American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  Even better than testing countermeasures was eliminating the chance of being fired upon. Since President Lyndon Johnson would not then allow American pilots to attack Hanoi and Haiphong, where supply shipments to the South originated, the supplies would have to be interdicted before they reached the South.

  America needed eyes in North Vietnam.

  DAY’S conversation with the director of operations was, as are most conversations between colonels and majors, somewhat one-sided.

  “Major, we’re cranking up a new outfit. It is called Operation Commando Sabre. It is top secret and you’re the CO [commanding officer]. We’re going to use F-100Fs as FACs.”

  That was a lot of information. Did he hear right? Majors don’t command fighter squadrons in Vietnam. F-100s used as FACs?

  The colonel pointed to a map on his wall. “You’ll be attached to the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing. Officially you are Detachment One of the 416th Tactical Fighter Squadron [TFS] at Phu Cat. That’s the closest F-100 base to North Vietnam. You’ll be working up north in Route Pack One. All war supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail have to come through this area.” He paused. “The area is heavily defended.”

  (The U.S. military divided North Vietnam into geographic areas called “Route Packs,” with Route Pack One being the southernmost and Route Pack Six, the area that included Haiphong and Hanoi, the northernmost.)

  The colonel pointed. “This is where the Ho Chi Minh Trail reenters Vietnam from Cambodia. Your AO [area of operations] in-cludes the Mu Gia Pass, a real hot spot. The North Vietnamese are moving SAMs into Route Pack One, and that threat has to be eliminated.”

  Day wondered about the choice of aircraft. The F-100F is a two-seater, a training model used to check out new pilots. They were few in number; only 339 were manufactured.

  Almost as if reading Day’s mind, the colonel said, “The F model gives you an extra set of eyes. The aircraft will go in low and fast. One man flies the aircraft, the other looks for targets. We’ve assembled a few pilots and aircraft at Phu Cat. They’re waiting on you. This sort of thing has never been done before, so you’ll be developing doctrine and tactics as you go along.”

  The colonel paused. He knew from Day’s personnel file that Day had flown across most countries in Europe at high speed and at about a hundred feet of altitude. “Major, what do you think of using F-100Fs as FACs?”

  Day paused and looked at the map. He remembered that when he ripped across Europe, he could see church steeples and rivers but that was about it. Trying to locate, identify, and mark camouflaged targets as small as a AAA battery seemed impossible, especially if people on the ground were shooting at you.

  “Sir, I think it’s a very bad idea.”

  “Fine. Get up to Phu Cat, take charge, whip that group into shape, and go to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  THE distinction between flying “up north” and flying in South Vietnam may elude many today. But in 1967, North Vietnam was the most heavily defended real estate on earth, a place where pilots could walk on the flak and play tag with the SAMs, a place of highly lucrative targets such as truck parks, fuel depots, railroad stations, power plants, and enemy air bases. By contrast, South Vietnam was relatively safe, devoid of AAA and SAMs, boasting very few lucrative targets, and requiring mostly monkey bombing. So when a Vietnam-era fighter pilot says he flew up north, that means he ripped off the front gate of hell and flew into the deadliest air-defense system ever devised.

  PHU Cat was a former Vietcong training base south of the DMZ, about twenty miles northwest of Qui Nhon and near the infamous Route 1, a road known around the world because of Bernard Fall’s seminal work Street Without Joy.

  When Day first came to Vietnam, he wrote almost daily letters to Doris and the children. Then he bought tape recorders — one for him and one for Doris — and began sending home taped messages. When he moved to Phu Cat, he sent Doris a tape that said, “I have a new job. I have the cake and the icing too.”

  He did not tell her that he was the commanding officer of a top secret unit, that he was flying up north, and that he had one of the most dangerous jobs in Vietnam. And she, being The Viking, knew better than to ask.

  Commando Sabre “tasking” — to use the military term — was simple: stop the flow of supplies from north to south. To do this, pilots would locate and identify truck parks, fuel dumps, and enemy convoys, then call in strike aircraft — those carrying bombs — and direct the attacks against the targets.

  There were no precedents, no history to draw upon. The Air Force had flown FAC missions in Korea. But that was fifteen years earlier, and now SAC domination of the Air Force meant there was no FAC doctrine. Thus, Day’s job was not only to crank up the first jet FAC operation in history but to develop Air Force doctrine and tactics for the FAC mission. And he had to do so at a new base in an undeveloped country.

  He had the outfit operational in two weeks.

  For a few days the Commando Sabre group used the call sign of the 416th TFS. But this was a special outfit, and a special outfit needed its own call sign. The call signs of FAC units in 1967 and those that came later all reflected their aggressiveness in the face of great danger: Gunsmoke, Stormy, Wolf, Nail, Typhoon, Playboy, and Tiger.

  In mid-June a new call sign was heard in the skies over North Vietnam.

  Misty.

  In the beginning, when the new guys began broadcasting their wussy call sign, there must have been a few snickers. If so, they didn’t last long.

  Other pilots quickly learned that the “Fast FACs” or “Super FACs” or “Misty FACs” were an aggressive bunch of bastards who pressed the fight; they got down in the weeds, trolled for trouble, and did things with an F-100 that had never been done before.

  For most, “shit” is a one-dimensional expletive. But fighter pilots have a multifaceted usage of the word that might be confusing. For instance, if a pilot describes a fellow officer as a “shit” or a “real shit,” then that officer is an unpleasant fellow. On the other hand, if that officer is described as a “good shit” or a “great shit,” then he is a prince among men. No higher praise can be awarded a fighter pilot than to say he is “shit hot.” (The phonetic version used in polite company is “Sierra Hotel.”) Finally, if a pilot is being fired at by AAA, SAMs, machine guns, and rifles, and the Gomers are standing on hilltops throwing rocks at him, he is “in the shit.” The Mistys flew only up north, and they were in the shit on every mission.

  Earlier, when FACs found a target — or thought they had found a target — they launched marking rockets, then said, “Do you have my smoke?” The strike pilot then came back with “Roger that.” The FAC would say something like, “Your target is fifty meters north of the smoke,” or “Your target is twenty meters west of the smoke.” When the strike aircraft attacked, they usually saw no signs that they had killed anything other than monkeys.

  The Mistys came screaming in, fired their rockets, and asked, “Do you have my smoke?” When they got an affirmative, the Mistys said, “Hit my smoke.” When Mistys called in a strike, often there were secondary explosions, indicating an ammunition supply or fuel dump had been hit. A truck park might be obliterated. The Mistys found targets that, when bombed, made things blow up; made the ground shake.

  For about a week after Misty cranked up, it was just as Day had feared: targets were impossible to find. But after maybe a half dozen flights, the Mistys not only knew the AO intimately but began to see the hand of man against the jungle. They saw tracks on the road still glistening with water and knew a vehicle had recently passed. They saw faint condensation from a truck exhaust at dawn, anomalies in camouflage that revealed it was not real, or wilted leaves that stood out ever so slightly from the jungle. They could pick out the shape of a gun battery under the camouflage. They developed “Misty eyes”: they could see what no other pilots could see.

  “Hit my smoke” and high-value targets became the hallmarks of the Mistys. That and their aggressive nature. In
deed, everything about the Mistys was a reflection of Day’s leadership. Tigers breed tigers. A candy-assed commander will have few tigers working for him. Each makes the other uncomfortable.

  “Misty” would become a call sign of mythic proportions, one of the most famous of the Vietnam War.

  IN the beginning, the Mistys were numbered according to the chain of command, and then according to when a pilot entered the group. As the first commander, Day was “Misty 1.”

  “Misty 2” was Bill Douglass, the operations officer and a laconic fellow who became famous for consistently neglecting marking rockets in favor of pointing the snout of his F-100 at a AAA battery and boring in with guns chattering.

  The other pilots were lieutenants and captains, junior birdmen who, like the Flying Tigers or the Eagle Squadron or the Doolittle Raiders of World War II, were volunteers. And, as is often the case with elite outfits, they were in awe of their commanding officer. They had checked him out and knew he was qualified to fly almost every jet fighter built and that he had almost five thousand hours in the cockpit. He was the only squadron commander in Vietnam who was a major, so he had to be shit hot. Plus, he was a plainspoken man. Four decades later, when former Mistys were interviewed, they to a man spoke of Day’s bluntness. “He called a spade a fucking spade,” one said.

  Phu Cat was a busy base, host to several fighter squadrons and numerous support groups. Transient pilots were always passing through. They wanted to know about Commando Sabre. Aircraft flying out of Phu Cat usually flew in flights of four or eight aircraft. These guys took off before dawn, seven days a week, and they flew alone. Who were they?

  All questions were turned aside with “That outfit is top secret and you don’t have the need to know.”

  But there is one thing that warriors always know: where the battle is. And the word got out among men who wanted to fly and fight: if you want to get in the shit, call Major Bud Day at Phu Cat.

  Calls began coming in from Sierra Hotel fighter pilots at Nellis, Willy, Cannon, and Luke, fighter bases inhabited by warriors. And the warriors flocked to Bud Day. During the years of the Vietnam War, some three million Americans passed through Vietnam. Only 157 of those men served as Misty pilots. But those 157 men wrote history large. It would be difficult to find another outfit so small in number from which would spring so many legends, so many decorations for valor.

  And so many shoot-downs.

  Mistys had the only job in the Air Force whereby a pilot could strap on a fighter, not file a flight plan, and go where he wanted, at any altitude and at any speed. A typical mission was to take off, fly north, divert east over the Gulf of Tonkin, then drop down and take up a heading through Route Pack One, also known as the “Pack.” The reference point for entering the Pack was often a big house on the banks of the Ben Hai River. The white house had a red roof and was called “Tara” or the “plantation.”

  Each F-100F had a pilot in the front seat and another in the back — “the pit” — who took photographs and wrote down the location of AAA or SAM sites on a map. The photographs were developed immediately upon landing, and sometimes the information was used in a “cross briefing” for the next Misty flight. Armament was minimal: two pods, each containing seven white phosphorus marking rockets, and two 20 mm cannon. The cannon had four hundred rounds of ammo and fired at three thousand rounds per minute, so the few seconds of cannon fire were to be used only if working a rescue and enemy forces were close. Nevertheless, these men were Mistys, and it was not unusual for them to point their aircraft at a gun emplacement and fire away.

  Day had decreed that speed was good, so Mistys came in with a lot of smash — 450 or 500 mph — and at about four thousand feet. But four thousand feet is almost a mile high, and at 500 mph the landscape is a blur, so sometimes they flew slower and lower. The AAA fired at them had a muzzle velocity of about three thousand feet per second. This meant it took one second or less for the explosive rounds to reach their altitude. So the Mistys jinked — altered the flight path in an unpredictable manner — constantly. This was a tremendous workload on the pilot and — because he could not anticipate the jinking — gave a tremendous pounding to the guy in the pit.

  Mistys worked the AO, looking for targets for about an hour before climbing out to the tanker to refuel. After another hour and a half down in the weeds, they tanked again and worked the AO another hour or so before returning to Phu Cat. The missions were so demanding that oil needed to be added to the engines after four hours of flying time. The average mission was five hours, but some lasted six or seven. In July, Day stepped up the pace and went to four sorties per day, which meant he had continuous coverage of the Pack for about twenty hours every day.

  While Mistys often violated rules about speed and altitude, the one operating procedure they never violated was the order not to go over a target twice on one mission. Such a move was considered suicidal. And though the Mistys liked to say that when they went up north they were alone and unafraid, that was nonsense. They were terrified. When Day and the other Mistys returned from a mission, they sometimes had to be helped from the aircraft. They might have lost three or four pounds; their flight suits were sodden with perspiration and urine. They were so sweat-drenched that their boots squished when they walked. And they knew a marrow-deep fatigue that came from being shot at hundreds of times in the past five hours. Indeed, Mistys were shot at from the time they entered the Pack until they exited. It was not unusual for a Misty departing North Vietnam airspace to look down and see the next Misty flight entering the AO. And it was not uncommon that the entering aircraft trailed behind it, like a series of airborne farts, puff after puff of smoke from exploding AAA.

  From the beginning, Mistys came home with holes in the wings and fuselage. By mid-August, Day had taken hits on three missions and was considered — in Misty lingo — a “magnet ass.” In one of his tapes to Doris, he told her about being hit and added, “Remember, Doris, that’s the name of the game.”

  IN Vietnam, Day developed and wrote Air Force doctrine for jet FACs. But several other things mark Day’s leadership of the Mistys. The most important speaks to the issue of character and integrity, traits noted in many of his ERs. He was more concerned with the welfare of his men than with his own advancement, a rare trait in the Air Force and a sign of a great leader. But this was something he learned in the Marine Corps, where taking care of subordinates is almost a religion. The trait was best illustrated by a story.

  One morning Day took off before dawn and found the AO covered with patchy fog and a low cloud deck — a recipe for disaster. A gunner needs to know the course, altitude, and speed of his target. The course of an aircraft is obvious. A gunner could look through the patchy fog and estimate with considerable accuracy the altitude of the cloud bottoms. Had a Misty come in skimming the bottoms of the clouds, the gunner would know his altitude within a hundred feet or so. AAA gunners in North Vietnam were some of the most experienced in the world. Thus, low clouds and fog sandwiched an aircraft into a narrow zone from which it would be almost impossible to escape.

  Plus, a Misty would not see AAA or missiles until they popped through the fog. And by then it was too late to maneuver.

  Day returned to Phu Cat and postponed the outgoing flight until the fog lifted.

  A few minutes later, the vice wing commander, a full colonel, banged open the door of the Misty office, accosted Day, and said, “I have frag orders for Route Pack One.” (“Frag orders” are fragmentary orders, a brief outline of a mission.)

  “I just came from up there,” Day said. “The weather is too low.”

  The colonel raised his voice. “You don’t get it, Major. That’s a Seventh Air Force TOT [time on target] and you have to meet it. Get that aircraft in the air.”

  Bill Douglass and several other Mistys were in the room and moved away. But they listened.

  Day moved so close to the colonel that their noses were about four inches apart. “YOU don’t get it, Colonel. I don’t care
what Seventh Air Force says. My men are not going.”

  The colonel stomped out. Douglass and the young pilots looked at one another. They had a boss who would risk his career for his men. The incident became part of the legend of Misty 1.

  About that same time, Day decided that the Mistys’ intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel assigned from the wing, was not up to unit standards. He fired the colonel, another risky career move and one that so angered the brass that, to get even, they replaced the colonel with a first lieutenant. The replacement, Ray Bevivino, was an Air Force Academy graduate who believed he could win the war by himself. He worked so many weeks without a break that Day had to order him to take a day off. Using information that was as close to real time as then was possible, Bevivino developed the best intelligence system of any Air Force unit in Vietnam.

  Another part of Day’s Misty legend concerned his greatest flaw as a leader: he flew too much, six or seven days a week. When Bill Douglass talked him into taking a day off, Day used the time to fly missions in South Vietnam.

  One of the most amazing facts about Day’s time as leader of the Mistys, and for at least four months afterward, is that no Misty ever aborted a mission for mechanical reasons. This is remarkable. First, aborts were common at every F-4 and F-105 outfit in the theater. Numerous fighter pilots were not as committed to combat as they might have been; many were in Vietnam only to get a ticket punched, and they lacked the warrior ethos. Some of them dropped their bombs far from the target. Second, a jet fighter is a complex and temperamental piece of equipment. It is relatively rare for a fighter to be fully mission capable (FMC), that is, every aircraft system — radio, engine, mechanical, electrical, weapons — works as advertised. Oil pressure may be down a bit. The exhaust temp might be a few degrees too hot. A radio might be scratchy. A pilot, if he so desires, can always find a reason to abort. And third, Day had only seven aircraft for a mission that called for twenty-hours-per-day operation at high speeds, frequent use of the afterburner, and almost always high-G maneuvers.