stories, and many of those were datelined from Pleiku and Kontum in the Central Highlands.

Now Heslin finally has published “Thunder” (Outskirts Press), on his 1967-68 first tour and his thrilling helicopter missions in the Dak To-Kontum area. One of those missions earned him a Silver Star. I am working with three Connecticut screenplay writers on a proposal for a 60-minute Netflix series pilot based on “Heroes.” I’d say Jack’s book is even more worthy of a screenplay. His daring rescues as a Huey pilot in the 119th Assault Helicopter Co. out of Camp Holloway in Pleiku include many hot missions during which his choppers were riddled with bullet holes but somehow made it back to base.

Heslin flew in support of combat operations before, during and after the North Vietnamese Army’s 1968 Tet Offensive. The most harrowing missions involved rescuing wounded or besieged Americans. This was during some of the most intense fighting by U.S. units of the entire war. In some cases, he had to set his chopper down through a hover hole in triple canopy jungle. He would haul out bodies, parts of bodies and wounded men. “I remember at one point,” he writes, “reaching down to my radio panel to change frequencies and having to remove a severed arm that was lying across the panel. Those memories never go away.” Another time, going into a landing zone to pick up American KIAs, Heslin noticed that his rotor wash blew the severed head of a dead American rolling across the LZ.

Many of Heslin’s medevac missions involved SOG troops — the black clad Studies and Observation soldiers and their Montagnard companions who were some of the best fighting men we had. I met some of them in May 1972 in the Kontum area. Heslin’s descriptions of his missions come with details from his U.S. Army records, where those who were rescued testified to his bravery. One mission involved a crash landing in the middle of an enemy unit from which Heslin and ground troops were rescued by another chopper from his unit. “Many lives were saved because of the heroism displayed [by Heslin and others],” one of the rescuees wrote. “I highly recommend that CPT Heslin…be awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action.” He was.

After Heslin and the others were rescued and returned to their staging area at Dak To, he got another chopper and went back with a new crew to pick up the rest of the wounded. Darkness prevented it. But the next day Heslin went back again and completed the mission. Another time Heslin’s chopper skid hit a personnel mine on the ground, blowing a trooper out of the aircraft. But even with the damaged skid, Heslin completed the extraction of a small team of Americans.

“Fear was normal,” he said. “What you could not allow to happen was to cross the extremely thin line between fear and panic — panic killed. Panic would paralyze you and you would be unable to save yourself or anyone else. I saw it happen more than once in combat, and I heard the last radio transmissions from doomed pilots who were in total panic mode.”

Thankfully, Heslin made it home. He spent 20 years in the Army, retiring in 1986. After that, he worked with schools and companies in the greater Richmond, Va. area, developing the workforce through public-private partnerships. He is married for more than 50 years and has four daughters. Welcome home, Jack. And great job on your new book!