He had never considered joining the military. He said he was a poor farm boy and just wanted to be a farmer. But, then he joined the ROTC as a student at the University of Delaware. When he graduated with an agriculture and chemistry degree, he went into the chemical corps for the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant. There marks the true beginning of a stellar military career for retired Fort Rucker Chief of Staff, Col. Willis R. (Bob) Bunting of Ozark.
“I had never even thought of going into the military. I always wanted to be a farmer, do something in agriculture. My real plan was to teach agriculture. But, anyway, (after college) I was commissioned as a reserve officer in the chemical corps in 1960…it was a peacetime army.” Eventually, Bunting found that he did not like the chemical corps and began hearing stories from pilots about flight school and decided to apply. He was accepted and reported to fixed wing flight school at Fort Rucker in December 1961. It was during his time in his first flight courses that he attended church one night in Ozark and met Linda Stubbs who soon became his wife. They have now been married for 54 years and he calls her the “perfect wife.”
Bunting prefers not to talk about his years in the military and mostly talks about the men who served with and under him and about his wife and children that he had to leave so many times throughout the years. But, in conversation he eventually opened up about some of his time in Vietnam, as difficult as it apparently is to remember. He is humbled by those memories and said, as he looked off into the empty space of the room with a distant look in his eyes, “It was not a fun time. It was not a fun time.”
With unending appreciation and admiration, Bunting talks of those missions, of his men, with trepidation mixed with enormous understanding, care and concern for what his men went through, never even letting on of any concern for himself.
Having served tours in Korea, leadership assignments to Fort Bragg, NC, Fort Sill, OK, Fort Benning, GA and as a rotary wing pilot at Fort Rucker before being shipped to Vietnam in 1966, Bunting was uniquely ready to serve as a leader in a combat zone. He readily admits, though, that his first tour “in country” was without incident. Others, he said, got shot up or shot down, but he “flew all around, day after day” and never heard a “single round.”
Bunting returned to Fort Rucker as an instructor pilot with the Department of Tactics. Eventually, he was sent back to Fort Benning as a major, and then went on to the Commanding General’s College at Fort Leavenworth, KS. While in Kansas he received the news that he would be returning to Vietnam for a second tour.
Soon after returning to the war-torn country, Bunting was made Commander of the 48th Assault Helicopter Company (AHC)—the Blue Stars. Vietnam was winding down at that time, so nobody was quite sure what to expect. Then his unit was sent to Dong Ha in the dangerous demilitarized zone, also called the DMZ. Few knew about the mission that was to come because it was a top secret mission that became known as Lam Son 719-Laos. The DMZ was located near the 17th parallel and served as a boundary between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. It was the Ben Hai River. During Lam Son 719, the U.S. employed 659 helicopters. Of those, 444 were shot down or otherwise damaged by hostile fire.
Danny Grossman was a pilot who flew with then unit commander, Maj. Bunting. He recalled the mission in his story, “How to Grow Up in Sixty Days or Less,” which can be found online at the website for the 48th AHC, www.48ahc.org.
“The winds of war were about to change and not for the better. We were going to Dong Ha and then into Laos for Operation Lam Son 719, the bold Vietnamese incursion into Laos to cut the supply line on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Grossman wrote.
According to multiple military historians’ online and printed accounts, American helicopters supported and provided all transportation of all South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops/supplies into and out of Laos during this operation and Lam Son became the theater for the heaviest anti-aircraft barrage ever incurred in the entire Vietnam War.
Bunting is somber when remembering this time in the war and for good reason. He lost ten of his men during the 55-day campaign and multiple helicopters—out of 31 helicopters, only a few made it out of the campaign; he was shot down many times himself.
In fact, Bunting was the first Blue Star to cross the boarder and became the first one shot down. “When I was shot down I was low to the ground. I’m taking troops in and hovering low. Two times I was shot down in one day—on the first day of the invasion, Feb. 8, 1971. I was on top of the landing zone, Hotel (what they called one of many landing zones—LZ), and got shot down right there. On Feb. 28, 1971 I got shot down and wounded,” he explained. “We were coming in to a pick-up zone (PZ). That’s where we got hit in the tail rotor. We started spinning and we went down. My gunner was shot. Blood was shooting everywhere. My number two guy, a lieutenant (a different helicopter), came in and hovered so we were able to get out and get my gunner out.”
Bunting said it was scary but everything went fast and they just kept going. “You’re scared enough. We could hear the North Vietnamese (NVA) coming through the jungle. We knew we had to get out fast. You can’t help but be scared. There was a lot of shooting. It was not a fun time,” he said as he gazed off seemingly returning to that place as he told the story. He said that he did not want to be evacuated out to a hospital so he stayed where his unit was, Khe Sanh, where he was treated for his “buttock” wound and continued to lead his men. Perhaps, his tenacity to continue on day after day, mission after mission, without regard for his own safety is what made his men respect him so much. It is often found in the stories of his soldiers, in various printed sources and on line, that Bunting never flew above altitude for safety, he stayed with his men. He flew in the lead. He led them.
Grossman described the same terrible incident (Bunting was in the co-pilot seat) this way: “As we approached the PZ, there was a strange and tense calm. I mean nobody was shooting at us. How cool! What the heck was going on? We sat down quickly in the PZ. I could see the wounded ARVN soldiers being carried to our chopper. Their bodies were so mangled and bloody. Just as they approached, a mortar round exploded at our 2 o’clock position about 15 to 20 meters away. We were hit. It was a trap. They were waiting for us…As I took off and just past the tree line, all hell broke loose. We were hit by so many rounds. I remember them coming through the chin bubble and hitting the bottom of my armored seat…We took more hits…We were on fire and sat it down…”
An injured Bunting, the crew chief, Grossman, and the critically wounded gunner found their strength and exited the aircraft amid continuous gunfire and made their way to a clearing more than a mile away so the other helicopter could try to rescue them, which it did. Later that day, back in Dong Ha, Grossman remembers thinking, “it was just another day. Tomorrow would be another day with other horrors. All the crews had a day like I/we had, all of them…everyone went through their own private hell over there…It went on day after day with no let-up…”
One particular mission during Lam Son 719 was considered to be pure “suicide” by Bunting. When he was told to get his 10 best crews together to fly into a NVA heavily occupied area he responded to his superior with, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s suicide.”
“We didn’t have night vision goggles back then,” he explained. “That place had already been shot up. It was a combat zone. You could hardly see during the day because of the burning (landscape) and smoke.” Then, he was told that it was an order, that he and his men had no choice.
Bunting called his crews together and told them the mission, then asked for volunteers. There were none—at first. Bunting simply told his men, “Okay. I’ll go by myself.” He walked to his aircraft and began the pre-flight routine. The men were not surprised by his bravery, his honor. No way were they going to let him go alone.
In the book, “The Price of Exit,” author and former pilot Tom Marshall wrote, “Major Bunting, instead of displaying emotion or threatening the young warrant officers, simply declared that he understood…However, as commander, he had his duty; he felt he had no choice but to go.” Then Marshall compares the moment to an important time at the Battle of the Alamo. “The gravity of the moment was no less serious than when Colonel Travis drew a line in the sand at the Alamo,” Marshall wrote adding, “Bunting walked away from the pilots and began the engine-starting sequence in his Huey. A wave of passion swept through the young pilots…The Blue Stars swarmed to their Hueys, saddled up, and followed Major Bunting back into hell over Laos.”
“We were scared to death,” Bunting recalls. “We knew this (the mission) could really be suicide.” Bunting said the NVA had the ARVN surrounded and all attempts to bomb the Vietcong, even with B-52 bombers, had failed. “The NVA had figured out where all the PZs and LZs were. They knew we were trying to re-supply them (the ARVN). We had put that unit in,” he said. “The NVA had some type of intelligence and were monitoring all of our communications." Grossman also flew with Bunting on this ‘suicide’ mission.
A hero to many who served under him in Vietnam, Bunting is humble and said it was and is important to lead from the top. “I was proud of my young men. They fought well. They served our country well…Things happened. I think the whole story of anything is that you have to lead from the front,” he said. “You have to be the guy that’s always out front.” Indeed he was, based on all recorded accounts of his command of the 48th AHC.
Bunting said he believes that Vietnam is a better place now because of what this country did there and he often thinks of the sacrifices so many made. “What do you say to those who fought and died and then we were able to pack our bags and come home? I think of this oftentimes,” he pondered. “I believe Vietnam is a better country now. Even though it’s still communist, they’ve moved more toward capitalism. They would not have done this had we not been there. But, we paid a high price for that.”
Finishing his military career in 1989 after 29 years and eight months in the U.S. Army, Bunting is still not the farmer or agriculture teacher he once dreamed of being. But, he lives among the trees and land and educates everyone he is contact with about more than he, perhaps, can even imagine. Bunting went on to run for public office and was elected mayor of the city of Ozark. He spent 12 years in that office before retiring. He is now 78 years-old, cares for his wife who battles Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and continues to remain active in civic life, his extended military family at Fort Rucker and his beloved 48th Assault Helicopter Company.
Video of Bunting’s helicopters in action during Lam Son can be viewed at the following links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TjQPsGxUfg
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