John Seebeth made countless missions to rescue the wounded, often from active battle zones, throughout his nine months as a Dustoff medic during the Vietnam War.
Dustoff crews were medical evacuation units that flew unarmed helicopters to pick up wounded soldiers and Vietnamese civilians from battlefields and transport them to American hospitals.
The decision whether or not to fly the more dangerous missions, where the helicopter would have to land without a gunship escort, was up to the crew. John was 19 during his time in Vietnam, and the pilot of his helicopter was only 21. It didn’t matter how dangerous the missions were.
“They always said yes,” Linda Seebeth, John wife, said. “They would go in.”
The bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dustoff crews became law in September 2024, though John said the process of designing the medal was still ongoing.
The Congressional Gold Medal, which can be awarded via Congressional legislation, is the highest civilian award in the United States. The effort to award the medal to the Dustoff crews began over nine years ago but was slow to move through Congress.
According to Linda, about 3,600 people flew Dustoff, but only 800 are still living. Throughout the war, the crews managed to save over 900,000 people.
“There’s nothing like, you know your patient, you see the life go out of them,” John said. “And because of your actions, you see life come back. When you go to bed at night, and you think about that.”
John nearly lost his life while serving in Vietnam when he was shot at by enemy fire. The bullet ricocheted off the top of his body armor and pierced the front of his neck. The injury stopped his heart and left him unable to speak.
“And boy, I had a lot to say,” John said.
When he returned home from the war, a doctor was eventually able to take a skin graft from John’s thigh and reconstruct his larynx. While he was able to speak again, the horrors of the war stayed with him.
“When U.S.-returning ‘Nam vets came back to the civilian world, we brought all those experiences back with us,” John said. “And of course, me being a medic and picking up the wounded in a helicopter, the medevac, you know, I’m a lovable guy, but I’m just, the images.”
John said he didn’t know it at the time, but he was dealing with PTSD. But after over a year of being inpatient and then outpatient, he was finally able to attend Ocean County College in New Jersey in 1971.
“I was wondering if the girls would like me,” John said. “The way I talked — I had this tube hanging out in front of my neck.”
He started a veteran’s club at the college and was elected student government president. He left with a two-year degree in police science before applying to Indiana University, where he majored in criminal justice. He wanted to be a Pennsylvania State Police Officer.
While attending IU, John’s friendships with a fellow student and wounded Vietnam War veteran changed his outlook on his experiences during the war.
“John came to an understanding of what the Vietnam War was really about,” Linda said. “He went from being pro-war, like he was at OCC, to becoming anti-war. He couldn’t accept that the death and suffering that he witnessed and experienced was all based on lies.”
Linda said it had been a difficult time for John, as he was also coping with losing his dream of becoming a state trooper. The doctors told him that the hole in his neck would never close.
John had to redirect. A paper he wrote about the then-unsolved murder of a black woman named Carol Jenkins in Martinsville helped steer him towards eventually studying race relations at The Ohio State University.
“I was the only white person in class,” John said. “A lot of times discussion, classroom discussion, they would talk about the blue-eyed devil. And of course, there I have dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, and I talked out of my neck.”
He left the program, hesitant to intrude on the rest of the class’s chance to use race relations to process their own experiences, and eventually got into social work during his time volunteering at a children’s hospital. From there, he pivoted to environmental activism, becoming involved with the idea of climate change as it was developing.
“He’s looking at the world and saying, ‘I flew Dustoff and I did rescue missions. What can I do to rescue humanity from the course I see them on?’” Linda said.
John moved out west to Washington State in the late 1980s and found a job helping disabled veterans find employment opportunities. Even though he loved his work, he felt like there was more he could be doing.
“With my disability pension, if I lived a simple life, you know, I could be an activist,” John said. “That’s what I was going to become, an environmental, social justice activist.”
He now lives with his wife in Issaquah, Washington, a thirty-minute drive to Seattle. They met while they were protesting the development of a road that would clear-cut forest. Linda is a former educator, mother and also had a long history of environmental and social activism. They live on a forested, seven-acre plot of land with their dog, Shepherd.
In 2008, Linda wrote a book based on John’s time in Dustoff, conducting interviews and retrieving documents and correspondence from the war.
“It was healing for John,” Linda said. “Vietnam remains in the blood and bones of many veterans — veterans who have experienced combat and witnessed the horrors of war like John did.”
John and Linda now run a website that informs about Dustoff and serves as a landing point for veteran, local and climate news. It details Linda’s books and John’s fight to get Congressional recognition for the Dustoff crews.
“It means a lot that the medal is given to Vietnam[’s] Dustoff [crews] as a whole, because we were a team,” John said. “We flew the missions so others may live.”
