January 25th, 1969. Fuai village, Meong Delta. 90 American infantry men are pinned in an open rice patty. They’ve been there for 2 hours. Five are already dead, including their commander. The rest are running low on ammunition, taking fire from a fortified North Vietnamese machine gun bunker they can’t see and can’t destroy.

 Cobra gunships have tried. They can’t get the angle without killing the Americans hugging the dirt 50 meters from the bunker. Artillery can’t touch it. The infantry can’t maneuver. [music] They’re dying in place. And everyone watching from the air knows it. Then a white Stson cavalry hat appears in the door of an 06 Loach Scout helicopter.

First Lieutenant Allan Ace Kazalo drops his helicopter to 10 ft above the enemy bunker. so close his rotor wash is kicking up dust from the sandbags. Machine gun fire is tearing through his plexiglass. He’s not retreating. He’s not firing rockets from a safe distance. [music] He’s landing on top of the bunker.

 His crew chief jumps out, tosses a grenade through the firing port and scrambles back aboard. Kazalo pulls the pitch and climbs just as the bunker explodes beneath him. The 90 men in that rice patty lived because a helicopter pilot from a cattle ranch in [music] Oregon decided that the book on how to fight wars was [ __ ] And [music] sometimes you just land on the problem.

This is the story of the most unconventional helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. The guy who went awall from a hospital to [music] get back to combat. The guy who captured enemy soldiers with a Civil War cavalry saber. The guy who was shot down six times in 18 months and kept coming back. The cowboy who turned a scout helicopter into a weapon of absolute chaos.

 Alan Kazalio wasn’t supposed to be a pilot. He was supposed to be running cattle. Born in 1946 on a cattle ranch along the California Oregon border. Raised on horseback, self-reliant, the kind of guy who fixes problems himself. In 1966, he got drafted. Instead of resisting, he leaned in, went to armor officer candidate school at Fort Knox, got commissioned as a second lieutenant, then volunteered for helicopter flight school.

 Flying came naturally to him, not because he was some kind of prodigy, but because helicopters and horses operate on the same principle. You don’t fight them, you work with them. You feel what they’re telling you. Kazalio graduated flight school in October 1967 and shipped to Vietnam 2 months later. He arrived at Dong Tom Base Camp in December 1967.

 Assigned to Droop third squadron fifth cavalry regiment attached to the 9inth Infantry Division operating in the Meong Delta. The unit had a nickname the Bastard Calav because they weren’t attached to a cavalry division. They were orphans operating independently which suited them fine. And they had a tradition, yellow scarves, white stsons hats, the uniform of the old horse cavalry.

 Most pilots wore them casually, a nod to history. Kazalio took it further. He showed up wearing a full 1860s cavalry uniform, blue coat with brass buttons, yellow silk scarf, white stson, and strapped to his belt, a genuine Civil War era cavalry saber. Not for show, for use. See, while other helicopter pilots were thinking of themselves as modern aviators, Kazalio saw himself as a continuation of something older.

 The guys who’d ridden into battle on horseback weren’t scared of getting close to the enemy. They’d charged with sabers drawn, trusting speed and aggression to carry them through. Kazalio figured a helicopter was just a faster horse. And if the mission required getting close, closer than doctrine allowed, closer than seemed sane, then that’s what you did.

 His call sign was Waragon 10. The name fit because what Kazalio did in an06 Loach scout helicopter wasn’t reconnaissance. It was a fight. But first, he had to survive long enough to learn the aircraft. That almost didn’t happen. The Hughes O6A Cailluse, nicknamed the Loach, was a tiny helicopter. Two seats, bubble canopy, looked like a flying fishbowl.

 It was designed for observation. Fly high, stay safe, spot the enemy, call in the gunships. Kazalio ignored all of that. He flew the loach at treetop level, sometimes lower. He’d skim across rice patties so low that the rotor wash would part the water, revealing hidden sand pans or tunnel openings underneath.

 He’d hover next to canals, close enough that his door gunner could see into enemy bunkers. close enough that if someone fired at him, the muzzle flash was 10 ft away. This wasn’t bravery. This was tactical logic. The O6 was small and agile. At low altitude, it could turn faster than an enemy gunner could track. At high altitude, it was a slowmoving target.

Kazalio’s theory was simple. Get so close that the enemy panics. Make them shoot poorly. Make them reveal their position. then let the Cobra gunships overhead shred them. The tactic was called pink team operations. The scout, white team, would fly low and draw fire. The gunships, red team, would circle above and destroy anything that shot at the scout. Pink team, white plus red.

 It worked, but it came with a cost. In his first 18 hours of combat flying, 18 hours, Kazalia was shot down. December 1967, his helicopter crashed. He suffered a broken jaw and other injuries serious enough that he was evacuated to the 106th General Hospital in Japan for surgery. Standard procedure, recover in Japan, then get shipped back to the United States. War over.

 Kazalo disagreed with this plan. While his jaw was still wired shut, he walked out of the hospital, found a C130 cargo plane heading back to Vietnam, and climbed aboard. Technically, he was absent without leave. Awol, a court marshal offense. He didn’t care. His unit was in combat. He was a pilot. The math was simple.

 He landed back at Dong, walked into the operations tent with his jaw still wired, and reported for duty. His commanders could have charged him. Instead, they put him back in the cockpit because in a war where good pilots were in short supply, a guy willing to escape a hospital to fly combat missions was exactly the kind of crazy you needed.

 Over the next 18 months, Kazio would be shot down five more times and walk away from all of them. The crews started calling him invincible, not because he never got hit, because he never stayed down. Lieutenant Colonel Hugh L. Mills Jr. Another scout pilot who flew in Vietnam and was himself shot down 16 times knew Kosalo personally.

 Years later, he said this. Ace was the eternal cavalry man. He lived and breathed cavalry and embraced the historical elements of the branch. It wasn’t unusual for him to walk around the troop area in full 1873 uniform, including the 1860 pattern saber. Some people thought he was eccentric. I thought he was the real deal.

 Mills knew what he was talking about. He and Kosalo both went awall from hospitals to get back to combat. Both captured enemy prisoners from helicopters. Both flew the O6 Loach like it was an extension of their nervous system. And both understood that in the Meong Delta, the safe way to fly would get you killed just as dead as the reckless way.

 The difference was the reckless way sometimes won the fight. September 1968, Kazalio spotted an enemy soldier who dove into a canal to hide. Standard procedure. Mark it. Move on. Kazalio landed the helicopter, put on his Stson, drew his Civil War cavalry saber, waited into the murky water, and started probing the mud with the blade until he felt something solid.

 A man erupted from the surface, gasping. He’d been breathing through a reed lying on the bottom of the canal, a Vietkong technique to hide from helicopters. Kazalio marched him back to the helicopter at sword point, made him stand on the landing skid, and flew him to base for interrogation. There’s a photograph. It happened.

 When asked why he’d gone through the trouble, Kazalio said, “Scouts got beer and soda credits for prisoners. We got pretty good at it.” This wasn’t the only time. He captured multiple prisoners this way. The legend of the cowboy in the Stson who’d land his helicopter and drag you out of a canal with a sword became part of Delta Troop folklore.

 But that was a sideshow. The main event, the action that defined his entire career happened 4 months later. January 25th, 1969. Charlie Company, Fifth Battalion, 60th Infantry, was crossing an open rice patty near Fui Village when a fortified NVA bunker opened fire. The company commander was killed instantly. Four other soldiers went down in the first burst.

 The rest hit the dirt and couldn’t move. For 2 hours, they stayed pinned. Every time someone tried to move, the bunker’s machine gun cut them down. They’d tried everything. Cobra gunships made gun runs. Too close to friendlies. Had to abort. Artillery couldn’t get the angle. The bunker was dug too deeply and reinforced. Infantry tried to maneuver.

 Three more men were wounded. Ammunition was running out. Wounded men were bleeding out in the dirt and that bunker kept firing. Then Kazalio arrived overhead in his Cobra gunship. He circled once, twice, looking at the geometry of the problem. The bunker was 50 m from the Americans. Any explosive with enough power to destroy it would kill the men it was pinning down. Standard weapons wouldn’t work.

Rockets, too much blast radius. Cannon fire, not accurate enough at this angle. Artillery, same problem. But there was one weapon that could get close enough. Kazalio landed his Cobra, climbed out, walked over to one of the O6 loaches from the scout section, got in, took off.

 He brought the tiny observation helicopter back to the battlefield and dropped to 10 ft above the bunker. Machine gun fire tore into the plexiglass. Bullets punched through the thin aluminum skin. The men on the ground watched, horrified, as the helicopter descended directly toward the bunker that was killing them. Someone later said it looked like watching a man commit suicide in slow motion.

 Kazalio kept descending. The rotor wash kicked up dirt and dust from the sandbags. The bunker’s machine gun was firing straight up at him now, point blank. Tracer rounds were streaking past the cockpit. The sound inside that tiny helicopter must have been deafening. Bullets tearing through metal. The engines screaming, the rotor blades chopping air just feet above enemy soldiers.

 And then he landed on top of the bunker. The loach’s skids settled onto the sandbags. His crew chief, door gunner, kicked open the side door, jumped out onto the roof of the bunker, pulled a fragmentation grenade from his vest, yanked the pin, and dropped it through the firing port. He dove back into the helicopter.

Kazalio pulled the pitch. The loach lifted off. The bunker exploded beneath them. The blast wave rocked the helicopter. Debris and smoke erupted from the fortification. And then silence. The machine gun had stopped. The bunker was gone. 90 men in that rice patty stopped breathing for a second. Then they realized they were alive.

 The thing that had been killing them for 2 hours had just been destroyed by a helicopter pilot who’d landed on top of it. Gazalio didn’t leave. He landed again, this time next to the pinned infantry and climbed out to brief the ground commander on the battlefield layout from his aerial perspective where the other enemy positions were best route to assault.

 Then he got back in the helicopter, switched back to his Cobra gunship, and provided overhead fire support until the infantry secured the area. Why did it work? Because Kazalio understood something most people miss. The bunker machine gun was designed to fire horizontally across the rice patty, not vertically at a helicopter 10 ft above it.

The gun’s traverse couldn’t elevate enough. The firing port faced outward, not up, and the crew inside had never trained for a helicopter landing on their roof. It wasn’t suicide. It was geometry. and Kazalio had done the math in the 30 seconds it took to circle the battlefield. A general officer who’d been overhead in a command and control helicopter watching the entire engagement landed immediately after the fight.

 He promoted Kazalio from first lieutenant to captain on the spot, awarded him a silver star in the field, and recommended him for the distinguished service cross. Gazalio received the DSC on May 7th, 1969, the nation’s second highest award for valor. The citation called it extraordinary heroism. That’s putting it mildly.

 In 2024, surviving members of Charlie Company wrote a letter to the US Senate advocating for Kazaliio’s Distinguished Service Cross to be upgraded postumously to the Medal of Honor. They wrote, “We owe our lives to First Lieutenant Ace Kausalio. He attacked a fortified bunker in a scout helicopter when every other option had failed.

 We were running out of ammunition and time. Without him, none of us would have made it home.” 18 signatures. 18 men who are alive today because a helicopter pilot decided the safe thing to do was land on the enemy. Kazalo served two tours in Vietnam, 18 months total, over a thousand combat flight hours in his first year alone.

 He logged more than 2100 total hours in country, most of it at altitudes where a mechanical failure meant instant death. He received every valor award the United States military can give except the medal of honor. Distinguished service cross, silver star, four distinguished flying crosses, soldiers medal for pulling pilots from a burning helicopter crash, two purple hearts, 48 air medals, two bronze stars.

 He wasn’t done fighting, but the army decided he was too valuable and too reckless to send back. His request for a third tour was denied. Officially, it was because he’d strayed too many times across the DMZ into Cambodia and Laos, pursuing enemy forces into areas American helicopters weren’t supposed to go.

 Translation: He was effective, but he didn’t follow the rules. And the rules said no more Vietnam for Ace Kazalo. He stayed in the army, rose to lieutenant colonel, commanded the fourth aviation training battalion at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where he helped develop the combat aviation handbook that’s still used today. The scout tactics he pioneered in the Meong Delta, low-level aggressive using the helicopter as bait, became standard operating procedure for Army aviation.

Even stateates side, he stayed in character. When he attended the command and general staff college at Fort Levvenworth, every other officer carried a briefcase. Kosalo carried saddle bags. When he attended civic functions, he wore his 1860s cavalry uniform. Always a cowboy. But the war had taken something from him that wouldn’t show up until years later.

 In 1986, Kosalo contracted a rare virus that led to cardiomyopathy, progressive weakening of the heart muscle. The army medically retired him after 20 years of service. He went back to California, competed in team roping events with his brother, taught at the local college. His heart kept failing. By 1993, he could barely function.

 He moved to Portland, Oregon to await a heart transplant. On April 27th, he received a new heart. The surgery went well. Doctors were optimistic. The next day, April 30th, his new heart failed. Massive heart attack. He died at 46 years old. April 30th, the same day Saigon fell in 1975, the same day the Vietnam War officially ended.

 Kazalio had escaped death six times in Vietnam, survived crashes that should have killed him, lived through a war that broke thousands of men. But his heart, the thing that had driven him to escape hospitals, to land on bunkers, to charge into fire when everyone else retreated, couldn’t survive peace. In 2020, the Army Aviation Association of America inducted Allan Ace Calo into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame.

 The citation acknowledged his combat heroism, but focused on something else, his role in developing scout tactics and embodying the spirit of Army aviation, past, present, and future. There’s a memorial wall at the Living Memorial Sculpture Garden in Weed, California. Kazalo helped establish it before he died. A large bronze plaque with his name sits at the center of the hot LZ wall dedicated to veterans of all conflicts.

The Pentagon is still reviewing whether to upgrade his distinguished service cross to the Medal of Honor. Senators from multiple states have endorsed it. Dozens of surviving soldiers from Charlie Company support it. General officers who flew in Vietnam support it. Whether it happens or not, the men who flew with him already know the truth.

Ace Kazalo redefined what a scout helicopter could do. He turned a fragile observation platform into an offensive weapon. He taught himself to fly closer to the enemy than anyone thought possible, survived being shot down six times, and saved 90 men by landing on the thing trying to kill them. He did all of it while wearing a Stson and carrying a sword.

 Because to him, being a pilot wasn’t about technology or tactics. It was about the same thing that drove cavalrymen to charge enemy lines on horseback a 100red years earlier. The willingness to close with the enemy, to take the risk yourself so someone else doesn’t have to, and to never ever quit. The O6 Loach is still in service today as the MH6 Littlebird.

Special operations pilots fly it in combat using the same low-level tactics Causal Leo pioneered in 1968. They don’t wear Stsons. They don’t carry sabers, but they fly the way he taught them to fly. Fast, low, and aggressive. always a cowboy, always a cavalryman, always leading the charge. Kazalo’s heart gave out at 46.

 But the spirit he brought to the battlefield, the refusal to accept that some things can’t be done, the willingness to land on the problem when everyone else is flying away, that never dies. It just finds a new helicopter and a new pilot willing to take it lower than anyone else dares.