I Always Wanted to Fly

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “At March I was assigned to the 320th Bomb Wing, which flew the new, all-jet B-47. It was interesting work. I carpooled to Riverside Community College with Bob, a friend of mine. Bob was a pretty ambitious type. One night he said to me, ‘Mike, I took the OCS test.’ I said, ‘Good for you.’ A month later, Bob said, ‘I passed the test.’ Bob would get Cs when I would get As in classes we took together. I thought, ‘If Bob can take that OCS test and pass it, I surely can.’ I had no burning ambition to be an officer. I thought I might stay in the air force and retire as a warrant officer or a master sergeant. But Bob’s casual comments sort of became a challenge for me. I took the OCS test and actually got a class starting date ahead of Bob. I entered OCS in March 1960 and was commissioned a second lieutenant that September. I wanted to be a pilot. I remembered when I left March, one of the maintenance officers had taken me aside and said, ‘You need to be a pilot. Pilot is the only decent job in the air force. That’s what you need to ask for. Above all, don’t be a navigator.’ When it came time for assignments, I put down pilot training. We took our physicals, and a lot of us wound up in navigator school, some for eyesight, some for different reasons. My sitting height was too great. There were a couple of us in that fix. The medics said, ‘Come back tomorrow. We’ll measure you again.’

  “ ‘What am I going to do by tomorrow?’ I thought. ‘Cut a vertebra out of my back?’ Actually, the word was passed from class to class how to get by these things. The way to pass in my situation was to get up early and walk around, because when you first get up your back is stretched out and you are taller. Then, just before going down to the flight surgeon’s office, have two guys sit on your shoulders to compress your spine. I sat in a chair that morning, upright. One guy sat on my left shoulder, the other on my right. When I was measured again, I was still an inch too tall. The medics suggested I go to navigator training. I thought that’s what that captain told me not to do. But we had other guys in my OCS class who had flown as enlisted men. One had been a loadmaster on a C-124 transport. He said, ‘No, no. Navigator is a good job.’ In fact, that’s what he put in for. He didn’t want to be a pilot. I went to navigator training at Harlingen AFB in Texas. I graduated in August 1961 and requested electronic-warfare training. A friend told me that EWOs did neat things. Even in peacetime, they were doing dangerous things such as flying reconnaissance missions around the Soviet Union. That sounded exciting to me, and that’s what I put in for. Instead, I ended up with an assignment back to Carswell in B-52s. I was assigned to the 7th Bomb Wing, 9th Bomb Squadron. They didn’t have a flying slot available when I arrived, and while I was waiting, I met a pilot who said to me, ‘I know you.’ ‘I used to be here in the 26th Bomb Squadron as an enlisted man,’ I said. He replied, ‘I was in the 26th too. I’ll need an EWO in a few months. I want you on my crew.’ ‘Why do you want me on your crew?’ I asked. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’ ‘Anybody who went from enlisted man to become an officer and worked that hard should do well on my crew.’ Several weeks later, I got on his crew when the slot opened up. It was a select crew. I got a spot promotion to captain a short while later. I thought I had arrived in hog heaven. I worked hard and tried to do everything really well, not to let my crew down.

  “Because we were a select and STANDBOARD crew, we were picked to participate in varied things. In 1964, for instance, we went to Eglin AFB in Florida to do the first tests dropping iron bombs from the B-52. We spent a couple months down there, flying on the range, with F-104s and F-100s flying camera chase while we dropped 750-pound bombs. We flew the B-52D model, which eventually became the Vietnam-era workhorse.

  “In January 1965 we were sent to Andersen AFB on Guam. The Vietnam War had begun. We sat on alert with our B-52s loaded with 105 750-pound bombs, I believe. The bombs were carried in the bomb bay and on underwing racks. We flew only training missions on this deployment. Then in June ’65 we were at Andersen again with a wing from Mather, near Sacramento. We had targets assigned in both South and North Vietnam. Some of our targets in North Vietnam were airfields, but luckily we never went. It would have been a disaster, if you can imagine twenty-seven airplanes, flying in trail formation, with one-minute separation between airplanes, going in at about twenty thousand feet. I was on the first B-52 mission to bomb in South Vietnam. My airplane was in the second of two waves. By the luck of the draw, the wing from Mather led the first wave. I believe there were nine aircraft in that wave in three cells of three. There was five-minute separation between the first and second waves. We took off from Guam after dark. We were going to refuel over the Philippines. The lead airplane in the first wave was five minutes early to the refueling point.

  Crew S-11, B-52D, 7th Bomb Wing, Carswell AFB, Texas, 1965. Captain Mike Gilroy is third from right. K. Gilroy.

  “What do you do in SAC when you are five minutes early? You do a 360-degree turn, and they did. The turning B-52 lit right into one of the B-52s behind it. There were two airplanes down, and we were not even halfway to the target yet. Beepers were going off everywhere. I think we lost five people from those two crews. Of course, we were all pretty well hyped-up for the mission. Our target was in the Iron Triangle, near Saigon. Intelligence had given us a threat briefing and put these big combat radii of the MiGs on their briefing charts. The MiG circles were well down where we were. We knew we were going to get bounced by MiGs. Over the target, it was all uneventful. We dropped our bombs and began the long flight home. When we got back to Andersen, there was a congratulatory telegram from the army commander in the Iron Triangle area saying what a wonderful job we had done, that we saved their bacon and killed all these people. Then the SAC inspector general came to investigate the accident and asked our wing commander, ‘Did you tell the air crews not to make 360-degree turns?’ The wing commander, a colonel, replied, ‘No.’ And then he was gone. From that time on, the new wing commander—it was the most stupid thing you ever saw in your life—at the end of every mission briefing got up and said, ‘Don’t make 360-degree turns to kill time.’ That was the fix. One of the interesting differences between SAC and TAC was that SAC probably never made the same mistake twice. Once you made a mistake, there was a procedure put in place to keep that from happening again. In TAC you were supposed to be a free thinker. ‘We are not going to give you any unnecessary restrictions’ was the message. ‘Go do it.’

  “We flew nineteen missions into South Vietnam and then came back to the States, back to pulling nuclear alert—seven days straight on alert, in on Thursday morning, off the following Thursday morning. A little boring, yes, but it had its compensations. We went in there Thursday morning and took a series of tests. We took an emergency-procedures test, of course. Then the EWOs had to take a radar-signal-recognition test. We listened to radar-signal tapes. The Intelligence people would play a Fansong SAM missile radar tape, and if you identified it correctly, you had to mark down on your sheet ‘Fansong.’ If you missed, you listened again until you got it right. They played Whiffs and Firecans and Firewheels—all the AAA radars: the YoYo, a missile-defense radar deployed around Moscow; Scan Fixes, Scan Threes, and Spin Scans, fighter intercept radars. That was tremendous training for the Weasel program later on, because the Weasel program didn’t do any of that. SAC EWOs moved into the Weasel program effortlessly. The ones that came from ADC or ATC had problems.

  “Of course, we flew airborne alert too—‘Chrome Dome,’ as it was called. Our missions from Carswell were over the Mediterranean. We flew through the Strait of Gibraltar on to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, back and forth. Chrome Dome duty lasted only about three months, after which you wouldn’t get it again for about a year. Those were long missions, twenty-seven hours or so. There wasn’t much for the EWO to do, most of the time, so I used to sit in the pilot’s seat and fly the airplane manually.

  “I was on the golf course one day at Carswell, playing with this pilot who had just transferred in from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. He said, ‘I got an EWO friend who just went
to an F-100 assignment.’ I said, ‘Oh? What’s that?’ ‘It’s something about killing SAM sites,’ he said—some real secret stuff. I thought, ‘That sure sounds interesting.’ I sort of had itchy feet. There was a war going on, and I thought it would be fun to do some of that. I went down to Personnel and said, ‘I heard about this program where EWOs can get into fighter aircraft and do this SAM site stuff.’ Of course, they didn’t know anything. They got out the books that had all the courses listed. ‘There is no course like it,’ they insisted after reviewing the course listings. I talked to some of the guys in the squadron, but none of them had heard anything either. Then there was a guy who ran our electronic warfare simulator. He had an assignment to the Weasel program. He was going through a divorce and was fighting for custody of his daughter. He called me and said, ‘Mike, I heard that you are looking for this kind of an assignment. I got it. Would you want to take it?’ I said, ‘You bet.’ He and I went down to the personnel section to swap assignments. This time they said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘There has to be a way,’ I insisted. They shook their heads. We made an appointment with the wing deputy for operations, a colonel. He called the chief of personnel at SAC Headquarters and made it happen.

  “Three weeks later, I left. My orders were cryptic: ‘Report to the American Motel, Sepulveda Boulevard, Long Beach, California, for three weeks of training at the North American facility at Long Beach Airport.’ It was January 1966 when I drove into the parking lot of the American Motel. As I checked in, I asked the clerk if she knew anything about a school. ‘I have orders to report there.’ She replied, ‘I don’t know anything about that, but there is a hospitality room back there,’ and she pointed down a hallway, ‘and some guys asking questions like you are down there. They may be able to help you.’ There I learned from other guys who drifted in that come Monday morning, someone would pick us up and take us out to Long Beach Airport.

  “Come Monday morning, there were eight of us. Way in the back of the airport, there was a fenced-in area with concertina wire on top of the fence. We went into this hangar, and in the hangar was an F-100, a couple of classrooms, and a cockpit simulator. There were some North American Aviation (builders of the F-100) guys there and some Applied Technology guys. They gave us the academic portion of the Weasel school. We students were four pilots and four EWOs. An instructor from North American told us to pair up, one pilot and one EWO. ‘You’ll be a crew,’ he said. ‘That’s how you’ll fly your combat tour. However you guys want to do this. It’s up to you.’ The flamboyant pilots immediately paired with the flamboyant EWOs. It got all the way to the end, and I hadn’t picked anyone. Ed Larson and I remained. Ed Larson was an OCS guy like me, a little older than most, a little junior in rank than most. We paired up—a wonderful choice for me. Ed was a superb individual. That night, most of us went out to dinner. We had a drink beforehand and shot the breeze. I looked at my pilot, and he was asleep with his face about a quarter of an inch from his soup bowl. I thought, ‘What the hell have I got myself into, here?’ Later I learned that Ed would fall asleep almost anywhere at the drop of a hat.

  “The simulator training was fun—pretty basic. They had an operable stick and a vector scope. All you did was fly and put the SAM signal at the twelve o’clock position, until you had station passage. The classroom instruction was terrible. An engineer from Applied Technology gave us four hours on how the SAM system worked, how the associated Fansong radar worked, and how the guidance signal worked, and how the triplets moved. ‘Why do we need to know that stuff?’ I thought. I wished he would get on with it. We were falling asleep and dozing. I remember three months later, thinking, ‘What the hell was that guy saying?’ How the triplets moved was really important then, but it didn’t seem important at the time. We were supposed to go from there to Nellis to get training in our airplanes, but the airplanes weren’t ready. They were still being modified. ‘Come on back to Nellis with me,’ Ed said. ‘I’m an instructor pilot there in the F-105. When I instruct, I get an F model, a two-seater, and you can fly with me.’

  “For six weeks I flew every working day. I flew three times a day, if I could, with Ed Larson. It was a lot of fun. On one of the first missions we flew down the Grand Canyon. That was exciting, after having flown B-52s for years. We went down to Death Valley and flew below sea level. I had my own stick and throttle in the back seat, and Ed encouraged me to fly. I was really impressed with Ed Larson as a pilot, and my earlier misgivings vanished. Our airplanes finally arrived, and we transferred to the Weasel squadron. My Weasel class had eight pilot-EWO crews. By then I felt I was born to be in that airplane. The instructors were the guys who had originally gone over to Vietnam and checked out in the F-100F two-seater. Some of them had killed SAM sites; most of them hadn’t. They had maybe twenty missions each.

  “The instruction was general. We had two SAC RBS sites that we flew against—one at Walker Lake, Nevada, and one at Saint George in Utah. We would make passes on the RBS sites from different directions to get used to the equipment. I had a panoramic scope in the back and a vector scope. The receiver had a variety of functions. One was a direction-finding capability. When you tuned to a specific signal, two tuning bars appeared on the scope, and it would either tell you the signal was in front of or behind you. As you flew by the SAM site, station passage, you only got a brief indication that you were abeam or over the site. If you missed the instant of station passage, the tuning bars looked the same if you were approaching or leaving the site. I would soon learn that in the heat of combat, detecting station passage was difficult but critical to the success of our mission. You could also gate the Fansong signal, and the receiver would display the scan and the fly-back time. You could actually tell where you were in the scan of the enemy radar. And if he launched a missile, you could tell if he was launching at you or at someone at the left or right of you—if you had the presence of mind to do that when you were being launched at. I didn’t have the presence of mind to do that. I just assumed they were launching at us.

  “The first six seconds the missile was unguided. Then, after the booster rocket fell off, the guide vanes in back of the sustainer rocket deployed. Above a thousand feet, the missile became a real threat—not below, although Intelligence was liable to exaggerate and say it could operate down to five hundred feet. I learned that between the SA-2 SAMs and the MiGs they could force us down where they had their real capability, their antiaircraft guns. The flak was capable because there was so damn much of it. We had six training missions at Nellis. Our primary weapon was the Shrike, the AGM-45 antiradiation missile. We never fired one at Nellis. We carried them on the airplane but never fired one. And we carried CBUs, and we never dropped any of those either. But all the pilots were experienced and had lots of time in the airplane. They all came from Bitburg or Spangdahlem in Germany.

  “We had six aircraft to ferry to Thailand. Two crews went over by Military Airlift Command aircraft. Those of us lucky enough to fly our own aircraft across the Pacific went to McClellan, from where, on June 29, we took off for Hickam AFB in Hawaii. It was great. I flew manually most of the way. I did everything but the takeoff and the landing, including joining up with the tanker. We got to Takhli on July 4, 1966. We were there with six airplanes and eight crews. Forty-five days later, we had no airplanes. We had four people killed, three wounded. Two were wounded so badly, they had to fly them back to the States. Two more were POWs. One guy quit. Not a great start.

  “After we arrived at Takhli, we started off with a typical week of briefings of what we couldn’t do—targets we couldn’t hit, places we couldn’t fly over. The rules of engagement. The 105 wing from Korat went in a certain time every day, and the 105 Wing from Takhli went in a certain time of day. The biggest driver was the tanker schedule, controlled by SAC. What a way to fight a war. The targeting was a disgrace, we all knew that. A lot of times we would go after suspected truck parks, river crossings—worthless things. Then we were sent to someplace like the thermal power pla
nt, or the Thai Nguyen steel mill, or some other heavily defended target. We’d hit it the first day and get the crap shot out of us, lose several airplanes. Go back the next day, and the next day, and we’d lose about half as many airplanes because of the damage we’d done before and the defenses being out of shells and missiles. Then, invariably, there would be a bombing halt—it was either Christmas, or Easter, or Tet, and we stopped bombing. They resupplied. Then we’d go back to the thermal power plant or the steel mill and we’d lose several airplanes again.

  “At Takhli we really had no checkout at all. We didn’t know how to do anything against SAM sites. No Weasel crew we talked to had any experience in a real tough area such as Route Pack 6. It was still an evolving program. Our first five missions we flew into Route Pack 1. One SAM site at Vinh would come on the air occasionally. He was a crafty guy. I don’t think anybody ever took him out. Then, on August 7, 1966, we got a mission up to the northeast railroad in Route Pack 6. You talk about a transition: from doing nothing to going up to the northeast railroad, probably the most heavily defended piece of real estate in North Vietnam. We were lead of a flight of two. Pete Pitmann was on our wing with a D-model. One Weasel and one D to take out the SAMs. We refueled over the water. The weather was crappy. Clouds covered half to three-fourths of the area, and then there was a haze layer below us. We were about ten minutes ahead of the strike force.