Medical Service Corps (MSC) pilots in the cockpits of the Army's air ambulances.2 But he did not succeed until shortly after the armistice in 1953. From early 1951 on, the Surgeon General had advocated training some MSC officers as aviators, and in the spring of 1952 the regulations governing Army aviation were amended to allow MSC personnel to become pilots. A quota of twenty-five MSC officers, mostly second lieutenants, was set for flight training in October. None of the current MSC officers had ever been helicopter pilots, although a few had had some aviation training. By early July, fifty-three applications for the slots had been received, but only seventeen applicants were qualified. Eight MSC officers began flight training in October, and one washed out before graduation. The other seven graduated on 28 February 1953. In September the Surgeon General's office requested and received a standing quota of ten MSC officers per month for attendance at the Army Aviation School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. By 1 October the Medical Service had twenty-four officer pilots and soon received five more by transfer from other branches. None had flown in Korea before the armistice in July.

After the Korean War the Surgeon General's Office applied itself to assessing the potential of helicopter ambulances in future conflicts. In particular, Lt. Col. Spurgeon H. Neel, Jr., in a number of medical and aviation journals, publicized and promoted the Army's air ambulances. The Korean experience, he realized, could not serve as an infallible guide to the use of helicopters in other types of wars and different geographical regions, but it certainly showed that helicopters had made possible at least a modification of the first links in Letterman's chain of evacuation. A superior communications system would allow a well-equipped and well-staffed ambulance to land at or near the site of the wounding, making much ground evacuation unnecessary. If the patient's condition could be stabilized briefly, it might prove helpful to use the speed of the helicopter to evacuate the patient farther to the rear, to more complete medical facilities than those provided at a rudimentary division clearing station. Triage might be carried out better at a hospital than in the field. But the Korean War and the concurrent French struggle in Indochina had afforded only limited, imperfect tests of helicopter medical evacuation. The potential was obvious, but not fully proven.

2At this time the Army Medical Service consisted of six corps: Medical, Dental, Veterinary, Army Nurse, Women's Medical Specialists, and the Medical Service Corps, which provided a variety of administrative and technical services.