08/28/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C7JGkFfTA/
April 29, 1975. Saigon is falling. Major Ba Van Nguyen of the South Vietnamese Air Force had a Chinook, a full load of fuel burning away, and a family the North Vietnamese would not forgive. His commanders were already gone. So he flew to where his wife and 3 young children were waiting, loaded them aboard with his crew and neighbors, and headed out over the South China Sea with nowhere to go.
Then he heard American voices on the radio. He followed them to a ship, the USS Kirk. It was a small frigate. A Huey could land on its deck. A 12-ton, twin-rotor Chinook could not, and the sailors waved him off, frantically.
He came in anyway, low over the fantail, and held the helicopter in a hover while the people aboard jumped down into the sailors' arms. His wife went last. She was holding their 10-month-old daughter, and there was only one way to do it. She counted to 3 and dropped her baby. A sailor named Kent Chipman was waiting underneath. He said later there was no way they were going to let them hit the deck. They caught them all.
Now Nguyen was alone in the Chinook. He flew clear of the ship, settled into a hover with his wheels touching the waves, and, while still flying the aircraft, worked his way out of his flight suit. Then he rolled the helicopter to the right and jumped out the left side as it went in.
The rescue boat found red spreading in the water where the wreck sank. It was hydraulic fluid. Nguyen was unhurt.
The Kirk's captain, Paul Jacobs, later put it in writing: "There could hardly have been a more masterful bit of flying, or a braver pilot that day."
In 2009, the Navy went looking for the pilot they never forgot. An email found his son. In 2010, the crew of the Kirk reunited with the Nguyen family in Virginia, and Kent Chipman, in his old dress uniform, snapped to attention and saluted the man in the wheelchair.
The baby they caught is a grown woman in America today.
