A reason to celebrate

Thursday was Dan Markell’s birthday … sort of. Actually, it marked 40 years since the Chinook helicopter he was in was shot down in Vietnam

By Rae Kruger
MARSHALL — Forty years of borrowed time were celebrated Thursday, said Dan Markell.

Markell shared birthday cake acknowledging the day his Chinook, or CH4, helicopter was shot down by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

“Thankfully, the Viet Cong didn’t hit the cabin,” Markell said.

If they did, he’d be dead, Markell said.

Markell had been joking with friends at the Daily Grind last week when he brought up his 40th birthday would be on May 8. A friend asked what he meant and Markell explained.

“Absolutely, every day is a gift,” Markell said of each day since his helicopter went down in the Mekong Delta.

Markell was the crew chief on the Mother Goose. “We were carrying a load of steel planking for a runway,” Markell said. “We flew over a river, and apparently, that’s where the bad guys were. They shot us from the back.

“The shots came in and hit the hydraulics in the back. I was on the right side (of the helicopter),” Markell said. “The helicopter was anywhere from 300 to 400 to 500 to 1,000 feet off the ground.”

If the cabin had been hit, the pilots would have died and the helicopter would have had a furious and fatal crash landing, Markell said.

What happened instead was a “semi-crash landing, about a half-mile at the most from where we’d been shot,” Markell said.

The soldiers tried to douse the fire with a fire extinguisher but quickly saw they couldn’t save it.

“We got a safe distance away and watched it burn,” he said.

“There was so much smoke,” Markell added. “The pilots did a may-day, so the Army knew where we were.

“The Air Force came to rescue us in a small helicopter about a half-hour to 45 minutes later. It was less than an hour after we went down.”

It was an intense 30 to 45 minutes of waiting, Markell said.

The crew had little time to think of the incident.

“We were in the air the next day,” Markell said. “The next day we went back and flew out to see if there was anything we could rescue. We couldn’t. It was melted to a crisp.”

Markell said while he thinks of the incident and his good fortune almost every day, he rarely talks about it.

“We got hit many times,” Markell said of being shot at while on duty in the helicopter. “Those were not as dramatic.”