‘It was a long year’

Riverside resident William J. “Jack” Cochran was awarded the Silver Star Banner Friday at ceremony at the McCook Athletic Exposition Center in McCook. Cochran was one of nine veterans from the 16th Cook County Board District who were honored at the ceremony hosted by County Commissioner Jeffrey Tobolski.

“I’m honored and I’m humbled by this award,” Cochran said after receiving the recognition.

The Sliver Star Banner is awarded to members of the military who were wounded, injured or became seriously ill while serving in a war zone.

Cochran, 69, a retired airline pilot, served as lieutenant in the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army during the early days of the Vietnam War. Cochran served one year in Vietnam, from Aug. 25, 1966 to Aug. 25, 1967.

“It was a long year,” Cochran says.

Cochran earned a Bronze Star for bravery in combat.

Fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, Cochran came down with a serious case of malaria which knocked him out of commission for about five weeks. For a time he had a fever of 105 degrees.

“I was in intensive care for 10 days,” Cochran told the Landmark.

But during the rest of his tour, he was a platoon leader who led his troops in fierce combat.

“I saw combat regularly,” Cochran said with a hint of the soft southern drawl of his native Georgia. “We would go days when there wouldn’t be a shot fired in anger, and then they’d find us or we would find them, and then all hell would break loose. It was horrible.”

The 101st Airborne was used for search and destroy missions. Unlike other units, the paratroopers spent almost no time at their home base. Rather, they moved around South Vietnam seeking out the enemy.

“We were kind of the point of the spear with ground combat troops,” Cochran said. “We moved around a lot. We went to different areas of the country. We weren’t tied to any particular area of the country.”

Platoon leaders of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam had the highest casualty rate of any group during the war except for F-105 bomber pilots, Cochran said.

Although trained as paratroopers, the 101st Airborne made only one combat parachute jump in Vietnam.

“My unit made the only combat jump in Vietnam,” Cochran said. “It was symbolic more than practical.”

Cochran’s platoon took casualties regularly and often was outnumbered by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces. Cochran would call in air strikes to balance the scales.

“They were stealth fighters, those Vietnamese,” Cochran recalled. “They were pretty crafty.”

Cochran grew up in Atlanta and joined ROTC while a student at Georgia Tech before Vietnam was much noticed by Americans.

“It was a tradition in my family to serve, and I intended to serve, but I honestly never expected to be serving in a war,” Cochran said. His ancestors served in the Army dating back to the Revolutionary War.

But when Cochran graduated from Georgia Tech in 1965 with a two-year commission as an Army lieutenant, the escalation of U.S. forces was just moving into full swing.

A year later he was leading soldiers in combat.

The year fighting in the jungles of Vietnam was an intense and sometimes horrible experience that he will never forget.

“I did learn something,” Cochran says. “I learned that once surviving that and getting through that, I can handle anything in life that comes along. I’ve had life’s usual hard times – with personal relationships that failed, with careers that have failed, those kinds of things. They are so much easier to deal with when you’ve dealt with something that is life and death.”

He left the Army just five days after returning to the United States. Always interested in flying (he flew single engine aircraft as a teenager), he used his veteran’s benefits to train to become a pilot.

In 1969, he was hired by Braniff International Airways. Six months later he was laid off as Braniff began its spiral toward extinction.

He got hired by United, but again was laid off after about six months. He then got hired by Eastern Airlines and spent 20 years with Eastern before Eastern went out of business in 1990.

“I’m 48 years old, way older than any airline pilot that I ever heard of getting a new job, but United Airlines hired me back in 1990,” Cochran recalled.

With Eastern he was he was based in his home town of Atlanta, but working for United he had to move to Chicago.

In 1994 he settled in Riverside with his second wife.

He flew with United for 12 years until he reached the then mandatory retirement age of 60 in April of 2002. He flew to Europe often and sometimes continued on to India, but when his daughter, now 16, was born, he switched to flying domestic routes so he could be home more.

“I loved flying to London,” Cochran said. “That was my favorite place to fly.”     

Now he volunteers one day a week at the Museum of Science and Industry, where he talks about a 727 airplane, – a plane he personally flew – that hangs from the ceiling at the museum.

His son Bryan is a commander in the Navy special operations force and has served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cochran says that seeing combat changes a person.

“We don’t come back exactly the way we were,” Cochran says. “We have a different perspective on things. You appreciate life a lot more, the small things in life. It takes a pretty strong will to overcome what you’ve seen and what you’ve been through and not have serious, long lasting side effects.

“Some do it fairly successfully and I feel like I’m one of those. And others haven’t. There are military hospitals that are filled with veterans who have really never been able really put it behind them and move on.”