Legends of Carrier Aviation | The most unbelievable stories from some of the greatest ever aviators.

all right [Music] in his book the bridges of tokori novelist james michener writes movingly of the heroes who fought in the korean conflict in the book's final scene an admiral stands on the darkened bridge of his carrier waiting for pilots he knows will never return from their mission and as he waits he asks in the silent ship do the darkness and they must find this spec lost somewhere unsafe when they find it they have to land on the pitching deck not only cats [Music] in 1908 orville wright conducted demonstration flights for the u.s army at fort myer outside washington dc the u.s navy ordered lieutenant george c sweet to investigate these demonstrations and after his observation he quickly reported the airplane would prove invaluable in naval warfare by 1910 aviation pioneer glenn curtis had his own exhibition team his skilled pilot eugene eli proved to the u.s navy the aircraft could be functional on navy ships he validated that both the sky and sea could be synchronized into an impressive force and naval aviation was born in 1911 25 000 was appropriated by the u.s navy to purchase three airplanes and training for three naval officers lieutenant theodore ellison lieutenant j.g john towers and lieutenant john rogers they became the navy's first three naval aviators and set in motion a unique form of airmanship that continues to produce naval officers with extraordinary heroism and inspiring leadership the last reminder scott this is one of the few things where the first time you do it you've got to do it right naval aviation's triumphant achievement in assimilating the all-powerful synergy of both sea and air has produced legends who set the standard heroes such as medal of honor recipients david mccamble and james stockdale the first american in space alan b shepherd and the first man on the moon neil armstrong these heroes of the past have joined their shipmates in heaven but are firmly in place in the legends of carrier aviation and like them a whole new generation of legends live on meet the only navy ace to have scored combat victories in both the european and pacific theaters of world war ii at 100 dean dislaired was not only a legendary world war ii ace but served in the navy's first jet squadron in 1947 and achieved the record for most arrested landings on a straight deck carrier well i completed flight training in september 42 and sent to norfolk [Music] to report to my squadron vf41 the squadron was attached to the uss ranger cv4 ranger was the first carrier built from the keel up as a carrier all the rest of them that we had were conversions of some from some other type of ship we did a lot of training there in the norfolk area getting acquainted with wildcat and then got underway again heading heading east that day we met up with the queen mary which was heading west and we were told that they had churchill aboard he was headed for halifax for a meeting with president roosevelt who was flying in from washington so we flew cover for the queen mary and we finally hit land again we went into scapa flow in scotland which was the home port of the british home fleet where we became a part of the british home fleet operating under the control of animal sir bruce fraser who was a home plate commander and we went out and operated with units of the home fleet up and down the norwegian coast we went up pretty far because it would get very cold it was ice in the water and we were inside the arctic circle they didn't really keep us too well informed about what we were what was happening or what we could expect to run into finally we got into some action and we were launched and vectored out where the last we we relieved a unit ahead of us on station as the combat air patrol the weather was not that good many many clouds and heavy clouds in case some cases and we were vectored out after the bogey oh we couldn't find it it was so cloudy out from behind the one quite large crooked cloud clouds here and around and behind it came this airplane and he came around the front and i recognized it as not one of our friends so i tally owed so we headed for him in uh full speed and he saw us coming and and he turned and headed south i figured he was he was heading for friendly territory such as germany because i recognized it as a german junkers 88 which was a very good airplane finally caught up to him and i got to thinking instead of picking part of the engine or any other part of the airplane i would aim for that juncture of the wing and the fuselage you'd have these fuel tanks in the wings i'm up here i came down and i aimed for that for that spot with all six guns i opened up because i had to aim up here took a lead that i figured i needed and squeezed the trigger and i guessed right well i could see my tracer's hitting right exactly where i wanted him and i came and i got about in this position on him and and all of a sudden the airplane just exploded it was a huge ball of fire and there was i flew through a bunch of small parts of german airplane that were flying in the little directions i couldn't avoid them fortunately i didn't hit any of them and i recognized engine parts like uh i saw piston rods and things like that then i flew flew by and he'd just disappeared in that whole ball of fire the power and presence of naval aviation was proven to the world during world war ii five years later it would be affirmed again in korea carriers moved overnight to provide close air support to outnumbered forces when south korea was suddenly invaded by communist north meet another centenarian who is not only a legendary naval aviator but a prominent rear admiral renowned for his brilliant leadership okay well my name is actually donovan brown shelton i served for 40 years in the navy and i was proud to do it and i served in three wars the world war ii korea and vietnam and uh my favorite mission was in korea in 1951 march the 3rd i was on a night interdiction mission with a fellow named hot dog mayfield that was there was a night interdiction meeting flying f4u5 ends i was a night fighter pilot all my career and so i was taken off from the princeton which was about uh 65 70 miles off the coast in the sea japan with on from once on so we would take off in this case at three o'clock in the morning and fly west to once on circle once on frickin connections and so forth and then we would fly at eight thousand feet up the coast and make it hard for the trains and the trucks and so forth that were carrying goods south and we always had good luck there was always trains there always trucks are always cars on the road and on the railroad and headed south they had been doing that very recently and so uh this night interdiction was a new thing but anyway i got i got up to hung down okay came back to once on and um i started to make a circle in my engine quit so i uh didn't know quite what to do at first and i uh called the ship and said i think i'll try to call to get back to the ship will you connect me with the lso who was bill spell and bill spell and i had done a lot of night work together and i had tried the i had the idle button the start button and by punching it here i could get the engine to run at idle which was about a thousand rpm but i would i could get the engine running idle and i could get a good glide going so i did that and i headed to the ship i got to the ship at 3 200 feet using the foot thing on the on the idle button and i checked in started my pass and bill spill was there of course and i uh i i landed and made three wire believe it or not five o'clock in the morning at night on october 31st 2021 admiral don shelton peacefully began his last eternal watch and in heaven as he did on earth he once again soars the high untrespassed sanctity of space to touch the face of god meet 96 years young royce williams his legendary mission was finally declassified and is what hollywood blockbuster movies are made from his amazing story you're about to hear remained top secret for over 50 years and is why he's been nominated for the congressional medal of honor as a little child uh my brother and i had discussed amongst us we agreed we wanted to be naval aviators and we both were i don't know i did i came from the midwest or it wasn't the love of the sea but it became the love of the city i liked being a sailor one day in north korea about a hundred miles from vladivostok russia soviet union and it wasn't supposed to happen i flew an early mission against a target on the athle river which separates north korea and soviet union and there were a lot of airplanes involved because we had three carriers operating together as a result as expected i would think the soviets got very upset and they started flying a lot of airplanes and making a lot of chatter on their radios and so forth but they didn't fly at sea and they not participated in the korean war and we didn't consider them a threat well when i landed they said take a quick lunch and come back you got the next mission it was a combat air patrol i'm flying with three other guys that i know but i've never flown with before but we knew what we were to do the weather was messy in a blizzard with the ceiling the base of the clouds had about four to five hundred feet snow and the tops of those clouds at 12 000 feet so we got our briefing we took off and uh joined up under the clouds and then climbed as a formation to on top of the clouds at 12 000 feet while we were in the clouds we received information from our combat information center that there were inbound bogeys meaning unknown aircraft so popping on top i looked to the north and i could see seven contrails all in one formation at that point the flight leader uh had a problem with his airplane are possible but he was directed with his wingmen to come back and remain over the ship so i took the lead and i had a wingman and i uh charged my guns checked everything ready to fight and learned to go fired the tests around and as the airplanes came over us i identified him as mig-15s as they did that they returned the reverse and i thought probably going back to land they were probably at least 50 000 feet an area that my airplane couldn't reach and when i got to 26 000 feet i was still tracking them but they were very speedy and they were probably 70 miles ahead of me and at that point the formation split with four airplanes turning off to the right have three to the left and what it turned out to be they were going to bracket me i reported to combat information center cic that had lost contact with these airplanes and they said so have they as they became a smaller radar target anyway i was directed to reverse come back and establish a barricade between the last sighting of the airplanes and the task force well in that turn four of them came in at my 10 o'clock position 12 o'clock here and 10 o'clock over here and they were all firing and i turned hired into them as they swept by and i got within the range and got my sights on the number four guy i fired a short blast and he went down at that point my wingman left me to track this airplane and three others came in for the other side so i'm now alone with sexton it's a long story it took place for about 35 minutes whereas most aerial combat is from seconds to less than five minutes for sure well the remaining three that first attacked me uh pulled up abruptly to probably 2000 feet above me and i was still sort of tracking them at that point they turned around and i was going to try and shoot the guy that just lost his wigman but he was in the sun and i saw the other two included their original flight leader had turned around and were coming in and they were shooting already i thought a little out of range but i changed and aimed at the lead guy and when i thought i was in range i fired again a short burst and he stopped shooting and he turned left no longer attacking me but his wingman was so i switched on him and we exchanged fire and he would find just a short burst when he quit firing and he just kept coming slid underneath me while i continue to shoot him it's my assumption that he was dead there was no maneuvering or anything well they were knocked down to five and instead of being in a formation they're operating singly taking the turn and i was flying at a level altitude 26 000 feet full power it was a matter of evasion of uh one airplane at a time and watching him at my tail maneuvering to uh ruin his uh hope to to shoot me down and as he would go by they would normally climb again at a fantastic rate of climb and my attention since he was not able to follow that act was to see who's next and go through the same thing time after time well one of them made came by a rather flat instead of climbing and i was able to turn on him and shoot at a very close range and parts of this airplane were coming off and everything and i had to maneuver violently and keep from running into it well more of the same getting dull they're hit they're just repeating the same things the same type of attack go whirl away above you so another one was for me a possible i thought and i i tracked him and i fired as he was starting to go out of range but he started smoking and slowing down and i ran out of ammunition and uh lo and behold i saw another mig right coming in on me i made a hard turn to get away from it but he hit me with a 37 millimeter cannon right in the button wing and fuselage and the damage was was it when it exploded in the accessory section of the engine shooting away the cable for control of the rudder and knocking out all the hydraulics it exploded in the accessory section so i was uh damaged goods in the airplane was harder to fly being out of ammunition i probably almost ought a few i didn't bother checking the fuel they had nothing i was going to do about it so i would go for the clouds that were covering the task force and my elevator was working perfectly and so i wrote two hands on the stick abruptly pull up and once i got to the level i wanted and the guy was starting to get his gun side on me again then i would push over and dive and i made a series of these things until i got into the clouds well once in there i lost sight of the guy behind me it was in perfect range probably 400 feet and i started counting my blessings and see what i had to worry about uh whether i was going to have to jump which would have been fatal because the winter conditions uh survival although i had a survival suit on i've probably last less than 20 minutes so i just i knew the ottomans of the clock so i just descended carefully and until i was in the clear and i was talking to cic that i'm inbound and damaged and they said they're getting the flight deck ready because they were about to launch another attack on the targets ashore so it took maybe 10 minutes or so which gave me time to find out my problems and part of it was that i had very little directional control and that below speeds of 170 knots i would uh lose control of the airplane and start stalling fragments from the warhead of the 37 millimeter cannon there were 263. so i passed that information to the ship and when i got the signal charlie that cleared the land i was in a position behind the ship and pointed at it but not without being at quite an angle uh to my landing uh platform the flight deck so i notified them again i'm coming in hot and the lso says to the commanding officer of the ship he's coming in hot can you kick it up a bit while there was a lot of wind from the big storm we were around and besides that the ship can add another 30 knots and he says bring him in any speed he wants and the next thing i'm saying i can't i can't line up and the lso said well i'll cut you for an early wire but the the width of the ship was not landing space and i knew it would be going over the side but the captain being a knowledgeable naval aviator turned the ship and lined it up with me and i made a good landing [Music] because of the unique flexibility of the carrier and its ability to deliver lethal force to 85 of the earth's land area from the air there's not a target that can't be rapidly eliminated when called upon in the 1960s naval aviation would take the lead i loved the challenge of carrier aviation this one mission uh the gonna be six a-fours going uh against this surface-to-air missile site there there was one other f8 and i we were both black suppressors we got there the the groups of three split off the ones from north to south dropped their bombs they had good accurate hits guys from south to north end dropping their bombs and the place lit up anti-aircraft fire really heavy i called my lead cactus jack and i said cactus there's an 85 there i'm gonna take it he said okay so i went up and i started my run down i got the nose down got a really good aim point going had the speed i wanted and uh all of a sudden i just felt this kind of a bump after the bum bump uh the whole airframe was shaking so i knew i'd been hit oh i i went ahead and fired what i had left at the 85. then i pulled up and headed back toward the east and that's the direction of the coast and and i said i said to cactus i said i've been hit back here he said how serious is i said i have no idea but i think it's serious so he said i'll come take a look so he did a big u-turn came around he said you're on fire you better get out of that damn thing i said well i you know it's running okay right now i want to get as far away as i can i didn't want to go down right there because they'd be they'd be a little hostile so i got up to 11 000 feet i got up to 450 knots it's almost 500 miles an hour finally he he really got excited and he said it's going to blow go now go don't wait yeah it's really it scared me enough i just went ahead i just let go and just pulled and ejected that all the other airplanes knew where i was god bless them this is what i love gonna tear up they fly by and give me the finger and rock their wings and so then i started trying to give them the finger got their raft here and i'm trying to give them back that was like a shot like a like a shot of energy just knowing that they cared they knew where i was i'm sorry so i felt safe i really really felt safe i survived the ejection i i was in one piece basically not very well held together at this moment but still i was all in one piece but only about a half mile ahead of me maybe even a quarter of a mile where all of these junks these fishing boats guy standing with an ak-47 he fired three bursts off to my right side and uh they had a net thrown over the side of the thing there's just one other guy that i saw there and uh they're yelling and pointing at the net you know so i pushed my raft over there as best i could i didn't disconnect from it i left it attached to my body and i tried to climb up on this net and i had trouble doing it i couldn't use my left arm i felt heavy as hell i kept getting my foot tangled in the in the net i was trying to climb on board and he was getting more and more anxious i think and impatient and i got my upper body over the ramp uh the railing and he swung and hit me with a rifle but broke my nose and knocked a tooth in right here anyway so i i rolled onto the deck then was able to stand up and i just lifted my arm over my head to surrender the other guy on the boat then came and walked up and took the 38 from my i had a 38 revolver around my my waist in a holster the one that the navy issued us and he went back over sort of toward the center of the boat and crouched down and now i'm facing this young man with the ak-47 he didn't quite he wasn't practiced at what he was trying to do there i could tell he was thinking about that and i could see this a1 coming he was really he was so low he was almost hitting the wave tops with his prop so i just moved my foot back to brace myself and all of a sudden here he is that a1 comes over it was loud uh you could you could smell the exhaust and and feel the prop wash and the guy with the ak-47 was completely surprised when that happened he turned curled up into a ball and fell down onto the deck and clammed up just like he'd rolled into a into a ball well my wife had bought me a 22 caliber ruger automatic weapon that i carried in the diagonal zipper pocket of my flight suit i thought this is my last chance so my left hand was practically inoperative because of my left shoulder pain but i thought maybe i could the pistol you have to pull it pull the the receiver back to it then it every time you pull the trigger it'll fire but it had to be cocked and i was concerned with my left hand that i wouldn't be able to grip it tightly enough so i decided i we had leg restraint straps around above and below our knees as part of our ejection seat paraphernalia and those those remained with us they would bang together when we walked we call them fighter pilot spurs because you could hear the things so i thought if i put that pistol against it with the receiver against that it's a triple thick canvas webbing that goes around the knee that strap i could push down with my hand i didn't have to grip it i said push down and get enough leverage to get the thing cocked pulled it out he still wasn't looking i put it down and i got it cocked on the first try i guess my motion caught his attention because he looked up at me holding a pistol in my hand and he had just seen the guy take a pistol from me he turned and looked at his buddy like where did that come from he he knew he had taken a pistol from me and here i'm standing holding on and then i guess he decided it didn't matter how i got it but the fact that i did have he started to turn the ak-47 toward me and i shot him i was at very close range i am no more than six eight feet away not even that much maybe six feet so i couldn't miss i hit him just above his right eye this is hard his head rocked back i hit him just below his right eye then his head rocked back forward again i shot him one more time right in the top of the head and he made a sound i will never forget kind of a combination of a moan and a belch and he fell forward and hit his face face first onto the deck and something slid across and hit me in the uh [Music] toe of my right boot and i looked and it was a piece of his jawbone with two teeth attached this was a young man about my age i was 25 and i was thinking under other circumstances he and i could have very easily have been sitting by a table at a sidewalk looking at pretty girls walking by and drinking beer he didn't want to be there i'm sure any more than i did and i actually said i'm sorry and i meant it so the other guy who had taken the 38 revolver saw me shoot his buddy he raised the 38 and pointed it at me and pulled the trigger and this is one of the miracles of my life about six weeks before this a guy in our sister's squadron was showing everybody how quickly he could draw a pistol and he accidentally fired off a round in the ready room it became policy to only carry four rounds in that revolver so that the one under the hammer in case you drop it on the hammer it won't fire and then the first the first chamber past that if you pull the trigger it will fall on an empty chamber and it won't fire then you have four shots left and that's the condition my my pistol was in when he when he had it so when i shot his friend he raises the pistol pulled the trigger it didn't fire so he dropped it and jumped in the water so now i am in command of my own fishing boat as such i still had the yellow lanyard attached to my harness uh bouncing against the side of this boat was my raft and pretty soon i saw a helicopter coming from the east and um so as he was approaching he said clear your raft swim clear of your raft so i finally let go of my raft i hun unhooked it from my harness and they came into a hover and here's this horse collar so i just put my right arm through and i tried to lock it down and and the guy saw that i was having trouble so he just lifted me up i was hanging on with this thing under my my right elbow i was not going to let go if i died i wasn't going to let go he got me up then into the into the helicopter took me back to the ship what a heartwarming thing they put me down uh the guy helped me get out of the thing and a young seaman came over to lead me away and he came over to yells and i said welcome home sir he says i went to the a4 replacement air group to learn how to fly the a4 and then went to the fleet in va 164 the ghost riders and air wing 16 aboard uss oriskany and earwing 16 was came to be known as bloody 16 because we had the highest lost rate of any carrier since world war ii it just was a matter of timing and targets that we took the brunt of it because we got there in the summer of 67 and the first week we lost i think it was five airplanes and three pilots um and it was because we were doing three alpha strikes a day the to the big targets in hanoi and haifang and it was day after day and losing a lot of people so that was our introduction to to combat i mean we got thrown right right to the dragon through that i only got hit three times on that first cruise and they were smaller holes and didn't really affect the airplanes flying but on the second cruise johnson had instigated the bombing halt above the 20th parallel and those of us that had gone through the combat of the first cruise line boy this is a piece of cake now so we're not going to haiflong in hanoi there were still some bad places there so this one flight we had a new guy a replacement pilot on board he was senior to be a lieutenant commander so i let him lead but i said i'm going to be telling you basically where to go what to avoid and all that and i said we're going into this little bridge to try to knock it down and i said but don't go over tam daw on the way into this place it was on a direct route to the target i said don't go there because we think it's a gunnery school because every time you go near that place they'll shoot at you and they're good so we go in and what does he do but goes right by tam da and i'm just about to key the mic to say you know we got to go north a little bit and boom right on our altitude but they were off a little bit on the azimuth big black puffs of 85 millimeter and so i called the brake which is you know an evasive maneuver and we get back on track to the target we go over the ridge and drop the bridge and we come back the same damn way i was thinking well i had a wingman on my wing i was leading the second section i thought well should we just sit back and watch the show and let him go over tam. or should i tell him again and about that time the two sections were separated but you always had a combat spread so that one missile one piece of flag wouldn't kill two airplanes you know one two birds with one stone thing anyway we're separated and right on altitude right in between the two sections five bursts of 85 millimeter the big black bursts you know and so i called break right for their section and then i called break left for me and my wingmen [Music] and just as i got my airplane up about 100 degrees of bank maybe boom this 85 millimeter shell hits my drop tank and goes on through which means the proximity fuse didn't work the contact fuse didn't work and there the fuel air mixture of what was left in my drop tank was not right for an explosion and the thing went up oh and the other thing was if i was in any other degree of bank it would have hit the airplane it would have gone up through the drop tank and hit the airplane i wouldn't be sitting here anyway so it goes up and it blows up above the airplane and i was already on my back there was like 74 holes in the bottom of the airplane didn't hit anything vital no fuel tanks or anything like that and uh i didn't actually know if i was hit or not because i just felt this when it hit the drop tech i went up sideways and it was like somebody just lifted the airplane up and then this thing blows up above me and i thought so i said you know the the big thing in naval aviation is it's better to die than embarrass yourself so i said i think i'm hit and uh headed for the coast and normal procedure is for your wingmen to come and check check you over you check each other over for battle damage so my wingman mike comes up alongside i said would you check me over close something happened there and he just comes up there and the next thing i heard was holy cow that was an expression we used a lot holy cow it was something like that so there was when i got back that the hole was like that big through the drop tank and it was just that was pure luck on so many levels of luck you know or else i wouldn't be here the most memorable carry mission was on july 23rd 1967 when as a iron hand lead in a strike group on the zata pol storage area on highway 15 between hanoi and the chinese border i'm the lead panzer i have a crusader wingman we have four crusaders in the flight is tar cap and enroute to the target we are bounced by eight count em eight north korean big seventeens we did not find out that those mig-17s were north koreans until 20 years later because u.s intel plays i've got a secret anyhow the fight ensued one of the crusader suits down one i'm up and out of it when i'm alerted to this and say there's eight of them back there and i put the throttle to it got them over the fight one of the fighters shoots one down another fighter shoots at one and his missile goes for the tailpipe of echo seder and lops office starboard uhd so there's uh one wounded crusader there's two migs down at this time the third mig is shot down by my wingman timmy hubbard who was battling at 17. put every bullet he had in and around him um shot him with a sidewinder that didn't get him put every zuni he had at him and that airplane started to fly apart and they tim pulled up beside him and uh gave him the finger and when he did the canopy came off the kid jumped out and the airplane exploited and tim says i'm ammo minus i'm uh bingo and the bombers haven't got to the target the bombers bomb to the target we've got three guys and shoots two wounded crusaders on the way out the lead crusader page boy one is being attacked by two migs and he says i've got two behind me i'm on fire i look around and find him and i said red who's the flight leader turned right i didn't want him to go to china it'd have been an ugly sar i swoop across the circle load up one zuni and put the zuni right between the two migs that were shooting and red right in front of him and it scared the migs off they went home we all went home and we went back and we briefed on the ship april 24th of 67 i was on a bar cap a barrier combat air patrol uh which is just boring holes in the in the sky and got a recall so we came back to the ship and said you're late for the brief we're going to kepp it was a typical way the war was run from washington johnson mcnamara ran a crappy war let me tell you you know they dictated the targets from washington and here we're going on the keppe airfield the first time we're ever striking the mig air base and we get short notice to do it so i'm in in the brief you know and the skipper hand-picked who we wanted on on the strike and so there was we were six planes of tar cap which means you're you're target you're capping right near the target for the bombers so i get up to my airplane and i said i got one sidewinder and uh chief says i'm sorry we were in a rush on a turnaround that's all we could get had time to get you and not you got a bad wingstash you got so he got one sidewinder there's no gun on the f4 so off we go we had a alpha strike which is about 24 airplanes of bombers and and strike airplanes and tar cap airplanes and so we coasted in by cam fah and the 85 millimeters he came start going off you can tell 85 from 37 by the color of the smoke for one thing 37 millimeter is kind of a grayish and and and it's much more repetitive and the 85 millimeters you know a little higher in their black puffs of smoke so we could go through that for a while and we turned then towards cap which is 37 miles northeast of hanoi we started circling the skipper decided we're going to tar cap over this railroad line which is the main supply line from china to hanoi and i think it had about a gun an inch on the thing i mean it was just stuff coming up like crazy like goofballs um which i couldn't believe we didn't get hit by these things and so charlie plum actually did take a hit uh he lost an engine um so the skipper says uh charlie can you get about by yourself so he's okay skipper so he takes off back towards cam fah and he's down low he's ends up he says i got nigs on my tail so john holm who was my section leader and department head in the squadron and i take off to go help charlie and we get most of the way towards charlie and he says i eluded them they run they run out of things that shoot at me i'm okay i'm gonna be feet wet so we turned we turned back towards the target then but before we before we left i said an a6 um piloted by irv williams came off the target on fire and i saw them eject so when we came back came back in i'm hearing uh this guy on the radio saying there's migs coming up the valley and i found out later it was irv on the ground with his emergency radio telling us that come to the valley before he got captured so suddenly there's migs everywhere their migs were chasing the a4s coming off the target and we start scrambling with them and i i to this day i don't know how many there were there they were a lot i you know six maybe maybe more and they were they were in a in a luffberry circle and what their tactic i soon quickly figured out was there are so many of them and they're full they're make 17 can really really turn if it's phone right and they're flying in a circle and so i start i use the vertical so the fight was from basically the ground to about 5 000 feet with these migs down in a circle so i'm just going up down and every time i went vertical uh gary anderson was in my back seat and i said gary loose you know as we get in loosen your straps and so you can turn around and see and i'd rotate the airplane back and forth and check r6 and make sure nobody was on it as we went vertical and then you know i just i was time it was like a chess game i was trying to time my turn to come back in where i had an opportunity to to use that one sidewinder ahead and so as i was coming back in i had a guy back here who i would had been trying to play and hoping he would get up like this and look up ahead and and there's an f4 with a mig right on his tail and and i wasn't sure whether it was ev southwick or or john holm um so i yelled i said i said linfield which is our call sign breakport and so as as he broke the other mig back back here must have called called what was going on to the to the mig on ev's tail because mig ev was busy shooting a mig down and the old adage goes back to rickenbacker in world war one if you focus for 15 seconds on the guy who's shooting somebody's going to get you you never saw before and that's exactly what was happening so the guy calls the mig to turn and so he he does a like they make just when he's going really fast is a really slow it was like slow speed sidewinder tone hosed off my one signer when i had a sweet tone at about a half a mile and it and his slow turn causes right up the tailpipe ba-boom most of the tail comes off and smoking and i see him going back down down towards the ground ev now has shot his mig down and he's i can't transfer my wing fuel so he's got we i don't know why he didn't have a transfer to start with pizza hut i mean maybe couldn't transfer it period i don't know but it's four thousand pounds of gas in the wings that he couldn't use so he's he's got to go out now at max concern which is 250 knots so here we are with north vietnam at 250 knots and i'm doing a a weave behind him protecting him and i look back and there's another mig circling over the one i i just shot down and to this day i'm just regret not going back and hosing off a sparrow at that guy the most memorable probably was the day i was shot down but there's a better story about two weeks before i was shot down we were on a target uh it was kept airfield it's the first time we got you've heard of kepp because a lot of guys have been unkept and it was the first time that we could go in and actually bomb the enemy's runways and these migs would come up and and it was their territory you know we were we were 100 miles out at sea and we had to fly into their territory and they would launch these migs off these these runways and they come up and and harass us and so we're getting into about we're probably 30 miles from cap all right and i take a anti-aircraft shell in my starboard engine 57 millimeter shell blows a hole about that big uh in the in engine and not only did it uh that set the engine on fire but it took out um one of them one of the missiles actually it it it torched off one of the my sparrow missiles so i got a i got a missile hanging on the airplane which is burning and then uh in addition to that it punched a hole in one of my fuel tanks so i'm on skipper's wing and he looks over there and he sees what's going on and he said going back to the ship you know you you can't uh you can't help us here so i got this airplane i got one engine on fire i got a i i got uh holes obviously big holes in the airplane uh i'm using fuel on this one tank and i point the the nose of the airplane back towards the beach cap is i don't know 100 miles maybe from the beach and so i'm looking because i know that if i can get over the water even if i have to punch out of this jet uh my co-pilot and i are going to be okay and so i'm i'm looking for the water you know i'm sitting there going as fast as i can with this engine and the fire went out on my starboard engine so i'm okay there but i still only have one engine and so i finally see i said don don monk was my radar interceptor after don tom i said uh we um i i i i can see the beach we're gonna be okay he said charlie charlie you got three migs at one o'clock high i got three mig 17's they're coming in on me okay i didn't think that was fair you know i mean oh i want to get back to the ship and here they go and they come down and and of course i am a wounded duck to start with only one engine uh and i got a hole in the airplane and i'm leaking fuel so here they come and i start to hassle with these guys now i don't know how low i really was but i i have this memory that i was looking up at the insulators on telephone poles i was that low and so i'm hassling with these guys okay now from an f4 the f4 was designed as a high altitude supersonic interceptor we were a mach 2 airplane we were we were supposed to go faster than anything in the air okay so they didn't think that a pilot ever needed to see behind him uh because nothing was ever going to be back there and so my visibility the visibility for an f4 phantom is from about probably four o'clock to about eight o'clock you can't see anything behind you you got an ejection seat you got your back seater and you got all the sharepoint so i can't see these guys i got them cornered on my six o'clock position but i can't see them don monk my radar intercept officer he can't see back either he had unstrapped totally six players strapped in in that seat six places he had unstrapped and got back he's kneeled down on his ejection seat looking out the back of the airplane okay so he's reaching over to his um uh to his microphone he's telling me he's calling the migs and he said okay charlie you got one coming uh okay he's uh it's uh four o'clock five o'clock oh he's six o'clock misses away the mig shot his heat seeking missile uh at me and and i knew it well i'm thinking the heat seeker my starboard engine is dead i've got my port engine in full afterburner okay that that missile is on my my afterburner i said i'm i just shut off the engine i shut off my port engine [Laughter] now this uh f4 phantom uh can go 1400 miles an hour but when you got no power on it it comes down like a greased anvil i mean i mean when we started to fall but uh by this time i had turned around and i could see that that missile and the thing just went ballistic it just tumbled out of the sky what a great relief that was i um i hit the igniter started my good engine again pulled up the other side of the turn those three migs shot two of their atolls apiece i dodged six missiles that day because my radar intercept officer don monk was kneeling in his seat looking back and calling these migs so anyway i'm getting low on fuel coming back to the ship all right uh the uh the challenge is still not over right i only got uh one engine and i'm i'm i'm running out of gas fast again my backseater saved my tail again he called the ship and said send a tanker out to us we're not going to make it back to the ship we got a tank we were over an undercast we were 25 000 feet or so and we were an undercast we couldn't see the ship or a tank or anybody else my back seater vectored this tanker in and vectored me around turned me to port turned a tanker to starboard i put out the probe to plug in and i had 300 pounds of jet fuel the emergency light comes on at 2100 pounds and the a3 tanker pops out of the cloud he's got the basket there for me to plug into perfectly i mean it couldn't have been more perfect i plug in to the drogue and start taking on gas okay so i got enough to get back to the ship i'm still not calm yet uh my my uh my flaps weren't working and so i got to make a no-flap single engine pass is going to be faster than normal so sure enough you know i mean i by that time i had 100 carrier landings i i think i can do this so i bring around and come down perfect landing on the ship and man am i glad to be aboard the ship [Music] in 1968 i had made two combat cruises of vietnam and a fairly outspoken guy as you might imagine and uh came back from a very tough cruise on enterprise i think the number we lost 11 guys in 17 days the air wing did on enterprise and a lot of guys were getting out of the navy and joining the airlines they were paying about twice as much but i consider how i came about the navy my navy career i stayed in and i was headed tactics at miramar san diego [Music] in fighter squadron 121 which was a mother rag the training place for all all phantom drivers in the navy so one day i got a call a skipper wanted to see me and brought me in and he said we just got this unsolicited report from cnn about uh it's called the alt report written by frank alt who was the ceo of the carrier coral c at the time and of course we're about five years into the war by that time so it's getting old especially being run by mcnamara and lbj you know tell me how much i knew the young guys always end up fighting the war anyhow for for the older guys so skipper called me in he says redisportion they all report said almost quote verbatim uh at nas miramar start two graduate schools one for the f8 aircraft and one for the f4 aircraft two graduate schools get well programs if you will to change things out here during the war in the carrier navy so i thought holy mackerel what a job and he said will you do it and i said how much time he said they've asked for it 60 days now you got to remember this is a graduate school they've been training guys for five years in the phantom but it's got to be a level of changes to change the war out there so i had about 15 16 guys all really talented airplane drivers great combat experience with me so i looked at i looked at what i thought needed to be done very rapidly only had two months and i thought man you can't go to the bureau of personnel and ask for people it'll take months to get them so i used i used 9 of us from tactics phase all combat guys hand-picked them in all a man and unique he had they had some unique ability in addition to their flying number one thing you got to be able to to teach it at the level that the navy wanted now joe is a famous mel holmes best aerodynamics guy i ever met and a great phantom pilot i've known him most of my flying life and jerry sawatki big polish kid it's an animal in an airplane and people were afraid of him it smashed nash he got his call signed for a good reason smash he was unbeatable he said i'd rather die than lose and these guys all brought jimmy rolison a brilliant man on radar and weapon systems he knew it all and what he didn't know he knew the questions to ask so jc smith the best ro backseater i could find i'd flown with him a lot jimmy lang been shot down twice in the back seat of phantoms in his two cruises and lived and these guys are good daryl gary who went on to be my lifelong friend he was a jg in those days and had three tours three additional tours at top gun when they got up and was running you know the award been going on we didn't have any place we didn't have any building we didn't have a training room we didn't have any place for our flight gear or anything so steve smith he was a backseater but he was really should have been a felon he can get anything done on any given day and he was my admin guy and he flew with all of us but uh i told him i said on friday afternoon i said stevo we gotta find a place i said i know where there's some old buildings quonset hut like buildings i said i want you to go down talk to him get us one and uh that's where we started top gun and we just by hook or crook we got it done the greatest friendships you ever had best fraternity guys i've ever had in 60 days we looked at everything saw the obviously the kill ratio up until that point in in vietnam was 2-1 we shot down two of them for every one of us that they got we started bringing the classes in our our students were from fleet squadrons we sent out to the ceos and said send us the very best front cedar backseater that you can find morning today we're going to run our alpha strike and this is a culmination of your training here at top gun your task today fighters is going to be to get a strike group on and off of a target and they did and we had some remarkable students and we used to fly the a4s against the students what we did was from the day top gun began to the end of the vietnam war we moved the kill ratio from two to one to 24 to one we got 24 of them for every one of us now how you get there smart guys none of them got out of the navy until later the fleet accepted the new top gun tactics the only thing we did was fly in the vertical with your phantom had so much power it was a winner up there anybody that's ever ever flown off carriers and really knowledgeable naval aviator you know the flexibility uh the speed the sound the the ways of doing deceptive things i you know show me something better there is nothing that i know and i would be willing to go back in combat tomorrow i went to vf 92 the silver kings as a replacement pilot to the america on on yankee station and i actually flew in in the morning on a cod went into the ready room met the skipper and he said how are you feeling i said great he said that's good we're a little short on pilots that's why you're here if you're up for it we'll brief in an hour and uh will be vigilante escort into north vietnam i thought that sounded pretty exciting and interesting i was introduced to my rio and so an hour after that we were banging into the air so we came back and we landed nice trap and bombardier navigator for the vigilante was talking and he said as we approached the target area we encountered a severe aaa that was virtually obstructing the target area and i'm going oh my goodness that's what that was and then he said and then they fired two sams at kite ii fortunately they went off under his airplane and didn't damage him and i looked at my rio and i said did we have warnings for a sam launch and he said yeah sure the full set of warnings and they launched on us just like the textbook and i never saw a thing i didn't see the sams i didn't hear the warnings it was a very scary thing and i probably should have been dead so then 196 missions later and now we're on the uh uss constellation uh in may of uh 1972 and on this mission they've just introduced linebacker we've been mining the the harbors this air the constellations flying three alpha strikes a day i'm on the first strike and the third strike and on the first strike i'm going to be mid cap for the strike group going into a petroleum storage area south of haifang my flight lead austin hawkins accelerates through the flight group and we go and position ourselves between the strike force and the intended threat environment and as it turned out we were 15 miles away from the target we can see people rolling in on the target there were some hundred millimeter uh air bursts bursting big black clouds out out around us and so we had to move uh a little farther in a little farther north um about that time the uh red crown broadcast on guard uh bandits bandits blue bandits uh zero four zero at forty we knew that meant that there were migs mig-21s coming out of kepp air base which was about 40 miles north of us at the time and so we motored north and went into kepp air base at about 4 000 feet i was on the left side i'm looking at the runway as it's coming down [Music] i see two mig-21s holding short i see mig-17s and mig-19s and revetments beside the runway and about that time my rio calls out mig-21s on the roll and i look back on the runway and there's two mig-21s and a section takeoff with our fighter tactics i was in the best position to execute the attack so i called kite two's got the lead burner now in place port and the two our two airplanes flipped down and went into a steep dive heading for the end of the runway as we went down we uh leveled off it at about 50 feet going down the runway then sure enough there's two big 21s right in front of me at which point they both broke and uh went into a hard poor turn uh very low under 50 feet i'm lifting my wings to go over the tops of taller trees as we try and saddle into a half mile behind them and and get into a good sidewinder shot came round one i'm dodging a tree and and picking out and i squeeze a sidewinder off takes about six minutes actually took four seconds but it seems like an eternity for that sidewider to come off the rail and the sidewinder made a hard turn towards the inside of the circle and i thought that it had gone stupid or lost a fin or something and so i was just pulling in to shoot another one when the sidewinder came back into the fight and the two migs are there and the sidewinder came down and went right behind the the second mig and went off and sprayed a bunch of dust on the hill right behind him but it didn't bring the sidewalk didn't bring the mig down so we came around again i i pulled on again and shot a second sidewinder it did the same thing went inside got to a lead pursuit came back and right at the last minute it turned left and went up right up the tailpipe of the wingman there's a big orange fireball and two pieces of mig came out and slammed into the ground so there was no ejection opportunity so now i had given the the uh flight lead to hawkins but i thought i'd help him out a little bit if he wasn't he had i had seen a couple sidewinders go by but nothing so i pulled on and fired another sidewinder or what i thought was a sidewinder and it went out and did the same thing and it just the the sidewinders we were shooting at that time just didn't have the ability to uh make that last turn on a on a 7g uh target um but i did come in and fire one more and that one went by and and uh again knocked some trees down as as we're going so i needed to straighten out the flight lead so i'm gonna just lob a sparrow in front in front of this mig and that'll make him turn and we'll be able to shoot him with a sidewinder so i pulled up into him and did a barrel roll attack and came across the top intending to come in here and shoot the sparrow but as i got upside down i'm i'm upside down at about 150 feet and i look over to my right side and here's two mig-21s coming in on us in an attack position the two migs went right over the top of us and we were doing about 1.2 which we knew that the mig-21s that vietnam was flying couldn't fly fast couldn't fly supersonic below 10 000 feet so we were feeling pretty comfortable and pretty safe until jim mcdivitt called there's a mig-21 coming up behind the flight lead and so i called kites in place turn we both turned up towards each other where we can get into a protective situation the mig fired an atoll at hawkins and it pulled route and went off right underneath him but it didn't affect him much although it took out his radios when we were trying to call him i meanwhile dropped back on the mig and i'm following him back to the to the west and jim mcdivitt bless his heart says uh kurt what are your plans we don't have any sidewinders left and uh we're down to 4 000 pounds of gas uh i said you're right so i just broke off and and headed towards the coast went back and uh made a normal semi-normal carrier landing actually uh hawk took us into the lead he did a break and i didn't uh when did a reverse uh a an aileron roll and then came around and and landed so we got to it was a it was a big deal on the flight deck just like all the movies everybody's all happy but you're doing uh everything you need to do to stay alive in this very hostile environment in the 1972 cruise that was my fourth combat cruise on midway i did one on coral sea one on ranger early on 66 through 68 on those two carriers then once shore dude and came back and did two cruises on midway 71 through 73. well they didn't complete the second one anyway uh in that 72 cruise of all the four deployments i made over there that the most exciting or most impactful thing i think in my career my life happened in that time number one was on may 23rd 1972 my pilot and i and our wingmen launched off on a big mid cap big combat action patrol the mission of that is to place fighters between the enemy a fighter base and where the bombers are going to go in and bomb so that because the bombers while they're in in their bombing road they're they're very susceptible to uh big attack so we were supposed to place ourselves between kepp airfield up and north of hanoi for the strike going in at haifang harbor and as soon as we crossed the beach to go to our station our controller in the ship off the coast said we have migs uh 37 miles 270 37 miles i got a contact on the radar and i couldn't lock it up because of the ground but the closure rate between the migs and us was so fast that by the time muggs called out he says on the nose uh two to seven miles or something like that he said i've had a two and so we're playing refined combat spread when the migs came right down between us we cross turn to get on their tail going this way he says cross turn we'll go high you go low rookie went down we went high well what we didn't though we had our fangs out and we were we made a mistake i just that's the way it is because you should clear behind the migs before you turn because make sure there's nobody else coming well lo and behold their plan was there were four big 17s trailing these two mig-19s in there and their plan was for us to turn on the 17th which we did and then they we would be be between them and then these four here could shoot us down what their they made a mistake also was that they didn't leave enough separation nose to tail between the first two and the last four so instead of breaking between the two elements we broke right into this formation of big 17s and that's when the excrement hit this air conditioning system so to speak and uh mug said oh and i remember he said holy cow holy exclamation it's raining migs and so there we were breaking into this formation of mix 17s and that's when we started turning and burning and fight mig-19s and gone made a turnaround they came back through the fight and then exited so we we started out fighting six of them we ended up fighting four of them uh mig-17s of course it could turn inside the radius of an f4 and so we had to fight vertically and he didn't want to get into turning system well most tried to turn on one and i saw of course i'm out of cockpit now i'm checking our six and uh as he starts to turn on one of them i look back here and there's a mig-17 on our eight o'clock and he's tracking this and he's starting to shoot his 37 millimeter at us and i yield mugs eight o'clock tracking and shooting and do some of that pilot stuff up there and so as he's turning this one he looks back like that and again he realized that you know this was the real threat and he was closing and he maneuvered that airplane so violently that it actually departed controlled flight and the phantom just did a back flip we went nose over tail as this mig back here and i'm i'm trying to keep track of the mig and i'm suddenly going like that and i said what in the hell are you doing up there i've lost the mig and when we had done we've done a backflip and the mig of course went on run by us he finally pulled out like that and there's a big right in front of us so we take a shot at him uh he sees it coming and he defeats the missile we turned around a couple more and we got in position to shoot another one again the missile didn't uh didn't he defeated it so here we are we had four four sidewinders and we'd already taken two shots and missed i thought oh god you know this can be a great day and then of course i'm back here and then i see one at four o'clock i mugged four o'clock tracking and shooting there's another one so muggs pulls real hard on me like this and this guy just turned up like this and the mig-17 has a big bulbous nose and mugs knew that when he got in a position like that he couldn't see over his nose to see what we were doing because mugs had been part of a exploitation program called have donut have drill and he had actually flown one of those mig-17s in that program so he knew what what it would look like from the inside of the cockpit out and as soon as that guy turned up like that most went into neutral put full forward on a stick we just started pulling negative g's and we just started building separation between these two all of a sudden this guy he realizes hey they should be coming out here pretty soon where i can get a shot at him i guess and he starts looking like that by that time we hadn't made enough separation like that we rolled back in behind him like this and got a dead shot right up and his tail off he ejected so then we started looking around we don't see anything in the meantime while we were doing our stuff up above poor rookie and and ken they had gone down and they had a mig on their tail the whole time we were fighting up there chasing them at treetop level we saw him coming so we called him cross sake bringing the east or west or whatever it was and then we rolled down behind him here's rookie here's the mig hears us he said keep turning he turned the mig there and we got our second kill so we got two kills and one dog fight against six migs and uh got the hell out of dodge after that we didn't see any more action and uh tanked and got back to the ship when they told us they were going to send 100 plain b-52 strikes to hanoi high falling but what really our biggest danger is going to be going sterl from all these electrons they're going to be beaming down on us and they're not going to be shooting at them they're going to be shooting at us because they can't shoot at them so i get rest cap i said okay that's that's not a really good one because you know hopefully nobody's going to get shot down certainly no b-52s are going to get hit but we have iron hand we have whatever so we're i mean we're right at feet wet feet dry maybe not even and a three-pack of sam's come up and all of a sudden i see a big explosion fire and you know crash uh flaming debris and it's it's a small airplane it turned out it was uh va 82 a7 the only 7 lost in linebacker 2 and he had been one of my students in vt-21 i didn't know that at the time didn't i didn't i thought he had no chance of surviving he did he was p.o.w he came back uh back home but from that point on you know dodging my wingman switched off frequency because he thought it was me so black eagle found and then when he didn't answer i thought well how that happened he got back on and we got it straightened out and then we okay i see a b-52 get hit and it's a very impressive fireball let me tell you said okay we got customers this guy i figured he didn't make it but now we've probably got customers and i spent the rest of the time just dodging sams they were like one of the uh b32 crew called like fireflies and that is a very apt description just trying to stay alive until i had one four pack coming at me then i didn't know that they did that until i read the linebacker book usually everyone fired three only got three but they had a four pack and i was dodging them one at a time and the last one went off really close big bang and uh it was scary uh and nothing hit the airplane you know i've a bang usually flying tactical off it's a video game you hear nothing i never heard the only time i heard bombs go off when i dropped four or two thousand pounders heard those go off i heard it when the the flag actually hit the airplane i guess i need to tell you that story because that was a rather exciting flight but i realized that no helicopter pilot in their right mind is coming into this maelstrom to pick up anybody what the hell was i doing here you know and i got close enough to charlie time i went back to the ship and said this is crazy and and that was you know i i was just doing what i was needed to do to dodge the sams and realize that this this was going to be a pointless exercise that wasn't going to be helping anybody i just going to get myself a better you know case through recovery and i'm tooling in a mile and a half call the ball and i said clara that means you can't see the ball clara on the ship i don't even see the ship and then they keep you know giving you but i had needles and i flew apc so you know i had to stabilize the approach approach power compensator maintains your angle of attack when you move the nose it's going to maintain that angle of attack on speed okay that you got to be meatball lineup angle of attack so i've got some leaves centered uh i've also got an echo you you have a flight path marker there so everything was looking good there and then they cut three-quarter mile call the ball i said auto clara no ship and the lso says roger i hear you keep it coming and by the time i process that i see the ball of ship and land and it just it was like almost the time when i saw the flak burst show up in my right windscreen and just stay there it was that kind of you know and it trapped and you know they taxied up i'm gonna kill the lso i mean i'm pissed because that was scary big time but by the time you get to the lso because you've got to go out i see maintenance and then you go to the ready room where they finally came in there and i said you better have a damn good story for that i hear you keep it coming and he said well i did think i was going to see you a little earlier than i did but you were stabilized on glideslope auto throttle i knew you you knew who i was and it's that trust between lso and pilot you know you you trust them you trust them with your life you really do and i hear you keep it coming okay but it was a little closer than i liked when i got there in vietnam special purpose missions were vital to survive the heroism displayed by the search and rescue crews known as tsar were legendary saved countless lives of those shot down behind enemy lines meet james lloyd call signs zeke who can attest to this legacy after a four-year ceasefire which started in 1968 above the 20th parallels north vietnam with the aid of china and the soviet union were well prepared and waiting for us in the ten and a half months that followed we lost 15 fixed-wing aircraft which consisted of a third of our a7s and like most pilots flying combat missions i convinced myself that the events that led to the losses of others wasn't going to happen to me but on the evening of august 6 i was to learn otherwise lieutenant commander heart bell our admin officer and i were assigned to seek out and destroy the large truck convoy that was reported early in the evening up in the vinson area heading south the sun had set and it was dark by the time we crossed the beaches and little did i know at that time that dark sky was going to play an extremely part important role and be a strong ally of mine for the hours that followed it wasn't long we found our target i rolled in in a 45 degree dive delivery that dropped two mark 82 500 pound bombs on the truck movement they were what they looked like from the air was just a fine thin line of muted headlights pulled off rolled over inverted to evaluate my hits when i got an indication in my cockpit that i was being painted by a fan song radar and seconds later it gave me an indication that a sam missile had launched i looked off about 10-12 miles away and i could see the fireball of the infamous soviet-built sa-2 surface-to-air missile approaching three times the speed of sound and our defenses in those days one of the biggest one is a sand brick avoid it trying to make it out a stall out or at least it can't turn with you now at night you have poor depth perception so if i turn too soon it would be able to track me if i waited too late i'd get caught up in the 500 foot kill pattern so when i saw the dark center of the nose cone and the fireball i rolled over and did what we call a split s pulled down to avoid it it screamed by me missing me but what i didn't know a second sam had been launched went up behind me blew my left wing off i was in a steep dive i don't remember much about the injection other than the fact when i pulled the d-ring between my legs the ultimate alternate handle i got a i saw the 2000 feet screaming through the altimeter then the red lights of the instrument panel pulled away second two later the plane blew up on impact i shot horizontally swung twice in the chute and hit the hit the rice paddies i don't remember getting out of my equipment my seat or my parachute or my helmet i just remember running to get away from the fireball because the 20 millimeter was cooking off and i didn't want to be around when the 500 pounders went off plus the light of the of the fire was giving me away instantly people came streaming out of the villages screaming yelling and i went i don't know a few hundred yards got behind a little clump about three feet high of razor grass sat in that and kind of tried to evaluate the situation i was basing in shock once one minute i'm flying an airplane familiar cockpit comfort of the cockpit seconds later i'm in the enemy's backyard i was 150 miles north of the dmz 21 miles in from the coast in an area i was told by a commanding officer no americans were ever seen again in 10 years i put mud on my hands and my face to cut down my skin skin tones and also to hold off the hordes of mosquitoes and i the villagers literally came up within six feet of me and didn't see me after i calmed down a bit i pulled out one of my survival radios and called art who was overhead told him i was alive and he told me that lieutenant commander bernie smith our ops officer who was another outstanding pilot was coming in to help him out then i could hear bernie talk on the radio calling me and when i called back he couldn't hear me he just here static so he said jim click me one right two left which i did he came in low fast with his lice on and that's when i realized that everybody around me was armed everybody was shooting at that airplane when he was overhead i'll turn your damn lights off i don't want company down here which he did and we didn't have gps we didn't have night goggles it was a lot of luck he told me that a helicopter was on its way in i looked around and with all the enemy right around me and as much as i wanted to get out of there i told them turn the helicopter get i'm back it's too hot a slow mover won't make it i asked for some bombs to be dropped on the other side of the rice paddies my thinking was i think i was over in the other part of the rice paddy well i've seen bombs going off for months obviously every day that was the day at the office for us anyway but i had no idea how devastating you were on the ground the shock wave and the sound was devastating but worse yet was the light of the bombs it lit me up and lit everybody up around me i could see literally a hundred people if not more all around me i told them to knock it off that's not gonna work i'm gonna have to move and i was a little nervous of leaving that little clump of grass i felt secure there but i have to emphasize i had to get out by daylight i got out of that little clump of grass and it was it was for about 30 minutes 30 40 minutes i've been watching 11 north vietnamese about 40 yards from me and they would talk loudly i knew they were 11 because i named each one of them a number so i keep track of them because i don't want to get on the radio with one or two standing near me so i got up started to move away from that comp grass putting their voices behind me and when they faded the silence i took off running i probably went about an eighth of a mile got down the calm of the radio call in to tell them i'm on the move that i was heading north only because it was seemed to be quieter when i realized i lost both radios no radio no rescue so as hard as it was i turned back i worked my way back there was clumps of grasses all over the place i didn't know which one i had to go into then i used the voices of those 11 men and vector myself into the exact clump of grass that i was hiding in i couldn't see i just groped around and i found the prc90 radio had the strongest of the two and it never left my right hand the rest of the night i retreated a second time and got going checked in whatever i'd be crossing rice paddies i'd be sliding and falling in the mud slimy slimy stuff making all kinds of noise so i got off on the petitions between the rice paddies and started moving and i was making good time so i kept on going and i'd be going across rice paddies and there'd be a whole string of north vietnamese all lined up like a rabbit hunt beating pans yelling i thought i'd heard my name being called and i didn't know if it was actually my name or a vietnamese word that sounded like it because the guys overhead were talking to me they were my friends so they were we're not using my call sign they were using my name after about four or five hours which humbles seemed like eternity i traveled about well i found out later exactly two miles from where i landed it's an open field fairly quiet so i pulled out my radio and i said this is probably the best it's going to get you go ahead and bring the helicopter in a second time the a6 that was overhead it was a commanding officer of our a6 squadron and his bombardier navigator lieutenant commander grady jackson took over unseen command the two a7s had flown over five hours which is a tremendous amount of time for a single seat in-flight refuel two or three times were relieved by commander ernst the plane started stacking up overhead and that brought in the north vietnamese and i thought that it's going to be a race to see who's going to get to me first and the skipper commander mccracken of the helicopter rescue squadron went and personally visited admiral rasmussen who was the commander of task force 77 and convinced him that his people could do it and then when he gave the green light i was told the error war in vietnam stopped for one thing and one thing only and that was to get an a7 pilot out that got in a lot of trouble an hh3a helicopter cc king had been airborne most of the night one of the other helicopters was commander mccrackeny when he got done with the admiral he jumped in the helicopter and there was three of them and they just took turns refueling on on the destroyers and then going back in up to the coast waiting for the call-in they did that all night well when i called in big mother 60 was sent in it was flown by harry zinzer and bill young and they came in and when they got in my vicinity the planes overhead said jim take over vectors and i could see him coming with all his lights on and everybody was shooting at him i got up and ran up and jumped up and down waved my arms giving myself away from the to the north vietnamese to get his attention and i was bathed in the floodlight of his landing light he flew over and disappeared everybody the plane saw me the north vietnamese saw me at the time the helicopter did not so i was managed to turn him around with the help of the planes overhead and get back over and he says turn on a light any kind of light well before i could do anything pencil flares that we carried popped up all around it confirmed the fact they'd been listening on the radios all night he said which one's you and i said negative none of them disregard i'm turning my strobe on don't shoot don't shoot don't shoot well the strobes all around went off at the same time but he went into a hover a couple maybe 100 yards away and i just took off in a dead run i couldn't see him because i would still have lost my night vision but they were i sound like the whole north vietnamese army was closing in on me they were right behind me ran up to the helicopter it was hovering there his cable was down i hooked on i did my helmet on so the noise was devastating rocks mud flying around and i closed my eyes and waited to be hauled up nothing looked up and the helicopter was sitting right next to me in the mud he had landed to get below a deflection angle of a aaa gun a 37 millimeter that was trying to shoot him and so he got below the deflection angle and we had a few seconds and a few seconds only for me to get on board before they got the gun lowered and doug ankeny and the gunner reached over his gun i i'll never forget the look of his face and his outstretched hand and him yelling come on come on then he grabs the back of my flight suit and pulls me in meantime when we landed the north vietnamese thought they shot it down because they landed and they turned the lights off so they stormed the helicopter matsumaski on the other side years later said he was laying them down like cordwood and right before we got to the coast which seemed like forever two missiles went right by the helicopter probably 50 feet and we figured they were then at the time the newer shoulder mounted heat seekers that would go after slow movers we avoided those and then the gunner grabbed my shoulder and pointed down out the open door and you can see the breakers we were feet wet the savior of a navy pilot over the years the carrier has secured the united states ability to respond to the unexpected and support other nations when in crisis in 1991 naval aviation would once again confront an enemy on the other side of the globe my most memorable carrier mission was flying night one in desert storm and i was the flight lead of a uh 84 plane strike that included all the airplanes off of saratoga and and i was on uss john f kennedy and also some air force wild weasels and uh our mission was to go in and take down the air defenses in baghdad when the uh after the f-117s airplanes went in so we took off and uh it was 700 miles up to baghdad we had practiced this a few times but it was pretty exciting because the a7 didn't have any air-to-air radar we're flying in the middle of the night it was two o'clock in the morning and you had the rendezvous on these kc-135 tankers we were putting six airplanes per tank or there were four tankers so there's 24 airplanes all trying to rendezvous in the middle of the night and this one piece of sky you'd get into the tanker and we called the tanker the iron maiden because it had a a short 15 foot hose on it and and a lead basket that weighed about 75 pounds and if you did it wrong you got slapped with the with a hose so you had to plug it about four or five times as we went up the refueling route before we got dropped off so that everybody in the flight would have a full tank of gas uh and no no small feat just to do that and that was before you even got into combat and then uh we came off the tankers and went up to the aywax frequency and the f-117s were just coming uh out of baghdad we couldn't cross the line until they they uh dropped their weapons and all you saw on your radar scopes was all of these uh radar sites come up so we proceeded up into into country we were kind of did a spoke around baghdad where there would be three airplanes on each one of these spokes we uh we got up there we heard the checked in with the aywax and you heard the call that there were migs airborne at a fairfield called altocadam which is just north of baghdad and uh it was actually the target of this of the a6's who were part of this strike uh as we went up uh the lead f-18 got a lock on what was a uh a mig-25 fox bat he uh he held lock on him but he had to break it off to as this fox bat got out of out of the out of range uh and uh the fox bat actually came around and shot down scott spiker at that time scott was a good friend of mine because we had been in squadron va 105 previously uh i didn't actually see the shoot down there was a glow up in the sky uh to the north of me which i'm assuming was probably him getting shot but what i do know is that that mig then continued south and right at me and uh i had a full full load of chaff which is reflective kind of a tin foil you put out there that that decoys airplanes and i was pumping that stuff out as fast as i could and the a7 at the time had gotten this new box called the airborne self-protect jammer and i i believe that thing saved my life because all i could see was that thing going repeat repeat repeat blinking away uh and then over the top of me it went this fox bat in full afterburner and uh i did i thought it was one of our tomcats that had just gotten screwed up and we was in the wrong piece of sky it wasn't anyway proceeded in and uh it was a real milk bowl kind of night the very cloudy you couldn't see much and then all of a sudden about 50 miles from baghdad it got clear and all you saw was this dome over the top of of uh baghdad which was their their anti-aircraft weapons all being fired into the sky and then popping out of the top of it were missiles it got you pretty your heartbeat going pretty good so i i went in and uh the first thing i s that we were told because we had we were carrying three harm missiles which are anti-radiation missiles they seek uh the radars of enemy sites and uh they said don't look when you fire these things at night because they're going to be pretty bright well of course being a good naval aviator i fired the first one off looking at it and was blind for about 15 seconds because it was so bright um so my first one went off and it went up real high and it was fired at at a pre-brief site that we knew and then the second one uh i i was a little smart and closed my eyes on that one fired that off same thing went up high and went after one of the missile sites but the third one was why the a7s were actually there was because we had a mode called target of opportunity that none of the other airplanes had which allowed you to pick out a target that hadn't been hit and so i went to target of opportunity mode and looked at my radar scope and uh there was a strange symbol on there that i had never seen before it was a six that was blinking back and forth and whatever i was what the heck is that and i looked up and there's a missile just kind of coming right at me it's like now i know what that is and i locked on shot uh my last arm and it as i talked about the first two going straight up this one went straight down at the radar site that i was over uh and i pulled as hard as i could and and got out of dodge uh the missile missed me and the uh hopefully the radar site got blown up so we ended up exiting the uh exiting and getting out of there um one of the funnier parts of this whole thing was we had said to all of the people in the strike group if if you don't feel threatened then come on out at medium altitude we were up at about 25 000 feet but if you feel threatened the iraqis aren't going to chase you down low so go down to a thousand feet or whatever and uh i exited high because it seemed like things were calmed up but my my wingmen of uh in a very high pitched voice was oh accident low and he was getting out of there well the exiting low part worked great until he got down to the border where we were i was i was up high i i couldn't see him but i kind of knew where he was and i looked down and he got near the border and uh every little triple a gun and and small small range missiles were firing at him as he came out and added to the pucker factor but we all got back we got back to the tanker with a low on gas so we all had to plug three or four times again going back to the aircraft carrier and uh thinking that this five and a half hour flight was about over now you had to face the night landing on the aircraft carrier and uh fortunately we all got aboard without any issues there and uh one of my lieutenant commanders and i parked on the flight deck right next to each other we both climbed out of the airplane looked at each other went holy whatever and kind of knelt down and kissed the flight deck it was uh probably the mission that that you most uh remember it for the rest of your life the legends of naval aviation have proven their commitment to preserving freedom around the globe these unsung heroes have gone on to push the envelope of impossibilities from the deck of the carrier to the surface of the moon and even to the office of the presidency and like the pioneers who mastered the fusion of both sea and air power over a century ago a whole new generation of naval aviation continues to carry on and take that torch to new heights and possibilities as you watch this film there's a carrier steaming along far off on one of the seven seas its mere presence around the world faithfully stands the watch to preserve the peace [Music] far in the distance there's a promise it seems far in the distance i put it on the altar though it was mine [Music] i put it on the old town there's the greatest city we have not seen in the in between [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're all seeking [Music] you

Channel: The Tailhook Association

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Id: B2Iw9NSmSh8

Length: 107min 10sec (6430 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022