Fighter Pilot

by Christina Olds

  SAC had been established by belligerent old General Curt LeMay and General Tommy Power, both pronuclear nutcases. Under their rules, if a wing commander messed up even a little bit he was canned and gone forever, so SAC fostered attitudes about how tough they were. What they really did was made a bunch of liars out of many wing commanders, DMs, and DOs. Guys at wing level were scared people. They would lie, cheat, steal, and deny—anything to make themselves look good.

  I went on an inspection tour of the bomb wing at Mather AFB and directed the commander, “Show me a load-out. Use load team number three. How many load teams does it take for you to be C-l?”

  He answered, “Three, sir.”

  Three load teams for an entire bomb wing? I was familiar with a fighter wing, where you had twelve load teams per squadron, thirty-six per base. Three load teams! This seemed unbelievable. So I said, “Okay, take load team number three and give me a load-out.” The resulting Chinese fire drill was something to see because I knew something he didn’t: Two NCOs out of load team three had transferred the previous Friday. I arrived Monday and they hadn’t reacted to it. They didn’t even know it! I demanded, “What the hell happens when you have an ORI [operational readiness inspection]?”

  They said, “Usually we borrow load teams from Castle.”

  “You pass an ORI with borrowed load crews? For God’s sake, that’s not realistic!”

  At another base, I asked a CO, “What’s your jet engine test cell reject rate?” This guy, who was on the general’s list, looked at me and answered, “Oh, my staff keeps track of details like that.”

  I said, “I sat at your standup this morning, Colonel; your major briefed you and he gave you some figures. Have you got any idea what he said, even sort of?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s around 25 percent, which is quite acceptable. These are old engines, you know, the old J-47s, and…” Blah, blah, blah.

  “Well, that was close, Colonel, but I’ll tell you what, either the major was lying to you or he is awfully dumb, because that figure isn’t really close.”

  He said, “General, I don’t see how you can say that. The major is a good man. He—”

  “All right then, he’s just dumb! He did not check his figures. Right now your test cell reject rate is running above 50 percent. If you don’t believe me, let me show you how I know this, and let me show you why it is important and let me show you why it is happening.”

  As chief of safety and IG, I was very unhappy with SAC engine maintenance. I had been warning them, “You are going to have trouble, deep trouble, big trouble.” But they were too smart. They thought they knew better. They did not listen to fighter pilots or to anybody else for that matter. They lost five B-52s that year, the most ever lost in one year. Four of them had jet-engine maintenance as the basic cause: one at McCoy, one out of U-Tapao, one that went off the end of the runway at Griffith, and one guy that flew out of Guam, did a rudder exercise stall from 36,000 feet all the way down to 6,000 feet, and punched out. Maintenance.

  I told the colonel, “Let’s get in your staff car and go out to your jet-engine test cell.” A look came across his face and I thought, You sucker! He’d been there two years and he didn’t know where the test cell was—not even the vaguest idea.

  We went and I introduced him to his maintenance chief. I said, “Sarge, let me have those records,” and I showed the commander. “Now, Colonel, here is your true reject rate. What does this mean to you? You are manned 130 percent in your jet-engine maintenance facility. The rest of the air force, outside of SAC, is manned about 75 or 80 percent in their jet-engine maintenance facility. You have all the people. Now, let’s see why your maintenance is so lousy.” So we went to a huge maintenance hangar and I continued, “Now, Colonel, I want you to walk from this wall down to that wall and by the time we get across this floor you’re going to tell me what’s wrong with your maintenance.” Well, of course, he couldn’t do it. I walked him back and forth a couple of times, finally saying, “Don’t you see anything?”

  He replied, “Nope.”

  “Show me a four-striper. Show me just one out here in this big repair setup.” There weren’t any. “Now, let’s go find those 130 percent. You are about 200 percent manned on the top three NCO grades. Let’s go find them.” The few we found were sitting around in offices with their feet up. “Now, let’s go over to the NCO club.” It was about eleven o’clock in the morning. There they were. All the E-7s, E-8s, and E-9s were sitting around drinking beer and coffee. And he wondered what was wrong with his jet-engine maintenance! Hell, he didn’t even know that anything WAS wrong. Now, that is ignorance. He was working in a system designed to promote this guy and to reward his ignorance.

  When LeMay scared the hell out of his people, he made something out of them that I don’t think was their true nature. He made them cringe and hide the truth. He made them say, “Yes, sir, yes, sir,” becoming chronic liars protecting their own skins. Whom were these guys going to promote? Whom were they going to favor in their OER (Officer Effectiveness Report) system? It wouldn’t be somebody better, or even someone similar to them. A man like that has to have somebody working for him that he can dominate, and he is invariably going to pick a lesser individual.

  After about twenty years of this system the incest destroys the force. I had a bunch of really great friends in SAC, but a big group of guys were developed into people who were afraid to think for themselves. They damn near destroyed the air force in the process.

  My favorite IG tour was to Southeast Asia in late summer 1971. I spent a lot of time talking to some fine young pilots frustrated by lack of action. LBJ had stopped the bombing in 1968 and advertised to the world that we were not really serious about the whole thing. Essentially, from a combat pilot’s point of view, he said, “All you troops can die for our country, but we won’t let you win for it.” Still, the guys had to serve their tours and be ready for anything.

  At Da Nang my team passed out the usual safety questionnaires to the troops. Living in Rocket City and flying Stormy FAC missions daily, one would need to be a supreme optimist to think about dying in an accident. One smart-ass captain (God love him) answered the question about flight safety hazards, “If I knew of one I would report it to our flight safety officer,” and on his ground safety quiz, he cited “sleeping through rocket attacks” as a major hazard. Another cited “flying combat.” The wing commander was less than thrilled with my out brief. He didn’t think it was funny. The troops really got it from him later.

  The one SAC, B-52 base I visited was U-Tapao. I had been to every fighter outfit in the theater beforehand. When I arrived at U-Tapao they told me, “You cannot inspect us, General. We are flying combat.” I said, “Not so that anybody around here would notice. Let’s get on with it.”

  What a lousy place! U-Tapao was so godawful that I made a point of briefing the SAC chief of staff at Offutt when I got back. His staff practically called me a liar. They sent a SAC team of their own over, followed my footsteps, and discounted everything I reported. In response I got the USAF IG to send a special team of experts over to review their report. They proved everything I said was right, and worse.

  There were some damn fine pilots, some fine squadron commanders in the theater, and some old-timers who were on their third tours, but everybody languished because there was nothing to do but kill monkeys and snakes. The best part left was the flying. I sneaked in about twenty more missions and got two more counters. It was fun! I flew with every wing except the 8th at Ubon. That CO would not let me near his airplanes, something to do with my previous reputation. I flew out of Da Nang, Phu Cat, and Phan Rang; I flew out of Tan Son Nhut in an 0-2; I flew out of NKP (Nakhon Phanom) in OV-10s and got some great F-4 rides out of Korat and Udorn. I wouldn’t fly with U-Tapao. For Christ’s sake, who had that amount of time? It took them fifteen hours to brief and then the chaplain took thirty minutes, which I really thought was funny. He would get up and give them a little prayer for his combat troops. I wante
d to puke. The closest any of those guys had been to real combat was walking under the wing of a B-52, where one of the bombs might fall off onto them. It was laughable. My attitude was slipping down the toilet.

  At the staff level, I met some guys who were just not with it. When I flew out of Da Nang we took a half hour coming back from the target. We dropped twenty-four 500-pounders. I couldn’t believe it! On nothing! Coming back we just flew formation up the coast. I asked the wing commander that night, “What in the hell did we waste all that time for? We should have been practicing pod formations, SAM breaks, MiG calls, and stuff like that.”

  He said, “Oh, we don’t do that stuff. That’s dangerous. We might have an accident.”

  I asked, “What will you do if they send you north?”

  He said, “Oh, we are not going up there.” And I knew they couldn’t because, the damn airplanes were not being maintained. I discovered that about 10 percent of the F-4s in the theater in 1971 could not fire an AIM-7. If you tried, the damn thing would not even come off the rails. All the 7-A launchers were horribly maladjusted. It was sad. The attitude that prevailed was “Don’t bother us with that stuff. You know that’s not what we’re here for.”

  Back in June, the wings had been briefed on my coming visits. Udorn sent me an invitation to attend a dining-in. Of course an IG could not accept such an invitation—undue influence and all that. I declined but mentioned that if I happened to be in the O club during that time I’d stop in. It turned out I arrived on my birthday and wing CO Colonel Lyle Mann and 555th commander Joe “Red” Kittinger went all out! After my sorry reception at Ubon, they really rolled out the red carpet. All the bar girls were in long white dresses and leis, about seventy-five fighter pilots and backseaters showed up, and of course all the Udorn colonels. It was a gala reception. They told me a giant cake with a couple of girls inside was scheduled to show up. It never did. Something about two guys talking the girls out of the cake before it left the kitchen. Harrumph!

  Red Kittinger was determined to give me another chance at getting number five. Colonel Mann warned him his career would be at stake if anything happened to my precious hide, but Red got me on a protective reaction mission scheduled for North Vietnam the next day. We’d be escorting a recce aircraft with the Triple Nickel’s best instructor pilot in my backseat. I was elated! After refueling, the recce aircraft turned back (due to lack of hostile fire), so we trolled around over Hanoi. To my great disappointment, the North Vietnamese didn’t send up any MiGs that day, an obvious relief for the Udorn CO. Same thing happened the next day. Oh well, I had a ball anyway.

  Just like my days at Ubon, MiG killing was not the name of the game at this stage of the Vietnam “conflict.” As wing commander, I had carried out all the frag orders issued by 7th. Our mission was to escort and bomb targets. That’s what we did. The name of the game for me was to get all my guys in—the Thuds, too—get them on target quickly, bomb accurately, and get the hell out with everybody. Seventh Air Force finally realized that we had to do that my way, and we did. I made the MiGs come to me on those missions. I never had any trouble finding them—they found me—but MiGs were not the name of the game anymore. All SEA wings were still playing by these rules in 1971 but Udorn was the only wing that really knew how to go north if they had to, the only bunch showing any interest. Those guys really had their shit together. They were eager to go, really thinking and reading everything they could get their hands on. They slept it, dreamt it, ate it, lived it. Jesus, Red pumped me and pumped me for advice and tactics experience. I loved it.

  At the end of that tour I had to ask myself a very serious question: How in the name of God could the Air Staff populate a combat theater with people who weren’t interested in combat? How could they say we were combat ready when all they’d been doing for two years was dropping Ping-Pong balls on muddy trails? How could they accept a state of training where the boss might say, “Go north! Right now!” knowing his troops couldn’t do it? How could they put wing commanders in there who were not fighter guys but a bunch of staff weenies who were filling the square to get their stars? How could they use combat this way and risk people’s lives? It was bad, really bad, and to my mind, part of a bomber general’s thinking.

  I had to brief the chief on all this but of course I couldn’t reveal the fact that I’d flown missions. Hell, as a general officer I wasn’t supposed to fly at all, just be ferried from place to place. The IG was definitely not supposed to fly combat, for Christ’s sake, yet that’s how I knew that only Udorn was ready. After I gave General Ryan the IG safety part of my trip, I said, “Sir, there is something else I’d like to say. Fighter forces in Southeast Asia today cannot fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Not only that, there’s nobody down in 7th Air Force who would know how to frag a Pack 6 mission.”

  The chief snorted, “What?” And his three-star DO chimed in with, “I don’t know how you can say that! They are all C-1. Besides, what makes you think that we have to go back north?”

  I answered heatedly, “General, a marine guarding the gate at the embassy in London in full-dress uniform is still capable of assaulting a bunker with an M-16 and grenades because that’s what he’s trained to do. He’s just doing that grand tour for funsies, but he is basically a combat-ready soldier. Your troops in Southeast Asia are just guarding the embassy gate and they are not combat-ready troops. If we have to go back north we are going to lose our hat, ass, and spats, and the record will show that we did.”

  The record will also show that General Ryan at the time turned around after I left and demanded, “What is the matter with those goddamn fighter people over there? The navy is shooting down MiGs. The navy is doing good work. What is the matter with those goddamn AF fighter people?” Well, I had told him what was wrong and he chose not to do anything about it. What the hell did he want? Even when he was told he wouldn’t listen. It galled me.

  This went on through the end of 1971 and into spring of ’72. At the end of March and beginning of April, the People’s Army of Vietnam rolled a massive force across the demilitarized zone in what became known as the “Easter offensive.” At first Washington’s response was lackadaisical and confused, but Nixon finally ordered Operation Linebacker, a continuous bombing effort by the navy and USAF in May, to halt transportation of supplies and materials across the DMZ, prevent the total collapse of South Vietnam, and protect America’s prestige for the scheduled summit meeting with Soviet premier Brezhnev.

  At the time of the invasion, we had fewer than ten thousand U.S. troops remaining in South Vietnam, most of them scheduled to leave within the next six months. Our air power was less than half that of its peak strength in ’68–’69. An immediate ramp-up scrambled almost two hundred F-4s, a squadron of F-105G Wild Weasels, and over one hundred B-52s back into action. Navy ships steamed in, on high alert. But despite all this, we started losing.

  I took all I could. I went back to Washington and said, “I volunteer to go back. You can bust me to colonel. I want to take about twelve good guys with me and put them in Korat, Ubon, and Da Nang. We can get this show on the road. After that I’ll come back home again. But God, let me do this because right now, it’s a shambles.” It took the Pentagon a week to decide whether or not they’d do that.

  When they called back, my IG boss, General Ernest Hardin, offered, “Olds, we’ll let you take an inspection team over. You can inspect missile maintenance.” Oh God no. The final straw.

  “General Hardin, sir, what you are telling me is that you want me to go over there and try to fight the 7th Air Force commander all by myself, with no help from the chief, no support from here at all. I’m supposed to go, sneak around, and do it all alone. You know I will fly. You want me to go up there and get killed and you guys won’t even support me? Nuts to that!” I turned in my retirement papers. That was SAC leadership. It really hurt. It hurt a lot of fine people in far more ways than it hurt me.

  Starting in May of ’72, when Linebacker went into action,
pilots sent north on MiG CAPs were also going up specifically to find MiGs. A disreputable navy lieutenant, whom I shall not dignify by naming, got his third, fourth, and fifth MiGs on the first day of Linebacker. USAF Captain Steve Ritchie, flying an F-4D with the Triple Nickel out of Udorn, got his fifth MiG in August. Some F-4Es by then had the top-secret “Combat Tree” system on board, giving them the ability to identify and locate MiGs when still beyond visual range, a far different circumstance from five years previously, when we knew fuck-all about which aircraft were MiGs. Ritchie was a brilliant pilot, despite his annoyingly cocky egotism, and he flew a hell of a lot more combat missions than I did. I wish I’d had him with me at Ubon. He was the right man in the right place at the right time to get magic number five, and he sure enjoyed the ace fuss. But Steve later admitted to me that he was helped along by the new detector stuff and the dedicated ground controllers he had, which was big of him. It doesn’t downplay his achievement, but it sure made me wonder what the 8th could have done with that new gizmo.

  Nixon’s Watergate scandal erupted in June and Jane Fonda visited Hanoi in July, broadcasting her antiwar message via Hanoi radio. It was horrible to think our American POWs were being made to listen to her crap. Operation Linebacker ended in October, Nixon was re-elected in November, peace talks collapsed in Paris in December, and Linebacker Two started up a week before Christmas, inflicting the most intensive bombing campaign of the war. Nixon and Kissinger pressured the North Vietnamese to get back to peace talks and the South Vietnamese to accept the terms of the deal, and finally, on January 15, 1973, Nixon announced the end of offensive operations against North Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords ending the conflict were signed January 27. Thank God, the POWs were released and started coming home in February. Saigon fell with a crash in 1975. It was a hell of a scramble getting our civilians and remaining military personnel out.