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Dear Mom, I'm Alive: Letters Home from BlackWidow 25

by Randolph Pierce Mains

260 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-2398; ISBN 1-4120-4590-8; US$21.26, C$27.00, EUR17.55, £12.16

This is a story of one young man's right of passage. One out of every three American helicopter pilots never returned from the bloody chaos of Vietnam. Randy Mains beat the odds.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

This is a story of one young man's right of passage. One out of every three American helicopter pilots never returned from the bloody chaos of Vietnam. Randy Mains beat the odds. For a full year he endured gross incompetence in the chain of command, top-secret excursions into neutral Laos, routine recover missions that would turn suddenly, unexpectedly into life-threatening nightmares one-thousand hours spent flying into the perilous heart of a terifying jungle inferno. Mains learned the meaning of courage and camaraderie...and experienced the gut-wrenching pain of personal loss. Most importantly he survived to tell his own unforgettable story of the real war Mom never knew about.

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About the Author

Randolph Mains flew 1042 combat hours during his one-year tour in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal Cross. twenty-seven Air Medals and the Bronze Star medal. He remained in aviation is currently has over 10,000 flying hours.

his thirty-six year aviation career has taken him to the Australian Outback, where he lived on a 1632-square-mile cattle ranch, herding cattle by helicopter and delivering meat by small, fixed-wing aircraft to Aboriginal settlements scattered throughout the Northern Territory. It was in Australia that he and a colleague purchased, sight unseen, a Cherokee-6 fixed-wing aircraft that had crashed in the remote Simpson desert. The the men rebuilt it there in the desert and flew it back to civilization. He has flown seismic survey and heli-rig work over the jungles of Papua New Guinea. It was in New Guinea that he tried his hand at hunting crocodiles. In 1976 he was employed as a senior instructor pilot for Bell Helicopter International in Iran for two-and-a-half years prior to the revolution and managed to flee the country on the last commercial chart flight out. Two weeks later, in February 1979, he began his EMS, emergency medical services, career flying on the Houston Life flight program. he found himself a pioneer in this new and exciting field trying to prove to a skeptical medical community, and to a doubting American public, that the helicopter air ambulance concept could work and save lives in peacetime as it did in Vietnam. Through the hard work and dedication of other equally committed ex-Vietnam helicopter pilots like himself the concept was accepted and adopted by other hospitals nationwide.

In 1980 he went to San Diego, California, to set up what was one of the most successful hospital-based programs in the United States. It was in San Diego that he acquired his California emergency medical technical certification after seeing a need for an extra pair of hands at the accident scenes to which he flew the medical teams. In 1982 Mr. Mains won the first annual Golden hour award and he was flown to Washington to receive the accolade that recognized him as the top medevac pilot in America.

While working as chief pilot for the San Diego Life program he graduated from San Diego State University in May 1984 where he earned a degree in journalism and a minor in English creative writing.

After he, himself, nearly lost his life on three separate occasions while flying on EMS missions, he wrote his first book entitled The Golden Hour. The novel addresses the grim realities faced by EMS pilots flying across America who, at the time, flew their machines in a sector of civil aviation where, while saving lives, the odds of having a fatal accident were as high as any the men faced in Vietnam.

In December 1984 Mr. Mains moved to the Middle East to accept a position with the Royal Oman Police Air Wing where he became the head of training and a flight examiner.

After serving 13 years in Oman he took a year off to go sailing on his 42' cutter-rig sloop Ocean Spirit. In 2004 he accepted a position with Abu Dhabi flying men and equipment offshore to the oil fields in the Persian Gulf. His wife, Kaye, lives in Victoria, Canada.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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