Baby name story: Cheyenne

Cheyenne helicopter

A few years ago, a San Francisco newspaper ran a profile of fallen soldier Sgt. Cheyenne Willey (1969-2005), who’d died in combat near Baghdad. The profile noted that Cheyenne had been “[n]amed for the helicopter that helped his father out of a scrape in Vietnam.”

That helicopter must have been the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne attack helicopter, which was used by the Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

(This story makes me wonder if the baby name Sioux, which started popping up in the U.S. data in the ’50s, wasn’t influenced by the Korean War’s “Angel of Mercy” Bell H-13 Sioux helicopter.)

Source: “Profiles of the Lost.” East Bay Times 14 Mar. 2010.

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