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Bernard F. Fisher dies at 87; Vietnam rescuer earned Medal of Honor

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The jungle airstrip was a burning mess and about 1,000 feet shorter than Maj. Bernard F. Fisher would have liked.

But his wingman, Maj. Dafford “Jump” Myers, had crash-landed there and leaped from the flames into the underbrush. With a rescue chopper at least a half-hour away, he would soon be killed by North Vietnamese soldiers who were pounding the besieged Green Beret outpost in the A Shau Valley.

“There wasn’t an option,” Fisher later recounted.

The only way to save Myers would be to land in heavy fire on a runway littered with jagged metal wreckage and fragments of tin roofs from bombed-out huts. It was “almost suicidal,” Fisher later acknowledged, “but I felt a strong impression that I should do this.”

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“Jump was one of the family—one of the fellows we flew with—and I couldn’t stand by and watch him get murdered without at least trying to rescue him,” he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, “Beyond the Call of Duty: The Story of an American Hero in Vietnam.”

Fisher, whose spectacular rescue of his stricken comrade was witnessed by other pilots providing cover from above, became the first Air Force officer in Vietnam to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for courage on the battlefield.

Fisher died Aug. 16 at the Idaho State Veterans Home in Boise. He was 87.

His son Steven said Fisher, who had Parkinson’s disease, died from conditions related to old age.

A modest man wholly lacking in flyboy swagger, Fisher retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1974. For several years, he flew for an Idaho-based commuter airline. He also grew fruit trees and kept bees on his family farm in Kuna, Idaho, where his parents had moved when he was a teenager.

He was a scoutmaster and loved to fly low over camping events, dropping sweets on the delighted Scouts.

“We’d pack candies into nylon stockings and I’d be the bombardier,” Steven Fisher, a retired Air Force officer , recalled.

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Born in San Bernardino on Jan. 11, 1927, Bernard Francis Fisher grew up in Clearfield, Utah, and served in the Navy from 1945 to 1947. He attended Boise State Junior College and the University of Utah before dropping out, concluding that he’d be happier as an Air Force pilot than as a doctor.

The university belatedly gave him his bachelor’s degree in a 2008 ceremony at the Utah state Capitol.

In Vietnam from 1965 to 1966, he flew some 200 combat missions. After only six months, the casualty rate among the pilots he arrived with was about 40%, he wrote.

On March 9, 1966, Fisher led a mission in the embattled A Shau Valley that earned him the Silver Star.

The next day came his celebrated rescue – an achievement that quickly resounded throughout the Air Force.

Fisher and Myers were part of a small unit of planes assigned to aid Special Forces troops and Montagnard fighters who were surrounded by 2,000 enemy soldiers. While strafing North Vietnamese forces, Myers’ A1E-Skyraider was hit.

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When Fisher swooped down after it, he skidded into a fuel storage dump but his wingtips passed over most of the barrels. Turning around on the tight strip, he saw Myers, who had lifted himself out of a ditch. The frightened pilot waved him down, and then desperately hoisted himself onto a wing.

“I grabbed him by his flight suit and pulled him into the cockpit headfirst, and he crumpled to the floor,” Fisher wrote. “We didn’t say much, but he looked up and gave me a weak smile and mumbled something like, ‘You are one crazy son-of-a-gun.’”

As enemy soldiers peppered the plane with ground fire, Myers, slathered in mud, oil and soot, asked for a cigarette.

“Sorry, I don’t smoke,” Fisher responded.

Years later, Lt. Col Eugene Deatrick told the Air Force Times that he called his superiors to recommend Fisher for the Medal of Honor.

“I’ve got this family man with five kids who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and the strongest cuss word he uses is `Shucks!’” Deatrick said. “He has just pulled off the bravest act of the war.”

Fisher and his wife Realla, whom he met at a church ice cream social, later had a sixth child. After 60 years of marriage, Realla Johnson Fisher died in 2008.

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Fisher’s survivors include their six sons, 33 grandchildren and numerous great grandchildren.

For years, Fisher and Myers kept in touch. Until Myers’ death in 1992, they exchanged calls every March 10.

In 1999, a supply vessel for the Navy was named after Fisher. A Utah highway also bears his name, along with a park in Kuna, Idaho.

His plane, pocked with bullet holes, is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com
Twitter: @schawkins

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