Bruce Perry Crandall was born on February 17, 1933, in Olympia, Washington. He joined the Army National Guard at fifteen and later enrolled at the University of Washington on a baseball scholarship, batting nearly .600 as a high school outfielder. The Korean War intervened. Drafted in 1953, Crandall attended Engineer Officer Candidate School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, graduating in 1954. He earned his wings and spent his first overseas assignment mapping the Libyan desert from Wheelus Air Force Base in Tripoli. Aviation suited him. By 1965, he commanded Company A of the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division, stationed at An Khe, Vietnam. His radio call sign was Ancient Serpent 6.

The mission that morning was a routine troop insertion. Crandall's flight of sixteen helicopters carried soldiers from Plei Me to Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, the first major engagement between American and North Vietnamese regular forces. On the fourth lift, enemy fire found the helicopters. By the fifth, the landing zone was a killing field. The ground commander ordered the other aircraft to abort, but Crandall refused to leave his soldiers behind. With his wingman, Major Ed Freeman, Crandall continued flying into X-Ray. The medevac helicopters, designed and equipped for casualty evacuation, would not land in such intense fire. So Crandall did it in their place, loading wounded men into a helicopter built to carry troops, not stretchers. Across more than a dozen flights, over sixteen hours that stretched from 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., he carried more than 70 casualties to safety and ferried ammunition back in.

Crandall's commanding officer recommended him for the Medal of Honor shortly after the battle, but the paperwork stalled in the military bureaucracy. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross instead. Crandall went on to fly over 900 combat missions across two tours in Vietnam before retiring. The Ia Drang story reached the public through the 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, written by Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, both of whom had been on the ground that day. The 2002 film adaptation, We Were Soldiers, cast Greg Kinnear as Crandall; the real Crandall served as an aviation consultant during filming. Finally, on February 26, 2007, President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to Crandall at the White House, correcting a four-decade oversight.

The University of Washington's Medal of Honor Memorial stands at the south end of Memorial Way, tucked inside a traffic circle between Parrington and Kane Halls. Privately funded and dedicated on Veterans Day 2009, the memorial honors eight UW alumni who received the nation's highest military decoration. Crandall's name appears alongside those of Greg Boyington, the Marine Corps flying ace; William Kenzo Nakamura, a Japanese American soldier who fought in World War II while his family was interned; and five others whose service spans from the trenches of World War I to the jungles of Vietnam. Crandall was inducted into the Air Force's Gathering of Eagles in 1994, one of only seven Army aviators so honored, and the Army Aviation Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2013, the Seattle Seahawks invited him to raise the 12th Man flag before a home game. The ballplayer from Olympia who traded a scholarship for a cockpit became one of Washington state's most decorated soldiers.