Vietnam II: A War Novel Episode 3 (V2) (3 page)

Captain William Bell

F-15 Driver

Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa

After busting our ass to get there we found ourselves with nothing to do except wait.  Now we were hours away from the deadline and there was a typhoon between us and them.  It frustrated everyone.  We either wanted to kill something or go home.

When we arrived at Kadena we were put into a composite squadron, made up of planes and pilots from several different stateside units, under the banner of the 18th Fighter Wing.  I was personally paired with Major Peter West for this deployment.  He was a good instructor and I knew I could learn a lot from him, but I cannot say I was ecstatic to fly with him.

“Watching you taxi centerline is like watching a monkey fucking a football Catfish.”  He had said more than once.  “You’re always off altitude, you’re always out of formation and you make lousy corn.”

I was a prior enlisted maintainer, a ROTC Nazi, a fact that I had kept on the down low from the ring knocker academy graduates after the poor reception my past brought me in undergraduate pilot training.

“You ever heard of Kimpo Air Base Catfish?”  West asked one day after chow.  West insisted I eat every meal with him and work out with him every day.  He said it was to make us a better team, but honestly I think the man was lonely.

I shook my head in response to his question.

“You don’t know about Kimpo?”  He said.

That was what I just indicated, but he was making a show.  This felt like a loaded question.  I could not do anything except walk into the trap and shake my head again.

“You see this patch Catfish?”

He pointed at the 18th Wing patch that adorned his left shoulder.  It was a fighting chicken in a yellow background.

“Let me tell you a little about it.”  He took a swig of beer.  “This is the Fighting Cock.

You see the military is full of myths and legends.  Some are good and inspire troops to greatness.  Others serve as a warning to others.  The curse of the 18th Wing and the Fighting Cock is one of the later.” 

There are three distinct characteristics of the legend West explained.  First the Fighting Cock on the wing emblem, the "ZZ" tail code on 18th Wing aircraft; and the fact that the 18th Wing has never been stationed in the continental United States.

The story goes that the 18th Wing airmen behaved cowardly in the Korean War.  When the Red Chinese overran Kimpo Air Base the 18th Wing pilots fled in their aircraft rather than try to repel the brutal Communist attack against the operating base.  The remaining ground crews, left undefended without their aircraft, faced the wrath of the advancing enemy unequipped, as this was before the Air Force trained airmen in even the most basic small arms training.

When the base fell the enlisted men left behind were strung up with wire from hangar rafters.  When General MacArthur found out about the incident he was enraged.  In the face of such cowardice, the 18th Wing was punished in various ways.

First the 18th is forbidden from ever landing on American soil.  Second they were made to wear a patch displaying a surrendering chicken with a yellow background indicating cowardice.  Third, wing aircraft had to wear the ZZ tail code designating them as the lowest wing in the U.S. Air Force.

“We’re going to fix it.  One way or the other we are going to redeem the 18th.”  West told me.

Major West, for better or worse, was making it his personal mission to break the chicken patch curse.  I knew they was a danger in trying to prove anything to yourself or others.  Officers, in my experience, find their defeats in their personal crusades.  It looked like West had found his.  Unfortunately he was dragging me along with him.

Airman First Class Holly Kennedy

March AFB, California

POW Reception Area

Military Medical buildup began shortly after American troops began moving west across the Pacific.  Deployment orders went out to the hospital ships Comfort and Mercy.  By late September they were on station and ready in the Gulf of Tonkin.  Once the POWs were released they would be sent there first and depending on their medical and mental condition moved on to the March Air Force Base stateside facilities.

As one of more than 2,600 active-duty Air Force and Navy men and women who were deployed stateside to provide medical care to returning POWs in Jungle Storm I was integrated into a system that started on the ground at the point friendly forces found living POWs.  It required an additional 11,000 naval medical reservists that were recalled to active duty, most of which were used to fill large staffing gaps at joint military medical facilities whose staffs were cut to the bone to support Jungle Storm.

A step by step treatment process based on a simple ladder system had been devised for returning POWs once they had been found.  They would be immediately treated by corpsman in the field, the sick and injured personnel would be identified and then quickly moved up the medical treatment ladder as required.  It was assumed all the POWs would require medical treatment of some kind.  Then battalion aid stations would provide POW patients with a physician's skills and clinical judgement in a safer environment in order to accomplish a more complete examination. The next step up the ladder was a casualty receiving and treatment ship where POW patients would be treated by teams of physicians and nurses supported by a staff of medical technicians with more complete medical facilities including a basic laboratory, a pharmacy and greater surgical capabilities if needed.  At this step of the ladder the POWs would begin to receive psychological testing as well as support.  It was also assumed that they would be in bad shape mentally after so many years of captivity. 

The POWs would then be transported to a hospital ship.  The scope of treatment available at these facilities matched a fully-staffed stateside military hospital in the United States. 

From there, once stabilized, the POWs would be moved to March AFB.  This was considered the most important part of their treatment.  It was at March where the POWs would be treated in depth for the psychological wounds they had to endure.  They would be evaluated weekly until they were deemed fit to reenter society.

We were ready for casualties as well.  Both among the POWs and our own warfighters.

Fleet Hospital 6 and 7 were the first mobile medical facilities deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin.  They were built in just over two weeks by Navy Construction Battalion Units. 

The entire facility arrived in 400 containers to Thailand aboard the afloat prepositioning ships.  In two weeks, the Seabees with the assistance of Navy medical and support personnel, transformed the shipping containers into a 500-bed, forward-deployed medical facility, complete with operating rooms, intensive care units and radiological facilities.

They saw their first patient, a pregnant female Marine officer, five days after construction finished.

The purpose of the fleet hospitals were to service members of all coalition forces, expatriates and recovered POWs as well as enemy prisoners of war (EPWs) and refugees.

While the fleet hospitals worked ashore, Navy hospital ships operated in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin and the South Pacific.  Among the first ships there were the largest hospital ships in the world, the USNS
Comfort
(T-AH 20) and USNS
Mercy
(T-AH 19).  These ships were a 1,000 bed floating hospitals and each was equipped with 50 trauma stations for casualty receiving, 12 operating rooms, a 20-bed recovery room, 80 intensive care beds and 16 light- and intermediate-care wards.

We were prepared to receive POWs and tend casualties as the Operation Jungle Storm evolved.

Major Leonard Armstrong

KC-135 Aircraft Commander

Off the coast of Vietnam

“UNKNOWN AIRCRAFT…UNKNOWN AIRCRAFT…You have entered the People’s Republic of Vietnam airspace without authorization.  Turn to a heading of zero nine zero immediately.”  The Vietnamese air traffic controller said on the radio in better English than I spoke.

“HANOI this is FUELR 31.  We are maneuvering for weather.  Unable to comply.”  Fields, the copilot, told him on the UHF.

This was all a game.  We might as well have written up a script and sent it to the Vietnamese so that they had their lines.  They knew exactly what kind of aircraft we were.  Conversely we knew exactly where we were.

I kept the plane skirting the border of their ADIZ.  I could see water underneath us, but the coast was not far and we were miles into their airspace and not in a North Korean kind of way.  We were well inside what the international community considered their airspace.

“Turn to zero nine zero immediately!”  The controller said sounding flustered.  I wondered what kind of brass he had standing over his shoulder.

“Unable to comply.  There is a typhoon out here.”  Fields said.  He looked at me for strength. 

I nodded.  He was doing well.

The weather was bad however the worst of it was Far East.  We could turn now without issue.  Still we pressed on a northwest heading.

“AMERICAN AIRCRAFT…AMERICAN AIRCRAFT…DO YOU COPY?”  A different voice now hailed us.  I was guessing this was the boss man.  Probably the head controller and he no doubt had his own superiors either in the room or on the phone.  I had been to plenty of these foreign air traffic control centers to know it was just a bunch of guys smoking cigarettes and reading papers waiting for their hour or so on the scope.  I could bet tonight everyone was at their consoles busting their humps or at least looking that way.

“HANOI this is FUELR go ahead.”  Fields responded.

“TURN EAST NOW OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.”

The copilot reached for his switch on the yoke and I waived him off.

“HANOI..FUELR 31 turning east now.”   I told them as I turned the plane to a zero nine zero heading and pushed up the throttles.  We had pushed our luck about as far as I felt comfortable.  We would have to jink back to the north eventually to miss the worse of the typhoon, but we could deal with that when we were well clear of Vietnamese airspace.  Right now I wanted to get the hell out of there.

“Wow those guys can’t take a joke.  You’d think they didn’t know there was a storm going on.”

The copilot nodded.  He looked relieved that this part of the mission was over.

“Boom…Pilot”

“Pilot, Boom go ahead.”

“We have to retrograde.  Did those guys in back get what they needed?”

I peaked back at the ten electronic warfare guys in the back of the aircraft.  They had brought a dozen boxed with them containing gear I didn’t recognize that was unpacked and strung up in various configurations around my cargo compartment.

“They look happy.  Let me check.”  The boom was off for a moment.  “I’m getting a thumbs up.”

“Let’s go home.”

We were part of a three ship out of Kadena.  The other two went to do some air refueling with fighters and an E-3 Sentry out of Kadena.  The storm was clearing up enough to fly a few sorties.  We had gotten off course and drifted too close to the storm. 

That was the story we were going to tell if things went bad.  The PACOM AOC in Hickam was taking the chance that the PAV Air Force would not shoot down an unarmed tanker.  Of course they were also taking that chance with our lives.

“The EWO says that set off their early warning and we were locked on by at least two and maybe three of their strategic surface to air missile rings.”

“Great,” I said not really meaning it. 

This mission sucked. 

Unknown to us at that time it was going to get worse.

Fighting to get back to Kadena that night was as close to throwing up in an airplane as I ever got.  We had pounded down some sushi downtown before we left Okinawa and I was regretting the wasabi every time the airplane shook and changed altitude with the turbulence.  I had to take the autopilot off.  Old Bob could not compensate for the kind of weather we were in.

Fields had already vomited twice and was on oxygen when we wandered into a patch of severe turbulence.  The resulting wing rock was so violent that the two engines on the right wing went dead.  All of the gauges, oil pressure, fuel flow etc., just dropped to zero all of a sudden.  It appeared to be a two engine stall.  I got control of the aircraft and we started running the checklist.

Fields came back to life, pulled out the book and started working through it step by step while I stabilized the aircraft. 

Aviate

Navigate

Communicate

The first thing to do was keep the airplane in the air.  Nothing else you did mattered if you crashed into the ground.  When that was accomplished you made sure you were headed where you wanted.  The last thing you did was call for help.  There was little anyone on the ground could do for a stricken aircraft anyway except keep other aircraft out of our way.

When we got to the correct step in the emergency checklist I cleared the boom to the back.

He wandered into the cargo compartment with a flashlight to see if there was any damage to the engines.  There were windows back there designed for just that.

"We just lost #4!"  I heard him say after he plugged into the intercom system.

"I know that" I told him through the static.  I had been able to get three restarted.  Four would not respond.

"No!  Listen to my words.  We LOST the engine.  It’s not there anymore!"

The turbulence had been so violent that the wing-rock had flung number four engine off the right wing.

This was the worst storm I had ever seen and we had no business flying in it.

I just hoped it was worth it to the war planners.