When Earl Tilford Jr. was serving in Vietnam from 1970 to 1971, he didn't realize he was helping to create history.

But recently, the History Channel did.

Dr. Tilford, now a history professor at Grove City College, will share his expertise in aviation search and rescue for the cable television show "Broken Wings," which is about aviation archaeology. It airs at 8 Sunday night.

"One of the things that I find fascinating is that you're dealing with technology and human beings and what they do in emergency situations," he said. "And as a historian, how they piece together events, very much like a police office, or forensics using the last minutes of someone's life and how they may have reacted and what they may have done. With that, we try to come up with some approximation of truth. Historians are very much like detectives."

Having served for more than 30 years in both the Air Force and Army, as well as teaching at the Army and Air War colleges and the Air Force Academy and writing the Air Force's history of search and rescue operations in Vietnam, Tilford was just the type of expert the History Channel was looking for. "I also wrote my doctorate dissertation on Air Force search and rescue operations during the Vietnam War. My segment will involve a couple search and rescue stories in aviation archaeology."

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