Gerald Naekel

The world of aviation puts people in situations and events that are completely outside the visible norm for most of society but are well-known to pilots of all sorts, especially military and business aircraft operations that routinely operate all over the world for a wide and varied source of people and businesses. I started as a North Dakota farm boy pilot at 16, and by 18 years old, I was alone as a bush pilot in South America, largely in the Amazon River Basin in northern Brazil, where I had solo ferried a Cessna 205 to Brasilia. From there, I became an Army Warrant Officer pilot at 19 - which was not so age-unique at the time during the height of the Vietnam War. I went to the Grumman OV-1 Mohawk flight school and Vietnam for two, or nearly so, tours flying with the only Mohawk unit with the armed Mohawks, where we flew entirely in Laos (CIA "Secret War") and North Vietnam until the last few months of the war. I flew over 550 single-pilot - sometimes heavily armed - Mohawk combat missions. After 22-1/2 months in Vietnam -- with only a few months between tours going to the Mohawk instructor pilot school -- it was running out of luck and timing all at the same time as I was only some 20 hours later - medivac'd out of Vietnam to Clark AFB in the Philippines and then for some months through a series of Air Force and Army hospitals.