Editor's note: Three Linn County veterans have been honored this year with the title of Distinguished Veteran: Raymond Martinak, profiled on page A1, and Gene Peery and Frederick Schulze, featured here. The award from the Linn County Veterans Commemoration Association was instituted in 2001 to let the community salute a deserving veteran for his or her military service. The recipients are honored by being at the head of today’s parade, introduced at the VCA’s two announcer locations along the parade route, and given VIP seating in the reviewing stand.

SCIO — Gene Peery earned his private airplane pilot’s license even before he received a diploma from Scio High School in 1965.

But it was piloting a 1,300-horsepower helicopter in Vietnam in 1967-68 with the 119th Assault Helicopter Company that really taught the fourth-generation Scio farmboy how to fly.

“I actually went through the Army’s mechanics course while I was waiting to get into flight school,” explained Perry, who now operates an equestrian program for troubled youth near Scio. “I was just 18 when I went in and I was flying combat missions in Vietnam when I was 19 and 20 years old.”

Peery said nearly all of his tour of duty was spent in the central highlands of Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos.

“It was pretty mean,” Peery said. “We worked with the special forces teams. We would deliver them into Cambodia or Laos and then come back and get them in a few days. They were amazing people. We didn’t know their real names. They had call signs like Snake or Rooster. We could hear bullets whizzing by as they were running toward the landing zone and calling us on the radio. Nearly all of them I knew were killed.”

The choppers took on so much enemy fire that pilots rotated in and out of the zone for two months at a time. Peery served his first and last two months in country on that duty.

“I had three days to go in country when the special forces wanted us to take them into a tight area where they thought there might be enemy tanks hidden in the trees,” Peery said. “They lit us up. The world opened up on us and we took 50-caliber hits. The blades were shot up. When we got back to base, I could put my fist through holes in the chopper’s rotors.”

Peery earned a Purple Heart and Silver Star on another mission where his helicopter was shot down.

“We were putting two infantry companies onto a hillside west of Dok To,” Peery said. “They shot our engine out and we went down. We bounced hard and they began dropping mortars on us. They drove us into the tree line, which was an ambush. They opened up fire on us and hit us with grenades. We had a really bad fight for about six hours.”

Without regard for his own safety, Peery ran across an open area to the downed helicopter to retrieve smoke flares and other needed items for the soldiers. During the firefight, Peery was hit in the left arm with a bullet from a rifle.

“After I was wounded, I refused to get on a chopper that was full,” Peery said. “We fought our way back down the hill. I stayed with the men and we kept our heads together.”

In another battle, Peery’s chopper didn’t go down, but “they took the paint off my helmet.” Peery said the Viet Cong would ambush the helicopters as they were picking up the last 10 or 15 soldiers.

“They opened up on us and I can still see the windshield disappearing,” Peery said. He earned the Air Medal with a V for valor for that action.

Once, Peery used 50-caliber ammo cans hooked to cargo straps to retrieve soldiers who were hanging onto a cliff. “We had to rock the aircraft into the trees and used the rotors to chop the limbs,” Peery said. “Those Huey blades would do it.”

Peery called his tour of duty “intense, exhausting. You never relaxed.”

After a year in Vietnam, Peery used the survival skills he learned in combat as a flight instructor at Fort Rucker in Alabama.

“I loved it. It was the last thing those kids did before they went to Vietnam,” Peery said. “They let us show them what was really going to happen and how to survive.”

After the war, Peery flew helicopters in Africa, Canada, Iran, Alaska and Hawaii. For 10 years, he operated a school that trained former military pilots for commercial jobs with international companies.

Peery married Deidre Paul of Albany in 1973. They have two grown children: Summer Graber, 27, teaches school in Dillingham, Alaska, and Bryce, 25, is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot who has served one 15-month tour in Iraq and may return there in March.