Shortly after I returned to the Forrestal, an officer from the carrier USS Oriskany addressed my squadron to ask if any of us would consider volunteering for combat duty aboard his ship. The Oriskany had lately lost a number of pilots, and the squadron was considerably undermanned. A few others and I signed up.
The year before the Forrestal fire, the Oriskany had also suffered a terrible disaster at sea when a magnesium flare had ignited a blaze that nearly destroyed the ship. The Oriskany fire was not as great a holocaust as the fire that had engulfed the Forrestal. Ordnance had not exploded in the blaze, and the fire was brought under control in four hours. But it was nevertheless a terrible calamity for the pilots and crew. Forty-four men had been killed. In addition, the carrier was suffering high casualties in 1967. The Oriskany was regarded as a dangerous place to live.
I was relieved at this unexpected change in my fortunes. The Oriskany was coming off Yankee Station for a few weeks, and my services would not be needed until it returned. I met Carol and the kids in Europe and spent a pleasant family holiday, visiting my parents in London and relaxing on the French Riviera. I was still waiting for my final orders when we returned to Orange Park, Florida, which was near my last squadron’s home base in Jacksonville, and where my family would await my return from combat duty. In September, my orders came through. I was an eager thirty-one-year-old lieutenant commander in the Navy, no longer worrying excessively about my career.
Many of my parents’ friends wrote to them after the Forrestal fire to express their concern for my welfare. My father wrote a brief response to all, informing them, “Happily for all of us, he came through without a scratch and is now back at sea.”
–– CHAPTER 15 ––
Killed
On September 30, 1967, I reported for duty to the Oriskany and joined VA-163—an A-4 attack squadron nicknamed the Saints. During the three years of Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign of North Vietnam begun in 1965, no carrier’s pilots saw more action or suffered more losses than those on the Oriskany. When the Johnson administration halted Rolling Thunder in 1968, thirty-eight pilots on the Oriskany had been either killed or captured. Sixty planes had been lost, including twenty-nine A-4s. The Saints suffered the highest casualty rate. In 1967, one-third of the squadron’s pilots were killed or captured. Every single one of the Saints’ original fifteen A-4s had been destroyed. We had a reputation for aggressiveness, and for success. In the months before I joined the squadron, the Saints had destroyed all the bridges to the port city of Haiphong.
Like all combat pilots, we had a studied, almost macabre indifference to death that masked a great sadness in the squadron, a sadness that grew more pervasive as our casualty list lengthened. But we kept our game faces on, and our bravado became all the more exaggerated when the squadron returned to ship after a mission with one or more missing pilots. We flew the next raid with greater determination to do as much damage as we could, repeating to ourselves before the launch, “If we destroy the target, we won’t have to go back.”
We had one of the bravest, most resourceful squadron commanders, who was also one of the best A-4 pilots in the war, Commander Bryan Compton. In August, six weeks before I reported for duty, Bryan had led a daring raid on a thermal power plant in Hanoi. For the first time the Saints had been equipped with Walleye smart bombs, and their accuracy reduced the risk of killing great numbers of civilians when striking targets in densely populated areas. The Hanoi power plant was located in a heavily populated part of Hanoi and had consequently been off-limits to American bombers. Contrary to North Vietnamese propaganda and the accusations of Americans who opposed the war, the bombing of North Vietnam was not a campaign of terror and wanton destruction against innocent civilians. Pilots and their military and civilian commanders exercised great care to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. With the introduction of smart bombs, militarily significant targets that had previously been avoided to spare innocent lives could now be attacked.
Bryan Compton successfully petitioned for his squadron to receive smart bombs. Once the Saints were equipped with the new ordnance, he sought and received permission to bomb the power plant. He took just five other pilots from the squadron with him on the mission. Diving in from different points on the compass, through a terrible barrage of antiaircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles, five of the six A-4s hit their target. The mission was a huge success, but rather than leaving off the attack as soon as the bombs had struck their target, Bryan flew two more passes over the power plant, taking pictures of the bomb damage. For his courage and leadership of the raid, Bryan received the Navy Cross.
I was third pilot on another raid Bryan led, this time over Haiphong. During the raid, the plane of the number two pilot was shot down. None of us saw him eject. Bryan wanted to determine whether or not the missing pilot had managed to escape his destroyed aircraft and parachute safely to ground. He kept circling Haiphong at an extremely low altitude, about two thousand feet, searching in vain for some sign that the pilot had survived. We were taking a tremendous pounding from flak and SAMs. I was scared to death waiting for Bryan to call off the search and lead us back to the Oriskany and out of harm’s way. To this day, I will swear that Bryan made at least eight passes before he reluctantly gave up the search. Bryan has since dismissed my account of his heroism as an exaggeration, claiming, “You can’t trust a politician. They’ll lie every time.” But I remember what I saw that day. I saw a courageous squadron commander put his life in grave peril so that a friend’s family might know if their loved one was alive or dead. For his heroics and his ability to survive them, the rest of the squadron regarded Bryan as indestructible. We were proud to serve under his command.
In the early morning of October 26, 1967, I prepared for my twenty-third bombing run over North Vietnam. President Johnson had decided to escalate the war. The Oriskany’s pilots were on line twelve hours a day, flying raids from midnight to noon or from noon to midnight. We would rest for twelve hours while another carrier took up the battle, and then return to combat for another twelve-hour shift. The Saints were now dropping on Vietnam 150 tons of ordnance a day. Until this moment we had found Johnson’s prosecution of the war, with its frustratingly limited bombing targets, to be maddeningly illogical.
When I was on the Forrestal, every man in my squadron had thought Washington’s air war plans were senseless. The night before my first mission, I had gone up to the squadron’s intelligence center to punch out information on my target. Out came a picture of a military barracks, with some details about the target’s recent history. It had already been bombed twenty-seven times. Half a mile away there was a bridge with truck tracks. But the bridge wasn’t on the target list. The target list was so restricted that we had to go back and hit the same targets over and over again. It’s hard to get a sense that you are advancing the war effort when you are prevented from doing anything more than bouncing the rubble of an utterly insignificant target. James Stockdale, the air wing commander on the Oriskany who had been shot down and captured in 1965, aptly described the situation as “making gestures with our airplanes.”