Yeager: An Autobiography

VIETNAM

Glennis saw much worse than my burned face at the big hospital at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where she was working as a volunteer in the lab, as our most seriously wounded guys were being airlifted in from Vietnam. I was commander of the 405th Fighter Wing, headquartered at Clark, in charge of five squadrons scattered across Southeast Asia: a squadron of fighter-bombers on Taiwan, armed with nuclear weapons targeted into China, in case the war spread; two squadrons of B-57 Canberra bombers at Phan Rang; an air defense squadron at Da Nang, both in Vietnam, and a detachment of fighters in Udorn and Bangkok, in Thailand. The logistics involved were awesome, and it was tough having my people dispersed over tens of thousands of miles of real estate, but I managed to squeeze in 127 combat missions.

I became a wing commander in 1966, but I had been to Vietnam for the first time a couple of years earlier, when Gen. Hunter Harris, commander of the Pacific Air Forces, called me at the space school and asked me to take a trip to Vietnam and Thailand. He said, "I want you to give a talk to each of our fighter wings. We're having trouble getting those men to do any good over there. They're releasing their bombs too high and pulling out, missing a target by five miles.'

Evidently, we were losing a lot of people while trying to knock out heavily-defended bridges. I spent a month going from base to base and talking to the pilots. I told them, "Damn you guys. You drank the best booze, had the best-looking women, flew the hottest airplanes-now you're gonna have to pay for your reputation. If you have a bridge to knock out, that's your job. I know the ground fire is lethal. I know that if you really press home and go down on the deck, you'll be lucky to come through it. But that's war. That's your mission, and you've got to start doing it."

I was a forty-three-year-old colonel talking to pilots who were ten or more years younger, but I think I made an impression because they knew I wasn't some middle-aged desk jockey, but a guy who put his own ass on the line more times than they ever would. I wasn't anxious to see a lot of young guys go out and die, but, damn it, not one of them had been drafted into the Air Force. They had chosen to become military pilots, knowing it was a high-risk profession. Maybe they joined because flying was fun, but all of their training and flying time was geared to make each of them a skilled professional killer. That's what gunnery ranges and dogfighting were all about. In combat, they were expected to go balls-out and accomplish their mission, no matter what, which was why we lost many of our best, aggressive pilots.

Whether or not a guy wanted to be in Vietnam was irrelevant. Personally, I didn't have any philosophical problem about it and didn't know many pilots who did. All of us did have problems with the way the war was being stage-managed from the White House, but hobbled as we were, we obeyed the rules and did the best we could. Every G.I. knows the old expression: "Ours is not to reason why. Our is but to do or die." That says it all.

I spent two years commanding the 405th. Being a wing commander was a huge job as well as a logistics headache. I was used to being in the thick of things, but my guys were scattered over thousands of miles. I was responsible for the morale, performance, and well-being of five thousand men under my command, and if something went wrong, if there was a screw-up or a major failure in operations, yours truly would take the heat. Somehow, I had to find a way to stay on top of my men and their equipment.

I scratched my head wondering how. The obvious answer was there was no way I could involve myself in the daily nitty-gritty of squadron life; a wing commander was a manager, forced to rely on his squadron commanders to keep up morale and operational performance. I knew some wing commanders who demanded that their squadron commanders report to them almost hourly, but that didn't seem a very practical way to try to run five combat squadrons simultaneously. Being a bird colonel meant surrendering the old squadron intimacy. Instead, I was like a judge in a tennis match, perched up on a high chair, overlooking the court and the players. I was above daily activities, but the trick was not to be so high above that I missed what was really happening below.

I had to trust my five squadron commanders to get the job done. The personnel under my command flew five different airplanes from six separate bases, and the only way I could figure to get a handle on what they were doing was to work closely with the squadron commanders. So, I brought them all into Clark regularly to review their problems and needs. I told them, "I'm here as a listener. I'm not able to stay on top of everything that's going on under my command, so I have to trust you, my commanders, to set me straight. I'm not a second-guesser, and you can run things your own way for as long as you get good results. If I see you making some of the same mistakes I made when I was a squadron commander I won't hesitate to point them out. Otherwise, you won't find me breathing down your neck. Hell, this is a learning process for me as well."

But I was a regular visitor. I made it a point to fly in for a day or two at each of my squadrons' bases at least once every ten days. I'd spend the night, attend their briefings, and go out on a mission with them. That way I could accurately monitor their performance, notice any changes in their proficiency or morale from one visit to the next, and stay informed about what was happening. We were the lucky ones because we did most of our combat flying in the south. The outfits that were really catching hell were hitting up north in the teeth of the most intense ground fire in the history of warfare, dodging everything from rifles, machine guns, hundred-millimeter cannons, and SAM missiles, to MiG 21s.

The list of what they couldn't hit was three times longer than what they could, and it was damned frustrating not to be able to fire on shipping offloading arms and ammo in Haiphong harbor, or to nail SAM missile sites or MiG bases, power plants, and fuel tank farms. All were on the forbidden list. The rules of engagement even forbade attacking a MiG while it was taking off or landing.

Vietnam was the first modern air war. We used "smart bombs," guided by laser beams and sophisticated electronics, developed a new weapons system in a tactical fighter aircraft called Weasel because its job was to ferret out and destroy enemy radar and missile installations, and armed some aircraft with secret electronics that could jam and disrupt North Vietnamese radar and communications. Meanwhile, the Russian-supplied North Vietnamese were no slouches, either. Their surface-to-air missiles were murderous, and their radar was able to counter many of our sophisticated measures with countermeasures of their own.

But you could get hurt flying in the south, too, where ground fire was intense at times, especially around the Ho Chi Minh trail. So, we always took off on a mission knowing that it would be either kill or be killed-one of the two was certain to happen-the same as any other combat situation in war. And I quickly learned that the kids flying in my squadrons fought with the same intensity that Andy and I had fought in World War II. Despite the uproar about the war back home being reported in the Stars and Stripes, those guys flew balls-out to do their jobs. There was no holding back, even when all hell broke loose.

I flew a Martin B-57 Canberra, a twin-engine bomber. It was perfect for our work, mostly air to ground bombing and strafing. It carried eight 750pound bombs, had four twenty-millimeter guns for strafing, and a range of more than eight hundred miles. Although the airplane was vulnerable to ground fire, and you had to be adept at "jinking"-weaving and twisting to avoid gunfire on the deck-it was damned effective as a light bomber. I flew with a copilot, taking part in close air-support operations, mostly at night, firing flares and hitting troops and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We had specially equipped recon airplanes that carried infrared detectors that could locate heat sources beneath the thick jungle canopy, as well as image intensifiers- low-light television and radar-that picked up troops and vehicles moving on a moonless night. We also had special "people sniffers" that detected sweat or urine traces down below. When any of these detection devices made contact, we'd be called in and hammer them.

In the south, a typical operation was responding to a call from a forward air controller, operating either on the ground with our troops, or flying in a small single-engine prop airplane, to launch an air strike on a specific point where Vietcong or North Vietnamese troops were spotted. The target was indicated for us by white phosphorous rockets, and then we'd hit it with heavy bombs or do strafing work.

Strafing was always dangerous because it meant coming in on the deck and drawing ground fire, especially over villages occupied by the V.C. A rifle bullet in the right spot could bring down a jet, and although we accumulated plenty of bullet holes on these missions, fortunately, few were lethal. We hit only villages where the V.C. had moved in, slaughtered the local leaders, and taken over the rice fields. They were expanding their cadres, raising food for their forces, and when they saw us coming half of them ran and the other half opened fire. That's the way the war was fought over there: bombing, strafing; strafing, bombing.

A lot of our strikes were directed against the fourth tree from the right because most of the real estate in the south was thick rain forest and jungle. On one occasion, we were ordered into an air strike against a suspected V.C. ammo dump. Christ, there was nothing down there but a thick canopy of trees, so thick we could barely see the bomb blasts, until one of the guys laid in a five-hundred pounder and the whole damned jungle blew up. The same thing happened to me.

The V.C. did a lot of tunneling, setting up whole battalions underground in a series of intricate tunnel networks that ants might have envied. Our intelligence could never tell where they were. But in the summer ol 1967, a combat battalion of American troops was moving across a valley about 150 miles from Saigon, when they began drawing heavy mortar and rifle fire from a particular ridge. My B-57 squadron was called in. I led a flight of four, carrying eight low-drag, delayed-action, five-hundred-pound bombs.

The forward air controller pinpointed the ridge as the most probable location ol the hidden V.C. They figured it was just honeycombed with underground tunnels. We went in and dropped one bomb at a time. I had a wingman with me, rolled in, picked a point where the ridge seemed most likely to be hiding the V.C., and dropped my bomb. I pulled up, but failed to see an explosion. I thought it was a dud. Suddenly, I saw an eruption of red-brick dust and smoke from either side of the ridge. We later discovered that my delayed-action bomb had gone right down the main entrance of the V.C. tunnel, shored with red bricks. So we went to work on that ridge and about every other bomb would result in red dust blowing out the side. Two days later, we received a report from Army intelligence that we had killed a tremendous number of V.C. troops. As a wing commander, I was credited with killing fifty V.C. soldiers. And it was pure chance, like a blind man pitching a ringer in horseshoes.

For me, the craziest part of Vietnam was back at Clark. I was in charge of the pilots in my wing, most of whom were married and had their families living at Clark, so Glennis had the rotten job of consoling and helping new widows. We lost about one guy a week. I owned the pilots, but the 6200 Materiel Wing owned my maintenance and airplanes. Mine was not to reason why, and it was a screwed-up mess. A squadron under my command would be inspected five thousand miles away, and I would get a bad inspection report saying our bomb racks didn't work. Hell, nothing worked on our airplanes, including the nuclear weapons delivery system on our fighters in Taiwan. But as wing commander, I was responsible. And it did me no good to complain that I had no control over the maintenance because Gen. Jim Wilson, head of the Thirteenth Air Force at Clark, devised that system and insisted on sticking with it. He ran things his way.

Every Wednesday afternoon, he would come down to my wing, get behind my desk, and sit down. He operated on a card item system of control, and I would have as many as two hundred card items-meaning gigs-against my wing in a single week, which really wasn't so bad considering there were five thousand guys under my command. So, I had to flip through these cards with him: "Beer can on front lawn of barracks. Beer can removed." "Airman caught out of uniform. Airman reprimanded." On and on, through more important things like gigs against supply status and operational readiness. Each gig card had to have remedial action. It took me a couple of hours to go through these cards with the general. One of the combat support groups had sixteen hundred cards, and it actually took a day and a half to brief him. It was a helluva way to run an outfit, but General Wilson was effective; I'll admit that. Everyone, including yours truly, was scared to death of him.

General Wilson had one policy that could have been borrowed from one of those antiwar comedies. All of the airplanes due for maintenance in my wing were on a tail number schedule. That meant I had to predict one month in advance, and in the middle of a damned war, exactly when a particular airplane would be needing maintenance. If an airplane was shot up or shot down, the schedule went to hell. General Wilson would park his staff car at the taxi strip and read off the tail numbers of airplanes parading past him from a master list. If fighter 397 failed to show up at the precise time and date when I said it would, he wanted to know why. Man he was driving me nuts. I couldn't schedule an airplane to get shot down. Maybe 397 was hit by a SAM three days before, and that's why 399 was taxiing out instead

Finally, in desperation, I got together with another colonel named Ernie White, who ran the maintenance for my wing, and we devised a plan to beat Wilson's system. By God, if he expected to see 397 leave our maintenance hangar exactly when we said it would, then we would give the general what he wanted. Before an airplane left the maintenance hangar, we repainted the tail number to conform to the general's master list. That way, 397, which may have been blasted out of the sky a week earlier, came sailing past the general's sedan and was checked off. General Wilson never did catch on and later gave me one of the best officer-effectiveness reports I ever received. I'm sure the records never did get straightened out, but I got out of there with my whole skin.

Bud Anderson was also over there as a wing commander, stationed at Okinawa, but he spent most of his time with his squadrons based in Thailand where the living conditions weren't exactly posh. So whenever I flew in to visit, I loaded about two thousand pounds of fruit, grain, and vegetables into the bomb bay of my B-57, and when I landed his crews would laugh and say, "Here comes Yeager in that C-57," which was a cargo plane. As soon as I opened the canopy, the guys would shout up, "What's today's special, Colonel?" I'd say, "Avocados, papayas and rice. And you bastards better eat it all."

Andy and I had earned our share of medals in World War II, so we became kind of cynical about medal awards ceremonies in Vietnam. Christ, that country was about to sink under the weight of bronze and brass. If we flew ten missions in World War II-a six- or seven-hour combat mission each-we earned an Air Medal. If a Vietnam helicopter pilot flew ten combat missions-meaning ten takeoffs and landings with forays into combat zones in between-he also received an Air Medal. And because those pilots could take off and land a dozen times a day, some of them were collecting enough Air Medals to become scrap merchants. Lots and lots of people got many many medals for accomplishing less, if you care to look at the end result. As Andy put it, "Vietnam was a place where you could get a medal or a court-martial quicker than any place else."

Man, that was true. Not long before my tour ended, the Air Force filed court-martial charges against a bird colonel named Jack Broughton, who was a deputy wing commander of F- 105 Thunderchiefs that were fighting in the north. Jack was a helluva commander and a great combat pilot. His guys loved him. A couple of them had come in over Haiphong harbor as a Soviet freighter was off-loading weapons. The Soviets opened fire on them with a deck gun, and Jack's guys fired back. When they returned to base, they told Jack what they had done, and he, in turn, made a serious mistake. He destroyed their gun camera film-the evidence-and told his pilots to keep it quiet.

Meanwhile, the Russians filed a formal complaint, claiming American jets had attacked one of their ships without provocation. The White House queried General Ryan, then Air Force commander in the Pacific, and he launched an investigation. When the Air Force finally confronted Jack, he confessed, and the brass decided to court-martial him and his two pilots. When it came down to finding a colonel who was senior to Jack to head his court-martial board, every bird colonel in Southeast Asia ducked for cover.

Four or five colonels begged off, claiming they were too close to the war, flying up north themselves, to be objective. It was a damned mess and no bird colonel, hoping to be promoted to general some day, wanted to be involved. Everybody from the Joint Chiefs down wanted to nail Broughton and his pilots to make them examples. Nobody wanted to displease the Chief of Staff, but nobody wanted to nail Jack, either, because most of us sympathized. They finally came to me. I had no excuse. I wasn't flying in the north, and my date of rank preceded Jack's by several months. I wouldn't have minded being a general, and I didn't want the Chief of Staff mad at me, either, but somebody had to give Jack a fair shake.

Nobody was proud of his cover-up, but I didn't think he should be made the Air Force's whipping boy. The punishment should fit the crime. And the punishments in this case. could range from the ultimate disgrace of a dishonorable discharge to a fine and a letter of admonishment. To me, the heart of the matter was not what Jack had done, but what his pilots had done, and why.

Fighter pilots would go crazy with frustration watching Russian freighters unloading SAM missiles in Haiphong harbor, knowing that the rules of engagement prevented them from doing a damned thing about it. If those two guys in Jack s outfit had just said, "Screw the rules,' and hit that ship out of sheer anger, then Jack was really stretching things trying to protect guys like that. But if it could be proven that the Soviet ship fired first and Jack's pilots fired back in self-defense, then Broughton was guilty of bad judgment rather than being part of a conspiracy to cover up a serious violation of the rules of combat engagement. There wasn't a responsible officer in the Air Force who didn't believe that a pilot had every right to defend himself, if fired upon, under any circumstances.

Years before, I had got myself caught in the middle of a controversy involving the B-36 bomber. The Air Force wanted it, but Martin Aircraft lobbied hard against it, siding with the Navy, because it was too vulnerable in daylight bombing. General Boyd sent me to Washington to meet with a group of Air Force lobbyists preparing to testify in behalf of the bomber before Congress. I had flown against it as a test pilot in test exercises. In fact, I had made about twenty successful passes against a B-36 with Russ Schleeh at the controls. But an Air Force general tried to get me to say it was a good airplane. He asked, "What if you had tried to get at it at night or in bad weather" I said, "I probably couldn't find that thing without radar." The general got angry and said, "Then why don't you change your testimony?" I told him that wasn't the way it happened. The weather was good and I never missed finding the B-36. It was a piece of cake. At that point the general gave up in disgust: "You're doing more damage to us than the Navy." I was upset and called General Boyd. He told me to come on home. "Never compromise your integrity," he said. "Tell it the way it is."

That's exactly what I did in the Broughton case. A court-martial is not run by civilian rules of law but by the military code of justice. Together with four other officers, we sat as a five-judge panel, with a representative from the Judge-Advocate General's office on hand to advise us on the rules of procedure. The Air Force had conducted a thorough investigation, and the two-star general in charge appeared for the prosecution to recount the details of how Jack had destroyed the gun camera film. But when the young captain defending Jack tried to question the general about other matters, including making the entire investigation available to the court, the twostar refused. I said to him, "General, we're here to conduct a fair trial. You can't pick and choose what information you are willing to share with this court." The general reared up and said, "The hell I can't." It was that bad on the Air Force side. I said, "The entire Air Force report must be submitted to this court." Not only did he refuse, but he got up and stomped out.

I figured I knew why. The investigation would have revealed overwhelming evidence that the two pilots had been fired on first. That came out in the courtroom. We had good, solid data, including audio tapes of the mission that weren't destroyed. The prosecutor tried to argue that it was irrelevant to the charges against Broughton whether his guys were attacked first. A cover-up was a cover-up. Bull. It made all the difference in the world. Based on the evidence, we dismissed all charges against the two pilots. And it took the five of us on the panel only a few minutes to decide on a fair punishment for Jack. I said to the others, "If I were in Broughton's place, I would have laid it right out on the table. I would've gone up the chain of command and said, 'Here's what my pilots did and I back them one hundred percent.' Nobody would've punished a pilot for defending himself, and Jack would've been off the hook. But Broughton didn't do that. He took it on himself to protect guys who probably didn't need protecting, and in my opinion, we can't dismiss all the charges against him." The other judges agreed.

We found Colonel Jack Broughton guilty of destroying government property-the gun camera film- and ordered him to pay thirty-five dollars in damages, the cost of the film he destroyed. He also received an official letter of admonishment. It wasn't one of those stiff letters, but it was enough to follow him around in his personnel folder. In that sense, it was a kiss of death because the only way for a senior officer to survive a scandal of that magnitude was to have all charges against him dismissed.

Jack knew he was finished, his career destroyed. He loved flying and loved the Air Force, but he would never again have a command, and to a guy like that a desk job is a jail sentence. Jack was bitter, and I didn't blame him. He was relieved of his duties in Thailand and sent home. He resigned from the Air Force not long after. And I never heard a peep of criticism that I had been too lenient. In fact, General Ryan later mentioned the case to me and was complimentary. He said, "You got Broughton out of that mess as gracefully as possible. I was glad to see him retire rather than receive a dishonorable discharge. He didn't deserve that." He sure didn't.

Not long after that trial ended, I was recommended by Air Force headquarters in Washington to become a wing commander of tactical fighters in Vietnam. The wing was located at Phan Rang, where I had a squadron of B-57s, and it would be a natural for me. I would get to fly up north and meet some of those MiG 21s. Glennis began packing to go back to the States with the kids and stay at Jackie's in Indio until I got back in twelve months. I got word that orders were being published on the assignment, and we shipped all of our household goods back into storage. At Clark, I had been under the command of the Thirteenth Air Force, headed by General Wilson. My new assignment would place me under Gen. William Momyer, who headed the Seventh Air Force. I had never met him, but I heard he was a brilliant tactician. And just as I was about to leave for Phan Rang, the word came back that Momyer didn't want me. He told the Pentagon, "I choose my wing commanders, not you people. Send Yeager somewhere else."

General Ryan, who had approved my transfer went to bat for me with Momyer, who worked for General Ryan, but had the right to pick his own wing commanders. One of Ryan's deputies told me he heard the two generals arguing about me over the squawk box and that the conversation got pretty damned nasty.

It was degrading being the center of a squabble between two high-powered generals, one of them trying to shove me down the other's throat. I hadn't asked to go to Phan Rang; the colonels' assignment branch at the Pentagon had ordered it. If it had been my idea, I wouldn't have been so upset, because a guy who tries to pull strings to get something can't bitch if those strings wind up tight around his neck. General Ryan acted on his own taking up the cudgels for me because he knew, as I did, that I was the perfect guy to lead combat squadrons flying in the north. At that point, feeling really hurt at how I was being treated, I seriously thought about packing it in and calling it a career. I was a full colonel with twenty-six years under my belt and could have retired at two-thirds of my pay.

I had seen senior officers sticking around long after their careers had ceased to be enjoyable to protect their career investment and retirement dollars. I didn't worry about money. I figured I could make a living on the outside flying as test pilot for an airplane manufacturer. I used my own simple formula: either the Air Force was still fun for me, or it wasn't much fun anymore. If it wasn't fun, why hang around? Lt. Gen. Bennie Davis had replaced General Wilson at Thirteenth Air Force at Clark, and I really liked and respected him. I went to him for advice. I said, "General Davis, honest to God, I'm ready to throw in the towel. I'm exactly the guy they should want for that job. My people would be aggressive because that's how I do business. Instead, I get poked in the eye with a stick. I think it stinks, and right now I feel like I've about had it."

General Davis said, "Chuck, I know exactly how you feel. I thought about quitting once or twice myself. Being the highest-ranking black man in the Air Force hasn't been the easiest climb. But, hell, man, you've got to expect to get sandbagged every once in a while. I agree, you would have been perfect for the job, but Momyer will never take you now. No way. Why? Because Ryan wants him to. The fight isn't about you, but which of their wills is strongest. These battles go on all the time. Among generals, it's like a workout in a gym. So, stay cool and patient. I'm certain the Air Force won't let you go to waste. They'll make it up to you."

I took General Davis' advice and dropped the idea about early retirement. I figured I still had a few more bumps and bruises left to give to the cause. Meanwhile, the Pentagon assigned me to take over a TAC wing of F-4 Phantoms at Seymour Johnson in North Carolina. We were the first deployed to South Korea during the Pueblo crisis, when the North Koreans captured a Navy boat, and were over there for six months. By then, my oldest son, Donald, was fighting out in the boonies of Vietnam. I could fly from Korea and visit him. I would have to sneak in because Momyer was still in command, but it would take more than that guy to keep me from seeing my son.

I'd fly into Vietnam from Korea in my Phantom while General Momyer was still commanding the Seventh Air Force over there. I knew he wouldn't let me into the country just to visit my son no way. In fact, he probably would have court-martialed me for trying. A full colonel couldn't fly into the country without his personal permission, and I wasn't about to receive that. So, I bluffed my way through the communications net by using a call sign-Blue Bird One that I had used when I was flying B-57s over there.

Meanwhile, I had arranged to fly into Cam Rahn Bay, where the Army picked me up in a chopper and flew me out to Bong Son, where Don was flown in from the bush to visit with me. A few times, I choppered out to his outfit bivouacked in the central highlands and spent the day with them. He was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. I flew back to the air base in a chopper with Don as a gunner, kind of riding shotgun for the old man. I got a kick out of it.

On a few of these sneak visits, Seventh Air Force headquarters almost caught up with me. The operations officer at the base was a friend, and he tipped me that Momyer's guys wanted to know the name of the pilot who had flown in in an F-4. The general had those bases wired, but I managed to stay about an hour ahead of him. So I got the hell out, but not before coming in over the trees at 600 knots where Don was, then pulling up and doing slow rolls. Don later told me it was something to be seen: guys hit the deck like it was the end of the world. He enjoyed those visits, and so did I. It was really something for a guy like me to see my son in that environment, doing the things he was doing. Once I even went out with them on patrol, which was an interesting experience for an Air Force colonel.

I noticed he was using just about everything I had taught him about hunting and fishing and living in the wild. He and his platoon were wiping out V.C. left and right because they knew their habits, ambushing them at night with starlight scopes and claymore mines. Don would set a mine on the rope bridges across a jungle river, and it would be so black at night, that he would stay right at the end of that bridge until he knew their point man was just about across it. He said he waited until he could smell the garlic on the guy's breath before detonating the mine. That kind of war was an eye-opener for me; those were really brave kids. Later in his tour, Glennis and I took his girlfriend and went to Hawaii to visit him during his leave. Don came out of it without a scratch.

Andy also went out with his son, Jim, who was flying a single-engine prop airplane for psychological warfare. Jim would scoot over the jungle canopy and turn on his big loudspeakers that blared a propaganda message while a second guy kicked out thousands of leaflets. He took up Andy on one of his missions and said, "Hey, Dad, would you mind doing a little work here?" So, Jim, a second lieutenant, had a bird colonel kicking out leaflets.

Once Andy and I flew a combat mission together.

He flew in the back seat of my B-57, and we went out and bombed a bunch of trees at the direction of a forward air controller, who thought V.C. were hiding down there. It was no big deal to either of us, and only later did we talk about the fact that it was our first mission together in twenty-two years. Considering all our close calls since then, it was amazing that two old jocks were still around to do it.