This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
She was the woman in the floppy jungle hat, standing in front of a Hiller 360 helicopter—young, with a confident smile, dressed in khaki coveralls.
Her photo immediately caught my eye the first day I walked into a warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area that housed the massive collection of helicopter legend Stanley Hiller’s aircraft and aviation memorabilia. It was 1991, and I was a grad student starting a job as the curator of the Hiller Aviation Museum.
There I stood, surrounded by all manner of Hiller aircraft—production helicopters, experimental Rotorcycles, and even the infamous Hiller Flying Platform. But who was that woman in the floppy hat? I had to know her story.
What I would learn became an obsession with the story of a true aviation pioneer—a story I would eventually travel repeatedly across an ocean to pursue, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux.
There, I would sit for hours, quietly soaking up the remarkable memories of Valérie André, the woman in the floppy hat.
She was a French Army doctor and a trailblazing helicopter rescue pilot. She flew 128 missions and rescued 168 soldiers during the French-Indochina War. Those missions took her to the most dangerous combat zones imaginable. Despite red crosses painted prominently on her aircraft, Valérie was always a target of enemy bullets and mortar fire. She would also become France’s first female Army general.
We first met in 2003, after I had finished my first book and finally felt I had enough credentials to contact Valérie to ask if I could tell her story. To my surprise and delight, she wrote back and said she would be happy to meet.
I flew to Paris, and I found her waiting at the entrance to the building and discovered our countries and native languages were not the only things that made us different. At six-foot-three, I towered over her by one foot and one inch. So her first impression of me was lasting. To her, I would always be “the tall American.”
Valérie had first moved to this apartment in the 1960s with her late husband, Col. Alexis Santini, France’s first military helicopter rescue pilot and Valérie’s mentor in Vietnam. The apartment was small but had a sweeping balcony view over Issy. Valérie called it her “bird’s nest.”
The living room was a testament to her love of aviation and her career in the French Army as a helicopter pilot. I noticed a model of a Hiller UH-12/360 prominently displayed on her mantel. I could tell it was a gift from the Hiller Company, similar to models I had seen in the museum.
As with most veterans, Valérie was reluctant to discuss her military career. She seemed more interested in talking about my work at the Hiller Museum. I had read Valérie’s autobiography, Madame le General, but I wanted to know more about the lives of the people who had intersected with her life. As it turned out, my first visit to see her would turn into a nearly annual trek to uncover the myriad details of her fascinating life.
In subsequent visits, I learned that Valérie had dreams of hurtling through air and space at a very young age. At 10, she met the famous French aviatrix, Maryse Hilsz. She proudly showed me the photo taken that day at the Strasbourg airport—a little girl clutching a bouquet of flowers to present to Hilsz. It was the photo that captured the moment Valérie André knew she would become a pilot.
And I would quickly understand how Valérie’s story would inspire so many other young girls to reach for new heights.
She told me about the darkness of World War II, the German occupation of France, when she left her native Strasbourg in defiance of German orders to continue her university studies and was nearly arrested when her university was raided by the Gestapo. She managed to flee to Paris, but others, including her landlord, would perish in concentration camps.
Valérie lived underground in Paris while attending the Sorbonne for her medical studies. She was in Paris when de Gaulle’s army of the Free French, followed by the Americans and British, liberated the city in 1944. It was a moment that she never forgot.
“We felt like we were able to breathe again.”
From that point, the military became her new passion. When she graduated in 1948 with her medical degree, she volunteered to serve in France’s military medical corps and was shipped off to Indochina, where the French were engaged in a war against the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh for control over Vietnam.
Even though Valérie was commissioned as a captain, many thought the military was no place for a woman. But Valérie’s skill, dedication, and tenacity always proved her detractors wrong. She trained to become a neurosurgeon in the military hospitals of Saigon and Hanoi to help treat the many soldiers with head trauma wounds in the field.
But aviation never left Valérie’s soul. When the medical corps organized an air-droppable surgical unit to treat wounded at remote French outposts, Valérie was the first to volunteer. On one mission, she parachuted into an outpost in Laos, where she spent several weeks treating not only wounded French soldiers but also the local population and even wounded Viet Minh. Her stamina was incredible, and in that instance, her military legend began to take root.
“The Meo people called me ‘the woman who came from the sky,’” Valérie said proudly, showing me a photo of herself in front of the French fort known as Muong Ngat.
The war between the French and the Viet Minh was bloody, and casualties were massive by 1950. French soldiers serving far from the major cities of Saigon and Hanoi were often under constant siege, and it was often impossible to transport the wounded to hospitals. However, the situation changed when the helicopter came to Vietnam. When Valérie saw the demonstration of the medevac-equipped Hiller in Saigon, she knew she had to be part of the service.
“As a doctor, I could help stabilize the wounded men.” She added with an impish grin, “I only weighed 98 pounds, so maybe I could rescue an extra man, too,” since the combined weight would not exceed the payload.
She went back to France for flight training, and when she returned to Vietnam, she was placed into service in September 1951.
“I hated the war, but there was always an exhilaration to flying.”
Her missions were dangerous, and she often needed to be escorted into combat zones with fighter planes that peppered the surrounding areas with machine-gun fire to clear the enemy from the landing zone. She only had a few minutes to land, load her wounded, and take off before the enemy regrouped. Each mission was grueling.
Recognition of Valérie André’s accomplishments came from far and near. She was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and even recognized in the U.S. with a Legion of Merit award from the U.S. Air Force. Her crowning achievement came in 1976 when she was promoted to general, becoming the first woman in the French military to attain that rank.
Despite her record of heroism, Valérie always seemed nonchalant about her accomplishments. She was obviously proud of how she had served France, but she never felt a need to boast. Her modest confidence always struck me as her finest quality.
But Valérie André did take pride in inspiring other female pilots. When she turned 90 in 2012, she told me that she was going on a trip to Washington, D.C., with Catherine Maunoury, the world champion aerobatic pilot, and Patricia Haffner, the pilot of the Air France jetliner who would fly them there. Valérie called the trip a “girls weekend.”
As Valérie approached her 100th birthday in 2022, the civilian heliport in Issy-les-Moulineaux was named in honor of Gen. Valérie André. She attended the ceremony in full dress uniform, as a military band and a number of dignitaries honored her on International Women’s Day.
I was there a month later, on April 21, when Valérie was feted at an elegant birthday celebration at the city hall of Issy-les-Moulineaux. After a decade of conversations, I was finally able to present her with my biography, Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André―Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire.
There was a bittersweetness to my final encounter with Valérie. A sense of frailty and by-the-moment existence overwhelmed me. I had known my heroine when she was still vibrant and active. Now, we were at the end of a life that I know was well-lived, but she lacked the freedom that was once her hallmark. We spent the afternoon quietly watching a French game show until the orderlies said it was time for me to leave. I knew this would be our final meeting.
Valérie André had cheated death many times, but her time finally came on Jan. 21, 2025. She was 102.
So many people asked me why I devoted so much time to a book that used the backdrop of the French-Indochina conflict. Just as the French War in Vietnam is little known in the U.S., Valérie’s life and career are even less known.
I was struck by the audacity and courage of the woman in the floppy hat. That compelled me to devote more than 10 years to writing her story. I still find it an uphill battle to bring her incredible story to a larger audience. But in the end, do we ignore the accomplishments of those who dared to break the mold and trailblaze so others may follow with less prejudice and fewer obstacles?
Should “forgotten wars” also mean “forgotten veterans”? I don’t think so. More than a half-century later, there are still many lessons to be learned from the period of the French and American wars in Vietnam, and I can truthfully say Valérie André taught me these lessons: the strength of character of both the French and Vietnamese people in a dark time and place in history and the ultimate decency of individuals who rise above atrocity and carnage.
These things will remain with me from my years spent with Valérie André.
This War Horse reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
