Retired helicopter pilot shares war recollections

Paul Walton has never lived a life surrounded by family.

Adopted by a single mother in Layton, Utah in the mid-1930s, he grew up an only child. And today, the Vietnam War veteran lives alone in Pahrump. Never married, no kids, no siblings. But a great friend by the name of Laurie Kvool.

And great stories, lots of great stories.

He knew from a pretty young age that he wanted to fly. And he knew he wanted to do it for the United States Marine Corps. So, after two years at Brigham Young University in the mid-1950s, he followed the advice of a recruiter and signed up for flight school. Two years later he was flying military brass and politicians, first in the Philippines and later in Laos and Vietnam.

“They had a program where after two years of college, you could go to flight training and I went down and found the Marine recruiter I said, ‘I want to fly airplanes. How do I do that?’”

He actually ended up flying helicopters. Big ones.

Walton was a member of HMM-361 who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in March of 1968 for an operation flying through enemy-infested canyons to deliver trucks to the Marines at Khe San when that base was finally abandoned.

“Yeah, well [President] Johnson told the leadership that Khe San is gonna be held at any cost. So they stayed longer than they should have,” Walton explained.

As Walton tells it, the Marines needed trucks “for the out” and there was no way to drive them up the canyon to the base. So the solution was to strap them to the bottom of a huge Sikorsy helicopter and fly them in under enemy fire.

According to the citation Walton earned, “Capt. Walton disregarded extremely high winds, poor visibility and enemy mortar and rocket fire as he made five trips to Khe San from Dong Ha.” He was also awarded the Navy Achievement medal.

In the middle of a conversation, Walton casually mentioned, “We spent 68 months building Air America.”

For those who never saw the movie or are not well versed in the history of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, Air America started as a private company run by notable World War II aviator Claire Lee Chennault that spent the late 1940s flying food and supplies into China supporting Chaing Kai-shek and his nationalist army in their war against the communist forces of Mao Zedong. When Mao won that war and the nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, the company, under financial stress, was secretly purchased by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Throughout most of the Vietnam War, Walton piloted a Sikorsky UH-34D or an S-53, later renamed the CH-53, and often flew supplies, personnel and VIPs between bases in Vietnam and Laos. And for at least part of that time, he did so as a quasi-civilian.

“I was in the Philippines,” Walton recalled. “One of the guys said he wanted to stay overnight like it was some big deal. And CIA guys were there and they interviewed about 10 of us. I wanted to fly the S-53 helicopter.”

But, while Special Forces personnel had been training Laotian troops, actual military operations in that country had not been politically approved at home. The solution? Temporarily remove the pilots’ military rank and have them fly as civilians.

“They couldn’t have any military in Laos so we had to give up our rank for the mission,” Walton explained. “We had to go in as a civilian just because they couldn’t allow the military to be in there, even though it was a military operation.”

When Walton was flying supplies in and out of Khe San with his co-pilot William Curley, on one mission, a journalist was embedded with them who wrote, “Like concert pianists, Walton and Curley played a symphony of speed, altitude, steep descent and touchdown at the controls — undisturbed by the discordant drums of the enemy gunners.”

Walton left the Vietnam War theater after the fall of Khe San in about 1969 and began training pilots until his discharge but continued to work as a pilot flying dignitaries around in the following years. One of those jobs got him a newspaper write-up in the early 1970s when he was tasked with flying some American military brass into an outdoor picnic event in Vancouver, Canada.

“It was a major and myself and two birds,” Walton recalls, using slang for colonels. “We went up to put a U.S. presence on their festivities they were having at this picnic area. Well, the trees, they were like 150 feet high all around it. Landing was no problem. But when I took back off, I had to use excess power and everything just to clear the trees. And I couldn’t get away from where the event was because they were too close to the trees. So, anyway, their whole picnic area, it got blown to crap.”

After the military, Walton bounced around several states, including a time going to school in San Jose, California right at the time the first Apple computers came out, which led to an interest in that technology. He also worked in real estate before becoming semi-retired in Las Vegas, where he lived at the Jockey Club before moving to Pahrump, where he continues to live on his own at age 88.

Walton came to the attention of the Pahrump Valley Times via his friend, Laurie Kvool.

“I met Paul when I became a volunteer driver for RSVP (retired and senior volunteer program) after I retired from a 30-year career as the fleet coordinator for the City of Las Vegas in 2020,” Kvool said. “I purchased my house and property here from my parents in 2014 (who bought the property in 1978), and came out on the weekends until I retired and moved here full time. I’ve always had a soft spot for seniors and decided RSVP was the place for me.”

Walton was an RSVP client and Kvool regularly drove him to do his grocery shopping for several years and they have stayed friends even after she quit driving for RSVP.

“Only recently have I had the privilege of listening to him talk about some of his experiences and memories as a Marine in Vietnam,” Kvool explained. “I try to ask him something about his tour of duty every time I see him now, and sometimes I can see in his eyes as he is talking, that he is back there. He was pretty much a one-man show and even though he would never come out and say it, I believe he was the best at what he did.”

Indeed, one can hear that same “he is back there” quality in Walton’s voice as he talks about his experiences.

Pulling items back to light from a lifetime of memories, he said, “I haven’t thought about this stuff in a long time.”