Voices of Veterans: Colonel Rich Buickerood Shares His Story of Service in the United States Air Force
AUSTIN, Texas— Today, Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chairwoman Dawn Buckingham, M.D., is proud to introduce the next installment of the series highlighting the VLB's Voices of Veterans Oral History Program. This week, we highlight the service of Colonel (Col.) Rich Buickerood who served in the United States Air Force.
Born in New Jersey, Buickerood said although his dad served in World War II, his parents "were average working folks." Once he graduated from high school, he enrolled at Rutgers University and was the "first to go to college in his family" and it was there he decided to enroll in ROTC.
"I remember we got to the table where the ROTC guys were and we needed an elective, and so I didn’t even know what ROTC was, and they said well, it’s an easy credit and a half and you need something, because I was in the first class of chemical engineers there at Rutgers," he explained. "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."
While Buickerood enjoyed every aspect of the ROTC program at Rutgers, he admitted he wasn't a very good cadet and "barely squeaked into the junior class" before somehow getting a pilot slot. "My last two years that I was there, I knew I was gonna, with some luck, eventually go to pilot training."
Commissioned in 1965 and sent to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, Buickerood said he underestimated how competitive pilot school would be "until guys started not coming back to work the next day and they were getting cut."
"I had a roommate who ultimately was killed in an aircraft, but we always used to say that if everything went A to B to C to D, that he was fine. But if it went from A to E and skipped those interim steps, he couldn’t handle it, and we had a lot of guys like that," he said. "One of my closest friends washed out because he couldn’t handle spins during the T-37 phase. A couple of the guys washed out because they couldn’t fly instruments very well. We lost a bunch of guys during the formation phase. So there were strong obstacles all through that period even though in retrospect we were ramping up for the Vietnam War."
Buickerood "didn't really know what to expect" when he learned he was headed to Vietnam. He called them all "young and bulletproof" and revealed that they never thought anything would happen to them. "You were confident in your skills and it was just an adventure. You never thought about any of the negative stuff. So you felt like you were prepared to do your job and that’s the way I felt. I was going over there to do the job my country wanted me to do," he said.
Buickerood recalled one mission, which happened on Easter Sunday 1968, which awarded him his first Distinguished Flying Cross. "We took off and I remember it was a beautiful day and I was listening to church music on Armed Forces radio, and we got down to someplace near Saigon [...] and we got sent to this target, and a bunch of guys had gotten overrun by the VC or North Vietnamese or whoever they were, and then they had sent in a dust-off rescue helicopter, and the rescue helicopter got shot down," he explained. "We were in there providing cover for them to try and get these guys out and we dropped all of our bombs, and then we were strafing and there were guys down there running up and down the roads and we were after them, and 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."
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Dr. Dawn Buckingham made history in 2022, winning a statewide election to become Texas' first female Land Commissioner. As Land Commissioner, Dr. Dawn Buckingham is committed to helping Texans after a disaster, supporting Texas energy, ensuring that every child in Texas receives a high-quality public education, serving Texas Veterans, and securing the border to keep our communities safe.
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