After we got back to Korat, we were treated like heroes and acted like fools. That night, as those of us who came home made ourselves gloriously drunk and loud, there burned a bitterness in me against the stupid generals who sent us in at low level, trying to sneak up on an enemy whom we had trained to be the world’s best air defense experts.
Our generals were bad news. But later my bitterness grew to include the administration in Washington (the people who were ultimately responsible for the madness in Vietnam). They just did not know what they wanted to do or what they wanted military power to achieve. As a result, they came up with strategies almost on a day-by-day basis. Meaning: we had no real strategy in the air war over North Vietnam. Sometimes it looked as though we were trying to punish North Vietnam into coming to peace talks. Sometimes it looked as though we were trying to force North Vietnam to stop supplying the Vietcong. Sometimes it looked as though we were flying sorties just to impress the White House that we were flying sorties. It was like the game of crack the whip. A little jiggle in Washington resulted in a huge snapping of the end of the whip out in Southeast Asia.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t cause the North Vietnamese a lot of problems. We sure tried. However, in the overall analysis, I am also sure that we gave the North Vietnamese a lot of comfort. They had to have been greatly encouraged about the way we fought the war, about the way we parceled out airpower and didn’t achieve dominance, about the way we ignored our own doctrine and failed to gain control of the air. As a result, we filled their POW camps with our pilots and littered their countryside with downed aircraft. We taught our enemy to endure air attacks, we taught our enemy how to best defend against the world’s greatest air power, and we taught our enemy how to defeat us in the end.
In my heart, meanwhile, I knew that I would never again be a part of anything so insane and foolish. The name of the game is to get the mission done. That takes a combination of the fighter headquarters and the unit level leadership. It takes a team, not the teacher-student or parent-child relationship that we had with our SAC leaders. I vowed that if I ever got in charge, if I ever became the omnipresent “ higher headquarters they,” I would not let such madness reign.
In time my bitterness changed to hatred of them — the omnipresent them — everybody above my wing, all the Fighter Headquarters from Saigon on up (and later, too, the real culprits, primarily the President and the Secretary of Defense). I didn’t hate them because they were dumb, I didn’t hate them because they had spilled our blood for nothing, I hated them because of their arrogance… because they had convinced themselves that they actually knew what they were doing and that we were too minor to understand the “Big Picture.” I hated my own generals, because they covered up their own gutless inability to stand up to the political masters in Washington and say, “Enough. This is bullshit. Either we fight or we go home.” I hated them because they asked me to take other people’s lives in a manner that dishonored both of us, me the killer and them the victim.
If you are going to kill someone, you better have a good reason for it. And if you have a good reason, then you better not play around with the killing. We didn’t seem to have the good reason, and we were playing around with the killing. Shame on all of us. If I had to be a killer, I wanted to know why I was killing; and the facts didn’t match the rhetoric coming out of Washington.
The rhetoric was that we were there to save South Vietnam for democracy and to keep the other Southeast Asia nations from falling into Communist slavery. Okay, I will buy that. But the way we fought was so inefficient that you wondered if the rhetoric was just a front we were putting up. Then there was the political situation in South Vietnam itself. It was bothersome that we were supposed to be defending a political realm that was so unstable and corrupt. You couldn’t trust the elected government, and the elections we called for were rigged from the start. So in Vietnam there was hypocrisy. Next came the strong assurances from the President that he would fight the war to win and then he did nothing of the kind. Worst of all for me was coming home from the war in 1965, visiting my wife’s hometown, Cresco, Iowa, and talking to the local Rotary luncheon. On the one hand, I was being told that we are out there on the frontier of freedom defending these people’s interests, even eventually their freedom. On the other hand, these people had no idea what was going on in the war. They were supportive. But how much comfort can someone who is killing other humans take when the folks back home don’t know what you are doing or why you are doing it?
What should we have done?
For starters, we should have actually taken control of the air. We should have taken down the MiG threat by attacking their airfields. We should have rooted out the air defense systems by attacking sector operations centers — even if they were in prohibited areas like Hanoi or Haiphong. We should have bombed any gun that shot at us on a priority basis. And we should have attacked the SAM storage areas.
How did I resolve these contradictions and confusions?
I returned to the United States in August of 1965, after maybe four months in the war, initially surprised that I wasn’t kept in battle until the war was won. After all, isn’t that how we do things in America? In 1965, I cared about winning. By 1967, I still wanted to win, but when I had a chance to go back to Korat as a Wild Weasel, I’d concluded that since the President didn’t really give a damn, and since the American people didn’t understand what we were doing, then why should I worry about it? Since I knew the ropes by then, and that this would probably be the only war I’ d ever be in, my goal was to get back to the war, do the best I could, and enjoy the thrill of combat, even though the war itself was a stupid, aimless, evil thing. My only disturbing thought then was the almost certain knowledge that as a Wild Weasel I ran an excellent chance of not coming home. But then, you never take counsel of your own fears.
To put it another way, I lied. Most of us did; and the folks above us wanted us to lie. I stripped myself of integrity. We lied about what we were doing in North Vietnam. We lied about what targets we hit: Say my Fragged target was a ford across a river. If I saw a better target — say, boxcars on a rail siding — I would miss my Fragged target and somehow my bombs would hit the boxcars. We lied about where we flew. For instance, I always tried to fly in the no-fly buffer zones on the Chinese border, because the North Vietnamese didn’t have any guns on the ground there. They also knew about our buffer zones and figured we would follow orders.
When I went into North Vietnam, there was nobody from Washington up there, so I did what I felt was in the best interests of winning the war. If our leaders had no interest in winning, whatever that was, well, I did; and I was going to try to win, even if they didn’t want to or were unwilling to really try. I loved the fighting. If they didn’t care about the truth, then I would lie. If they didn’t care about the killing and dying, then neither would I.
In war, of course, shit happens more often than at most other times. You are faced with the ever-present reality that you are out there killing other people, and that is very bothersome, especially if you really believe the stuff they taught you in church. You are stuck with a contradiction: “Thou shall not kill.” But you are killing. The only way to resolve the contradiction is to try to do it as humanely as possible. That comes from knowing why you are at war, and then to fight it in such a way that it is over as quickly as possible and everyone can go home and live in peace… or at least until the next war.
So you do your best to hit the enemy where it hurts. For example, the North Vietnamese airfields were off-limits. Now, you tell me — you are a pilot over North Vietnam near Hanoi with your head on a swivel, with Red Crown screaming out MiG warnings and beepers going off as Air Force pilots are bailing out of their jets, and there is an enemy airfield sitting there off to the right of Thud Ridge waiting for you to drop some bombs on it, and the Big Bosses send your bosses messages saying, “Do not bomb that airfield”—and you think, You’ve got to be shitting me, and you wonder how to get close enough to miss your Fragged target in order to lay some ordnance on the airfield with a slightly long bomb.
What good did any of that do? I learned something. I learned that you cannot trust America. And I tell my Arab friends that as I point out to them that the once-upon-a-time capital of the last nation to put complete faith in American military might is now called Ho Chi Minh City.
