Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  Mary Beth had gotten married to her football player. I never tried to win her back. Her marriage was the final nail in the coffin of my wishful thinking. I had to let her go. Eventually, I met a wonderful young woman in Coronado, Maddi, and married her in 1959. A year later, our daughter, Dana, arrived. My wife and I began a seventeen-year journey in Navy life, with far too much time apart.

  Flying is a dangerous game of risk versus reward. Push too far and you pay the price. Before I joined the Black Lions, I only had to look out for myself and my squadron mates. Different game now. I lived for two others who depended on me. Becoming a family man coincided with my first fleet assignment aboard the Hancock. My 1962 deployment lasted from February to November. We got back to the West Coast and started training for the next one, running simulated intercepts in our Demons three or four nights a week. On that schedule, even when we were at home we were not really home. I’ve already explained what that did to families. Our 1963 deployment began in the spring after being home for less than six months. Hugs, goodbyes, tears on cheeks. Dana’s little hand pressed into mine. Then back to the ship to manage a long-distance relationship through handwritten letters, voice messages on cassette tapes, and an occasional phone call.

  The second parting for my family was worse than the first. I didn’t want to be a stranger to my own daughter, but what choice did I have? The Navy needed me on the other side of the Pacific; it was my sworn duty to go.

  We did not stay long off South Vietnam. The new military junta restored order surprisingly quickly in the wake of Diem’s death even as the war against the Communist insurgency continued. Three weeks later, after John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president. The Hancock sailed for home port a few days after the assassination. We reached San Diego on December 15, 1963, to a joyous reunion. It was our last peacetime holiday season for a decade, and the only “home by Christmas” moment that many of us ever shared.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE PATH TO DISILLUSIONMENT

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

  January 1967

  I stood at attention on the flight deck of the Enterprise as the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steamed slowly in the channel past Hospital Point. A couple of tugs hove to, but were not needed. Every skipper in the Navy knew this channel like his own hometown.

  Ahead and off to port, USS Arizona lay in her grave. Above the national memorial, her flag flew proudly, the Stars and Stripes full in the wind. Beneath it lay the remains of more than a thousand sailors, killed on the first day of war on December 7, 1941, a full generation earlier. The USS Arizona Memorial is the closest thing to a shrine that the Navy has, this side of John Paul Jones’s crypt at the Naval Academy. Ever since that day of infamy, it has been tradition to render honors to those sailors whenever a warship arrives in Pearl Harbor. A flight-deck parade was the order of the day. A voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker, “Attention on deck, hand salute!” As one, the crew of the Enterprise touched our foreheads with our right hands and held position.

  I’d done this before aboard the Hancock, but it was different now, and everyone could feel it. Some of my shipmates held back tears in their eyes. After three years of war, we knew the cost. All those men, entombed in that shattered hull. Airpower did this.

  After this short stop at Pearl, my unit, Fighter Squadron 92, would be on its way to Yankee Station, the patch of water in the Gulf of Tonkin where our carriers operated against the North Vietnamese. VF-92, known as the Silver Kings, would join President Johnson’s three-year-long air campaign against North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder.

  I held the salute as we steamed past the Arizona, oil still rising to the surface from her rusted fuel bunkers after all these years. The white memorial was filled with people, civilian tourists mainly, who looked away from the names of the dead to behold the Big E sliding through the channel with a thousand men at rigid attention in their tropical whites.

  I’d returned from sea duty aboard Hancock just as the last hopes to avert war in Vietnam were dashed. As the Gulf of Tonkin incident drew the United States into an open-ended, overt commitment, I received orders sending me to the fleet antiair warfare training center at Point Loma in San Diego. While other aviators went to war, I was on the beach, helping the Navy evolve from analog technology to digital battle management, developing computer systems for our shipboard combat information centers. After two cruises on Hancock it was a welcome rest. I enjoyed two good years ashore with my wife and daughter.

  In August 1964, the president authorized airstrikes against Communist targets. On August 5, Everett Alvarez, the son of Mexican immigrants who settled in Salinas, California, was shot down while piloting an A-4 Skyhawk bomber. The first U.S. naval aviator to be taken by the North Vietnamese, he endured more than eight years of torture in captivity.

  I thought of the friends I’d lost since that first accident a few months after joining VF(AW)-3. Since then, the roster of the killed, missing, or wounded had grown long. Vietnam was chewing us up just as the Navy was trying to maintain America’s global commitments elsewhere, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. A lot of guys started getting out. When Rolling Thunder started, I was home. I was tempted to get out too. The airlines were hiring, offering salaries double or triple what we made as naval aviators. But I wasn’t wired to be an airline pilot.

  Whenever I was in San Diego, I went to North Island to see an old neighbor from my VF(AW)-3 days, Roger Crim. He was in charge of test flying the aircraft that had been patched up at the maintenance and overhaul facility. He usually let me check out a repaired bird. Thanks to him and one of his chiefs, I was able to fly everything from an F6F Hellcat to the aircraft that replaced the Demon, its larger, twin-engine cousin, the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II.

  The first time I flew the Phantom, feeling the rush of reaching Mach 2, convinced me to stay in the Navy. When my tour of duty ashore came to an end, I arranged to receive orders to train to fly the new fighter, before joining a squadron on the Enterprise.

  After ten years of flying fighters, I felt ready and confident. I’d aced the F-4 training at VF-121, the West Coast’s replacement air group (RAG) for the Phantom community. This squadron prepared all new F-4 crews for their Vietnam deployments. We flew constantly, training hard at our beyond-visual-range missile intercepts. We even got to shoot a drone down with a Sparrow, one of the only times I’d actually fired one of these new high-tech weapons. On the ground, our instructors gave us intelligence briefs and taught us about our weapons and sensor systems. Then came survival training. We had to escape and evade the enemy force (our instructors) as if we had ejected into hostile territory. After a few days, I was captured—everyone was—and thrown into a thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch wooden box with just a couple of breathing holes. When I made the mistake of revealing to the “enemy” guards my fear of spiders, they made sure to let me live with one for a while in that box. One cold night it crawled right across my face. This, of course, was nothing next to what the North Vietnamese were doing to our downed aviators.

  After a few days in Pearl, we were on our way west to Sasebo, Japan. Our arrival was met by massive protests. Students and radicals opposed the Vietnam War. Others protested the first-ever appearance of a nuclear-powered ship not far from Nagasaki, which had been devastated by an atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. Armed with clubs and throwing rocks, the protesters tried to storm the base. The police, wielding truncheons, water cannon, and bare knuckles, needed two days to return the Japanese city to its natural state: quiet law and order. Things were raw then. When the carrier Oriskany called at Sasebo around the same time we did, we learned that its air wing had lost half its aircraft over North Vietnam, and had suffered a third of its aircrews either killed, wounded, or missing in action. Their casualty list eventually included Lieutenant j.g. John McCain, the future senator from Arizona who was captured in October 1967.

  Only a few weeks before our ships crossed paths, one of
Oriskany’s F-8 pilots, Lieutenant Commander Dick Schaffert, fought an epic duel against six North Vietnamese MiG-17s and MiG-21s. He had been escorting an A-4 Skyhawk strike when they were attacked. Schaffert fired all three of his Sidewinder missiles, but each malfunctioned or missed. When he switched to his 20mm cannon, the high-G maneuvering jammed the pneumatic feed system, leaving him defenseless. Nevertheless, he stalemated the MiGs with an exceptional display of flying before slipping away on the dregs of his remaining fuel. Other Oriskany fighters showed up a moment later and downed one of the MiGs. They fired seven missiles in that fight. Only one hit.

  Aboard the Enterprise, we didn’t know any of this at the time, but there was enough scuttlebutt to give us a sense that the intel briefings back in California had been anything but thorough. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. The enemy was a mystery to us. We didn’t know their current capabilities; we didn’t know anything about their tactics. The intelligence officers who briefed us talked a lot about the antiaircraft weapons we would face, as well as the surface-to-air missiles the North Vietnamese received from the Soviet Union. We heard that MiG interceptors were based near Hanoi, but learned little of those airfields, or the geography and weather of North Vietnam. I assumed that as we got closer to Yankee Station, we would receive more thorough briefings and get an accurate air order of battle—basically a list of North Vietnamese forces arrayed against us. That never happened. The reports that could have helped us turned out to be highly classified.

  Though we were supposed to be heading to Yankee Station, a crisis developed off North Korea. En route to Subic Bay in the Philippines, we received orders to reverse course and speed to the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans had sent a commando team to assassinate the president of South Korea, then captured a U.S. Navy vessel, USS Pueblo, in international waters. Four torpedo boats, MiG-21 fighters, and two submarine chasers pursued the little intelligence-gathering ship. Their gunfire killed a sailor from Oregon. The North Koreans then boarded the ship, captured the crew, and began torturing them. They also scooped up enough classified material and encryption gear to allow the Soviets to read certain types of U.S. Navy communications for the next twenty years.

  It was humiliating. We were locked in a war seemingly without end, and now another one seemed to be flaring. The Big E steamed off Korea as a show of force.

  We arrived on station to face terrible winter weather. We sailed through blizzards and snow squalls that left us unable even to see the end of the flight deck from the ship’s island. Then Washington told us we would be flying patrols in these storms. Of the almost hundred pilots aboard, only six were selected to fly in that horrible weather. I was tapped to fly wing on our squadron commander, Commander T. Schenck Remsen.

  Nicknamed “Skank,” Remsen was one of the rarest of leaders. A talented pilot, he led from the front and always took the toughest assignments. He had a natural energy about him that inspired the junior officers, and his concern for their well-being engendered absolute loyalty to him. Naturally, when word arrived that we needed to fly a patrol along the Korean coast in a snowstorm at night, Skank took the mission.

  The flight deck turned out to be covered in ice. The crew had to assist us to our F-4 Phantoms so we didn’t slip and fall. Once in the cockpits, we were towed to the catapults, so we didn’t slide around on the ice. A night cat shot is always an experience. Add snow flurries and heavy seas and you’ve got a real adventure.

  We climbed above twenty thousand feet but never broke free of the storm. It was so thick that Skank and I couldn’t even see each other. My back-seater, Dennis Duffy, tracked him on radar and we followed a few miles behind. Snow and ice lashed our Phantoms. The windscreen was a kaleidoscope of snowflakes. It was like flying through a snow globe.

  The Enterprise finally vectored us to a holding pattern before we returned to the ship. As our approach time drew near, I thought it strange that they never gave us a weather report. We started our descents individually through the heart of the blizzard. Visibility was almost nil. Skank went in to land first, guided by radar from the ship. He saw nothing on that first approach. No lights, no carrier. Just blizzard and blackness. The landing signal officer said, “You sounded good when you went by us!”

  When he finally landed, Skank and the landing signal officer talked to me as I swung around the ship again. Stay low. Follow the ship’s wake. I got down as close to the water as I dared. Forty feet, maybe. The flight deck sits sixty-five feet off the swells. A red light began flashing in my cockpit. Low fuel. This was it. Either land or eject into the frigid seas and see how good our survival suits really were. Our life expectancy in the freezing water was five minutes. No thanks.

  In the darkness, I found the carrier’s white wake and followed it until I spotted the drop lights on the ship’s stern ahead. They were above me. The landing signal officer told me to climb. I pulled the nose up. As the Phantom’s nose topped the ramp, I pushed the stick forward, and an instant later, pulled back up. This was an old trick a World War II ace named Zeke Cormier taught me. It saved my and Dennis’s lives that night. The Phantom touched the deck, the tail hook caught an arresting wire, and we jerked to a stop.

  As we waited for the deck crew to clear us, my knees trembled and my feet shook on the brake pedals. Of all the flying I’d done to date, this was the most demanding. Why somebody in Washington wanted us in the air that night is anyone’s guess. I can’t think of what we accomplished in our ninety-minute sortie, other than perhaps impress the North Korean radar operators, who undoubtedly tracked our progress through the weather. We had risked our lives for nothing. Who were these politicians to play games with our lives? I’d never questioned our chain of command before, at least not above the squadron level. We trusted that our leadership would not saddle us with needless risk. But that flight was the first step down a path of disillusionment we all experienced in the western Pacific. I sat in the squadron ready room with a mug of hot coffee and a bag of popcorn. You’re all right, man. You can enjoy life again. But our problems only got worse from there.

  Not long after our Pueblo diversion, the Enterprise’s air wing went into battle over North Vietnam. I flew my first combat missions filled with assumptions and expectations based on the stories I’d been told by the combat veterans I’d known. They had ripped a swath through our enemies in a way that has rarely been equaled in history. I expected to do the same over North Vietnam. But that was not how Operation Rolling Thunder rolled.

  Conceived in Washington by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and approved by President Johnson, our bombing campaign was meant not to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. It wasn’t designed to demolish their air defense network, so we could operate over North Vietnam with impunity. It had nothing to do with tangible results or victory. It had everything to do with sending gradual messages to Hanoi. Where I had expected to be the tip of the spear, we were instead the thumb and forefinger of Lyndon Johnson’s gradual escalation of pressure on the North Vietnamese. We weren’t allowed to apply pressure anywhere that it might hurt. We were allowed just to pinch their metaphorical shoulder as a warning that if they didn’t behave, we would pinch harder.

  Gradual escalation of pressure on an enemy was a strategy conceived by people who probably had never even been in a schoolyard fight against a bully. Imagine the school bell’s ringing at the end of the day. You head out to walk home, and along the way you see a bully beating up on a younger kid. You go over to help, but instead of knocking down the bully, you tap him lightly on the back of the head and say, “Keep that up, and I’ll get serious!”

  What’s the bully going to do?

  The Rolling Thunder campaign was LBJ’s personal billy club. He would send us to smack the North Vietnamese for sending supplies and troops to the insurgents, then order unilateral stand-downs—known as bombing pauses—to give the North Vietnamese time to internalize the punishment and heed its lesson. But the pauses just gave them time to rearm. The American response s
eemed only to embolden Hanoi and convince its leadership that we were more worried about widening the war and possibly fighting China or the Soviet Union than we were about defeating them. They used the bombing pauses to resupply and prepare for the next onslaught. A lot of Americans died as a result. Some were friends of mine.

  On Yankee Station, the Enterprise air wing learned what this meant to individual aircrews. Johnson and McNamara micromanaged the losing air war from Washington, D.C., going so far as to pick our targets. There were perhaps 150 worthwhile things to bomb in North Vietnam. Airfields, military bases, supply facilities, power plants, bridges, rail centers, oil and lubricant facilities, a few steel mills, and of course Haiphong’s port facilities. As both China and Russia wanted to be Hanoi’s primary ally, they tried to one-up each other with military support. Large convoys of weapons and war matériel flowed across the Chinese border into Vietnam, while the Russians heavy-hauled tanks and surface-to-air missile systems via cargo ships to Haiphong Harbor. The enemy thus had sanctuary to bring in whatever was needed, and for years.

  Afraid of escalating the war, the Johnson administration refused to sanction attacks on Haiphong Harbor or the shipping there. As we started flying missions up north, we would pass near those cargo ships as they waited their turn to offload at the docks. We could see their decks crammed with weatherized MiGs and surface-to-air missiles that would shortly be used against us.

  But we couldn’t hit them. And we couldn’t mine the harbor, either. What a tragedy. The simple execution of an off-the-shelf aerial mining plan, long before perfected during World War II and carried out in three days, could have shut down that big port—the only one of its kind in North Vietnam. But the word from the White House was no.

  Those big surface-to-air missiles, as large as telephone poles, would spear up into the sky after our aircraft, homing on their radar signatures. They took a heavy toll. We could seldom bomb the missile sites for fear we might kill their Russian advisers.