Hamfist Over the Trail (3 page)

I had called ahead, and my mother had my favorite meal, meat loaf, for me when I arrived. She was so happy to see me. And so proud when I showed her my pilot training graduation certificate. She insisted on having it framed, and I told her I would like her to put it on the wall in the study, right next to Dad's Certificate of Commission.

Dad and Mom had gotten married on July 4
th
, 1942, and Dad shipped out to war the next day. He was gone for four years. When I thought about that, I felt like going away for a year, and having a visit with Emily at the six-month point, was nothing compared to what Mom and Dad had gone through. I wished Emily could meet my Mom and see things in perspective.

I had a nice visit at home. My grandmother came over as soon as she heard I had gotten back, and she was constantly kissing me and pinching my cheeks. She had brought a small, polished, wooden box with her, about the size of a cigar box, and called my mother off into the kitchen to give it to her.

My room hadn't changed since I'd left five years earlier to go to the Academy. I'd heard about some parents turning their kids' rooms into sewing rooms, exercise rooms or recreation rooms when their children grew up. Not my mom. One look at my room and you could believe she still had a teenager living at home. I checked the closet, and my collection of Playboy magazines was still there.

A friend of our family, Phil, who had flown with my dad during the war, came over the second day I was home. Phil was a chain smoker, and reeked of tobacco.

He brought his log book, went through page by page, as he sat next to me, and spent hours telling me war stories. My dad figured prominently in many of them. By his own admission, some of the stories got better with each telling and with each year that passed.

“You know the difference between a war story and a fairy tale?” Phil asked, in his raspy voice.

“No. what?”

“A fairy tale begins 'Once upon a time.’ A war story begins 'Now this is no shit.’ After that, there's no difference.” He lit another cigarette and fell into a paroxysm of laughter and coughing.

I spent a little less than two weeks at home. The time passed quickly, and before I knew it, it was time to leave for Hurlburt. Right before I left, my mother called me into the living room. She was holding the polished wooden box my grandmother had given her.

“Your grandmother gave me this,” she said, as she solemnly opened the box. “She had it in her window the whole time your father was away at war.”

Inside was a small, carefully folded Blue Star flag. The flag was about twice the size of a handkerchief, a white flag with a red border, with a blue star in the middle.

Mom unfolded the Blue Star flag and carefully hung it in the front window.

Then she put her hands on both of my cheeks and kissed my forehead.

“I don't want to be a Gold Star mother. Please be careful.” Then she gave me a long, tight hug.

As I drove away, I saw her wiping away tears.

10

November 6, 1968

It turned out the O-2 and the OV-10 were not the same plane at all. The O-2 was a small, underpowered civilian Cessna 337 that had been modified for military use. It had an engine and propeller in front, like a small light plane, and another engine and propeller in the back. It needed that second engine for performance, due to the weight of all the military modifications.

Those modifications were the addition of numerous communication and navigation radios , plus a rocket pod under each wing. Each rocket pod could carry seven folding-fin aerial rockets, and the large frontal area of the pod increased the aerodynamic drag tremendously. The weight of the equipment, plus the weight and drag of the rocket pods, really affected airplane performance. In fact, the airplane couldn't always maintain altitude when operating only on one engine. The service ceiling when operating with only the front engine was 2000 feet lower than the service ceiling with only the rear engine operating. And sometimes the rear-engine-only service ceiling was under 1000 feet! The only way in or out of the airplane was through the main entry door on the right side of the aircraft. If you needed to get out in a hurry, there was a large red handle just forward of the door. Pulling the handle released the door hinge pins, and you could push the door away from the aircraft. But you would still have to bail out manually. No ejection seat in this baby.

The OV-10, on the other hand, was a big, fire-breathing giant of an airplane. It weighed 10,000 pounds more than the O-2, could fly twice as fast, was fully acrobatic, and had permanently-mounted mini-guns. More important, it had turbo-prop engines and an ejection seat.

Here's the really incredible part: the guys who got OV-10 assignments first went to Canon Air Force Base before going on to Hurlburt, to get checked out in the F-86 and become fully-qualified fighter pilots.

The F-86, although an older jet, was still the “dream machine” for fighter pilots. It had earned a four-to-one kill ratio over the Russian-built MiG-15 in Korea. It was the jet version of the propeller-driven P-51: a fighter pilot's airplane. It was the airplane that Colonel Ryan had flown when he became an ace. And the OV-10 pilots would get to fly it for three months!

Once they got to Vietnam, the OV-10 jocks would be “Category A” FACs, meaning they could perform the more challenging missions, such as Troops-In-Contact, called TIC. Those of us who were in O-2's would be “Category B” FACs, and would not be authorized to conduct airstrikes in support of TIC until we had 300 hours of combat time.

Rather than getting checked out as full-qualified fighter pilots, we O-2 guys would get an “orientation ride” on the gunnery range in the back seat of a fighter. In the FAC world, we O-2 drivers were definitely going to be second-class citizens.

When it was time for my orientation ride, the “fighter” back seat they put me in was an OV-10!

Boy, had I made the wrong choice!

11

November 6, 1968

Okay, so I'd made a bad choice. Nothing I could do about it now. My dad had always said that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

It was time for lemonade.

Flying the O-2 was easy. Employing it for combat was a bitch.

The course consisted of classroom instruction and flying activities. Typically, class was conducted in the morning, and then flying was performed in the afternoon.

The classroom was a large theater-like auditorium, with very comfortable blue velvet seats. It was like a high-end movie theater, and quickly earned the name “the blue bedroom”, because it was really hard to stay awake once the lights went out for a movie or slide presentation.

And there was a lot to learn. We learned about the capabilities of every fighter aircraft, including foreign airplanes, such as the B-57 Canberra that was flown by the Australian Air Force. We had to learn about all of the different weapons the fighters could carry, and what weapon was best for use against every foreseeable target.

For example, the Cluster Bomb Unit, model CBU-24 or CBU-52, was a great antipersonnel weapon, not so great against a fortified target. The CBU was a large clamshell case, bigger than a 500-pound bomb. Inside the clamshell case were thousands of small balls, each ball containing nail-like projectiles called flechettes. The balls were about the size of baseballs in CBU-24, and about the size of softballs in CBU-52.

When the CBU was dropped, a radar fuse would open the clamshell at a predetermined height, and the balls would scatter in a doughnut-shaped pattern, and would explode when they hit the ground, sending thousands upon thousands of flechettes in all directions. You really didn't want to be on the ground anywhere near a CBU airstrike.

The Mark 82 was the workhorse of the bomb world. It was a 500-pound bomb, and came in two versions: the slick and the high-drag. The slick, as its name implies, was a streamlined bomb, while the high-drag had folding parachute-like metal fins that extended when the bomb was dropped. The Mark 82 was great against hardened targets.

Then there was the AGM-12, the bull pup missile. It had a 250-pound warhead, and was a terminally-guided missile. Once the fighter released it, a rocket motor would fire, and the fighter pilot had a small joystick to guide the missile onto the target. Really great when pinpoint accuracy was important.

Next, we had to learn about enemy defenses, ranging from small arms fire to anti-aircraft artillery, called triple-A, and surface-to-air missiles, called SAMs.

Small arms fire was basically anything the enemy soldier had in his possession. Typically, it was the AK-47 machine gun and whatever pistol the enemy happened to have. The effective range of small arms fire was only a couple thousand feet, so if we stayed a few thousand feet high, it would not be a major factor unless we were unlucky enough to be hit with the “golden b-b”.

Triple-A was a major threat, especially for a small aircraft like the O-2. The predominant triple-A threats were the ZPU, the 23 millimeter, and the 37 millimeter anti-aircraft artillery rounds.

The ZPU was a 14.5 millimeter gun, usually four barrels, with a blistering rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute. That's ten rounds every second. It was a really formidible weapon.

The 23 millimeter, called the twenty-three mike-mike, also came in various configurations, from one barrel to four. The four-barrel, the ZSU-23-4, was a real killer. The 37 millimeter was its larger cousin. In all honesty, many of the larger calibers were designed to shoot down the larger, faster airplanes. Anything from a ZPU on up would knock the O-2 out of the sky.

SAMs were the kiss of death for an O-2. The best defense against a SAM in an O-2 was to go to the bar and not fly. The two major SAMs used by the the North Vietnamese were the SA-2 Guideline and the SA-7 Strela. The radar-guided SA-2 was the size of a telephone pole, and was mounted, usually, in a stationary base. It was used to protect fixed targets, such as buildings, and had a range of about 25 miles. Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, was protected by thousands of SA-2s. The O-2 didn't fly anywhere near an SA-2 environment.

The SA-7, on the other hand, could show up anywhere. It was a shoulder-fired, portable, heat-seeking missile with a fairly small one-pound warhead, and had a range of a couple of miles. A one-pound warhead would only blow an O-2 into a hundred pieces, instead of a thousand pieces like an SA-2. The bitch of it was, you could find SA-7s virtually anywhere on the battlefield. They were light enough for the average enemy soldier to carry, and easy enough for the average enemy soldier to operate. They traveled faster than Mach 1, the speed of sound, in a corkscrewing flight path. And they homed in on any heat source, such as an aircraft engine.

The mission of the FAC was to be the eyes and ears of the fighter pilot. The FAC was assigned an Area of Operations – AO – and his job was to know the AO so well that he could spot anything out of place or new. This was called Visual Reconnaissance – VR. If he found a target, he would coordinate with local commanders, such as ground commanders and tribal chiefs, and get permission to expend ordnance on the target.

Once he obtained clearance to attack a target, the FAC would call the Direct Air Support Center – the DASC – and get fighter aircraft assigned for the airstrike. The job of the DASC was to make sure that the right strike aircraft and munitions were assigned to the target in a timely manner.

If more than one set of fighters was assigned, the FAC would have to prioritize which set to use first. Perhaps one set of fighters had the perfect ordnance load for the target, but had lots of playtime, while another set of fighters, with less-than-optimum weapons, may have only a few minutes of playtime. It was the FAC's job to determine what order to employ the fighters, and to de-conflict the fighters by making sure they were holding at different altitudes, or in different locations.

Once the fighters were on-scene, the FAC would mark the target, usually with 2.75-inch white phosphorous rockets, called willie petes, and then direct the fighters to place their bombs on target.

Typically, the FAC would be talking to the ground commander on FM radio, talking to the DASC on VHF, and conducting the airstrike on UHF. He had to constantly listen to all three radios to make sure everything was coordinated. Then, he had to keep track of the results of each airstrike: the call sign, type and number of fighters, the munitions, the time on and off target, the location of the target, and the results, called bomb Damage Assessment – BDA. All of this needed to be reported to the Intelligence department at the end of the flight.

During the entire airstrike he had to keep his airplane out of the way of the fighters, keep the airplane in a position to constantly see the fighters and the target, and keep from getting shot down.

Other than that, being a FAC was pretty easy.

12

December 20, 1968

Survival School was not going to be fun. Here I was, getting ready to go to the hot, humid jungles of Vietnam, and I was attending survival school in the frigid northwest. The plan was for us to have a few days of classroom, an escape and evasion – E&E – exercise, then spend another day as a simulated prisoner of war. And then, after that, we'd be taken out into the mountains 30 miles away and have to trek back to base. In the middle of the winter. This was not going to be fun at all.