Michael Novosel flew combat in three wars, and to get into the last one he threw away his rank as a colonel to become a lowly helicopter pilot, because they would not let a man his age fly any other way. He was one of the most extraordinary aviators America ever produced. He was born in 1922 in a small Pennsylvania town, the son of Croatian immigrants, and grew up in the Great Depression. He joined the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor and by 1945 he was a captain flying the giant B-29 bomber against Japan. After the war he kept flying, served again in Korea, and rose to lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve while working as a commercial airline pilot. Then came Vietnam, and here is where the story gets remarkable. By the mid 1960s Novosel was over 40, and the Air Force had no room for another senior officer in a cockpit. He wanted to fight anyway. So he did something almost unheard of. He gave up his lieutenant colonel's rank, dropped all the way down to warrant officer, and joined the Army to fly helicopters. Not gunships. Dustoff, the unarmed medevac helicopters that flew into the worst places on earth to pull out the wounded. Over two tours he flew 2,543 missions and carried out 5,589 wounded men. One of the men he pulled off a battlefield was his own son, Michael Jr., who was also flying Dustoff in Vietnam. The next week, his son returned the favor and extracted his father after the old man was shot down. Think about that. A father and son, both flying rescue helicopters in the same war, each saving the other. On October 2, 1969, near the Cambodian border, Novosel went in after a group of South Vietnamese soldiers surrounded by thousands of North Vietnamese. They were out of ammunition, out of radio contact, and pinned in the open. He had no gunship escort and no fire support. So he flew in alone, skimming the ground under constant fire. When he could not raise them on the radio, he flew low circles over the battlefield just to show them he was there, to rally them to assemble. Six times the enemy fire drove him off, and six times he circled back from a new direction. On the last pickup, reaching for a wounded man right next to an enemy bunker, he was hit, and the helicopter lurched out of control before he wrestled it back. When it was finally over, he had made fifteen passes and saved twenty nine men in a single day. Nixon gave him the Medal of Honor in 1971. Novosel kept flying for the Army until 1984, the last World War II aviator still on active flying duty, with 42 years in the air. He died in 2006 and lies in Arlington. In 2023 the Army did something it almost never does. It renamed an entire post, the home of Army aviation, in his honor. It is now called Fort Novosel, so every helicopter pilot the Army trains learns the name of the colonel who became a warrant officer just so he could go save the wounded.