Flying missions off the Oriskany, I often observed Soviet ships come into Haiphong harbor and off-load surface-to-air missiles. We could see the SAMs being transported to firing sites and put into place, but we couldn’t do anything about them because we were forbidden to bomb SAM sites unless they were firing on us. Even then, it was often an open question whether we could retaliate or not.
We lost a pilot one day over Haiphong. Another pilot released his bombs over the place he thought the SAM had been fired from. When we returned to the Oriskany, the pilot who had avenged his friend was grounded because he had bombed a target that wasn’t on Washington’s list. We all squawked so much that our commanders relented and returned the enterprising pilot to flight status. But the incident left a bad taste in our mouths, and our resentment over the absurd way we were ordered to fight the war grew much stronger, diminishing all the more our already weakened regard for our civilian commanders.
In 1966, Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara visited the Oriskany. He asked the skipper for the strike-pilot ratio. He wanted to make sure the numbers accorded with his conception of a successful war, and he was pleased with the figures he received from the skipper. He believed the number of missions flown relative to the number of bombs dropped would determine whether or not we won the war in the most cost-efficient manner. But when President Johnson ordered an end to Rolling Thunder in 1968, the campaign was judged to have had no measurable impact on the enemy. Most of the pilots flying the missions believed that our targets were virtually worthless. We had long believed that our attacks, more often than not limited to trucks, trains, and barges, were not just failing to break the enemy’s resolve but actually having the opposite effect by boosting Vietnam’s confidence that it could withstand the full measure of American airpower. In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war. I found no evidence in postwar studies of the Johnson administration’s political and military decision-making during the war that caused me to revise that harsh judgment.
When the orders came down to escalate the bombing campaign, the pilots on the Oriskany were ecstatic. As the campaign heated up, we began to lose a lot more pilots. But the losses, as much as they hurt, didn’t cause any of us to reconsider our support for the escalation. For the first time we believed we were helping to win the war, and we were proud to be usefully employed.
Today’s attack on Hanoi was to be an Alpha Strike, a large raid on a “militarily significant” target, involving A-4s from my squadron and our sister squadron on the Oriskany, the “Ghost Riders,” as well as fighter escorts from the carrier’s two F-8 squadrons. It would be my first attack on the enemy capital. The commander of the Oriskany’s air wing, Commander Burt Shepard, the brother of astronaut Alan Shepard, would lead the strike. Our target was the thermal power plant, located near a small lake almost in the center of the city, that the Saints had destroyed two months earlier; it had since been repaired.
The day before, I had pleaded with Jim Busey, the Saints’ operations officer, who was responsible for putting the flight schedule together, to let me fly the mission. The earlier raid on the power plant was the pride of the squadron, having earned Navy Crosses for Bryan and Jim. I wanted to help destroy it again. I was feeling pretty cocky as well. The day before, we had bombed an airfield outside Hanoi, and I had destroyed two enemy MiGs parked on the runway. Jim, who called me “Gregory Green-Ass” because I was the new guy in the squadron and had flown far fewer missions than had the squadron’s veteran pilots, consented, and put me on the mission as wingman.
I was still charged up from the previous day’s good fortune, and was anticipating more success that morning despite having been warned about Hanoi’s extensive air defense system. The Oriskany’s strike operations officer, Lew Chatham, told me he expected to lose some pilots. Be careful, he said. I told him not to worry about me, that I was sure I would not be killed. I didn’t know at the time that downed pilots imprisoned in the North referred to their shootdowns as the day they were “killed.”
Hanoi, with its extensive network of Russian-manufactured SAM sites, had the distinction of possessing the most formidable air defenses in the history of modern warfare. I was about to discover just how formidable they were.
We flew out to the west of Hanoi, turned, and headed in to make our run. We came in from the west so that once we had rolled in on the target, released our bombs, and pulled out we would be flying directly toward the Tonkin Gulf. We had electronic countermeasure devices in our planes. In 1966, A-4s had been equipped with radar detection. A flashing light and different tone signals would warn us of imminent danger from enemy SAMs. One tone sounded when a missile’s radar was tracking you, another when it had locked onto you. A third tone signaled a real emergency, that a launched SAM was headed your way. As soon as we hit land and approached the three concentric rings of SAMs that surrounded Hanoi, the tone indicating that missile radar was tracking sounded. It tracked us for miles.
We flew in fairly large separations, unlike the tight formations flown in World War II bombing raids. At about nine thousand feet, as we turned inbound on the target, our warning lights flashed, and the tone for enemy radar started sounding so loudly I had to turn down the volume. I could see huge clouds of smoke and dust erupt on the ground as SAMs were fired at us. The closer we came to the target the fiercer were the defenses. For the first time in combat I saw thick black clouds of antiaircraft flak everywhere, images familiar to me only from World War II movies.
A SAM appears as a flying telephone pole, moving at great speed. We were now maneuvering through a nearly impassible obstacle course of antiaircraft fire and flying telephone poles. They scared the hell out of me. We normally kept pretty good radio discipline throughout a run, but there was a lot of chatter that day as pilots called out SAMs. Twenty-two missiles were fired at us that day. One of the F-8s on the strike was hit. The pilot, Charlie Rice, managed to eject safely.
I recognized the target sitting next to the small lake from the intelligence photographs I had studied. I dove in on it just as the tone went off signaling that a SAM was flying toward me. I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers, “jinking,” in fliers’ parlance, when I heard the tone. The A-4 is a small, fast, highly maneuverable aircraft, a lot of fun to fly, and it can take a beating. Many an A-4 returned safely to its carrier after being badly shot up by enemy fire. An A-4 can outmaneuver a tracking SAM, pulling more G’s than the missile can take. But I was just about to release my bombs when the tone sounded, and had I started jinking I would never have had the time nor, probably, the nerve, to go back in once I had lost the SAM. So, at about 3,500 feet, I released my bombs, then pulled back the stick to begin a steep climb to a safer altitude. In the instant before my plane reacted, a SAM blew my right wing off. I was killed.
–– CHAPTER 16 ––
Prisoner of War