F-111 Operations In Vietnam

When the North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam in the Spring of 1972, we began to get preliminary alert signals. We knew that if F-111s were sent to Southeast Asia, we would be going since ours were the only combat-ready 111s. These alert signals were secret of course and provided some comical episodes as the entire unit stampeded the legal office to get their wills and powers of attorney up to date without telling the personnel troops what was going on. There were two false starts before we got the real order to move. After the first of these, I was assigned to the 429th TFS.

It had been decided that when we did deploy, we would try to set a record for elapsed time between the alert order and bombs-on-target. To do this, the two squadrons which deployed (the 429th and 430th) were divided into three groups. The first two groups were to act as ferry crews, while the third group would fly the first combat mission. The combat crews went directly to Takhli, where they had time to rest up and plan their missions. I deployed to Guam aboard a C-141 and had about 24 hours of rest before the first group arrived with the aeroplanes.

From Guam to Takhli was about a six or seven-hour flight. We hit a tanker over the Philippines, then went low level when we crossed the South Vietnamese border into Thailand. After checking the systems out, we went on into Takhli.

The first mission was to be flown by six aircraft. We had thought that it would be a high-altitude drop against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos or against some of the passes leading to it in North Vietnam. This would have been a relatively safe first mission and would have given the crews a chance to further check their systems and become acclimated to combat. Instead, the target package was changed while we were en route to Takhli. The six crews who were to fly those missions were assigned targets in route package five, the western part of North Vietnam. (Route package six, conceded to contain the most sophisticated and dense air defences in the history of aerial warfare, including the Red River Delta, Hanoi, and Haiphong. Route package five was just to the west.)

The aircraft was on the ground for about four hours for servicing, and then it was night and time to bomb North Vietnam. Three of the six aircraft ground-aborted· the mission with equipment failure, the fourth aircraft aborted in the air after his ECM equipment failed, the fifth aeroplane never returned from the mission, (and we never found out what happened to him) and the sixth aircraft couldn’t get to his primary target and was forced to hit the alternative. Incidentally, my regular A/C, Capt. Bob Sponeybarger, flew this aircraft. It was quite a shock to get up the next morning and learn that the mission had been such a dismal failure. I’m sure more than a few people were remembering the premature combat trial of the 111 in 1968 and thinking: “Here we go again. ” (Author’s note: The national news media was for sure and, though they didn’t jump on the F-111 until a further three aircraft were lost, they did so with a vengeance. In their December 4, 1972, issue TIME ran a cartoon showing three F-111s in formation with lemons in place of the national insignia. They reported the following comments made by Senator William: “The F-111 has often proved to be of a death trap to its crews. The mysterious disappearance of yet another F-111 makes it appear that the Air Force is unnecessarily risking the lives of American pilots in an unsafe and defective plane. ” Politicians of l’roxmire’s ilk were a bane to’ the military throughout the war in South-cast Asia, often ignoring salient facts in a story in order to garner publicity for themselves. In the case of the TIME story, the facts concerning the F-111’s combat record that to date were reported, but the aforementioned cart created an impression that was difficult to overcome, facts or no facts. )

I have my own theory about what happened to that first aeroplane to go down. The TFR is equipped with three modes: Hard, Medium, and Soft ride. They are graduated according to the number of G forces put on the aeroplane as it climbs and descends to maintain a given altitude. In gently rolling terrain, the hard ride would not produce any great discomfort. The terrain we flew through was anything but gentle. The karst is the most singular feature of North Vietnamese geography. It consists of vertical mountains, sticking straight up . . . as much as 2000 feet straight up . . . from the rain forest and marshland. If, for example, you are at 500 feet, and your TFR sees a 2000-foot mountain, the hard ride is going to subject you to instantaneous and constant 3Gs until you get over that mountain, then you will be plastered against your straps with zero-G as the TFR seeks that 500-foot altitude on the other side of the mountain. I know of at least one of our crews that was subjected to this, and they reported that it is an absolutely incapacitating experience. They could do nothing until the aircraft had levelled out again. When you lose command of your destiny, at night, over enemy territory, your chances for survival are noticeably depreciated. We eventually settled on. the median ride mode as the best operational setting when we had to go through the karst.

We got grounded after that mission. The systems were then checked out more thoroughly on training routes in Thailand. Our first combat missions after that were medium altitude drops on the passes just over the North Vietnamese border, in route package one.

After that, we began a schedule that generally had us flying every other night. On those missions, we flew alone, with no escort, and we planned our own tactics and routes to and from the targets. This gave us the best possible security and ensured that the enemy would not be forewarned. The only people other than the crew, who would have any idea of your final run-in, would be the radar prediction people. When we had our target and had settled on the best approach to it, we would go to them for advice on the kinds of radar offsets we could expect to get for the weapons delivery system. The obvious disadvantage to this was that if you failed to return from a mission, no one had any idea of where to begin looking for you.

The consequences of these tactics . . . having little chance of being found if you went down . . . were far less important to the crews than the guaranteed factor of surprise when you hit your target. That surprise achieved through our low-level penetration, and secret ingress and egress routes was our ticket into and out of the highest air defence threat environment ever encountered.

After the third F-111 loss, the more vocal critics of the military in general, and the F-111 in particular, began to ask questions. Of course, we couldn’t tell them much. Not only did we not know what had happened to the aeroplanes, we also did not know where it had happened. They put pressure on the military, and the upshot of the whole deal was that we were instructed to file a flight plan for each mission, showing our route to and from the target, and the times we planned to hit each turn point. We also had to call “Moonbeam”, the airborne command post for operations over the north, when we hit the turn points. We were allowed to code the calls, but they wanted to hear from us when we hit those turn points. If they didn’t hear from us, they would strict calling us on the radio. Now, this is a little risky, considering that you are down to within 300 feet of the ground, probably travelling at 450 knots or better, at night in the weather, and busier than hell keeping track of your navigation. You just don’t have a lot of time to be calling people on the radio. Well, we never did give them the exact coordinates. They would be somewhere in that bucket alright, but to give them the exact coordinates and have that information transmitted down to Saigon . . . which we considered to be a sieve as far as security was concerned . . . Well, that just wouldn’t have been healthy.

Of my 35 missions, three stand out in my mind as most memorable. On the first, we were after a rail siding on the Northeast Railway. It was snuggled deep in a valley, between 2000-foot cliffs. The only possible way to get at it was to fly up the valley. If we had flown across the valley, our radar offsets would have been too poor to give us a chance at it. Capt. Bob Sponeybarger was my pilot on all of my missions, and we had developed our tactics early in the campaign. Each crew had their own set of tactics, and ours were to be stabilised in the terrain following mode, at low level, before crossing the border into North Vietnam. On this mission, the weather was right down on the ground. We flew down the north side of Thud Ridge, then out around the southeast edge of it to line up with the valley. The early F-111 computers could not take much in the way of aircraft bank angle, so we had to make a very wide sweeping turn to line up. We never got above 500 feet the whole mission . . . except for one notable instance, which I will come to later. We were loaded with 12,500-pound Mark 82 “slicks”, (low drag bombs) which meant we had to toss them at the target. Our standard load for the low-level mission was the high-drag “Snakeye” version of the Mark 82, which allowed us to stay low after release. In this case, though, the valley we were in came to an abrupt end just past the target, which meant that we were going to have to pull up right after release anyway. It was very late at night, and I remember that we were concerned about getting out of route package six before daylight. The system worked like clockwork though, and we put our bombs right on the money, pulled up, and were a couple of miles off to the north before the AAA opened up. They had no idea of where we were of course, and were just firing blindly. On the way out, still in TFR, we popped over a small hill, and there on the other side was a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms held more than the normal amount of pilot fear for F-111 crews because the TFR was likely to interpret heavy concentrations of precipitation as solid terra firma and to react accordingly.

Sure enough, I didn’t have time for anything more than the universally acknowledged comment for sticky situations, (Oh shit!) and we were up to 10,000 feet. (The TFR automatically initiates a 4G pullup if it senses a “glitch” in its system, or· “sees” something it would like to avoid. ) Fortunately, by that time we had left the high-threat area, and the only indication of enemy activity we got was an early warning radar looking at us. We got back down in the weeds though, and kept going at a high rate of knots.

Another mission that stands out in my mind occurred on December 18, 1972. It was the first night of Linebacker II, and the F-111s were assigned the task of taking out all the military airfields in North Vietnam, prior to the main strike forces coming in. Our target was Hoa Lac, just southeast of Hanoi. Other aircraft were to hit Phuc Yen, Kep, Yen Bai and Bae Mai. We were in the clouds during the entire run-in to the target, but we broke out just prior to getting to the target. It was laying right in front of us, and the runways were raised just enough that they gave good radar returns. I put the crosshairs on the runway and let the computer release the bombs. Later photos showed that we got two on the taxiways and one on the runway. The airfield was shut down for the rest of Linebacker II. That whole area around Hanoi were multiple SAM rings, and I had inadvertently left one of my ECM jammers on.

My jammer began to “argue” with one of the SAM radars, which attracted its attention and highlighted our general position. (Author’s note: The exact way in which the various ECM equipment works is, of course, secret. In this case, the jammer in question was probably a deception type, designed to mask a specific target whose position was known to the anti-aircraft defences prior to the jammer being turned on. ) As soon as I turned the jammer off, they lost contact with us, as we dropped to an even lower altitude. We were clean now, with the bombs gone, and we were going like a raped ape. I believe this was the fastest I ever remember going on these missions. Our Mach meter indicated. 92, which I later figured to be 630 knots.

As I said before, each crew developed its own tactics. But there were several procedures that were common to all crews. One was the sweep angle on the wings during low-level high-speed operations. We had found that an angle between 45 and 50 degrees gave us the best trade-off in speed, range, and maneuverability at low level. It was a supersonic wing, but still very efficient in other ways. I don’t know of anyone who actually got supersonic in the 111 on these low-level missions, since getting through the mach at low level would require the use of afterburner, and you never wanted to use the burner at night because of the spectacular visual effect, which would have made things very easy for the AAA gunners.

The only real serious case of SAM firings at all that I know of was caused by a fly-up while the crew was inbound to the target. The fly-up allowed the North Vietnamese to get them on radar, and they couldn’t get low enough to lose that radar once it had them. When they got to the target, which was in the Hanoi area, it was laced with AAA fire. They plunged into it though, hit the target, and broke for home. As soon as they pulled off the target, they had a series of five SAs fired at them. The WSO was very busy with all of his countermeasures equipment, and they managed to avoid all the anti-aircraft.

These random fly-ups gave rise to the opinion that the enemy was firing chaff rockets up into our path, in order to cause a fly-up and allow them to acquire us on their radars.

Personally, I doubt this very much, since they really had no way of knowing when and where we were going to strike, and if they had, I don’t see how they could have gotten the rockets to explode at a low enough altitude. And finally, the chaff, while causing a fly-up, would probably have screwed up their own radar as well.

My last mission was by far the most memorable, though the memories are anything but happy. It was our second mission of Linebacker II. Our first mission was the strike against Hoa Lac Airfield on the night of December 18. Following that mission, we had a break of four days to allow the operations people to distribute the missions equally among all of the crews. During that break, I made the mistake of asking the Ops Officer for a mission to “downtown”. We had never been to any of the targets close to Hanoi, and both Bob and I were curious about the area. We had confidence in the F-111 and our tactics, and I guess we were eager to prove that we could challenge the most formidable air defence system ever devised and survive. It was not the first dangerous mission I had volunteered for, but I later promised myself that it was the last.

The target we were assigned was the river docks right in the centre of Hanoi. Now, “downtown” was a euphemism used to describe the magic ten-mile radius of the most intensive air defences around Hanoi. I really hadn’t expected to be sent right to the centre of it!

We took off from Takhli at about 2100, climbed to a medium altitude, and proceeded up through the Plain des Jars area of Laos into the Gorilla’s Head area of North Vietnam, where we began our let-down to penetration altitude.

This was December 22, which was really the height of the battle. The enemy was not as exhausted as he would become a week later, and the air defence crews were at their sharpest. We had been striking all around the Hanoi area, and, in fact, the river docks had been hit previously. Most of the strikes had been coming in from the southeast, since this gave the crews a more direct route out of the area, and minimised their exposure to the defences. We figured that they would be looking more closely at these southeast approaches, so we planned our run-in to the target from the north. After stabilizing in the TFR mode, we crossed to North Vietnam at 500 feet. The closer we got to Hanoi, the more we hugged the terrain. Our last leg before turning south was on the north side of Thud Ridge, which gave us complete masking from the air defence radars. When we came around the corner and turned south, we broke out of the weather. We were at three hundred feet, and there was a broken overcast above, with a full moon showing through the breaks in the clouds. Hardly the ideal F-111 weather. Visibility under the overcast was unlimited, and we could see the lights of Hanoi in the distance. We picked up our final run-in heading at Due Noi, about 10 miles due north of the target. At this point we were doing about 480 knots, and my impressions of the world outside the airplane are fragmentary, limited as they had to be since I was spending the majority of my time on the radar. I remember that they never did turn the lights off. They were welding the superstructure of the Paul Doumer Bridge, which we used for our radar offset in the final attack phase. We started to pick up some AAA fire, mostly 37-57mm stuff, five miles before we got to the target. It was the typical stuff, coming up with 111 clips of five, red and orange golf balls and, though there was a lot of it it was all behind us since they didn’t have us on radar and 11 was all directed at our sound. At that time I remember feeling a little letdown, since I had expected much heavier resistance. We had seen bigger stuff . . . 85 and 100mm . . . on a previous mission to Thai Nguyen. We later learned that the enemy had stopped shooting the big guns at low-level high speed targets because the rapid rate of traverse required was throwing the gun crews off the gun mounts and injuring them, and they had no hope of hitting us anyway. (Author’s note: Many of the civilian casualties claimed by North Vietnam to have been inflicted by US bombers were actually self-inflicted by the large calibre shells detonating at low altitude and spewing shrapnel indiscriminately about the countryside.)

But, though they weren’t coming close to us with their AAA, they were quite effectively tracing our path in the sky They had developed the tactics of blasting away with small arms fire . . . straight up . . . along this path, in the hope of getting a lucky hit. Two nights previous to our mission, one of the airplanes had come back with a hit in the extreme rear of its tailpipe. The previous night an airplane had returned with a hit in the stabilator. It seemed that they were getting the hang of their new tactics. And if I had been superstitious at all, I probably wouldn’t have flown the mission at all. Every one of the previous F-111s lost had a call sign ending in three, and they had all gone down on a Monday night. December 22 was a Monday, and our call sign was Jackel 33.

Our weapons system pickled off the twelve 500 pound Snakeyes as we roared over the docks at better than 550 miles an hour. With the F-111’s sophisticated system, and the good radar offset we had gotten from the Doumer Bridge, there was never much doubt that we would hit the target, and we could see the docks exploding as we rolled off the target and headed for the turn point for our initial leg back to base. As soon as we looked back in the cockpit, we saw that we had a utility hydraulic failure light. We didn’t think much of it at the time . . . we hadn’t felt any hits on the airplane, and we had gotten one of those lights on a previous mission. It was more of a minor irritation than anything else. But less than a minute later, we got a right engine fire warning light. We went through the bold-face procedures, shutting the engine down (Bold face refers to the instructions for emergency operations which appear in the flight manual. ) I called Moonbeam, reported that we were off the target and had lost an engine, and they acknowledged the call.

We had just reached the first set of foothills, and I had told Bob that we could start to climb, when I heard him say: “What the hell . . . !” I looked up from the radar to see him moving the control stick like he was operating a butter churn, and I saw that the entire warning-caution light panel was lit. There was no doubt about our next move, and with Bob’s command, “Eject! Eject!”, we fired the capsule rockets.

Everything worked as advertised, and it was a smooth ejection. When the parachutes opened, we were in the overcast, so we didn’t see the airplane hit, but we did see the glow of the explosion, and when we broke out we could see the wreckage burning fiercely. We came down on the side of a hill, and the capsule rolled over onto my side. But it was a real nice landing . . . like someone had raised your chair a couple of feet into the air and dropped It . . . and we both exited from Bob’s side completely unhurt. It was probably about 2230 when we hit the ground.

Fortunately, we had attended a jungle survival school a couple of weeks previously, and the lessons learned were still fresh in our minds. We had been told to separate as soon as possible, since it is much easier for one person to hide than two We would try to stay within a few hundred yards of each other to make the rescue as quick as possible when the Jolly Greens got to us . . . and we never doubted that they would come. We both had survival radios, and they were working just fine. It was the last I was to see of Bob for more than a month.

It was the beginning of the wet season in North Vietnam, and though the area we were in was not a thick jungle, the tall grass was quite wet, which made for a high degree of discomfort in the cool temperature. I found what I thought was a good hiding place, and settled down to wait for daylight, and our rescuers.

The North Vietnamese were out in force by 0430 the next morning searching for us. I had picked a hiding place right next to what was apparently one of the main trails up the side of the hill, and I spent most of the day literally frozen in place. I was so motionless that I wound up with a pinched nerve in my arm, which was under me all day. Shortly after dark, the last search party of the day came up the trail and paused next to my hiding place. They had a portable radio and were listening to Radio Hanoi, which I had assumed was knocked off the air by the bombing. After what seemed like an eternity, they moved off down the mountain.

I spent the next two nights moving to new hiding places. The weather in our area was so bad that we didn’t even see an airplane that we could call on our survival radios. On the third day, a flight of Sandy A-7s came into our area. Since Bob was closer to the top of the mountain, he did all the talking, relaying whatever I had to say. The clouds were still too low for them to come down through, but we were able to talk to them and they pinpointed our position. Unfortunately, at the end of our transmission, I heard rifle fire from Bob’s position.

Bob had been hiding in some vines, and the North Vietnamese had apparently heard him talking. One of them came crashing down the hill and just by chance stepped on him. The startled Vietnamese backed up, and fired. Luckily, he missed but that brought the rest of them down on Bob. The volleys of fire I had heard were signals that they had caught an American. They trucked him off to, Hanoi, and I was left alone . . . almost. The patrols in my area continued.

On the fourth day, the A-7s returned, pinpointed my position and then said that they were low on fuel and would go out to a tanker, gas up, and return. Well, by the time , they got back, the weather had socked me in and they couldn’t get back down.

The next day the weather cleared, and the bombing of Hanoi resumed in earnest. I spotted a big V of A-7s outbound from their target and called them, but they wouldn’t answer. Apparently they reported the call to the Sandies though, because it wasn’t long before they were over me. After determining my position, they left to get a helicopter.

As luck would have it, there was just one .50 calibre gun position in the area, and the helicopter flew right over it on his approach to my position, and they really hammered him. His refuelling boom was all but shot _off, the co-pilot was seriously wounded, and they were leaking fuel. To his credit, the pilot still tried for the pick-up. I had not given them real explicit instructions on my position though, and they came to a hover about 20 feet from me, on the steep side of the hill. I decided that it was now or never, and made a run for the penetrator, which was on the end of the cable. Just as I was about to make a grab for it, I lost my footing and the downwash from the big HH-53 knocked me to the ground, I did a backflip, and rolled down the hill. When I got up, the helicopter was leaving. I can’t really blame them . . . they were pretty well shot up, and may have thought that I had been hit by ground fire. As it was, they just barely made it out to a Lima Site in Laos, where the backup Jolly Green picked them up. I later learned from the Combat Cameraman on that helicopter that the North Vietnamese were running towards them, firing their AK-47s, while they hovered over me.

Why the North Vietnamese didn’t really comb the area I’ll never know . . . they must have known the helicopter was trying to get someone. But they didn’t, and I moved again that night.

By this time, the two pints of water that had been in my survival gear was long since gone, and I was getting mighty thirsty. The light misty rain that fell most of the time only served to keep me wet, cold and miserable. The jungle instructors had told us about the water vines and bamboo that existed in North Vietnam, but they had neglected to tell was that they were dry until well into the wet season. I drilled into several of these looking for water, but only found cool air. While I was hiding the next day, several Vietnamese came up the trail close to where I was. I would swear that one of them spotted one of those drilled bamboo, and exclaimed: “LOOK! AMERICAN!” Anyway, whatever he said precipitated a search of the area. I heard one of them coming my way, and tucked everything in. I had lost my mosquito net in the jump for the helicopter, and that had provided most of the camouflage for my face. I put my gloved hand over my face, and held my breath. I heard and felt the grass being parted over my head, but again my luck held and he didn’t see me.

Shortly after that, a flight of F-4s came into the area and called me on the radio. The flight lead spotted my position and told me to move to a better area for pick-up. Rather than give instructions that the North Vietnamese might overhear and understand, he told me to move from Nellis to my home. Nellis AFB is where we had been based, and we had lived in Las Vegas, which is almost due south from Nellis. But I have always considered Iowa my home, and that, of course, is almost due east of Nellis.

The next day there was 10,000 foot overcast, and the A-7s punched down through it and found me again. The leader called me and said: “Hey, did you know you were right up against a house?” Well, I didn’t of course, and I moved away from it while they strafed the house and environs. They picked up a lot of return fire, and told me that I was going to have to move to an area that was not quite so hot. In the meantime, they dropped a survival package that contained water, food, and batteries for my survival radio, which was getting weaker every time I used it. They gave me directions to the package and headed home.

I knew it was a hot area, because I had heard AK-47s firing at them from pretty close to my position. I had to decide whether it was best to just get the hell out of that area as quick as possible, forgetting the water in that package, or to go for that water. By this time, I was really thirsty, and the vote was 51 to 49 in favour of the water. I cautiously made for the area in which they had said the package had fallen. Suddenly, I came to a pretty well beaten path. I looked both ways and stepped gingerly across. The trip wire they had strung at the edge of the trail was practically invisible, and the explosive cap that announced its disturbance was the first indication that I had snagged it. I dove into a thicket of brush, but they had heard the cap go off, and the area was swarming with them in no time at all. It didn’t take them long to spot me. Then they just stood around jabbering and pointing at me. Finally, they got some guy to come up and tap me on the shoulder. I knew it was all over.

I stood up and made a gesture of surrender, and they were all over me. Funny thing, the first thing to come off was my Seiko watch . . . then they got around to my gun and knife. They stripped me down to my underwear and boots and marched me down the hill to a base camp they had set up as a holding area to await a truck to come out from Hanoi and get me. I had been on the ground, evading them, for a week.