Nice retorts, guys! Crab, you are quite right, my plea was to assess safety in the actual operation, and add the next thing that can measurably increase safety. If you spend your job in OGE hover or at low altitude and low speed, OEI safety is clearly an important safety option.
Where do we need more safety attention? Helicopter instrument procedures and kits, Night equipage, CFIT solutions, DVE solutions, expert copilot systems that tell you what actually happened in an emergency, etc, etc.
BTW, Crab, engines being shot seemed to be pretty rare in Vietnam. Once we read of a Marine pilot getting a DFC, and the citation read something about him getting an engine failure and flying for 30 minutes over enemy territory on one engine. We tore out the article and took it to our Awards and Decorations officer, asking for our DFCs, since all our aircraft were single engine and we had about 1,000 hours each "over enemy territory"! He threw us out on our bums.