Combat Reflections of a USAF FAC in the Vietnam War.

Part II

The pilots of the 23rd Tactical Air Support Squadron were stationed at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in northeast Thailand about 400 miles up-country from Bangkok. The airbase commonly called NKP, Naked Phantom and Naked Fanny was about eight miles west of the Mekong River separating Laos and Thailand. The runway and parking ramps were perforated steel planking (PSP), which was extremely slick when wet.

At NKP, Chic Randow and I became Cricket FACs and part of a proud tradition of brave pilots taking small, unarmed aircraft deep into enemy territory. Our squadron patch had been designed by the Walt Disney Studios. Jiminy Cricket floated beneath his umbrella complete with a UHF radio in its handle and looked for the enemy.

Our mission was to fly surveillance over the parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that snaked through the Steel Tiger sector of Laos and the immediately adjacent areas of North Vietnam. We were to look for, and direct attacks against, the big Russian, Czech, and Polish trucks that carried weapons, ammunition, people, and other supplies to the war in South Vietnam.

Although we were known as the Crickets, our squadron callsign was Nail. Each FAC had a personal callsign such as Nail 12 or Nail 59. On approximately 180 combat missions in the O-1 Bird Dog, I wore a basic olive-drab flight suit and standard combat boots. One calf pocket carried a vinyl escape and evasion (E & E) map of Southeast Asia. In the other, I had a hunting jacket made of camouflaged mosquito net. During an E & E exercise at Snake School (USAF Jungle Survival School at Clark AFB, Philippine Islands), the jacket had helped me evade a Negrito tracker who had passed within about ten feet of my hiding place. Over the flight suit, I wore a flak vest, a parachute, and a survival vest with two emergency radios and a number of other gadgets. I also had binoculars, a map case, and a kneeboard. I wore a regular helmet and a pistol belt with a standard issue .38 caliber Combat Masterpiece, a hunting knife, a canteen, and some extra clips for my M-16. I carried my little bag of bullets" with about fifteen more clips for my M-16, which had a couple of clips on its strap and another in the weapon.

The O-1 Flight Manual warned that the O-1F had not been structurally tested above 2,400 pounds. We did it fairly regularly, especially when we added a combat photographer in the back seat along with four White Phosphorous marking rockets under the wings and all those M-16 cartridges.

During NKP's southwest monsoon season in the summer, Chic and I were assigned temporarily to the US Marine Base at Khe Sanh, South Vietnam. Chic came back with a hand grenade for me. I added it to my bag. However, concerns about getting unceremoniously blown out of my O-1 caused me to wrap so much tape around the grenade, I probably wouldn't have been able to make it explode if I had needed it.

The squadron at NKP had great ground crews, and it seemed to take about three or four airmen to load me in and all my gear. I flew my first few Bird Dog missions with an unsettling feeling: if I needed to step out while flying, I wasn't sure I could reverse the loading process without those three or four airmen. After a month or so, my attitude had changed. Instead of being loaded in, the feeling became that of strapping on an O-1 and becoming an integral part of the aircraft.

On most daytime missions, we flew over roads that were empty. While the analysts at the DoD probably figured we were wasting fuel over empty roads, the roads were empty because we were patrolling overhead. So, without more lucrative targets, we often directed airstrikes against the roads and potential truck parks that were within 200 meters of a motorable road. Because the North Vietnamese knew our Rules of Engagement limited our attacks to the 400-meter corridor along roads we could see, the NVA generally developed their truck parks well away from the roads we could see. Access to and from the truck parks was on camouflaged roads we couldn't see. The main roads were 60 to 120 miles from NKP. We flew about an hour en route each way and had about an hour over the roads on most O-1 missions. To provide some margin of safety, a flight of two O-1s was assigned to each mission. The wingman flew random patterns about 500 feet higher than the leader. The second O-1 helped intimidate the gunners. If they didn't get both of us, the second FAC was going to call in help and try to rain bombs on the gunners who had fired. The dense concentrations of 37mm AAA around the fords, mountain passes, etc., had an effective range of 5,600 feet. The AAA had shot down three Bird Dogs in the previous three weeks, so the Nail FACs were directed to fly their O-1s at least 5,600 feet above the ground in the high-threat areas. The 37mm shells came at us in groups of about 60 if a four-gun emplacement fired. The shells exploded on contact, and a single hit was likely to blow a hole at least three feet in diameter. Check your Cessna and see where you might be able to give up that much sheet metal and keep flying. So most of our FAC missions were flown at about 6,000 and 6,500 feet. I used a pair of 7x35 binoculars, but we seldom saw what the North Vietnamese wanted to keep hidden under the jungle canopies.

Once we reached the Trail, we had another rule that probably produced the highest percentage of passenger air sickness of any USAF aircraft. We seldom flew more than ten seconds in a straight line, often rocking from 45-degrees of bank on one side to maybe 60 degrees on the other. (Try that for an hour with your spouse in the back seat and see how long your marriage lasts.) One morning I took an A-1 Skyraider pilot along to look for one of his buddies who had blown off a wing the previous night trying to drop some fancy munitions. We rocked around for about an hour in a couple of miles visibility. Afterward the fighter pilot told me that was the first time he'd ever been sick in any aircraft. I never learned how the combat photographers who went along on many O-1 missions solved the problem, but they did.