The Insider Attack That Should’ve Killed Me, Not My Friend

This story takes me back to Vietnam,1967. One of my best friends had been on sick call. He was a door gunner, who loved to fly, and when put back on the flight schedule, swapped with a buddy to fly his first day back. Two hours later, he was dead after the helicopter he flew on, had an engine failure and crashed. The ship I was on took the SOS call and flew in to the LZ to extract the crew, and the grunts on board, flying to an air assault. The SOS told us there was one KIA. It was my buddy, John Richard Gregoire. He had run uphill after getting his pilot out, and the main rotor hit him in the head, decapitating him. I felt I'd been hit in the gut when I saw him. We had just been talking a few hours before the accident.

A Marine veteran recalls the circumstances that led to his friend’s death instead of his during an insider attack in Afghanistan.