Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

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