The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  —and yet this flaming bazooka assembly line will, in the newcomer’s memory, seem orderly, sublimely well controlled, compared to the procedure he will witness as the F-4’s, F-8’s, A-4’s, A-6’s return to the ship for what in the engineering stoicisms of the military is known as recovery and arrest. To say that an F-4 is coming back onto this heaving barbecue from out of the sky at a speed of 135 knots … that may be the truth on paper, but it doesn’t begin to get across the idea of what a man sees from the deck itself, because it perhaps creates the notion that the plane is gliding in. On the deck one knows different! As the aircraft comes closer and the carrier heaves on into the waves and the plane’s speed does not diminish—one experiences a neural alarm he has never in his wildest fears imagined before: This is not an airplane coming toward me, it’s a brick, and it is not gliding, it’s falling, a fifty-thousand-pound brick, headed not for a stripe on the deck, but for me—and with a horrible smash! it hits the skillet, and with a blur of momentum as big as a freight train’s it hurtles toward the far end of the deck—another blinding storm!—another roar as the pilot pushes the throttle up to full military power and another smear of rubber screams out over the skillet—and this is normal!—quite okay!—a wire stretched across the deck has grabbed the hook on the end of the plane as it hit the deck tail down, and the smash was the rest of the twenty-five-ton brute slamming onto the deck, as if tripped up, so that it is now straining against the wire at full throttle, in case it hadn’t held and the plane had “boltered” off the end of the deck and had to struggle up into the air again. And already the Mickey Mouse helmets are running toward their fiery monster …

  The obvious dangers of the flight deck were the setting, the backdrop, the mental decor, the emotional scenery against which all that happened on the carrier was played out, and the aviator was he who lived in the very eye of the firestorm. This grill was his scenery. Its terrors rose out of his great moments: the launch and recovery. For that reason some crewmen liked to check out the demeanor of the aviators during these events, just as they might have in the heyday of the chivalric code.

  When John Dowd and Garth Flint came out on deck in their green flight suits, carrying their helmets and their knee-boards, they were an unmistakable pair. Dowd was the tallest pilot on the ship, almost six feet five. Six years ago he was captain of the Yale basketball team. He was so tall, he had to slump his way through the physicals in order to get into flight training, where six four was the upper limit. He looked like a basketball player. His face, his Adam’s apple, his shoulders, his elbows—he was a tower of sharp angles. Flint was Dowd’s radar-intercept officer. He was five eight and rather solidly built. He was not small, but next to Dowd he looked like a little jockey.

  Today they were to go out on a two-ship formation, with Dowd’s roommate, Dick Brent, flying a second F-4B. Dowd’s would be the lead ship; Brent’s the wing. The usual monsoon overcast was down within about five hundred feet of the deck. It was another day inside the gray pearl: the ship, a tight circle of the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin around it, a dome of clouds, fog, mist, which was God’s great gift to the North Vietnamese.

  They climb aboard and Dowd eases the power on to taxi the ship toward the catapult, while the aircraft directors nurse it onto the slot. The catapult officer is out there on the deck with his Mousketeer ear baffles on and his yellow jersey flapping in the wind. Assuming the preliminary stages have been completed correctly, the catapult officer is supposed to hold up five fingers to show the pilot that all looks good for launch. If the gauges look okay, the pilot then shows that he is ready for his little slide-for-life … by saluting. At this point three things are supposed to happen in a very rapid sequence: the catapult officer drops to one knee (to avoid having his head removed by the wing) and throws his hand forward like a cheerleader doing the “locomotive”; the pilot cuts on full afterburn; and a seaman on a catwalk across the deck presses a black rubber button and throws both hands up in the air. This somewhat hopeless-looking gesture says: “It’s done! We’ve fired the catapult! You’re on your way! There’s no stopping it!”

  To Dowd this is another eccentric note. This man who fires the slingshot—or who seems to—actually he’s signaling the steam-catapult crew below deck—this man, who appears to flick you into the sky or the sea with his finger, according to how things work out, is some little swabbo making seventy-eight dollars a month or whatever it is. Somehow this fact puts just that much more edge on the demeanor of the pilot’s salute, because what that salute says is: “I hereby commit my hide to your miserable care, sir, to you and your sailor with the button and your motherless catapult. I’m a human cannonball, and it’s your cannon.”

  So it is that today, just before he cuts on full afterburn and sets off the full 37,000-pound explosion and consumes the skillet in the fire-storm and braces the stick so he won’t lose control in the bad lurch of the slingshot, just before the big ride, in the key moment of knightly correctness, Dowd rolls his salute off his helmet with a languid swivel of his wrist, like Adolphe Menjou doffing his hat … a raffish gesture, you might say, with a roll to it that borders on irony … but a friendly note all the same … For this is a good day! They are flying again! There is no bomb load—therefore less weight, therefore an easy launch! … a good day—otherwise he might have, or would have been entitled to, according to the unwritten and unspoken rules (especially since he has more than one hundred missions behind him)—he might have ended that cool rolling salute by leaving his middle finger sticking up in the air, in an accepted fashion that tells one and all: “You’re only giving me the grand goose. Why should I salute? (Here’s one for you.)”

  But this is a good day!—and Dowd surrenders to the catapult without even an ironic protest, and he feels a tremendous compression, so great that the surface of his eyeballs flattens and his vision blurs, and the F-4B shrieks, and he and Flint hurtle down the stripe and off the bow of the ship, half blind and riding a shrieking beast, into the gray pearl. It couldn’t have been a smoother launch; it was absolutely nominal.

  Dowd heads on through the pearl, through the overcast, with Brent’s plane about five hundred yards back. The ride to the coast of North Vietnam will take them about twenty minutes. Just how high the cloud cover will be up around Haiphong is impossible to say, which means that the game of high-low may be a trifle too interesting. The weather has been so bad, nobody has been up there. Well … now somebody’s going up there. Already, without any doubt, the Russian trawlers in the gulf have painted the two aircraft on their radar screens. Painted! Such a nice word for it! The phosphorescent images come sliding onto the screen, as if a brush were doing it. And with those two delicate little strokes on a Russian radar screen somewhere out there in the muck, the game is on again.

  American pilots in Vietnam often ran through their side of the action ahead of time as if it were a movie in the mind … trying to picture every landmark on the way to the Red River delta, every razorback green ridge, all that tropical hardscrabble down below, every jut in the coast, every wretched misty snake bend in the Red River, every bridge around Haiphong harbor, every change of course, the angle of every bomb run from the assigned altitude … But just try to imagine the enemy’s side of it. Try to imagine your own aircraft (encasing your own hide) sliding onto their screens like a ghost stroke (observed by what Russian?) and the trawler signaling the coast and the cannon crews and SAM battalions cranking up in the delta and devising (saying what exactly?) their black trash for the day, which could be inexplicably varied.

  One day flying over Haiphong would be “a walk in Haiphong Park,” as Dowd would put it. The next day the place would erupt with the wildest storms of ground fire since the bombing of Berlin, Merseburg, and Magdeburg in the Second World War, absolute sheets of 37-millimeter, 57-millimeter, and 85-millimeter cannon fire, plus the SAM’s. The antiaircraft cannons now had sights that computed the leads instantly and automatically, and they were more accurate than anything ever dreamed of
in the Second World War or the Korean war. But it was the SAM’s that were the great equalizer. It was SAM’s that made aerial combat in Vietnam something different from what the aces of wars gone by—admirable innocent fellows!—had ever known.

  Dowd used to say to himself: “The SAM’s come up, and the boys go down.” One way or the other! The SAM’s, the Russian surface-to-air missiles, were aimed and guided by radar. They climbed at about Mach 3, which was likely to be at least three times as fast as your own ship was going when you heard the warning over your radio (“I have a valid launch!”). The SAM’s were not fired at random—each had a radar lock on your aircraft or somebody else’s. The only way to evade a SAM was to dive for the deck, i.e., the ground. The SAM’s own G-forces were so great they couldn’t make the loop and come back down. “The SAM’s come up, and the boys go down.” And the merriment has just begun. The dive brings you down so low, you are now down into the skeet range of that insidiously well-aimed flak! This, as they say, put you between a rock and a hard place. Sometimes the North Vietnamese also sent up the Mig-21’s. But they were canny about it. The Migs went up mainly to harass the bombers, the F-105’s, A-4’s, and A-6’s, to force them to jettison their bomb loads (in order to gain speed to evade the Migs) before they reached the target. But occasionally the F-4’s got a chance to tangle with them. What a luxury! How sporting! How nice to have a mere Mig to deal with instead of the accursed SAM’s! Of course, you just might have both to contend with at the same time. The North Vietnamese were so SAM-crazy, once in a while they’d fire them up in the middle of a hassle and hit their own planes.

  Dowd saw his first SAM last year when he was on a flak-suppression run. Other aviators had always told him they looked like “flying telephone poles,” but the only thing he saw at first was a shower of sparks, like the sparks from a Roman candle. That was the rocket tail. And then he could make out the shaft—all of this happening in an instant—and it was, in fact, like a pale-gray telephone pole, moving sideways through the sky as if skidding on its tail, which meant the ship it was after had already dived for the deck and the SAM was trying to overcome its own momentum and make the loop. You were always reassured with the statement, “If you can see it”—meaning a SAM—“you can evade it”—but there were some pilots who were so egotistical they believed that the one they saw was the one that had their name on it. A fatal delusion in many cases!—for the SAM’s came up in fans of six or eight, fired from different sites and different angles. “The SAM’s come up, and the boys go down”—and Dowd and his whole formation hit the deck and got out of there. Not long after that, Dowd and Flint were hit by ground fire for the first time—it was to happen four more times—in the same sort of situation. They had just come down out of the dive when they took hits in the port ramp and intake duct. Fortunately it was 14.5-millimeter fire, instead of one of the big cannons, and they made it on back to the ship.

  High-low! In what?—ten minutes?—Dowd will have to start playing the same game again this morning. Soon he will have to decide whether to go above the overcast or right on the deck. Above the overcast they will be safe from the gunners, who need visual sightings in order to use their automatic lead mechanisms. But right above the overcast is where SAM rules like a snake. More aviators have been wiped out by SAM’s popping out of the clouds they’re sitting on than any other way. Rather than contend with that automated blind beast, some pilots prefer to come in low over the terrain in the eternal attempt to get in “under the radar.” But what is it really, a strategic defense or a psychological defense?

  Such was the nature of the game that Dowd and every other pilot here had to play. Many of the pilots who flew over Vietnam had been trained by instructors who had flown in the Korean war. What tigers those old Korea jocks were! What glorious memories they had! What visions those aces could fill your skull with! What a tangy taste they gave to the idea of aerial combat over Southeast Asia! The Korean war brought on the first air-to-air combat between jet fighters, but it turned out to be dogfighting of the conventional sort nonetheless, American F-86’s versus Soviet-built Mig-15’s mainly—and it was a picnic … a field day … a duck shoot … American pilots, flying F-86’s in all but a few dozen cases, shot down 839 Korean and Chinese Mig-15’s. Only fifty-six F-86’s were lost. Quite a carnival it was. Morale among American ground troops in Korea slid like the mud, but the pilots were in Fighter Jock Heaven. The Air Force was producing aces—fighter pilots who had shot down five planes or more—as fast as the Communists could get the Migs up in the air. By the time the war stopped, there were thirty-eight Air Force aces, and between them they had accounted for a total of 299.5 kills. High spirits these lads had. They chronicled their adventures with a good creamy romanticism such as nobody in flying had dared treat himself to since the days of Lufbery, Frank Luke, and Von Richthofen in the First World War. Why hold back! Jousting is jousting, and a knight’s a knight. Colonel Harrison R. Thyng, who shot down five Migs in Korea (and eight German and Japanese planes in the Second World War), glowed like Excalibur when he described his Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing: “Like olden knights the F-86 pilots ride up over North Korea to the Yalu River, the sun glinting off silver aircraft, contrails streaming behind, as they challenge the numerically superior enemy to come on up and fight.” Lances and plumes! Come on up and fight! Now there was a man having a wonderful time!

  In Vietnam, however, the jousting was of a kind the good colonel and his knights never dreamed of. The fighter plane that the Air Force and the Navy were now using instead of the F-86—namely, the F-4—was competing with the new generation of Migs and was winning by a ratio of two to one, according to the air-to-air combat scoreboards, regular league standings, that were kept in various military publications. That was nothing like the fifteen-to-one ratio in Korea, of course —but more than that, it was not even the main event any longer. Not even the heroic word “ace” carried the old wallop. The studs-of-all-the-studs in Vietnam were not the pilots in air-to-air combat but the men who operated in that evil space between the rock and the hard place, between the SAM’s and the automatic cannon fire.

  In the past three years—1965, 1966, and the year just ending for John Dowd, 1967—the losses had been more brutal than the Air Force or the Navy had ever admitted. Jack Broughton, an Air Force colonel and commander of a wing of F-105’s flying over Hanoi-Haiphong from out of Thailand, described the losses as “astronomical and unacceptable,” and they were increasing sharply each year. What made the North Vietnamese game of high-low—SAM’s and ground fire—so effective was a set of restrictions such as no combat pilots had ever had to contend with before.

  Flying out over Hanoi and Haiphong was like playing on some small and sharply defined court. These two cities were by far the major targets in North Vietnam, and so there was very little element of surprise along the lines of switching targets. They could only be approached down a ridge of mountains (“Thud Ridge”) from the west, out of Thailand, which would be the Air Force attacking with F-105 fighter-bombers, or across a wide-open delta (perfect for radar defenses) from the east, which would be the Navy attacking from carriers in the gulf. The North Vietnamese and the Russians packed so much artillery in around these two cities that pilots would come back saying, “It was like trying to fly through a rainstorm without hitting a drop.”