by Dan Pedersen
The North Vietnamese used a road that ran through Laos and into South Vietnam. This supply route, which we had bombed for years, was known to us as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Dubbed Operation Barrel Roll, the air campaign stretched from 1964 into 1973 and continued after the peace accords were signed. American aircraft, including B-52s, flew hundreds of sorties in support of the crumbling Laotian army.
Back home, the Paris Agreement was hailed as a victory. Our POWs were coming home. Our troops were pulling out. South Vietnam would survive and have the right to determine its own fate.
But only the U.S. troop pullout was real. The war in Laos continued, and the Big E’s air wing went back into the fight, bombing Communist insurgents and their lines of supply. Far from celebrating the war’s end, we found ourselves in the midst of another one that nobody at home even knew had gone on for nine years.
Well west of the Vietnam border, we hit a truck convoy on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Flying low and slow, an Air Force forward air controller marked targets for us with smoke rockets. We rolled in and hammered them with bombs. During another pass, the forward air controller’s plane took a critical hit from ground fire. When he crash-landed on a small dirt road, we had another rescue mission to cover.
Far from the coast, we were going to have trouble getting him out, but we stayed over him, wishing yet again that the F-4 had an internal gun. We could have killed a lot of bad guys with a 20mm Vulcan Gatling gun that day. At last, another aircraft from his unit arrived and managed to land in a patch of open ground. When they hauled their comrade aboard, we thankfully avoided a repeat of what happened the day Harley and Al ejected.
As the weeks wore on, the squadron’s mood shifted from shock and grief to stubborn resolve. The guys carried out their missions, flying in an air corridor that took us past Quang Tri practically every day. I could not have been prouder. Gordo and Harley had selected and trained well. Lieutenant Terry Heath ranked among the best, a pilot who thoroughly understood the F-4 and could take most anyone in a dogfight. Having been on Harley’s wing that day over South Vietnam, he was affected by the loss particularly hard. He’d risked his life repeatedly to find out what happened to Harley and Al. His poise and character helped keep things together.
If only the larger war had followed his example. All around South Vietnam, the Americans were turning out the lights. The final prisoner release took place in March. On the twenty-ninth, the last of the American combat troops climbed aboard transport aircraft at Saigon for the long journey home.
Before crossing the Pacific for Pearl, we stopped at Subic Bay. Those nights at the Cubi Point Officers’ Club were the wildest, hard-drinkingest I’d ever seen. The guys really unleashed, like dozens of overwound springs suddenly releasing their tension. In retrospect, it was probably the first real act of healing for the squadron.
On June 7, 1973, the Enterprise arrived at Pearl Harbor. During our arrival salute to USS Arizona in 1968, we were filled with anticipation of what combat would be like. Now we had names to mourn. As I stood rendering another salute to our lost battleship, I thought about our POWs such as Jim Stockdale and Harley Hall, Ron Polfer, J. B. Souder, Arvin Chauncey, Robby Reisner, Coal Black, and Dieter Dengler, to name a few. They were tortured, beaten, and psychologically run down. They were forced to sign confessions, starved, denied medical care, and, to add a final insult, used as propaganda tools when actress Jane Fonda showed up in Hanoi, with television cameras rolling, to fawn over our enemy. Some of these men never came home.
In March, most of these POWs returned to America. Harley was not among them. The mystery of his fate was never unraveled. Al Kientzler was told by a guard that his pilot had died in his chute, but Lieutenant Heath saw him running from his landing spot into some nearby trees. We’d received intelligence tracing his handover from unit to unit all the way to Hanoi.
The worst fear for all of us wasn’t death. It was ending up like some of the Korean War crews shot down over enemy territory. Never handed back at the end of hostilities, they simply vanished. Rumors abounded over the years that some ended up in Soviet gulags, wasting away in Siberia, forgotten by everyone but their families. When we heard that Harley had not been released, the nightmare we all feared became his reality.
We were different men when we arrived at Pearl that spring day. It would take time for each of us to sort out what that meant. I guess that process started in Hawaii. Few of our squadron took the chance to go on liberty there. It was the only stay at Pearl I ever made where most of my men remained aboard. We caught up on sleep and considered our futures. With the war over, did we want to stay in the Navy? The airlines were paying well for good pilots. A peaceful, lucrative, and far more family-friendly career waited for them on the other side of the gate. Gordo would be moving on to another command. That meant I’d be moved up and given the squadron.
Just before we arrived at Pearl, we received a priority message ordering VF-143 and our sister fighter squadron on the Enterprise, VF-142, to turn around and redeploy in fifty-one days. Breaking the news to our men was going to be tough. And it could cost the Navy some good people. Honestly, I wouldn’t blame any of them for getting out. Already we were due for a mass exodus. As we faced other threats—the Russians, the Chinese, more chaos in Southeast Asia and the Middle East—we needed to keep our talent. That would be a major leadership challenge in the weeks ahead.
We sailed out of Pearl a few days later, California bound. When I came aboard, the guys told me stories of the ship’s last view of home. When the Big E was set to sail from Alameda in the Bay Area, antiwar activists tried to storm the base or delay the carrier’s departure by swarming the boat basin with small boats. The Navy and Coast Guard fended them off, and the Enterprise sailed on schedule. But a sour feeling prevailed when the carrier steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge. The country was poorly led and bitterly divided. A good portion of the public simply hated the military. I like to think those who felt that way were just ignorant. If they knew us, perhaps they would have come around. Maybe peace would bring some perspective and understanding. Or maybe that was asking too much of people who called us baby killers and spat on returning veterans in airports. We felt our universities were playing a role in spreading this poisonous, hateful view among younger Americans.
Halfway home, Gordo and I broke the news to the squadron of our quick return to sea. This time, the Navy was sending us to the East Coast to deploy on USS America for operations in the Mediterranean Sea. Cruises in the Med usually meant we would operate near the Middle East, the other major flashpoint of the Cold War. We promised to do our best to make it a “vacation cruise.”
Four hundred miles from the California coast, the Big E launched her air wing. The attack squadrons flew to Whidbey Island, Washington, and Naval Air Station Lemoore, in central California. While some of the Dogs sped for Miramar, the rest of the squadron came home on Navy DC-9s when the ship made port in Alameda.
Those of us who flew into Miramar were in for a treat. We landed, taxied to the ramp, and parked our Phantoms side by side, arrayed before our families. Waving American flags, holding our kids on shoulders and cheering, they were a sight that stirred us all. We climbed out of our planes to meet a herd of kids. Many of them put on their dads’ big flight helmets and were lifted into the cockpits so that their fathers could patiently explain what the myriad instruments and switches did. As Dana and Chris found me, their mom trailing after them, my family was reunited again. Steak and baked potatoes were on the menu that night. Afterward, I made sure we finally took the swim that got derailed on the last night of the war six months earlier. It was a long one, with a lot of joyful splashing.
Every fighter pilot wants command of his own squadron. When I learned I was to become the skipper of the Pukin’ Dogs, I made sure to bone up on squadron lore. It began in 1953, at the end of the Korean War. The insignia of VF-143 was a winged griffin, a mythological predator with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. During a squadron f
unction, one of the pilots tried to craft a snarling griffin out of papier-mâché. It ended up looking like a dog with wings, hunched over in the throes of misery, coughing up something it had eaten. Seeing it, one of the wives exclaimed, “My God, it looks like a puking dog!” Ever after, VF-143 had its proud nickname. For all the challenges ahead, I relished the opportunity.
The change-of-command ceremony was a formal affair with full dress whites, VIP admirals, and well-rehearsed speeches. When I parked and got out of my car, I heard something tear. The rear seam of my pants had split open, exposing my white Navy briefs. I couldn’t believe it. There was no time to bolt for the base tailor shop. Gordo, whom I was relieving, was ready for our joint entrance, and all the guests and troops were waiting. When I walked to the platform, I hoped nobody would be checking my six.
When my turn came at the podium, I made a point of keeping my tail away from the crowd. As I began my speech, I heard a stir behind me. Though the crowd was none the wiser, the small group of VIPs had a clear view of my loose deuce. I heard a few quiet cheap shots in their muffled hilarity. I made my remarks in spite of my mortification. At that point the air wing commander took the mic and said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it sure is a bit breezy today!” I could only laugh. After a quick turn at the base tailor, I hustled to the reception at the O club.
With less than two months before deployment, the squadron went right to work. The leadership lessons I’d learned in the fleet and applied at Topgun were my basis for everything we did. Lesson one: Above everything, take care of your people. My men needed to feel valued. After the shared hardships out on Yankee Station, the grief over Harley’s loss, and the chaos unfolding in the streets back home, beyond the front gate, we closed ranks. With those outward pressures pushing in on us, we became one of the tightest bunches I’ve ever known.
Another lesson was to take good care of your aircraft. Among the first things I did at Miramar was make sure the squadron kept the aircraft it had flown on the Enterprise on its most recent deployment. Usually a returning squadron sent its planes through a maintenance cycle and took new aircraft from inventory. The crew chiefs, maintainers, and plane captains hated this. Out on the Big E, they had gotten to know their current aircraft like family. Each Phantom has little quirks that make it perform just a bit differently from the others of its type. Some have issues. Some are unusually reliable. Once our maintainers figured all this out, they knew how to dote on them and the squadron gained a performance edge. At the end of the cruise, our F-4s had the most beautiful paint jobs and were free of corrosion. I pulled strings that let us keep these same aircraft as we prepared to go to the Mediterranean.
We broke for a trip to Las Vegas at the end of August for an enormous reunion of American aviators of all services who had flown in Vietnam. We would unofficially welcome back the 166 men taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. Some three thousand of us and our wives gathered at the Hilton. There were many spontaneous mini-reunions that night as old friends saw each other for the first time in years. The happiness touched everyone. The war over, the years of hardship in the rearview mirror at last, our former POWs were ready to pick up their lives and careers. What an enormous challenge. Some came home knowing nothing of the Summer of Love, the Watts riots, the Kent State shootings, or the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Their last experience of America predated acid rock and Woodstock. Fitting into the here and now and getting to know their families again tested the former POWs all over again.
I was chatting with old friends and our wives that night when somebody wrapped his arms around my shoulders and said, “Hello, Yank.” I turned in my seat to see Ron Polfer. “Pompadour,” as he was called by the guys at VF-121, was shot down flying a Vigilante reconnaissance plane. Punching out at about seven hundred knots cost him his eardrums, a few broken bones, bruises to his whole body, and capture by the North Vietnamese. But he survived to return and become chairman and president of Zeiss International. Arvin Chauncey, an attack pilot and liberty buddy of mine, greeted me in the same warm fashion. I had not seen him since the day he was shot down too. Throughout the evening, Bob Hope and many other friends of the military entertained us and turned it into a night most of us will never forget. The song of the evening was “Born Free,” which few managed to sing without tears rolling down their cheeks.
Shortly after our Vegas interlude, the Pukin’ Dogs said farewell to Miramar one more time. Yet another goodbye with our families. Chris clung hard to me again. Every time he did that it became harder to leave. No matter how tough the man, no matter how much combat experience and passion for flying he has, the sight of your little boy brokenhearted by your departure never fails to hit home.
At least we weren’t being sent to Yankee Station.
We climbed into our Phantoms and flew east to Norfolk, and the rendezvous with our new home, the carrier USS America.
The Mediterranean, home of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, became a powder keg on October 6. That was the day our Israeli friends awoke to the greatest crisis of their lives: an imminent Arab invasion. The nation of Israel responded to that gathering storm with a massive preemptive strike.
When the Yom Kippur War started, I was at Norfolk with the Dogs. All I could do was hope my Israeli friends, Eitan Ben Eliyahu and Dan Halutz and the rest of them, were out there knocking MiGs down and laying waste to ground targets. I’m sure they felt the same as their American friends at Miramar headed to Vietnam in 1969. We all knew that the proxy nations we fought were but tentacles of a common enemy: the Soviet Union.
Our deployment to the Med was undertaken in this light. In January 1974, the America and its battle group sailed across the Atlantic to join the Sixth Fleet, then began a series of port-of-call stops from Barcelona to Athens. The pace was slow and easy. We flew, but not too much to wear us out. The ports we visited—it was indeed a vacation cruise. We explored the ruins of classical Italy; we saw Sicily and the Greek islands of Corfu and Rhodes. After the strains of Vietnam, this Med cruise turned out to be exactly what the Pukin’ Dogs needed.
We would make periodic sweeps through the eastern Med to show the flag, then return to Athens for some time ashore. The guys in the squadron pooled resources and rented a beach house in a resort town called Glyfada. That became our base of operations when ashore, and the pilots would crash in every nook and cranny of the place at night. We’d have to step over each other to get to the head in the middle of the night. Psychologically, the Mediterranean cruise prepared us for peace better than anything could have.
I ran the squadron as best I could with men like Skank Remsen and Gene Valencia as my inspirations. One of the things I did was get hold of a theater-grade popcorn machine. Our maintenance guys found a place for it in their area, and we charged ten cents a bag. The money we made went into a squadron fund to be used for the morale and welfare of the Dogs. Twice on the deployment, guys lost a family member back home. Both times, we secured emergency leaves for them, using the popcorn fund to buy their plane tickets. The popcorn fund also bought all the pilots and naval flight officers a white or blue turtleneck, a blue blazer, gray flat-front slacks, and cordovan loafers to wear during our nonuniform time ashore. (As we were in Europe now, not the Cubi officers’ club, I insisted that my men be sharply dressed.) We looked superb, and in a crowded club we could spot each other a mile away. It was a great way to boost our sense of pride.
Every great leader I knew made a point of taking care of his chief petty officers. This was important, as the chiefs oversee the nuts-and-bolts operations that keep the squadron functioning. The enlisted crew worked directly for the chiefs, not for the officers—a point that good officers never forget. I made a point of getting to know our chiefs, drinking coffee with them from time to time to hear the view from the hangar deck. Their input was vital to the morale and effectiveness of the squadron. At times, the chiefs invited me to eat with them in their mess. I was grateful for those opportunities—and took the opportunity
to return the favor when we were on deployment in the Mediterranean.
I had asked Vice Admiral Bob Baldwin at AirPac if the Navy would consider chartering a 747 for us. The idea was to fly out our wives and girlfriends to enjoy a mid-deployment break while we were in Greece. Such a gesture would help improve retention, I said. And Admiral Baldwin went to bat for us, recognizing the high cost of training someone to replace any of the high performers in my squadron in 1973. Halfway through our cruise, a United Airlines 747 landed in Athens with the squadron’s wives and fiancées. We spent ten days in Glyfada together. The family that celebrates together stays together. Of all the experiences I had in the Navy during my career, this interlude in Greece ranks as one of the best. There would be no airline pilots coming out of this deployment, thanks to Admiral Baldwin.
One day at the fleet landing at Athens, I watched our chief warrant gunner, Bob King, dive into the water. He swam all the way to Glyfada to wade ashore and surprise the gang at the beach house. He had been a SEAL in Vietnam. Though he was always tight-lipped about his time out there, he did once tell me how he had escaped a jam by crawling to a river at night and floating downstream as patrols of North Vietnamese troops searched for him. Along the way, a snake wrapped itself around him and began warming itself. He drew his Ka-Bar knife and cut the snake’s head off as he drifted along. He was a great man who was revered by every man in the Dogs, including me. Imagine having men of such capability and deep experience at your disposal every day.
Our chiefs were uniformly superb. My own plane’s crew chief, Tony Baker, set the example every day with his work ethic and attention to detail. My aircraft was always well prepared and ready to go, thanks to him. All that hard work, yet it turned out not one of our chiefs had ever flown in an F-4. At the end of our seven-month cruise to the Med, as we were preparing to return to Norfolk, I realized that because several of our naval flight officers lived on the East Coast and didn’t need to fly home, our squadron would have five or six empty seats. Why not let the senior chiefs fly back with the air wing? I put out the word, and the chiefs pounced on the chance to experience a catapult launch and a fast ride home.
