by Tom Clancy
Did all of this make a real difference? In some ways, yes. Flying became safer for U.S. pilots. They had better targets — steel mills, bridges in Hanoi, SAM storage areas, and other targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Later they had a few precision, laser-guided bombs, which also helped. Later still, Richard Nixon’s Linebacker II campaign late in 1972 sent B-52s over Hanoi, and mined Haiphong Harbor. The B-52s put terror into the North Vietnamese as no previous U.S. effort had done, and gave notice to the Russians and Chinese that nothing in North Vietnam was immune to U.S. bombing.
But did any of this make a real difference? Obviously no.
LAST RITES
The war in Vietnam had many unexpected consequences, and many of them were surprisingly positive. Here, in his words, is how the war ended for Chuck Horner:
In 1974, I traveled to Saigon and Australia, by then a lieutenant colonel in the Pentagon. While there, I had studied the 1973 Middle East war in detail. Based on this experience and my experience in Vietnam, I had put together a briefing (containing lots of Israeli gunnery film) on air-to-air combat for presentation to Congress. This briefing led to an invitation to a fighter symposium in Australia. As a courtesy, I visited the Vietnam squadrons flying the F-5 to provide them an update.
Not much was going on in Vietnam in those days. The Vietcong, of course, had been wiped out during the Tet Offensive, and we had pretty much pulled out, though there were USAF units in Thailand that could defeat any major action. So the North Vietnamese just sat tight, concentrated on diplomacy, and waited for the United States to lose interest in the South Vietnamese.
While I was in Saigon, the VNAF officers I was meeting knew we had pulled out for good and they were on their own. Therefore, having taken lessons from us for the past several years, they were putting their faith in hardware: if they had more, they would be OK. So they spent their time with me begging for matériel, radars, aircraft, bombs, transport, etc. By then I was aware that they weren’t going to get most of what they were asking for. I also knew that the Congress had had enough of the war and that the next two squadrons of F-5Es scheduled to go to Vietnam were not going to be delivered. The Pentagon had already started action to use them in building an upgraded Aggressor squadrons force at Nellis.
One day, I was scheduled to drive out in an embassy car with a driver to Bien Hoa Airfield to brief the squadron there (the same briefing I’ d given the other VNAF squadrons), and a VNAF lieutenant colonel, Le Ba Hung, was assigned to escort me. Before I left for the air base, the escort officer called to ask if he could ride up in my car. I said sure, but was mildly surprised. Vietnamese officers normally didn’t grab a ride with an American. They liked to take their own cars. So by asking to ride with me, this Hung guy was giving up a little “ face.” He would have had more face if he had shown up at the squadron in his own car. Well, I went over to the VNAF side of the base. When he got in the car, he was wearing a flight suit, which was another surprise. “I’ve already heard your briefing,” he told me. “So I’m going to get in a mission while you brief the squadron.”
At once I liked this guy, which inspired me to ask him why he had decided to ride with me. He answered flat out that he’d had trouble finding gas for his jeep; and besides, any extra gas he could get, he used in his Ford Mustang convertible, which he used to haul around his French girlfriend. Now I really resonated with this guy. We were the same age, and he had been flying fighters since 1960. He had been shot down and Americans had rescued him. And when he was going through pilot training, he’d had an American girlfriend, but didn’t feel he could get married due to the nature of his job. Now he was the F-5E Tiger II project officer on the VNAF Air Staff.
At that point he asked me point blank, “Are we going to get those other two squadrons of F-5E aircraft?”
“Do you want the truth?” I answered. He nodded, so I said, “No.”
He looked down in disappointment, then asked me what I thought about that. As far as I could tell, I told him, the VNAF would not have to fight the MiGs. What his country needed, if North Vietnam invaded, was gas and artillery ammo. And he agreed… and surprised me again.
After I briefed the squadron, and he flew a combat sortie, we rode home together. In the car, he turned to me and asked what I thought of the squadron pilots. “They look awfully young and inexperienced,” I told him uncomfortably. I was sure he didn’t want to hear this. “Their appearance and their questions and comments don’t give me a lot of confidence. If I were you, I’ d be worried.”
Then he looked me right in the eye and said, “Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization won’t work. My squadrons can’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. And no matter how much equipment you give us, no matter how many drunken alcoholic civilian technicians you send over to do the maintenance on the equipment you give us, we are going to lose the forthcoming war with North Vietnam.” Once that had a chance to sink in, he went on: “Go back to the United States and tell your bosses what you’ve seen. Tell them that we desperately need your airpower until we’ve had time to grow a competent military force.”
I promised I would do that. And I did.
When I got back to the Pentagon, I wrote a trip report that included what I had observed. It said, among other things, that the policy of Vietnamization was a sham and wasn’t working, and that we needed to somehow stay engaged in Vietnam. If nothing more, we had to at least threaten to use our airpower if North Vietnam invaded the south. That paper made it two levels above me before it came back down with orders to destroy it and never bring up the subject again.
Even to the end we refused to recognize the facts or tell the truth about Vietnam.
After Saigon fell, I asked the intelligence guys to find Hung. They located him a few days later in a hospital at Wake Island, suffering from exhaustion. I wrote him a letter, but didn’t have any further contact with him until later. During the last few days of the war, he’d flown day and night, winding up in charge of the VNAF when all the generals left the country. Finally, after his last F-5 mission, he taxied into Tan Son Nut, and there was no one left to park his aircraft. Just about then, the North Vietnamese soldiers were coming over the wall, but Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant fighter pilot who headed the South Vietnamese Air Force (and was for a time prime minister), came by and picked him up in a helicopter. For a few hours they tried to rally the country; but when mortars started falling on the Joint General Staff compound, they climbed aboard Ky’s Huey and flew to a carrier. There Hung collapsed.
Later, I tracked him to the United States Indiantown Gap Refugee Center and drove up to see him, which delighted him. He introduced me to Chan, his oldest sister, his mother, and Chan’s four children, one of whom had been born on Guam and was therefore an American citizen. Chan’s husband, Coung, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, had been ordered to stay behind to surrender the Army while his generals booked with the refugees who came out on the C-141s. But Hung had been able to use his Air Force contacts to get Chan and the children out. He’d called Colonel Marty Mahrt, an old F-105 buddy of mine, and Marty had arranged for Chan, the mother, and the three children to be evacuated on the next flight.
Then Hung went over to Chan’s house and explained that she had to go, which was not what she wanted to hear. When Chan started crying and wailing, Hung took out his 9mm handgun and calmly told her that she had two choices. Either she, his mother, and the children would get on the airplane, or he would shoot them all and then kill himself. But he was not going to let them fall into the enemy hands. Chan knew Hung, and knew he meant it. So she packed a few things and they left for the airport.
En route, artillery fire sent them down in a ditch. But after it let up, they were able to make it to the airport, Hung and Marty were able to put them on a C-141, and Hung went back to trying to repel the invasion. To this day his Mustang convertible is probably parked in front of the squadron.
When I met them at Indiantown, I knew that they needed an American sponsor. (In order to leave the ref
ugee center and settle in the United States, you either had to have a large amount of money showing you could support yourself, or else you needed an American sponsor, who could help you get settled — usually by giving you a job.) So when I asked Hung who was going to do that, he told me that he himself didn’t need any help, since he had lived in the United States while attending various schools over the years and could easily find work and take care of himself. But it was going to be a problem for Chan and the others, because families who sponsored refugees wanted a family with a man in it who could earn money and help pay the expenses. “Okay, no problem,” I told him. “We’re on our way to Iowa for a vacation; but if no one comes forth in the meantime, they can come live with us.”
And so on our way back, we picked up Ba, the grandmother; Chan; Bich, a thirteen-year-old daughter who was a year older than my oldest daughter; Lingh and Que, nine- and eleven-year-old sons (my son, John, was ten); and Ain, the baby daughter, less than a year old. They lived with us for a year, and it was a wonderful experience. Every meal we ate rice with chopsticks. Mary Jo and Chan were like sisters. Ba took care of Ain and Nancy. The three boys roomed together and got along. Susan and Bich roomed together and acted like teenage sisters: they fought most of the time.
Hung, meanwhile, became the head manager at the Naval Academy Dining Room until the local mob ran him out of town because he tried to make them stop exploiting the Vietnamese who had replaced the Filipinos in the dining room. After Chan left us, she held good jobs and raised her family. Her oldest boy graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in nuclear engineering. All the others excelled in school and are working citizens; Ain, the youngest, graduated from college and never received a grade below A in her life.
In November 1990, Chan’s husband Coung was released from Vietnam. I was in Riyadh when I got the news and was overjoyed. Over the years after the evacuation of Saigon, he had been in reeducation centers and had endured a great deal. Ba also died about that time; but her wish to be buried in the soil of Vietnam was never realized. Hung was married in Salem, Oregon, in 1979 to a wonderful and beautiful woman named Quin (who doesn’t take any sass from him). His sons are named Viet and Nam, so he will never forget the country he once served so proudly.
3
The Vision of Bill Creech
Following Vietnam, the Air Force was in bad shape, but it was by no means only Vietnam that had caused it. The problems were systemic in nature; they were the consequences of the way the Air Force had been run for many years.
Ever since the heating up of the Cold War, it had been the nuclear mission, and those who were in charge of it, the SAC commanders, who had been running the Air Force. In doing so, the SAC commanders gave every other Air Force mission at best only partial attention. How could dropping a bomb on a bridge compare with destroying the Soviet Union? The SIOP became supreme, and, as Chuck Horner had discovered, other methods of training were either downplayed or forbidden.
Bomber generals like predictability, order, and control, and in World War II, the best guarantee of bombing success had involved sending one’s bombers over the target in a specific line at a specific altitude. When the bomber generals became the SAC generals in the decades that followed, they ran the Air Force the way they already knew and already thought best — with order, centralized control, and intense micromanagement from above.
The authority of the SAC was further enhanced when Robert McNamara became the Secretary of Defense, and instituted the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) used by the Pentagon to build the annual budget submission for Defense. PPBS made the USAF Nuclear Forces — SAC and Air Defense Command — into what were called the Major Force Program 1, MFP-1. Since MFP-1 programs supported the most important part of America’s military strategy, they were to receive more DOD attention, and money, than other programs. Meanwhile, TAC and Conventional Forces were MFP- 2—second class.
The SAC generals took the ball and ran with it. Their methods, their procedures, became the only ones allowable, and they refused to tolerate any deviations. They did their best to standardize everything for which they had responsibility, and manuals and directions became the order of the day.
For instance, Walter Sweeney, a SAC general who commanded TAC in the early sixties, devised a system for rating the wings using what was called “Management Computation System” (MCS). Each wing’s activities were given a monthly score. These included not only measures of combat capability such as bomb scores and aircraft-in-commission rates, but also on-time payment of officers’ club bills, the number of lawns that needed cutting in the base housing area, the number of DUIs (driving under the influence) ticketed to a wing, and the number of contributions to the Air Force Aid Society. From all this a composite score was computed. The wing with the top score was presumably the best wing in the Air Force, while the one with the lowest was the worst. If a wing had a bad record paying its club bills, that counted as much as anything else, and the wing commander would certainly be criticized, and might even lose his job.
It’s no surprise that a system that measured uncut grass alongside bombing skill had no credibility with the troops. No surprise, either, was the result: the troops lied.
Take the case of a range officer at the bombing range at Poinsett, five miles south of Shaw AFB, at Sumter, South Carolina. An F-100 flight from Myrtle Beach was going to be on the range. The flight leader would give the range officer a call to tell him the kind of scores his squadron needed for their MCS points; and the range officer made sure that they got them. Consequently, if a pilot threw a bomb way off target, the score actually reported by the airmen became a no-spot (the smoke charge didn’t function when the bomb struck the ground, so the airmen scoring the bombs couldn’t tell where it hit). In short, there was no failure, and no loss of MCS points.
Another Sweeney game was to call from his office directly down to a squadron. Whoever picked up the phone was put to a test. Procedures that pilots were supposed to commit to memory were printed in the pilots’ handbook in boldface letters, and the hapless man on the phone was asked to parrot the boldface for a given emergency in his type of aircraft. Sweeney, naturally, had the book open before him; and if the pilot on the other end of the phone missed a word, he got a vicious chewing-out. And Sweeney wanted it all exactly as written; it had to be “Throttle — Off,” not “Throttle — Shut Down,” even though they meant the same. The result, first, was that the boldface procedures were soon pasted to the wall over every telephone in every squadron in TAC. Second, when Sweeny asked for the pilot’s name, he got an alias. Some of the names were very creative — Captain John Black, for instance, would become Captain George Suckfinger — yet the SAC general never caught on.
To the pilots, standardization and authority were important, but not this kind of mentality, and so the best of them fought back. They saw a vast gulf between the jobs they were being told to do and the jobs they felt needed to be done, and it seemed to them they had three options: they could crack under the strain, do a half-baked job, or fight by deceiving — lie and do the real job as much as they could swing it. Thus, integrity meant lying — not a good place to be, and the strains showed.
They showed in many ways — problems with drugs, alcohol, race, and sex. Too many crashed, too many were lost. They showed in smaller but equally telling ways, too: too many aircraft inoperable because there weren’t enough parts, too many hangar floors filthy, too many NCOs in their offices instead of with their troops, too many troops without clean toilets or clean washrooms.
It wasn’t until 1978 that a general named Bill Creech took command of the TAC, saw what needed doing, and did it, but that was several years in the future. In the meantime, men like Chuck Horner started laying the groundwork for reform.
When Chuck Horner returned from Vietnam in August 1967, he was primarily an operations man: he flew fighter planes, that’s what he did. Now, while continuing his strong operational inclination, he found himself on a steep learning pat
h. He needed to understand how to work the bureaucracy, needed the right kind of mentoring, needed to be shown how to get things done off the field as well as on. It was very lucky for him that his first major job offer after Vietnam put him in the heart of tactics development at Nellis AFB in Nevada.
NELLIS AFB
Nellis has long been, as it calls itself, the “Home of the Fighter Pilot.” Because of the large-scale ranges and the free and open airspace, much of the USAF’s fighter equipment and tactics development has been carried out there, and after Vietnam began to make its presence felt, and money was freed up to develop the new conventional systems needed to fight that war, it was a very busy place.
In the 1960s, two major functions were based at Nellis: a fighter wing that performed F-105 (and later F-111) qualification training; and the Fighter Weapons School (FWS), where top fighter pilots received (and still receive) advanced training in fighter pilot instruction — at first in the F-100 and F-105, and later in the F-4.
Fighter pilots with a great deal of experience (usually 1,000-plus hours) and credibility were selected both for their flying skills and their ability to instruct, and sent to the FWS for a six-month intensive training course — in effect, a doctoral degree in Fighter Operations. The academics were fiercely difficult, and there was nearly endless flying in which every move was graded in a laboratory environment on the ranges. Beyond that, FWS students learned how to be superb platform instructors, as well as how to work with maintenance to ensure that the bombing systems were working correctly and the munitions being maintained properly.