Good effort on a good deed, but bad outcome

I was a pilot in Vietnam, tasked to fly children out of South Vietnam. 

About ten minutes after takeoff, we heard an explosion as the rear fuselage of the plane began ripping apart. The after-action report said the rear loading ramp failed, so the door opened and caused decompression.

Most of our hydraulics and rudders instantly went inoperable.

We did our best to regain control and return to land the plan, but we bounced off a rice field, soared back into the air for about half a mile, and then crashed. Our plane hopped like a rock skipping across a pond— only we were bouncing across the land. When we stopped bumping around, the aircraft shattered into four big pieces, some of them catching fire.

It was brutal—

•  175 people survived.
•  138 were killed, including 78 of the children we were trying to rescue.

Every bit of paperwork that came through said there was nothing we could do, that it was just an accident. That’s hard. This was the first of many flights out that were part of this effort, and it got off to a really bad start.

For decades I’ve wondered what I could have done differently, what I might have double-checked, how I might have responded to losing control of the plane…