Two Souls Indivisible (7 page)

At twenty-four, Halyburton was one of the youngest officers onboard, and while he was proud to be part of a complex, powerful enterprise, he had quibbles with life at sea. The odor of jet fuel seemed always to permeate his clothes and hair, the omnipresent steam created an acrid smell, and the food was lousy. As he told Marty on tape, "The kitchen ran out of eggs, so breakfast doesn't hold much appeal to me. Lunches have been pretty bad, and dinners have been edible but nothing tremendous." Alcohol was forbidden, but Halyburton, like most officers, kept a fifth of gin and a fifth of Scotch in his footlocker.

He found refuge, if not exactly quiet, in his relatively spacious stateroom, where he lived with a lieutenant. (Most junior officers were quartered in crowded, six-person bunkrooms, but for some reason he was given better accommodations.) He kept a diary ("Feel the urge & need to write again. Imagine a poet-artist-RIO"), worked on some of his poetry, and read Ayn Rand and
Wind from the Carolinas,
a historical adventure novel. He recited inspirational passages from a small black vinyl book that his mother had given him. The typewritten letters did not always strike the narrow page evenly, but the slants and smudges brought a human touch to lofty truths.

Tho all seems chaos now and
Night prevails
Upon earth's wreck-strewn
Shores and blighted plains
Yet always after winter's
Cruel gales
Comes April with her
Iridescent rains...

These things shall pass, the
Wounding things of time,
And comfort to sustain is
Found in prayer.
Mankind is blest by lives
Pure and sublime,
The far reflection of the
Love we bear.

The hardest part of the cruise was the long separation from home. His daughter, Dabney, was born four weeks before he left, and Porter had seen her for only five days. Onboard, he heard plenty of stories about troubled marriages. The military life, with constant uprooting, long absences, and mediocre pay, was brutal on families, and Halyburton did not want to see his undermined.

He and Marty had met in college and had been married for only a year and a half. The pair cut a striking figure on the dance floor: Porter, with long, powerful strides, twirling his petite bride; Marty, her short blond hair flipped over the top of her head, smiling and laughing. On their first anniversary, Porter gave her a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume; she gave him an apron with his name on it. He read her passages from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." She called him "Julius," because when he walked out of the shower, his hair flopped over his forehead like Julius Caesar's.

She wasn't keen about his joining the Navy and flying jet fighters; surely there were safer ways to make a living. But she knew she couldn't talk him out of it and never really tried. Her perspective changed when Porter was in flight training in Key West and the spouses were allowed to visit a carrier. For the first time, Marty heard the roar of the engines and saw how the planes were "shot out of the catapult like a cannon." She was surrounded by the exhaust, the flames, the smoke; the din was constant and the crewmen ran about everywhere. She felt the quaking of the deck when the jets landed, and she saw the arrest wires stopping these great machines on a dime. She realized the entire operation was connected, communal—it was the most exciting thing she'd ever seen in her life. When they got home, she told Porter, "Now I understand why you want to do this."

Halyburton considered himself fortunate in one respect. For most of his missions, he flew with Lieutenant Commander Stanley Olmstead, whose good looks, humble roots, and aeronautical savvy seemed lifted from a military recruitment catalogue. He was six-feet-one, with curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an easy smile. He was raised on a farm in Marshall, Oklahoma, and in the 1950s entered the Navy, where he excelled as a guided missile pilot and a test pilot and was also invited to join the Navy's elite Blue Angels. His dream, however, was to become an astronaut, which was not unrealistic, for many of the astronauts had been military test pilots. Vietnam would be his first time in combat, but he was eager to continue his education, enter the Apollo program, and fly to the moon.

Halyburton was initially wary of the thirty-one-year-old officer. Previously, Olmstead had piloted a single-seat F-8, but now he had to fly with Halyburton, a junior navigation officer—literally a backseat driver. Many lieutenant commanders would resent such an arrangement. A picture of the two men, wearing flight suits on the carrier's deck, reveals the contrast between them: Halyburton, his head tilted, his weight back, his arms pressed against his stomach, appears reticent, tentative; Olmstead, his chin out, his hands on his waist, exudes confidence and maturity.

Nevertheless, the pair worked well together. Olmstead sought advice from Halyburton, relied on his judgment, and made him feel like part of a team. Soon a friendship developed. For each flight, when one of them botched a radio transmission, he owed his partner a beer. They kept a running tally; Porter almost always owed Stan a drink or two.

The
Independence
was initially based off the coast of South Vietnam, and on July 1, 1965, Halyburton boarded the back seat of his F-4 Phantom for his first combat mission. Their task was to support the ground troops against the Communist insurgents, and Olmstead fired high-velocity Zuni rockets at the Viet Cong, destroying eleven huts. They had two more missions the following day. Within a week, the ship steamed north to launch flights over North Vietnam, and Halyburton flew almost daily for five and a half weeks. At first he found the bombing runs exciting. Many were at night, requiring them to use flares before launching the explosives. They attacked bridges, trucks, and boats, dropped napalm, fired sidewinder missiles, and took reconnaissance photographs. Halyburton liked the action, a pace he maintained on-board as the assistant weapons officer, which required him to be ondeck when ordnance was loaded. His unit packed more than a million pounds of bombs, missiles, and ammunition during his time at sea.

In August he had a two-week break in Japan. Marty, home with the baby, couldn't visit, and the respite only heightened Porter's homesickness. "I confess I broke down and cried a little bit the other night," he told her on tape. "I couldn't stand being in a beautiful place like this without you." He then returned to the flight line, and by the end of the month he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant j.g.; he would soon receive his first air medal. But by then doubts about the operation had set in. Mirroring Cherry's sentiments, he was frustrated by the petty targets, using million-dollar aircraft to drop bombs on the Viet Cong's water buffalo.

And the Vietnamese were crafty in their defenses. On a night raid, Halyburton would see the lights of a town in the distance, but the Vietnamese had early-warning radars and could hear the low-flying jet. As the F-4 approached, the town's lights shut off, the countryside went black, and the target disappeared. Trucks that carried supplies to the South were difficult to pinpoint as well. As Halyburton later discovered, the Vietnamese camouflaged the top of their vehicles with a green canopy. When a driver heard a jet, he drove to the side of the road, making the truck indistinguishable from the countryside. At night, the driver simply turned off his lights. Even when the Americans did hit a truck, they couldn't be certain whether it was military or civilian. Once Olmstead bombed a vehicle that Halyburton feared could have been an ambulance, but Olmstead believed he had no choice. They had been under antiaircraft fire, and he concluded that the civilian designation was meaningless when an entire country was shooting at you. "They're all Communists," he told Halyburton.

The bombing restraints were suppose to induce the enemy to the negotiating table, but in Halyburton's view the restrictions simply emboldened the Vietnamese, allowing them to move or safeguard vital assets, like oil tanks and factories. He was disappointed that they did not encounter any Soviet MiGs. Shooting down an enemy aircraft is every fighter crew's dream, and it also provides the greatest test for an RIO, who has to home in on a moving target. While Halyburton was still useful on bombing raids, with navigation, communication, and spotting landmarks, he felt less essential.

He was further distressed by the dishonesty of the flight reports. When the airmen returned from their missions, they were debriefed by an intelligence officer. One day Halyburton read a notice describing the different ways in which an aviator could describe an attack. But each outcome pertained to a successful hit, such as inflicting collateral damage, cratering a road, or destroying the target. Missing was not an option.

During one debriefing, Halyburton acknowledged that his bombs did not strike the target: "I think we missed."

"You're not supposed to say 'missed,'" the official responded. "Well, you can say whatever you want. I'm telling you we missed."

Counting hits, real or imagined, was part of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's statistical obsession, the belief that he could quantify his battlefield successes to justify the further escalation of force, even if the numbers were meaningless.

Nonetheless, Halyburton was proud of his flight performance—he would fly on seventy missions—and still believed that communism had to be stopped in Southeast Asia. But by the second week of October he was glad his tour would be over soon. He had one more stint on the line; then the
Independence
would be leaving on November 21, arriving home by Christmas. He could volunteer for another tour of combat, but he had already decided against it. He had done his duty, and the separation was becoming painful. He told Marty on a tape,

Most of the time I don't feel sorry for myself ... I feel like I'm doing something real worthwhile and not just for myself ... You get a good feeling about it. But being away from you is just about more than I can take. I look at your pictures and read your letters and wonder what you are doing, what you are wearing, who you are with. I guess I'm really homesick now.

Marty was getting equally nervous. She watched the news three times a day and saw a report that an A-6 Intruder from the
Independence
was shot down, its crew presumably captured. "Oh, I
just pray something can be done to bring an end to this fighting," she wrote to him.

Finally, on October 16, Halyburton received some good news. He was going on an "Alpha strike."

Alpha strikes carried high military importance—in this case, a bridge in the town of Thai Nguyen, a target that had previously been on the restricted list. The bridge, seventy-five miles north of Hanoi, was a major rail link between China and North Vietnam, for the railroad moved weapons that were ultimately brought into the war. The importance of the mission was made clear at the briefing, which was attended by Admiral Grant Sharp, head of the Pacific Command, whom Halyburton had never seen before. Halyburton's previous missions usually entailed four aircraft, but this one would involve thirty-five—a massive strike force. No one ever explained the change in strategy, and Halyburton didn't care. All along, he believed the Navy was dissipating its resources by trying to strike individual trucks or other incremental assets instead of attacking "hard targets" and inflicting real damage. Now was their chance.

On the morning of October 17, a Sunday, the strike force departed, with Halyburton's F-4 at the very end of the formation. The jets flew at three thousand feet above the water, refueled above the Gulf of Tonkin, and reached the coast forty miles north of Haiphong, avoiding its missile installations. Then they descended, dropping so low that, in the words of one pilot, "I could see individual grass spears." The low altitude enabled them to fly undetected by the radar at SAM installations, but it also put them in easy range of antiaircraft fire.

The size of the mission created another tradeoff. It added firepower but also integrated different types of jets—which specifically hurt Halyburton's fast F-4. That aircraft, by itself, would normally fly at about 550 knots, but because it flew this mission with the plodding A-4 Skyhawk, encumbered with heavy bombs, the F-4 had to travel at about 360 knots, which also decreased its ability to maneuver. Halyburton and Olmstead had bad luck as well with the position of their plane at the rear of the formation, increasing their exposure to enemy fire. The airmen were assigned not to hit the primary target, the bridge, but to destroy the surrounding antiaircraft sites used to shoot down planes.

The strike force, flying west for twenty minutes at treetop level, penetrated deep into North Vietnam—much farther than Halyburton had ever flown before. He knew how exposed they were and how they would have little means to resist or dodge enemy bullets or "flak," little gun bursts that would explode near a jet, spraying it with shrapnel. Fifty miles from the target and forty miles northeast of Hanoi, the jets flew over a hill and into a valley. They were suddenly about fifteen hundred feet aboveground, and Halyburton, looking straight ahead, saw karst ridges, the sheer limestone cliffs that were the marker for their next turn.

"Stan, we're coming up to our next point," Halyburton said while peering at his map. "We're within five miles of karst ridge."

"Roger."

Then Halyburton saw three puffs of black smoke as enemy gunmen, waiting near a railroad intersection, fired exploding projectiles at the American onslaught. The snipers may have had radar, hidden by the valley, that alerted them to the jets; the pilots later described the ammunition as the size of tennis balls. Then Halyburton felt a thump. The F-4 was still flying straight, but he knew they were hit. He tried to key his microphone, in his oxygen mask, to notify the other airmen, but when he pressed the button he realized that the mask had been blown off.

It was the first indication that he had seriously underestimated the impact of the shrapnel. He then leaned to the side and looked through a small tunnel into the cockpit. He saw Olmstead's head slumped over, his helmet off, papers blowing all over, and holes in the canopy. The cockpit had been hit from below, causing metal fragments to rip through the top. Halyburton realized that Stan was either dead or mortally wounded. He thought that if he had a control stick, he could turn the plane around and eject with some chance of being rescued. But there was no control instrument in the back seat of an F-4, and he knew the aircraft was doomed, though it continued to fly straight. Halyburton saw he was heading right for the karst ridge. In the seconds before impact, it occurred to him that he might be better off staying in the plane, that death might be better than ejecting into enemy hands. But he realized that wouldn't be right.