{"id":153,"date":"2016-05-12T06:53:09","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T01:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/?page_id=153"},"modified":"2025-03-15T01:19:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T20:19:56","slug":"153-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/exhibit\/153-2\/","title":{"rendered":"David E. Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Taylor, circa 1967.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

David E. Taylor \u201966 <\/strong>
(Captain, U.S. Marine Corps, 1966\u20131971)<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Military service was the norm for young men in the early \u201960s, but David Taylor\u2019s father, a veteran of World War II, encouraged his sons not to enlist right away. He had served in World War II before college and, regretting the late start on his own education, wanted a different future for David and his older brother. Instead, the Taylor boys headed to college on Navy ROTC scholarships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David entered Brown in the fall of, and quickly joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, where his friends were mostly football, basketball, and hockey players.Despite some rocky moments, David finished his four years at Brown strong: he graduated on time, earned a commission, and, at the end of his senior year, met his first wife Kathryn Fuller. After graduating in June of 1966, David joined the Marine Corps\u2014a decision he calls \u201cthe manly thing to do.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Taylor in a Lambda Chi Alpha portrait (second from right). Photograph for Liber Brunensis<\/em>, 1965.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

With his college days behind him, David traveled to Pensacola, Florida to learn how to fly. He reasoned that the conflict in Vietnam would be over in a year, so the 18 months required for flight school meant he would never have to see war. The training at flight school was intense: the men spent 25 hours in a T-34, took examinations, and endured Dempsey Dumpsters (in which men were dumped into a twelve-foot-deep pool while strapped into a cockpit replica). David was chosen to become a helicopter pilot, flying the CH-53, a \u201cnew semi-experimental aircraft that was just wild,\u201d he recalls. After six months of training in the new CH-53, David flew from Portland, Oregon to Da Nang in August of 1968. He describes the descent as something you would see in Dante\u2019s Inferno: “You\u2019re looking out over this landscape, and it\u2019s night and you see nothing but explosions, flares, and fire.” <\/strong>This was the height of the war, right after the Tet Offensive. David and his squadron spent the first night in “hootches”\u2014makeshift huts. The smell was terrible, the bathrooms unsanitary, and the night sleepless. The next day however he relocated to Phu Bai where he would spend the rest of his 13-month tour. Camp here was comfortable: flight officers lived in corrugated Quonset huts equipped with air conditioning. Operating such expensive aircraft demanded a comfortable living environment for proper recuperation after missions. This was a \u201cgroup of really smart dedicated people. The enlisted guys\u2014different world,\u201d David said.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Taylor
Taylor with CH-53 A, wearing his Nomex flight suit in DaNang, Vietnam, Marble Mountain Marine Corps helicopter base. Photograph, Spring 1969.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The mission of his squadron was to support the northern half of operations for the Marine Corps with heavy helicopter support. Since the CH-53 copter could carry 20,000 pounds, sometimes the missions would be to retrieve and deliver a 105-mm howitzer which weighed as much as 7500 pounds. David\u2019s job was to transport it to where the gun installations were. He never knew what he would encounter. \u201cEn route, there\u2019s all sorts of crazy things that could happen: there\u2019s artillery going overhead, there\u2019s air strikes occurring, B-52s doing things called Arc-Light or carpet-bombing, and if you ever got in the middle of one of those things, you would wish you hadn\u2019t.\u201d Often David\u2019s copter would bring back the wounded and the dead but according to him, \u201cyou didn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David and the rest of his squadron made history. In only thirteen months, he flew seven hundred missions and was never shot down. After his tour ended in 1969, David signed up for Helicopter Marine Experimental-1 (HMX-1), whose primary mission is to transport the President of the United States and other high-ranking officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as the youngest flight officer in the squadron, David was as \u201chighly decorated and had as much combat and flight experience in the CH-53 as virtually any other pilot in the Marine Corps.\u201d But with a year left to serve with HMX-1, David walked away. A second tour in Vietnam after three years back in the states was not an option. Instead, he attended Harvard Business School and later joined the real estate firm Trammell Crow Company. David stayed with Trammel Crow until his retirement, helping it grow from 100 employees with $800 million in assets to 5000 employees with over $30 billion in assets and eventually becoming a partner. Still, Vietnam was the \u201cgreatest experience of my life,\u201d David says. \u201cYou faced death every day, so you looked at life differently.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David E. Taylor \u201966 (Captain, U.S. Marine Corps, 1966\u20131971) Military service was the norm for young men in the early \u201960s, but David Taylor\u2019s father, a veteran of World War II, encouraged his sons not to enlist right away. He had served in World War II before college and, regretting the late start on his … David E. Taylor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"parent":39,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-153","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/153\/revisions\/495"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/vietnam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}