by Dan Pedersen
By rights, I should have been leading the air wing, but Hoagy Carmichael was not about to give up his command when we were going back into combat. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same thing. I would ride this out beside our task force commander, Rear Admiral Bob Coogan.
Around WestPac, a rescue force was cobbled together under Seventh Air Force command. The plan called for Air Force helos to stage the Marines out of an air base in Thailand. En route on the night of the thirteenth, one of the birds crashed, killing twenty-three men. That put the operation on hold, at least until the Coral Sea reached the area.
The next morning, Air Force F-111s and A-7 Corsairs discovered the captive American crew aboard a fishing boat. The Khmer Rouge planned to take them to the mainland, making rescuing them far more difficult. The planes bombed and strafed in front of the vessel and shot up several patrol boats, sinking one, but that failed to dissuade the Khmer Rouge. The fishing boat continued on its way, and the planes overhead eventually lost sight of it. There were conflicting reports as to exactly where the crew was taken. Some thought they’d been taken back to Koh Tang. Other sources thought they were on the mainland.
On the afternoon of the fourteenth, President Gerald Ford ordered the Seventh Air Force to execute a helicopter assault on Koh Tang island and the Mayaguez. The forces landing on the island were to find the crew, if they were there, while another team helicoptered onto the Mayaguez and steamed it out to international waters.
Just before the rescue force went in, Admiral Coogan received a direct call from President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. I was with him in the Coral Sea’s flag quarters and listened with great interest. President Ford ordered the carrier to strike targets on the Cambodian mainland, including port facilities and a nearby naval base.
“Admiral,” the president said, “go get our ship and crew back. It’s your show. Use all available means, but no nukes.”
I wondered how many times our commanders on Yankee Station had heard such a command. Not even Nixon had ever expressed such a clear and explicit willingness to let us fight.
The rescue mission began at dawn on May 15. As the strike aircraft catapulted away and Marines in Air Force helicopters sped toward Koh Tang, I led a dozen F-4s on a fighter sweep over the mainland. Approaching Phnom Penh, we increased speed and dove down to the deck. Two dozen J79s shook the streets as we rocketed along at five hundred knots at just five hundred feet. We were there in case some MiGs wanted to make trouble. None showed up. Meanwhile, the size and suddenness of the air strike let them know America was serious.
Darrell Gary, who was scheduled to fly later in the day, climbed up the ladder to the Coral Sea’s flight deck. Because the initial strike quickly obliterated the targets so completely, Darrell’s flight was scrubbed. We meant business—and showed it.
Unfortunately, these were the days before a unified Special Operations Command and quick-reaction forces. The hastily thrown-together rescue group from multiple services operated with inaccurate intelligence and a complete misread of the situation on the island. The CIA believed Koh Tang was lightly defended, if at all. In fact, more than a hundred Khmer Rouge troops held the island to deter their Communist brothers from North Vietnam, who had laid claim to these patches of turf off the Indochinese coast.
Our Marines rolled into hot landing zones laced with machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire. From the ship, Darrell watched as several CH-53 heavy transport helicopters took hits. One crashed offshore after receiving two RPG hits. The survivors were in the water for hours until a gig from one of our escorts pulled them to safety. Included in those survivors was the Marine forward air controller, who somehow found an Air Force survival radio that he used to call targets for the A-7 Corsairs overhead. Clinging to wreckage, the radio’s batteries slowly failing, he gave everything he had to try and secure help for the embattled Marines pinned down in the landing zone.
Three CH-53 Jolly Green Giants went down during the rescue operation. Fifteen Marines were killed on Koh Tang and fifty more wounded during the fighting that raged throughout the day.
Meanwhile, our attack aircraft saturated the Mayaguez with tear gas. An American warship raced into the anchorage with a company of Marines aboard. An hour after the assault on the island began, the Marines, clad in gas masks, swarmed aboard the cargo ship and found it abandoned. We had our ship back. Where was the crew?
The Khmer released them, sending them back out to sea, where a Navy patrol plane spotted them. Another American warship steamed to the vessel and pulled the crew aboard just before the lunch hour.
The final act played out through the afternoon as the Air Force tried to extract the Marines from the landing zones. Heavy fire repeatedly drove them off, and one battle-damaged Jolly Green force-landed on the Coral Sea’s deck. Our maintainers swiftly patched it up. A few hours later, it went back into action.
The fighting raged, and our frustration level grew. The birds kept taking hits, and the Marines were reporting heavy casualties. By dinner, the Air Force brought in an AC-130 gunship and five C-130s carrying fifteen-thousand-pound bombs known as BLU-82s, nicknamed Daisy Cutters. They were the biggest, most destructive conventional weapons in the American arsenal.
The first one detonated as Darrell and others watched from our deck. Darrell saw the enormous explosion followed by the shock wave the blast unleashed. It obscured the island and swept right across the Coral Sea, causing the huge carrier to shudder from its impact.
As darkness fell, another Jolly Green staggered out of the moonless night. The massive helicopter carried a crew of five and managed to pull aboard thirty-four Marines before suffering engine trouble. The crew set down on the carrier’s deck, and when its ramp dropped, almost three dozen wounded Marines tumbled out onto the flight deck.
Our ship’s corpsmen raced to help them, triaging the wounded and lining them up on one of our elevators. The air wing’s senior master chief went from man to man, offering water and words of support, giving them anything they needed. Even those who weren’t wounded suffered from dehydration after twelve hours of combat in the tropical heat. The wounded on the elevator were lowered to the hangar deck, then carried by corpsmen and volunteers to our medical facilities, where surgeons operated through the night. They saved every one of those wounded Marines.
That night, a young second lieutenant was given a bunk in Darrell’s stateroom. He was shocked and exhausted, with a What in the hell just happened? expression on his face. Forty-eight hours before, he was living an easy life on Okinawa. He woke up, ended up in a hot LZ, and watched some of his men die.
During the last part of the evacuation, that officer saw a C-130 make a run right in front of his position, dropping a BLU-82. A parachute opened above the bomb, and it swung down to land practically on his Marine platoon. It didn’t go off. The mother of all bombs turned out to be a dud. Thank God.
In less than three weeks, the Coral Sea and her air wing had witnessed the final evacuation of South Vietnam, then taken part in what is now called the last battle of the Vietnam War. The fifteen Marines killed on Koh Tang island became the final men whose names were etched into the wall in Washington a decade later. Three more Marines, declared missing in action on the island, were captured by the Khmer Rouge and later beaten to death.
Though the cost was high, we got our ship and crew back. There was no repeat of the Pueblo incident. The Communist Khmer Rouge did not have time to inspect or offload the cargo, which meant whatever secrets lay inside the containers from our embassy remained safe. The U.S. government has never divulged their contents.
Aboard the Coral Sea, we were heartened by President Ford’s willingness to let us off the leash. My new air wing performed brilliantly, destroying all of its assigned targets. It would take time and years to figure out how best to handle crisis situations as this one. The aborted attempt to rescue our hostages in Iran in 1980 would be another case study in how not to conduct such operations. They became the ca
talyst for changes that gave our military the flexibility to handle any such task the world might throw our way. For now, President Ford had shown our adversaries some of the strength and resolve that might have helped us during the LBJ years.
After we took our wounded Marines to Subic Bay, we steamed south for Perth and a ten-day port call. The Aussies welcomed us with a great hospitality. We were treated like family everywhere we went. The crew drank and laughed with our friends from down under and put the scars of the war in their rearview mirrors. By the end of it I was so exhausted from all the free drinks and parties that I crawled into my bunk and slept the sleep of a free man. The world was at peace for the first time in ten years.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TOPGUN AND THE TOMCAT
While I was out with my air wing aboard the Coral Sea, the Navy began its first major evolution into the post-Vietnam era. The renaissance centered on a new and potent fighter aircraft whose design Topgun helped influence, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.
Our work at Topgun in 1969 and 1970 continued to spark a rethinking of naval aviation and its role. Thanks to the efforts of so many dedicated commanders and junior officers, Topgun would not only survive the transition to peacetime, but would undergo a new golden age that helped shape how we would fight for the next twenty years.
In combat aviation, no aircraft is forever. Our beloved Phantom served a long and useful service life. But the future was within view even on the day that I accepted the assignment to lead Topgun in 1969. My old friend from Miramar, Sam Leeds, took command of Fighter Squadron One, the first unit that was assigned the new F-14, in October 1972, based on USS Enterprise. Later that year, VF-124, the Crusader fleet replacement squadron whose sword we stole and hauled around at Mach 2, stopped training pilots to fly the obsolescent F-8 and began training the first Tomcat pilots.
The last of the carrier-deploying Phantom squadrons made the transition to the Tomcat in 1987—a fifteen-year overlap during which both F-4s and F-14s served well and capably at the same time.
One of my few regrets is that I never had the pleasure of being part of the Tomcat tribe. When I had the chance, I would log some time just sitting in that Grumman-built bird, daydreaming about the things I could have done with someone like J. C. Smith or Hawkeye Laing in my rear seat.
Of course, the F-14 Tomcat almost never made it into the world, thanks to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who loved to think he knew people’s business better than they did. In 1968, he tried to force the Navy to adopt the hulking F-111 fighter-bomber for use on aircraft carriers.
Imagine SecDef’s chagrin when a mere three-star admiral, the head of naval aviation at the Pentagon, decided to stand in his way. That truth-telling sailor, Tom Connolly, testified to Congress, “There isn’t enough thrust in Christendom to make that airplane into a fighter.” And he won. The Navy avoided being saddled with the “Flying Edsel,” so named by its unhappy Air Force pilots because its chief advocate, Secretary McNamara, had been president of Ford Motor Company. McNamara took his revenge, denying Vice Admiral Connolly a deserved promotion to a fourth star. But the last word belonged to the Navy. It paid tribute to a great man by naming its new world-beating fighter aircraft after him. The legendary Tomcat was born. Though it fell right in line with other Grumman felines in history—Wildcat, Hellcat, Bearcat, Tigercat—the name was the artful final act in a Pentagon dogfight.
Where the F4D Skyray was like a Porsche and a Phantom like a muscle car, the F-14 Tomcat was a supercharged Cadillac: big, comfortable, the plushest ride in fighter aviation. It had a roomy cockpit, and the instrumentation, controls, and switches were well laid out, placing its systems easily to hand. A long bubble canopy offered visibility for the pilot and RIO vastly better than the F-4’s. Grumman even thought to install a “hassle handle” on the rear instrument panel. During combat, the rear-seater could grab hold of it, gaining leverage to twist in his seat and check for a threat astern, between the Tomcat’s twin tails.
The Tomcat, like the Phantom, was a twin-engine interceptor, designed mainly for fleet defense. But unlike the Phantom, the Tomcat was saved by Grumman’s attention to its heritage: Their designers found a way to mount it with a powerful 20mm Gatling cannon. Topgun had a hand in that particular development. When the Navy’s project officer from the Pentagon showed up at Nellis to pitch the F-14’s coming glory as a missile shooter, future Topgun CO Mugs McKeown and I were on hand to ask, “Where’s the gun?” I admit, we knocked around that projects officer pretty well that day. Ultimately the Tomcat was built with that Gatling gun tucked in the fuselage below the cockpit. The hollow moan of the six-barrel Vulcan rotary cannon can never be forgotten by those who’ve felt and heard it. Six thousand rounds per minute has a useful effect on an enemy pilot’s psychology, too. Vice Admiral Tom Connolly was the one who took our input at the Pentagon and made a gun-armed Tomcat a reality.
The gun was great to have, but the advanced AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missile could really reach out and touch someone. Tracking up to six targets simultaneously with her Hughes AWG-9 multimode pulse-Doppler radar, one F-14 could destroy them out beyond one hundred miles with the Phoenix. At nearly half a million dollars apiece, the Phoenix blew through budgets nearly as fast as it chased down targets at Mach 5. Considerations of weight would leave the typical Tomcat weapons load-out short of the six it was designed to carry. The more typical load-out was four Phoenix carried on mounts on the aircraft’s belly, and two Sparrows and two Sidewinders hanging from the wings. The final Tomcat variation, the F-14D, was known as the Bombcat. The versatile machine could carry the GPS-guided precision bomb known as a Joint Direct Attack Munition, as well as Paveway laser-guided bombs, a centerline reconnaissance system, or an infrared targeting pod. With that Gatling gun added in, Navy air wings were equipped to deliver a heck of a lot of firepower.
The Tomcat had a variable-geometry wing. It could retract, sweeping back almost flush with the fuselage, twenty degrees off the tail, or extend to nearly full stretch at sixty-eight degrees for takeoff and slow flight, adjusting automatically to maximize performance at any airspeed. With the wings swept back, she resembled a lethal bird of prey, but was still surprisingly maneuverable (the fuselage itself was shaped to produce aerodynamic lift). Once her Pratt & Whitney engines were replaced by the more reliable General Electric F110 and updated avionics, the thirty-eight-million-dollar fighter had power to spare.
When the movie came out in 1986, the Tomcat became a star. It would stand as the symbol of Topgun and naval aviation generally for decades. It would rival the Phantom as a favorite among fighter pilots and aviation enthusiasts alike. Plenty of squadrons continued operating the F-4 as the Tomcat made its way to the fleet. But the future was closing with us fast as I wound down my tour as air wing commander in the Coral Sea. At Miramar, Topgun continued its original mission of preparing to handle the threat of what lay ahead.
In 1975, the year Tomcats began deploying in larger numbers, Topgun went through a major evolution in the way it taught air combat maneuvering. This was made possible by new technology. The Cubic Corporation, based in San Diego, working with Navy engineers, devised a special telemetry pod that could be mounted on an aircraft’s Sidewinder missile pylon. Dave Frost flew some of the first tests around 1972, exploring ways to capture a full, reviewable record of a dogfight within defined airspace over our combat training ranges. The so-called air combat maneuvering range (ACMR) would revolutionize how our fighter pilots were educated. It enabled us to push beyond a problem that hampered us in Topgun’s early days. The problem looked like this.
The scene: Hangar One at Miramar. A student aircrew is slumped in their seats, exhausted after four or five dogfights in the mission just completed. Their faces are lined with the impressions of their oxygen masks cinched tight to stay in place under heavy G. Their flight suits are stained with sweat from the physical exertion of high-speed maneuvering. Before them stands their instructor, tall at the podium, resplendent in his tail
ored blue Topgun flight suit, his debrief polished by the murder boards, carefully consulting his notes of each student’s moves. Topgun had long since embraced the good news/bad news approach to enlightenment. Sometimes, especially early in a class, it was difficult to find good news. But delivering and dissecting bad news was how people learned after taking a licking.
The instructor would say, “Cruiser, by offsetting on the third engagement you made a good initial turn after the Merge, and I had to go vertical to avoid an overshoot. At that point you seemed to lose sight of me—is that right? Rowdy, did you see me from the backseat?”
The instructor would turn to the chalkboard and diagram the fight as his notes from his knee board and memory permitted. But these data sources were fallible, especially when the mind that produced them was under strain of G forces, short on blood as all the aircraft changed speeds and altitudes. Multiply that complexity by the four or five engagements that typically took place in one flight, and the human senses can short-circuit trying to apprehend it all. A cassette tape recording of the radio calls could help, but only so much. The instructor had to do what he could to determine who did what to whom and derive the appropriate lessons. We used to say, “First man to the chalkboard wins the fight.”
Captain Ault and his people anticipated this problem well in advance. His famous 1969 report had described the need for an electronic monitoring system to sort out the precise choreography of every ACM flight. Merle Gorder, the author of the report’s recommendations, advised the major fighter commands on each coast to establish an ACMR, noting that cost estimates and plans were already available thanks to a report jointly filed in November 1968 by the Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University.
Less than a decade later, the potential of that system was realized at Topgun’s range in Arizona, east of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma. Telemetry made it possible for the new system to record the myriad data of an air-to-air engagement in a given block of airspace, including the altitudes, speeds, headings, G forces, weapon status, everything. It gave our instructors a choice between a “God’s-eye view” and switchable individual perspectives from any cockpit in the fight. Now that an unblinking electronic eye could show whether a pilot had fired his missile within its performance envelope, gone were the days of “I gotcha” versus “You did not.” The ground stations would relay the hard data to a central station on the range and then via microwave data link to Miramar. With every squeeze of a trigger, the system would run numbers and function as an umpire, calling kill or no kill. It made possible a renaissance in fighter combat training.
