As one of the 25 Green Berets of the Advance Team aboard our C-123 from Pope AFB, NC, to Eglin AFB, we landed at around 6am on Wednesday September 2nd, 1970. It was typical Florida weather, hot and humid.
Now, I had never been on an Air Force base. I thought all military mess halls were the same. Let me tell you: I was wrong! This Air Force mess hall was more like a restaurant! I remember at breakfast the cook asked me how I wanted my eggs. I thought, “You must be trying to pull a joke on me.” In the Army, eggs were either cold & scrambled or warm & scrambled. I told him I’d like them over easy. He asked how many and I told him two would do it. I thought to myself, “I’m gonna like this.” They had several different fountain drinks and when they told me I could have seconds I was hooked.
They bused us to “Auxiliary Field #3” (today it is named Duke Field.) The other Ft Bragg Green Berets would be arriving in another week or so. One of our first tasks was to secure the Tactical Operations Center building, which was only about 200 yards from the runway. The OSI (Office of Special Investigations) guys swept the building for bugs and did their security checks. We placed three rolls of concertina wire around the building, creating only one entrance. We installed a field phone at the entrance for communications to the staff inside. From September 3rd on, this building was guarded 24×7.
Six of us were given that round-the-clock task of guarding the building. While on shift, we would rotate a guard every two hours: you’d pull guard duty for two hours, then you’re free to do other things for the 10 hours before your next shift. If I wasn’t on guard duty, I was training or sleeping. It was hard work keeping up with training events, and the PT events, AND guard duty.
This TOC building that we guarded was where a lot of the Top Secret planning for the raid was accomplished. I never entered it, but inside this building there would be a lot of brass spending the next few months planning the mission.
Read Sgt Terry Buckler’s full story in Who Will Go.
On the Friday night, November 20th, 1970, a C-130 picked us up from Takhli RTAFB, where we had been housed in the CIA compound since deploying from Eglin AFB. The NKP (Nakhon Phanom RTAFB) flight line was blacked out when we landed—even the air traffic control tower people had been relieved of their stations for secrecy. The C-130 landed without any lights on the aircraft or on the runway. It taxied to the parking ramp. With the rear ramp open, and taxiing very slowly, but without stopping, the C-130 crew let us ten A-1 pilots hop out the back, two pilots for each of the five A-1s. The C-130 continued taxing, pulling up the ramp, out to the runway and took off. They had other people to deliver to other locations. It was about 10pm. The only people on the flightline were the crew chiefs and us. The wing commander came out to us. As we were walking to get our flight gear at life support, he was asking question after question, none of which I was I authorized to answer. He got rather pissed. We went straight to the birds, cranked up and taxied out. No aircraft lights. No radio calls. No taxiway lights or runway lights. Total silence. (The radio was not to be used until we were over the POW camp.) Major Jerry Rhein and I were in the lead aircraft. Taking off at the exact second, we did a 360 over the base to join up. A specially equipped MC-130 “Combat Talon” was to rendezvous with us there and lead us onto our target. For this mission, timing was everything. Our MC-130 wasn’t there. We did two more 360s and couldn’t wait any longer. The “backup plan” was to navigate ourselves to Son Tay, following the planned route and arriving at the appointed time, 0200 local Saturday, November 21st. No way Jose! We had agreed among ourselves earlier that this was not was not a viable plan. We would, however, fly the course until we got lost (which we knew we would) and then head straight for Hanoi. We’d just hold south of the IP, which was at a point along the Black River, due west of the camp. When the TOT (Time Over Target) came, we’d hop in and do our thing. The route was NKP direct to Vientiane, Laos. Then, we were to head due north and drop to low-level. The plan was to weave through the karst and valleys all the rest of the way to Son Tay. Impossible at night for A-1s. The first backup plan was to rendezvous with the Talon over Vientiane at the appointed minute, but because we had made an extra 360 over NKP we could not make that time. We hit Vientiane a little late—maybe five minutes late. There was no Talon. We turned north and pressed on. After Vientiane, there were no ground lights. The ground was ink black. And then, our worst nightmare loomed in front of us: a cloud bank. Being lead, I wasn’t worried about my wingmen colliding with me. But the rest of the flight broke out in every direction, like a covey of quail, everyone in God-only-knows-what direction. Pushing it up, I climbed straight ahead and soon popped out on top. Not an A-1 in sight. Hopeless to rejoin without lights or radio, we were all on our own. After a short time, Jerry Rhein and I noticed a speck of light far ahead. A star? After watching it a while, we were sure it was below the horizon. It had to be something else. Heading straight for it, it took some time to catch. A fully loaded A-1 is no speed demon. Sure enough, there was our Talon with a teeny-weeny white light on the top of the fuselage and a dim bluish glow coming from the open ramp in the rear. You really couldn’t see the bluish glow until you were only a few meters from it. There were already two A-1s there, one on each wing. We moved up. The left one moved outside and let us take our assigned place on the left wingtip. A few minutes later, our other two A-1s slowly pulled up. Once we were all in place, the little white light went out and the bluish glow went out. The Talon then led us down into the terrain-hugging. From there on in, it was ‘hold on tight’ as it bobbed and weaved through the hills and valleys. The Talon driver was top notch. His power applications during climbs and descents and gentle banking allowed our heavy A-1s to hang right in there. The three day “moon window” we had for this operation provided good night visibility. But several valleys we drove through were so deep that the mountains sometimes blocked the moonlight. When that happened it, was like diving into an inkwell. You could make out only a few feet of wing tip and that was only because of our own exhaust flame. When turns or ups & downs occurred at those times it was tough. As we emerged from the mountains and were out over the Red River Valley, it was almost like being over Iowa with Omaha and Council Bluffs up ahead, lights everywhere…but this was Hanoi. Soon thereafter, the Talon started climbing and we knew the IP (Initial Point from which we will approach the POW camp) was coming up. We had an assigned altitude to be at over the IP. The choppers, with their own Talon, were going to be under us coming in from a different direction. They should have been slightly ahead of us, but you couldn’t be sure everyone was on time. The planned time of each of the various flight elements involved in the mission was based upon everyone’s overhead time at the Son Tay POW camp itself. The IP times were calculated for the different speeds of all of the different raid aircraft. At the IP, then the Talon transmitted the first word of anything we heard on the radio all night. The transmission was to be picked up by a high orbiting EC-121 and relayed back to the ground command post. It let them know we had crossed the IP. (We were two seconds off. The best we had ever done during practice without the Talons leading us was ten minutes!) The Talon then accelerated out ahead and up and disappeared in the night. The heading the Talon announced was 091. Trying to reset our high-technology Directional Gyro by a wiggly ‘whiskey compass’ was an exercise in futility. Good thing all the towns, cities and roads were lit up. With all the target study we had done, it was like we were in our own back yard. Peach 5 ‘peeled’ off to the right. He was backup, just in case anyone was shot down. His assigned orbit was a large hill just south of our course. As it turned out, the hill was a North Vietnamese Army artillery practice range and it wasn’t long before they started taking a few rounds. They moved off to somewhere else, probably closer to the camp. Then Peach 3 and Peach 4 peeled off to the left to hold just short of the camp until called in. The plan was to call them in when we and Peach 2 had expended 50% of our ordnance. Then they would do the same with us, each time expending 50% of what you had left. That way, if someone went down, there would always be aircraft in the air that had some ordnance left to support. Then Peach 2 dropped back so we could set up a two-aircraft ‘daisy chain’ around the POW camp. It was like a precision ballet. At 3,000 feet, rolling into a bank alongside the POW camp, I saw, down below me, two flares pop right over it, having been released from one of the Talons at 1500 feet. Apple 3, an HH-53 Super Jolly Green Giant helicopter, opened up with mini-guns on the guard towers and the guard quarters. The towers either blew apart or caught fire. At this time, our job was to make sure no one approached the camp. No one did. We could see the sparkles from a Firefight Simulator dropped by one of the Talons on the other side of town as a distraction. Soon after, we could see a large explosion and fire where another Talon dropped napalm on an infantry base armory a few klicks to the South. Then we heard Gearbox (the ground command team) transmit, “We’ve lost Axle.” ‘Axle’ was Colonel Bull Simons’ call sign. One Apple, carrying half the assault force and Bull Simons, had landed the in the wrong place. They had drifted slightly off coming in from the IP, placing them a few hundred meters south of the camp. The FM and VHF radios were almost impossible to read, let alone get anything in of your own. (The UHF was kept for AF use to call the MIG Cap or Weasels if needed or to talk among ourselves.) The Apple that had dumped the guys did a 180 and went back to pick them up. Bull Simons and the rest of the assault force made it back to the camp without a casualty. The whole incident only lasted a few minutes. As soon as Simons got on the radio, he asked Blue Boy for a status report. The answer was “Negative Items, so far. Still searching.” (‘Item’ was the code word for a prisoner.) Simons then told us to take out the foot bridge to the Citadel. We called a group of building surrounded by a small moat ‘the Citadel.’ It was a few hundred meters southeast of the POW camp and had a small foot bridge on the side nearest the POW camp. Intel had told us it was a military cadet training facility and probably had a small armory. We didn’t want anyone coming across that bridge armed and get within rifle range of the camp. Jerry and I put two WP (white phosphorus) bombs on it and when my wingman came in, he saw the bridge was wiped out and dropped short to get anyone that might have already come across. WP does a real number on wooden structures. The fire storm was not small.
Read the second half of John Waresh’s story in Who Will Go.
My most memorable moment was reading about the mission the next day in the Stars & Stripes newspaper. That’s when I learned the objective of the mission that I had been supporting that night. Our F-105 had been shot down by a SAM from the Son Tay area during the Raid, flew as long as we could toward a safe area, ejected, and were rescued by Apple 4 and Apple 5.
Here’s the story of our shoot-down, ejection, and rescue.
Five F-105 Wild Weasel aircraft participated in the mission in an air defense suppression role intended to shield all other aircraft in the area from North Vietnamese surface to air missiles, which intelligence sources had indicated included five separate sites in the immediate target area. There was nothing different in this mission than the hundreds of missions the five Weasel aircrews had flown prior to 21 November other than the fact that we were not privy to the mission objective, and due to the 1968 cessation of bombing none of us had ever been to the Hanoi area. So, we were not accustomed to the heavy concentration of air defenses that we would encounter. Aside from that the Raid was a “perfectly normal” mission for all 10 Weasels.
On 19 November we were offered an opportunity to volunteer for a special mission so highly classified that none of us were permitted to discuss it even among ourselves. We were given no details except that we were not on the schedule to fly normal missions pending this one. About noon on 20 November our Squadron Commander informed us that we would be briefing at 1930 hours that evening in a location separate from our normal mission planning and briefing facility. The building was heavily guarded and when we entered the briefing room, we were all required to provide identification. When the briefing was set to begin the room was secured so no one could enter or leave.
Our Squadron Intelligence Officer handed us our SAR cards and told us to be sure we knew what they said, particularly the answers to questions we had provided when we arrived in theater; that we would “need them.” We also received completed mission planning packages complete with charts, routes and times for each leg and target area details. Only then did we learn that our mission was to support a ground operation near Hanoi, and that a lot of other American aircraft would be in the area with us. The briefing was extremely detailed and included the most recent intelligence information with regard to enemy air defenses. This was a very unusual amount of detail in that most missions we flew were preceded by pretty generalized information with respect to threats we might encounter. The briefing also included locations we could attempt to reach should we be forced to eject from our aircraft for any reason. Our instructions were to remain in the area until all friendly forces had safely left the area. That meant a very long time over target and the need to manage fuel consumption very carefully. As events played out there was a certain amount of irony in that requirement. We still did not know the objective.
We were given the callsigns Firebird 1 through Firebird 5, which I’m told was borrowed from the Navy.
Lt Colonel Bob Kronebusch and Major John Forrester were “Firebird 1” and were the two aircrew who planned the mission tactics and prepared our mission packages along with General Manor’s planning team and our squadron intelligence officer whose last name I can’t remember even though I remember her first name was Nina.
“Firebird 2” were Major Bob Reisenwitz and Major Ray MacAdoo, “Firebird 3” were Major Bill Starkey and Major Everett Fansler, “Firebird 4” were Major Murray Denton and Captain Russ Ober, and “Firebird 5” were Major Don Kilgus and me, Captain Ted Lowry.
From here this narrative will be predominately in first person because each of the ten of us would remember their own role independently and differently. Of the ten who flew to Son Tay, I’m aware of only two who remain.
From a personal standpoint, participation in the Raid was a watershed event in that it forever shaped my views and what I believe is worth worrying about.
As Firebird 5, Major Kilgus and I were the on-scene airborne spare whose task it was to “replace the first weasel who was shot down.” We took off from Korat Royal Thai AFB at ten minutes to 1:00 am and headed toward our first refueling stop in far Northeast Thailand. We were loaded with a full internal fuel load, 1500 gallons of fuel in our three external fuel tanks, and we carried two AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation missiles for self-defense. Aside from those two missiles we had to rely on our ability to evade any missiles that were fired at us.
Coming off the tanker, we could see off our right wing a huge array of navigation lights going in the same general direction we were flying. We realized that was the strike force and commented on how many aircraft were involved.
We left them behind as we followed our planned flight path to the target area. We had an uneventful ingress, just doing our normal prestrike preparations, with the difference then that we programmed the preplanned emergency North Vietnam ejection point into our doppler navigation computer. It was a mountain southwest of the objective area that was about 3500 feet high and would afford some degree of protection due to its rough terrain and that it was pretty much devoid of people. In case we did have to leave the aircraft, we wanted to be in the most isolated area possible.
Read the second half of Ted Lowry’s story in Who Will Go.
