Listening to every transmission from 35,000 feet
Episode 4.
At 12:35am, the first problem arises. Frog 1 has to abort due to a broken oil line. Frog 1 is an EC-121 “College Eye” aircraft orbiting over the Gulf of Tonkin like us. It is based on the “Constellation” airliner and has a role similar to today’s E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System). Its role is to shine a radar on all aircraft in North Vietnam—especially on our low-flying assault force tonight, which would be too low for our land- and sea-based radars to follow. In contrast, our RC-135’s role is to monitor every radio wave that the enemy transmits.
As a testament to the excellence in planning, there is a backup aircraft, Frog 2, already on station nearby. Literally, within one minute, Frog 2 takes over that role.
At 12:40, at only 1,000 feet above the ground as observed by Frog 2 and according to plan, the six helicopters begin air refueling along their path over Laos with their HC-130 tankers Lime 1 and Lime 2. In this unprecedented formation are the one HH-3 Jolly Green Giant and five HH-53 Super Jolly Green Giants.
“Combat Apple” is the name for our RC-135M missions. We are the 6990th Security Squadron from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan. These reconnaissance missions were tasked with providing real time tactical and strategic intelligence to battle commanders on the ground—and back in Washington D.C., as you’ll see at the end of this Son Tay Raid mission.
It’s a three-hour flight from Okinawa and we need to be on station for 12 hours over the Gulf of Tonkin, so our missions are long—our shortest mission is more than 18 hours! This allows 24-hour coverage with the two 12-hour shifts in theater. Every mission has at least one or two air refuelings of 80,000 pounds or so, which I love to watch up front in the cockpit when I can. This is a mentally grueling, bumpy 30-minute period, (at moments, terrifying to me at night in monsoonal clouds, rain, and tropical lightning storms). The pilots fly two airliners in formation with 8 to 12 feet of separation nose to tail, maintaining boom contact for half an hour—twice on many missions!
Further, there are overlapping flight schedules with one Combat Apple crew on orbit in the Gulf of Tonkin (referred to as the “Gulf bird”) that focuses chiefly on air operations and threats in the Gulf as well as activities over North Vietnam. The second Combat Apple crew is orbiting over northern Laos (referred to as the “Laos bird”) where the focus is air activity over North Vietnam but closely covers ground action along the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam.
Our RC-135M is for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) and, particularly, Communications Intelligence (COMINT). It is designed to intercept virtually anything transmitted into the airwaves, from taxi cabs to tanks, walkie-talkies to facsimile, Morse code to radar signals, tactical airfield communications with aircraft (TACAIR) to Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) and SAM sites. Our linguists interpret the most urgent signals while airborne, but the recordings are translated, decoded and analyzed later on the ground at the US Army’s Torii Station on Okinawa. At Torii Station, adjacent to Kadena AB, all this transcription and analysis was done at a no-windows facility, with barbed wire and dog patrols at the perimeter.
[NOTE: Many years later, this was all consolidated onto Kadena AB with the construction of a new secure building, Larson Hall, named for our first squadron commander, Lt Col (later Maj. Gen.) Doyle E. Larson. General Larson became the first commander of Electronic Security Command.]
See more photos and stories on this website and in Who Will Go, which is just as much to honor the wives and family as the men themselves.
Click Here: The book.