Vietnam vet, pilot flying high at 80

Henry Pasquet of Ellsinore winged his way across skies of the Butler and Carter counties May 16 in his Cessna 150 to celebrate his 80th birthday. Knowing rain was moving in, the retired U.S. Air Force combat pilot shortened his junket to cut hay.

“All I wanted to do since I was a little kid was fly,” said Pasquet. “I grew up seeing military airplanes flying the sky. The sky was filled with airplanes growing up in Garden City, New York, by Mitchell Field.”

His desire to soar also had him touching down on the battlefields of Southeast Asia.

Pasquet recalls, “when I was two years old, I got a tinker toy airplane. I threw it and it wouldn’t fly. I was so frustrated.”

When he was 11, the family moved to Virginia. They bought a farm that was the furthest from the airport since, “they didn’t want us to learn to fly,” Pasquet said with a smile, adding, it didn’t work.

“My brother (George) and I are both retired Air Force pilots. He flew C130s too. They could have gotten the other farm,” Pasquet joked.

“The military was my dream, all my life,” he said. “As young as I can remember, that’s what I wanted to do. It seemed like the impossible dream. There was a guy in our church that was a Navy pilot and I thought my goodness, this is impossible. So few people are selected.

“I got to realize my dream, I didn’t realize it was dangerous.”

He was 23 when he started flying in 1964 with a flight indoctrination program in college.

“The air force paid for my time and I was able to get my private license before I went in,” he said.

When he filled out his dream sheet of Air Force assignments, he wrote the southeast.

“I ended up flying in Vietnam. They took me to Southeast Asia. That’s not what I had in mind,” Pasquet recalled.

Training to fly war missions, Pasquet recalls losing friends and classmates. He also shared his own near misses. He admits not trusting people and not going by the book saved his life.

“The first time you land at this little abandoned airport. It was just a paved road with dirt on each side with rubber trees cut down just enough the plane’s wings wouldn’t hit,” he said. “That was our runway and then you see these guys in the black pajamas running off into the jungle, you have to wonder.”

“We were the target,” Pasquet said. “I had 30,000 pounds of artillery shells I was getting ready to offload. I had a new loadmaster and he was very slow. They release the locks, then we just shoot the power and the pallet slides off the back of the airplane. He was very slow and sometimes things are hardened but at times, they’re second to second.

“You don’t know if you’re going to inhale again and you think, am I going to inhale again? Am I going to exhale again? The heartbeats and you see flashes of light.”

The voice of the strong veteran pilot cracks when he talks about “having known guys who were killed and left little children, little daughters. That really hit me quite a bit. I didn’t even get a Purple Heart. I didn’t get a scratch on me the whole time. The only flashback I had was when I was waking up from my open heart surgery, due to Agent Orange.”

Early in his career, he met and married Wanda, who had grown grew up in a military family. They have two sons, Henry L. Jr., and John Arthur.

Pasquet taught at Three Rivers College after leaving the military, as well as pastoring churches.

When he went on the Honor Flight in 2017 and viewed the rows of crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, he asked, “Did they have their sins forgiven? Every one of us is a sinner.”

Pasquet explained, “I’ve been around the world. This is where I chose to live” and fly.

He’s down to one plane and “I didn’t have time to do the farm. I’ve got about 140 head of cattle and 320 acres and turning 80, I didn’t have time to fly. I still fly the Cessna 150. I used to try to get out every week but I’m down to about every couple of weeks to once a month now.

“I enjoy flying over the farm. I get so relaxed when I fly. One thing we started when we were first married, whenever I fly Wanda would cook me a pot of chocolate pudding and she still does.”