Page 8 - Aerotech News and Review, April 7, 2017

Vietnam air combat: The privilege of serving
by Dennis Anderson
special to Aerotech News
One minute you were soaring in the wild blue above the fields of North Vietnam and environs of Hanoi “at about Mach 1.3,” and the next instant your aircraft was on fire and disinte- grating around you.
To even aspire to be an American air warrior, “You had to believe that you were the best pilot, that you were bulletproof, that you were invisible, that no one could touch you.
“Anyone who didn’t believe that didn’t have any business being there,” recalled retired Air Force Col. Joe Kit- tinger, a veteran of 483 combat mis- sions and a year in the notorious pris- on camp known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
You were the best, even if you were shot out of the sky after downing MiG jet fighters and three combat tours. You needed to be the best to live to tell about it.
With luck, you ejected and your parachute opened, dropping you from 10,000 feet away from the worst sur- prise of your life, toward the worst days and nights of your life.
Kittinger recalls “I had studied at every survival and escape school there was, and I was going to hit the ground and evade for a year, make my way back.”
Instead, his parachute plopped him square in a field filled with rice and farmers “and about 50 of them swarmed my butt.”
The first thing, they stripped his boots, his flight suit, grabbed his pis- tol. Wobbling on a wounded left leg, “in my skivvies ... the first thing an 80-year-old lady waved a knife at my neck and I jumped back. The next thing, a 14-year-old boy did the same thing.”
Kittinger, like other surviving POWs, lived because North Vietnam- ese militia or troops arrived, pulling him out of the crowd, and pushing him into transport to an infamous prison camp that inspired dread in aviators known in the jargon as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
“It’s just the worst ‘Hilton’ in the world,” Kittinger joked to a tent full of aviation history buffs at the Los Ange- les County Air Show. They gathered to hear about the air combat of the Vietnam War.
A robust man at 89 years, with a zest for good beer, good food and good friendship, he added, “The ser- vice was awful! The rooms were too small. The food was lousy. There’s just nothing to recommend it. Don’t ever go there!”
Kittinger experienced a storied ca- reer before his parachute descent into a kind of hell.
In 1960, to advance the cause of high-altitude research for the Air Force, he executed a free-fall para- chute jump from higher than 103,000 feet, more than 20 miles above the Earth. Over Vietnam, between 1963 and 1971, he logged a staggering 483 missions, the last one that dropped him into a year in the Hanoi prison camp.
“I was going to stick with the Ge- neva Convention, name, rank and
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serial number,” Kittinger said. His interrogator told him, “The Geneva Convention does not apply to you, because you are not soldiers. You are criminals.”
Held in solitary confinement, beat- en and treated as war criminals, Kit- tinger said, “We considered it a tour of duty ... and a duty to resist. We held church every Sunday. We’d each have a hymn, and nobody could remember the second verse, so we’d sing the first verse four times.”
Kittinger, by virtue of his POW survivor status, led a history panel of history-making military pilots. Joining him on the panel was retired Air Force Lt. Col. Dick Rutan. Kittinger and Ru- tan share a connection bonded by air combat, and making history.
Rutan piloted the V oyager — de- signed by his brother Burt — on the world’s first round-the-world unrefu- eled flight. The spidery V oyager air- craft was basically a flying gas tank filled to the wingtips that completed its trip into the record books in 1986.
Other panelists included retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson; retired Air Force Col. Bob Ettinger; and retired Air Force Col. Roy Mar- tin, all who became distinguished test pilots after their tours of duty in the flak-filled skies over Vietnam.
The men on the small stage in the small tent were variously still lean, or had put on weight. They were some bald, some with hair gone white. Mar- tin still wore a dapper, black tailored flight suit known to combat pilots as a “party suit” with a lot of patches and embroidery. Others retained their leather jackets, and the general sport- ed a blue blazer sport coat and highly polished loafers. Their common de- nominator was a confidence and surety innate to warriors who fly and fight.
In Vietnam air war, the existential hazards were “Triple-A,” Anti-Air- craft Artillery, SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), and MiGs — the Soviet or Chinese jet fighters who were their op- posite numbers in the Vietnam air war.
Rutan volunteered to fly “Misty FAC” missions, a low-and-slow aerial recon mission, Forward Air Control aircraft tasked to find “Triple A” guns and SAM sites. These missions were done in a two-seater F-100 Super Sa- bre, a workhorse fighter-bomber of the
Photograph by Linda KC Reynolds
Dennis Anderson, military journalist and author, (far right) moderates ‘Going Downtown — The Air War in Vietnam during a history panel discussion at the Los Angeles County Air Show. The retired U.S. Air Force officers shared intimate and frank stories about the Vietnam War. All five fighter pilots believed the war was lost by political leadership but that the final air campaign secured release of American POWs. Pilots are: Lt. Col. Dick Rutan, Col. Joe Kittinger, Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, Col. Bob Ettinger and Col. Roy Martin.
Held in solitary confinement, beaten and treated as war criminals, Kittinger said “We considered itatourofduty...andaduty to resist. We held church every Sunday. We’d each have a hymn, and nobody could remember the second verse, so we’d sing the first verse four times.”
early Cold War tasked for protecting aircraft penetrating North Vietnamese air space.
“It was very exciting,” Rutan said. “Your job is to find targets, and direct fighter-bombers in to destroy them.
“We would go round up some fight- ers, go in and destroy it ... ‘Wow we got to see the whole thing.’”
Rutan added, “We had a high loss rate ... the highest. ... We lost 28 per- cent, one out of four shot down, in- cluding yours truly.”
On his last mission, his aircraft was hit, on fire, and he nosed it toward the Gulf of Tonkin before ejecting.
“That was the day I joined the Gulf of Tonkin ‘Yacht Club,’” he said, floating in a survival raft until he retrieval by a search-and-rescue helicopter.
“I knew I was going home — that I had made it.” Curling up in the chop- per, he said “I wrapped myself in a blanket, and went to sleep.”
To the audience of the enthralled, Rutan said he offered “a little pseudo psychology” about the mindset of combat. Which followed, it is “Kill, or be killed.” Destroy the enemy’s
guns, or be destroyed. Forget adrena- line, Rutan said. That is about running away from bears chasing you.
“The epitome of competition is one man against another,” he said. And that spirit of competition is fueled by what Rutan called “The combat gland,” which might be somewhere in the back of the neck.
“The combat gland has an addic- tive, euphoric effect,” Rutan said. “Every time you shoot back, it’s kill and be killed. You want more, and you want more, and you want more.
“If you’ve lived your life without being shot at, you’re missing some- thing,” he said. It is a physical compo- nent, particularly of the “testosterone- charged male.”
The hazards of air combat are fun- damental. Injuries that maim and burn, but more likely, instant death by fiery explosion, or burning to death in a flaming airframe.
Pearson, who went on from his air combat duty to be commander at Ed- wards Air Force Base — the world’s capital of flight test — recalled three specific encounters with death.
“Years later you think what’s im- portant, what changed your life,” Pearson reflected. “For me, it was about three, maybe four deaths that changed my life ...
“The first time I killed a person, and knew I killed him,” he said. “When you drop bombs you think you prob- ably killed people ... when you look somebody in the eye and kill them, you see them and you know that you killed them, you have to live with that the rest of your life.”
The next death encountered came “When your wingman or lead gets shot down, and they’re on the ground you have to live with that for the rest of your life.”
In 1972, after a dozen years of fight- ing, President Richard M. Nixon’s decision to initiate the “Christmas Bombings,” of Hanoi and Haiphong harbor was intended to bring the en- emy, the North Vietnamese, back to
peace negotiations. One key motiva- tion of a massive bombing campaign was to compel the communist regime in Hanoi to release the American POWs.
“In the Christmas bombings, our B-52s flew same pattern night after night,” Pearson recalled.
Pearson, in his first combat tour, was flying an F-4 fighter-bomber.”
“You never forget sight of a B-52 receiving an SA 2 in the weapons bay, with 50,000 pounds of fuel, and 30,000 pounds of bombs going off all at one time.”
The bomber, and its crew’s destruc- tion, looked like a nuclear fireball.
Ettinger recalled that flying to drop bombs on Hanoi was called “Going Downtown.”
His tour of duty was in 1967, and he, too, piloted an F-4 Phantom, an- other of the two-seater workhorse fighter-bombers of the Vietnam War. The job involved being a witness to death, and demanding the internal for- titude not to be panicked or shaken by that proximity to sudden, most often, fiery death.
“The only way you can think about it is that it’s the other guys who are gonna get shot down, and well, that’s too bad,” he said. “But you have to get over it, and even if it’s very close, it’s a miss.”
For the five men gathered to un- spool some of the history of an un- popular and long-enduring American war, it was a kind of class reunion, even though none of them had flown together, and most flew during dif- ferent periods of combat that for the record books began in 1960 and ended in 1975.
For the most part, as Kittinger, the elder statesman of air warriors re- counted, “it was a crappy war” run by “crappy leaders ... politicians who did not let the military do their job.”
For his part, Martin said he arrived in Vietnam as a young Air Force fighter pilot poorly prepared for the
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