According to the usual practice, they crossed North Vietnam at its narrowest around the finger-shaped lakes between Vinh and the South Vietnamese border (hence the name Finger Lakes), then flew out to sea and proceeded north until they returned inland to hit a target.
As they roared in from over the South China Sea, they could see the target from fifty miles, huge white petroleum storage tanks and a large pumping station to the west on the north bank of the river that ran out of the city toward the sea. They came in from the east at 15,000 feet above the ground. The air was crystal clear, and the sun was behind them. The leader rolled over to his right and pointed his Thud at the storage tanks.
Horner waited fifteen seconds and followed him down, offsetting to the west so he wouldn’t get hit by enemy ground fire shot at the leader. It was absolutely calm as Horner watched the lead’s bombs set off two of the storage tanks in a violent orange and black maelstrom. He eased his aircraft’s nose to the right, checked his dive angle, airspeed, and altitude; and when his gun sight crept up on the huge pumping station, he depressed the bomb-release button on top of the control stick, then reefed back on the stick to keep from hitting the ground, and watched over his right shoulder as his bombs struck dead center on the mass of pipes and buildings that had once been a petroleum-pumping station.
With his head twisted completely around over his right shoulder and the nose of his jet now pointed toward the sky, he somehow saw red fireballs stream past on the left side of his canopy. Someone is trying to kill me, he thought abstractedly—the way we might think, It’s raining out. Meanwhile, he racked his jet toward the sea and tried to see the lead, who was just fifteen seconds ahead. Then he realized that he couldn’t see the leader because both of their jets were surrounded by greasy black smoke with orange centers making whoomp whoomp noises that rocked his jet. At that point, he put his jet into maximum afterburner, to get as much speed as possible, and started to dance around in the sky, to kill any tracking solutions the gunners might be working out.
It’s just like the World War II and Korea veterans said it was, he thought, as he flew out over the sea. And instantly he was a veteran.
Later, AAA too became part of the routine. If he looked down at the ground, he could see the red flame from the barrels of the AAA as they shot up at him. He could tell when the big guns were shooting at him because of the black greasy puffs. The 57mm guns were arranged in a circle and would fire in salvo, so what he saw was a circle of fire. And then if he looked to the other side of the formation and above the flight, he could see the black smoke of projectiles exploding. The smaller-caliber weapons featured tracers that snaked up from the ground and then curved behind the flight. In reality, the tracers didn’t curve; they appeared to because of the movement of his aircraft. Orange tracers were the sign of 37mm guns. The projectiles from these weapons exploded in gray-white smoke. . . . All in all, fascinating to look at.
After the excitement and skill of an attack and evading AAA, the trip home was easy—a thoughtful time. When a man is filled with adrenaline, he thinks fast, but on the way home he has time for meditating about what he has just done.
As he flew back to Korat that day—no longer a virgin—Horner realized that war is not the glamorous heady adventure described in song and story. He wondered what those gunners on the ground thought of him. He was pleased that they’d missed him, and glad that he’d frustrated them, but he took little joy that he and his companions had wrecked so much of their homeland and probably killed some of their countrymen.
As Horner accumulated missions—killing more people and destroying more property—he began to accumulate an abhorrence of war. For him, this abhorrence was a complex emotion:
He always felt the pain of the people he was attacking . . . but not enough for him to stop what he was doing. He hated the stupidity and immorality of war . . . but he loved being shot at and missed. He loved taking part in the struggle, the excitement, the high. He was afraid of being killed . . . yet unafraid (like most good fighter pilots, keeping his fears in a box). When he would sit in the arming area waiting for his flight to go, a little voice would whisper in his ear, “You are not coming back from this mission.” Yet he would shrug it off and fly. Once he was on the mission, he was so busy that he didn’t have time to be afraid. Afterward, sometimes, his hands would shake—probably, he claims, from fatigue as much as anything else.
“I love combat,” he says. “I hate war. I don’t understand it, but that’s the way it is.”
During the next two months, Horner flew forty-one combat missions.
Most often the F-105s would fly in pairs into North Vietnam, conducting road reconnaissance—looking for trucks—with a fixed alternative target such as a bridge. They dropped a variety of munitions, most often 750-pound bombs; but they also carried antitank rockets and were sometimes Fragged to hit a bridge with them. These would punch small holes in the bridge floor, and repairs could be made in hours. The best missions were against stored petroleum, freight cars in rail yards, and big bridges. The worst were what they called “Whiplash Bango Alert,” during which they’d sit on the ground in their Thuds and wait for orders to scramble in order to provide CAS for clandestine operations in Laos. When they finally scrambled, it was usually at the end of their vulnerability period—during the two hours from 1000 to 1200, they were “vulnerable” to a scramble; the jet was cocked, they had to wear G suits, and they sat around close to the jets so they could get airborne quickly—and the target was usually suspected troops in the jungle. Meaning: they bombed the jungle.
★ All the pilots soon came to realize that they were not fighting the war in the most efficient manner.
For the most part, the planning aim was to make it difficult for North Vietnam to help the Vietcong with logistical support, which was a reasonable goal. Within that aim, however, so many restrictions were placed on the pilots that very little of that aim was actually achievable. Robert McNamara’s strategy was one called Graduated Pressure, and its aim was to persuade the North Vietnamese to give up rather than going all out to defeat them. As a result, the pilots were saddled with politically selected targets, rules of engagement, buffer zones, target exclusions, and all sorts of other counterproductive arrangements. Unlike the Army, the Air Force wasn’t caught up in measuring success by counting bodies; however, the Air Force measures of merit, such as numbers of sorties flown, hardly made better sense. Any sortie might well have been useless, due to the lack of decent targeting or munitions; yet it was seen by headquarters as just as important as a sortie against a good target. Finally, the planning aim was to avoid gaining control of the air (for the sake of Graduated Pressure), and there was no serious thought given to destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war and his will to fight.
When Horner first went to Korat, most pilots counted all of these oddities as a sign of the fits and starts and inexperience that go with fighting a new war. Still, it was hard to overlook the inefficiencies, and not to ask why their efforts appeared to be so fragmentary, and without the conviction needed to win a war. It all seemed like such a limp way to hit the North Vietnamese. If you’re going to hit them, then hit them.
In time the pilots came to realize that it wasn’t just an efficiency problem; it was a stupidity problem. And then in time they came to realize that it was more than that, it was a matter of lies and betrayals. That realization—for Chuck Horner, anyhow—was not to come until later, but in the spring and summer of 1965, he could not fail to register oddities such as the following:
Early on, when they were short of munitions, he and other pilots would be sent over North Vietnam with a single bomb and their gun, their mission supposedly being to intimidate the North Vietnamese. Meanwhile, splendid targets, such as piers full of supplies and warehouses, were off-limits. Likewise, the airfields north of Hanoi were off-limits (allowing the MiGs a safe haven from which to launch attacks on our own aircraft). The enemy was allowed the use of his own government buildings, even
as he was blowing up South Vietnamese government buildings in Saigon. And he was given buffer zones along the China border, in order for us to avoid “frightening” the Chinese. The enemy used this protected space wisely.
Orders like these flowed out of the bizarre rules of engagement. When the Frag came in at night with the targets the pilots were scheduled to hit, included would be a long list of ROEs, primarily telling them what they could not do. They could not hit any target of opportunity. In the beginning, they could not engage enemy forces unless fired upon (this changed). Areas such as Hanoi and Haiphong were off-limits. They could not attack SAM sites. And they could not attack airfields, even if a MiG was taking off to intercept them.
Pilots are realists and craftsmen. They want to get the job done, and to do it well. It didn’t take them long to see that even their best efforts would not get the job done well.
What they didn’t know was that, besides the policy of Graduated Pressure, the President and his Secretary of Defense wanted to maintain absolute control of the war for political reasons. On the one hand, they wanted to look strong in the United States and perhaps slap the North Vietnamese around enough to persuade them to give in. On the other hand, they didn’t want the conflict to grow into a full-fledged war that would endanger the success of the President’s domestic efforts, such as the Great Society.
In addition, the Secretary of Defense arrogantly believed in his own intellectual and moral superiority over his immediate military subordinates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Joint Chiefs passively accepted it. They were constitutionally responsible not only to the President but to the Congress, to tell the truth as they saw it, but they didn’t. They knew the Johnson-McNamara policy would not work, and they were silent.
Meanwhile, in the skies over Southeast Asia, the frustration over the rules of engagement increased. The pilots sensed that they were constructed by men who did not have a feel for what was going on in the cockpits over the North. Their sense of fighter-bomber tactics and of the vulnerabilities of the F-105 was dim to nonexistent. Much worse, they had not the slightest vision of what they wanted done, and therefore they could not pass it on to the pilots.
If a pilot who is laying his life on the line is told to do a half-baked job, to perform less than credibly, even though he might die doing it, then you will soon have a problem maintaining military discipline and loyalty up the chain. The ROE orders made pilots perform tasks that were not credible . . . and so in time the orders were disobeyed and the pilots lied about it. In this way began the erosion of discipline and respect for authority that followed from the Vietnam experience.
★ Route Packages (so called because the mission was to interdict the supply of support to the Vietcong in South Vietnam) caused the pilots a somewhat different—though related—problem. The Route Packages themselves were simple enough. They offered a reasonable, though arbitrary, way to lay out North Vietnam into geographical areas.
The country was divided into seven zones, starting at the DMZ (the line separating the two parts of Vietnam) and looking north. Thus, from south to north, the Route Packages went RP I to RP IV. The part of the country that was mostly west of the Red River was called RP V, while the rest—including Hanoi and Haiphong—was VI. Phuc Yen and Hanoi were in VI A, the western part of VI, while Haiphong was in VI B, the eastern part of VI.
In practical terms, defenses in RP I and II were relatively light. In III and IV, defenses were heavier but still moderate (but with one or two real hot spots, such as the Than Hoa Bridge, which resulted in more shoot-downs than any other single target). MiGs flew out of V, which was bad, but it also contained a lot of jungle where there were no SAMs or guns, which was good. VI was the worst, with the Red River Valley, MiG bases at Phuc Yen and Dong Ha, Hanoi and Haiphong, and the northeast railroad.
The reason for Route Packages was to allow the U.S. Navy and the USAF to operate over North Vietnam without coordinating with each other. Each service could operate over its own designated zones, and in that way, each service could keep control of its own aircraft without having to place them under the control of a single air commander. Thus, the USAF got RPs I, II, V (V was farthest from the sea), and VI A, while the Navy got RPs III, IV, and VI B (VI B and IV were near the sea). In other words, the Navy got the midsection and the USAF got the top and bottom.
There were both benefits and drawbacks to Route Packages. The chief benefit was that the Navy and the Air Force kept out of each other’s way and they could plan their operations apart from each other, so there was never a coordination problem. In those days, it was also likely that U.S. forces did not have the command and control that would have allowed Navy and Air Force aircraft to operate with each other in the same airspace. It was likely, too, that Air Force and Navy planes would have been intercepting one another and perhaps even taking shots at one another. The chief drawback, of course, was that U.S. forces were not mutually supportive, which meant that the enemy could easily take advantage of the split in U.S. forces, and contend with two weaker divided air efforts rather than one unified and coordinated force.
It also gave pilots another reason to act contrary to what they saw as stupid, wrong, and lacking in credibility.
For example, when the weather was bad in an Air Force Route Package, Air Force pilots were not allowed to hit an alternative target in the Navy’s Route Packages.
Let’s say that Horner was flying in RP VI A, going after a bridge on the northwest rail line to China, and the weather turned bad—thunderstorms. Logic would say he ought to fly over to the northeast rail line to China and drop on a bridge over there; but since that was in RP VI B, he was expected to weather-abort the mission and bring his bombs home.
Did he do that? No.
What he did was fly to wherever there looked to be a suitable target, drop on it, and then report 100 percent of ordnance in the original target area. He would not report any BDA (Battle Damage Assessment), since he knew that the original target had not been hit, while there was a smoking hole a hundred miles away that they could not correlate with any Frag, so they did not report it, even if photos showed it.
Meanwhile, Chuck Horner came to understand that both he and the enemy ultimately worked for people whose interests did not include either of them; they did not really care if he or they died. Their agenda involved some geopolitical goal, while his was to stay alive.
★ None of these realizations came in a flash. For Horner, some didn’t hit him until after he returned to the United States. If, however, there was a Road to Damascus moment for Chuck Horner, it had to be on the July day in 1965 when the Thuds from Korat and Ta Khli made history. On that July 24, sixteen F-105s were sent to destroy a radar-guided SA-2 surface-to-air missile site located at the junction of the Red and Black Rivers in North Vietnam. This was the first-ever attack on a SAM site, and it turned into a ghastly fiasco.
Before that date, the Air Force and civilian authorities responsible for determining the course of the war had further determined that U.S. aircraft should not attack the SA-2 sites then being set up in North Vietnam. In that way, they reasoned, the United States wouldn’t annoy the North Vietnamese enough to provoke them into using the SAMs. . . . “Annoy the North Vietnamese?” Chuck Horner observes. “Why would the North Vietnamese go to all the trouble of setting the SA-2s up if not to shoot at U.S. aircraft? And keep in mind that U.S. aircraft were already bombing their country, so they had plenty of reason to be annoyed. What we should have done is sink the boats bringing the SAMs from the USSR. We should have bombed the trains that brought them from China. If we missed them there, we should have bombed them the first time we saw them being taken out of the craft. And failing that, we should have bombed the very first sites they set up. Instead we put the sites off-limits in the ‘hopes’ that the North Vietnamese would not use this weapon against us, if we did not shoot at them. How dumb can you get?”
One day in July, the North Vietnamese shot down an RF-4C, an unarmed reconnaissance version
of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom jet, with a SAM-2. In other words, the North Vietnamese had missed the subtle reasoning that would have had them install SAMs without actually using them, and now the United States had to teach them a lesson.
On the night of July 23, a warning order went out to Korat and Ta Khli to stand by, a retaliation mission against the North Vietnamese SA-2 site was being planned; Frag to follow. At 11:00 P.M. the Frag arrived. It called for low-level tactics to defeat the SAMs, without thought of the many AAA guns that were defending the sites. To fool the North Vietnamese, the Thuds from Korat would let down in Laos just across the border, fly east down a deep valley in northern Laos that the Communist Pathet Lao used as their stronghold—without thought that the Pathet Lao might see them, or perhaps choose to take some target practice themselves—then turn north at the Black River and hit the target in the delta at the Black and Red Rivers junction. The Thuds from Ta Khli, meanwhile, would let down to the north and fly east until hitting the Red River, then come south—without thought to the midair-collision potential resulting from Korat flying up from the south and Ta Khli coming down from the north. They also Fragged the munitions. Since it was a low-level attack, the F-105s were given napalm and CBU-2s. These last were new munitions—tiny bomblets containing ball bearings carried in tubes under the wing. When you reached the target, you blew the ends of the tubes and the bomblets dropped out and fell to earth. When they exploded, the ball bearings inside were like bullets, scattering in all directions, punching holes in whatever they struck. (The bomblets also had the bad habit of colliding in midair behind the wing, detonating, and punching holes in the dispensing fighter aircraft, setting it on fire or destroying its fuel cells and hydraulic flight control lines.)