Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  I checked my heading. Wings level. A split second later, the forward air controller called, “Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  I pickled the Mark 82s. The F-4 lurched upward as the six thousand pounds of bombs came off our hardpoints and began falling toward the ground. Simultaneously, I pushed the throttle further and lit the burner. The Phantom’s twin J79 engines responded and we pulled up with five Gs back to where we belonged—far above the fray.

  Duff, my back-seater, said, “Let’s haul ass, Kemosabe!”

  As we climbed, my throat constricted, heart filled with dread while we waited to hear from the forward air controller. Toughest part of the mission is waiting for the results from the big grunt FAC.

  Oh shit. Did I just kill a bunch of Marines?

  No word from the controller. The altimeter needle spun as we speared through three thousand feet. The seconds ticked off. No word. Behind me, Dennis was probably twisted in his ejection seat, trying to see where our bombs had landed.

  Oh shit…

  The radio filled with static, then the forward air controller’s voice shouted, “Great run! Great run! Right on target!”

  I started to breathe again. Then a big smile formed under my oxygen mask. We’d done a few of these close air support runs in training, and a couple more over South Vietnam on our way to Yankee Station, but nothing like this. Those Marines were dangerously close to the release point.

  One by one, my division of Phantoms made their runs, then we formed up and flew back to the ship, or home plate, as we called it. For days we flew these missions, supporting those desperate Marines. It felt good to be doing something useful. Every North Vietnamese we took out by our bombs was one less rifle pointed at our men below.

  The Marines held. And as a joint Army, Marine, and South Vietnamese rescue force battled its way up Highway Nine to break the siege, the Enterprise air wing returned to its regularly scheduled programming over North Vietnam.

  We flew day and night in any kind of weather. We flew alpha strikes, which were large, unwieldy raids of thirty or more planes. We F-4s provided escort against the MiG threat, or went in to suppress air defenses while A-4 Skyhawk attack planes struck the targets. We flew two-and four-plane armed recce missions, searching for anything worthwhile Washington allowed us to bomb.

  Because we owned the airspace over their country, the North Vietnamese took to sending war matériel and men south to the war zone under the cover of darkness. To counter this, we flew at night, hunting for their vehicle convoys in hopes of catching them on the roads heading south.

  The North Vietnamese guarded those truck convoys with light antiaircraft guns mounted on armored cars that looked a lot like the ones we built and supplied to the Soviets during World War II. With heavy machine guns or light cannon, they could hammer at us as we dove down to make our attacks.

  The rules of engagement made it much easier for them to hit us. Washington dictated that we drop flares first, identify any trucks as military vehicles, then dive down under the flare light to deliver our attacks. The enemy quickly figured this out. Whenever we dropped a flare, their gunners would lace the illuminated area below it with tracers and exploding antiaircraft shells. We’d dive through all that incoming and get a split-second opportunity to release our bombs.

  Once again, it would have been really nice to have had an internal 20mm cannon for such moments. We could have strafed our way in and suppressed some of the fire coming back at us. Instead, we just had to take it. There is nothing more frustrating than being a target that can’t fight back until your bombs impact behind you.

  One night, I was leading a two-plane armed reconnaissance patrol looking for movement on Highway One, which ran down the coastline. Near the port of Vinh, perhaps 160 miles from Hanoi, we caught sight of a couple of dim lights on the road.

  There are no friends of mine down there, that’s for sure.

  Free from concern for a friendly fire incident, we looped around and decided to attack west to east along the road. Normally, either we’d make a pass and drop a flare, or one plane would drop the flare while the other attacked under it. Better yet, sometimes we delayed our attack until the flare burned out and most of the flak had stopped. We were a whole lot smarter than those rules of engagement writers back in D.C., and our being unpredictable gave the North Vietnamese gunners fits.

  I’m tired of getting shot at. Screw the flares.

  We carried cluster bombs that night. Think of these things as mother bombs that open up and released to spew dozens of small baby bomblets all over the area below. These hit the ground, detonate, and do their damage with thousands of whirring fragments of shrapnel. They were designed to kill troops in the open, but we found that they could cut through unarmored vehicles and set them afire. A good drop with a full load of cluster bombs from an F-4 would create a kill zone hundreds of meters in every direction. They were devastating weapons and much feared.

  Down we went, my wingman trailing offset, just behind me. I released first. He followed a heartbeat later, and as we pulled off target and climbed into the dark night, two full loads of cluster bombs lit up a truck convoy filled with munitions and barrels of fuel. The fiery streaks in the air above Highway One could be seen for miles. Pilots patrolling the coast that night saw the fireworks on the horizon and asked, “What’s happening down at Vinh?” That night we put a dent in the logistical train supplying the Tet Offensive in the South. These were moments to savor.

  After we returned to the ship, I got a surprise. Following the debrief, some staff weenie stormed up to me and threatened to court-martial me for violating the rules of engagement. That flare I didn’t drop? Yeah, that could have cost me my career, thanks to the rules of engagement and lockstep thinking of noncombat officers. I told him to pound sand. The attack was one of the most successful missions the squadron flew. It was also a reminder that in McNamara’s war, the margin between a court-martial and a valor award was thin.

  The missions continued, as did the losses. There were nights I got back to my bunk struggling with despair. Seeing friends die is never an easy thing. At times, you think you grow hard to it. Other times, their deaths open wounds that the heart simply cannot heal. On those nights, I would crawl under the covers and lay there, unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, mind racing.

  Could we have done anything different? Could he have gotten out and we just didn’t see the chute? Fortunately, none of them were from my squadron.

  I’d try not to think about their families back home, but the faces of the wives and kids would sometimes elude those efforts, and they would come back to me in a rush. I found through my Navy career that some men revel in the challenge and rush of combat. That pace off Vietnam? It was their hunting ground. Me, I never got to that point. Combat was a responsibility, even a sacred duty. That moment as we passed the Arizona was a reminder of that legacy and the connection we combat pilots shared in it. I took it very seriously, of course, but I never liked it. Those men I would never see again, those families I would see too soon again—they were the cost of that adrenaline rush others craved. That was a burden I couldn’t carry and love at the same time.

  The enemy always had a say, and that was the wild card in combat. You could do everything right. Your division could do everything right. Your chain of command could make every right decision and lead from the front, like Skank did. Yet we faced a cunning, devoted, and frankly courageous enemy who found ways to surprise us with new tricks.

  On those sleepless nights, my brain refusing to shut off, I would think of those empty wardroom chairs. We lost some excellent pilots. All the talent in the world was not enough when fate called your number.

  I didn’t go to church much after I left home, but I never lost my devotion. As the missions grew tougher and the roster of the dead and missing grew longer, I relied heavily on that faith to see me through. Knowing that there is a purpose, that it wasn’t all about capricious random acts of chance that could kill us, gave me a measure of comfort
that made getting into the cockpit every morning an easier task.

  In those sleepless nights, which most of us out on Yankee Station had, we did our best not to think of home. It could make you cautious, hesitant in the air, get you killed. If you were wise, you never looked past the next dawn. Some combat vets would tell new guys, “Assume you’re never coming back, truly believe it, and you will make it home.” It was a psychological paradox of battle.

  In my darkest times, I would think of Mary Beth. The heart loves who it loves. Nothing can change that. While I had not spoken to her or seen her in over a decade, I remembered every nuance of her face. I worked on my marriage every day I was home in California. I loved my wife and always would, whether we made it through the ordeals of combat and separation or not. But in my most honest moments, I knew Mary Beth would always be the love of my life, and it gave me comfort to know she was out there in the world. Most people never find their soul mate. At least I knew who mine was, even if I never saw her again.

  After weeks of nonstop operations, we left Yankee Station and set course for Subic Bay for a rest period. We were wound as tight as humans can be. If you’ve ever watched the opening scenes of the movie Das Boot, you may understand the craziness we unleashed at the Cubi Point Officers’ Club. These breaks from combat offered a chance to release the tension. It came out in spasms of partying, womanizing for a lot of the guys, stunts, pranks, and rivers of alcohol.

  The club sat on a hill overlooking Subic Bay’s mile-and-a-half-long runway. With a thatched roof, a concrete floor, and disposable plastic or metal furniture, the place pulled off the stereotypical tropical dive bar aura perfectly. We drank the beer that helped make Andrés Soriano one of the richest men in history. His San Miguel beer cost ten cents a bottle and there was plenty to be found.

  The place had catered to nearly every naval aviator who’s ever done a WestPac cruise. The walls memorialized them, and in that respect our tropical dive bar was part museum, part memorial to those who came before us. Every squadron contributed plaques or photographs or memorabilia. It lent the place a hallowed feel, and in later years after Subic Bay closed down and the Navy left, the Cubi Point O Club was almost perfectly replicated back in Pensacola at the National Naval Aviation Museum. It was that important to us.

  We had some unique features built into the place over the years. A local engineer and some junior officers built a small catapult track including an old aircraft cockpit with a tail hook release handle. Its propulsion system was nitrogen-powered and shot you down a short track. If you didn’t get the arresting hook down to catch a wire you ended up in a tank of lukewarm water. Actually, it was probably mostly beer, though I suspected that late at night some junior officers had added other ingredients. Loud cheers followed any attempt, successful or not. The “cat track” was indifferent to the rank of the man in the cockpit. One night I watched the secretary of the Navy get very wet a couple of times.

  The coiled tension sprang out of us in other ways. With lots of alcohol came an erosion of self-restraint, and those resentments built up on Yankee Station leached out of us at times. There were arguments and fights. Having learned on Yankee Station that rank alone did not make you a leader, we did not consider every superior as such. Leaders had courage, skill, and a willingness to set a good example. They took the toughest missions while working harder than everyone else. Those who did not measure up were obeyed only because of their rank and the fact that we were devoted to the discipline our Navy had instilled in us.

  One night, an air wing commander who was roundly despised by his men somehow triggered his junior officers. Rank forgotten, the young guys started throwing punches. The air wing commander fought back, but, outnumbered, he was beaten to the deck. Still he refused to quit. He called out his men to bring it on, and they went at it again. Nobody intervened. That was an internal affair best resolved as warriors will. When the beatdown ended and the air wing commander lay on the deck, bloody and put in his place, his pilots looked down at him and one shouted, “Now we’re even, CAG.”

  When you’re asked to risk your life day after day for a cause that often made no sense, bound by rules that made it more likely you would die, poor leadership was often the final straw. That night, I felt grateful we had Skank Remsen leading us into the fray.

  After about a week in the Philippines, we rotated back to Yankee Station, stopping along the way at a point off South Vietnam for a combat refresher. This was Dixie Station, from which we launched missions in direct support of the men fighting on the ground. There was little AAA, and no surface-to-air missiles here in the South, so these missions gave us a chance to get our heads back in the game before heading north to continue the Rolling Thunder campaign.

  At the end of March, in a speech declaring that he would not run for reelection in November, Lyndon Johnson changed the entire dynamic of the air war. He announced an immediate suspension of all bombing attacks north of the 20th parallel. Just like that, Rolling Thunder was over, neutralized by a lame-duck president.

  Up until then, the MiGs had been forced to operate from China, reducing their effectiveness. When LBJ told the world where we would not be bombing anymore, he essentially told the North Vietnamese we were giving their fighter regiments a safe space again. At the same time, the new restrictions greatly reduced the Air Force’s role in the air war over North Vietnam. The onus to continue it fell on the Navy.

  The MiGs returned to their nests around Hanoi, the pilots rested and better trained than in the past. They studied our tactics and developed their own new ones to counter ours. It didn’t take them long to come after us.

  On May 7, 1968, five of our F-4s ran into what they thought was a pair of MiG-21 interceptors, one of which was piloted by Nguyen Van Coc, an ace with six American planes to his credit. The MiGs took off from Xuan Airfield and sped after an EKA-3B Skywarrior, an all but defenseless electronic warfare aircraft and tanker.

  The plan was to use our Sparrow missiles and engage the MiGs once they’d been radar identified. With the airspace north of the 20th parallel essentially free of Air Force aircraft, radar could suffice to identify MiGs as they took off. No longer did we need visual identification to fire. We were going to use our interceptors as intended: missile platforms for beyond-visual-range missile shots.

  The sky was hazy with broken clouds, making it perfect for our all-weather F-4s. Instead, the battle was a confused affair on both sides from the get-go. Our Phantoms raced to intercept and rescue the Skywarrior’s crew, whose jamming efforts failed. As the F-4s closed, local ground defenses mistook the MiGs for American aircraft. NVA antiaircraft gunners lit up their own planes. They broke off the intercept and circled over Do Luong until their ground controller sent them after the Phantoms.

  The MiGs spotted the F-4s in heavy cloud cover at about nine thousand feet. It turned out that the two lead MiG-21s tracked on American radar were bait. Trailing them were two other MiG-21s staying low over the treetops to hide from our sensors.

  Four on five were the odds, and two F-4s encountered the MiGs first. A pair of Sparrows left the rails but lost their locks, missing their targets. As a cat-and-mouse game developed in the clouds, one of the F-4s got separated from the others. Nguyen Van Coc, low on fuel at this point, was about to turn for home when the lone F-4, flown by Lieutenant Commander Einar Christensen, a pilot from our air wing staff, and Lieutenant j.g. Lance Kramer, crossed in front of him. Nguyen Van Coc fired a pair of heat-seeking missiles—copies of the Sidewinder captured a decade before during the air battles of the Taiwan Strait.

  One of the missiles struck home, knocking the F-4 out of the air. Christensen and Kramer managed to eject, and they were subsequently rescued. They were the North Vietnamese ace’s ninth and final air-to-air victory.

  Two days later, a pair of Big E Phantoms tangled with three MiG-21s, possibly four. The F-4 crews fired four Sparrows but did not score a confirmed kill. Fortunately, all of our aircraft returned that day. The MiGs were getting mo
re aggressive, and I was getting more and more eager to encounter them.

  On May 23, 1968, I led an element of two F-4s in Skank Remsen’s division during a BarCAP patrol. BarCAP was short for barrier combat air patrol. It put us on station between our carrier task force and the North Vietnamese coast in such a way that we could quickly intercept any MiGs launching from the fields around Hanoi.

  Usually these were boring missions where nothing happened. The MiGs made rare appearances, but never when I was up there. This day turned out to be different. A group of MiG-21 interceptors—those latest and greatest examples of Communist high tech donated to the North Vietnamese cause—sped off one of their runways and climbed out toward the coast, looking for trouble.

  This was the moment every fighter pilot wants. While I never liked combat, I did want to find out just how good I really was. The years of hassling off San Clemente—the secret fight club that kept the art of air combat alive in the fleet—those moments of risking aircraft and career boiled down to what we could do with our aircraft when challenged by the enemy’s MiGs.

  Our ship-based radars picked up the MiG launch almost right away. The controller called us and gave us a vector. Skank pointed his nose toward the shore; my wingman and I did the same. Power on, J79s roaring, we sped toward the fight of our careers.

  As we closed, the controller called out, “Bandits, bandits! You’re clear to fire!”

  It was a perfect intercept. Textbook. The MiG-21s appeared on our airborne radars. Our rear-seaters stared at the scopes, calling out targets and seeking a lock for our long-range Sparrow missiles. We’d been taught to shoot those AIM-7s at about twelve miles. Skank held our fire and narrowed the range, hoping to give us a better chance at a kill.

  We achieved lock-on with good missile ready lights. We had our targets. They were coming at 12 o’clock, so it would be a perfect shot. Sparrows worked best when fired head-on.