by Tom Clancy
KORAT—1965
In March 1965, a series of air strikes against ninety-six targets in North Vietnam called ROLLING THUNDER began, and a platform was needed from which to base the attacks. For this purpose, Thailand proved ideal. It was close to both countries; the Thai Air Force had very fine airfields with 10,000-foot runways that they were under-using; Thailand was secure (there was no insurgency there); and finally, Americans could keep a low profile (no press was allowed), which meant that the American military presence could be concealed.
Before ROLLING THUNDER, some of the strikes had been launched out of the bases in Thailand, but those were short-notice deployments in and out of the bases, and no real infrastructure had been needed. The U.S. Air Force had simply used the runways and ramps, and the pilots slept in hotels, tents, or U.S. training compounds. But in March and April, when the attacks against North Vietnam (and Laos) began in earnest, two F-105 squadrons were sent to Korat (which grew to four squadrons by the time Horner returned to Korat in 1967), and a wing infrastructure was now needed to operate the bases in Thailand. Horner and Myhrum were to become part of this infrastructure.
At Korat, the wing staff was headed by Bill Richie, who had earlier flown across the Atlantic, using British equipment and F-84s, to prove air-to-air refueling for deployments. Horner and Myhrum were to serve as duty officers in the Wing Tactical Operations Center—that is, they were to be staff officers, who would help plan the missions. There were no plans for them to fly.
★ And so there they were, in April 1965, standing for the first time on the aircraft parking ramp at Korat Air Base, the Klong Courier now on the next leg of its circuit.
Though it had a first-class runway with a tower, in those days Korat was at best a sparse place. On a ramp in front of the tower, the Thai Air Force had its trainer aircraft parked, and nearby was a parking ramp for the two squadrons of F-105s. The buildings were wood frame with tin roofs. The housing was in the same type of wood buildings, with screening and open boards, so the air could circulate.
Soon after they landed, Horner and Myhrum were met by a friend from McConnell AFB in Kansas, Major Pete Van Huss. Van Huss was the ops officer of the McConnell squadron at Korat; the other squadron came from Kadena AFB in Okinawa. They all piled into a jeep and drove to where the hooches were located, which was about a mile off the flight line where the jets were parked. Van Huss dropped them off in a dusty stand of grass. They set their bags down and watched a flock of Thai carpenters set to work nailing and sawing.
The Thais put up a hooch frame, nailed screening all around it, put up boards along the sides at an angle—to keep the rain out and let the air in—put on a tin roof, hammered on the doors, and then went to the next open space and started on another hooch. Horner and Myhrum walked in, dropped their bags, and set up the cots that services had left for them. Then they unpacked and slipped into flight suits to go over to the officers’ club (a couple of hooches with a bar tacked together inside), run by hired Thais. Since they were the FNGs,9 they kept their mouths shut, except to welcome old friends as they filed back in from flights or other duties. Since the fighter community is very closely knit, and Horner and Myhrum were experienced fighter pilots and had some reputation, it was easy for them to fit in.
They very quickly picked up a pretty good idea about what was going on at the base: who was there, the kinds of missions being flown—bombing targets in North Vietnam like ammo dumps and bridges—and what were the gripes and good deals. The bad news was that the pilots at Korat were not willing to let the new guys fly with them . . . at least not then. Horner and Myhrum were there as staff, and in those early days of ROLLING THUNDER, operational tempos were not active. There weren’t enough sorties to go around.
That was to change a few weeks later as the flying tempo increased and some of the pilots got shot down. The resulting shortage meant that nobody could go on R & R unless Myhrum and Horner took up the slack in the flying schedule. But for the first couple of weeks it was very frustrating.
★ When Horner arrived at Korat, the squadron from McConnell and the squadron from Kadena operated as independent units; the one from Kansas was owned by TAC, while the one from Okinawa was owned by PACAF (officially, Southeast Asia came under PACAF, which made the squadron from Kadena more equal, in an Orwellian sense, than the squadron from McConnell). The two had a common command post and shared a mess hall, where the food was just about inedible. Horner, Myhrum, and a few others (most of them nonrated—to take care of supply, motor pool, maintenance control, intelligence, civil engineering, and the like) had been brought in to set up a wing structure not only for Korat but also for Ubon, Udorn, and Takhli. However, that quickly proved impossible, for there were not enough people to handle it, nor were there sufficient communications. Consequently, provisional wing structures were set up at each field.
From the start, there was rivalry between the two squadrons. Both TAC and PACAF wanted their squadrons to get their noses in the war. On the face of it, Kadena, from PACAF, had first dibs, since it was PACAF’s theater of operation. However, things weren’t quite that simple. Because Kadena and Yokota (in Japan) had nuclear alert duties, PACAF needed augmentation, which meant that TAC deployed a squadron. That didn’t mean that the TAC squadron was welcome, since PACAF didn’t want to share the glory of fighting the North Vietnamese with a TAC squadron any more than TAC wanted to share the glory with a PACAF squadron. It was all very adolescent, and in the end, it all proved moot. There turned out to be plenty of war to go around.
The competition between the commands was obvious, even at base level. Though the pilots and maintenance crews were all perfectly friendly, the deployed commanders were often reluctant to help one another out; each was trying to hog the war for himself. For example, Kadena squadrons, unlike TAC squadrons, normally didn’t deploy to other bases, and so didn’t have available the extensive war reserve spares kits that the others did—metal boxes on wheels that contained what a squadron needed for the first thirty days until a supply line to the depot could be put in place. You’d think it would be easy for a mechanic from Kadena to get a part from the TAC deployed spares kit. Think again.
The rivalry was also evident in the makeup of the provisional staff. PACAF made sure that Kadena people filled all the important positions, no matter what their qualifications were. Another bone in the TAC people’s craw was the rotation policies: the PACAF people rotated in and out on short notice, while the TAC people were there for as long as 120 days.
Leaving aside the command nonsense, life for the pilots in the spring of 1965 was relatively easy. They flew at most once a day, and planning the next day’s mission might take a couple of hours. After that, their time was their own. As for the missions themselves, most of them were far from difficult: They’d fly in a two-ship team along a stretch of highway in south or central North Vietnam until they saw something worth shooting or bombing. If they hit bingo fuel before they found anything, they’d drop their bombs on a bridge. In those days there were very few big missions, such as the multi-flight attacks on a fixed target deep inside North Vietnam that later became more the norm; but there were a few (which typically did not go well). Wartime flying was in fact very much like peacetime flying . . . except that people were trying to kill you.
★ Meanwhile, Horner and Myhrum took up their jobs as duty officers in the one-room Wing Tactical Operations Center (though it had a divider that split it into something like two rooms). For security, it was surrounded with a barbed-wire fence. The security was necessary because that was where the Frag—the term for Fragmentary Order, now called the Air Tasking Order—was received from Saigon. The Frag order was a computer listing of all the data associated with the next day’s air operations. It told pilots who would fly where, when, and drop what ordnance on what target, what tanker would be used and what off-load (that is, how many pounds of fuel each pilot would get from the tankers). It would also contain the call signs of the MiG CAP10 and other information.
Each pilot, if he was any good, and certainly the lead pilot, would go through the pages of the Frag the way he might go through a telephone book and find his unit—say, the 388th Tac Ftr Wing (Provisional). There, listed by call sign, were all the sorties the 388th was expected to fly the next day. After the call sign was further information: for example, Teak, 4 F-105s, Vinh Oil refinery BE12356778. This last was the bomb encyclopedia number, or BE number. This told pilots where to look up information about each target (which in fact intelligence had already done for them, since they also got the Frag). The pilots would then go to intelligence, and be provided with whatever information intelligence had available: this might be printouts of microfiche film of the target, drawings or maps, or only a verbal description. The pilots would certainly get latitude and longitude coordinates and probably DMIPs (Desired Mean Impact Point) and weapons-effects data: e.g., for 90 percent destruction, use this number of weapons of this type.
If intelligence had a photo of the target, the pilots would study it, so they could recognize it and know exactly where they should put their bombs, then they might divide up who targeted what. The flight would also plan the mission so that the debris from one aircraft’s bombs would not obscure the target for those behind him. Usually first bombs were dropped downwind of the other aim point(s).
Maps and pictures were additionally used by the pilots to “go from big to little.” Let’s say they were hitting a power station, a small target that might be hidden by trees. First they would plan their ingress route, based on weather, enemy defenses, terrain, etc. Then they’d look for large visual reference points—a bend in the river, a rail line, a bridge. Once they had one or more of these, they’d start looking for other reference points, so they could walk their eyes onto the target. Thus, after the bend in the river comes a large triangular rice paddy, and then on the east corner of the paddy there is a small canal that runs north and south, with a patch of jungle just south, and then the power station is two football fields’ distance to the south of that on the east bank of the canal.
Many of the targets Horner’s people were tasked to hit required this type of planning: they were so insignificant that they couldn’t see them until just before they released their bombs at about 4,000 feet above the ground; and so they flew to where they knew the target was located, and when it appeared they had barely enough time to adjust their flight path. If they were good, it appeared under their pippers (the red dot in the gun sight) at the right altitude, airspeed, and dive angle for their bombs to hit the target. On the other hand, if they had a good target—such as a railyard full of boxcars—then advance planning didn’t matter, since they could find the target from fifty miles away, and when they rolled in there was so much target that their pippers would be on something worth bombing regardless of their dive angle, airspeed, and altitude of release.
The Frag would also provide tanker information—that is, it told the pilot his air refueling contact time and which tanker track he’d be flying to—e.g., “Shell 30 at Orange anchor.” And finally, the Frag would provide a Time on or over Target, which was the time the bombs were scheduled to hit the target (all the other aircraft involved in a mission—MiG CAP, RESCAP, radar surveillance aircraft, and later Wild Weasels and support jamming—planned their efforts based on a pilot making his TOT).
Working the Frag was harder for the flight leader than for the other pilots. First of all, he had to ask himself how long it would take to reach the target from the tanker drop-off point. He would then call the tanker unit and tell them where and when he wanted to be dropped off. Then he would figure out how long it would take to fly to the tanker and refuel, and that would tell him what his takeoff time would be. He would then give this to the wing ops center, who would pass the word over to maintenance and also “deconflict” his flight from the other flights taking off around that time, in order to avoid midair collisions.
Meanwhile, he would need to look up other information: Who was pulling RESCAP that day? What was the call sign and frequency? Were there special instructions (such as: Avoid Phuc Yen airfield by ten miles . . . so as not to really disturb the enemy)? What were the flight call signs and targets being struck in the same time frame (so he’d know who was in the air when he was, where they were, and doing what)? And what were the code words for the day (such as for recall)? The better the flight leader, the more capable he was in reading the Frag, extracting all the relevant information, and then briefing the flight in such a way that a precise image of the coming reality was created and everyone could fly the mission in his mind before he set out. In that way, when he flew the mission he had already reduced the confusion and fog of war to the minimum.
★ Horner’s and Myhrum’s job was to break out the Frag order, and outline those items that applied to their base: missions, call signs, times for takeoff, refueling, and Time over Target. They would receive the Frag around 2200 at night (it would usually arrive on a T-39 executive jet that flew over from Saigon), with first takeoffs at 0600 in the morning.
In the beginning, the Frag was a nightmare to decode because the Frag team in Saigon would send the entire thing, which was a huge, complex document. Later the planners in Saigon separated out the information that didn’t change (such as tanker tracks, radar control unit information, frequencies, and so forth) into a separate Frag that was kept in operations, and the daily Frag contained only information that was new.
Once they’d broken out the Frag, Horner and Myhrum would give the details to intelligence, so they could dig out target materials, and to maintenance, so they could load the jets with munitions and get them ready to fly.
Once these arrived, the two of them passed the info over to the squadron duty officers, who would wake up the flight leaders so they could plan the missions.
It didn’t take them long to get into the groove of life at Korat.
During the day it was fiercely hot, but in the late afternoon or early evening, a thunderstorm would pass through and the air would cool off. That made sleeping at night very comfortable, and there was the squawking of the geckos—small, very loud lizards—to lull you to sleep. The roads were dirt, and red clay dust was everywhere. When it rained, they got muddy with red clay mud; but everything dried when the sun came out. They had common showers, where the maids also did the laundry and washed the sheets and clothing during the morning. And most had outdoor toilets.
For a swimming pool, they used a twenty-man life raft filled with rainwater. In the heat of the day, the pool water was cool and welcome. If you were flying and were sent on the early mission, you could find a place in the pool when you landed. But if you were flying a later mission, you had to wait until someone left the pool before you could sit in it.
★ After enduring a week of the confusion and frustration that goes with being in the military, Myhrum and Horner informed the two fighter squadrons at Korat that while they had been sent over to serve as staff officers and help plan missions, they still wanted to fly.
No one heard them. They kept getting the runaround: “Well, not today, but maybe tomorrow.”
Fed up, finally, Myhrum gave a call to a friend at Ta Khli. “Sure,” he told him, “we’re looking for pilots. Come on over.” Without telling anyone in authority, the two men packed their flight gear, arranged for someone to cover them in the command post for a couple of days, and went out to board the Klong Courier. But as they approached the ramp door of the C-130, Major Pete Van Huss of the McConnell squadron ran out to intercept them. “You can fly with us after all,” he said. “You don’t need to go to Ta Khli.” So they started flying. (Later, when the McConnell squadron rotated back to the States, they were handed off to the new squadron, who needed their experience.)
Chuck Horner’s first combat mission came in May 1965, when he flew as number two in a flight of four F-105s, each loaded with eight 750-pound general-purpose bombs. They’d been sent to destroy a gasoline storage area and pumping station at Vinh, North Vietnam, which was a
hundred miles south of Hanoi. More eager than nervous, he accomplished what had become “the routine” of preparation, briefing, preflight, taxi, takeoff, aerial refueling, and formation flying to the target . . . “routine,” because as the duty officer breaking out the Frag, he had already helped plan many sorties and he had also planned and executed practice missions for years.
It was early morning as they refueled over the Thai rice paddies, neat brown and green squares waiting to be planted or harvested . . . a stark contrast with Laos, which they crossed next. Laos was mostly mountainous jungle, wild and beautiful. Everywhere was a dark green canopy of trees, and here and there were small mountain ridges and karst—limestone mesas whose sides consisted of sheer cliffs thrusting sometimes a thousand feet up from the jungle floor, their tops a dark green cap of jungle. Next they flew across the high, narrow, north-south-running mountain range that separated Laos from North Vietnam. Beyond lay North Vietnam itself, a narrow strip of peaceful, beautifully green land, with the mountains on the west, the sea on the east, and a scattering of islands along the coast. Near the coast were numberless rice paddies, and near the mountains were low foothills, usually covered with jungle. Several rivers flowed from the mountains and snaked to the east and the ocean. In the morning, the land was calm, with fog in the low spots. During the day, rain clouds built up, especially over the mountains, and produced much lightning and heavy rain until well into the evening. As the pilot approached the coast, he saw more roads, and more towns and villages. These tended to be a cross between Oriental and French. Most buildings were wooden, with tin roofs, and raised on stilts off the ground. More solid structures, however, were occasionally left over from the French, usually large, made of white concrete, with red tile roofs.