Racing Back to Vietnam

by John Pendergrass

  I always reminded myself that this was a group of men drinking beer; no one was under oath, and what really happened was probably exaggerated.

  The military life is a transient one. Many of our squadron members grew up in military families and had been stationed around the world for most of their lives. Since you’re never in one spot for very long, it’s almost impossible to be a devoted sports fan. You get moved from place to place, and you rarely get a chance to watch your team on television, much less in person. (We had several Naval Academy graduates who kept up with the Army-Navy rivalry, but the interest didn’t seem as intense for Air Force Academy graduates.)

  In the Vietnam era, professional baseball was still the most popular sport, and the New York Yankees seemed to have the most followers. In pro football, the Dallas Cowboys were the top team. No matter who you liked, you stayed in touch the best you could. But with a roughly twelve hour time difference back home, you never saw a real live game while stationed in Vietnam.

  If sports were difficult to follow in wartime, the ebb and flow of political events were even worse. A fighter squadron is by necessity an apolitical group, as removed from national politics as an organization can be. Everyone in our squadron loved his country and was proud to serve in wartime, but the main reason that they were in the Air Force was that they loved to fly. The opportunity to soar in the sky was an adventure that they were proud to choose. An Air Force squadron has virtually no say in strategy and no input in political goals; its duty is simply to perform the mission it is assigned, regardless of the danger or difficulty. A fighter squadron in wartime is the place where political plans become actions, the spot where the dangerous work gets done; the one place where you are defined by what you do rather than what you say.

  Even though their lives were often at the mercy of politicians, most of the men in my squadron cared little for politics. They were probably more conservative than the general public, but they rarely identified themselves as Republican or Democrat. Most of them had only had the chance to vote on a few occasions. After all, they were constantly on the move, often being assigned with little notice to another base in another country.

  So despite being in the line of fire, the political controversies of the Vietnam War that seemed so important back home were rarely discussed at Da Nang. Stories of war protestors in the U.S. would occasionally filter in through magazines and newspapers, but by 1971–1972, this was old news that garnered little notice. Everyone agreed that it was more fun to protest a war than to fight it. In early 1972, when Richard Nixon went to Red China, his visit meant very little to the 390th TFS. There was no cease-fire; not even a slowdown in the pace of the war. In fact, Nixon’s trip was followed by the launching of a spring offensive by the North Vietnamese, and the air war actually got ratcheted up a notch.

  The men doing the fighting were committed to carrying out their mission, regardless of who was setting policy. No matter who was serving as President, anything less than a total commitment is an unaffordable luxury during wartime. This is the way the military has always worked; you fall in line and you follow orders.

  Still, the people who flew had definite opinions about the men who served as their commanders-in-chief. Lyndon Johnson was almost universally disliked by anyone who flew in combat in Southeast Asia. The President had launched the Rolling Thunder air campaign in March 1965. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. Air strikes in North Vietnam would persuade Hanoi to drop their support of the Viet Cong insurgents in the South, while destroying the bridges, rail yards, and power plants in the North would reduce the men and materiel headed to South Vietnam. Our South Vietnamese allies would realize that we were committed to helping them survive as an independent nation. LBJ and his civilian advisors clearly thought they had things pretty well figured out.

  The problem came when, early in the conflict, Johnson’s military advisors presented him with a plan to strike the major targets in the North in a brief, intense bombing campaign, but Johnson, fearful of Chinese intervention in the war, instead chose a limited, gradualist approach. The President (along with his Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State) would pick and choose the targets to be struck. Fancying themselves military tacticians, they would select the number of aircraft to be sent, the types of plane (no bombers allowed, just fighters carrying bombs), the types of ordnance, and the routes to be flown to and from the target. Their target selection was good for a limited number of days. If the weather was bad, it was tough luck for the Air Force; the military had to request permission again.

  To give LBJ some credit, the threat of Chinese intervention in the war was real. One only need look back fifteen years to the Korean War to see that. And the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has always set military strategy, but the level of civilian-tactical control during Rolling Thunder was unprecedented. Some of the rules of engagement seemed designed to produce failure. Many areas, such as central Hanoi and Haiphong, were completely off-limits. At times, pilots were prohibited from striking SAM sites or MiG bases unless they were first shot at. During the three years of the Rolling Thunder campaign, Johnson would occasionally call a halt to the bombing, allowing the North Vietnamese to regroup and resupply their forces, all of which worked to the detriment of the war effort.

  As is usually the case, it was the young men chosen to fight the old men’s battles that suffered the consequences. The fighter crews, the ones who were actually risking their lives, resented being handcuffed by byzantine rules of engagement cooked up by inept politicians. These political restrictions cost American lives and took a toll in captured airmen. In North Vietnam, the majority of POWs were fighter crews shot down over the North during the Rolling Thunder campaign.

  Of course, this was all before my time. When I came to Da Nang in 1971, the Rolling Thunder campaign had been over for more than two years, and with just a few exceptions, North Vietnam was a prohibited area. But for the members of my squadron, those POWs were never forgotten. There was often a personal link; some of our pilots had trained under some of the POWs or had served with them at another base, and they often knew their families. The POWs weren’t statistics; they were friends, neighbors, and acquaintances with wives and children.

  Most of the pilots in my squadron felt that Johnson’s leadership in the war was a story of foolish rules and squandered opportunities that resulted in an unnecessarily large number of airmen being killed or captured over North Vietnam. There was also a lot of resentment over the fact that the President had stayed mostly silent on the fate of the POWs, even though he had evidence that they had been tortured. While he claimed to be working behind the scenes to free them, the whole issue seemed to be an embarrassment for his administration. The POWs were a living, breathing symbol of the failure of his Vietnam policies.

  I understood and agreed with most of the criticisms of Johnson and his policies. After all, the warriors who flew the fighters over North Vietnam, battling AAA, SAMs, and MiGs, were living, breathing heroes to me. I couldn’t help but be influenced by their sentiments. But there was another reason, of which I was totally unaware at the time, for LBJ being held in such low regard by many in the military. During World War II, Johnson had been awarded the Army Silver Star for gallantry by General Douglas McArthur. But his decoration was an outright sham, a clear case of stolen valor and an insult to the brave men who earned the honor.

  At the time of Pearl Harbor, Johnson was a politically ambitious Texas congressman. Since the voters of that era frowned on politicians who sat out the war in Washington, Johnson felt that he needed wartime service on his resume, and so he persuaded President Roosevelt to send him on an inspection tour of the Pacific. In this way, LBJ managed to tag along as an observer on a single bombing mission in a B-26 over New Guinea in 1942. The B-26, according to one version of events, was attacked by enemy fighters; others deny that an attack ever took place. Regardless, before his aircraft reached the target, a generator went out and the plane was forced to turn back.


  LBJ was nothing more than an idle passenger during this mission, merely along for the ride. Nonetheless, he received the Silver Star, along with a citation stating that he had shown “marked coolness” during the flight. The whole episode had lasted no more than thirteen minutes according to most accounts, and none of the other crewmembers received any decoration. Later revelations by surviving crewmembers suggested that the aircraft never even came under fire.

  Johnson’s Silver Star has to be one of the most undeserved decorations ever awarded. Lyndon Johnson placed a lot of restrictions on the men fighting the Vietnam War, but he never had any reservations when it came to wearing his bogus Silver Star. For most of his life, he wore a Silver Star pin on his lapel, and frequently boasted to others about his courage under fire.

  Although this episode of the bogus Silver Star was news to me, I could certainly see why a fighter squadron resented an unearned military decoration. No one gets rich or famous serving in the armed forces; one of the few rewards of military service is recognition for courage and valor in combat. Most everyone who flew fighters on Southeast Asia won multiple Air Medals. When I was at Da Nang, there was even a formula for awarding the Air Medal for fighter combat missions, based on the danger involved. Ten missions were needed over North Vietnam, fifteen missions in Laos, or twenty missions in South Vietnam. Since most of the pilots and WSOs had more than a hundred and fifty combat missions during a tour, the Air Medal was often earned multiple times.

  In addition, almost every pilot and WSO in a fighter squadron earned a Distinguished Flying Cross during their tour. If you flew enough missions, you were sure to encounter your share of dangerous sorties. In fact, the squadron had an awards officer whose job it was to keep track of these particularly hazardous missions. But the Silver Star was rarely awarded; our squadron had perhaps a handful of people who had earned the nation’s third highest decoration for truly heroic conduct under very heavy enemy fire. And unlike LBJ, no one received a Silver Star for tagging along in the back of an airplane.

  I never heard anyone talk or brag about their military decorations. During my year in Vietnam, that wasn’t part of the culture of a fighter squadron. Self-effacement was very common, but self-promotion was hardly ever seen. A flight suit had no room for military awards. That isn’t to say we didn’t respect those who had achieved recognition; our wing was the home of Captain Lance Sijan, the first Air Force Academy graduate to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Sijan was shot down over Laos in November 1967. In spite of multiple fractures, no food, and little water, he evaded capture for forty-six days.

  Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was seen as a stronger and more decisive leader, and was therefore held in higher regard as Commander-in-Chief than was LBJ. His Vietnamization policy was welcome in our squadron; we were all glad to see an unpopular war wind down. From a practical point of view, the reduction in ground forces made little difference to most of us. Serving in Vietnam was sort of like being pregnant; you either are or you are not. It didn’t matter if there were only sixty thousand other Americans serving with you instead of five hundred thousand; you were still personally one hundred percent at risk.

  More importantly, Nixon took on the POW issue, bringing the account of the prisoners and their treatment to the forefront. In a war that had yet to produce a fighter ace, these POWs became our heroes, a rallying point for the country. Nixon’s treatment of the POW problem won him many admirers in our squadron.

  Admittedly, the vagaries of politics were just window dressing in Vietnam. Regardless of who was the commander-in-chief, regardless of anyone’s personal political persuasion, the job of a fighter squadron has always been to fly the assigned mission. These men faced danger and death every time they flew. They did what the mission demanded and never complained. The fact that they were trained to do so made it no less courageous.

  TEN

  AIR-TO-AIR REFUELING

  Fall 1971

  I had been flying for around three months when I was fragged on a single ship mission to Cambodia.

  One-aircraft missions were rare; our squadron almost always worked in flights of two planes. Trips to Cambodia were even rarer, as most of our targets were in Laos and South Vietnam. I was happy to be flying with my buddy, Ben—a big, husky bear of a guy with a permanent grin on his face. Ben was one of those people who did everything right and made it look effortless. He also had the ability to find that touch of the absurd, which never seemed far from the surface in wartime. Ben rarely seemed worried, and that tended to rub off on me.

  Our target that day was a weapons cache just over the South Vietnamese border. As I was checking out the details at the mission planning room at wing headquarters, I noticed that our flight had an air-to-air refueling scheduled on the way to the target. This was something completely new for me; I had never experienced an air-to-air refueling in any aircraft.

  During most day missions out of Da Nang, we rarely had to refuel. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was just a few minutes away by air; by the time we had taken off, checked in with the Airborne Command and Control Center, and contacted our Forward Air Controller, we had usually crossed the fence into the Laotian panhandle. Once our squadron switched to nights (the three squadrons rotated night flying duties), the story changed. The night missions were flown in support of gunships over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and two or three air-to-air refueling on each mission were the norm.

  Although the first aerial refueling in combat took place during the Korean War, Vietnam is rightly known as the first tanker war. Since a flying gas station was available, fighters could take off with more ordnance and less fuel and could stay airborne longer, greatly extending their range. During Rolling Thunder (and later, during the Linebacker campaign), aircraft would hit the tanker on the way into North Vietnam and, if necessary, refuel again on the way home. Wartime is full of emergencies, and those tankers came to the rescue of many fighters away from home and short on fuel. There were even a few times when they broke the rules and ventured into enemy airspace to save an aircraft from flameout.

  At the time of my mission with Ben, our squadron hadn’t flown at night for several months; I wondered if this single-plane trip to Cambodia might have been an effort to keep refueling skills sharp. Since I didn’t want to screw anything up, I asked Ben if there was anything I needed to know, anything I ought to do to prepare for the aerial refueling.

  “Hell, no, Doc,” he replied. “The tanker is a flying gas station. We’ll drive up, tell the attendant to fill it up, and watch while he pumps the gas. We won’t even need a credit card. Those guys are very talented; they really know how to pass gas.” Then he burst out laughing. The other pilots in the room smiled and shook their heads. I was the fall guy for one of the oldest lines in the Air Force.

  A little over twenty minutes after takeoff, we were on a tanker track over Thailand. The big KC-135 tankers flew in Northern Thailand, just over the Laotian border, maintaining a certain altitude and direction. These oblong orbits were called “tracks,” and most had a call sign with the name of a color, such as cherry, lemon, or orange. We headed toward our scheduled rendezvous with the Cherry tanker. As we approached the tanker, another F-4 was disconnecting from the refueling boom while a second Phantom was waiting off to the side for his turn. The scene reminded me of a mother duck with three ducklings in tow.

  The KC-135 dwarfed the F-4s in size. The aircraft was a big, lumbering giant of a plane, a modified Boeing 707 that could deliver many thousands of pounds of fuel to other aircraft and still have plenty left to fly around for hours.

  The second aircraft was cleared in for fuel and connected to the boom in no time at all. After another few minutes, it was our turn. I thought there might be a bit more to it than Ben had described, and I was right, but the whole process was very orderly and methodical; just a few words exchanged between the pilot and the tanker. Ben flew our aircraft under and slightly behind the belly of the tanker, where a series of lights on the bottom of the fuselage le
t him know when he was positioned properly. I watched as the boom operator in the KC-135 lay on his stomach, peering through a Plexiglas window, moving the boom as he gave us directions over the radio. His instructions were short and specific: “Left two feet,” “Up one foot,” etc.

  The boom is a long pipe attached to the rear of the tanker that telescopes in and out. Near the end of the boom are two airfoils that angle out in a V shape. They give stability to the device and allow the boomer to “fly” the boom. The refueling receptacle on an F-4 is on the spine of the plane, just behind the canopy of the backseater.

  The fighter pilot’s job during refueling is to fly a stable position within the air refueling envelope. Too close is dangerous—in rare instances, mid-air collisions have occurred—too far back, and the boomer is forced to disconnect. It’s a dynamic process; both aircraft are flying more than three hundred miles per hour, constantly moving in three dimensions, up and down, back and forth, left and right. To me, it seemed like they were bouncing about on separate, unsynchronized trampolines. It’s similar in some ways to flying close formation on another fighter’s wing; it looks routine to the uninitiated, but is often more difficult than it appears.

  I watched as the boom flailed around like a drunken snake. For a moment, I it looked like I was going to get popped on the head by the end of the boom, but we had a good boom operator who made a fast connection. A few minutes after hookup, he told us that he was disconnecting and that we had gotten such-and-such thousand pounds of fuel. (A gallon of fuel is a little over 6.5 pounds; a Phantom burns a heck of a lot of gas.)

  I wrote down the number of pounds of fuel we had taken from the tanker. This was my sole contribution to the refueling process.

  Most of the fighter pilots I flew with seemed to take air-to-air refueling for granted. They did it at night, they did it in bad weather, they did it whenever it was called for. It was like taking off and landing; a skill that every fighter pilot has. They made a difficult task seem ordinary.