Ewen receives Congressional Gold Medal

Jerry Ewen, of Greybull, was recently honored at with an interim Congressional Gold Medal for his service as an air ambulance pilot in the Vietnam War. Ewen travelled to Oklahoma City, Okla. for a ceremony hosted by the Vietnam Dustoff Association in September. One hundred and eighty former Dustoff and Medevac crew members put in for the award, with 108 attending and receiving the medal at the ceremony. 

“It means recognition that was long overdue,” Ewen said. 

Ewen served from 1968-1969 in the 498th and 54th med companies, from the time he was 19 to almost 22. He flew a Huey UH-1H with a crew of three other men, hoisting the injured out of the jungle, sometimes under fire. From 1962 to 1973, air ambulance crews flew 4996,573 combat missions, rescuing about 900,000 wounded. Ewen and his crews are responsible for 1,123 of those missions, about 2,300 patients. 

He recalled one mission where his crew spotted a little girl over an area riddled with mines. They hovered down to her, and the medic reached down to grab the child. 

“I could hear him crying over the intercom,” Ewen said. “...I look back, and that’s a sight I’ll never ever forget because she’d had both legs traumatically amputated below the knee from a Claymore mine, and she was absolutely silent, and laying there on that big green army stretcher. It was hard. That kind of thing, it takes a while to emotionally accommodate that, and I think this medal, it goes at least part ways to balance some of that out.”

Vietnam veterans did not receive a warm reception on their return home from an unpopular war. Ewen has seen the attitude towards their service change over the years, and noted that when he wears his veteran’s cap, he has had people pick up the tab at restaurants. But this medal will be the first official recognition from the government for the air ambulances’ work. 

“(The Congressional Gold Medal was) first awarded to George Washington for his leadership during the American Revolution, it has since recognized only those whose contributions have profoundly shaped our nation’s history,” Doug Peterson, of the Vietnam Dustoff Association, said at the ceremony. 

The Dustoff association lobbied Congress to instate the award, resulting in the passage of the U.S. Army Air Ambulance Crews of the Vietnam War Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2024. Over 5,000 letters and emails were sent in support of the measure. The medal’s front-facing art, a soldier waving down an air ambulance, is based off an illustration by Joe Kline, who served as a crew chief in Vietnam. The medals were presented as an interim award as final designs are determined, with Ewen noting the association wanted to honor the Vietnam veterans, now mostly in their 80s, while they could still enjoy the honor.

Awards will also be given posthumously. Ewen put in for an award for one of his best friends from Vietnam, Richard Brightmire, who passed about a year ago, and intends to give it to Brightmire’s daughter.  Air ambulance crews suffered an estimated 30% attrition rate for those wounded and killed in the line of duty. They flew under the creed, “So others may live.”

“For me, the real award, the real recognition, is those guys that we saved off the battlefield that were able to come home to their families. That’s where the real reward lies,” Ewen said. “We never learned their names... I’ve always wondered, for all these years, what happened to them, thousands of them, and I just hope that they lived and went on to lead productive lives, and they raised families, and now they have grandchildren and great grandchildren, just like the rest of us do, that they survived.”