Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  When the North Vietnamese began flying Russian-and Chinese-built MiG fighters, the Navy and Air Force asked Washington for permission to bomb their airfields. The request was denied. Categories of targets that could not be struck under any circumstances included dams, hydroelectric plants, fishing boats, sampans, and houseboats. They also included, significantly, populated areas. Seeing the military value of these restrictions, the North Vietnamese placed most of their SAM support facilities and other valuable cargo near Hanoi and Haiphong—places we were forbidden to strike. The airfields around Hanoi became sanctuaries for the MiGs; the commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had overall responsibility for the air war, urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to lift the crippling restrictions. Meanwhile, the enemy fighter pilots could sit on their runways in their planes without fear of attack, waiting to scramble when our bombers showed up.

  Eventually, Johnson and McNamara caved to pressure and agreed to allow strikes on the airfields. Yet they micromanaged even this, picking specific airfields and leaving others out of bounds. “It was always necessary virtually to beg target authorization out of Washington bit by piece,” Admiral Sharp wrote. Instead of letting the Navy launch a blitz that might break the back of the North Vietnamese Air Force, we hit a few air bases at a time while leaving the rest unscathed.

  Postwar research suggests that Hanoi occasionally received updated target lists about the same time we did on Yankee Station. Our own State Department passed the list to North Vietnamese via the Swiss government in hopes that Hanoi would evacuate civilians from the target areas. Of course they cared little about that. They simply used the valuable intel to duck the next onslaught, moving MiGs out of harm’s way and bolstering antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile batteries in the target areas for good measure. Destroying the MiGs on the ground proved difficult enough, but we were also ordered not to attack them in the air unless they could be visually identified and posed a direct threat.

  This was a setup for failure. And it got a lot worse.

  Those rules of engagement negated the way we had trained to fight in the air. The value of our F-4 Phantoms was their ability to destroy enemy planes from beyond visual range. The AIM-7 Sparrow was the ultimate expression of that new way of fighting. Track and lock with the radar system, loose the missile from ten miles out, and say goodbye to a MiG. This is how the Navy trained us to fight. We abandoned dogfight training because of the Navy’s faith in missile technology. Most of our aircrews didn’t know how to fight any other way. Yet our own rules of engagement kept us from using what we were taught.

  The rules of engagement specifically prohibited firing from beyond visual range. To shoot a missile at an aircraft, a fighter pilot first needed to visually confirm it was a MiG and not a friendly plane. The thought of inadvertent or accidental shootdown of our brothers was of course intolerable. It did happen, sadly, in the heat of combat. Yet three years along, the training squadron in California was still teaching long-range intercept tactics to the exclusion of everything else. Our training was not applicable to the air war in Vietnam.

  This played directly into the kind of fight the MiG pilots wanted.

  The MiG-17 was a nimble fighter armed with cannons, but no missiles. It was old school, derived from the lessons the Soviets learned in the Korean War. With such a plane, the North Vietnamese needed to get in close and track our planes with their gunsights. They would sometimes wait to open fire on us until they were within six hundred feet. Here we were, trained to knock planes down at ten miles. The F-4 carried only missiles; it did not have an internal gun because contractors and the Pentagon believed the age of the dogfight was over.

  We brought our expensive high tech into this knife fight in a phone booth. The result? The MiG pilots scored a lot more heavily than they should have.

  That one-versus-six fight that the Oriskany’s Dick Schaffert survived illustrated another problem. He started the day with four AIM-9 Sidewinders. On deck, just before launch, one of the missiles was found to be nonfunctional and was pulled off his aircraft. That left him three. He fired all of those at the MiGs, but none hit. His gun failed him, too.

  Our weapons didn’t work as advertised. I’d like to say this was an anomaly, but the exact same thing happened before Pearl Harbor with our torpedoes. Those weapons were the high-tech wizardry of the 1930s, which meant they were expensive. The Navy couldn’t afford to go blow up their torpedoes in training shoots. Instead, they used a dummy warhead that would cause the torpedo to float after its run. Very few live warheads were ever detonated prior to 1941.

  So imagine the surprise when the torpedoes proved to be unreliable. They ran in circles. They didn’t explode. The Navy bureaucracy resisted any suggestion that the torpedoes were malfunctioning, blaming instead the frontline sailors who were supposedly using the weapons improperly. It wasn’t until 1943 that the problem was finally identified and solved. It was a purely technical issue.

  Over Vietnam, our Sparrow missiles usually malfunctioned or missed. So did the AIM-9 Sidewinders. How could we not have known this prior to 1965? Well, history repeats: The weapons were so expensive that the Navy could not afford to use them in training. Live-fire shooting was done against drones flying straight and level, like an unsuspecting bomber might be caught doing. We didn’t know we had a problem until the weapons had to be deployed against fighters.

  While we never lost air superiority over North Vietnam, the MiGs and their pilots remained a significant threat. Their success against us pointed to a larger and more ominous problem: If the 170-odd MiGs of the North Vietnamese Air Force could inflict so many casualties on us, what would happen in a war with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviets, where they would outnumber us in the air maybe five to one? If Vietnam was a preview of our performance, we would be chewed up and overwhelmed.

  We had to find a way to win in spite of these technical problems and political interference. Robert McNamara was a numbers guy. Under him, the Pentagon measured success in the ground war by the body count. In the air, the metric was the number of sorties flown over North Vietnam. One sortie equals one plane flying one mission. A ten-plane raid resulted in ten sorties. This became a delusional world. A sortie counted in the total even if our bombers were forced to dump their payloads short of the target, which often happened when MiGs appeared.

  Facing pressure to generate sorties, the carriers were worn ragged. Aircraft handling crews worked twelve hours on, twelve off, spotting and respotting the decks, launching strikes, recovering aircraft, arming and refueling the birds, racing to meet the sortie rate required of them. Each pilot often flew twice a day, with each mission taking several hours to brief and debrief. We flew to the edge of fatigue and beyond. Aviators who were shot down and recovered were back in action in a short few days. During the Oriskany’s December 1967 MiG battle, Commander Schaffert flew with an undiagnosed broken back because no other pilots were available. The injury prevented him from turning his neck to check his tail. To compensate, he unstrapped his shoulder harness and swiveled his whole upper torso. If he had to eject, he probably would have died. The Bear, as he was called, is a combat legend in naval aviation. He survived Vietnam to become a respected author on the war’s history.

  While the tempo took a heavy toll, it also led to needless tragedies, including major fires aboard our carriers that were the result of exhausted crews making mistakes. Scores of sailors and aviators died in those accidents, and the fires on two carriers were serious enough to risk the loss of the ship.

  We were losing good men needlessly in the push to maintain the sortie rate. Why? Competition between the services. With the Air Force and Navy battling furiously for appropriations, both were determined to outdo the other in sorties flown.

  In 1967, just before the Enterprise arrived in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Navy and Air Force ran into a severe shortage of ordnance. With peacetime levels of production unable to supply the war’s demands, the Pentagon resor
ted to buying back thousands of bombs that had been sold to our NATO allies, paying inflated rates. They took old iron bombs out of World War II–era storage. The carriers still had to fly many missions short on bombs. Instead of two planes carrying the available ordnance, six or eight would be used. That way, when McNamara saw the daily numbers, he didn’t see any drop in the Navy’s performance.

  When the war revealed these weaknesses, the Washington bureaucracy was so moribund it could not find solutions. It kept us doing the same thing over and over with the same results: The North Vietnamese doubled down in supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam while we flew ourselves to exhaustion.

  This has been a fast summary of a pervasive, serious, multilayered crisis. I can assure you it was far harder to experience it than it has been to write about it. The problem has been well explained in many other books. But it was real. It was tragic. And it was a bitter experience for those of us who survived it.

  The only difference in my telling is that I would be given the responsibility of doing something to fix the problem. I’ll get to that story in a moment. But first I’ll have to show you how a carrier air wing survived a tour on Yankee Station in 1968.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  YANKEE STATION EDUCATION

  Yankee Station, off the coast of Vietnam

  Early 1968

  I stood in the locker space next to our squadron ready room, donning G-suit, boots, gloves, and packing my survival gear for the next mission. I reached into my locker and grabbed my Ray-Bans. More than a decade old, they came with me on almost every flight. As I took my helmet from my flight bag, I found my little stuffed mouse. Still there in his nest, beaten up from transoceanic travel, he peered out at me with the same stoic expression that caught my eye in that unvacated locker at North Island.

  Hey there, fella.

  The mouse was my good-luck charm. Thousands of hours in high-performance jets. Combat over Vietnam. Night landings aboard old carriers—that critter saw me through all of it. I thought about giving him to Dana. She was eight now and would probably love him. Then I remembered his original owner. I had no right to gift this toy. His home would always be in my flight bag. I’d have to get my little girl something else when I got home.

  When. Not if.

  I gave the mouse another look, then returned the bag to my locker. Helmet in hand, I almost forgot my National Match Colt .45 pistol in its shoulder holster. Another good-luck charm that I had flown with ever since my father-in-law, Coronado’s assistant chief of police, gave it to me. Retrieving it, I was good to go.

  I wanted a MiG. Badly. All us fighter pilots did. But those North Vietnamese pilots were cagey and elusive, thanks to their radar ground control and the handcuffs that were locked on the wrists of those who wanted to destroy them. Weeks would pass without any American spotting a MiG. Then suddenly they would come streaking out of nowhere to tear into our thirty-plane strike formations.

  I had yet to encounter one on any of my flights over North Vietnam.

  Day after day, we flew missions from Yankee Station to hammer targets of questionable value. We bombed truck convoys when we could find them on search and destroy missions. They moved mostly at night in total darkness. We bombed supply depots and occasionally went after power plants, as well as military barracks long flattened by the squadrons who had deployed before us. We went after bridges and SAM sites. Very occasionally, we received permission from Washington to hit the MiG airfields around Hanoi.

  The F-4 was designed from the ground up to be a Mach-plus interceptor. It was supposed to be the bane of all Soviet-built strategic bombers. Over Vietnam, the Phantom became perhaps the most versatile multirole aircraft America ever produced. Still with its interceptor heart, it functioned as an escort fighter, a utility strike bomber, and, south of the Demilitarized Zone, a close air support attack aircraft.

  We were doing it all, learning on the job how best to carry out our missions. And they were never the same. But the two-a-days over the North, usually one at night, left us worn out. Lack of quality sleep also put our nerves on edge at times. We grew easily frustrated. Some people started to withdraw under the pressure, the exhaustion, and the grief over losing so many friends. This didn’t happen in my squadron. Skank and the other senior pilots set the example by flying almost all the difficult missions with the junior crews, while never griping about the targets or the rules of engagement. They were great pilots as well as tremendous inspirations to all of us. Skank kept us focused and working as a team, taking care of each other as we flew daily into harm’s way. In our air wing, all of the squadrons were led by example. It wasn’t always that way, as some other outfits experienced.

  We were losing guys to SAMs, flak, and even marauding MiGs whose pilots, well directed by radar, would launch slashing attacks into our formations. They were particularly adept at hitting the Air Force F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers, forcing them to jettison their ordnance and sparing the targets from being struck again.

  Naval aviation and the Air Force will always be rivals as well as brothers in arms. In 1968, I felt for those Thud pilots, who took heavy losses over North Vietnam. Out of 833 F-105s built by Republic, 382 went down in Southeast Asia. Those Thud pilots were like our A-4 Skyhawk drivers—courageous and dedicated American heroes.

  This afternoon, it was our turn to go beard the North Vietnamese lion. Dressed, armed, and ready to go, the pilots on the scheduled mission walked into the Strike Operations Center for the briefing. We usually went to the Strike Ops Center because that’s where the ship’s intelligence officers worked. We considered them lazy and figured they had no idea where our ready rooms were, so we made it easy and went to them.

  As we entered, I caught sight of the day’s map and my heart sank. No chance of MiGs on this run. The target area straddled the DMZ between North and South Vietnam at a place called Khe Sanh.

  At the end of January, the North Vietnamese Army launched a major attack against a series of special forces outposts and the Marine firebase at Khe Sanh, which sat up on top of a flat-topped hill with all sides exposed. The embattled American and South Vietnamese troops were soon surrounded, deluged with artillery fire, and cut off from overland resupply. Helicopters and transport planes trying to get into the small airfield at Khe Sanh faced a gauntlet of antiaircraft weapons on their approach, then mortar fire as they touched down on the runway. A night assault by the North Vietnamese managed to break through the base defenses, but before they could exploit the penetration, a Marine platoon counterattacked into the charging enemy troops. In a swirling fight that evolved into a brawl with bayonets, rifle butts, and bare knuckles, the Marines threw them back.

  They were holding on with sheer guts and firepower. Overhead, two Air Force B-52 Stratofortresses gave the Marines support by carpet-bombing the enemy’s positions. Marine aircraft, other Air Force fighter-bombers, and now the Yankee Station air wings were joining the fight to save the firebase and the lives of the valiant men enduring the siege.

  We launched late that afternoon and flew two hundred miles to our marshaling station above Khe Sanh. With the battle filling the surrounding valleys with gray-black smoke, we had only glimpses of what was happening below. The airfield was a scene of carnage. Burnt-out aircraft lay pushed to the side of the runway, victims of the mortar barrages. The base itself looked like a lunar landscape, with thousands of shell craters overlapping in the soft reddish soil.

  I checked in with the Marine forward air controller whose job it was to guide us onto target. He was down there, right among those young American kids, enduring the artillery barrages and night assaults alongside them. With his radios and expertise, he was their fist of God. He was probably a Marine aviator as well, so he spoke our language and understood our perspective.

  The forward air controller heard my check-in radio call and responded immediately. The situation sounded dire from his description. North Vietnamese troops were massing just beyond the wire for another night assault, and he wa
nted me to hit them with everything under my wings before darkness gave them the opportunity to attack again.

  The late day offered a rare cloudless sky. The blue stretching above me contrasted with the ugly coils of smoke and flame filling the valley under my Phantom’s nose. After receiving my instructions, I started down to begin my run.

  “Keep your speed up, five hundred knots, four hundred feet, they’ll be shooting at you,” called the forward air controller. “Drop all your Snakes on my signal. Remember, there are Marines on the wire, just off your left wing.”

  I carried a dozen five-hundred-pound Mark 82 Snake Eye bombs. When we dropped these, spring-loaded air brakes or fins would deploy, and the bombs would fall virtually straight down at the point of release. It made for a very accurate weapon, plus it gave us aircrew time to get away from their explosions and fragment patterns when we were dropping from low altitude.

  I leveled off at four hundred feet, going five hundred knots. The Phantom sped through clouds of smoke. From the hills to our right, small-arms fire erupted and my back-seater, Dennis Duffy, and I could see the muzzle flashes. Moments later, red-orange tracers laced the sky ahead and level with us.

  With my high speed, I wasn’t so concerned with taking hits from those North Vietnamese troops on the right of us whose tracers were horizontal, but I was terrified of blowing the run and dropping my Snakes on the Marines near the wire by accident. Earlier, an inexperienced Navy pilot did just that by accident and wounded some of our men.

  The idea of killing Americans with a misplaced bomb? Well, I knew I would never get over that if it happened.

  I listened carefully to every word the forward air controller said. If I wasn’t exactly level, the bombs might fall right or left of the target area, depending on where my wings were to the horizon. Holding steady while every bad guy with an AK-47 seemed to be shooting at me was no easy feat. In fact, it was the toughest flying I’d ever done.