What a Vietnam Huey Pilot Teaches Us About Failure

And how a No-Fail policy in life may lead to the fate of Icarus

The Lament for Icarus. Herbert James Draper. 1898.

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How many of today’s ills result from never knowing limits? From never knowing failure?

Robert Mason was a helicopter pilot with the Air Cavalry during the Vietnam War. He wrote about his experiences in the Battle of Ia Drang and some of the most brutal combat flying imaginable in his memoir Chickenhawk. Before his combat flights, however, he writes about his flight training.¹ This part struck me.

As with all helicopters, the Huey (Bell UH-1 Iroquois) was prone to engine shut offs. So, while the new trainee was beading sweat from dealing with pedals, control sticks, gauges, wind, terrain, altitude, humidity, elevation, speed, powerlines, and not looking like a fool by failing out of flight school – the lovely instructor staff would shut the engine off mid-flight to see how the trainee would handle it.   

It would go like this: While the Huey is “crabbing sideways,” the instructor shuts the power down and observes. What will the trainee do? While the Huey is “bucking in somebody’s rotor wash,” the power shuts off and the instructor looks on. What will the trainee do? While the Huey is calmly whomping five-hundred feet above the earth, the engine is shut down and the instructor locks his eyes on the trainee. The trainee is ready for it. He turns the helicopter into the wind to soften the landing, which the instructor knows he will do, when suddenly the trainee sees black power lines blocking his flight path. The trainee took the bait. And he failed.

The training program not only allowed failure, it forced it. The crucial point was that a trainee had to fail and overcome until both failure and overcoming were elemental to his being, or the trainee would never be trusted to fly men into combat.  

My sense is that an anti-failure ideology is on the rise. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han believes we live in an “achievement society.”² My hunch is that when achievement becomes the sole standard of the good life, failure becomes intolerable – and eventually it becomes forbidden. It becomes cruel to fail someone; to set them back; to stain their spotless record; to give an F. One example is No-Fail grading that has permeated our school systems. The achievement society, then, does not so much care about soul-deep purpose as it does for skin-deep appearance.

This contrast raises a question: what is the decisive difference between an anti-failure culture and a pro-failure culture? What significant truth does it reveal?  

Let us start with a real life example. During one jungle insertion, the pilot of the helicopter in front of Mason was shot and killed by an enemy machine gunner. Mason dropped his grunts off and immediately got airborne. The same machine gunner that killed the pilot took aim at Mason and riddled his Huey with bullets as it rose above the canopy. At one thousand feet, the engine died – and Mason’s training kicked in. His bird landed so hard that it skidded ten feet, but he, his copilot, and his crew survived.

He did not freeze when he saw the pilot – his friend – slumped over dead in his cockpit because he had already learned to accept consequences. He did not panic when the bullets smacked his helicopter with a tick tick tick because he already knew everything can go wrong. He did not blame or complain or lament when his engine went silent at a thousand feet because he was already schooled in failure.

And what if he had not been allowed to fail in flight school? What if the focus were more on getting a diploma than earning a diploma? Would the instructor staff be all that different from the Vietcong? Actually, the No-Fail mafia’s refusal to give an F makes it worse than the Vietcong inasmuch as it kills with an A+ and a smile while the Vietcong were more honest with their taunts and AK-47’s.

The significant point is that a fear of failure was irrelevant because the prospect of body bags was imminent. Nothing mobilizes a soul – or a society – like an enemy. For this reason we not only find a cult of failure in war, but in sport, entrepreneurship, and other ever-faithful pockets of the modern world where consequences cannot be hidden from, and where an enemy is front and center. This makes it clear why academia is ground zero for this anti-failure ideology – rarely, if ever, does it bleed or die as a result of its own foolish ideas.        

Still, it is strange that there exists an aversion to training for failure outside of a few cultural pockets of sanity. An F is neither a bit of grenade shrapnel nor fiery swirls of jellied napalm. It is not bankruptcy. My point is that an F is not the apocalypse – it is preparation for the apocalypse.

An F is life-affirming. An F unblurs a mind drunk on success and makes each second young and vibrant again. An F introduces us to ourselves in a way an A+ never can, which may be why those who silently and solemnly worship at the altar of the F are more likely to fight than flee when the black jungle erupts in yellow muzzle flashes. It freezes time and puts the immediate present to the question, which may be how an F can add purpose to achievement once again.

Besides, there is a certain savage joy in failure. Joy in learning how to turn stomach churning terror into calm when death is one wrong decision away. Joy in each failure reminding us that we are imperfect. Joy in training for all plans to shift and then flowing with the chaos.

I found something similar in skydiving. After training so many emergency cut away procedures that I was doing them in my sleep, I secretly hoped my chute would malfunction so I could cut it away. This may make me sound like a fool, but let us ask what would happen if we did not train skydivers for failing chutes. Is it better to jump out of a plane at thirteen thousand feet believing our parachute was packed by Cain or by Abel? Is it better to assume it will never malfunction or secretly hoping to cut away the main chute to see how well we can handle our last chance at life? Which is more foolish?

What then?

Like Icarus, the achievement society is flying closer and closer to the sun. It refuses to believe its wings of wax will melt. Why would it, when it has never been allowed to fail and fall?

So we are up against an anti-failure culture that is cruel in its niceness, and a pro-failure culture that is caring in its cruelty. It is relevant that an anti-failure culture will burn without a pro-failure culture on guard, but a pro-failure culture will endure with or without the aid of an anti-failure society.

What then is the nature of the “achievement society” that gave birth to this anti-failure ideology? The longshoreman philosopher wrote, “What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.”³ The achievement society is unfinished and does not know it. It is ignorant on a biblical scale because it never knew what-it-is-to-have-an-enemy. Despite wolves with freshly red fangs pacing on its peripheries – terrorists raping and pillaging Israel, Russians blitzkrieging Ukraine, a Hermit Kingdom and a Dragon Kingdom hoarding nuclear weapons – it stands in horror of the letter F while little more than empty air stands between it and annihilation. We might make a prophesy: the achievement society may one day be found guilty by those whose first taste of failure is a free-falling helicopter in war instead of an F in peace.

So much for civilization.

On an individual level, Mason was trained to fly as if “the engine would quit at any moment.” This is not a bad way to live a life, or to chip away at finishing a mind. What can be more nourishing to the mind and soul than a bit of failure to remind us that each moment is rich with enemy? That each second is an opportunity for self-renewal?

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1. Mason, Robert. Chickenhawk. New York, Penguin Books, 1984.

2. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler, Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2015.

3. Hoffer, Eric. Reflections On the Human Condition. [1st ed.] New York, Harper & Row, 1973.