A Marine Phantom + comments

I monitor a couple of groups where Vietnam vets post some of their “private stock” photos; those they took themselves.  Unlike the more familiar published photos we’ve commonly seen over the years, these are often more gritty and show detail.  Infrequently, the thread will take a personal tack where recollections of the same or similar events from differing perspectives develop.  This was one of them.

A Pilot's "Dinner speech"

A friend sent this piece to me yesterday. Over the course of living a pretty full life, I've encountered two groups who thoroughly loved their work...cops and pilots. The pilot who authored these words summed up a pilot's love affair with his work as well as any I've seen before:

Change Of Command Dinner speech by CDR "Beef" Wellington, former USNR VFA-203 "Blue Dolphins" C.O.

"Two days ago I closed out my career as a Naval Aviator. The realization is just now starting to hit me, as I'm sure it will the rest of you someday. What follows are my remarks at my farewell dinner. Several of the guys in my squadron had asked me for a copy of what I had written and because it had been jotted down on the back of a cocktail napkin in my weird-assed hand writing and because these things came from my heart, I debated for a while whether or not to write it down, but the response from all the guys and their wives was so humbling and overwhelming, I thought... why not.

Being an F/A-18 pilot and an airline pilot at the same time gives you an interesting and different perspective. Unlike others, at my airline (NWA) they do not have a history of hiring Single Seat Naval Aviators and as such we are definitely in the minority. On every trip when you first sit down next to a guy, the first volley of questions in getting to know each other always includes "What is your background?" Based on 3 years in the airline industry, I have recently decided to flat out lie and stop telling guys that I am a Naval Aviator and an F/A-18 pilot. You might be asking yourself, why would anyone do that?

There are 3 reasons.

One - Because everything that the uninformed population knows about Naval Aviation they got from the movie Top Gun: a credible and reliable source of information if there ever was one.

Two - Because when I tell guys that I am an F/A-18 pilot, the machismo and bravado that immediately comes from the left side of the cockpit becomes somewhat intolerable and I am forced to sit and listen to stories for the next 4 days that go something like, "Mike, did I tell you about the time when I landed my C-5 on a 15,000 foot runway with only 30,000 pounds of fuel in the tanks, with the weather at minus, and oh, oh yeah, did I say it was at night." You gotta be $hi **** n' me!

Three - Because, in their state of curiosity, invariably questions get asked about what flying the F/A-18 is like and what this business of Naval Aviation is all about. It is in my futile attempts to answer these questions that I have finally decided that it is impossible to do so. How can anyone possibly explain Naval Aviation?

How do you explain what it has been like to have seen the entire world through the canopy of an F/A-18 like a living IMAX film?

How do you explain what is like to fly an engineering marvel that responds to your every whim of airborne imagination?

How do you explain the satisfaction that comes from seeing a target under the diamond disappear at the flick of your thumb?

How do you explain catapult shots - especially the night ones?

How do explain the exhilaration of the day trap?

How do you possibly explain finding yourself at 3/4 mile [on final], at night, weather down, deck moving, hyperventilating into your mask, knowing that it will take everything you have to get aboard without killing yourself?

How do you explain moons so bright and nights so dark that they defy logic?

How do you explain sunrises and sunsets so glorious that you knew in your heart that God had created that exact moment in time just for you?

How do you explain the fellowship of the ready room where no slack is given and none is taken?

How do you explain an environment where the content of a man's character can be summed up into two simple 4-word phrases - "He's a good Sh**" or "He's a F---in' idiot."

How do you explain the heart of maintenance professionals whose only enjoyment comes from taking care of our young sailors and providing us with "up" jets to execute our craft?

How do you explain the dedication of our young troops who we burden with the responsibilities of our lives and then pay them peanuts to do so?

How do you explain the type of women who are crazy enough to marry into Naval Aviation, who endure long working hours and long periods of separation and who are painfully and quietly forced to accept the realization that they are second to the job?

The simple fact is that you can't explain it; none of it.

It is something that only a very select few of us will ever know. We are bonded for life by our proprietary knowledge and it excludes all others from our fraternity. As I will, no matter where you go or what do, you should cherish that knowledge for the rest of your life. For when I am 90 years old sitting on my porch in my rocking chair and someone asks me what I have done with my life, I will damn sure not tell them I was an airline pilot, but rather I will reach into my pocket, pull out my Blue Dolphin money clip and tell them I was a Naval Aviator, I worked with the finest people on the planet, and that I was the Commanding Officer of the Blue Dolphins."

Zoom

Blue Water Sailors - The Original Gus

 

In foreign ports sailors somewhat frequently use the terms “blue water/brown water” to distinguish the nature of their sea service from other sailors they see on the streets and in the joints.  Brown water sailors were those who sailed in shallow waters…rivers and just off-shore, such as Riverenes and the Coast Guard.  Blue Water sailors went out where the water was very deep, very blue, and rose up into massive waves so they, with reasonable justification, thought of themselves as the real sailors swaggering on the streets.  It was a good-humored joshing where even the Brown Water sailors tended to acknowledge the differences; the acknowledgement usually forced by a question: "have you guys ever gone out far enough to be in water above your knees?"

The original Gus, shown skylarking above, only recently popped up on my screen.  He had apparently attended a ship's reunion 2-3 years ago and in his own inimitable fashion, chose to wear a c.1968 set of whites.  However, if those whites are his originals, then he's done a fine job of keeping himself fit after all these years.  Maybe, maybe not.  In other pictures he looks a little larger as most of us are.

Gus was a bona-fide Blue Water Sailor and this picture is part of the proof...it was taken as the ship was riding out a heavy sea similar to the one shown in the video clip a couple of articles back.  He's standing just outside of the sheltered bridge area so he could feel the full force of Typhoon Wendy that was moving slowly across the Tonkin Gulf in early September.  The waves were massive and the spray stung out there where he was standing.  At some point in its life, Wendy was a Cat 5.

An interesting character, Gus was a recent UCLA graduate who raised his right hand and swore his oath of allegiance at the same time and in the same room as did I...we were the only two lads present that morning so, I suppose we were destined to be service pals, and we were.  Unfortunately for Gus, he was a political science major, a course of study that most techie types would suggest, involves no science.  His problem was that the Navy testing and classification routines strongly favored those with some math and science capabilities.  Original Gus apparently had few of those skills.  However, in most other respects he was a lively and intelligent shipmate, if a bit idiosyncratic.

The Reserves.  Reserves were not particularly well-received by the USN regulars we found aboard ship.  And after reading Manchester, Jones, and Mauldin, among others, I'm of the opinion that enlisted service people are pretty universally seen by the Regular (read: career) service management structures as no more than canon fodder and, in a sense that's exactly what they are.  Jones wrote most eloquently about that situation following his WWII service.

But, the Guses and other Reserves like them presented a new kind of challenge to Regular Navy management.  The nature of the Vietnam War and the constant threat of the Draft forced all young men age 18-26 during those years to deal with military service in some fashion.  Almost overnight the more selective services, Navy and the Air Force, had a significant rise in the quality of their recruits as tons of college-trained lads came into the Draft pool.  Not all of them wanted to be officers, which required almost twice the time on active duty.  Further, neither the Navy nor the Air Force ever had to rely on the Draft to fill their manpower needs during the Vietnam War…there was a ready supply of high quality volunteers from which to choose.  Those volunteers were recognized by the Navy management as being a pretty smart group...esp. the Reserves since they had figured out how to get done in 2-years what others were taking 4-years to do.

So, there was Gus, BA-UCLA, reporting aboard to start his 2-years of ACDU (active duty) as a Seaman.  However, since the Reserve unit had not declared him a "striker" for anything, what to do with him?  Other Reservists that had scored well on the classification tests had been designated as “strikers” for the various technical ratings aboard ships….radio, machinists, electronics, sonar, radar, fire control, etc.  Sometime during the preceding year a rather dour Reserve Commander asked me if I wanted to be a "striker" for one of the technical jobs...and me not knowing what he was talking about said, "sure, why not."  And with that brief exchange my cruise was destined to be a fairly decent experience.

Gus apparently didn't get the same deal.  When about 4 of us reported aboard late one afternoon, we were directed to the front compartment of the ship...up in the bow.  That was the standard response to all new reports for, up there was 1st Division...the deck apes...the Bosuns...later to be observed as the crappiest jobs on the ship.  Fortunately, just before settling in, a black Petty Officer, one of the first blacks I had ever seen in a working situation, rushed into the compartment and called my name along with one other guy, told us to grab our kit, and follow him.  Unfortunately for Gus, his wasn't one of the names called...and there he stayed with the deck apes for the entire 7-month cruise!

Sailor Gus.  So, before an hour had passed, Gus and I had been separated to pursue different tasks aboard ship.  We would remain in those separate assignments for the duration of our 7-month cruise of the Western Pacific.  My new digs were near the back of the ship where the ride was smoothest and the berthing space was quite a bit larger.  Technical rates were well cared-for aboard ship.

Meanwhile, Gus had to learn how to deal with living in the much smaller, much rougher riding space in the bow.  But, worse than that, he had to deal with the ship’s Bosun…a really foul tempered jerk who rarely spoke loud enough to be heard.  Gus, an ebullient, outgoing soul had problems with that jerk from the very beginning.  He told me that he had reminded his new boss that “we” are all on the same side here, what’s the problem?  Gus never elaborated beyond that but, I can imagine that the dour prick he was stuck with was just one of those consistently ugly types.

Deck Apes were responsible for the heavy lifting aboard ship…handling mooring lines, anchors, gangways, life-lines, railings, and every square-inch of the main deck from fore to aft…down to the waterline.  In addition, they manned the helm steering the ship, and handled all PA announcements from the bridge.

Gus never did any of that…for reasons I never knew.  I suspect that Gus simply presented such a foreign attitude with a cheerful countenance such as the jerk had never before seen, it simply overwhelmed the jackass.  Next thing we knew, Gus was in charge of cleaning the interior passageways…every night, all night long!  That suited Gus just fine because he never had any further reason to deal with the jerk for the rest of the cruise…no supervisor and he was free every day after catching what sleep he could.  During those days, on his own initiative, he spent time with the QMs…the ship’s navigators and let them know he was interested in working with them.

To my knowledge, Gus was never formally accepted in the QM section aboard ship, nor promoted to the Petty Officer rank he’s wearing in the picture.  We left active duty about the same time, when we returned home.  Our contract required 2 additional years of weekly drills so, he may have gotten his crow then.  I wouldn’t know, as I never attended any of those post active duty drills.  Life’s trolley pulled out of the station with me aboard shortly after discharge.  The first picture shows Gus wearing a Signalman’s crow; how that came to be, I wouldn’t know…he never worked with the Sigs while we were underway.

Gus, the Trust Fund Yuppie ?  Few, but me, aboard ship knew that Gus was a member of a well-to-do Southern California family.  He grew up on a Palos Verdes Peninsula property located a few miles south of LAX and had traveled extensively with his family during his childhood.  His family home was surrounded by several acres of Eucalyptus groves with pathways carved throughout the woods, interspersed with randomly placed fire pits.  Coupled with the mild climate, the social gatherings around those fires were something special.

Gus and his siblings lived in a separate residential structure apart from the main house.  So, in retrospect, it seems that much of Gus’s odd personality was probably self determined from an environment of significant freedom all his young life.  He was one of those one-of-a-kind characters.

First order of business after a month at sea was to find a roof-top beer garden overlooking the harbor, then a good restaurant for a big steak, and a friendly flow of smooth hooch.

Three California lads doing what they already knew how to do…briefly friends of a common experience, destined to become a lawyer, an engineer, and a preacher.  Guess which was which.

Kirin

Blue Water Sailors - The Tin Can Navy

For many reasons, Seventh Fleet sailors, when on the Pacific, sense themselves in the company of spirits.  Massive, historic events took place out there….not very long ago as history goes.  Most of the sailors have a keen sense of that history as they cruise through, by and over it.

Whether Pearl Harbor is their home port or they are just stopping over on the long transit to the Western Pacific, no one can ignore they're berthed in the shadows of the USS ARIZONA and the USS MISSOURI, both vessels that define the endpoints of America’s involvement in WWII.  Each rates a sharp salute.  

Further west, just about every deployment brings a tour of the legendary sites of the largest naval war in history...we pass over the site where the previous ship bearing our name rests on the bottom, the victim of a torpedo in 1942.  

Beneath these waters lie the ghosts of our forefathers, and if you listen carefully to the wind on a moonlit night, I swear you can almost hear them calling out, "carry on, Sailor".  And that's what we do....

“The destroyer is different from the rest of ships. It is small, fast and personal.  No other ship offers the experience that a destroyer does in any sea state.  Long after they are gone, their crews remember.” 

The destroyers were affectionately known as Tin Cans for the way they took the seas.  They bobbed, rolled, dunked, dove, pitched, and twisted in the waves…even in relative calm.

During long transits, the smaller destroyers had to be periodically refueled from the carrier.  When the ships came alongside to pass the fuel lines, carrier sailors got to see the smaller destroyers from close aboard. To a man, no carrier sailor ever wished he had been a destroyerman.  However, also to a man, no destroyer sailor would have had it any other way.

...and those aren't heavy seas !

Blue Water Sailors - Heavy Seas

Sailors tend to be a pretty close-knit group and they have a lingo all their own; some of it steeped in centuries of tradition.  They sail over the horizon and disappear from sight of loved ones left on the piers at home.  What occurs on the other side of the horizon can be difficult to describe.  Much of it is pretty monotonous.  Engines drone on and daily routines repeat again and again.

Sunsets are often spectacular; you don't see much wildlife.  A few flying fish jump out occasionally, glide a few feet, then plunge into the water again.  Porpoise ride your bow wave in and out of port, then disappear once you're further out.  No birds if you're far enough at sea.  Sharks' fins rarely break the surface.  

Gooney birds glide up, over, and down the wake; pirouette on a wing tip touching the surface and retrace their flight path in the other direction ...they're spectacular aviators and they venture out a lot farther than the Gulls.

Then, the skies darken, the swells pick up....and, pick up higher.....and, wow.  Heavy seas...a sailor's code for a wild ride.  Hard to clearly describe heavy seas to a landlubber.  Words don't quite cover it...even good ones.  The clip below does a good job of showing a ship, the 456' French Frigate shown above, riding out heavy seas.  Words don't quite cover it.  Sound is great on this...view full screen.

Home is the Sailor

Home is the Sailor

By James J. Kilpatrick

November 1969

San Francisco – The aircraft carrier Coral Sea left Alameda, bound for Vietnam, on Sept. 7, 1968.  She returned this past Friday, a great grey bulk of a ship, her fourth tour of combat duty behind her.  Her aging hull was stained with rust, but her flags were flying as happily as so many tropical birds.

As combat cruises go, Coral Sea’s last tour on Yankee Station offered no more than a footnote to the chronicles of war.  She had been on the line only a few weeks before bombing was halted north of the 17^th parallel.  The rest of the time was spent in ground support, reconnaissance, and routine patrol.

To the 4,500 officers and men, the tour was a tour of duty—hard and exhausting duty, performed under constant tension.  The steam catapults were forever pounding and the jet engines screaming for release.  There was danger, and there was death:  Marvin Naschek, Tom Bitter, and Norman Ridley, dead; Quinlin Orell, James Hunt, and Larry Stevens missing in action.

When a great ship comes into port, especially to its own home port, the crowds turn out.  So it was on Friday morning.  By 8 o’clock, they had begun to gather, wives and parents and children, bearing their hand-lettered signs:  “Scott Says ‘Howdy’”…”Welcome Eddie Schofield from the Dalles, Ore.”… “Hi Jerry Schur”…The 12^th Naval District band gave forth; gulls figure skated on the sky; balloons, like airborne tulips, flowered above the pier.

A little before 9 o’clock, the ship could be seen beyond Golden Gate Bridge, an unmistakable speck on the sea.  It would be an hour before she docked.  There was time for a visiting father to glance at the papers.

Student militants at Stanford University called off their nine-day occupation of the Applied Electronics Laboratory, amid indications that the University administration would yield to demands that war-related research be halted…

On Pier 3, Lorette Harvey of Lisbon, Maine, pushed a stroller back and forth.  Before long her husband, Aviation Supplyman Raymond Harvey, would see his new-born baby Kevin.  Phil Duncan’s mother was there from San Jose to meet her sailor son, just as she used to meet her husband 20-years ago.

Meanwhile at Merritt College in Oakland, 30-members of the faculty Senate were locked in a conference room by angry students demanding a “retraction.”  The students aroused by conflicting reports on the development of a Mexican-American Studies Program, kept the professors imprisoned for three and a half hours.

By 9:20, Coral Sea was plainly coming in.  You could see the sailors lined in dress blues on the flight deck.  The whole Vinton family had come from Medway, Mass., to meet Petty Officer Donald Vinton—father, mother, brother, girl friend.  Mrs. Charles Brinegar was there; her husband, a chief in aviation ordinance, has served his country for 22-years.  

At Harvard, agreement was reached on a plan to reduce the university’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program to an extra-curricular activity.  The agreement represents a victory for student militants who last week seized a university building.  In New York, 200 young men, demanding an end to the university’s program for training Naval Reserve officers held a seven-hour sit-in.

Now the ship was nudging her 63,000 tons against the pier, and the moment of reunion was close at hand—the moment when man and woman, mother and son, father and child, could cling to one another.  We scanned the crowded decks, searching for a single face.

A radical student at Stanford University pleaded to have the group continue the sit-in until troops or police were ordered in.  At that point, he said, the students could abandon the laboratory to wage some form of guerrilla warfare on campus.

High in the crow’s nest, 75 feet above the flight deck, a slim young sailor skimmed his white cap toward the pier.  It landed with fine precision right at this reporter’s feet.  I looked up, and he waived.  Even from a distance, you could tell; He had lost weight, and grown a little older, but the old grin was there.  Son Chris was home from Vietnam.

Liberty commences

Vietnam Aerials – 1970 (prox)

A Central Highlands Village

Pictures are fascinating when you consider that they record just a fraction of a second in time. Although I don’t specifically look for pictures like these, when I see something unusual, I’ll stay awhile to have a look.

These pictures of circa1969-70 Vietnam, taken during the war from a military aircraft really stood out for their clarity and subject matter. Most of us who served over there didn’t get this kind of view; however, most of us heard of the places or went through them from time to time. Capable 35mm SLR cameras were relatively new and only recently available at an affordable price. Even at that, there were some operator challenges to getting a good picture out of them. Due to the high cost of color printing at the time, most of us used slide film. The manual controls could be fussy for a novice to master. In my outfit there were only a handful of 35mm cameras in use and it’s anyone’s guess how many of those guys were capable of taking a good picture.

In the case of these particular shots, considering the operation challenges, add to it the scarcity of guys assigned to fly low and slow enough to take pictures like these and I would consider them very rare. As a bonus, the photographer, an Air Force pilot, provided a brief description of the image.

If you only heard of these places over the network nightly news, along with the body count….here they are, or rather, were:

And along the final approach course to Nha Trang:

Here are a couple taken in the Saigon area:

If you were listening to the broadcast news back then, you would recall the huge shrill raised about incursions into Cambodian airspace. Here is a picture of one of those incursions...a massive thunderstorm cut the 25-year old pilot off from taking a direct route to his home base.

Adios

Vietnam - Robert S. McNamara & General Curtis LeMay

Studying the USAF’s early days inevitably leads to a focus on a surprisingly small number of men who played key roles in its development from just after the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk. The picture above is a visual link between General Hap Arnold, one of the first Army aviators to take a Wright flying machine into the air, to the formation of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), led by another remarkable USAF commander, General Curtis LeMay.

In the c.1945 picture, taken at the close of WWII, Arnold was the commander-in-chief of the Army Air Force and LeMay had commanded the Third Air Division of the Eighth after rapidly rising from the position of an Air Force Major at the start of the war. LeMay moved from the ETO to the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater in August 1944, later taking command of the final aerial assault on the Japanese home islands.

About the time we graduated from EHHS, Air Force Chief of Staff General LeMay, 57, and Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara, 47, were involved in epic clashes over the direction the defense of this country should take. LeMay was a highly experienced combat commander with an incredible service record; McNamara was a former “Whiz Kid” at Ford Motor Company, who had been a low-level statistician during WWII, ultimately working for LeMay in that role. After commanding the Berlin Airlift and leading the formation of the Strategic Air Command after WWII, LeMay, who was once McNamara’s Army superior, became McNamara’s subordinate when JFK came into office, bringing McNamara with him as Secretary of Defense.

McNamara’s culpability in taking our generation into Vietnam is told in the following article published in the AIR FORCE Magazine, August 2009, not long after McNamara died. LeMay retired in 1965, some would say in disgust.

”The No-Brainers of Robert S. McNamara

By Robert S. Dudney, Editor in Chief

His lack of integrity was deeply troubling, but it was the world-class arrogance that did the real military damage.

It should be evident to all that Robert Strange McNamara (b.1916), to paraphrase a line from the 1940 book Guilty Men, was among the worst selections for high office since Caligula chose to make his horse a consul at Rome. He died July 6, 2009, at age 93. Today’s officials can profit from studying his career.

McNamara, the Pentagon chief in the Kennedy and Johnson years, showed sketchy character on many occasions, but nowhere did he do this more baldly than in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. My predecessor, John T. Correll, dissected it in an editorial, “The Confessions of Robert S. McNamara.” I cannot improve upon it. He wrote:

‘Robert S. McNamara could give duplicity a bad name. In his new memoir, ... he says that the Vietnam War was a mistake and that he knew it all along. We should have gotten out in 1963, when fewer than 100 Americans had been killed. When he and other US policymakers took us to war, they ‘had not truly investigated what was essentially at stake.’

“McNamara was Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 in the Kennedy Administration, which led the US into the Vietnam adventure, and in the Johnson Administration, which widened the involvement to a war in which 58,000 American troops died. He was not some star-crossed functionary who went passively along with a policy he opposed. He was so fiery an advocate that Vietnam became known as ‘McNamara’s War.’ His actions then and his statements now cannot be reconciled with honor.

“The duplicity has another dimension. News accounts bill In Retrospect as a stark admission of guilt, but an actual reading of it tells a different story. McNamara does, to be sure, acknowledge that he and his colleagues were ‘wrong, terribly wrong,’ but the admissions account for relatively little of the book’s substance. The bulk of it explains how these were honest mistakes and not altogether the fault of McNamara and his friends.”


Correll went on to point out a startling blind spot in the book:

“Somehow, it is not altogether surprising that McNamara comes close to ignoring the rank and file of the US armed forces. In the entire book, there are just four brief instances, one of them in a footnote, when the troops cross his mind. The best he can bring himself to say for those killed in action is that ‘the unwisdom of our intervention’ does not ‘nullify their effort and their loss.’”

Damning as these passages are, it is what comes next that most clearly spotlights McNamara’s biggest failing. Correll wrote:

“McNamara never learned the real lessons of the war. In Retrospect ticks off ‘11 major causes for our disaster in Vietnam,’ but they run mostly to philosophical mush like, ‘We misjudged then—as we have since—the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries,’ and, ‘We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.’

“Incredibly, McNamara recalls—but regards it as insignificant—that the service Chiefs told him in 1964 that the US had not defined a ‘militarily valid objective for Vietnam.’ With similar arrogance, McNamara continues to believe that his strategic and tactical abilities were better than those of the military professionals and that his micromanagement of the war was a good idea.”

In short, his lack of integrity was deeply troubling, but it was the world-class arrogance that did the real military damage. Many have testified to the pervasiveness of this arrogance. One who experienced it up close and personal was Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, USAF Chief of Staff in the years 1961-65. LeMay was the greatest combat commander the Air Force had ever produced, yet it counted for little in the lounges of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Warren Kozak, author of a new biography, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, notes that, “Robert McNamara had very clear ideas of what he wanted to do at the Pentagon. ... He was determined to take control.”

Faced with such brash confidence, LeMay and the Chiefs didn’t have much of a chance. McNamara killed key service programs. He halted the supersonic B-70 bomber that was LeMay’s top priority. The Pentagon chief forced on the Navy and the Air Force the dual-service TFX—later F-111. Most especially, LeMay quarreled with McNamara over the latter’s embrace of “gradualism” in Vietnam. LeMay was proved right.

The New Frontiersman saw little reason to consult with the Chiefs. They “sensed this and felt that Kennedy and the people under him simply ignored the military’s advice.” LeMay was “especially incensed” when McNamara brought in a group of young statisticians as a buffer between him and the military. LeMay referred to them with the dismissive term “whiz kids.”

Bombs Away

Historic Document - Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the authorizing document used to enable the executive branch to attack North Vietnam at will rather than having to gain concurrence from Congress. It was drafted in response to an open sea incident that occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. 

Ultimately about 2,600,000 of our young men and women would be engaged in-country and 58,000 of them would die there.

Signatures on the document are Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX), Lee W. Metcalf (D-WY), and John W. McCormack (D-MA)

Patriots, all. Democratics, all.

Yankee Station

As we’ve aged, retired, and started reflecting on some of the things we’ve experienced over the past, nearly 50-years since EH, the net has come along at a propitious time. As no other generation has ever had available to them, we have the tools to ask long, unanswered questions and have a reasonable expectation of finding answers. It amazes me nearly every day.

Someone mentioned the F4 Phantom recently and that started my mind going. This was the plane most young pilots wanted to fly, but few got the opportunity. It had a reputation for being powerful, somewhat unwieldy, and dirty with respect to throwing out a lot of black smoke. We used to joke that a Phantom didn’t land as much as it arrived as it came aboard a carrier. They hit hard and emitted a lot of smoke from burning rubber as their heavy frames arrived on deck.

As so many others are going through their old picture files, a lot of old Vietnam material is beginning to appear in online venues such as Flikr and other sites. If you have a specific memory of something you saw, but never photographed, there is now an opportunity to find some of those pictures you never took.

This story is illustrated with a couple of shots I frequently saw but never photographed. Unlike the WWII veterans, we have a marvelous communication tool available to us in the net. For those with an interest in the subject, all you need to know is how to ask the question. I recalled the boiling smoke from the Phantoms coming aboard (arriving) and the close calls they often had with a pitching deck as they made their final approach.

If you were Navy, this is the kind of stuff you saw on Yankee Station, if you were Army or Marines, you saw something different, and if you were Air Force, you saw something different still. I think Navy had the most exciting jobs but since they were done in locations remote to news media, there wasn’t much of a record created of their duties. Only pictures like these, taken by some of the sailors themselves can do a good job of telling their story.

The last picture is an aeronautical chart marked by a carrier pilot for his use in flying a mission into North Vietnam. This is the kind of thing that is essentially unique and rarely seen by others. However, as we clean out some of the old boxes and trunks, this is the kind of thing we are finding.

Not On My Watch

Happy 4th

click pictures to enlarge them

(Words adapted from: "A Few Good Men")

Never forget...there is nothing so conducive to civilized behavior than the threat of a punch in the nose for uncivilized behavior.

Adios

Legacies & Reunions, Part 2

-->

The desire to reunite with former classmates is similar, yet different than the pull former soldiers, or airmen, or sailors feel in wanting to associate with their old comrades in arms. While class reunions are interesting from the standpoint of comparing notes with one another as to how we’ve done in the interim between reunions, old warriors don’t compare notes in the same manner.

As classmates, we were locked in competition with each other for various recognitions and achievements. However, the old warriors generally associate for the purpose of recalling their shared time together. Dad had a good time meeting with others who had served in Eighth Air Force during WWII and they used their twilight years to learn more about the war in which they fought so long ago. When they were young, they had scant time to consider why there were there and how what they did fit into the larger whole.

It’s possible with this new technology to express complex thoughts with a few words and pictures. Once they were young…now they are old…and they still hold each other in high regard. Once, without hesitation, they trusted their lives to the others.

WWI - 94th Aero

WWII Eighth Air Force

Vietnam Recondo Team

Adios

Legacies & Reunions, Part 1

My father often remarked that all of our fathers and grandfathers had volunteered for wartime service and that our volunteer heritage went back to the Revolution. For years, his telling of those facts meant little to me, for I hadn’t volunteered because of a sense of patriotism—I volunteered seeking to avoid service in a SE Asia rifle company and managed to accomplish that.

However, I did not manage to avoid combat service and thereby became, quite by chance, the fifth generation to not only volunteer, but also the fifth generation to serve in a combat area.

Greatgrandpa served in an infantry regiment assigned to the Army of Tennessee and participated in most of the battles fought by that western army. He served for the duration of the war…a remarkable feat for that period. Grandpa served in an Army division assigned to France during WWI, and his son (my father) flew with the Mighty Eighth Army Air Force during WWII.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an organization almost as old as the more familiar DAR, has been marking familial lines of service such as ours with a series of crosses, one for each of the wars in which our country has fought since the War Between the States. These fine medals provide a tangible family record of service like nothing else I have found.

During the late 1890’s the crosses were first conceived by a Georgia woman as a tribute to her father and the old soldiers still living. The old rebels had just begun to gather together a few years earlier for the first time since the war and formed the United Confederate Veterans (UCV). Since no medals were awarded by the Confederacy for wartime service, the ladies wanted to honor their fathers’ faithful service and have continued to do so for their descendents for over a century.

If you click to enlarge the old timers’ picture in the preceding post, you can see at least six of them wearing their original Southern Cross of Honor on their left breast.

Adios

Vietnam – Part 3, Perception

The Internet came to my house about 1996 and one of the first things I did with it was to dig into my family history. For the past century or so, all we knew of our ancestors was that they were farmers who lived in a couple of Southern states and their lines were originally from the Carolinas. We were sophisticated city folk and saw not too much of interest in some Southern farmers. So the old ones stayed buried and we, the new ones, pressed on.

My first question of the then new Google search engine was to ask who were the two other names on my 3^rd great grandfather Jim’s grave marker. Grandpa Jim’s marker simply bore his name, named the two others, one a company commander and the other, a regiment commander, all followed by the notation: “Rev War.”

As 9-11 demonstrated, there has never been a shortage of those who, if given the opportunity, would take or destroy what we have. Although we knew from family tradition that grandpa Jim had served during the Revolutionary War, we knew none of the details. But the ability to easily research those other two names through the Internet revealed a rich story of a 15-year old youngster trekking the wilderness as part of a company of men from the western Virginia frontier settlements.Curiosity about the service of a Confederate great grandfather, a grandfather who served in WWI, and finally the fantastic story of my father’s service over occupied Europe in WWII followed. The latter story is something I thought I knew well, but there was a tremendous amount of detail that my father never told. After pondering all this new-found heritage, it struck me that Patton touched a notion accurately in his 1922 poem, 

Through A Glass, Darkly,

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.
As it was with all the others before me, Vietnam service was just the most recent in a continuing tradition of service to the ideals of freedom and country—whether it was worth the cost will long be debated…but the debate changes nothing that has happened. People can take issue with this thought, but their arguments matter little in the larger sweep of history.What does matter is that until the United States of America was established, in all of human history there was never before a place on this earth where common men could own property and live in peace, relatively free of tyranny.

Franklin and the other Founding Fathers knew the fight to preserve those freedoms is an ongoing fight—their own words clearly express that belief.

I look at vintage pictures of old soldiers differently these days. Now, I see myself in their faces. 

As the noted Civil War historian, Bruce Catton wrote, “once, ages ago, they had been everywhere, and seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young.”

United Confederate Veterans - 1917

Adios

Vietnam – Part 2, Aftermath & Awakening

In Part 1, I mentioned that I was no longer concerned about Vietnam after I was clear of it. That was true for about 20-years until I made my first and only visit to the Wall in Washington. I recalled the furor over its design and had decided that it was an ugly monument to an ugly war…I wanted no part of it.

After the passing of 20-years, we had been sold a bill of goods by a Leftist dominated media, that we had lost that war. But those of us who were “there” knew better. America lost not one single battle during that war, nor was there a single instance of an American retreat. Those of us who were “there” saw the incredible mismatch in weaponry and fighting personnel. We had essentially no opposition in the air or at sea. Ground opposition, while credible and tenacious, was simply no match in terms of tactics or training.

No, the correct description of how that war ended is that our political class elected not to win it. I know this argument has been raging for nearly 40-years, and I have no interest in arguing it further here; suffice it to say that within any given 30-day period, given the go-ahead, I believe we could easily have taken Hanoi and as much else of the place as we wanted. To have left the issue undecided as we did, dishonored an entire generation of American soldiers and left open the door for them to have been shamefully disrespected upon their return home.

Those like me, who arrived home from overseas inside a military base and simply drove out the gate saw none of the stupidity seen by some of our brothers when they arrived home in some of the various airports where they deplaned. To this day, few of us openly acknowledge our service although none of us have anything to be ashamed of and each and every one of us have secured an honored place in the history of these United States. That honored place is a spot in the line of march started by our fathers and brothers of the 1776 Revolution.

We were visiting D.C. some years ago when my wife suggested that we go see the Wall. I replied, no…I didn’t know anyone on it and really had no interest in it. She persisted…maybe she was the one who really wanted to see it, so we went.

It was a scene not unlike the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan where the old timer slowly walks amidst the grave markers with his family walking quietly behind and tears flood his eyes. Now, I fancy myself a tough nut, but for some inexplicable reason, more and more tears flooded my eyes as we walked along that Wall. The Wall seemed to rise out of the ground with a couple of names even with my ankles; then more names as the Wall rose to my knees; and many, many more names as the Wall dwarfed me near the center. The overwhelming sense was that I had been a very, very lucky man to have gotten through that mess alive and unbroken.

I don’t recall any particular name on the Wall, but do recall there being a large number of ethnic surnames…surely they were the guys who weren’t so clever as we were to find an easier way through to the other side.

One visit was enough…I haven’t been back since and have no plans to do so again. I wouldn’t trade the fellowship of any one of those guys on the Wall for a whole room full of the screaming protesters that greeted us when we came home. As for those who found legitimate ways to avoid service, I have no problem with them as long as their strategies were lawful; however, if I were one of them, I would forever wonder if one of the kids named on that Wall had taken my place.

Adios - (See Wetterling's "Still the Noblest Calling")

Vietnam – Part 1, Beginning

For the graduating Class of 1963, Vietnam was little more than a distant rumble when we took our diplomas home from the coliseum that night. First we had to deal with the JFK assassination as first semester Freshmen, then continue our first semester studies while attempting to maintain new social lives in new surroundings with new girls, new boys, new teachers, new coaches. The film, Animal House, was set in this time frame.

The first hint of trouble afoot that I recall was that Life magazine issue showing the burning Monk. “What in the hell is that all about?” I thought. By Summer 1965, LBJ announced his decision to dramatically increase troop strength in Vietnam and it quickly became clear that without maintaining a student deferment, all lads age 18-26 were going to be drafted.

Our class game plan quickly became an extended infatuation with higher education. Since the trek of our age slot through history roughly coincided with draft pool for Vietnam—we were 18 in 1963 and 26 in 1971; the Vietnam War ramped up in 1965 and was in decline by 1971. So if we could get our BS in 1967 or 1968, our MS in 1969-70, and get into a doctorate program after that…well, we could keep rolling that student deferment over indefinitely or at least until that bloody war was over. That is what occurred and I would suggest that is why so many of our classmates became doctors or professors. And a number of them were not from our high school pool of top academic achievers…funny thing, motivation.

A wild card, in the form of the draft lottery, was introduced in 1969, so if your number was higher than 195 in that lottery, you were home free…you would never be drafted. Before that, from 1965 to 1969, there was a constant pressure to either stay in school in order to hold that student deferment or find a Reserve program that offered little exposure to the Vietnam jungles. I don’t recall ever meeting one of my peers who was anxious to be a soldier or sailor.

Six month active duty reserve programs were available through most branches of the military, but by 1965-66 there were 2-year waiting lists for those programs. These were good programs because with just a 6-month of active duty obligation, there was not really enough time to train someone to go to Vietnam, so most of those reservists served their active duty periods in the USA, “playing soldier” as most of them described it. Dan Quayle and Al Gore were two of those 6-month reservists, both I’m relatively sure, gaining entry around the waiting lists due to the pull of their politically connected daddies.

As a back up to the 6-month programs, 2-year active duty reserve programs were available from the Navy and Air Force. Even though the active service requirement was the same as an Army draftee, these programs were superficially attractive because neither the Navy nor the Air Force were in the business of crawling through Southeast Asian jungles. Of course, assignments to Sea Dragon, the MRF, Tuy Hoa or Da Nang were not mentioned in the recruiting spiel.

Reserve officers were obligated to 3-1/3 years of active service while pilots signed on for 5-year active duty hitches with about 18-months of that spent in training. After the training, pilots could look forward to 3-1/2 years on the line—plenty of time for a lot of them to die. Google, “Still the Noblest Calling” for one of the most poignant personal recollections of Vietnam combat air service I’ve read. Be sure to use the “quotes” in your search…it was written by J.D. Wetterling.

When you finished your active duty service, you were still obligated to be a member of the reserves for several more years until you had completed six. The newspapers and evening TV news talking heads continued bleating body counts, the “students” kept rioting on their university campuses, and oddly, very oddly, you didn’t care any longer—your time in that hell was done. Of course you grieved for those lost, you always do, but it wasn’t your war any longer—it was someone else’s turn.

The protest fervor continued building, but it didn’t involve you any longer. In fact, it seemed rather self-centered and selfish on the part of the students….Mommy, Mommy, not me, not me. Time to grow up kid, you thought. Time to grow up. For years after the service I could quickly tell if someone had served or not…it was something in their bearing and in their humor.

Age and experience adds perspective that youth can never possess—it takes time, kid and you won’t find it in the books. A well-regarded personality recently visited our soldiers in Afghanistan and returned home in awe of the young soldiers he met. He said that he felt small in their prescience. “The opportunity to serve occurs only once while you are young,” he observed. “I had the opportunity to serve during the Vietnam War, and did not take it,” he said. “My draft number was high so I didn’t go,” he continued, “and I have regretted that decision all my life.”

Adios