We have been learning about Neil Ostgaard and his service in the Vietnam War. Neil grew up in Tracy; graduated from St. John’s University in 1965 with an Army
The pilot s instructions were both explicit and alarming: “You see that guy right there? Go straight to him, because if you don t you ll be chopped up by the helicopter blades!”
The small helicopter Jo Anne Shirley of Dalton was flying in had just landed at an awkward angle halfway up Bach Ma Mountain in South Vietnam, where an F-4D Phantom jet crashed during a medical mission decades earlier. They were looking for any trace of the aircraft that went down on Nov. 28, 1972, or her brother who was aboard, U.S. Air Force Maj. Bobby Marvin Jones.