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Rotor Wash: A Huey Door Gunner's Vietnam
Paperback
Series: The Boys Who Didn't Come Home, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 26 2026
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.57 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
June 1966. Hollis Caudill, nineteen years old, stands in the open door of a Huey and learns what the valley costs.
He is a door gunner with the 227th Assault Helicopter Battalion, flying resupply and extraction missions into the Vinh Thanh Valley during Operation Crazy Horse - one of the bloodiest helicopter operations of the Vietnam War. He has an M60, a crew chief who speaks in facts rather than comfort, and a 1964 Ford Galaxie waiting under a tarp at home in West Virginia.
By the time the operation ends, he will have carried the dead from a burning ridge, watched a ship go down in a paddy, and made a choice in eight seconds that he will spend the rest of his life accounting for.
Rotor Wash is the story of what a man learns he can do - and what he brings home from the learning.
For readers of Chickenhawk, Matterhorn, and The Things They Carried - a Vietnam War novel of helicopter combat, crew brotherhood, and the long silence of coming home.
This novel contains:
- The Vinh Thanh Valley campaign of May-June 1966, told from the door of a UH-1D Huey - the lifts, the extractions, the aircraft that didn't make it back
- The crew of Miss Margaret: a crew chief who never wastes a word, a door gunner learning what his hands are capable of, and the men they carry in and the men they carry out
- A chapter from inside the mind of a PAVN anti-aircraft commander on the ridge above the valley - the other side of the same war
- Father Patrick Maddox, a Catholic chaplain whose single sentence will follow Hollis from a revetment at Camp Radcliff to a porch in West Virginia
- A coming-home story that refuses to pretend a year in the door leaves anyone the same
Based on the real Operation Crazy Horse and the real units of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). The Author's Note explains what is historical and what is invented.
The Boys Who Didn't Come Home - an ongoing series following the men of the 1st Cavalry Division and the families who waited. Each book follows a different soldier. You can start anywhere.
Book One: The Ia Drang - Ray Halvorsen, nineteen years old, at Landing Zone X-Ray. November 1965. Available now.
Book Two: Rotor Wash - Hollis Caudill, door gunner, Vinh Thanh Valley. You are reading it.
Book Three: Deacon - forthcoming 2026.
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