by Tom Clancy
Our warrior society, I began to see, isn’t all that different. The husband would die. The widow would be comforted, food would be brought over, there’ d be tears and shared memories and that missing-man flyby that chilled all of our souls. But Monday would roll around, the pilots would go back to their jet aircraft mistresses, the wives would go back to raising kids and bonding with one another, and the movers would be pulling up to the widow’s house. She no longer qualified to live on the base; and her former pals, her inner circle, didn’t want their own husbands hanging around her, lest she snag a new husband. Worse, none of our warriors, husbands or wives, wanted her reminder of the death that lived seconds away whenever we strapped on our jet and took to the wild blue yonder.
It hit me then that, daily, our wives had to contend with the unspoken horror of all that. Not only did they dread our death, but just as real was the knowledge that their lives, as members of an extremely close interdependent society, also hung in the balance. And I came to appreciate the steel in their unspoken and unacknowledged courage — as opposed to our own drunken ribaldry, which we pretended was “guts”—in the ever-present face of death. The pilots were scared children who used booze, offensive behavior, and profane language to hold the awareness of their fragile mortality at arm’s length. But our women shared a gut-wrenching horror that someday the wing commander would show up at their front door to announce that they were now going to have to provide for and raise the children alone, that they were about to be turned out into the world to fend for themselves, and that their closest confidantes in the world would soon stare through them, lest they see what might be in store for themselves.
Service wives, especially fighter pilot wives, are the most underrated warriors in the world. Daily, they confront their own fears, staying home to change a dirty diaper and getting ready for the next move, while shoring up the inflated egos of their mates before they go off to chase around the sky. God bless and watch over them.
★ Death came personally to Chuck Horner during his time with the 4th TFW.
One of the 4th’s missions was to deploy to Turkey and sit alert with a nuke on their F-105s. They flew gunnery training over the Mediterranean, air-to-ground at Koyna range in Turkey, and low level all over Turkey. While Horner was in Turkey around Christmas of 1964, his parents, his sister, Mary Lou Kendall, her husband Bill, and their three children were killed in a car accident in Iowa (Christmas was not a lucky time for the Horner clan; John Towner had been killed during the Christmas season of 1953-54).
Those deaths were terrible, and so was Horner’s grief. Despite them, however, there was a fascinating side story that made, and still makes, the horror and grief a little more bearable.
When Chuck Horner came back to the States for the funeral, he was a nobody captain with a lot of pain, yet the USAF took care of him royally — actually, they treated him like a warrior. They arranged transport that brought him from Turkey to Des Moines before his sister from San Diego could get there. Colonel John Murphy, his wing commander, even had the TAC commander’s personal T-39 transport meet Horner at McGuire AFB when he got off the military air transport system aircraft that brought him from Germany.
All of this cost a great deal of money. Nowadays, the media might even have a field day with the story of misuse of government jets. But the cost of that government jet that flew Chuck Horner from McGuire to Des Moines got paid back many times over during the next few years. There are some things you have to do for warriors.
After the 4th TFW, Horner’s next move was into combat in Vietnam.
2
The Big Lie
In April of 1965, Chuck Horner was on TDY at McCoy AFB in Orlando at a gunnery workup, preparing for a weapons meet called Red Rio. Because it was a major meet, he had done a lot of flying to prepare for it — pure gunnery missions three times a day, bombing and strafing — and he was at the peak of his performance. One night at the bar, the ops officer fingered him. “You’ve got orders,” he said. “Take a jet and get yourself back home to Seymour.”
“I better wait until morning,” Horner answered; he had a couple of drinks in him.
“No way,” the Ops said. “Get your ass in the jet and go.”
So Horner packed that night and flew home to Seymour Johnson, where he was met when he arrived. “You’ll be leaving in the morning on a secret mission,” he was told. “Pack for hot weather.” He went home and kissed Mary Jo hello; the next morning a staff car arrived, and he kissed her goodbye.
Also in the car was Major Roger Myhrum, a friend from the 4th TFW, Seymour Johnson, who had joined the wing at about the same time in 1963 that Horner had. Myhrum was older than Horner and was in another squadron, the 333d, but they both flew F-105s and got along well. Now they were traveling together on commercial airline tickets to San Francisco, destination classified; they didn’t have a clue about where they were going.
In San Francisco, a bus picked them up, along with some other pilots from McConnell AFB, Kansas, and took them to Travis AFB near Oakland. After the bus left them off, their destination began to grow clearer: Somebody handed them an empty bag and sent them down a line. They filled the bag with soldiers’ gear — rifle, pistol, mosquito netting, sleeping bag, poncho, helmet, mess kit, and web belt with canteen. In the military, they handed out that kind of gear when a man was about to go off to war, just in case he needed it. On the one hand, it was better to be safe than unprepared, but on the other hand, when a pilot gets handed a rifle and a poncho, he gets a bit edgy. It suggests that he’s about to go and live with the Army in the field, directing air strikes. Horner wanted to fly jets, not stomp around on the ground. Fortunately, they also gave him a.38 pistol, which was a weapon you carried when you flew jets in combat, so that was reassuring. Well, time would tell.
Horner and Myhrum were then loaded onto a commercial jet contracted to the military and headed west. They landed in Bangkok, where they were told they would be going upcountry in a couple of days on the Klong Courier — that was the call sign of the C-130 that took people and supplies clockwise from Bangkok around to all the Thai bases in the morning, and counterclockwise in the afternoon. They were going to a base called Korat, in central Thailand, about a hundred miles northeast of Bangkok, where two squadrons of F-105s were located.
Korat was one of four bases — the others were Ta Khli, Ubon, and Udorn — the Air Force was then operating in Thailand, though the bases remained under the control of the Thai Air Force. The Air Force had been at these bases on and off for several years, training Thais. Early in 1965, F-105s from Korat raided North Vietnamese munitions storage areas supplying the Vietcong in the South. Even though more raids soon followed, the U.S. presence at the air bases in Thailand was kept very quiet, partly to keep it a secret from the enemy and partly to avoid embarrassing the Thai government.
Two days later, while Horner and Myhrum were waiting at the Bangkok airfield for the Klong Courier, Horner ran into a pilot from Korat whom he knew named Dick Pearson. Along with another pilot from Korat, Pearson was passing through on his way to Washington, D.C., where they were being sent to answer hard questions about an embarrassing incident over North Vietnam.
Horner was eager to pick Pearson’s brain, for this was his first in-person conversation with anyone who had flown combat missions over North Vietnam. And it was here that he received the first of many lessons pointing out the gulf between reality and fantasy in the Vietnam War.
On April 6, during a strike at Vinh, in North Vietnam, two North Vietnamese MiG-17s had shot down two F-105s, numbers one and two in a flight of four.
The flight had been holding south of the target awaiting another flight to clear the area. As they waited, the flight leader let the formation get slow: The Thuds were loafing along at about 350 knots, and they were bomb-laden, and thus clumsy and vulnerable. To make matters worse, the two elements became separated by a couple of miles, though they were still in visual contact.
Dick Pearson, who had bee
n number three in the flight, had looked up and watched in horror as the two MiGs slid in between the formations, and then each MiG blew an F-105 out of the air. He and his wingman immediately jettisoned their bombs and tanks and went after the MiGs, but they dove for the deck and escaped. Pearson and his wingman then returned to the scene of the shoot-down and started a RESCAP (Rescue CAP) — circling the area and looking for chutes or flares and listening for beepers.
What the commanders in Washington wanted to know was how a couple of ignorant Third World peasants flying two vintage MiGs could take out two supersonic, state-of-the-art American jets. The answer was no surprise to Horner, no more than to the two pilots who were about to get laid out on the carpet in Washington. However, it was not welcome information to the commanders in Washington: Fighter pilot training during previous years had concentrated on nuclear delivery, and now the pilots were fighting a conventional war. Such incidents were bound to happen.
The MiG story, of course, came as a shock to Horner, but then he simply passed the North Vietnamese success off to a flight leader mistake. In fact, he was right up to a point. The flight leader had let his formation get too slow; and he hadn’t made sure that everyone in the flight was alert to intruders. He had let himself fall into stateside gunnery range habits, where one tended to concentrate on spacing rather than combat alertness. On Horner’s first mission, he remembers that his own pull-off from the target was not all that aggressive. Aggression came fast, however, when he noticed the orange golf balls passing his canopy and all the black puffs with orange centers of smoke between him and the number one aircraft.
More important, however, Chuck Horner was as naive as other Americans when he deployed to war for the first time. He was a believer. He thought he and the other American pilots would eat the enemy alive, that American jets were unstoppable, that American tactics were superb, that America’s cause was just, and that American generals knew what they were doing. As for the actual leadership in Washington and the decisions they were making about the war in Vietnam, he didn’t have a clue. As it turned out, neither did they.
KORAT—1965
In March 1965, a series of air strikes against ninety-six targets in North Vietnam called ROLLING THUNDER began, and a platform was needed from which to base the attacks. For this purpose, Thailand proved ideal. It was close to both countries; the Thai Air Force had very fine airfields with 10,000-foot runways that they were under-using; Thailand was secure (there was no insurgency there); and finally, Americans could keep a low profile (no press was allowed), which meant that the American military presence could be concealed.
Before ROLLING THUNDER, some of the strikes had been launched out of the bases in Thailand, but those were short-notice deployments in and out of the bases, and no real infrastructure had been needed. The U.S. Air Force had simply used the runways and ramps, and the pilots slept in hotels, tents, or U.S. training compounds. But in March and April, when the attacks against North Vietnam (and Laos) began in earnest, two F-105 squadrons were sent to Korat (which grew to four squadrons by the time Horner returned to Korat in 1967), and a wing infrastructure was now needed to operate the bases in Thailand. Horner and Myhrum were to become part of this infrastructure.
At Korat, the wing staff was headed by Bill Richie, who had earlier flown across the Atlantic, using British equipment and F-84s, to prove air-to-air refueling for deployments. Horner and Myhrum were to serve as duty officers in the Wing Tactical Operations Center — that is, they were to be staff officers, who would help plan the missions. There were no plans for them to fly.
★ And so there they were, in April 1965, standing for the first time on the aircraft parking ramp at Korat Air Base, the Klong Courier now on the next leg of its circuit.
Though it had a first-class runway with a tower, in those days Korat was at best a sparse place. On a ramp in front of the tower, the Thai Air Force had its trainer aircraft parked, and nearby was a parking ramp for the two squadrons of F-105s. The buildings were wood frame with tin roofs. The housing was in the same type of wood buildings, with screening and open boards, so the air could circulate.
Soon after they landed, Horner and Myhrum were met by a friend from McConnell AFB in Kansas, Major Pete Van Huss. Van Huss was the ops officer of the McConnell squadron at Korat; the other squadron came from Kadena AFB in Okinawa. They all piled into a jeep and drove to where the hooches were located, which was about a mile off the flight line where the jets were parked. Van Huss dropped them off in a dusty stand of grass. They set their bags down and watched a flock of Thai carpenters set to work nailing and sawing.
The Thais put up a hooch frame, nailed screening all around it, put up boards along the sides at an angle — to keep the rain out and let the air in — put on a tin roof, hammered on the doors, and then went to the next open space and started on another hooch. Horner and Myhrum walked in, dropped their bags, and set up the cots that services had left for them. Then they unpacked and slipped into flight suits to go over to the officers’ club (a couple of hooches with a bar tacked together inside), run by hired Thais. Since they were the FNGs,[9] they kept their mouths shut, except to welcome old friends as they filed back in from flights or other duties. Since the fighter community is very closely knit, and Horner and Myhrum were experienced fighter pilots and had some reputation, it was easy for them to fit in.
They very quickly picked up a pretty good idea about what was going on at the base: who was there, the kinds of missions being flown — bombing targets in North Vietnam like ammo dumps and bridges — and what were the gripes and good deals. The bad news was that the pilots at Korat were not willing to let the new guys fly with them… at least not then. Horner and Myhrum were there as staff, and in those early days of ROLLING THUNDER, operational tempos were not active. There weren’t enough sorties to go around.
That was to change a few weeks later as the flying tempo increased and some of the pilots got shot down. The resulting shortage meant that nobody could go on R & R unless Myhrum and Horner took up the slack in the flying schedule. But for the first couple of weeks it was very frustrating.
★ When Horner arrived at Korat, the squadron from McConnell and the squadron from Kadena operated as independent units; the one from Kansas was owned by TAC, while the one from Okinawa was owned by PACAF (officially, Southeast Asia came under PACAF, which made the squadron from Kadena more equal, in an Orwellian sense, than the squadron from McConnell). The two had a common command post and shared a mess hall, where the food was just about inedible. Horner, Myhrum, and a few others (most of them nonrated — to take care of supply, motor pool, maintenance control, intelligence, civil engineering, and the like) had been brought in to set up a wing structure not only for Korat but also for Ubon, Udorn, and Takhli. However, that quickly proved impossible, for there were not enough people to handle it, nor were there sufficient communications. Consequently, provisional wing structures were set up at each field.
From the start, there was rivalry between the two squadrons. Both TAC and PACAF wanted their squadrons to get their noses in the war. On the face of it, Kadena, from PACAF, had first dibs, since it was PACAF’s theater of operation. However, things weren’t quite that simple. Because Kadena and Yokota (in Japan) had nuclear alert duties, PACAF needed augmentation, which meant that TAC deployed a squadron. That didn’t mean that the TAC squadron was welcome, since PACAF didn’t want to share the glory of fighting the North Vietnamese with a TAC squadron any more than TAC wanted to share the glory with a PACAF squadron. It was all very adolescent, and in the end, it all proved moot. There turned out to be plenty of war to go around.
The competition between the commands was obvious, even at base level. Though the pilots and maintenance crews were all perfectly friendly, the deployed commanders were often reluctant to help one another out; each was trying to hog the war for himself. For example, Kadena squadrons, unlike TAC squadrons, normally didn’t deploy to other bases, and so didn’t have available the extensive w
ar reserve spares kits that the others did — metal boxes on wheels that contained what a squadron needed for the first thirty days until a supply line to the depot could be put in place. You’d think it would be easy for a mechanic from Kadena to get a part from the TAC deployed spares kit. Think again.
The rivalry was also evident in the makeup of the provisional staff. PACAF made sure that Kadena people filled all the important positions, no matter what their qualifications were. Another bone in the TAC people’s craw was the rotation policies: the PACAF people rotated in and out on short notice, while the TAC people were there for as long as 120 days.
Leaving aside the command nonsense, life for the pilots in the spring of 1965 was relatively easy. They flew at most once a day, and planning the next day’s mission might take a couple of hours. After that, their time was their own. As for the missions themselves, most of them were far from difficult: They’d fly in a two-ship team along a stretch of highway in south or central North Vietnam until they saw something worth shooting or bombing. If they hit bingo fuel before they found anything, they’d drop their bombs on a bridge. In those days there were very few big missions, such as the multi-flight attacks on a fixed target deep inside North Vietnam that later became more the norm; but there were a few (which typically did not go well). Wartime flying was in fact very much like peacetime flying… except that people were trying to kill you.