The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  God knows how many planes and pilots were lost just trying to knock out the North Vietnamese ground fire. The Air Force had Wild Weasel or Iron Hand units made up of pilots in F-105’s who offered themselves as living SAM bait. They would deliberately try to provoke launches by the SAM battalions so that other ships could get a radar lock on the SAM sites and hit them with cluster-bomb strikes. This became the ultimate game of radar chess. If the SAM battalions beamed up at the Wild Weasels and committed too early, they stood to get obliterated, which would also allow the main strike force to get through to its target. On the other hand, if they refused to go for the bait, recognizing it for what it was, and shut down their beams—that might give the strike force just enough time to slip through unchallenged. So they’d keep shutting on and off, as in some lethal game of “one finger, two fingers.” Their risk was nothing, however, compared to that of the Wild Weasel pilots, who were the first in and the last out, who hung around in the evil space far too long and stood to get snuffed any way the game went.

  Navy pilots, Dowd among them, were sent out day after day for “flak suppression.” The North Vietnamese could move their flak sites around overnight, so that the only way to find them was by leading with your head, as it were, flying over the target area until you saw them fire the cannons. This you could detect by the rather pretty peach-pink sparkles, which were the muzzle explosions. The cannons made no sound at all (way up here) and seemed tiny and merely decorative … with their little delicate peach-pink sparkles amid the bitter green of the scrabble. Dowd and his comrades could not unload on these flak sites just anywhere they found them, however. As if to make the game a little more hazardous, the Pentagon had declared certain areas bomb-free zones. A pilot could hit only “military targets,” which meant he couldn’t hit villages, hospitals, churches, or Haiphong harbor if there was a “third-party” ship there. So, naturally, being no fools, the North Vietnamese loaded the villages up with flak sites, loaded the churches up with munitions, put SAM sites behind the hospitals, and “welded a third-party ship to the dock” in Haiphong harbor, as Garth Flint put it. There always seemed to be some neutral flag in port there, with one of North Vietnam’s best customers being our friends the British. One day one of Dowd’s Coral Sea comrades came in for a run on a railroad freight depot, pickled his bombs too soon, went long, and hit a church—whereupon the bitter-green landscape rocked with secondary and tertiary explosions and a succession of fireballs. The place had gone up like an arsenal, which of course it was. Every now and then Dowd would be involved in a strike aimed at “cutting off” Haiphong harbor. This was not to be done, however, by mining the harbor or blowing the docking facilities out of the water or in any other obvious and easy manner. No, this had to be accomplished by surgically severing the bridges that connected the port with the mainland. This required bomb runs through the eye of a needle, and even if the bridges were knocked out, the North Vietnamese simply moved everything across by barge until the bridges were back.

  If you were a pilot being flung out every day between the rock and the hard place, these complicated proscriptions took on an eerie diffidence, finally. They were like an unaccountable display of delicate manners. In fact, it was the Johnson Administration’s attempt to fight a “humane” war and look good in the eyes of the world. There was something out-to-lunch about it, however. The eyes of the world did not flutter for a second. Stories of American atrocities were believed by whoever wanted to believe them, no matter what actually occurred, and the lacy patterns that American bombing missions had to follow across Hanoi-Haiphong never impressed a soul, except for the pilots and radar-intercept officers who knew what a difficult and dangerous game it was.

  If the United States was seriously trying to win the battle of world opinion—well, then, here you had a real bush-league operation. The North Vietnamese were the uncontested aces, once you got into this arena. One of the most galling things a pilot had to endure in Vietnam was seeing the North Vietnamese pull propaganda coup after propaganda coup, often with the help, unwitting or otherwise, of Americans. There was not merely a sense of humiliation about it. The North Vietnamese talent in this direction often had direct strategic results.

  For example, the missions over N———D———. Now, here was one time, in Dowd’s estimation, when they had gotten the go-ahead to do the job right. N———D———was an important transportation center in the Iron Triangle area. For two days they softened the place up, working on the flak sites and SAM sites in the most methodical way. On the third day they massed the bomb strike itself. They tore the place apart. They ripped open its gullet. They put it out of the transport business. It had been a model operation. But the North Vietnamese now are blessed with a weapon that no military device known to America could ever get a lock on. As if by magic … in Hanoi … appears … Harrison Salisbury! Harrison Salisbury—writing in The New York Times about the atrocious American bombing of the hardscrabble folk of North Vietnam in the Iron Triangle! If you had real sporting blood in you, you had to hand it to the North Vietnamese. They were champions at this sort of thing. It was beautiful to watch. To Americans who knew the air war in the North firsthand, it seemed as if the North Vietnamese were playing Mr. Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves.

  Before you knew it, massive operations like the one at N———D———were no longer being carried out. It was back to threading needles. And yet it couldn’t simply be blamed on Salisbury. No series of articles by anyone, no matter what the publication, could have had such an immediate strategic effect if there weren’t some sort of strange collapse of will power taking place back in the States. One night, after a couple of hops, Dowd sank back into an easy chair in the wardroom of the Coral Sea and picked up a copy of some newspaper that was lying around. There on the first page was William Sloane Coffin, the Yale University chaplain, leading a student antiwar protest. Not only that, there was Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, standing by, offering tacit support … or at least not demurring in any way. It gave Dowd a very strange feeling. Out in the Gulf of Tonkin, on a carrier, one was not engulfed in news from stateside. A report like this came like a remote slice of something—but a slice of something how big? Coffin, who had been at Yale when Dowd was there—Coffin was one thing. But the president of Yale? There was Kingman Brewster with his square-cut face—but looked at another way, it was a strong face gone flaccid, plump as a piece of chicken Kiev. Six years before, when Dowd was a senior at Yale and had his picture taken on the Yale Fence as captain of the basketball team … any such Yale scene as was now in this newspaper would have been impossible to contemplate.

  The collapse of morale, or weakening of resolve, or whatever it should be called—this was all taking place in the States at the very moment when the losses were beginning to mount in both the Navy and the Air Force. Aviators were getting shot down by the hundreds. Sometimes, at night, after dinner, after the little stewards in white had cleared away the last of the silver from off the white line, after playing a few rounds of acey-deucey in the lounge or just sinking into the leather billows of the easy chairs, after a movie in the wardroom, after a couple of unauthorized but unofficially tolerated whiskeys in somebody’s stateroom—after the usual, in short, when he was back in his own quarters, Dowd would take out his mimeographed flight schedule for the day just completed and turn it over to the blank side and use it to keep a journal. In 1966 and 1967 more and more of these entries would make terse note of the toll of friends: “We lost Paul Schultz & Sully—presumably captured immediately on landing in parachute. Direct hit from SAM coming out of clouds—site near Kien An.” Or: “Bill C. got it over Ha Tinh today—body seen bloody on ground.”

  Or they were about how John Dowd hadn’t gotten his: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I think today was a give day. 8 SAM’s or so
fired from multiple sites and it looked like a few had my no. on them. However they missed their mark & so this entry is made … Doc H. presented those who participated in the ‘A’ strike with a little vial of J. W. Dant cough medicine.”

  In light of all that, it may be of interest to note one fact concerning the mission to Haiphong and points north that Dowd has just headed off on: he did not merely volunteer for it—he thought it up!

  For four days, which is to say, ever since Christmas Day, the coastal ports of Haiphong, Cam Pha, and Hon Gay have been socked in with bad weather. Dowd suggested and volunteered for a weather-reconnaissance hop to find out how bad it actually was, to see if the soup was moving at all, to see if the harbors were by any chance clear of third-party ships and therefore eligible for bombing, and so on. If anyone had asked, Dowd would have merely said that anything was better than sitting around the ship for days on end, doing make-work.

  But anything—even playing high-low with SAM over the North?

  The answer to that question perhaps leads to the answer to a broader one: How was it that despite their own fearsome losses in 1965, 1966 and 1967, despite hobbling restrictions and dubious strategies set by the Pentagon, despite the spectacle of the antiwar movement building back home—how was it that, in the face of all this, American fliers in Vietnam persisted in virtuoso performances and amazing displays of esprit throughout the war? Somehow it got down to something that is encoded in the phrase “a great hop.”

  The last time Dowd and Garth Flint were out was four days ago, Christmas Day, during the American Christmas cease-fire; and what a little tourist excursion that was. They flew a photo run over Route 1A in North Vietnam, came in under the cloud cover, right down on top of the “Drive-In,” as it was called, fifty feet from the ground, with Garth taking pictures, and the Charlies were down there using Christmas Day and the cease-fire for all it was worth. The traffic jam at the Phun Cat ferry, going south to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was so enormous that they couldn’t have budged even if they thought Dowd was going to open up on them. They craned their heads back and stared up at him. He was down so low, it was as if he could have chucked them under their chins. Several old geezers, in the inevitable pantaloons, looked up without even taking their hands off the drafts of the wagons they were pulling. It was as if they were harnessed to them. The wagons were so full of artillery shells, it was hard to see how one man, particularly so spindly a creature, could possibly pull one, but there they were in the middle of the general jam-up, in with the trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, old cars, rigs of every sort, anything that would roll.

  Now, that was a good hop—and Dowd so recorded it in his journal —an interesting hop, a nice slice of the war, something to talk about, but merely a photo hop … and not a great hop. There was such a thing as a great hop, and it was quite something else.

  Sometimes, at night, when Dowd would write on the back of his flight schedule, he’d make such entries as:

  “Great hop! Went to Nam Dinh and hosed down the flak sites around that city. Migs joined in the caper, but no one got a tally. Think I lucked out in a last-minute bomb run & racked up a flak site pretty well.”

  The atmosphere of the great hop had something about it that was warlike only in the sense that it was, literally, a part of combat. A word that comes closer is sporting. Throughout his tour of duty on the Coral Sea, no matter how bearish the missions became, Dowd seemed to maintain an almost athletic regard for form. Even on days he spent diving from SAM’s and running the flak gauntlets, even on days when he was hit by flak, he would wind up his journal entries with a note about how well (or how poorly) he drove his F-4 back down onto the carrier, and often with a playful tone: “2nd pass was a beauty but only received an OK—which was an unfortunate misjudgment on the part of the LSO [landing signal officer].” Or: “Went to Haiphong Barracks. 3 SAM’s launched—one appeared to be directed at yours truly—however with skill & cunning we managed to avoid it, although it cost us our first bombing run, which was in question due to lack of a target—no flak to suppress. After whifferdilling around we rolled in on a preplanned secondary target. What deleterious havoc this bombing caused the enemy is questionable. However the overall mission was quite successful … RTB good approach except for last ¼ mile. Received cut-1 for my efforts.”

  A great hop! With skill & cunning we managed to avoid … death, to call it by its right name. But pilots never mentioned death in the abstract. In fact, the word itself was taboo in conversation. So were the words “bravery” and “fear” and their synonyms. Which is to say, pilots never mentioned the three questions that were uppermost in the minds of all of them: Will I live or die? Will I be brave, whatever happens? Will I show my fear? By now, 1967, with more than a hundred combat missions behind him, Dowd existed in a mental atmosphere that was very nearly mystical. Pilots who had survived that many games of high-low over North Vietnam were like the preacher in Moby Dick who ascends to the pulpit on a rope ladder and then pulls the ladder up behind him.

  Friends, near ones and dear ones, the loved ones back home, often wondered just what was on the minds of the fliers as the casualties began to increase at a fearsome rate in 1966 and 1967. Does a flier lie on his back in bed at night with his eyes wide open, staring holes through the ceiling and the flight deck and into outer space, thinking of the little ones, Jeffrey and Jennifer, or of his wife, Sandy, and of the soft lost look she has when she first wakes in the morning or of Mom and Dad and Christmas and of little things like how he used to click the toggles on his rubber boots into place before he went out into the snow when he was eight? No, my dear ones back home—I’m afraid not! The lads did not lie in their staterooms on the Coral Sea thinking of these things—not even on Christmas Eve, a few days ago!

  Well … what was on their minds?

  (Hmmmm … How to put it into words … Should it be called the “inner room”?)

  Dowd, for one, had entered the Navy in 1961 without the slightest thought of flying or of going to war. The Navy had no such designs for him, either. Quite the contrary. All they asked was that he keep playing basketball! At Yale, Dowd had been an aggressive player, the sort who was matched up against other college stars, such as Dave De Busschere of the University of Detroit (later of the New York Knicks). At the end of his last season, 1961, Dowd was drafted by the Cleveland entry in the new American Basketball Association. He had his naval R.O.T.C. obligation to serve out, however, and the Navy sent him to Hawaii to play ball for the fleet. This he did; his team won the All-Navy championship in 1962. There was nothing to stop him from playing basketball for the rest of his service stint … just putting the ball in the hoop for Uncle Sam in heavy-lidded Hawaii.

  Now that he was in the military, however, Dowd, like many service athletes, began to get a funny feeling. It had to do with the intangible thing that made sports so alluring when you were in school or college, the intangible summed up in the phrase “where the action is.” At Yale, as at other colleges, playing sports was where the action was—or where the applause, the stardom, and the honor were, to be more exact. But now that he was in the Navy, something about sports, something he had never thought about, became obvious. Namely, all team sports were play-acting versions of military combat.

  It is no mere coincidence that the college sport where there is the greatest risk of injury—football—is also the most prestigious. But the very risk of injury in football is itself but a mild play-acting version of the real thing: the risk of death in military action. So a service athlete was like a dilettante. He was play-acting inside the arena of the real thing. The real thing was always available, any time one had the stomach for it, even in peacetime. There were plenty of ways to hang your side out over the edge in the service, even without going to war. Quite unconsciously, the service athlete always felt mocked by that unspoken challenge. And in the Navy there was no question but that the action-of-all-actions was flying fighter planes off carriers.

  In his last year at Yale, Dowd had m
arried a girl named Wendy Harter from his home town, Rockville Centre, Long Island. About a year and a half later they had a son, John Jr. And then, out in Hawaii, on those hot liquid evenings when the boy couldn’t go to sleep, they would drive him out to Hickam Field to watch the airplanes. Both commercial liners and military fighters came into Hickam. By and by Dowd was taking his wife and his son out there even when the boy was practically asleep in his tracks. One night they were out at Hickam, and Wendy surprised Dowd by reading his mind out loud for him.

  “If you like them so much,” she said, “why don’t you fly them?”

  So he started training … with a vague feeling of pour le sport. This was 1963, when the possibility of an American war in Vietnam was not even talked about.

  A man may go into military flight training believing that he is entering some sort of technical school where he is simply going to acquire a certain set of skills. Instead, he finds himself enclosed in the walls of a fraternity. That was the first big surprise for every student. Flying was not a craft but a fraternity. Not only that, the activities of this particular brotherhood began to consume all of a man’s waking hours.

  But why? And why was it so obsessive? Ahhhhh—we don’t talk about that! Nevertheless, the explanation was: flying required not merely talent but one of the grandest gambles of manhood. Flying, particularly in the military, involved an abnormal risk of death at every stage. Being a military flight instructor was a more hazardous occupation than deep-sea diving. For that matter, simply taking off in a single-engine jet fighter, such as an F-102, or any other of the military’s marvelous bricks with fins on them, presented a man, on a perfectly sunny day, with more ways to get himself killed than his wife and children could possibly imagine. Within the fraternity of men who did this sort of thing day in and day out—within the flying fraternity, that is—mankind appeared to be sheerly divided into those who have it and those who don’t—although just what it was … was never explained. Moreover, the very subject was taboo. It somehow seemed to be the transcendent solution to the binary problem of Death/Glory, but since not even the terminology could be uttered, speculating on the answer became doubly taboo.