← The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Ryan Keys
The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Ryan Keys
Scramble the Seawolves: The Story of the Navy’s Most Decorated Squadron
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They are the most decorated squadron in the history of naval aviation. In five years of combat flying, hand me down helicopters in one of the most hostile environments on earth. And almost nobody outside of the military helicopter community has ever heard of them.
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You know, the big battles, the famous names, the headlines. But what about the stories history forgot? I'm Ryan Keys, host of the Ready Room podcast, and in this special series, Footnotes of History, retired Navy Captain Tim Kinsella discusses the obscure, the overlooked, and sometimes downright unbelievable chapters of military history. Here's lucky.
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What if I asked you who do you think the most decorated naval aviation squadron is? You'd probably guess it was perhaps a fighter squadron that was founded back in the 1920s and fought through World War II through Midway and Coral Sea and other great battles, fought through Korea, fought through Vietnam. That's who you'd think it would be. I mean, they'd been around long enough, been through enough action. But what if I told you it wasn't? What if I told you it wasn't even a fighter squadron? What if I told you it wasn't even a fixed wing squadron? What if I told you that they only existed for a couple of years? What if I told you it was a helicopter squadron? Well, today, that's what we're going to talk about. The most decorated squadron in Navy history, howl3 the sea wolves. So let's go back a bit. Let's go back to the Mekong Delta. 14,000 miles of waterway. Rivers and canals and rice paddies that stretch to the horizon and back again. A labyrinth of brown water threaded through jungle so dense that from the air it looks like solid green concrete. No roads and very few landmarks. And somewhere beneath that canopy of trees and jungle, there's a tough and wily enemy who has lived there for generations. And he's doing his best to kill you. And you him. It's 1966, and the United States Navy is fighting a war it did not train for, in terrain it did not anticipate, and with a problem that had no clear solution. So the Viet Cong, they own the waterways. They move men and weapons at night in sampans and junks, slipping through channels no wider than a city street beneath overhanging jungle that hides them from satellites, aircraft and the naked eye. The Navy's patrol boat, river, also known as the pbr, is fast and well armed. But a PBR and a river is fighting a war in two dimensions. And the enemy, well, they're in all sorts of dimensions. They're everywhere else, and they're all around them. So what you need, what the situation demands, is something that can appear from nowhere in minutes and rain accurate sustained fire through the trees onto that enemy. What you need is an armed to the teeth gunship helicopter. And in 1966, the United States Navy doesn't have one. So welcome to the story of helicopter attack squadron light 3 HAL 3, the seawolves. As I said, they are the most decorated squadron in the history of naval aviation. In five years of combat flying, hand me down helicopters in one of the most hostile environments on earth. An all volunteer force of naval aviators, door gunners and mechanics, they flew more than 120,000 combat sorties. They earned five Navy Crosses, 31 Silver Stars, 219 Distinguished Flying Crosses and more than 16,000 Air Medals. 44 of them made the ultimate sacrifice. Over 200 were wounded. And almost nobody outside of the military helicopter community has ever heard of them. And that needs to change. There's a 2018 PBS documentary called Scramble the Seawolves, directed by Jeff Arbello and narrated by Mike Rowe. You know the guy from Dirty Jobs. And they set out to try and correct that. It won best feature documentary at a San Diego Film Awards and at a one time Vietnam war specialist and history professor who used to work with the Navy seals. He heard of the film's trailer and he told a filmmaker's film flatly, the Navy never had a helicopter attack squadron. Well, the filmmaker, the director, he pulled out his phone and he showed him the five minute trailer and said, I'm about to give you a history lesson. So that's the measure of how thoroughly these men have been forgotten. And this episode is a little bit of additive help to try and help fix that. So to understand why these Seawolves exist, you have to understand operations, market time and game warden. The Navy's effort from 1965 onward to deny the Viet Cong freedom of movement in the Mekong Delta. Communist forces were infiltrating the coastal interior waterways to supply roughly a third of all men and arms moving into the south while at the same time conducting terror campaigns against villages all along the rivers. The PBRs, those Navy patrol boats, they were remarkable craft. They had glass fiber hulls, water jet propulsion and twin 50 caliber machine guns. They were fast, they were aggressive, but they were completely exposed to ambushed from the riverbanks, according to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was later the chief of Naval operations. But in 1966, he was rising through the ranks and watching the Delta war closely. According to him, the boats were being blown out of the water Navy fatalities, they were outpacing the ability to train replacement sailors, and the effectiveness of seal teams and special operations was suffering for lack of reliable air cover. Now, the army, they had helicopters, and of course they did. You saw them in every Vietnam movie. The Bell, uh, one Iroquois, the Huey, as you might know it, had been flying gunship missions since the early days of American involvement. But there was a problem that went beyond the practical. The army and Navy, they spoke different languages, they had different radio frequencies, different call signs, different tactical terminology, different priorities. When a PBR was taking fire in a canal, the army had no map for precious minutes were lost in translation. If there was a choice of an army unit in need of air cover or a Navy unit, well, they had their orders. And it wasn't the Navy that won out. So it was Rear Admiral Norval G. Ward, Commander, Naval Forces Vietnam, who found a solution. In 1966, Ward offered General Westmoreland a deal. The Navy would provide crews if the army contributed helicopter gunships, which didn't exist in the Navy inventory, and the army agreed. Members of Helicopter combat Support Squadron 1 HC1 began flying borrowed Army Hueys from ships and shore bases in the Delta. They had no manual for it, no doctrine, they just flew. And when they found out it worked, well, the Navy, they formalized it on the 1st of April, 1967. And I think it's fitting that an outfit that is this unconventional is born on April Fool's Day. But there you have it. Helicopter Attack Squadron Light 3 was officially commissioned at Vung Tau Air base, South Vietnam, and excuse my pronunciation, I'm not a native Vietnamese speaker. Their first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Joseph B. Howard, he had four detachments and they were already in the field. The call had gone out across the Navy for volunteers, and 80 pilots were selected. Every single one of them had chosen to be there. So now let's talk about the man who took the seawalls from a promising experiment and then turned them into a defining force in the Delta War. In September 1968, Rear Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr. Arrived in Vietnam as commander of Naval forces Vietnam Com. Nav. 4v. He was 47 years old. He had been promoted over 35 senior admirals to get the job. And he came with a clear eyed view of what needed to happen. Zumal. He wasn't a cautious man. He was a strategist who believed in taking the fight to the enemy, all the way to the enemy, regardless of how uncomfortable that made people. His predecessor had largely confined naval operations to the four inner rings of the delta where the population was densest and the political stakes were the most visible. Zumwalt looked at the map and he saw the outer rings, the deep mangrove, the. The U Min Forest, the Kaomao Peninsula, and said, that is where the Viet Cong think they're safe. That is where we are going to take the fight into those outer sanctuaries. Zumwalt needed a mobile, hardened presence. He created Sea Float, a floating base built on lashed barges anchored in the Song KWA Lon river in the deepest south. And he followed that with Solid Anchor, an actual base built by barging in sand and dirt and constructing it on the riverbank itself. Now, these were not comfortable postings. They were meant to be thorns in the side of an enemy that had considered this territory its own. And at the heart of both operations were the seawolves. HAL 3 Detachment 1 was permanently assigned to solid anchor PBRs, river salt craft, army infantry, SEALs, and seawolf gunships, all operating together from a base the Viet Cong despised specifically because it was sitting on ground they had called their own. Zumwalt. He later presented awards to the squadron personally. He attended Seawolf reunions. He knew what these men had done. When the Seawolf association gathered in later years after the war, Zumwalt, he always made the trip because he understood the ledgers of sacrifice and courage. His own eldest son, Elmo Zumwalt iii, a naval officer who served in Vietnam. He died of cancer in 1988 from Agent Orange exposure. The Admiral had been the one who ordered the use of Agent Orange defoliants in the Delta. He lived with that for the rest of his life. But that's a different story and a much harder one, and maybe one we'll save for another podcast. But it's part of who Zumwalt was. A man who made difficult decisions and accepted their consequences. For the Sea Wolves, Zumwalt was the commander who fully understood their value and used them accordingly. He didn't manage the Delta war. He. He attacked it. So if you've seen a Vietnam film, any Vietnam film, you know the sound of a two bladed Huey, that distinctive two bladed rotor, the percussive thwap thwap thwop that carries for miles. Think Platoon or Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now. It became the sonic signature of the entire war. But the Sea Wolves Hueys, they were something particular and something you probably haven't seen in the films. They were army surplus. They were hand me downs, they were aircraft that had Done time in the field. They had shot at, been patched up and returned to service, passed along to a Navy squadron who were told, here are your machines now go make them work. The Seavo's maintenance crews, the maintainers, as we call them in the navy, did exactly that. One of them said it plainly, they gave us equipment below their standards, but not below ours, because we had maintenance people who were whiz kids. They modified these aircraft in ways that would have alarmed a procurement officer, or supply officer, as we call them in the Navy. Rocket pods on the pylons, twin M60 machine guns on flex mounts on either side, and then two additional gunners, one on each side, hanging out of the open doors with shoulder fired M60s, one foot braced on the rocket pod, firing down and to the rear as the aircraft rolled through an attack run. By 1969, the armament had expanded further. Miniguns, automatic grenade launchers, 30 caliber weapons. The seawolves were essentially improvising a weapon system in real time under combat conditions. Innovations proven in the Delta were later adopted as standard equipment across the fleet. Conditions in the field were, in the words of one maintainer, sparse, as were the materials, necessitating creative ways to accumulate equipment outside the normal supply chain. To which another veteran added simply, we were the McHale's Navy of Vietnam, a cross between McHale's Navy and the Black Sheep Squadron. Later, uh, one Lima Hueys, the slicks called Sea lords, were added for SEAL insertion and extraction. No rocket pods, no gun mouths, just speed and nerve. And I assume that our listeners know who the seals are. Stands for sea and land. They are the navy's commando troops. They can do anything. They can drop in from the air, they can come in from under the water, and they're the ones that do the dirty work for the Navy. And they're pretty amazing. So now let's talk about the men. Every man in hell. 3. He volunteered, and that's done a small thing. Nobody was assigned to the squadron. You had to want it. And the men who wanted it were a specific kind of person. The pilots came from across naval aviation, ranging from fresh training to combat veterans. They went through army helicopter school at Fort Beng, then Fort Rucker, because the Navy had no gunship training program of its own. They learned the Huey, they mastered aerial gunnery, and then continued their education in the most direct way available by deploying to Vietnam and getting shot at the door. Gunners were enlisted men who had either trained at Fort Rucker or, if they'd volunteered after arriving in country, being trained by the squadron itself. By 1969, every enlisted crewman took the HAL 3 plane captain course before assignment, making them simultaneously crew chiefs and gunners, responsible for both maintaining and fighting their aircraft. Nobody knew those aircraft better. By then, the Navy was running short of volunteers and assigning people to the squadron. One of those assignees later called. I knew nothing about the Brown Water Navy or the Seawolves until I got my orders. I did end up flying as a door gunner with 598 combat missions. I did volunteer to fly, so maybe there's some insanity in my veins. The attachments were small. Two helicopters, four pilots, a handful of enlisted aircrew and maintainers. They lived on converted LSTs, that's landing ship tanks anchored in the rivers or at shore bases across the delta. They operated in pairs, always a lead gunship and a wingman. Captain Dick Caton from Hell 3. He said members took pride in the mission entrusted to them. They took a lot of pride in the flying that they did because they knew it mattered. It mattered to those men on the ground and in the rivers. The culture that developed was tight, irreverent and fiercely loyal. As one Seawolf explained it, there was no officer enlisted separation. The crew and pilots were all one group and on commitment. We trusted each other with our lives. You're never going to leave someone behind if you put them there. By God, you're going to get them out even if it costs you your life. These were, on average, very young men. 20, 21, 22 years old. The average age of a Seawolf detachment would not have looked out of place on a college campus. So what did it actually feel like to fly a Seawolf mission? So let's try and build a picture. You're sleeping, or you're trying to sleep on a converted LST anchored in the middle of a river in the Mekong Delta. It is two in the morning. The air is thick with humidity. You can hear the water lapping against the hull. Then the alarm sounds. The one MC crackles and the voice says, scramble the Sea Wolves. This is what Lieutenant Commander Bud Barr, a HAL 3 pilot, had to say. We could be sound asleep at night when the horn would go off and the one MC would sound scramble the Sea Wolves. The pilot would get a briefing on the mission. The CO pilot would man the aircraft and begin the startup procedures, and the crew chiefs and gunners would arm the helicopter and untie the blades. That whole evolution from sound asleep to in the air was less than 3 minutes airborne in darkness over a river. You know as well as any street back home, which is not quite well enough when someone is shooting at you. The Sea Wolves flew at treetop level 80 to 100ft. Deliberate. It complicated the enemy's targeting. It also meant ricochets off the jungle floor could come back up at you. The pilots and gunners could see the men they were fighting and the men they were fighting could see them back. When contact was made, the sequence was reflexive. The gunner taking fire would drop a flare at night, a smoke grenade. In daylight, the lead helicopter rolled in first. Rockets and machine guns break off. Wingman follows, swap lead and wing and alternating passes, sustaining fire while one reloads from the angle. When ammunition ran low, the hot turn, land, rearm, refuel with engines running and back in the air, the entire evolution in minutes. At night, which is when the Viet Cong preferred to move. The Sea Wolves flew in complete darkness, navigating by memory and starlight and the dim reflection off river channels. No terrain following radar, no night vision equipment, just skill, accumulated experience and a kind of nerve that is very difficult to describe to someone who has not been required to have it. One veteran described the attack philosophy with characteristic simplicity. If you took fire, the gunner would immediately drop a flare or smoke grenade to mark the target, and the lead helicopter would typically be first in and on. The intimacy of this fighting, you can see them and they can see you. There is something in that sentence that tells you everything you need to know about the nature of this mission. This was not bombing from altitude. This was not releasing ordnance from 30,000ft and watching a distant flash. This was personal. This was up close. You looked into the faces of the people you were shooting at and they looked into yours. By 1970, the Viet Cong had adapted. The shock of the armed helicopter had worn off. Enemy forces were concentrating DSHK heavy machine guns, also called dishkas, around their vital positions and using them aggressively. They had learned helicopter attack patterns. They knew the kill envelope. And still the Sea Wolves went in because they had to. 31st of October 1966, Halloween. Two Navy PBRs and a routine patrol near My Tho city encounter what can only be described as a fleet. More than 80 sampans and junks in convoy, transferring an entire Viet Cong battalion across the water under cover of darkness, the PBRs come under intense fire from both banks and a group of boats hiding in an inlet, retreating down the river with dust closing in. The PBR commander calls for air support. HC1 detachment 25 scrambles. They arrive within 15 minutes. When the flight leader asks, the PBR commander where he wants to strike, the answer comes back in the most American idiom imaginable. I want y' all to go in there and hold field day on them guys. They do. On the first pass, a junk disappears. In a secondary explosion, the munitions it was carrying detonate. On the second pass, another secondary, the enemy troops break and run through open rice Paddies. By nine o' clock that night, 35 vessels sunk, six captured. The Sea Wolves claim 16 additional junks and sampans destroyed, seven more damaged. The battalion transfer is broken up. This was the moment the concept was validated. Not in a briefing room or in a strategic planning document, but on a river at night against 80 boats. If the Seawolves have a natural partner in the Vietnam war Besides the PBR, it is the Navy Seals. The Seals operated in units of four to 14 men deep in Viet Cong territory. They moved at night through jungle the enemy had used for decades. When they reached their objective and found themselves badly outnumbered, the they had one break, radio silence, and the word that went out was scramble. The Sea Wolves. The relationship between them went far beyond professional coordination. SEAL teams would consider delaying or changing operations. If the Sea Wolves weren't available, they were emboldened to take on missions they wouldn't otherwise have considered because the Sea Wolves would insert and extract them in places nobody else would fly into. Chief Gunner's Mate Barry Enoch, a Navy SEAL who earned the Navy Cross in Vietnam, he put it this way. Most important, they were always there for us when we were down in the mud and darkness, the night illuminated with red and green tracers. The VC behind every shadow. Many times after we were out of danger, they stayed with us until we were safely extracted in the middle of the river and out of the range of enemy fire. The Sea Wolves didn't provide fire support and leave. They waited. They stayed on station in the dark, circling, keeping watch until their brothers on the ground were safe. This is the kind of thing that cannot be manufactured by doctrine or regulation. It comes from something else. One River Rat veteran, a PBR sailor, put it in the starkest terms. He said the mere existence of the Sea Wolves, just the knowledge that they could be called, probably deterred more enemy aggression than anyone will ever be able to measure. 14-9-1968. Lieutenant James R. Walker of HAL 3 Detachment 3 is leading a fire team in support of United States naval forces on the Mekong River. An oiler has been caught in an enemy ambush from both sides of the river. Entrenched positions, intense fire. The ship badly damaged Walker's team rolls in and begins working over the enemy emplacements on both banks, drawing fire onto themselves and away from the stricken vessel, pass after pass, burning through ammunition, suppressing the Viet Cong positions. His ammunition exhausted, Walker is preparing to break off and rearm when he receives word. A crewman aboard the oiler is critically wounded. No medevac aircraft can get in. The fire is too heavy. The oiler has no flight deck. There's nowhere to land. Walker hovers his aircraft over the bow of the moving ship with his gunner directing him inch by inch. He places one skid on a pylon fitting a piece of metal protrusion on the bow not designed for this at all. And he holds station long enough for the wounded man to be lifted aboard. Under fire over a moving vessel with one skid resting on a bit of metal sticking out of the ship. He then flies the casualty to Vinh Long airfield. Rearmed and returned to the fight. Walker received a Navy Cross for that. There were five of them awarded to hell, three over the course of the war. Five individual acts of heroism so extraordinary that they earned the second highest decoration the United States Navy can bestow for valor. Each one is its own story, and each one deserves a podcast episode of its own. 28 April 1969. Two Seawolf helicopters, Seawolf 320 and Seawolf 305, are operating against NVA and Viet Cong elements in Cambodia. Seawolf 320 is hit and goes down. Seawolf 305 is also taking damage, engine oil pressure falling, the aircraft progressively losing the ability to fly. The pilot of 305 does not turn from home. He stays on station and lands to reach the sole survivor of Seawolf 320's crew. Both aircraft are destroyed. Army helicopters come in and extract the survivors. But the lone survivor, Seawolf 305, is killed by enemy fire while departing the landing zone. His name was Petty Officer Lloyd T. Williams Jr. He received the Navy Cross posthumously. He was a crew chief and door gunner who had already been wounded, who had continued to fight, and who in the end went down doing what seawolves did, staying with the man who needed him. 15-9-1970. The Battle of Vi C Lake. This is remembered as one of the most intense combat engagements in the squadron's history. South Vietnamese regional forces had unexpectedly encountered formidable opposition southwest of Ca Mao. As the engagement deepened, it became a major action against a well entrenched, disciplined enemy, one that had set a deliberate trap. Their Tactic was refined by years of hard isolate an Allied ground unit surrounded with heavy weapons, allow the beleaguered men to call for help, and then lie in wait for the helicopters. When the Medevac helicopter dustoff 86 attended the pickup, it was driven off by concentrated ground fire. It called for gunship escort and withdrew to wait. Four Seawolf gunships went in. Two from Detachment 6, two from Detachment 1, and three on the wing of the Medevac, and the landing zone ignited. Heavy concentrated fire hit all four gunships nearly simultaneously. Seawolf 312 went down first, striking a dike during the landing flare and turning what might have been a survival crash into a wreck of twisted metal. The door gunner aboard 312 recalled it in fragments. A hail of tracers hit after hit, the aircraft beginning to auto rotate, and his crewmate throwing everything overboard that was heavy and wouldn't shoot, saving everything that would shoot for after the crash, one crewman jumped into the water to pull his wounded partner back towards a hovering Sea Lord. He felt the man take a round. He took a hit himself below the waterline, went down, got back up and made it to the aircraft, so exhausted he could not lift his M60. So he fired it where it lay as they lifted off under fire. By the time it was over, the Sea wolves had lost four aircraft. The army lost 14. At the memorial service held on the helicopter pad at Song Ang Doc the following day, more than one man wept. It was the costliest single day in the squadron's short history. And the Sea Wolves were back in the air and heading to the next fight before it was over. Five Navy Crosses, 31 Silver Stars, 219 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 156 Purple Hearts, 101 Bronze Stars, six Presidential Unit Citations, more than 16,000 Air Medals. Why? Why'd they get so many? Well, the first answer is proximity. The Seawolves were not providing air cover from altitude. They were in the fight at 100ft, in direct contact with the enemy. Every single sortie across. 120,000 sorties in five years. The arithmetic is simple. When acts of extraordinary courage happen at that rate in that environment, the decorations accumulate. The second answer is culture. It was all volunteer, every man there by choice. Captain Dick Caton, one of the squadron's leaders, observed that members took pride in the mission entrusted to them. But it went deeper than pride. One Seawolf described it plainly. There was no officer enlisted. Separation. The crews and pilots were all one group in small detachments, far from any rear echelon. And that kind of equality under fire creates a bond that is very hard to break. The third is the relationship with the men they supported. One army veteran wrote to the Seawolf association, years after the war, army aviation wouldn't pick up what was left of our team because we were in a hot LZ and they couldn't risk the lives of the aircrew. For two army types, a Navy Seawolf helicopter heard the conversation and it came in and picked us up. That is not an isolated story. That pattern, going where others would not go, repeated itself across five years and 100,000 sorties. Each repetition is a decoration, or at least it should be. Fourth reason is the rapid reaction posture. 24 hour watches, less than 3 minutes from alarm to airborne, 3 minutes within 15 minutes of the call, typically engaging the enemy. This tempo, sustained across years, is physically and psychologically extraordinary and underpinning all of it. The maintainers, the men who kept these aircraft flying on improvised parts, borrowed supplies and sheer inventiveness, who fixed bullet holes and tree strikes and the accumulated damage of operations so relentless that any rational assessment would have grounded the fleet. They got the aircraft back in the air and then the crews flew them again. We dare to go when and where others would not go. People need not take our word for this. All they have to do is ask the units our squadron supported. Ask the brown water Navy sailors, including the SEALs and UDT. Ask the U.S. army and Marine Corps Special Forces and advisors. Ask the Green Berets, Long Range Patrol Mobile Strike Force and Ranger Team members. Ask the South Vietnamese villagers who were in danger of being overrun by the VC and NVA. So said Tom Oldby, held three seawolves that one during a Vietnam memorial speech on July 4, 1996. The men who are asked have never needed to be asked twice. By 1971, the political calculus of the Vietnam War had shifted. The Vietnamization, the gradual transfer of combat responsibility to South Vietnamese forces was underway. American units were drawing down. Hal 3 began at stand down in January 1972. The last seawolf gunship departed Vietnam in early March. The squadron was disestablished on the 16th of that month, five years and two weeks after its commissioning at Vung Tau. And in a final distinction that could only belong to this particular outfit, the Sea Wolves became the only Navy squadron ever formed and disestablished overseas. They never had a home base in the United States. They were born in a combat zone and they ended in a combat zone. It took the Navy four years to realize the mistake. And in 1976 and in 1977 helicopter attack squadrons light four and five were established reservist units that would eventually see combat and Desert Storm in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The lineage runs forward from HAL 3 to Naval Special Warfare Aviation. Today, every Navy helicopter pilot who has supported a SEAL team, provided close air support to riverine forces, or conducted a medevac in a hot zone owes something to the men who figured it out the first time in the Mekong Delta with borrowed Hueys and three minutes from a standing start to Airborne. Many operational records remain classified at the National Archives. The COVID nature of missions in support of SEALs and special operations means the full history may never be known. The Seawolf association has spent decades tracking down veterans and fighting for recognition of door gunners who weren't officially credentialed as combat aircrew until 1997, a quarter century after the squadron disbanded. Congress formally honored HAL 3 in 2010, 38 years after the last aircraft left Vietnam. Gary Eli, a door gunner who spent years maintaining the Seawolf Huey on the deck of the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, he put it without any self pity. There's no way you can experience what went on over there and how it went about unless you were there. His daughter Mel only learned the full story when she watched the Scramble the Sea Wolves documentary and saw her father's name. She called him. How come you never talked about it? You guys were so brave. You're all heroes. He just shrugged and said, I just did what I had to do. I just did what I had to do. There's a, uh, one Bravo Huey at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola right at the entrance to Hangar Bay 1. So it's one of the first things you see that is the Sea Wolves monument. It is modest, given what they did, but then modest is perhaps right. These were men who did not seek recognition. They sought the mission. 44 names on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C. who were seawolves. Over 200 wounded, 120,000 sorties, and every SEAL who made it home from a bad night in the delta. Every PBR crew that survived an ambush. Every soldier who heard the whomping rotors through the jungle and knew that help was three minutes out. That's the real accounting of the Seawolves. So that's the story of HAL3, the seawolves of the United States Navy, the most decorated squadron in naval aviation history. Born in the field. All volunteers, all in. If you want to go deeper, and I hope you do, the 2018 PBS documentary Scramble the Sea Wolves is available on DVD at scramblethesewolves.com Directed by Jeff Arbello and narrated by Mike Rowe, it features original combat footage and veteran interviews and won Best Feature documentary at the 2019 San Diego Film Awards. It's absolutely worth your time. Beyond that, Daniel Kelly's book US Navy Seawolves, the elite HAL 3 helicopter squadron in Vietnam is the definitive written account and the Seawolf association is online@seawolf.org still working to document the history and find the men who were there. So that's all for now folks. Thanks for listening to the history that happened before the history you know. If you enjoyed this podcast, give it a like and a share and support your National Naval Aviation Museum and the Museum Foundation. So until next time, this is Lucky signing off.
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Thanks for tuning in to the Ready Rooms miniseries Footnotes of History, hosted by Captain Tim Kinsla, where you experience the obscure, the overlooked and often unbelievable chapters of military history. Don't forget to like subscribe and leave a five star review. Fly Navy.