Faith of My Fathers (22 page)

This latest unexpected glimpse of mortality added even greater urgency to my recent existential inquiries and made me all the more anxious to get to Vietnam before some new unforeseen accident prevented me from ever taking my turn in war.

So it was with some relief that I received my orders at the end of 1966 to report to Jacksonville, Florida, where I would join a squadron on the USS
Forrestal
and complete Replacement Air Group (RAG) training. I trained exclusively in the A-4 Skyhawk, the small bomber that I would soon fly in combat missions. Later that year, we sailed through the Suez Canal, on a course for Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf and war.

III

                                                                                                            In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

“Lancelot and Elaine”

         
CHAPTER
14
         

The
Forrestal
Fire

Tom Ott had just handed me back my flight helmet after wiping off the visor with a rag. Tom was a second-class petty officer from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a fine man. He had been my parachute rigger since I came aboard the USS
Forrestal
several months earlier to begin RAG training off Guantanamo Bay. A parachute rigger is responsible for the maintenance and preparation of a naval aviator's equipment. Tom had heard me complain that I often found it difficult to see through my visor. So he always came on deck before launch to clean it one last time.

I was a thirty-one-year-old A-4 pilot, and like most pilots I was a little superstitious. I had flown five bombing runs over North Vietnam without incident, and I preferred that all preflight tasks be performed in the same order as for my previous missions, believing an unvarying routine portended a safe flight. Wiping off my visor was one of the last tasks executed in that routine.

Shortly before eleven on the morning of July 29, 1967, on Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf, I was third in line on the port side of the ship. I took my helmet back from Tom, nodded at him as he flashed me a thumbs-up, and shut the plane's canopy. In the next instant, a Zuni missile struck the belly fuel tank of my plane, tearing it open, igniting two hundred gallons of fuel that spilled onto the deck, and knocking two of my bombs to the deck. I never saw Tom Ott again.

Stray voltage from an electrical charge used to start the engine of a nearby F-4 Phantom, also waiting to take off, had somehow fired the six-foot Zuni from beneath the plane's wing. At impact, my plane felt like it had exploded.

I looked out at a rolling fireball as the burning fuel spread across the deck. I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire. I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire. I put the flames out and ran as fast as I could to the starboard side of the deck.

Shocked and shaking from adrenaline, I saw the pilot in the A-4 next to mine jump from his plane into the fire. His flight suit burst into flames. As I went to help him, a few crewmen dragged a fire hose toward the conflagration. Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier ran ahead of me with a portable fire extinguisher. He stood in front of the fire and aimed the extinguisher at one of the thousand-pound bombs that had been knocked loose from my plane and were now sitting in the flames on the burning deck. His heroism cost him his life. A few seconds later the bomb exploded, blowing me back at least ten feet and killing a great many men, including the burning pilot, the men with the hose, and Chief Farrier.

Small pieces of hot shrapnel from the exploded bomb tore into my legs and chest. All around me was mayhem. Planes were burning. More bombs cooked off. Body parts, pieces of the ship, and scraps of planes were dropping onto the deck. Pilots strapped in their seats ejected into the firestorm. Men trapped by flames jumped overboard. More Zuni missiles streaked across the deck. Explosions tore craters in the flight deck, and burning fuel fell through the openings into the hangar bay, spreading the fire below.

I went below to help unload some bombs from an elevator used to raise the jets from the hangar to the flight deck and dump them over the side of the ship. When we finished, I went to the ready room, where I could check the fire's progress on the television monitor located there. A stationary video camera was recording the tragedy and broadcasting it on the ship's closed-circuit television.

After a short while, I went to sick bay to have my burns and shrapnel wounds treated. There I found a horrible scene of many men, burned beyond saving, grasping the last moments of life. Most of them lay silently or made barely audible sounds. They gave no cries of agony because their nerve endings had been burned, sparing them any pain. Someone called my name, a kid, anonymous to me because the fire had burned off all his identifying features. He asked me if a pilot in our squadron was okay. I replied that he was. The young sailor said, “Thank God,” and died. I left the sick bay unable to keep my composure.

The fires were consuming the
Forrestal.
I thought she might sink. But the crew's heroics kept her afloat. Men sacrificed their lives for one another and for their ship. Many of them were only eighteen and nineteen years old. They fought the inferno with a tenacity usually reserved for hand-to-hand combat. They fought it all day and well into the next, and they saved the
Forrestal.

The fire on the flight deck was extinguished that first afternoon, but the last of the fires still burned belowdecks twenty-four hours later. By the time the last blaze was brought under control, 134 men were dead or dying. Dozens more were wounded. More than twenty planes were destroyed. But the
Forrestal,
with several large holes in its hull below the waterline, managed to make its way slowly to Subic Naval Base in the Philippines.

It would take almost a week for the
Forrestal
to reach Subic, where enough repairs would be made to the ship to enable it to return to the States for further repairs. It would take two more years of repairs before the
Forrestal
would be seaworthy enough to return to duty. All the pilots and crew who were fit to travel assumed we would board flights for home once we reached the Philippines. It appeared that my time at war was to be a very brief experience, and this distressed me considerably.

Combat for a naval aviator is fought in short, violent bursts. Our missions last but an hour or two before we are clear of danger and back on the carrier playing poker with our buddies. We are spared the sustained misery of the infantrymen who slog through awful conditions and danger for months on end. Some pilots like the excitement of our missions, knowing that they are of short duration, but most of us concentrate so fiercely on finding our targets and avoiding calamity that we recall more vividly our relief when it's over than we do our exhilaration while it's going on.

I did not take a perverse pleasure in the terror and destruction of war. I did not delight in the brief, intense thrill of flying combat missions. I was gratified when my bombs hit their target, but I did not particularly enjoy the excitement of the experience.

Nevertheless, I was a professional naval officer, and the purpose of my years of training had been to prepare me for this moment. As the crippled
Forrestal
limped toward port, my moment was disappearing when it had barely begun, and I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the
Forrestal.

A distraction from my despondency appeared on the way to Subic in the person of R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the
New York Times
correspondent in Saigon. Serving as a pool reporter, he arrived by helicopter with a camera crew to examine the damaged ship and interview the survivors. When he finished collecting material for his report, he offered to take me back to Saigon with him for the daily press briefing irreverently referred to as the “Five O'Clock Follies.” Seeing it as an opportunity for some welcome R&R, I jumped at the invitation. I passed a few days there pleasantly, wondering about my future, and beginning a lifelong friendship with Johnny.

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.”

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.