“There was a SAM site slightly to the south of the target, which dominated the approach. We went for it. The flak was terrible—absolutely awful. At the apex of our turn, when we were the most vulnerable, a pair of MiG-21s made a pass at us, and one fired a heat-seeking missile. We went down into the flak, and the MiGs pulled off. We fired a Shrike at the SAM radar. It didn’t do any good. The second Shrike didn’t do any good either. Both missed. We had CBUs and the gun, and I tried to direct Merl to the site. He said, ‘I can’t see it, I can’t see it.’
“I told Merl when we passed over the site where it was. He said, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ He still couldn’t see it. Merl did a tight turn about a quarter of a mile from where the site was. I said, ‘Merl, it’s down there. If you want me to show you, give me a run-in from about five or six miles out, and I’ll take you right over it.’ My equipment was good, but it had its limitations. One of the difficulties of localizing a SAM site was that I had to reduce my bandwidth to only this one signal. It blocked everything else out, so I didn’t know what else was going on. To get an accurate alignment on the site, I had to get far enough away to be sure we were heading toward the site. Then I had to watch carefully because the indicators on my scope moved quickly once we passed the site.
“The site was obscured by smoke and dust caused by the flak and the bombs from the strike force. Out we went. We were getting the crap shot out of us the whole time. It was the only mission I was ever apprehensive on. I was scared shitless. I didn’t have the feeling that Merl could handle the situation. We got out about seven miles and headed back in. Another MiG-21 made a pass at us. Again the flak took him off our back. Our wingman got hit—one of his flaps came down due to flak damage. He could only make right turns. We continued to take lots of hits. They counted 137 holes in the airplane when we got back to Takhli. We got station passage. I called it out to Merl, and he rolled over to look down and again couldn’t see the site.
Lieutenant Colonel Phil Gast, squadron commander, and Colonel Bob Scott, wing commander, congratulate Mike Gilroy after he returns from his one hundredth mission over North Vietnam, 1967. Captain Merl Dethlefsen, Mike’s pilot and a Medal of Honor winner, is standing at the front of the aircraft. K. Gilroy.
“I said, ‘OK, let’s try it again.’ So we went out six or seven miles and tried it a second time. The whole time the flak was all over the place. It’s the worst I had ever seen. It was bursting all around us. On my scope I saw what looked like a whole lot of apostrophes. I thought, ‘What the heck is that?’ They appeared in clusters, disappearing and reappearing. When I looked out, I realized it was the proximity fusing of the flak. We came back in the second time. I called station passage to Merl. He flipped up the wing and said, ‘I got it,’ nosed over, and dropped the CBUs on the site. The site went off the air. Merl made a tight turn and returned and strafed the site with the 20mm cannon.
Mike Gilroy kneeling by a carpet showing the names of everyone in the 354th Fighter Squadron who completed one hundred missions over North Vietnam, 1967. K. Gilroy.
“We headed for home. We didn’t have enough fuel to get to Takhli, so we got an emergency tanker way up north in Laos and then landed at Udorn. We got more gas and continued on to Takhli. I got out of the airplane at Udorn, walked up to Merl, and shook his hand. ‘You did really good,’ I said to him. He really did. He deserved the Medal of Honor for that mission. He displayed the kind of courage and professionalism all Weasels liked to think they had. When we got back to Takhli, our squadron commander wanted to know what happened. We chatted with him for about half an hour. Then he called in Ken Bell, our wing man, and the number-two guy who had to leave the area because of flak damage, and asked them what happened. Then he got the guys who flew that day and talked to all of them. He then wrote us up for two Air Force Crosses. I finished up the first part of April, and at my hundred-mission party at the Officers’ Club, our squadron commander came in and said, ‘I want to propose a toast. Mike has been put in for the Medal of Honor.’ Merl’s and my award recommendation for the Air Force Cross had gotten to 7th Air Force in Saigon, and they had changed it to Medal of Honor recommendations. Mine eventually became an Air Force Cross. I am very proud to have it. Merl and I worked well together from then on. April 13, 1967, was my last mission, my one hundredth mission over North Vietnam. I never thought I’d make it out alive.”
When interviewed after the March 10, 1967, mission, Merlyn H. Dethlefsen humbly replied, “All I did was the job I was sent to do.” Merl and Mike, a team after all, did a lot more than just their job. Merl Dethlefsen is deceased.
Chapter 16
Yellowbird
The Air Force’s most effective truck killers were the AC-119 and AC-130 gunships, the B-57, a few C-123s equipped with special detection devices, and the A-26.
Carl Berger, ed., The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia
I had many harrowing experiences in my three years there, but I kept extending. I liked the flying. When I left, I had more combat time in the B-57 than anybody else, 450 missions or something like that, many of them night interdiction in Route Packs 1 and 2 and in Laos. On my party suit I had a patch that read “Laotian Highway Patrol.”
Ed Rider, B-57 pilot
Major Fred E. “Ed” Rider
Distinguished Flying Cross (3), Air Medal (23)
Ed was born in 1937 in a farmhouse somewhere in the rural Alabama countryside. There were mules and cotton and not much else for him to remember, except for the airplanes he occasionally saw flying overhead. “I was fascinated every time one came over my house,” Ed said, his eyes shining brightly. “I used to draw airplanes when I was a kid. I thought at times, ‘Maybe someday I can fly an airplane.’ But then I had no idea how I would learn to fly. I remember reading stories about zeppelins dropping bombs on England in World War I. I dreamed about them at night. In 1953 I read about dogfights between F-86 Sabre Jets and Chinese MiGs in Korea. I was having trouble staying in college because I didn’t have any money, so I joined the air force. It took six years before I made it to pilot training. I worked on B-57 bombers as an electronics technician. A captain who took a liking to me occasionally took me along on a test hop and let me take the controls if it was a dual-control model. It was fun to fly the plane. I was good at it. He encouraged me to go to OCS and then to pilot training. I followed his advice. I was high enough in my class to get any fighter I wanted, but I found out they didn’t get much flying time, so I stayed in ATC. I wanted to fly. In five years in ATC I racked up 3,300 flying hours in T-33, T-37, and T-38 jet trainers. I loved every minute of it.
“By 1965 I was tired of the place and volunteered for Vietnam duty. An ATC general came to speak to us on personnel policies. During the question-and-answer period, I put up my hand. When I was recognized, I said to him, ‘Every month, I fill out a form volunteering for Vietnam. Every month my commander throws it in the wastepaper basket. Why is that?’ It got deathly quiet in the room. The general said, ‘You and your commander see me afterwards.’ We did. I got reassigned, and so did my commander. I went to Kansas to some National Guard base to get a transition check into the B-57, the type of airplane I worked on as an airman. From there I went to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I was assigned to the 8th Tactical Bomb Squadron, the Yellowbirds. Our sister squadron was the 13th, the Redbirds. The 8th and the 13th rotated back and forth to Da Nang. The 8th was at Da Nang when I arrived. I sat around the squadron building for about a week, and no one offered to train me or even took notice of me. One Friday afternoon, somebody came into the ready room looking for someone to fly the courier to Vietnam. I said I’d go. He said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I just got here, and I am sitting around doing nothing,’ I replied, ‘so I might as well fly to Vietnam and do something.’ He said, ‘You can’t go. You don’t know what’s going on yet.’ But he couldn’t find anybody else. It was Friday afternoon, and everybody was looking forward to the weekend. So he came back and said, ‘OK, you’re it. Go see the sergean
t. He’ll cut you some orders. In Saigon go to this hotel on Tudo Street. Our guys have rooms there, and they’ll tell you what to do.’
“I jumped on a contract flight out of Clark to Saigon and found the hotel on Tudo Street in Saigon. I said to the Vietnamese desk clerk, ‘I’m here with the B-57 guys. I understand you have a room for us.’ The Vietnamese laughed and said, ‘I don’t know anything.’ ‘Just get me a room,’ I said. He laughed again and said, ‘There is no room in town.’ There was a little bar in back, and it was already curfew, so I sat down next to a guy and ordered a drink. ‘This is the most screwed-up war I’ve been in,’ I said to him, ‘and it’s my first war.’ He laughed and said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I told him my story. He gave me a long look and said, ‘I’m a B-57 guy. We have a room upstairs. It has eight bunks, and you are welcome to one of them.’
“The next night they gave me a navigator, and a transport picked us up and took us to Intelligence at 7th Air Force Headquarters, where we signed for a bunch of top-secret documents. They told us to put them in the tail section of the aircraft. We went out to Tan Son Nhut Airport and cranked up. It was pouring rain. I couldn’t see, and I was on a VFR clearance. I mentioned that to the navigator. He said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’
“I called the tower and told the controller that I had never seen this airfield before and didn’t know where the runway was. ‘I know where you are parked,’ the guy in the tower responded. ‘Pull out to the taxi-way and turn right. Call out the markers as you go down the taxiway.’ When the tower determined I was at the end of the runway, he said, ‘You’re cleared for takeoff.’ The rain was pounding down. I couldn’t see a thing. I went down the centerline, and when I hit takeoff speed, I pulled back on the yoke. That was my first takeoff in Vietnam. We hit all the fighter bases—Takhli, Udorn, Ubon, Korat. By that time of night there was no GCA, only tower operators. At the first stop I made two approaches without seeing anything. Finally I climbed back up to altitude, got my letdown book out, and studied where the TACAN was, where the runway should be, and what the needle had to look like for me to hit the runway. I really concentrated and let down to about two hundred feet over the TACAN, and sure enough there was the runway. I landed. The runway had a dip in it, and the dip was full of water. I hydroplaned like crazy. My brakes didn’t do anything. I went onto the overrun—all mud. I was going down the right edge of the runway to stay out of accumulated water, so when I hit the overrun, I cranked up the right engine, stepped on the left brake, and turned around, blowing mud all over the place. When the Intelligence people showed up, they unlatched the rear compartment and took their sack of documents. They signed a release, even though I had no idea what they had taken out of there. Away I went to the next place—VFR again. I was really good on instruments, otherwise I couldn’t have done it at night and in that weather. We finally got back to Saigon at nine in the morning. I did this about eight times.
“Then one morning I got a call from the command post, and they told me to bring all my gear on the next flight because I would be getting off in Da Nang, where my squadron was. In Da Nang I crawled out, another guy crawled in and took the airplane. The next day I was on the schedule to fly a bombing mission into North Vietnam. I told the scheduler, ‘Look, I’ve never been on a bombing range. I don’t even know how to work all the switches.’ He handed me a -34 and said, ‘I guess you have to study tonight. Learn where all the switches are.’ He was serious. I talked to some of the guys and asked, ‘How do you do this?’ ‘Well,’ one of them said, ‘you get up close to the target, roll upside down, throw the nose down onto the target, roll right side up in about a forty-five-degree dive, and when it looks about right, you pickle.’ That was my instruction in bombing technique. The next day, I dropped my first bomb over North Vietnam. Fortunately, it was daytime.
“My lead—we always flew two ships during the day—was experienced. All the people in the squadron were experienced. They’d been with the airplane since it came from the factory. They’d all been together in the 3rd Bomb Wing up in Japan, and all they ever did was practice dive bombing and strafing. They were good at it. The B-57 was a fantastic airplane, a stable platform with lots of fuel and lots of armament. We could take off with ten thousand pounds of ordnance, climb to thirty-five thousand feet, go out to a target five hundred miles away, let down and do an hour of road recce, make twenty-five hot passes, climb back up to fifty thousand feet, and go home unrefueled. The B-57 came to Bien Hoa a year before I did, in ’64. Those guys did a terrific job. The Viet Cong put up a reward for anyone who shot down a B-57 or killed a pilot. At Bien Hoa, to save time, they lined up the airplanes in a straight line and had the next reload stacked right behind them. When the Viet Cong attacked the base with 81mm mortars, the whole flight line went up when the mortars hit. Pieces of airplane flew all over the base. A couple of the guys ran out and got some of the airplanes airborne and saved them. When it was all over, five B-57s had been destroyed; fifteen more were damaged.
“Those early Bien Hoa guys were iron men. They’d fly out of Bien Hoa with a full bomb load up to Da Nang, refuel, and then take off and go way the hell up into northern Laos, around Dien Bien Phu in Route Pack 5, and then hit bridges and other strategic targets—really stressful. They did that every day. Finally, the airplanes moved to Da Nang. We evolved into night flying to go after trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We were pretty successful at that.
“We had two models of the B-57. The B model had eight fifty-calibers, four in each wing. When you fired them all at once, you fired at a rate of 6,000 rounds a minute. They carried 2,400 rounds. The E model had four 20mm guns, M-60s, and also fired at a rate of 6,000 rounds per minute. The E carried 1,160 rounds. Normally, if I had a pinpoint target, I’d fire two-second bursts. I got about six passes out of the 20 mike-mike (20mm cannon). Seldom did all eight of the fifties fire at the same time. At times, it took me twelve to fifteen passes to fire out. We had tracers for the fifty-caliber but not for the 20 mike-mike. After a fifty-caliber pass, I’d retract all the breaches and reset them before rolling in for the next pass. It cooled the barrels; otherwise, they got so hot, rounds would start cooking off. When I first got over there, I was on a target with one of the old heads. I had a hard time keeping up with him. He flew a five-G pattern. I was working myself to death trying to keep myself from getting lapped by him. And I did get lapped a couple of times, that’s how tight his turns were. He’d fire two passes to my one. The FAC timed me, and it was eighteen seconds between passes—a real tight pattern. After I came off the target for the last time, I pulled up to join up with him on his right wing. Just then, a few rounds cooked off. The tracers went right in front of his nose. He looked over at me and said, ‘Rider, are you pissed at me?’
B-57 formation near Phan Rang, 1968. F. Rider.
“I had many harrowing experiences in my three years there, but I kept extending. I liked the flying. When I left, I had more combat time in the B-57 than anybody else, 450 missions or something like that, many of them night interdiction in Route Packs 1 and 2 and in Laos. On my party suit I had a patch that read ‘Laotian Highway Patrol.’ One time me and my nav were up north looking for trucks. At low altitude you sometimes could see their combat lights. I saw something on the road, and I said to the nav, ‘There is a truck.’ We went after him. We carried funny bombs (Mark 35 firebombs that split open a few hundred feet above ground, spilling a cascade of bomblets that at night looked like a fiery waterfall). I went after the truck in a shallow high-speed dive. I released. When the bomb fuse went off and it split the canister to release the bomblets, the antiaircraft gunners saw the flash. They knew instantly where I was and where I was heading. Both sides to the left and right of the truck lit up like a Christmas tree. I pulled up thirty degrees, and the rounds went by parallel to me. I quit pulling up until the volley passed me. It wasn’t a truck after all. It was a trap. I got up to altitude where the guns couldn’t reach, and I sprayed bombs all over the area where the guns were. The nav had hooke
d a tape recorder to our intercom. After the mission, we listened to the tape. For that bomb run all there was on the tape was one exclamation, J——C——!’ then silence.
“A friend of mine fell for a trap in the daytime. He thought he spotted a truck on the trail. To his wingman, he said, ‘I’ll get this one. You go ahead and look for more.’ You should never do that and send your wingman off. You need someone looking out for you. It wasn’t a truck after all but concrete, and the sides of the road had 57mm emplacements. He got hammered good but managed to get out with one engine out and a round below the rear cockpit. It shredded the nav’s legs and his right arm. The pilot had a briefcase with a bunch of flight manuals behind his seat. That’s what saved him. The briefcase took most of the shrapnel. One of the wings was missing sheet metal bigger than a dining room table. The tail was shot up, and he lost electrical, hydraulics, and oxygen. Without radios and oxygen, he dropped down low and flew along the coast, looking for Da Nang, planning to make a belly landing. He didn’t know his gear had come down. He made his first approach to Da Nang and saw no fire trucks and decided to make a low pass. On one engine, that is quite a feat. There was an F-4 in the pattern, and he cut off the F-4. The F-4 pilot screamed over the radio, ‘What the hell is that B-57 doing cutting me out of the pattern?’ As the F-4 driver looked down, he could see right through the B-57. He then got all the fire trucks out, since the B-57 had no radios.
A 57mm shell did this damage to the wing of a B-57, 1968. F. Rider.
“At night it was too hard to go two-ship. We couldn’t keep up with each other. I had my own night tactics. If there was any kind of moon, you could see the road, because the roads were white sand along the coast. We’d turn off all the lights in the cockpit, and with no lights you could really get your night vision. Only the nav kept his altimeter light on low. I couldn’t see any instruments. I set the power beforehand to give me the speed I wanted and let down to 200 to 300 feet. That’s where I wanted to be. I experimented in the daytime. The guns were harmonized at 3,200 feet. That’s where I wanted my target, where the guns intersected. I figured the altitude and airspeed that would give me convergence. Then we flew down those white roads, and when I saw a black dot on the road, that was usually a truck. When he got to the right angle on my windshield, I’d close my eyes, squeeze off two seconds, open my eyes, and make a hard break to the right or left, because the muzzle flashes would tell them where we were. One night we hit a fuel tanker. The world lit up like you wouldn’t believe.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 33