Jim Cundell spent 36 years bringing wounded service members back from war. Then he spent another 17 making sure 4,600 of them got the homecoming they never had.
Story & Photography by Nathan Sparks
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (July/August 2026)
Somewhere over the Pacific in the late 1960s, a young airman lay stacked five litters high in the belly of a C‑141. He had lost a leg. His hands were burned and wrapped, useless. He had been told he needed to eat, but he could not lift the spoon. So Jim Cundall crouched on the cargo deck, contorted himself beneath the lowest litter, and started to feed him.
The soldier shook his head. “But you can’t feed me in the position you’re in.”
“Look,” Jim told him. “We both did a job they told us to do. We didn’t ask for it. You did your job. And I’d like to do my job — and it’s not going to hurt me near as much as you got hurt doing yours. So let me do my job.”
The soldier ate everything on the tray.
That moment, more than any commendation or promotion, distills what Jim Cundall did across 36 years of military service. He carried people home. And then, when the uniform came off, he kept right on carrying them.
Jim was born in Nashville and was about to be drafted in 1963 when fate, in the form of a city councilman, intervened. The councilman was in the Tennessee Air National Guard, learned that Jim was about two weeks from a draft notice, and pointed him toward a hospital commander who ran him through a battery of tests. “You did real good on these tests,” the officer told him. “You can do whatever you want to do.”
Jim, who already had a civilian job in medical lab work at the Red Cross in Nashville, picked a new unit nobody had told him about — a flying medical squadron tasked with picking up wounded service members at forward hospitals and ferrying them toward home. It sounded interesting. He had no idea what he was signing up for.
His first temporary duty mission was to Japan, flying into Korea to retrieve patients and bring them back to major hospitals at the rear. On approach, the flight’s instructor pointed out the window. Mount Fuji was rising clean out of the cloud deck. The instructor told the crew to get out the camera.
“We didn’t have one,” Jim says. They had thought about it. They had decided against the weight. He still calls it the best photograph he never took — and his deployments only got more eventful from there.
By 1967 the Air Force was burning through aeromedical evacuation crews so quickly that it began calling on Guard and Reserve units to send qualified people. Jim and a handful of others volunteered. A typical rotation ran from California to Hawaii to the Philippines, then up to Vietnam, Okinawa, and Japan, and back across the Pacific to the United States. A single tour could put more than seventy hours of actual airtime on a man in one week. The Air Force eventually had to throttle the schedule. The medics did not always want to slow down.
Each plane carried roughly 40 patients — some ambulatory, some on litters — and the patients were often 18, 19, 20 years old. Jim was 29 when he started flying them. “When you see a 19‑year‑old kid hit by a Bouncing Betty,” he says, naming the antipersonnel mine that sprang to waist height before it detonated, “that was the most devastating thing.”
Many did not survive. The ones who did came aboard with shrapnel buried in their backs and a stunned, faraway look. They had trained together, gone to war together, gotten hit together, and then been split apart for evacuation. By the time Jim met them, they were strangers in their own bodies.
He understood, very quickly, that medicine was not the whole job. “You take care of their health things,” he says, “and they’re still kids. They’re kind of lost.” So he made a practice of being something more than a flight medic. He listened. He joked. He looked them in the eye while they ate.
He fed the soldier on the litter. He stood for nearly an hour beside a young Black serviceman strapped to a Stryker frame — the rotating bed used for spinal injuries — who reached out with the only fingers he could still move, hooked them into the cuff of Jim’s pants, and asked, simply, “Can you talk to me?” Jim sat and talked until the man fell asleep. Despite six decades of trying, he still cannot recall the soldier’s name.
By the time the war ended in 1975, Jim had stopped counting the flights.
The Guard was supposed to be a part‑time commitment. It never quite worked out that way. Between deployments, Jim built a parallel career in clinical and blood‑banking sciences. He ran the lab at the Red Cross in Nashville until 1980, when a job offer brought him and his wife Nancy to Knoxville. He took on regulatory and quality‑control work for the plasma centers owned by Armour Pharmaceutical — setting standards for the FDA, then making sure his own company met them.
Three years in, Dr. Carl Nelson, the founder of Knoxville’s Medic Blood Center, invited him to lunch and never quite let him leave. Jim joined Medic’s leadership in 1983 and spent the rest of his civilian career there.
Along the way he was elected to the Tennessee state medical lab board, eventually serving as its chairman — including a stretch when he had to be reelected in absentia because he was running an aeromedical operation in Saudi Arabia. He chaired the FDA Liaison Committee for the plasma industry. And he sat on the presidential panel that, in the early 1980s, debated whether blood centers should begin asking donors questions about HIV risk before there was a test that could detect it. Four panelists, Jim included, said yes. Thirty‑six said no. The four took it to the FDA themselves. When Jim finished his presentation, the FDA staff in the room rose to their feet and applauded. “We just applauded you,” one of them told him afterward, “for what we can’t do.” Six months later every blood center in the country was asking the questions.
He went back to a war zone in 1990. By then Jim was an E‑9 — Chief Master Sergeant, the highest enlisted rank in the Air Force — and the senior enlisted aeromedical evacuation manager for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Reserves ran air evac out of the desert. The Guard ran it out of Germany. Jim moved between Riyadh, Oman, and a small forward base whose nurses were, at one point, so short‑handed and so closely watched that Jim quietly let a rumor spread that he was the lone female airman’s father, just to keep the harassment down. “It worked,” he says.
There was the night, days before the air war began, that the chaplain corps suddenly multiplied in his briefing room — five chaplains where there had been one the day before. There was the plane full of patients his commander asked him to set up “for tomorrow night” with no explanation given. There was the time their inbound formation overshot a turn and his C‑141 nearly drove into the back of the lead aircraft.
There was also the morning he walked into the office of the base administrator he needed a favor from, noticed a Nerf basketball goal taped above the trash can, and came back the next day with a Nerf ball of his own. “I noticed your goal,” he told the man. “I played in high school. Brought you something.” He got every plane he asked to be reconfigured for litter patients. Around the desert, the joke spread: if you needed something done, find Cundall.
Jim retired from the Tennessee Air National Guard in 1999, after 36 years. Then a Knoxville businessman named Eddie Mannis had a vision, and Jim went back to work.
HonorAir, the program Mannis built to fly East Tennessee Vietnam veterans to Washington, D.C., to see the memorials raised in their honor, made its first flight in 2007. Jim joined as the flight director’s right hand and as the program’s intake interviewer — the man on the phone who first heard each veteran’s story and helped decide who got a seat on each $100,000 plane. Across the program’s life he flew on more than twenty missions and personally interviewed every one of the roughly 4,600 veterans who eventually boarded an HonorAir flight. The 38th and final mission lifted off from McGhee Tyson last fall, after the program had simply run out of East Tennessee Vietnam ground veterans to fly. “I had four veterans left,” Jim says of that last manifest. “We took them.”
The men he interviewed by phone told him things they had never told a wife, a son, or a priest. They told him because he had been there, too. “He talks to another veteran now,” Jim says, “and they’re on the same level. They understand.” He listened.
The trip he remembers best is the last one. He almost didn’t go — knee trouble, balance trouble, the long hours of a Saturday on a tarmac. The HonorAir team insisted. He went in a wheelchair. He watched men he had spent decades shepherding home press their fingers to the names cut into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Afterward, one of them turned to him and said something that has not left him since:
“Y’all came in. Y’all took them away. We never got to say goodbye. This is our chance to say goodbye.”
For most of his career, Jim believed his job had been to load wounded kids onto airplanes and keep them alive long enough to land. On that last flight, a generation of his patients — gray now, slow now — finally let him hear the rest. “We would have hated to go out into the jungle if we knew y’all weren’t there,” one veteran told him. Knowing he was up there, they said, was how they made it through the day on the ground.
Jim Cundall will tell you he was lucky. He came home. He got a long marriage to Nancy, a long career, and a corner of Knoxville that knows his name. He will downplay the rest — the night runs into Da Nang, the HIV vote that took six months to become national policy, the Medal of Honor helicopter pilot, Larry Taylor, whom Jim once drove up to Fort Knox to be measured for the Class A uniform he had never bothered to own. He will tell you instead about the boys he fed.
He still calls them boys. He always will. ◆
Comments are closed.