Charles Sapp was born and raised in Concord, North Carolina. He joined the Navy as a naval aviation cadet in October 1952, and began fixed wing flight training in February 1953. He received his wings on the P-2V, and was commissioned the same day in Hutchinson, Kansas “of all places for the Navy.” He then did training in blimps in Brunswick, Georgia, went to a squadron in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and then to the airship wing staff in Lakehurst, New Jersey. After that, Sapp went to the Navy postgraduate school in Monterey (“a great place to go to school”) to get a bachelor’s degree, which he did in 1961, the same year the Navy got rid of airships, or blimps. He was then assigned to the naval pre-flight school at Pensacola, where he taught math and physics, and then went to helicopter training there. Trained on the Kaman H-2 helicopter, went on a Med cruise, and then joined the USS Independence (CVA-62) in 1965 for a WestPac cruise, supporting Operation ROLLING THIUNDER in Vietnam. He then flew the only helicopter off the USS Richmond K. Turner (DLG-20), on search and rescue missions for downed pilots in North Vietnam. Sapp describes several harrowing missions, including running low on fuel over Chinese territory, saving two pilots off a mountain, and rescuing a downed A-4 pilot at night in the Tonkin Gulf. He returned to Vietnam for the third time in 1967, flying Hueys. He remembers the evacuation of a South Vietnamese Army outpost, and a women directing the families (“bravest person I ever saw”). He remembers magic shows, chickens and pigs, a SEAL insertion, a shoot down, Sinatra, and Atlas Shrugged (“maybe I'm telling my politics more than anything else”). He recalls a great letter from an Air Force commanding officer (“it was better than any medal I ever got”), Aussies in the bars, and a tremendous secondary explosion when he rocketed a sampan. Sapp does think “that it was good that we were there, that we did some good.”