Grunt Air

"Grunt Air" tells the story of an elite Air Force helicopter unit used for the secret rescue of American pilots shot down during the Vietnam War who were being held and tortured by the enemy in Laos and Cambodia. Mid-1971 saw the Vietnam peace talks in Paris going nowhere. Eager for an end to the war, the U.S. halted POW rescue missions that might encumber the peace talks. Washington did, however, authorize military survey teams to collect crash site information. The 7th Air Force used this "loophole" to create a clandestine POW rescue operation. Nicknamed 'Grunt Air' by the Air Force boys, they flew missions daily, disguised as a purely technical team, at one point even rescuing the wife of a CIA agent trapped behind enemy lines. Not long after its formation, Grunt Air located three POWs in a North Vietnamese prison camp near Hanoi. The officers - an American, an Australian and a South Vietnamese - had knowledge of sensitive information that could under no circumstance reach enemy commanders in Hanoi and Moscow. Their fate was sealed: either Grunt Air rescue these men or a B-52 strike would be ordered to take care of them.