Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board Chairwoman Dawn Buckingham, M.D., introduced the latest installment of the Voices of Veterans Oral History Program, highlighting the service of retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Rich Buickerood, according to a news release from the Texas General Land Office.
Born in New Jersey to parents he described as “average working folks,” Buickerood was the first in his family to attend college, the release said. He enrolled at Rutgers University in its first class of chemical engineers and signed up for Air Force ROTC when he needed an elective. “I said to them ‘I know I don’t want to be in the Army’ because my father never talked very highly about it, ‘So I guess I’ll sign up for the Air Force.’ And that was my big career move,” Buickerood said in the release.
Commissioned in 1965 and sent to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Buickerood said he underestimated how competitive pilot training would be “until guys started not coming back to work the next day and they were getting cut.” Classmates washed out over spins, instrument flying, and the formation phase, he recalled, even as the Air Force ramped up for the Vietnam War.
Buickerood said he and his fellow pilots headed to Vietnam feeling “young and bulletproof.” He recounted an Easter Sunday 1968 mission that earned him his first Distinguished Flying Cross, when his flight provided cover after American troops were overrun and a rescue helicopter was shot down. “We stayed on target for a long time until we were about to run out of gas, and apparently we saved a whole bunch of people,” he said.
The full interview is available through the Veterans Land Board’s Voices of Veterans program, which records and shares the stories of Texas veterans, according to the land office. The series’ recent installments have featured veterans of World War II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.