Finally, in about an hour, I was a master of dead reckoning. I had never flown a better-instructed flight. Nor would I.
AT THE END of our OV-10 training, we turned in our choices for our next assignment. I asked to fly over Laos rather than South Vietnam. After each mission I’d be able to return to a comfortable base. I wouldn’t chance living in a tent. Maybe it was more risky than flying over Vietnam, but maybe not.
I was given my first choice: I’d be flying out of Nakhon Phanom Air Base in northeast Thailand. I vaguely remember my romantic notions about it all. My earlier letter to my father was a clear statement of my beliefs about why I was going into the war: I was part of a military arm of my nation and I was acting to prevent enemy troops from landing on the shores of America and taking over my country. I was needed. Besides all that, and maybe mostly, I wanted to fly the OV-10 in combat. I wanted the adventure. I wanted to see myself doing something like that.
On to Southeast Asia
BEFORE GOING TO THAILAND, I attended a survival course in the Philippines. Unlike the general survival course at Fairchild Air Force Base, this course was specifically geared to the jungle. A new group of pilots and I sat through classes on evasion techniques and spent time in the jungle. We were shown plants to eat and plants to leave alone; in fact we were given a deck of cards with photographs of jungle plants, labeled.
I met Dan “Hoot” Gibson, a dry-witted captain my age. Hoot was a career officer, but he had an informality about him that I liked. We shared a kind of unconscious distance from what we were doing, a distance that allowed room for humor. I couldn’t have said why I liked him back then, nor could I have said that about Johnny Hobbs or Jim Butts, or other good friends in Yokota, but looking back, I see that our shared distance somehow supported our friendship. We weren’t as serious—in a gung ho, careerist way—as many other pilots.
FROM THE PHILIPPINES we were flown to Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, for “orientation” to Southeast Asia. I remember walking off the cargo plane. I sensed a voice saying, You are here. You are in Vietnam. This is it. You are here.
I was silent, overwhelmed, alone, looking over a tall chain-link fence bordering the airfield at surrounding mountains pockmarked with bomb craters. I sensed that “the enemy” was out there somewhere, brooding, waiting for my blood. I was afraid, but I felt safe, somehow confident that bad stuff would happen to the other guy.
Part of our several days of orientation was a course on maintaining good relations with local populations. I saved one of the handouts:
DOS AND DON’TS FOR AMERICANS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
1. Do not make unfavorable comparisons between the way things are done in the U.S. and Vietnam.
2. Do show interest in history and culture of Vietnam to include religion, folklore and holidays.
3. Do avoid controversial subjects in conversation. Personal views are taken as those of your employer or government.
4. Do be modest about your possessions.
5. Do accept courtesy and respect with dignity.
6. Do be patient. A Vietnamese behaves very reasonably by his own standards.
7. Do be quiet and dignified at all times. Any loud or exaggerated behavior is considered vulgar, especially in public.
8. Do maintain self-control at all times. Do not get upset or show temper if things go badly.
9. Do laugh heartily at comic actions or dragon dancers when laughter is praise.
10. Do not boast about physical prowess. Vietnamese associate strength with lowest classes of their own society and make a virtue of avoiding physical exertion. They are sensitive about their small and slender physique. They resent anything which could be interpreted as a challenge.
11. Do not laugh at a Vietnamese or put him in a position to be laughed at by others. This causes him to lose face—a very serious matter to Chinese and Vietnamese.
12. Do not ridicule a student if you are the teacher.
13. Do keep hands off people’s heads, particularly children’s heads. The head is the most sacred part of the body.
14. Do not be offended if a Vietnamese man holds your hand. For Vietnamese this signifies nothing other than friendship and should be interpreted as a compliment.
15. Do not put your feet on a table, desk or chair.
I never considered the tone of the handout. I just read it and put it away.
I remember the beach at Cam Ranh: a U-shaped bay of white sand up against low, steep green mountains. I remember thinking it was one of the most beautiful beaches I’d ever seen.
PART 5
(1970–71)
COMBAT
Nakhon Phanom
NAKHON PHANOM AIR BASE in Thailand was about what I’d expected. Some buildings seemed hastily constructed. The flight line area, where airplanes were kept, had a kind of steel netting on the ground rather than asphalt. The netting covered taxiways and places for the airplanes to sit while not flying; the runways were paved.
I lived in a room in a long, narrow building with identical rooms side by side—a kind of very long, one-story motel on low pilings. A narrow boardwalk extended the length of the building, and across a grassy area sat another building, identical to ours. In the grassy area sat the Nail-hole, our thatched-roof bar.
There were two groups of fliers in our squadron: the night fliers, who flew 0-2s (small push-pull propeller aircraft) and the day fliers, who flew OV-10s. My roommate was a tall, thin, redheaded night flier from South Carolina, Rick Sizemore. Within a few days of my arrival we hung a dark, heavy cloth curtain across the middle of our room so that the window and door, along with my bed, desk, and chair, were on my side. He’d sleep most of the day on his side, where he also had a desk and chair as well as his bed, and while he flew at night, I’d sleep. On my desk were envelopes, writing paper, a journal, good-luck charms, a portable cassette tape recorder for messages to and from home, my Super-8 camera, and sometimes cigarettes.
Hoot Gibson, whom I’d met in the Philippines, ended up at Nakhon Phanom also. On the first night of the day that he and I and a few other new pilots arrived in Nakhon Phanom (NKP), a welcoming party was held in the Nailhole. The hut housed one large room with a Ping-Pong table, dart boards, and the bar, run by a Thai bartender, Paul—surely not his real name.
Initiation into our squadron, the Twenty-third Tactical Air Support Squadron (TASS), called for us to chug a glass of green liquid called a hammer and then say why we were happy to be a Nail (our call sign. I was assigned Nail 38). The hammer was about six ounces of vodka with a touch of green food coloring.
Lots of laughing and cheering.
On that night, as the party began to wind down, someone suggested a game of blow hockey.
“Too late for that,” said a pilot. “I’m going to bed.”
There was some murmuring. Then a pilot named Scott said, “Okay, I’ll play. How about you, Edgerton? Game of blow hockey?”
“Sure.” This was not a time for backing down. (As I look back, I see there never was.)
A rectangular lunch tray with the rough markings of a hockey field was placed on a small table and filled to the brim with water.
A short, stocky pilot said, “Okay, I’m the referee. Who else is playing?”
“I am,” said Scott. He pulled a chair up to his end of the tray. Someone put a chair down for me, and I sat.
“I got five dollars on Scott,” I heard.
“Ten on Edgerton.”
Money was changing hands. Someone patted me on the back. “Go get him, Edge.”
“Okay,” said the referee, standing between us. Then he chanted, “Positions, men. Chins on the table, hands behind your back. Blow the target into the opponent’s goal. Three out of five wins. No movement beyond the edge of the tray. On three. One, two, three.” He dropped a cork in the middle of the hockey field, and we began blowing the cork in opposite directions. Before I could get my bearings, the cork was in my goal. The referee picked it up. Cheering all around. “Positions, men. On three. One
, two, three.” This time I managed to score a goal. More cheering, some booing.
The referee picked up the cork. “Positions, men.” Two more goals and I’d win. I had to get this one. “One, two”—as the referee brought his hand down to drop the cork, it continued downward, but toward me—“three.” My face and head were soaked in water. A great cheer erupted, and pilots began slapping me on the back and welcoming me into the fraternity of Nail FACs. Someone had earlier escorted Hoot and the other new recruits outside. We would get them one at a time over the next few nights.
Laughing and cheering were not uncommon in the Nailhole, a building with one purpose: to provide relief from war. We spent a lot of time there, and if not there, then in the squadron building near the flight line, getting ready to fly, or in the officer’s club dining room or bar.
New pilots were assigned flying instructors. I was assigned Captain Don Charles. His job was to get me reacclimated to the OV-10 by flying aerobatics, instrument approaches, and simulated single-engine landings. I’d also fly after dark to “safe” areas in western Laos, where I’d practice dropping flares and shooting smoke rockets. The flares, after release, would be suspended from a slowly falling parachute and would show the ground beneath as if it were one very large, lit football field. Later missions would call for flying after dusk, or before dawn.
Then I had to fly several combat missions with Captain Charles before being turned loose on my own. I remember our first. We briefed for the flight and then caught a van from the squadron building over to headquarters. We were checked into that building by a guard, who read from the badges hanging around our necks. Inside, we found several other pilots in a small briefing room. I was surprised when a woman entered, Lieutenant Erickson—the intelligence officer. Before briefing us, she introduced a captain who gave the weather briefing. Low clouds were a problem that day. An ideal day for a FAC who wanted to fly was clear weather. If the ground was overcast below our minimum flying altitude, we didn’t fly. Broken clouds presented problems because they often drifted over a target area.
Then Lieutenant Erickson used a pointer to indicate “safe areas,” areas suitable for bailout, on a large map of Laos. She also pointed out areas of heavy triple-A firings (antiaircraft artillery) on previous days. As FACs we’d need to pass this information along (in a short prestrike briefing) to the fighter-bombers we’d direct on air strikes.
And then she said, “There’s a large concentration of gomers [enemy troops] just to the south of Delta Three Three [a point on the map].” She would be briefing most days for months to come, and she used the word gomers as casually as she would the word pencil. We would use it too.
We flew reconnaissance that day, looking for trucks, but found none. Troops were rarely seen. They were protected by jungle foliage. We were scheduled to direct bombers to cut a road. Captain Charles pointed out landmarks and helped me find our target, and when the fighters arrived, he assisted me in directing them to cut the road. He made all radio calls, simplifying my job, and I did all the flying. Much of the time I was confused or lost, and I was continually trying to update my position by matching ground features to map features. Because of the interference of low clouds, the bombers had problems with accuracy. No bombs hit the road. I watched for ground fire, but I didn’t see any. I knew that the most common antiaircraft artillery was thirty-seven-millimeter guns. I’d been told that their tracers, coming every few rounds, looked like orange Coke bottles streaking up from the ground.
After the bombers left to return to their base in Vietnam and we reported by radio to a command center that there was no damage to the road, I flew around looking for trucks and familiarizing myself with the general area below me. Any combat mission was flown in a numbered “sector” about a hundred miles square, and that particular area was the responsibility of a single FAC. We looked for trucks or any other signs of life in our sector, and we directed all air strikes. No other FAC would be flying in our area while we were there, nor would any U.S. military aircraft fly through a sector without our clearance.
We’d been told over and over that while flying above Laos we always had to “jink” to the left or right at different degrees of bank. This way, enemy gunners would have difficulty getting a “bead” on us. We knew to jink every second that we were flying over Laos.
At some point along toward the end of this, my first mission, I became engrossed with cockpit duties, including studying the maps in my lap, and I stopped jinking for several seconds. Suddenly I felt a jolt and heard a pop directly underneath the aircraft.
From the backseat: “Good God, man. Jink. They’re shooting at us.”
Fired at already! I pulled the aircraft into a left bank and then a quick right bank. Back to the left. I looked below but could see nothing except stretches of green jungle and long, steep, rocky east-west rises we called karst.
We flew home and landed. I had an idea what I’d be doing for the next year or so.
One day a few weeks after that first combat ride, Captain Charles and I were having a drink at the Nailhole, and he said, “Do you remember that first flight, when we got fired at?”
“Yep.”
“That was me banging my feet on the floor in the backseat. But don’t spread the word. Surprise is the key. I got the shit scared out of me the same way.”
I finished my checkout and started flying solo combat missions. Typically a target would be a section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the north-south, trans-Laos network of dirt roads through the jungle. We would direct fighter-bombers to bomb the trail, leaving a crater that couldn’t be crossed by a truck. Before takeoff we would be given “line numbers” for prearranged targets (used so that coordinates would not need to be read over the radio and possibly picked up by enemy monitors). Sometimes a target would be a suspected storage area or a river ford, and we would be given the time for rendezvous with the fighter-bombers.
We used an encoder/decoder “wheel” (it had fresh numbers every day) to encode numbers that needed to be recited over the airwaves. We always carried grease marker pens and used them to write radio frequencies, bomb-damage assessments, and so forth on our Plexiglas canopies in the lower left or right front corners. I got the hang of things quickly and started feeling at home in my job.
Occasionally we would see a parked truck or what might be a storage facility under the jungle canopy—a target that had not been scheduled for bombing. In that case we’d call Hillsborough, the airborne command center, and they would send fighter-bombers, if available, from a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin or from an air base in Vietnam or Thailand, or from another mission that had not required them to drop all their bombs.
During all my flying over Laos, I do not recall seeing one standing building or obviously inhabited area. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, where people had once lived, was deserted except for those bringing supplies from North Vietnam through Laos and into South Vietnam or providing shelter or operating the large antiaircraft guns hidden along the trail.
There were four “boxes” in southern Laos. These boxes, several miles square, where trails intersected or had once intersected, were targets when aircraft over Laos carried bombs but had nowhere to drop them. The boxes had been bombed until not one tree stood. They looked like the surface of the moon—nothing but sand and bomb craters. And on some mornings, through binoculars, I’d see truck tracks around craters and across a box.
B-52 bombers flew “arc light” missions. Suspected concentrations of enemy troops, trucks, or supplies would be bombed with a hundred or so five-hundred-pound bombs (from one B-52). When an arc light was scheduled for my sector, I stayed clear of the area and watched a B-52 fly over far above, leaving contrails, and then in the jungle far down below, an area about the size of a town would suddenly explode beneath the jungle canopy.
If we saw a convoy of trucks moving (I never saw trucks moving at any time other than dawn or dusk), we were to dive immediately and fire a rocket. When a smoke rocket exploded near a truck convoy, t
he truck drivers usually assumed an air strike was coming and quickly parked and deserted their trucks, climbing into “spider holes” (small bunkers). Otherwise, when resting or stopping, they hid their trucks under thick jungle foliage.
EARLY IN MY TOUR, I had the opportunity to visit a top secret facility on base. Inside, a map with electric lighting behind it covered an entire wall. The sergeant leading the tour explained that certain markings on the map indicated where U.S. Air Force jet fighters had dropped sensitive hearing devices along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The devices were located in small green plastic trees—at their base, where the trees planted themselves into the ground. The sounds of passing trucks on the trail could be heard in this room in Thailand. Specialists could hear voices, men around campfires occasionally, once arguing about Marlboro cigarettes. Most important, when trucks were heard moving along the trail (usually at night), jets could be summoned to drop bombs on the trail near the hearing devices.
The electronic wall confirmed our technical superiority over the enemy. And what an incredible technological advantage we had. We controlled the skies over Laos. We could bomb at will. How could they win?
Instructing in War
AFTER ABOUT SIX WEEKS of flying solo combat missions, I became an instructor. I still flew solo missions, but I also instructed the new guys arriving from the States. And on every pilot’s first combat mission, as soon as he flew straight and level for a few seconds, I lifted my feet in the backseat and crashed them to the floor. “Whoa! Jink, man! They’re shooting at us!”
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