“I picked up a SAM signal as soon as we entered the Cam Pha area on the coast northeast of Haiphong. I lined up on the SAM site, and Ed fired a Shrike—the first Shrike either one of us had fired. The radar went off the air at the appropriate time, so we figured we hit it. Another SAM site at our two o’clock position lit us up and immediately launched at us. I called the launch to Ed. He lit the burners, got some airspeed, and pulled up. We dodged the first missile, leveled out, and dodged the second missile. Then we were right next to this huge towering cumulus cloud, and the third missile came out of the cloud and blew up directly in front of us. When it exploded, it knocked the aircraft five to seven feet straight up in the air. The cockpit immediately filled with black smoke. As it turned out, we had taken a hit in the front end of the aircraft, where the 20mm cannon is. The cannon had a big can full of ammunition behind it. The missile exploded some of the ammunition, blowing our nose section right off the aircraft.
“With all the black smoke in the cockpit, it was hard for me to breathe. My mask was leaking, and I was choking. The only thing I could see through the smoke was the master caution light and the red fire warning light. The intercom was useless. I thought, ‘What now?’ as I was choking and fighting to breathe. ‘I better get rid of that canopy.’ On the left-hand panel was an auxiliary canopy jettison handle. If I pushed on one end of it, it rotated up, and I could pull the handle and blow the canopy. I couldn’t find it. I just couldn’t find that handle. I was running out of air. I was nearly asphyxiated. I thought, ‘To hell with it. I’m getting out of the airplane.’ And with that I rotated the ejection handles. It was a two-action ejection—you rotated the handles and the canopy went, then this trigger pops down, and you have to open your hands and squeeze the trigger to actually eject from the aircraft. I rotated the handles up, intending to get out of the aircraft. As I opened my hands to grab those triggers, I decided, ‘Maybe I should stay.’ When the canopy blew, it cleared the smoke from the cockpit, and I could breathe again. I could look outside, and I noticed it was a pretty day. I went to call position on the intercom, ‘Ed, are you still there?’ He replied, ‘Yeah. Are you still there? Are you hurt?’ ‘No, I’m not hit at all.’ ‘Well, we’re going to fly out of here.’ ‘Good. I couldn’t find my auxiliary canopy ejection handle,’ I said. ‘I had to fire my seat.’ ‘Me too, Mike.’
“We headed east toward the water, the closest way out of there. We were north of Haiphong. We had lost sight of our wingman as we were dodging the missiles, so we were by ourselves. In our open-cockpit airplane and without a nose section, we were going only about three hundred knots—much too slow to survive the flak. I could look back on the leading edge of our intake and saw a big hole. In spite of all the damage, we were still flying. It was a great airplane. It had a dry wing, unlike the F-4, which had a tendency to flame when hit in the wing. Sometimes we carried a 650-gallon centerline tank. That would absorb a lot of flak. The rest of the fuel was on top of the fuselage and in the former bomb bay.
“We were getting close to the coast. I looked back, and about 1,500 yards behind us, there was a burst of 85mm. I said, ‘Ed, they are shooting at our eight o’clock.’ ‘I see it,’ Ed answered. The next burst of 85mm was about 500 feet behind us. The rounds would go off in sequence—pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, in a circular burst. Then the third burst hit us underneath and threw the aircraft up in the air. At that time, our wingman rejoined us. Pete must have had at least a hundred knots overtake speed on us. He flew directly beneath us and overshot by about 200 yards. Then the next burst of flak hit him. I don’t know whether he pulled the AAA radar’s range gate off us, or they thought they had us and wanted to get another kill. Pete’s maneuver saved us and gave us enough time to get over the coast. Once over the water, Ed said, ‘Mike, the controls are gone. We have to eject.’ The flak had taken out our hydraulics. The plane went into a slow left bank, heading toward China. I said, ‘OK, Ed. See you in the water.’ We were both pretty calm about it. Ed said, ‘OK, Mike. Good luck.’ I sat up straight in the seat and ejected. Ed ejected right after me. Then I wondered, ‘Is the chute going to open?’ Next thing, I am under that beautiful canopy and everything is so calm and quiet. All the radio noise is gone. All the SAM and AAA radar signals, which only seconds earlier were blasting in my ears, were off the air. I sort of had the feeling that everything was OK. I observed our plane going down. It exploded about 1,000 feet above the water. It was good we got out when we did. I really wasn’t scared at that time. In fact, I released my survival kit and held onto the kit handle. I thought it would make a good souvenir. I unzipped my G suit pocket and put the handle in there and zipped it back up. I still have the thing on the wall at home mounted on a plaque: It says ‘Aircraft 358, 7th August 1966, Gulf of Tonkin.’
“I pulled out my survival radio and listened to the rescue effort on the way down. I tried to talk, but I was really garbled, and no one could understand what I said. Ed and I were coming down outside Haiphong Harbor, amongst those big karst islands. I was sure there was a pretty good chance we would be picked up. As I drifted downward, I was going over all the things I learned in survival school about water landings. The raft hits the water, pull on your risers and face into the wind, release the clips when the feet hit the water, release the canopy so it blows away from you. I thought I was Joe Cool, remembering all that stuff. All that repetition in survival training was invaluable. You’d think under stress you’d tend to forget those things, but most of it came back. The raft hit the water. My feet hit the water, and I released the canopy. The next thing I knew, I was under water and sinking fast. I forgot to inflate my Mae West. I couldn’t find the little tabs that hang out beneath your armpits. I couldn’t find them, and I was still going down. I thought I was about to run out of air. I couldn’t find the tabs no matter how hard I tried. ‘They are right under my arms,’ I thought in rising desperation, but I couldn’t find them. And just then, the white nylon cord that attaches to the life raft above me floated in front of me. I grabbed it and pulled myself up to the raft and hopped in. ‘How stupid can you get,’ I thought. But I still didn’t inflate my Mae West. Once securely in the raft, I retrieved my survival kit and opened it up. The only thing in the kit was two pairs of black wool socks. The Thais on the base had gone through the survival kit and taken everything out they knew what to do with. They probably did not know what to do with the wool socks. I pitched them over the side. We carried sea dye marker in our survival vest, pen gun flares, smoke flares, two or three radios, and baby water bottles. I had a drink of water then listened for the rescue on a survival radio. Our wingman was flying cover for us. He said, ‘There are boats in the water. I see one.’
“Ed had let out a sea dye marker so they could see him. I was closer to the islands than he, and I wasn’t going to let anybody know where I was until I was sure we were going to be rescued. At that time, there were seven aircraft flying cover for us. A ship was coming out of the harbor toward us. One of the F-105s went after him and dropped his bomb load near the ship. The ship turned around and went back. We were in the water for about an hour and a half before we were rescued. I could hear Crown Alpha on guard channel saying, ‘Where are they? I see them, I see them.’
“Ed let go with an orange smoke flare. Crown Alpha came in and landed and picked up Ed, and then I heard him say, ‘I don’t see the other one.’ Then I let my flare go. Crown Alpha was an amphibious SA-16 Albatross out of Da Nang with no markings. I listened to all the conversation on the radio, and I knew they were there to pick us up. As the aircraft taxied over toward me, I saw an Oriental face in a wet suit standing in the door. I was confounded. A trick by the North Vietnamese? I reached down and pulled my thirty-eight and pointed it at the rescue man standing in the aircraft door. He waved at me and shouted, ‘Don’t shoot, I’m Hawaiian.’ Then he jumped in the water and swam over to me, grabbed my raft with one hand, and pulled me over to the airplane.
“Once in the aircraft, I saw Ed, all bundled up in bla
nkets. He hurt his back. The seat gave him a massive compression fracture, and he never flew jets after that. As soon as I got in the airplane, the SA-16 rescue men looked at me and smiled. One said, ‘You forgot to inflate your Mae West, didn’t you?’ I looked down, and sure enough, there were the inflation tabs where they were supposed to be. ‘Yeah,’ I said sheepishly, ‘I forgot.’ Then they handed me a cup of coffee. The SA-16 had one bad engine, and the breeze was off the shore, so our takeoff was toward shore. They taxied out a ways and then pushed the good engine up to full power. Then they tried to push the bad engine up. We aborted two takeoff attempts. At the end of every takeoff, we received mortar fire from the nearby islands. The guys had the side door open and were shooting their M-16 rifles at the shoreline. The bullets probably got about halfway there.
“The most frightening part of that entire experience was the takeoff. The SA-16 started bouncing on its belly as it gathered speed. It would go a few feet in the air and crash down again. It seemed like every rivet in the airplane popped. The plane groaned and creaked. I envisioned a wing falling off or the floor caving in. On our third and final try, they bounced their way five feet into the air, and the next thing I knew we were airborne. They flew us to Da Nang. There Ed and I were met by the base flight surgeon. After he examined us, he told Ed he was not going back to Takhli but would be hospitalized at Clark in the Philippines. My back was hurting, too; in fact, I had a compression fracture, but it didn’t bother me much at the time. It wasn’t until years later when I had a CAT scan that I learned I had two crushed disks in my back.
“The next day, my wing, the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, sent a C-47 to pick me up and take me back to Takhli. There I learned that we didn’t have any Weasel airplanes left. We had lost seven aircraft that day—the highest toll for a single day. ‘What do you want to do?’ I was asked. I said, ‘How about thirty days leave?’ I hopped on a KC-135 tanker and went to Okinawa, then to Fort Worth. I got back a month later. How did I feel about coming back? At that time, the chances for anyone to complete a tour were poor. When I first arrived at Takhli, we were told that as Weasels we could count on getting shot down 1.6 times. ‘One out of the way,’ I thought. I believe everybody was pretty fatalistic but not overly concerned. Most thought that they themselves wouldn’t get shot down. The guy next to you may get shot down because he doesn’t have your abilities, but not you. Getting shot down, being taken prisoner, or getting killed was not something you sat around and talked about.
“That doesn’t mean the next time I went up to the northeast railway, about three months later, I didn’t have some second thoughts. And the guys in the squadron were giving me a bunch of good-natured crap, too. ‘Eh, Gilroy,’ I heard someone say in the briefing room, ‘you are going back to the northeast railway today. Didn’t do so well the last time you were there, did you?’
“We learned. A couple months after I was shot down, we wouldn’t have gone in that day under those weather conditions. You have to give yourself a fighting chance. At a minimum, you have to be able to see the missiles coming. The conditions we flew under that time, two months later I would have positioned us further away and probably been content to stand off and throw the Shrikes in there. You learn every time, and it makes you a little more capable.
“Of course, everyone had to deal with the stress of the mission and with fear. How did we do it? There was a lot of letting off steam during our off-duty hours. When I first got to Takhli, we’d go to the stag bar at ten o’clock in the morning. A lot of people would be there, and they drank all day, until evening. Then they got four or five hours sleep and flew the next day. We had five squadron commanders while I was there. Four were shot down. The last one, Phil Gast (he retired as a lieutenant general), came in as a brand-new lieutenant colonel. He said, ‘No more of that.’ I really admired Phil for doing that. He wasn’t popular when he did it, but the squadron went from one with the highest loss rate to an average loss rate.
“Our tour was one year or one hundred missions, whichever came first. You could take a month off your tour for every ten counters you flew against the North—eleven months at ten missions, ten months at twenty missions. Only one Weasel crew member I knew ever took advantage of that. Everybody thought you were a coward if you did that.
“The thing that really kept us going was the peer pressure from the people we flew with. When we went to the bar at night to have a drink, we wanted to have been as brave as they were that day or braver. We didn’t want to go in there having put our tail between our legs and done something embarrassing. Again, it is something like the Weasel crew feeding off each other to become something greater than what they were individually capable of. The whole squadron was like that. It wasn’t spoken peer pressure, although if someone did something stupid, we’d give him a hard time. Everyone wanted to be able to stand up as tall as everyone else and be able to look them in the eye.
“When I got back to Takhli from thirty days leave, the Weasel crews had gone over to Korat because Korat still had airplanes. We got our new planes a couple weeks later, in early September. My new pilot was Glen Davis, whose EWO had quit. Glen was one of the original Weasel pilots, and he was good. We had quite a bit of operational flexibility as Weasels, and as a result, we did a lot of low-level work when we were by ourselves. We’d be on the deck at one hundred feet. That’s a good altitude for a Weasel. Our weapon of choice was the 20mm Gatling gun. A lot of times we’d attack a site, end up dodging missiles, and need a gun because we were eyeball to eyeball with the SAM site. There was no time to climb back up to do a dive-bomb maneuver. The gun killed as many SAM sites as any other weapon we had available to us.
“When our primary target was weathered in, and we were sent to Route Pack 5 near Dien Bien Phu for road recce, we would go and make one pass in the area to see if there were any radar signals up. There rarely ever were. Then we drove over into Route Pack 6 and went SAM hunting. That was the most fun of all. We could really control the situation when we didn’t have a strike force to protect. We could pick our approach. If it looked bad, we’d call it off. If it looked good, we’d go in and kill them. We probably killed more SAM sites when we were by ourselves than when we were protecting a strike force. Some of our wingmen (Iron Hand bomb–carrying F-105Ds) didn’t like it at all when we headed back into Pack 6 to hunt for SAMs. Nobody was ever hit by a SAM when flying with me. Nobody. That, I think, was a measure of success.
“We carried two Shrikes on the outboard stations and two containers of CBUs on the inboard stations. The CBUs were good for killing SAM sites. After we dropped the CBUs, they opened up, and numerous small bomblets were released in a shotgunlike pattern. Those small bombs exploded into a multitude of fragments. One is enough to take out a radar. The Shrike had a small warhead with a proximity fuse, and the missile homed in on the radar antenna. It usually didn’t kill any people. It took the radar off the air, with no great damage to the site. We didn’t call that a kill if all we did was take the radar off the air. Unless we could follow up with CBUs, 20mm cannon fire, or an accompanying strike aircraft with bombs, we didn’t consider it a kill. Most of the time, when we were protecting a strike force, we trolled for SAMs at 8,000 feet above ground level. We wanted to be above the 4,500-foot level, where we picked up the 37mm and 57mm stuff. At 8,000 to 9,000 feet, it left us enough room to go into a good dive, track the target to see which way the wind was blowing, make our adjustments, drop CBUs, and still be able to get out without going below 4,500 feet. That time all the Weasel airplanes were shot down, Glen Davis flew single-seat missions. He led a lot of them because of his Weasel experience. When he finished his one hundred missions, I had sixty-five. At his hundred-mission party, Glen said, ‘Mike, if you want me to stay and finish your hundred missions with you, I will. But I hope you don’t ask me to do that.’ I didn’t.
“Then I flew with Merlyn Hans Dethlefsen. Merl came as a replacement pilot for Buddy Rheinhold, one of the original guys who got shot up. Merl was a strange
guy, I thought. He went through a class at Nellis that had one more pilot than EWO. All the pilots and EWOs paired up. Merl was the one who didn’t select anybody. He was a loner, a quiet guy. I soon regretted pairing up with him. We didn’t get along at all. He was the only nondrinking fighter pilot I’ve ever met—a Pepsi drinker and a born-again Christian. I was a hell-raiser, as many of us were. I figured I wasn’t going to live long. Merl and I were different. Merl never came to the bar at night as we all did to bullshit about what went on that day. We got along OK the first couple of missions, and then we didn’t. It got so bad, he wouldn’t speak to me except in the line of duty.
“The day Merl got his Medal of Honor, March 10, 1967, we didn’t get along well at all. We were flying the number three position of a flight of four SAM-suppression aircraft. Our call sign was Lincoln: we were Lincoln 03. We headed up to the northeast railway. The strike target was the Thai Nguyen steel mill. We went in on the overland route, rather than coming in from the Gulf of Tonkin side, at 8,000 or 9,000 feet. As we approached the target area, we started descending. I said to Merl, ‘We are really getting awfully low.’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ We were down to about 4,500 feet and still descending. At 4,000 feet I said, ‘Merl, something is wrong. We are going to get our asses shot off down here.’ Then we heard beepers. Lead had been shot down by AAA. Both guys bailed out and were captured. Number two was shot up so badly that he, too, had to leave the area. We pulled up. Merl and I were lead now. Major Kenneth Bell, who later made general, was on our wing.
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