“ ‘OK,’ he said. While he was circling, I told him ‘You are now at my nine o’clock position, eight o’clock position, and so on.’ ‘OK,’ he finally replied, ‘I think I know where you are.’ About that time, I heard the whomp, whomp, whomp of an incoming helicopter. I called him and told him, ‘You are about a ridge over from me.’ He came right overhead, but he couldn’t see me. I told him, ‘I am right below you.’ I popped a flare, and he spotted me. He moved the helicopter slightly forward, then the penetrator came down until it was level with me. As it swung toward me, I thought it was going to hit me. I put up my arms to ward it off. Instead, it dropped right between my legs—really close. I grabbed the top of the penetrator, released the pedals, stepped onto them, and hooked myself in. The chopper then backed off the mountainside, and I swung out over the valley, hundreds of feet up in the air. I started to get dizzy, so I kept my eyes focused on the ground. They pulled me up and in and gave me a shot of Old Methuselah. I had a second shot, maybe more.
“The rescue chopper took me to a helicopter base, and I transferred to another chopper, which then ferried me to Udorn, where the flight surgeon checked me over. I drank about half a bottle of Old Methuselah while the flight surgeon poked at me. He asked me, ‘How do you feel, Ralph?’ I said, ‘I feel OK—now.’ He said, ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’ ‘I hurt all over,’ I told him, ‘but nowhere in particular.’ I got back to Korat on a C-47 transport at two o’clock that morning. That day, we lost two F-105s and two were damaged. The other pilot also got picked up, and the two damaged aircraft recovered at Korat.
“I guess the worst mission I flew would be July 7, 1967, against Kep Airfield, only a week after my shootdown. Usually out of twenty airplanes we put into Route Pack 6, two would be Weasels and two would be flak suppression. We flew the flak suppressors in a flight of two, and each airplane pretty much operated independently. We were armed with four CBUs that we could drop individually or in twos. The idea was that when you saw some batteries firing, you dropped the CBUs over the batteries and had the gunners dive into their little foxholes, and the CBUs went off as they came back out. We had a formula for the attacking formation. The goal was to get all sixteen airplanes on and off the target in twenty seconds. The goal of twenty seconds was established as the time it took a gunner to pick out an airplane; track the airplane through the dive, bomb release, and pullout; and then crank the gun back up to vertical and try to select another target. We wanted him not to have a target when he got the gun back to vertical.
“Kep Airfield was on the northeast highway from Hanoi to China. Mine was one of the flak-suppression airplanes. We split up and took on the flak on the field. There were two batteries firing: one 85mm, which consisted of six guns, and one 57mm battery. I dropped two CBUs on the 57mm battery and two CBUs on the 85mm battery. Apparently, they got ticked off at me and decided I was going to be their target for the day. I went checking out to the south, jinking right and left, and they did their damndest to shoot me down. I flew along and thought, ‘I go to the right. No, I go to the left.’ Actually, I had to go left to get out of the area and into the protection of the mountains. I turned back to the left, they’ll think I’d turn right, so I turned a little more left. I tried to outguess those batteries, and they were trying to outguess me. And they were winning. Boy, they were really getting close with their big rectangular barrages. Those 85s must have been firing one barrage every two seconds. The barrages would overlap, and before one rectangle ran out, they would have another rectangle up there. And they were tracking me with those barrages, back and forth across the sky, until I didn’t know which way to turn. You can jink up and fly over a barrage, but you can’t fly through the rectangle, because of the fragments in there. They’ll tear your airplane apart. You have to kind of dive and roll, the thing I used to do with clouds.
“I finally pulled to the left—all the time in afterburner, the 85s still tracking me—and I headed for the other side of Thud Ridge. Then I jinked from one side of the ridge over to the other, back and forth, not to give any gunners a chance to line up on me. When I finally leveled out at altitude, getting ready to join my tanker, I was drenched in sweat. I happened to look at my right hand. There is an area where the glove ends and the sleeve of my flight suit had pulled up. The hairs on my arm were standing straight up. I brushed them down like you brush down the hairs on a dog to get them to lie down. I touched the back of my neck, just below the helmet, and my hairs were standing straight up. That was my worst mission.
“The allowable loss rate over North Vietnam was 6 percent. I think we were losing 18 percent over Route Pack 6—on average, two airplanes a mission. And sometimes we lost up to four from one squadron. With the other squadrons together, we sometimes lost eight to ten airplanes a day. At least we would have some of them severely damaged—they wouldn’t all crash. The way the air force controlled the 6 percent was by fragging targets in the lower route packs, where we seldom lost an aircraft. So the overall loss rate was only 6 percent. But a 6 percent loss rate on a one hundred–mission basis gave you a little less than a 50 percent chance of getting shot down. Of the pilots shot down, almost one-third were picked up by helicopters, one-third became POWs, and one-third got killed. That’s an Air Force statistic, not my statistic. One-sixth of the F-105 pilots got killed, and one-sixth became POWs. And I was fortunate enough to be in the sixth that got rescued. Let me tell you a little story. When I was having lunch with my family over at Spangdahlem one summer day, out of the blue my son, Ralph, who was about five at that time, said, ‘Daddy, don’t go to Vietnam.’ “I was shocked, because I was going to Vietnam. I said, ‘Ralph, why would you say that?’ And he said, ‘Daddy, you’ll get killed.’” Ralph Senior’s voice trembled as he told this story. “That comment haunted me and stayed with me throughout my tour in Vietnam. And when those guys were shooting the hell out of me, I’d hear his little voice. That did more than anything else to keep me alert, to keep me working, to keep me trying to second-guess those North Vietnamese gunners. When my airplane was on fire, I recall saying to the Lord, ‘I know I’ll get killed when you are ready, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take me now. I have a little boy, and he needs a father, and I’d like to be around when he grows up.’ And he granted my wish. Any fighter pilot who doesn’t believe in God—I don’t know.
“The spread ECM pod formation we developed worked well for us. The North Vietnamese tried to run MiG-21s up on us, and initially, they were getting our altitude. So we’d see the MiG-21s taking a look at us, and we’d change altitude, maybe 1,500 to a couple thousand feet. And we think that helped to throw the gunners off a little bit. But then the MiG-21s got a little more assertive and started making a 180 and coming in behind us. The first time they did this—I wasn’t on the flight—half of the guys dropped their bombs to flee from the two MiGs. When they asked me what to do about it, we three squadron weapons officers got together and discussed the MiG tactic. We decided if we had to drop our bombs, we’d have only one flight do it to chase the MiGs. We designated a MiG flight.
“We got to the point where we could predict on which side the MiGs would show up. We designated the flight that was on the opposite side from the MiGs to be the MiG flight. If the formation was flying toward the west, and if the MiGs were flying south of us, then the flight on the north side was the MiG flight. This went on for a few days, and the MiG flight would pickle its bombs and start turning toward the MiGs, and then the MiGs would turn away. All the MiGs were trying to do was to get us to get rid of our bombs. We decided to roll the airplane up sideways and not pickle our bombs. If they turned away, we would roll back into formation and continue on. That worked, because as soon as the MiGs saw the planform and knew the airplanes were sideways, they turned away from us. Once they’d turn away, they could never complete the turn and catch up with us again. That worked and got to the point where we didn’t lose a bomb except over the target.
“Turnover of experienced pilots because of the one hundred–mission tour
was a constant problem. Replacements took six to eight missions, sometimes more, to get a feel for things. After that, they seemed to be OK. I had a horrible time because it got to a point where I could talk to a new guy at the Officers’ Club and in my mind I would say, ‘This guy’s going to be shot down.’ There wasn’t anything I could do. It was the way the guy thought, the way he moved, the way he picked up his drink, the way he handled his cigarette. I don’t know what it was. But I got to where I could predict the guy was going to be shot down. And I hated doing that. And I thought, ‘What should I do?’ Should I say to him, ‘Pack your bag and get the hell out of here. Go AWOL(absent without leave, a courts-martial offense)? Get arrested. Go to jail. Do anything rather than get killed.’ I didn’t know what to say to those guys. I was so damned accurate on that, I felt horrible about it.
“After I came back to the States, I was at the Weapon Systems Evaluation Group in Washington. We were doing the Red Baron air-to-air-combat study. Later, we did an air-to-ground-combat study. I brought this up. There is something about pilots, and I don’t know what it is, something about their backgrounds which makes some of them good combat pilots and others not. I don’t know what that is. I can’t identify it. When, in our analysis, we stacked the capabilities of pilots in combat in fighters, TAC fighter pilots generally were the best. On a scale from one to ten, TAC fighter pilots at that time were about an eight. Then I would put SAC pilots on the scale and put them at about a seven. They generally were pretty decent. Some of them were easily as good as TAC pilots, better than a lot of TAC pilots, especially the older ones. But when I got off of TAC and SAC, the two combat commands, and went to the Air Defense Command, they were down to about a four. And Air Training Command pilots would be about a three, and other pilots would be down in the grass, like one and a half. Those were the pilots we were losing.
“There is something in their backgrounds that makes them what they are in combat. SAC and TAC pilots, I believe, thought about death in combat. When I went to Southeast Asia, I said to myself, ‘I am going to assume that I am dead. I am not going to get out of here alive. And I am not going to worry about it one more time.’ When I came out of it alive, and I arrived back in the United States, I couldn’t believe I was alive. I was standing on a street corner saying, ‘Holy smokes! Yesterday there was flak all over the place, and today I am standing here on the street corner watching the traffic go by, and nobody even realizes there is a war on.’ I couldn’t believe I was still alive, because I really believed I was dead. I didn’t think there was any way to get out of that, although I tried hard. We made a film at Korat called There Is a Way. The idea was that you could survive a hundred missions.
“Was a hundred missions too many? I don’t know. I had been at Korat six months and was getting ready to go home. Three guys I knew from Spangdahlem arrived. We all ate in the Officers’ Club at the squadron table. I sat right across from them, watching them eat. I thought there was something strange about the way they ate. What was it that seemed so strange? I couldn’t figure it out. I leaned back in my chair, put my fork down, and tried to figure out what it was that was so strange about the way those three were eating. I was bringing my glass of ice tea to my lips, and the ice was jingling in my glass. Then I looked at my hand: it was shaking. I put the glass down. They picked their glasses up smoothly, brought them to their lips, and brought them down again, not shaking. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m in bad shape.’ I looked to my right and to my left at the other pilots. All the old pilots were picking up their glasses, and their hands were shaking. They were bringing their forks up and trying to find their mouths. They reminded me of drunks who had to look at their ties to get their drinks to their mouths.
Ralph Kuster at his home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, demonstrating coming off a bomb run, March 1999. W. Samuel.
“After I got home, I woke up nearly every night soaking wet, seeing the flak going off in the bedroom. I found myself in the living room staring out the window trying to get things to calm down. One night, I remember looking at the houses across the road. There were some tall silver maple trees, beautiful trees. A thunderstorm came up, and these trees were rocking back and forth, and I was looking out the window. I didn’t know how I got into the living room. I told myself, ‘You are in Vienna, Virginia, and those are trees waving out there in the storm. They are not flak.’ But I was still seeing all those 85s and SAMs going off, and I was hearing those voices in my ears screaming, trying to get a message through, because everyone was always talking on the radios at the same time. I told myself, ‘You are not there. This is all in your head. Those are trees over there.’ Finally, I started getting through to myself, and the flak melted away, and I saw the trees waving, and then the flak came back. That went on for ten years.
“On some days we’d lose no airplanes over Route Pack 6. On others we’d lose two, three, or even four. Not all of those aircraft crashed. Nevertheless, they were heavily damaged and out of commission for days or weeks until they were again flyable. I think we had pretty smart pilots over there at the time, guys I flew with and trained at Bitburg and Spangdahlem. As weapons officer, it was my job to figure out why we lost so many airplanes one day and none the next. I finally thought I figured it out. I was shot down on June 30. Two vertebrae in my back and two in my neck were off-center. They were going to send me to Clark until I got better. I said, ‘No. I have eleven more missions up north. I think I’ll go fly them.’ So I was back in the cockpit in five days. For some time I had kept arguing that their gunners were tracking our IFF and TACAN. Intelligence kept saying the North Vietnamese didn’t have the capability to track either the IFF or the TACAN. I didn’t believe it. The guys who told me they were going to leave the IFF/TACAN on kept getting shot down.
“On my first flight back into Route Pack 6 after I was shot down, we were about ten miles in when an 85mm battery decided I was the one to shoot down. 85s went off in my 12:30 position. I could almost reach out and touch them. I didn’t get hit, but I heard the crack and smash. When the second barrage went off closer than the first, I thought, ‘All right, Kuster, what the hell is going on?’ I looked down and saw the TACAN was on. I turned the TACAN off. That was the end of it. I was positive then they were tracking the TACANs and possibly the IFF.”
Ralph Kuster survived one hundred missions over North Vietnam. He retired as a colonel after serving thirty years in the U.S. Air Force. Ralph settled in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he had attended Oklahoma State University and obtained a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. This was also the place where he met his wife, a peaceful place filled with lots of good memories. But there are summer nights when storm clouds come racing across the Oklahoma Hill country, and Ralph Kuster in his sleep fights SAMs and MiGs, trying desperately to stay alive.
Chapter 15
Lincoln Flight
Citation to Accompany the Award of the Air Force Cross
Captain Kevin A. Gilroy distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism as Electronics Warfare Officer of an F-105 aircraft engaged in a pre-strike, missile suppression mission in North Vietnam on 10 March 1967. On that date, Captain Gilroy guided his pilot in attacking and destroying a surface-to-air missile installation protecting one of the most important industrial complexes in North Vietnam. He accomplished this feat even after formidable hostile defenses had destroyed the lead aircraft and had crippled a second. Though his own aircraft suffered extensive battle damage and was under constant attack by MiG interceptors, anti-aircraft artillery, automatic weapons, and small arms fire, Captain Gilroy aligned several ingenious close range attacks on the hostile defenses at great risk to his own life. Due to his technical skill, the attacks were successful and the strike force was able to bomb the target without loss. Through his extraordinary heroism, superb airmanship and aggressiveness, Captain Gilroy has reflected the highest credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.
Colonel Kevin A. “Mike” Gilroy
Air Force Cross, Silver S
tar, Distinguished Flying Cross (3), Air Medal (11), Purple Heart
“I was born on June 4, 1936, in Menlo Park, California, about fifty miles north of the small town of Gilroy. Gilroy is named after my great-great-grandfather. He was a Scottish sailor on a Hudson Bay Company ship, the Isaac Todd. He came from Liverpool and landed here in 1814. He was the first non-Spanish settler in California. He was put off in Monterey with scurvy, which was a fairly common disease among sailors at that time. The ship went on up north to trade with the Russians for furs and was supposed to come back and pick him up. He stayed in Monterey for about six months, waiting for his ship to return. But for whatever reason, the tides or the prevailing winds, the ship never came back. He took a liking to California and decided to make his life here. He changed his name from John Cameron to Gilroy, which was his mother’s maiden name. This was just after the war of 1812, when it was still a common British practice to impress seamen. They’d go in the riverfront bars, hit some likely prospect over the head, and take him out to the ship. The next thing he knew, he was on the high seas. If they came looking for John Cameron, there wouldn’t be anyone living there by that name.
“John married Maria Clara Ortega, the daughter of the Spanish don who had the local land grant. At that time, under Spanish custom, the land always went to the husband, so he inherited eleven leagues square. That is a lot of land. When John died, I believe it was 1869, he didn’t have much land left. In his lifetime, control of the area had gone from Spain to Mexico to the United States. And during each change, some land was taken away. A year after he died, the town of Gilroy was incorporated, and they named it after him.”
Today, Mike Gilroy, the great-great-grandson of John Gilroy, is the mayor of Gilroy, California, a small town on the highway between San Jose and Monterey. “After finishing high school, I went to one of the local junior colleges for a while. One day in early November 1953, a couple of my buddies and I decided to go in the military. One went in the navy, the other in the army. I looked at the marines. But the Marine Corps recruiter was at lunch, and the air force office was open. I went through jet-engine-mechanic school at Chanute AFB in Illinois and then was assigned to the 11th Bomb Wing at Carswell AFB near Fort Worth, Texas. I was a mechanic on giant B-36 bombers with six conventional engines and four jet engines. I got there in ’54, about the time Jimmy Stewart was shooting the movie Strategic Air Command. Around Thanksgiving 1957 my enlistment was up, and I briefly got out of the air force before again reenlisting. That time I was stationed at March AFB, in Riverside, California.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 30
