Racing Back to Vietnam

by John Pendergrass

  I was impressed. For me, this was yet another one of those small miracles that makes flying fighters such a great experience.

  ELEVEN

  DOOM CLUB

  1971–1972

  I hadn’t been at Da Nang very long before I discovered the officers’ club, officially known as the DOOM club (Da Nang Officers’ Open Mess).

  Officer clubs are a staple of military installations around the world, a welcome spot to meet, eat, and drink; a temporary refuge from the trials and tribulations of wartime. Admittedly, whoever named the club at Da Nang had a macabre, twisted sense of humor. I already felt jinxed, if not cursed, by being shipped to Southeast Asia; I didn’t need to be reminded of my lot in life every time I had a drink.

  The DOOM club, located several miles from our squadron headquarters, was too far to walk to, especially during the monsoon season. If I wanted to visit the club, I had to catch a ride. Most of the time, I would tag along with a few of the guys from my squadron. If we were lucky, we could borrow one of the squadron’s trucks; otherwise, we had to hitchhike.

  When you’re accustomed to being catered to in a jet aircraft, being forced to thumb a ride in a monsoon downpour can be a little bit of a letdown. At Da Nang, the ground transportation network was a true democratic system, one that worked well. In the military, officers and enlisted men live in different worlds most of the time, but when it came to catching a ride, everyone was treated equally—first come first served, with no deference to rank. If you were driving a vehicle and had room for passengers, you were obligated to stop and pick up anyone with their thumb out. Even the wing commander had to play by the rules; on several occasions, he picked me up and went out of his way to drop me at the front door of the club.

  The DOOM club, located in an old wooden frame building with a tin roof, looked like it had been built before Ho Chi Minh was born. The writing on the sign out front had that pseudo-Trader Vic’s look that suggested you were about to enter a Polynesian paradise.

  The reality was far different. The main door was manned by a middle-age Vietnamese woman who was tough as hell. She had seen American officers come and go for years, and the fact that you flew fighters in combat did not impress her in the least. Her main purpose in life was to make sure that you had paid your club dues. It was a cruel system; if you had missed coming to the club the previous month, you still had to pay the dues for that month as well as the current one. No one was exempt from her scrutiny; if the squadron commander had not paid up, he could not enter.

  I joined the DOOM club soon after I arrived, but my account was always in arrears. I was frugal to the point of cheapness, and really hated paying money for past dues. The iron lady seemed to take a special delight when I was forced to shell out for several missed months. I sometimes wondered if she worked for the Viet Cong.

  The main room was dark and cool, with a low ceiling and a long bar at one end. Nearby, a bell hung on the wall. Bells are found in most military drinking spots; when it was rung, it was always good news: it indicated that someone was buying a round. Adjacent to the bar were some tables and a dance floor. Most of the time, a jukebox provided the background music, but occasionally the club would bring in a band from the Philippines. The DOOM club’s dance floor was generous, but lacked the one critical element needed for a successful dance—women. Only officers were allowed in the club, and there weren’t that many female officers stationed at Da Nang.

  Posted on one wall was a handmade list that had been added to many times over the years. The topic under discussion was, “Why an F-4 is Better than a Woman.” The opinions were a little wry and very predictable. “A Phantom doesn’t come with in-laws;” “A Phantom doesn’t mind if you look at other airplanes;” “A Phantom can be flown any time of the month;” “A Phantom can be turned on by simply flipping a switch.” The list seemed longer every time I visited the club. This conversation, and others like it, has probably been going on since the time of the Wright brothers—the humor of lonely men away from home, missing their loved ones.

  Officers in all the services—Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force—showed up at the club. Some pilots were in for a few days of temporary duty; others had had to recover at Da Nang because of weather or aircraft problems. Everyone tended to hang out with their own squadron members, but often there would be animated discussions over who had the worst lot in the war. It all depended on your point of view. The crews from the bases in Thailand were mocked for living in a spot with good food, bars, women, and no rocket attacks. Army and Marine officers who lived and worked in the field felt that we were living in paradise; compared to their days in the jungle, Da Nang Air Base was heaven.

  I always made a special point to visit the DOOM club on those occasions when we celebrated the final mission of one or more of our squadron members. At the end of a crew’s last mission, their Phantom would taxi back to the revetment, followed by a parade of base vehicles. The lucky men would be hosed down by a fire truck and a bottle of champagne would be popped for a well-earned goodbye toast. That same evening, the fortunate ones would, by tradition, come to the DOOM club to buy a round for the house. The happiness and relief of someone who has flown one hundred and fifty or more combat missions and survived to return home was almost palpable. Frugal as I was, I still looked forward to the day when it was my time to buy drinks for the house.

  The final mission celebrations at the DOOM club were unpredictable and sometimes chaotic; often I had no choice but to relax and have a good time. A fighter squadron gets used to running in high gear, and even relaxation can turn into a remarkably intense experience. Some of the men were prone to drink hard and drink often. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that there would be time later on for clean, safe living.

  During the first half of my tour, martinis were the drink of choice. (I have no idea who started the trend, and fortunately it faded away about six months later.) When it was someone’s turn to buy, that’s what got bought. The call to the bartender was, “A round of silver bullets for the whole table.”

  I’ve always hated martinis. But, since that was what was being served, and since the price was right (and since I really hated not drinking a free drink), that’s what I drank. If I could manage to slip away after no more than one or two, I did fine. If I succumbed to a third or fourth, I usually ended up welded to the bar for the rest of the evening. If you drink enough, dinner ceases to matter very much. (But then, the DOOM club was always more of a drinking spot than a place to eat; the food was too expensive to make a regular habit of dining out.) Eventually, I would wander out of the dark, air-conditioned club into the sweltering heat and humidity and head home, happy that my friends had survived a year at Da Nang, hoping that I would survive the night.

  On some evenings, when the alcohol seemed to flow like the Mekong River, we would all talk about the fortunes of war. The Vietnam War was a mixed bag for many people; it had its good moments, but they were usually far outweighed by the bad. The war was different things for different people at different times; danger and discomfort were not evenly distributed.

  For most Americans, the image of Vietnam is based on television reports, movies, and newspaper accounts mixed with stories from the veterans who served. The usual picture is one of young soldiers and marines on patrol in the jungle, fierce firefights, helicopters rushing troops into battle and lifting out the wounded, refugees streaming from burning villages. The common view is that a near-constant struggle with death and destruction on every side was the lot of every Vietnam soldier.

  This role, that of the heroic grunt on patrol battling the elusive Viet Cong guerilla, represented at most a quarter of the troops who served in Vietnam. The vast majority of veterans worked in supporting roles—not completely out of danger, but in relative comfort. The United States military did its best to make its rear bases as comfortable as possible. This was especially true of the Air Force. Most of the big air bases were near the coast and were well-defended and well-supplied with base ex
changes, barracks, and entertainment. The longer the war lasted, the more elaborate the facilities became. Clean sheets and cold beer were the norm for many of us in Vietnam.

  That said, there was no rear line in Vietnam, no place of absolute safety. Everyone was vulnerable to some kind of attack, be it from rockets, mortars, or street bombs. At Da Nang, we were hit at least a dozen times by rockets attacks. Some were harmless, some killed people. It wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the siege of Khe Sanh or many of the other battles fought by the Marines, but that’s little solace to the families of the people who died from a random rocket.

  Life in a fighter squadron was even more tenuous. The possibility of death or imprisonment was there every time you flew. One evening you’ll be having a drink in the officers’ club with a friend; the next day, he’s shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There were no guarantees for anyone.

  Like life itself, the Vietnam War was unfair; some were killed and maimed, others had little to worry about. We were resigned to the war, and we all agreed that you have no choice but to deal with life as it comes along. Sometimes you’re dealt a good hand, sometimes you’re not. If you’re fortunate and get to work in the mess hall instead of going on patrol in the jungle, give thanks. If things turn bad, as often happens, do the best that you can.

  Anyone who serves a tour in a war zone, regardless of the danger, deserves our thanks. Only around ten percent of the American men of draft age served in Vietnam. I found spending a year away from my family to be a horrible experience. I had been married less than two years when I left for Da Nang, and my son was only nine months old. When I go back and read the letters that I sent my wife from Vietnam, they reveal the pain and loneliness of that separation, the kind that comes when the most important people in your life are no longer a part of your daily existence.

  TWELVE

  NIGHT MOVES

  1971–1972

  The 366th Tactical Fighter Wing was composed of three squadrons of F-4 Phantoms. Normally, two of the three squadrons flew day missions, while the third one handled the night duties. Roughly every two months or so, word would come down from wing headquarters and the rotation would change. A different squadron would move to nights, while the crews returning to daytime would breathe a sigh of relief, happy to reenter the “normal” world of flying fighters in combat.

  Flying at nights was hard. The missions were longer, multiple air-to-air refuelings were the rule, and poor vision made even routine tasks difficult. I logged only a handful of night sorties, but they were some of the most challenging missions I was ever flew. More than enough to make me appreciate and admire the men who flew them night after night.

  Regardless of whether we flew at night or during the day, our wing had the same basic mission: interdiction of the weapons and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. The goal was always the same, but the types of aircraft, the tactics, and the success rate varied greatly between day and night.

  Interdiction was a weak part of a weak strategy used by the United States in Vietnam. The goal wasn’t to cut the Trail, or to completely stop the flow of men and materiel to the communists in the South; that had already been tried before, unsuccessfully. We were attempting to slow the movement, to make the Ho Chi Minh Trail more costly to the North Vietnamese, to reduce the pressure on the South Vietnamese.

  It was a flawed strategy, none of things that are normally done to win a war were allowed. The supplies for the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong brethren came in mostly by ship at Haiphong.The Rolling Thunder bombing campaign of North Vietnam had ended in 1968, so during my tour the trucks loaded with war materiel rolled mostly unimpeded through North Vietnam before entering the trail via one of the mountain passes linking North Vietnam and Laos. Yet invading North Vietnam was forbidden, mining Haiphong harbor was off-limits, and sending American troops into Laos was prohibited.

  Everyone in the squadron knew that waging war with a nebulous goal like “peace with honor” was a difficult task, but no one complained. As I’ve said, a fighter squadron’s job is to perform the mission assigned. It’s as black and white as a situation can be—you flew where you were ordered, with no opportunity to pass judgment on the wisdom or probity of the mission.

  Some of the guys in our unit referred to our flights over the Trail as “Beating the Tail.” The Laotians had an old saying: “You cannot kill a snake by beating on its tail.” Hanoi and Haiphong were the head, while the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the long, winding tail. We whipped the tail as hard as we could, knowing that while we might die in the process, the snake would survive.

  Everything centered on trucks. In the air war over the Trail, enemy soldiers weren’t being killed or captured in any significant number; the U.S. or South Vietnamese flag wasn’t being hoisted over conquered or occupied territory. Instead, hundreds of trucks were dying a sudden death, far from their birthplace in China or Russia. How bad a licking the tail was getting was measured mostly by the number of trucks destroyed. While porters and bicycles carried some supplies for the North Vietnamese, the vast majority of materiel was transported in trucks.

  Early in the war, the North Vietnamese had learned to move mostly at night; during the day, it was too easy to be seen and more difficult to hide. Nighttime was the main travel time along the Ho Chi Minh Trail; the trucks moved without headlights, with the same drivers repeatedly covering the same route for months on end. Driving in the dark became second nature for the men who lived on the Trail. Our mission was to find and destroy these trucks and prevent their supplies from reaching the communists in South Vietnam.

  Making things more difficult, the Ho Chi Minh Trail wasn’t a single road; but a vast network of roads, paths, and streams passing through Steel Tiger. There were dozens of branch roads, cutoffs, bypasses, and exits, as the Trail extended hundreds of miles from North Vietnam, down the panhandle, and into Cambodia. Even today, the Laotian panhandle is a wild place, a land of triple canopy jungle and limestone karst that seems to smother the earth. During the war, very little of the land had been cleared for cultivation; this was some of the most rugged terrain in all of Southeast Asia.

  In the daytime from the backseat of an F-4, the area looked like a large green blanket, marked with sinuous rivers and punctuated by jagged peaks that extended as high as eight thousand feet. At night, even the blur of green was gone. There were no lights, no sign of life; nothing but blackness.

  Mu Gia Pass, Ban Karai Pass, and Ban Raving Pass are names familiar to anyone who flew fighters in Southeast Asia. These were well-defended choke points that had been bombed repeatedly since back in 1965. As the war dragged on, the number of AAA sites continued to grow; by the time of my tour, the North Vietnamese had added Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) on their side of the passes.

  The first time I flew to Mu Gia, I told my frontseater that I felt like I had been to the moon. Mu Gia was as close to a lunar landscape as you’ll find on this planet: bomb craters lying on top of other craters, with filaments of newly built roads meandering through the pocked landscape. The area had repeatedly been struck by B-52 bombers early in the war and there were no trees, no buildings, no sign of life; nothing remained but holes in the brown earth.

  There was no more effective truck killer during the Vietnam War than the AC-130 Spectre gunship. The Spectre was one of a series of transport planes loaded up with guns and detection gear and used to support troops in contact with the enemy as well as destroying trucks. The AC-47 and the AC-119 preceded the AC-130, but by the end of the war, the Spectre was the king of the darkness, the most effective aircraft available for nighttime interdiction.

  Fast moving fighters, such as the F-4, operating on their own, were nowhere near as effective as gunships; they flew too high, moved too quickly, and saw too little. The main job of the F-4 was flak-suppression, stopping the AAA on the ground that was shooting at the gunship. When our squadron flew at night, we flew as an escort for the Spectre gunship.

  The Spectre was equipped w
ith a scope that intensified the available light from the moon and the stars and lit up the night. An infrared system could detect hot objects, such as truck engines, on the ground. For dealing with those trucks, a fully loaded gunship carried a deadly arsenal. The left side of the plane featured two 20 mm Gatling guns, a 40 mm Bofors cannon, and a huge 105 mm howitzer. To top it all off, the Spectre had a computer that linked the sensors and the ordnance together, eliminating much of the guesswork.

  Aided by these sophisticated sensors, the gunship would locate targets on the Trail, orbit in a left turn, and fire at the vehicles on the ground. On a lucky night, the Spectre might find a convoy of trucks, knock out the first and last vehicle to prevent escape, and proceed to destroy the entire group.

  The mood around the barracks changed during night flying. The trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail traveled throughout the night, often hitting a peak just before dawn. The gunships and their escorts followed the same schedule. During the day, the lights in the hootch were kept low; windows were blacked out; the maids cut back on cleaning and laundry; anyone up and about learned to tread softly. Since the night missions were much longer than the day sorties, the life of a fighter squadron was reduced to eating, sleeping, and flying, with little free time. I usually tried to get a sortie in the early evening so I could get to bed around midnight and still be able to go to work at the dispensary the next day.

  Our wing usually flew two-ship missions that took off at the same time. Once we linked up with the gunship over the target on the Trail, one of the Phantoms would almost immediately head to a tanker track over Thailand for air-to-air refueling. When the first plane returned to the target, the second F-4 would leave to hit the tanker. This pattern was repeated multiple times, with two or sometimes three air-to-air refuelings being the norm. The idea was to always have a fighter escort on station to protect the gunship.