By 1966, North Vietnam's Soviet-built SA-2 surface-to-air missiles were knocking American jets out of the sky, and nobody knew exactly how they worked. The big mystery was the guidance signal: the radio commands that steered each missile to its target. If the US could capture that signal, it could learn to jam it. But the only way to record it was to be on the receiving end of a missile. No pilot was going to volunteer for that. So on February 13, 1966, the Air Force sent a Ryan Firebee, an unmanned drone packed with electronic monitors, on a one-way mission over North Vietnam. Its job was to get shot down. It worked exactly as planned. North Vietnamese radar locked onto the drone and fired a missile. In the seconds before it was destroyed, the Firebee captured the missile's long-mysterious command signals and beamed the data back to a DC-130 mothership flying nearby. That one sacrificed drone gave the United States the information it needed to start jamming the SA-2. It was one of the first times a drone did a job that would have meant certain death for a human pilot.

February 24, 1969. Night. An AC-47 gunship, call sign Spooky 71, is circling over Long Binh, firing on Viet Cong attacking the Army post below. In the back, 23-year-old Airman First Class John Levitow is filling in for the regular loadmaster. His job is to arm magnesium flares, 27-pound canisters that burn at 4,000 degrees, and hand them to the gunner to throw out the open cargo door. The gunner is holding one with his finger through the pull ring when an 82mm mortar shell hits the right wing and explodes. Shrapnel rips through the cabin. Everyone in the back is wounded. The blast tears the flare out of the gunner's hand and pulls the safety pin. The fuse is now burning. The flare rolls loose across the floor, smoking, among cans holding 19,000 rounds of live ammunition. When it ignites, it will set off the ammo and burn through the floor to the control cables. Everyone dies. Levitow has more than 40 shrapnel wounds in his back and legs. He's lost feeling in his right leg. The plane is banking hard and partly out of control, and the flare is rolling wildly from side to side. He can't grab it with his hands. So he throws his whole body on top of it. Hugging the burning flare to his chest, he drags himself to the back of the plane and shoves it out the cargo door. It ignites in the air an instant later, clear of the aircraft. Spooky 71 made it home with more than 3,500 holes in it. Levitow became the first enlisted man in Air Force history to receive the Medal of Honor. Today the top honor for Air Force enlisted leadership graduates is called the John Levitow Award.