Tuesday, November 24, 2009
President George Bush Sr Agrees To Write Forward To Forthcoming DFCS Book
For nine years our oral historian, Dr. Barry Lanman, has been collecting oral histories for the purpose of publishing a book on DFC winners. President George Bush Sr, a World War II DFC winner, has just agreed to write the forward. The book should be published next fall and we hope by a major syndicated publisher. The book will cover DFC winners from the very first prior to WWII and then from all the wars including present day Iraqi operations. The book will be very diverse including women; Native Americans; and the Tuskegee Airmen.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Navy Pilot proved Soviets had missiles in Cuba
Retired Navy Captain William B. Ecker, age 85, passed away on Nov 5th at his home in Punta Gorda, Fla.
Captain Ecker received his DFC personally from President Kennedy for his close up photography of missile sites on Cuba. The proof of these sites resulted in the well known Cuban Missile Crisis and the confrontation with the Soviet Union which ultimately lead to the removal of all missiles.
Captain Ecker was portrayed by actor Christopher Lawford in the movie "Thirteen Days" starring Kevin Costner as an aide to kenedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Captain Ecker received his DFC personally from President Kennedy for his close up photography of missile sites on Cuba. The proof of these sites resulted in the well known Cuban Missile Crisis and the confrontation with the Soviet Union which ultimately lead to the removal of all missiles.
Captain Ecker was portrayed by actor Christopher Lawford in the movie "Thirteen Days" starring Kevin Costner as an aide to kenedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Boy Who Fled Vietnam War Returns as U.S. Officer
By SETH MYDANS
DANANG, Vietnam — Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.
A youthful and smiling man of 39, he bore on his shoulders the weight of the symbolism of cautiously warming military ties between Vietnam and the United States in the latest of fewer than a dozen naval port calls since 2003.
But the symbolism quickly became more nuanced as his welcoming ceremony was delayed by a dispute between the sides over the display of the red Vietnamese flag with its gold star aboard the Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, which had just pulled in to port.
Two hours later the flag was finally raised high on the yardarm, seemingly in accord with the Vietnamese demand and contrary to American naval custom.
The waiting generals began to smile again, the red carpet was rolled out, and Commander Le was free to proceed with his return.
“Stepping ashore was awesome,” he said after landing from his destroyer, the Lassen, which was anchored in Danang Harbor.
“To be able to return to Vietnam after 35 years and to be able to do it as commander of a United States naval warship was an incredible honor and a privilege.”
He was returning to a very different Vietnam from the one he fled at the age of 5 with his parents and three of his siblings. Most people in this young nation, like Commander Le himself, have no memory of the war.
In the last decade or more, Vietnam has opened its economy, increased trade with the United States and risen from postwar poverty even as the Communist government maintains control of the press and political expression.
The city of Danang today, with its four new bridges, its broad streets and its emerging high-rise skyline, is almost unrecognizable to those who were here during the war years.
Despite the changes, the flag-raising dispute and the background of Commander Le’s own story illustrated the complexities of a relationship that remains shadowed by the war even as it moves tentatively forward.
“Gradual and steady,” said Carlyle B. Thayer, an expert on the Vietnamese armed forces, describing the relationship. “The Americans see a glacier moving, and they call it progress.”
He said Vietnam had been slow to accept American overtures of closer military ties, hoping to balance Chinese influence in the region with an American presence but stepping carefully to avoid offending Beijing.
“The two considerations that govern the Vietnamese are worries about China and deep suspicion of the United States,” said Mr. Thayer, a specialist on Vietnam at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra. “Suspicion is the underlying feature that puts a brake on progress.”
The Vietnamese generals who greeted Commander Le — whose full name is Hung Ba Le — might have had reason to have mixed feelings.
Commander Le’s father, Thong Ba Le, who is now 68, was himself a commander in the wartime South Vietnamese Navy and for a time held a senior position here in Danang. In 1975 it was this same Communist military he was fleeing as his base came under attack by rocket and mortar fire. The family spent two days at sea before being rescued by a United States Navy vessel.
While he was able to take his wife and his four younger children when he fled, he was unable to rescue four older children, who were trapped in Hue, Commander Le said. Two of these sons spent several years in Communist re-education camps, he said.
After he reached the United States, the father’s story was a model of immigrant success as he worked his way up from busboy to manager of a grocery chain in Northern Virginia and provided for college educations for all of his children, including the four who followed eight years later in a formal departure program.
Commander Le is a model of the success of many children of refugees.
A standout scholar and athlete in high school, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1992 and was commissioned as a Navy officer. He is married with two children.
“I’m a lucky guy,” he said. “My dad got me out of the country. He did what he had to do. He gave us opportunities to have a good life in the United States.”
Aboard the Vietnamese tug that brought Commander Le ashore was a man with quite a different set of memories: Chief Engineer Nguyen Van Ne, 50, said that as a child he had been terrified of American soldiers.
“They burned down my parents’ house,” he said. “They burned it down because they thought we were Communists.”
But he said that those memories were in the past now and that he would like to visit the United States “just to go and have a look.”
“In America people are really good in their professions,” he said. “They get a good education and they get ahead, like Commander Le. He studied and he rose in his line of work.”
Like some second-generation immigrants, Commander Le never seems to have looked backward, learning only a little of the Vietnamese language and very little about his father’s past or his family’s history.
And so his visit on Sunday to his home city of Hue, 50 miles north of Danang, to meet the aunts and uncles who are his only relatives in Vietnam was a voyage of discovery of his roots.
“Something I recently learned was that my dad was not the first Vietnamese naval officer,” he said. “Back in imperial times, my great, great, great, great — four or five greats — grandfather served with the emperor. He was like an admiral.”
Commander Le prayed at the family’s ancestral shrines, visited their graves and learned of what he said were his family’s royal connections in the old imperial capital.
“I had noodle soup by the Perfume River, sitting on little plastic stools,” he said. “I definitely felt like a Vietnamese, just enjoying that food and the company of my family.”
Although he hardly mentioned the war to his children, Commander Le’s father has written accounts of his escape, bitter at what he calls the abandonment and failure of ideals of the withdrawing American military.
He has refused to return to Communist Vietnam, saying he fears for his safety, although it is unlikely that he would face difficulties. Though he is proud to be an American, he said in a telephone interview, he still honors the red and yellow flag of the former South Vietnam as a symbol of freedom and democracy.
Here in Danang, the flags in dispute were the Stars and Stripes and the gold star of Communist Vietnam.
According to United States Navy custom, the flag of the host nation is to be displayed only on the quarterdeck, beside the American flag, said a public affairs officer, Cmdr. Jeff Davis of the United States Seventh Fleet.
The Vietnamese custom is to fly their flag high at a level equivalent to that of the visiting nation, he said.
In previous port calls, the Navy has bent its traditions in honor of Vietnamese custom, Commander Davis said. But this time the Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, held firmly to American custom.
After two hours of unhappy discussions, the top Vietnamese military and civilian brass began to walk off the pier, abandoning the welcoming ceremony. At just that moment, their flag inched its way upward and began to flutter side by side with American flag.
“It’s beautiful,” one Vietnamese general said, looking up.
“Each country has its own customs.”
The next morning, though, reporters noticed that the Vietnamese flag was flying just six inches lower than the Stars and Stripes.
DANANG, Vietnam — Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.
A youthful and smiling man of 39, he bore on his shoulders the weight of the symbolism of cautiously warming military ties between Vietnam and the United States in the latest of fewer than a dozen naval port calls since 2003.
But the symbolism quickly became more nuanced as his welcoming ceremony was delayed by a dispute between the sides over the display of the red Vietnamese flag with its gold star aboard the Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, which had just pulled in to port.
Two hours later the flag was finally raised high on the yardarm, seemingly in accord with the Vietnamese demand and contrary to American naval custom.
The waiting generals began to smile again, the red carpet was rolled out, and Commander Le was free to proceed with his return.
“Stepping ashore was awesome,” he said after landing from his destroyer, the Lassen, which was anchored in Danang Harbor.
“To be able to return to Vietnam after 35 years and to be able to do it as commander of a United States naval warship was an incredible honor and a privilege.”
He was returning to a very different Vietnam from the one he fled at the age of 5 with his parents and three of his siblings. Most people in this young nation, like Commander Le himself, have no memory of the war.
In the last decade or more, Vietnam has opened its economy, increased trade with the United States and risen from postwar poverty even as the Communist government maintains control of the press and political expression.
The city of Danang today, with its four new bridges, its broad streets and its emerging high-rise skyline, is almost unrecognizable to those who were here during the war years.
Despite the changes, the flag-raising dispute and the background of Commander Le’s own story illustrated the complexities of a relationship that remains shadowed by the war even as it moves tentatively forward.
“Gradual and steady,” said Carlyle B. Thayer, an expert on the Vietnamese armed forces, describing the relationship. “The Americans see a glacier moving, and they call it progress.”
He said Vietnam had been slow to accept American overtures of closer military ties, hoping to balance Chinese influence in the region with an American presence but stepping carefully to avoid offending Beijing.
“The two considerations that govern the Vietnamese are worries about China and deep suspicion of the United States,” said Mr. Thayer, a specialist on Vietnam at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra. “Suspicion is the underlying feature that puts a brake on progress.”
The Vietnamese generals who greeted Commander Le — whose full name is Hung Ba Le — might have had reason to have mixed feelings.
Commander Le’s father, Thong Ba Le, who is now 68, was himself a commander in the wartime South Vietnamese Navy and for a time held a senior position here in Danang. In 1975 it was this same Communist military he was fleeing as his base came under attack by rocket and mortar fire. The family spent two days at sea before being rescued by a United States Navy vessel.
While he was able to take his wife and his four younger children when he fled, he was unable to rescue four older children, who were trapped in Hue, Commander Le said. Two of these sons spent several years in Communist re-education camps, he said.
After he reached the United States, the father’s story was a model of immigrant success as he worked his way up from busboy to manager of a grocery chain in Northern Virginia and provided for college educations for all of his children, including the four who followed eight years later in a formal departure program.
Commander Le is a model of the success of many children of refugees.
A standout scholar and athlete in high school, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1992 and was commissioned as a Navy officer. He is married with two children.
“I’m a lucky guy,” he said. “My dad got me out of the country. He did what he had to do. He gave us opportunities to have a good life in the United States.”
Aboard the Vietnamese tug that brought Commander Le ashore was a man with quite a different set of memories: Chief Engineer Nguyen Van Ne, 50, said that as a child he had been terrified of American soldiers.
“They burned down my parents’ house,” he said. “They burned it down because they thought we were Communists.”
But he said that those memories were in the past now and that he would like to visit the United States “just to go and have a look.”
“In America people are really good in their professions,” he said. “They get a good education and they get ahead, like Commander Le. He studied and he rose in his line of work.”
Like some second-generation immigrants, Commander Le never seems to have looked backward, learning only a little of the Vietnamese language and very little about his father’s past or his family’s history.
And so his visit on Sunday to his home city of Hue, 50 miles north of Danang, to meet the aunts and uncles who are his only relatives in Vietnam was a voyage of discovery of his roots.
“Something I recently learned was that my dad was not the first Vietnamese naval officer,” he said. “Back in imperial times, my great, great, great, great — four or five greats — grandfather served with the emperor. He was like an admiral.”
Commander Le prayed at the family’s ancestral shrines, visited their graves and learned of what he said were his family’s royal connections in the old imperial capital.
“I had noodle soup by the Perfume River, sitting on little plastic stools,” he said. “I definitely felt like a Vietnamese, just enjoying that food and the company of my family.”
Although he hardly mentioned the war to his children, Commander Le’s father has written accounts of his escape, bitter at what he calls the abandonment and failure of ideals of the withdrawing American military.
He has refused to return to Communist Vietnam, saying he fears for his safety, although it is unlikely that he would face difficulties. Though he is proud to be an American, he said in a telephone interview, he still honors the red and yellow flag of the former South Vietnam as a symbol of freedom and democracy.
Here in Danang, the flags in dispute were the Stars and Stripes and the gold star of Communist Vietnam.
According to United States Navy custom, the flag of the host nation is to be displayed only on the quarterdeck, beside the American flag, said a public affairs officer, Cmdr. Jeff Davis of the United States Seventh Fleet.
The Vietnamese custom is to fly their flag high at a level equivalent to that of the visiting nation, he said.
In previous port calls, the Navy has bent its traditions in honor of Vietnamese custom, Commander Davis said. But this time the Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, held firmly to American custom.
After two hours of unhappy discussions, the top Vietnamese military and civilian brass began to walk off the pier, abandoning the welcoming ceremony. At just that moment, their flag inched its way upward and began to flutter side by side with American flag.
“It’s beautiful,” one Vietnamese general said, looking up.
“Each country has its own customs.”
The next morning, though, reporters noticed that the Vietnamese flag was flying just six inches lower than the Stars and Stripes.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tricare Future Threatened
Tricare For Life was instituted to correct the broken promise that military retirees would recieve free health care coverage for life and it covers the Medicare co-pay. Now a heavy assualt has begun on Veterans/Retirees benefits to pay other programs our President promised during the campaign. And it is a high priority of his admiistration.
Please pay attention to what is happening and contact your congressional representatives to protect our benefits.
Please pay attention to what is happening and contact your congressional representatives to protect our benefits.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
First American Indian to fly for the Navy
Reported in the Washington Times today, 87 year old Tom Oxendine, was reported to be the first Native American Indian to fly in the Navy despite strict segregation policies. During WWII he served as a pilot flying the 02SU Kingfisher off of the USS Mobile during the Pacific campaign. He was awarded the DFC for heroic action in rescuing a downed airman off of Yap Island in 1944.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Air Story Out Of Vietnam
By Lawrence E. Pence - Colonel, USAF (Ret)
For most servicemen who served in Vietnam , the Freedom Bird was that civil airliner which took them back to the land of the big PX at the end of their tour. Mine was a bit different sort of Freedom Bird.
In mid-1967, as a junior Air Force Captain, I was detailed to 7th AF Hq in Saigon as an Air Technical Intelligence Liaison Officer, short name: ATLO (the "I" gets left out, as people look strangely at anyone who calls himself an ATILO, thinking he is somehow related to Atilla the Hun). My job was to provide 7AF and the air war the best technical intelligence support that the Foreign Technology Division of AF Systems Command (my parent organization) could provide, in whatever area or discipline needed. Also I was to collect such technical intelligence as became available. This was a tall order for a young Captain, and this assignment provided much excitement, including the Tet Offensive.
At that time, Operation Rolling Thunder was underway, the bombing of military targets in North Vietnam . The weather in NVN was often lousy, making it difficult to find and accurately strike the assigned targets, so a radar control system was set up to direct the strike force to their targets.
This system was installed in a remote, sheer-sided karst mountain just inside Laos on the northern Laos/NVN border. The site could be accessed only by helicopter or a tortuous trail winding up the near-vertical mountainside, so it was judged to be easily defensible.
The mountaintop was relatively flat and about 30 acres in size. On it was a tiny Hmong village called Phu Pha Ti, a small garrison of Thai and Meo mercenaries for defense, a helicopter pad and ops shack for the CIA-owned Air America Airline, and the radar site, which was manned by "sheep-dipped" US Air Force enlisted men in civilian clothes. Both the US and NVN paid lip service to the fiction that Laos was a neutral country, and no foreign military were stationed there, when in reality we had a couple of hundred people spread over several sites, and NVN had thousands on the Ho Chi Minh trail in eastern Laos. This particular site was called Lima (L for Laos ) Site 85. The fighter-bomber crews called it Channel 97 (the radar frequency), and all aircrews called it North Station, since it was the furthest north facility in "friendly" territory. Anywhere north of North Station was bad guy land.
The Channel 97 radar system was an old SAC precision bomb scoring radar which could locate an aircraft to within a few meters at a hundred miles. In this application, the strike force would fly out from Lima Site 85 a given distance on a given radial, and the site operators would tell the strike leader precisely when to release his bomb load. It was surprisingly accurate, and allowed the strikes to be run at night or in bad weather.
Th is capability was badly hurting the North Vietnamese war effort, so they decided to take out Lima Site 85. Because of the difficulty of mounting a ground assault on Lima Site 85, and its remote location, an air strike was planned. Believe it or not, the NVNAF chose biplanes as their "strike bombers!"
This has to be the only combat use of biplanes since the 1930's. The aircraft used were Antonov designed AN-2 general purpose 'workhorse" biplanes with a single 1000hp radial piston engine and about one ton payload. Actually, once you get past the obvious "Snoopy and the Red Baron" image, the AN-2 was not a bad choice for this mission. Its biggest disadvantage is, like all biplanes, it is slow. The Russians use the An-2 for a multitude of things, such as medevac, parachute training, flying school bus, crop dusting, and so on.
An AN-2 just recently flew over the North Pole. In fact, if you measure success of an aircraft design by the criteria of number produced and length of time in series production, you could say that the AN-2 is the most successful aircraft design in the history of aviation!
The NVNAF fitted out their AN-2 "attack bombers with a 12 shot 57mm folding fin aerial rocket pod under each lower wing, and 20 250mm mortar rounds with aerial bomb fuses set in vertical tubes let into the floor of the aircraft cargo bay. These were dropped through holes cut in the cargo bay floor. Simple hinged bomb-bay doors closed these holes in flight.
The pilot could salvo his bomb load by opening these doors. This was a pretty good munitions load to take out a soft, undefended target like a radar site. Altogether, the mission was well planned and equipped and should have been successful, but Murphy's Law prevailed.
A three plane strike force was mounted, with two attack air-craft and one standing off as command and radio relay. They knew the radar site was on the mountaintop, but they did not have good intelligence as to its precise location, It was well camouflaged, and could not be seen ;readily from the air. They also did not realize that we had "anti-aircraft artillery" and "air defense interceptor" forces at the site. Neither did we realize this.
The AN-2 strike force rolled in on the target, mistook the Air America ops shack for the radar site, and proceeded to ventilate it. The aforementioned "anti-aircraft artillery" force - one little Thai mercenary about five feet tall and all balls- heard the commotion, ran out on the helicopter pad, stood in the path of the attacking aircraft spraying rockets and bombs everywhere, and emptied a 27-round clip from his AK-47 into the AN-2, which then crashed and burned.
At this juncture, the second attack aircraft broke off and turned north towards home.
The "air defense interceptor" force was an unarmed Air America Huey helicopter which was by happenstance on the pad at the time, the pilot and flight mechanic having a Coke in the ops shack. When holes started appearing in the roof, they ran to their Huey and got airborne, not quite believing t he sight of two biplanes fleeing north. Then the Huey pilot, no slouch in the balls department either, realized that his Huey was faster than the biplanes! So he did the only thing a real pilot could do -attack!
The Huey overtook the AN-2's a few miles inside North Vietnam , unknown to the AN-2's as their rearward visibility is nil. The Huey flew over the rearmost AN-2 and the helicopter's down-wash stalled out the upper wing of the AN-2.
Suddenly the hapless AN-2 pilot found himself sinking like a stone! So he pulled the yoke back in his lap and further reduced his forward speed. Mean-while, the Huey flight mechanic, not to be outdone in the macho contest, crawled out on the Huey's skid and, one-handed, emptied his AK-47 into the cockpit area of the AN-2, killing or wounding the pilot and copilot. At this point, the AN-2 went into a flat spin and crashed into a mountainside, but did not burn.
It should come as no surprise that the Air America pilot and flight mechanic found themselves in a heap of trouble with the State Department REMF's in Vientiane . (REMF is an acronym. The first three words are Rear, Echelon, and Mother.) In spite of the striped-pants cookie-pushers' discomfort at (horrors!) an inter-national incident (or perhaps, partly because of it) these guys were heroes to everybody in the theatre who didn't wear puce panties and talk with a lisp. They accomplished a couple of firsts: (1) The first and only combat shootdown of a biplane by a helicopter, and (2) The first known CIA air-to-air victory.
Here's what the Andropov AN-2 Colt looks like -- get more info at http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/antonov-2-colt
For most servicemen who served in Vietnam , the Freedom Bird was that civil airliner which took them back to the land of the big PX at the end of their tour. Mine was a bit different sort of Freedom Bird.
In mid-1967, as a junior Air Force Captain, I was detailed to 7th AF Hq in Saigon as an Air Technical Intelligence Liaison Officer, short name: ATLO (the "I" gets left out, as people look strangely at anyone who calls himself an ATILO, thinking he is somehow related to Atilla the Hun). My job was to provide 7AF and the air war the best technical intelligence support that the Foreign Technology Division of AF Systems Command (my parent organization) could provide, in whatever area or discipline needed. Also I was to collect such technical intelligence as became available. This was a tall order for a young Captain, and this assignment provided much excitement, including the Tet Offensive.
At that time, Operation Rolling Thunder was underway, the bombing of military targets in North Vietnam . The weather in NVN was often lousy, making it difficult to find and accurately strike the assigned targets, so a radar control system was set up to direct the strike force to their targets.
This system was installed in a remote, sheer-sided karst mountain just inside Laos on the northern Laos/NVN border. The site could be accessed only by helicopter or a tortuous trail winding up the near-vertical mountainside, so it was judged to be easily defensible.
The mountaintop was relatively flat and about 30 acres in size. On it was a tiny Hmong village called Phu Pha Ti, a small garrison of Thai and Meo mercenaries for defense, a helicopter pad and ops shack for the CIA-owned Air America Airline, and the radar site, which was manned by "sheep-dipped" US Air Force enlisted men in civilian clothes. Both the US and NVN paid lip service to the fiction that Laos was a neutral country, and no foreign military were stationed there, when in reality we had a couple of hundred people spread over several sites, and NVN had thousands on the Ho Chi Minh trail in eastern Laos. This particular site was called Lima (L for Laos ) Site 85. The fighter-bomber crews called it Channel 97 (the radar frequency), and all aircrews called it North Station, since it was the furthest north facility in "friendly" territory. Anywhere north of North Station was bad guy land.
The Channel 97 radar system was an old SAC precision bomb scoring radar which could locate an aircraft to within a few meters at a hundred miles. In this application, the strike force would fly out from Lima Site 85 a given distance on a given radial, and the site operators would tell the strike leader precisely when to release his bomb load. It was surprisingly accurate, and allowed the strikes to be run at night or in bad weather.
Th is capability was badly hurting the North Vietnamese war effort, so they decided to take out Lima Site 85. Because of the difficulty of mounting a ground assault on Lima Site 85, and its remote location, an air strike was planned. Believe it or not, the NVNAF chose biplanes as their "strike bombers!"
This has to be the only combat use of biplanes since the 1930's. The aircraft used were Antonov designed AN-2 general purpose 'workhorse" biplanes with a single 1000hp radial piston engine and about one ton payload. Actually, once you get past the obvious "Snoopy and the Red Baron" image, the AN-2 was not a bad choice for this mission. Its biggest disadvantage is, like all biplanes, it is slow. The Russians use the An-2 for a multitude of things, such as medevac, parachute training, flying school bus, crop dusting, and so on.
An AN-2 just recently flew over the North Pole. In fact, if you measure success of an aircraft design by the criteria of number produced and length of time in series production, you could say that the AN-2 is the most successful aircraft design in the history of aviation!
The NVNAF fitted out their AN-2 "attack bombers with a 12 shot 57mm folding fin aerial rocket pod under each lower wing, and 20 250mm mortar rounds with aerial bomb fuses set in vertical tubes let into the floor of the aircraft cargo bay. These were dropped through holes cut in the cargo bay floor. Simple hinged bomb-bay doors closed these holes in flight.
The pilot could salvo his bomb load by opening these doors. This was a pretty good munitions load to take out a soft, undefended target like a radar site. Altogether, the mission was well planned and equipped and should have been successful, but Murphy's Law prevailed.
A three plane strike force was mounted, with two attack air-craft and one standing off as command and radio relay. They knew the radar site was on the mountaintop, but they did not have good intelligence as to its precise location, It was well camouflaged, and could not be seen ;readily from the air. They also did not realize that we had "anti-aircraft artillery" and "air defense interceptor" forces at the site. Neither did we realize this.
The AN-2 strike force rolled in on the target, mistook the Air America ops shack for the radar site, and proceeded to ventilate it. The aforementioned "anti-aircraft artillery" force - one little Thai mercenary about five feet tall and all balls- heard the commotion, ran out on the helicopter pad, stood in the path of the attacking aircraft spraying rockets and bombs everywhere, and emptied a 27-round clip from his AK-47 into the AN-2, which then crashed and burned.
At this juncture, the second attack aircraft broke off and turned north towards home.
The "air defense interceptor" force was an unarmed Air America Huey helicopter which was by happenstance on the pad at the time, the pilot and flight mechanic having a Coke in the ops shack. When holes started appearing in the roof, they ran to their Huey and got airborne, not quite believing t he sight of two biplanes fleeing north. Then the Huey pilot, no slouch in the balls department either, realized that his Huey was faster than the biplanes! So he did the only thing a real pilot could do -attack!
The Huey overtook the AN-2's a few miles inside North Vietnam , unknown to the AN-2's as their rearward visibility is nil. The Huey flew over the rearmost AN-2 and the helicopter's down-wash stalled out the upper wing of the AN-2.
Suddenly the hapless AN-2 pilot found himself sinking like a stone! So he pulled the yoke back in his lap and further reduced his forward speed. Mean-while, the Huey flight mechanic, not to be outdone in the macho contest, crawled out on the Huey's skid and, one-handed, emptied his AK-47 into the cockpit area of the AN-2, killing or wounding the pilot and copilot. At this point, the AN-2 went into a flat spin and crashed into a mountainside, but did not burn.
It should come as no surprise that the Air America pilot and flight mechanic found themselves in a heap of trouble with the State Department REMF's in Vientiane . (REMF is an acronym. The first three words are Rear, Echelon, and Mother.) In spite of the striped-pants cookie-pushers' discomfort at (horrors!) an inter-national incident (or perhaps, partly because of it) these guys were heroes to everybody in the theatre who didn't wear puce panties and talk with a lisp. They accomplished a couple of firsts: (1) The first and only combat shootdown of a biplane by a helicopter, and (2) The first known CIA air-to-air victory.
Here's what the Andropov AN-2 Colt looks like -- get more info at http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/antonov-2-colt
Monday, August 31, 2009
Pilot Was One of the Last Surviving Flying Tigers
In today's Washington Post we learned that Air Force Major General Charles R. Bond Jr. passed away. He was one of the last Flying Tigers. In 1996, a day after the 55th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Air Force awarded 255 Distinguished Flying Crosses to surviving members of the Flying Tigers or their families. Gen. Bond told reporters that the Distinguished Flying Cross he received that day was one of the greatest honors of his life.
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