They were wide-eyed, like grade-school kids seeing an ant farm for the first time.
They said “Wow.” They said “Whoa.”
They couldn’t help themselves. Not with a Black Hawk helicopter at the New Hampshire National Guard hangar just a few feet away. It didn’t matter that they came from the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton, using wheelchairs and walkers and canes to move inside.
On Friday, they were youthful minds, eager to learn.
“Quite a machine,” Walt Pierce told me after class had been dismissed. “I asked a lot of questions. Wonderful to see.”
Pierce is 98, a veteran of World War II. He and nine others from the senior home came by bus for this field trip. Some had fought in Vietnam 50 years ago, others in Europe and the Pacific 25 years before that.
They had never seen a Black Hawk. Not like this. Not this close. They could thank a Vietnam veteran named Gary Simard, who wore a No. 50 Mookie Betts Red Sox shirt and a walrus-like silver mustache.
He went straight to the top, writing a letter to Adjutant Gen. Bill Reddel and asking if he and his friends could get a tour of this cavernous place, with its ceiling that extends forever and its sleek fighting machines that have meant so much during a war that also, seemingly, goes on forever.
Simard recalled the sting of battle, stored in his memory, as soon as he arrived. There’s a Vietnam-era Huey helicopter out front of the massive complex, attached to a long pole, a Red Cross symbol on its side, its blades seemingly caught in mid spin.
I asked Simard about that relic, knowing he’d been in Vietnam. Had it brought him back? He barely hesitated.
“When we were moving south toward Saigon, the rest of our troops stayed in the mountains,” Simard told me during the post-event cookout. “We got a call to come back. They were under attack.”
So they went back, Simard said, flying in a Huey and dropping down to lend support.
“You do what you gotta do,” Simard said. “You know your fellow comrades are back there, and they need help.”
Pierce, a Navy pilot, had his own story to tell. The one from World War II. The one about his bombing mission against a Japanese transport. The one about releasing a bomb and destroying a ship, then signaling his co-pilot to pull up quickly to avoid any damage the explosion might have caused.
“We ran into (the Japanese) and sent directions and their speed to other planes,” Pierce said before attacking his hot dog. “But we had to go in and release the bomb because cloud cover was coming.”
That was a different war, in a different decade, against a specific nation state. These days, in the War on Terror, things aren’t so easily defined. Those trying to kill us are shadowy figures, and the Black Hawks have become vital, attacking sometimes, rescuing other times.
CW2 helicopter pilot Michael Fletcher of Derry comes from a family of veterans and pilots. At 42, he’s spent 22 years in the military, including 15 in the National Guard.
He was a Black Hawk mechanic in 2005 in Iraq for a med-evac operation. I asked him about the danger involved while swooping in to retrieve the wounded in a hot war zone.
“It’s a little bit of controlled chaos in that you’re landing in a dusty, dirty area,” Fletcher said. “There are a lot of civilians who are watching because they want to know what’s going on, so that is sometimes a concern because you don’t want to hurt anyone else, but you also don’t know who else is in that group.”
Eight years later, Fletcher was a med-evac pilot in Afghanistan. Before leaving, he told NECN, “It’s never easy to leave your family, but we know that the actions we’re all going to do (are) hopefully going to reunite people with their families again some day.”
“There were a couple of rare instances when we’ve run into people down the road who say, ‘I think you guys might have picked me up.’ ” he told me. “That was pretty cool and rewarding.”
The veterans from the Tilton home couldn’t get enough information from Fletcher and guardsman George Munson, who stood under a portion of a Black Hawk blade as he spoke.
Roger Davies, a Marine who fought during World War II and called himself a square-headed Welshman, had lots of questions.
He learned that the blades are about 65 feet long, that the nearby Black Hawk had room for 11 troops and four crew members, that it had about 4,000 horsepower, that it could travel 180 miles per hour, that the engine roars at 46,000 rotations per minute.
“I’ll be damned,” Davies said.
Walton Thompson, who flew missions off the Solomon Islands during World War II, rested both hands on his cane as he sat and listened to Munson and Fletcher.
He asked a few questions, then reversed the roles.
Suddenly, the student was the teacher.
“We had a gun behind me on a swivel,” Thompson explained. “We carried a 2,000-pound bomb. There were 70,000 Japanese, so we had a lot of targets. We liked to hit the fuel dumps. There were always a lot of fireworks.”
“Wow,” Fletcher said.
(Ray Duckler can be reached at 369-3304, rduckler@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @rayduckler.)