COEUR d'ALENE - Swapping stories about their experiences as active-duty Marines in the 1960s, three men, all veterans who served in Vietnam during the war, stood near a sleek red helicopter Thursday outside a hangar at the Coeur d'Alene Airport.

The common bond that brought these men - Todd Sloan, Nate Jolley and Ed Sonneborn - together under a clear, blue October sky was not their military service in Vietnam. It was opera.

Sonneborn, of Medical Lake, was at the airport preparing to take a helicopter ride, a raffle prize he won from Opera Coeur d'Alene during the organization's recent production of "Carmen."

"I couldn't believe I won," Sonneborn said.

It would be the 72-year-old's first time in a 'copter since the Vietnam era. Sloan, 73, and Jolley, 73, and several other Opera Coeur d'Alene board members and supporters were at the airport to see Sonneborn off.

Sonneborn's "Carmen" experience was his first opera.

"Esther talked me into it," Sonneborn said.

Esther Long, Sonneborn's fiancee, said they went to see it because Carmen was the name of Sonneborn's late wife.

A 20-year Marine on active duty from 1962 to 1982, Sonneborn said he enjoyed the opera, despite some hearing loss he experienced as a young Marine.

"It's about the feeling, too," he said.

This helicopter trip would be much different than Sonneborn's experience during the war.

Sonneborn said he finished his duty in Vietnam "just before Tet started." He was there when night vision scopes came into use, and said he was responsible for distributing them.

"It was really exciting for us that a Vietnam vet, who went to battle, gets to ride in a helicopter today," said Opera Coeur d'Alene board member Valleta O'Day.

O'Day's first husband was in Vietnam, a physician at the Third Field Hospital in Saigon. During that time, she lived as a civilian at Fort Lewis, and was learning to fly. Most of her instructors had been helicopter pilots in Vietnam.

"They were so skilled," she said.

Todd Sloan, who was in Vietnam in 1968, said the shiny, red helicopter Sonneborn was about to go up in was unlike the ones they had in Vietnam.

They used "big Chinooks" over there, said Nate Jolley, and they had to have hundreds of them to move large numbers of men, equipment and supplies into often rugged areas.

"To me, there was a tremendous improvement in the helicopter over that time," Sonneborn said.

Sloan said he returned to Vietnam in 2006, and saw how far they had come since the war. With large hotels and office buildings, Sloan said he saw economic health and prosperity.

He recalled the projects he worked on in wartime Vietnam. Sloan said they developed a method of using the farmers' pig manure to create methane gas that was used for lighting and cooking.

They put tilapia in the rice paddies, he said, where the fish would eat mosquito larva, and then provide another source of protein for the community.

Jolley said things were so primitive in Vietnam back in 1965 when he was there, that it wasn't unusual to see peasants using cone-shaped containers to move water from a ditch into a field.

"That's how they flooded the rice paddies," Jolley said. "It probably took them days."

For Thursday's trip through the skies over North Idaho, Sonneborn and Long would be in the hands of pilot Jim Van Sky of Big Country Helicopters.

They were headed to Priest Lake where they would land and have lunch at Cavanaugh Bay.

Van Sky donated the ride to be raffled off during the opera production, and said he was glad it also inadvertently became a way to "say a little thank you" to a veteran.

"As good as things are today, we really owe it to the guys that went before us," Van Sky said.