by John McCain
A five-mile gap separated them from the predominantly Canadian 27th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade, which had also been assigned to protect the Chongchon bridgeheads. Second Battalion was supposed to patrol the gap constantly to prevent the enemy from driving between the two forces. But that proved a practical impossibility. A mountain ridge ran through the gap that made it pretty much a no-man’s-land.
That’s where most of the Chinese came from that night, swarming down the mountains between the Canadians and the 2nd Battalion. They drove in from the right too, between the 2nd and 1st Battalion positions. They hit all three forces in a coordinated attack all along the bridgehead line. Before they hit Easy and G companies on Hill 123, they set up a roadblock to cut off their retreat. Then they came up both sides of the hill, following the communications wire that led to Easy’s command post. They completely enveloped both companies and caught most of the men in their sleeping bags. They shot them where they lay.
Red Cloud was the first to see them, and he shouted a warning from his position below the command post and opened up with his Browning automatic rifle. He fired magazine after magazine into the onslaught. The soldier feeding him his ammunition was killed in the first minutes of the battle. Red Cloud too was hit early, in the chest, but he kept firing and gave Conway a little time to try to organize some kind of defense. They were overrun by a battalion-size force of Chinese. Svach, who had been in every tough fight the regiment had, remembered it simply as “the worst night of my life.”
Salter was still awake, still digging his hole, when the night exploded with gunfire and Chinese buglers sounded the attack. Scrambling out of his foxhole, he saw tracers streaking everywhere and illumination rounds casting an eerie light on the slaughter below. He saw Chinese soldiers shoot men who had thrown their arms up in surrender. All was confusion and terror. The men couldn’t tell if they were firing at the enemy or at each other. No one knew what to do, and it was deteriorating into an every-man-for-himself fight, except for Red Cloud and another Browning automatic man, Private First Class Joseph Balboni. They were keeping the enemy in a cross fire and opening a draw for those who were still alive to follow down the hill.
On the rare occasions later in his life when Salter talked about that night, he did so with economy and no bravado. “I wanted to bug out. I just couldn’t figure out how,” he admitted. He jumped back in his foxhole for a minute or two and began a brief, intense negotiation with God, promising to live an exemplary life if He would just get him the hell off this hill.
A medic reached Red Cloud to dress his wounds. He didn’t think they were fatal and left Red Cloud to treat other wounded. He came back after Red Cloud had been hit again, this time more seriously, and told him he had to get off the hill or he would die there. Red Cloud refused the advice, got to his feet, rested his Browning in the crotch of a tree, and resumed firing. He and Balboni knew they would die where they fought. Red Cloud would receive the Medal of Honor, Balboni the Distinguished Service Cross. The official account said Red Cloud wrapped his arm around the tree to stay upright. Salter remembered it differently. He and another man crawled down to Red Cloud, who asked their help to keep him upright. Salter got a web belt and wrapped it around Red Cloud and the tree. Then Salter thanked him and started down the draw. He could hear the bark of Red Cloud’s Browning all the way down.
A lot of men had to fight hand to hand to get off the hill. Salter did too. When his rifle jammed, all he had for a weapon was his trench knife. Before he got very far, he saw three Chinese approach another Easy man’s foxhole. He rushed the first Chinese and strangled him to death, took the dead man’s weapon and shot the second soldier. The soldier in the foxhole shot the third. Moments after both men made it down the hill, Red Cloud’s gun went silent, and Chinese flooded down the draw, chasing after the survivors. But by that time, around three o’clock on the morning of November 6, four Quad 4s, armored vehicles with .50 caliber machine guns, had shown up at the base of the hill, opened up on the enemy, and cut down scores of them.
After the Battle for Hill 123, Svach believed no more than twenty of Easy’s original members were still alive and fit for service. Among the company’s dead were First Lieutenant Leslie Kirkpatrick, a West Pointer, and Second Lieutenant John Horony, a World War II veteran. Five of the company’s sergeants had been killed and two of its medics. It had been a long, long war for Easy Company, though not a man in it had been in Korea longer than four months. Not a man had been ready for what he would experience. Not a man had been adequately armed and equipped for the war. Not a man had imagined what he would be called on to do and what he could endure. And now most of them were dead or wounded or missing, and the survivors were suddenly at war with the most populous nation on earth.
AS THE CHINESE BEGAN withdrawing, an officer who had arrived with the Quad 4s ordered Salter and the other survivors to take back the hill. “With what?” they yelled. “We haven’t got any ammunition.” But they knew they had to go back up; they could hear wounded crying out. So up they went. Salter had barely started when he was concussed by a mortar round and hit with shrapnel. Those who got to the top unhurt counted around five hundred Chinese dead, many of them lying in front of the bodies of Mitchell Red Cloud and Joseph Balboni.
Walker got the rest of his army back across the Chongchon, and Mao briefly accommodated Walker and MacArthur’s optimism that the Chinese weren’t in the war to stay. The Chinese divisions in Korea seemed to disappear after that first week of November. The Eighth Army regrouped, and on Thanksgiving Walker ordered the offensive to the Yalu that would get them all home for Christmas. But the Chinese were waiting for them, armies of them. American and ROK forces west of the Taebaeks were knocked back past Pyongyang, past Seoul, finally halting their retreat and holding near Osan, where Task Force Smith had made its seven-hour stand. On the other side of the mountains, 1st Division Marines were trapped at the Chosin Reservoir, where they would begin their legendary fighting retreat to the sea. General Walker was himself killed in an automobile accident in Pyongyang two days before Christmas. General Matthew Ridgway assumed command of the Eighth Army, and under his leadership the army would fight its way back to the 38th parallel by April, where the fighting would stalemate until a cease-fire was agreed to in 1953.
Salter was taken first to a field hospital and eventually transported to Japan to convalesce. He rejoined Easy in time for China’s New Year’s Offensive, and he fought in more desperate battles in that cruel and chaotic first year of war. The company would lose many more men. Salter was promoted to sergeant first class and received the Silver Star for his heroism on Hill 123. In a firefight south of the Han River in February, he volunteered to flank and lob a grenade at an enemy machine-gun nest that had his squad pinned down. His lieutenant told him he’d write him up for a Medal of Honor if he did. “I decided against doing it,” he recalled. “I wouldn’t even have brought it up if I’d known it would be that dangerous.” When that same lieutenant was later wounded, Salter took command of the squad.
He was home in time for Christmas 1952. He lived a good and happy life, but he never forgot the terrible responsibility he and other green kids had been given in an unexpected war, and what it had cost them to do it.
Wild Weasels Leo Thorsness and Harry Johnson in regulation mustaches and bush hats with their F-105 “Thud.”
CHAPTER TEN
Valor
Leo Thorsness, a Vietnam War pilot and POW, fought MiGs, missiles, and artillery to protect the lives of his wingmen.
WHEN OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER BEGAN in March 1965, North Vietnam’s air defenses were rudimentary and vulnerable to destruction from the air. Luckily for Hanoi, the U.S. government had no intention of authorizing anything so provocative. The “program of measured and limited air action . . . against selected military targets in the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam]” authorized by presidential memorandum on February 13, 1965, would prove to be so gradual and selective that it gave the North Vietnamese
and their Soviet and Chinese sponsors the time they needed to create the most sophisticated, lethal air defenses U.S. air power had ever faced.
The longest bombing campaign in American military history began with strikes on minor military targets in the Vietnamese panhandle north of the Demilitarized Zone and south of the 19th parallel. Rolling Thunder’s initial strategic objective was to discourage North Vietnam’s further support of the communist insurgency in South Vietnam using tactics that were more likely to encourage them. It is not just in hindsight that the campaign’s limitations and gradual escalation appear absurd. Starting a month after the campaign began, when President Lyndon Johnson ordered the first pause in the bombing, some of its advocates were conceding privately that it wasn’t yielding the kind of response they had expected from Hanoi. Henceforth they would shift its objective to interdicting and destroying North Vietnamese support for the Viet Cong, while authorizing more targets north of the 19th parallel and escalating the commitment of American ground forces. Thirty-five hundred marines sent to secure the airfield at Da Nang at the start of the air campaign would become the first combat troops in Vietnam when Rolling Thunder’s lack of success persuaded Washington to fight a ground war.
The recognition that Rolling Thunder wasn’t achieving its objective never seemed to prompt the revelation among its advocates that perhaps it had been a stupid idea to begin with. That conclusion appeared reserved for the men who flew the missions. They recognized the folly and realized the dangers posed by rules of engagement that seemed perversely designed to lower the risk of enemy casualties by increasing the risk to American pilots. Even now, a half-century later, recalling those restrictions can summon up old resentments better left buried.
The targets, timing of strikes, and number of sorties were decided in Washington and approved by civilian authorities in the White House. For almost two years final decisions were made almost exclusively by civilian authorities, many of them in meetings of the famous Tuesday Lunch in the Johnson White House. Those meetings, after Johnson’s election in late 1964, were usually limited to the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and, for some reason, the White House press secretary. It wasn’t until late 1967 that a military representative, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was regularly invited to join their council.
Targets were selected and restrictions imposed not to win a war by crippling the enemy’s ability to wage it but to persuade Hanoi to negotiate a political settlement and to avoid upsetting the Soviets and Chinese. As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara put it, Rolling Thunder should present only “a credible threat of future destruction [and make] it politically easy for the DRV to enter negotiations.” The result, according to the Air Force historian Wayne Thompson, was “an air campaign that did a lot of bombing in a way calculated not to threaten the enemy regime’s survival.” Or, as James Stockdale described it, “We were making gestures with our airplanes.”
The initial rules of engagement for Rolling Thunder excluded almost everything in a thirty-mile-wide zone around Hanoi and a ten-mile zone around Haiphong. The latter restriction meant critical war supplies coming into Haiphong Harbor were protected. Nothing within thirty miles of Vietnam’s northern border with China could be targeted. Power plants were originally off limits, as were North Vietnamese air bases. American pilots sometimes flew right past airfields where enemy MiGs were parked. They could shoot down a MiG that was shooting at them, but they couldn’t hit one on the ground. The day before my last combat mission in October 1967, I dropped my CBUs, cluster bombs, on the runway at Phúc Yên airfield north of Hanoi, destroying two parked MiGs in the process. It was my proudest accomplishment of the war to date, and I got an Air Medal for it. It was also the first time the MiG base was attacked in the nearly twenty months Rolling Thunder had been under way.
The same weird logic governed U.S. rules regarding the enemy’s surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites. If a SAM site was shooting at them and if it was located outside a restricted zone, pilots could destroy it. Otherwise, it was off limits. There was a concern that the Soviets, who supplied most of the missiles, might have had advisors present at some of the sites. They did, of course, especially early in the war, when our intelligence believed Russians probably manned every SAM site in the North.
Sometimes rationales for forbearance were even more Alice in Wonderland–like. The first North Vietnamese SAM sites were spotted by a U2 spy plane early in April 1965. The U.S. Air Force and Navy petitioned Washington for permission to strike them. Washington refused: the sites were in the restricted zone around Hanoi. Even as more SAM sites were installed, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton convinced McNamara that refraining from bombing them would send “a signal to Hanoi not to use them.” In a meeting in Saigon, McNaughton brushed aside the concerns of the air force fleet commander, Lieutenant General Joseph Moore, saying, “You don’t think the North Vietnamese are going to use them! Putting them in is just a political ploy by the Russians to appease Hanoi.” Navy flyers once counted 111 missiles on railcars near Hanoi. They were denied permission to destroy them, provoking one of the aviators to complain, “We had to fight all 111 of them one at a time.” I, too, observed Soviet ships come into Haiphong Harbor and off-load SAMs. I saw them transported to firing sites and put into place, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about them.
Even when SAM batteries were operational and firing at Americans, to no one’s surprise, the Vietnamese and their Russian advisors made sure to locate them within the restricted zones around Hanoi and Haiphong, where the Americans couldn’t hit them without special permission. My squadron lost an aviator to a SAM near Haiphong one day. None of us saw a chute open. Another pilot dropped his bombs on the location where he thought the missile had launched. He was grounded when the squadron returned to the ship because his target hadn’t been on Washington’s list.
At the beginning of Rolling Thunder, North Vietnamese air defense relied almost entirely on anti-aircraft artillery (AAA), and many of those were comparatively small caliber. It’s believed the North had about fifteen hundred anti-aircraft guns at the start of 1965, most of them of the 37 mm and 57 mm variety. By the start of the following year, it had five thousand guns, many of them radar-guided 85 mm and 100 mm. By 1967 the routes Thunder pilots flew were bristling with AAA: seven thousand guns, U.S. intelligence estimated. Although the SAM threat and, to a lesser extent, MiGs, preoccupied mission planners and pilots, anti-aircraft fire was responsible for most of the U.S. aircraft losses during Rolling Thunder.
The SAMs’ principal utility was forcing American pilots to fly low to avoid them, into the waiting embrace of North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners. Not long before my own encounter with a SAM, my squadron lost a guy near Haiphong. None of us saw him eject, but our squadron’s commanding officer, Commander Bryan Compton, possibly the bravest man I have known, was determined to find out what happened to him. He kept circling the area at extremely low altitudes, searching for some sign of him, as we got our closest look ever at the enemy’s AAA. It was something. We took a terrific pounding from flak. I was scared to death, and the memory of it is still one of my most vivid of the war. Compton, just as cool as you like, made eight passes before finally breaking off the search. Before we left the area, we wanted to take out the SAM site that had shot down our friend, but because it was within ten miles of the city we weren’t allowed to touch it.
Around five thousand SAMs were launched during Rolling Thunder, and they brought down 101 aircraft. As pilots adjusted tactics to the threat and electronic jamming capability improved, the SAMs’ success rate declined correspondingly. But that’s not to say the threat didn’t warrant the attention given it. I knew more than a few guys who were among the unlucky 101. I happened to be one of them. More to the point, SAMs were an essential component of a sophisticated triple-threat air defense system supplied by the Soviets and Chinese that was quickly set up, integrated, and as formidable as a
ny seen before. And it was the gradual escalation of Rolling Thunder and the foolish assumptions of its architects that made that possible.
North Vietnamese SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites proliferated rapidly after the first were sighted in April 1965, while the enemy acquired more and deadlier anti-aircraft artillery than any Allied pilots had braved over Germany. North Vietnam had about fifty MiG-17s at the start of Rolling Thunder. Slower than American fighters, they were maneuverable and effective at the disruptive hit-and-run tactics their pilots were trained to perform. By 1966 the first MiG-21s, supersonic and armed with heat-seeking Atoll missiles, had started to arrive in country and gave Hanoi more than a hundred aircraft capable of intercepting American planes. An advanced early-warning radar system with over two hundred facilities tracked U.S. aircraft incoming from Thailand, Laos, and the Tonkin Gulf and coordinated counterattacks from guns, missiles, and MiGs.
In his memoir Fighter Pilot, the legendary World War II and Vietnam War ace Brigadier General Robin Olds, who led the single most effective raid against Vietnamese MiGs of the war, described the experience of aerial combat over North Vietnam: “Missiles streaked past, flak blackened the sky, tracers laced patterns across my canopy, and then, capping the day, MiGs would suddenly appear—small, sleek sharks, cutting and slashing, braving their own flak, firing missiles, guns, harassing, pecking.”
It was dangerous work, often for objectives of little or no strategic value. Worthwhile or not, they cost many good men their lives. In my A-4 squadron alone, thirty-eight aviators were killed or captured over Rolling Thunder’s three years. In 1967 we lost one third of our guys. With so many more valuable targets off-limits, pilots were asked to hit the same things over and over again. I flew my first combat mission campaign in June 1967, more than two years into Rolling Thunder. The night before, I had gone to my squadron’s intelligence center to punch out information about my target. Out came a picture of a military barracks in Vinh, with some details about the target’s recent history. It had already been hit twenty-seven times. Hardly any structures were still standing; it was basically a rubble heap. There was a bridge a half mile away that the North Vietnamese Army used. It had never been touched. It wasn’t on the list.