Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  Some targets were hit again and again not because Washington wanted to make the rubble bounce but because they proved remarkably resilient. The most memorable of these was the famous “Dragon’s Jaw,” the Thanh Hoa Bridge over the Red River.

  The first of many strikes on the Thanh Hoa Bridge was led by my friend Robbie Risner on April 3, 1965. Seventy-nine aircraft were involved, including forty-six F-105s, some armed with guided missiles and the others carrying bombs, that were assigned to strike the target. The missiles practically bounced off the bridge’s superstructure; in the words of one pilot, it was like firing “BB pellets at a Sherman tank.” Thirty-two missiles were fired at the bridge, and over a hundred 750-pound bombs were dropped that day. Some bombs hit the bridge and some didn’t, but no bomb or missile did more than char it and stop traffic for a few hours. Two planes were lost to anti-aircraft fire and the pilots captured. Risner’s F-105 was hit by flak and burning while he continued to direct the strike until it was completed. There were many future missions to knock down the Dragon’s Jaw before Rolling Thunder stopped in 1968. Thousands of tons of ordnance were dropped and fired at it. All failed. The bridge became an icon to the North Vietnamese, a memorial to their unyielding resistance. It became a symbol to a lot of Americans too, many of them pilots who got to know the damn thing too well, a symbol of a war that was becoming a lost cause. The bridge was finally destroyed in 1972. Americans were using laser-guided munitions then, and they brought it down in the first strike after bombing resumed in the North. The Vietnamese rebuilt it the next year.

  In the forty months between the first raid in 1965 and the last strike in 1968, Vietnam’s air defenses shot down 104 pilots in the vicinity of the Thanh Hoa Bridge. I was destined to become friends with and be inspired by quite a few of them: Jim Stockdale, Jerry Denton, Paul Galanti, Jerry Coffee, Howie Rutledge, and, of course, Colonel James Robinson Risner, who was shot down a few miles from the bridge in September 1965. He had been an ace in the Korean War, as well as an outstanding wing commander in Vietnam. A couple weeks after the first raid on the Dragon he was the subject of a Time magazine cover story. The head of the prison camp system greeted him personally when he arrived in Hanoi. “Ah, Colonel Risner,” said the man the American prisoners called “the Cat,” smiling at his newest inmate, “we’ve been waiting for you.”

  The first dogfight of the Vietnam War occurred in the second massive air raid on the Thanh Hoa Bridge, the day after the first strike. Four MiG-17s dropped from the clouds and dove on a formation of F-105s. They shot down two before breaking off the attack and returned to a base that was excluded from Washington’s approved target list. Two air force pilots, Captain James Magnusson and Major Frank Bennett, were killed.

  On July 24, 1965, four F-4C Phantom fighter escorts were targeted by two SA-2s, the first surface-to-air missiles launched by the North Vietnamese or, more likely, by Russians acting on their behalf. All four Phantoms were damaged, and one was destroyed. Its pilot, forty-one-year-old Captain Richard “Pop” Keirn, ejected safely and was taken prisoner. His backseater, Captain Roscoe Fobair, who was on his last mission and scheduled to go home the next day, was killed. It would be Keirn’s second time as a prisoner of war. He had been shot down over Germany in World War II.

  A lively debate within the administration concluded with President Johnson ordering retaliatory strikes on the two offending SAM sites. Three days later more than a hundred aircraft—air force, navy, and marine—took wing to execute the president’s order, and flew into a trap. One target turned out to be a dummy site, and the other was unoccupied when the bombers arrived. Anti-artillery guns were waiting instead. They shot down four F-105s and so badly damaged another that it crashed while trying to land and destroyed the plane escorting it in the process. Three pilots were killed, two captured, and one rescued.

  Now that the missile batteries Americans had known about for months were operational, something had to be done to address the threat they posed. That something was Project Weasel, “Wild Weasel,” as it quickly came to be known. Wild Weasels were dedicated SAM killers assigned to every Rolling Thunder mission. The first Weasel aircraft were F-100F Super Sabres, two-seat fighters specially equipped to track SAMs. Their pilots were among the air force’s elite, and most of the backseaters, the electronic weapons officers (EWOs), had been weapons specialists on B-52 crews. Their training began in October 1965 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida’s panhandle. The first Weasels were all volunteers, which seemed only fair given the nearly suicidal nature of their earliest missions.

  In the first missions, code-named “Iron Hand,” Weasels would fly ahead of the strike force. Weasels were always “first in, first out,” staying on station until the last bomber had delivered its payload and was headed home, which could mean fifteen minutes or longer in the high-threat areas. That’s a long, long time when somebody’s shooting at you, and somebody was always shooting at Weasels.

  They were hunter-killers. Weasels would bait the enemy into firing missiles at them. Camouflaged SAM sites were hard to spot through the thick jungle canopy that covered much of North Vietnam. To find them you had to get their crews to turn on their acquisition radar. To get them to do that you had to give them a target to acquire. So the Weasels, paired with F-105D bombers, would fly ahead of the strike force, get themselves noticed, or “painted,” by SAM radar and usually shot at by SAM crews, shoot back, and call in the F-105Ds for the kill. One of the first Weasel EWOs, Air Force Captain Jack Donovan, gave them their motto when, after he arrived at Eglin and heard the tactics for killing SAMs, he exclaimed, “You’ve gotta be shitting me!”

  The first five Weasel crews arrived at the Royal Thai Air Force Base at Korat, Thailand, in November 1965, after five weeks of rushed training. They flew their first mission the next month, paired with supersonic F-105D fighter-bombers. The Sabres were supposed to find the SAMs and then strafe the sites with their 20 mm cannon while the F-105Ds bombed it. The first confirmed SAM kill was credited to captains Al Lamb and Jack Donovan on December 22. By the summer of 1966 the Weasels could claim nine SAM sites destroyed. Despite its successes, Weasel I ended that summer; its casualty rate of 50 percent was unsustainable. For all their fine qualities and the valor and skill of their crews, Sabres weren’t the right aircraft for the job; they weren’t fast enough and couldn’t keep up with the F-105s. Weasel II was launched with F-4s as the SAM hunters, but they weren’t right for the job either. So in the summer of 1966 training for Weasel III commenced, with F-105s, a two-seat version of the fighter-bombers, claiming the honor.

  The F-105 Thunderchief was already the air force’s workhorse in Vietnam, flying three-quarters of Rolling Thunder sorties and suffering the highest casualties. By the end of the war 334 Thunderchiefs, over 40 percent of the air force’s F-105 inventory, had been lost. The pilots who flew them loved them and called them the Thud. There are various explanations for the nickname: that it was named for the sound it made when it landed or when it crashed in a jungle, and that “Thud” was just a funny diminutive of “Thunderchief.” The etymology of warplane nicknames is an inexact science. We do know Thuds were very fast, could take a beating, and packed a big punch. Originally designed to deliver a single nuclear bomb from a fuselage bomb bay at low altitudes and high speed, it could carry a lot of ordnance: six-thousand-pound bombs under its wings. It was a lot faster than the Sabre, even faster than the F-4s that flew fighter cover for them, and more agile, but not that agile. A big plane with little wings, it sacrificed maneuverability for firepower. But Thuds weren’t made for aerial combat. They were built for speed and punch, and only the top pilots got to fly them.

  Thuds were in a few dogfights in Vietnam, some by choice and others by necessity. But the F-4 was the designated MiG killer, responsible for destroying 107 of the 137 MiG-17s and MiG-21s shot down in the war. Some Thud pilots went looking for MiGs after they unloaded their bombs, but that wasn’t advisable. F-105s had the speed advantage over MiGs, although less of
one with the MiG-21. MiGs were a hell of a lot more maneuverable, and they tended not to be found when they didn’t want to be. They liked to hit and run. I didn’t see many MiGs until my last few missions in Vietnam. When I did see some, the F-4s kept them from bothering us. They were sleek, hard to spot, and quick. They darted in and usually got right back out after one pass. Thud pilots did manage to shoot down twenty-seven MiGs during the war, and they got all but three of them with the Gatling. But MiGs shot down nearly an equivalent number of Thuds. The Phantoms were better suited for the work, and the MiG pilots knew it. When they were out hunting, they were hunting Thuds.

  ROLLING THUNDER’S PLANNERS HAD divided North Vietnam into six mission sectors, called route packages or PAKs. Three were assigned to the navy carriers at Yankee Station. The three northern and western PAKs belonged to the air force, one of which it shared with the marines at Da Nang. The navy’s routes brought pilots in over the Gulf; their targets, especially in the early months of Rolling Thunder, were usually in coastal areas. The air force pilots flew out of the Thai bases. PAK VI was the most dangerous route they flew; it was the most northern and closest to Hanoi, and it boasted the most formidable air defenses. There were two ways in: one took them out over the Tonkin Gulf, where they would come around and attack from the east; the other, more popular route had them come in from the west, flying over the center of a mountain ridge north of the Red River. Stray to the south or north of “Thud Ridge,” and there was hell to pay from anti-aircraft and SAM batteries. But until later in the war, when the Vietnamese managed to haul some AAA up the mountains, staying over the middle of the ridge was the safest way in, even though it got its nickname for the Thuds that were lost over it.

  A strike package could consist of anywhere from thirty to over seventy aircraft, including fighter-bombers, fighter escorts, electronic jamming aircraft, Weasels, command-and-control aircraft, and search-and-rescue planes. Each Thud formation, including Weasels, had a dedicated KC-135 fuel tanker that flew a pattern over Laos roughly halfway to the target, where the Thuds would take on fuel before entering North Vietnamese airspace and again on their way home from the mission. Once over the target, the bombers would descend to between three thousand and one thousand feet and drop their payload. As soon as they did, they were free to head home.

  Modified for Weasel missions, F-105Fs and, in 1967, the updated F-105Gs were loaded with the new radar honing and launch-detection electronics, carried Shrike missiles under their wings that honed in on SAM radar, and, like all Thuds, had a 20 mm Gatling gun in the nose. The Shrike had a range of seven miles. The North Vietnamese SA-2 surface-to-air missiles had a seventeen-mile range. That was part of the thrill for the Weasels. The enemy almost always got to shoot first.

  Training for the new Wild Weasels was moved from Eglin to Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. They deployed in May 1966, this time to the air base at Takhli, Thailand, and went into action almost immediately. By the end of August five of the first eleven F-105F Weasels in country had been shot down. That year 126 Thuds were lost, although obviously not all of them were Weasels.

  A FULL COMBAT TOUR for a pilot in the Vietnam War was one hundred missions. Thud pilots at Takhli and Korat usually flew sixteen missions a month, so it took them a little more than six months to complete a tour, which they had roughly a 60 percent chance of doing. A Defense Department study claimed Rolling Thunder lost one plane for every forty sorties. The Thud pilots had a saying: “By your sixty-sixth mission, you’ll have been shot down twice and picked up once.” If you were a Weasel, your chances of returning from one hundred missions were poorer.

  Not everyone has the temperament to live with those kinds of odds. Every group of Weasels would have one or two who couldn’t hack it after the first or second mission. Those who could handle it found a way to put the future and everything in it out of their mind—their family, their ambitions, everything. It’s not that you didn’t think about your loved ones or life back in the States, but you had to try to not put yourself in the picture. Otherwise you started wondering whether you would be in the picture again, ever.

  People have different ways of coping under that kind of strain. Some guys rely on dark humor, others on false bravado. Most Thud pilots were heavy smokers in those days and joked that the optimistic among them were the ones who thought they would die of lung cancer. Quite a few found relief in rowdy off-duty habits. Whatever gets you through the night, as the song goes. But however differentiated their psychological defense mechanisms might be, combat pilots tended to imitate the same style. The air force pilots at Korat and Takhli wore Australian bush hats, grew their mustaches, and were somewhat unruly in their recreation.

  That doesn’t quite describe my friend Leo Thorsness, a man of gracious manners and steady temperament. He is from the upper Midwest and possesses the friendliness and equanimity common to people of that region. He certainly wore the hat and the mustache, and when I first got to know him, I could see he was tough. I can’t picture him being too wild, though. He would not have found that to be a necessary quality for the job. He had what he needed: the skills, guts, and mental toughness to do a hard job in extreme circumstances. And he was faithful to his country, to the men he served with, to the call of duty—Leo had fidelity in spades.

  He was born in 1932, the youngest of Emil and Bernice Thorsness’s three children, and raised on a farm outside Walnut Grove, Minnesota. His family had always worked the land. It was the Great Depression, and the Thorsnesses scraped out a modest living from the soil. They grew their own food and made good use of everything they possessed. They were raised to work hard. His father hired himself out as a farmhand to earn extra income. When they were old enough, Leo and his brother John baled alfalfa for neighboring farmers. They were poor, though Leo said he didn’t realize it until he was older. “We defeated the Depression one day at a time,” he remembered. They had everything they needed, never went hungry, and never lost their land. “We were a typical family.”

  A popular, good-looking kid, he played sports, did well in school, and liked to hunt and fish. He was an Eagle Scout. He had ambitions: he wanted to go to college, though he hadn’t quite figured out how he would earn the money to pay for it. His brother had enlisted in the army and was serving in Korea in that first, awful year of the war, when Leo enrolled at South Dakota State, just across the border from Minnesota. His first day there, while waiting in line to register, he spotted Gaylee Anderson, another freshman and “the cutest girl there.” He got behind her in line and started a conversation with her that has never finished.

  By the end of 1950, with the example of his brother in mind and a plan to return to school four years later on the GI Bill, Leo quit South Dakota State and enlisted in the air force. He was nineteen. Two years later the air force, in need of pilots for the war, initiated the Aviation Cadet Program. Leo applied, and in January 1953 attended officer training school at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, then learned to fly at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. While he was at Goodfellow, he got some advice from a veteran aviator that he never forgot. “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots,” the older man told him, “but no old, bold pilots.”

  During his Christmas leave in 1953, he and Gaylee were married. Their daughter, Dawn, was born the following year, after Leo had received his second lieutenant’s commission and pilot’s wings.

  He was trained to fly the big B-36 strategic bombers but ended up flying F-84s and the F-100 fighter-bombers before transitioning to the F-105. He was stationed at the big American air base in Spangdahlem, Germany, from 1959 to 1963. While there Leo took night classes to complete his college degree in between “seventy-two-hour tours sitting at the end of the runway with a nuclear bomb in an F-105 bomb bay.” By the time he was rotated back to the States he was only six months shy of a degree; the air force let him finish at the University of Omaha, then assigned him to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where F-105 drivers trained. He liv
ed in Los Angeles and pursued a master’s degree at the University of Southern California, while commuting to Vegas once a month to fly enough hours to stay qualified as an F-105 pilot.

  He did more than stay qualified; he earned top marks in flying hours and gunnery and bombing scores. After earning his master’s degree in defense systems management he moved his family to Vegas. He knew he would have to go to Southeast Asia soon. Rolling Thunder was well into its second year, and the air force had lost a lot of men and aircraft. It was his turn, and he was ready for it—as ready as you can be. He assumed he would fly Thuds in the big strike force packages. It was dangerous work. He knew that; he knew the casualty rates. He’d heard reports of the North’s lethal air defenses. What he didn’t want to do was become a Wild Weasel. That would just tempt fate too much. There are no “old, bold pilots,” he remembered. He was more than willing to do his duty, with all its attendant risks, but he wanted to have a decent chance to get home to his family. The “first in, last out” live-bait missions of the Wild Weasels looked a little too much like suicide runs. But even if they were—especially if they were—you needed the best pilots to fly them because only the best stood a decent chance of surviving them. Unfortunately for Leo, he was one of the best pilots.