Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire "Flak Traps", Vietnam aviators worst nightmare.

There were night FACs on rocket patrol around some bases, and in fact I flew a couple of night "team cover" missions and one very ill-fated night parachute team insert! The Nail FACs flying out of Thailand also flew night FAC missions over the Trail in Laos, but those are about all.

We quickly abandoned our night missions for several reasons. We flew them with two pilots, an observer, full fuel tanks, full rockets and a flare rack - which made us almost 25% over maximum allowable takeoff weight. THOSE were scary takeoffs. Second, our airfield was closed at night, meaning we had to land on a blacked-out runway - it was like descending into a black pit and was extremely dangerous. Lastly, since the rescue helos couldn't fly at night, there was absolutely nothing we could if a team went hot except listen to them die.

The night parachute fiasco was "another agency" (ahem) that had the hots to do something out there, and since it was our sandbox, we had to have a plane there. The radio frequencies got screwed up, I never did contact them, and we later learned that they got scared and dropped the team from a higher altitude - ABOVE me! They probably fell all around me in the dark. Two of them got skewered on tree limbs, and we never learned what happened to the rest of them, but it could not have been good.

Anyway, the night did in fact belong to the NVA. That was the real impetus to us developing night vision for individual troops, not just "search" devices like Starlight Scopes.

The price of freedom, is a value the protected shall never know. Thanks for having brass balls, gents...hope this thread keeps going...and devoid of the ingrates...

Sheesh!

Chills... dammit that hit home.

Writing this stuff also has me reliving it in my mind, of course. And it scares the poop out of me worse than when I was doing it.

LOL! You are getting a clue as to how crazy it sounds to the rest of us!

Maybe, but I get it double-barreled!

Tyrone, maybe a clue, maybe the cold sweats at 3 in the morning. Stuff I wrote on the topic in days past was a regurgitation that left me more at peace, nothing more. Life as the designated bait in a team effort was never boring.

I loved the smell of napalm....anytime.

Amen, Dan. Writing about it was the catharsis that ended my long period of PTSD or whatever it was.

Love the stories, always enjoy hearing the stories from you guys. I'm curious if any of you flew any ops near Firebase Ripcord in 1970?

http://wordpress.ripcordassociation.com/facts-about-ripcord/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fire_Support_Base_Ripcord

Nope. My time in hell was Feb to Dec '71.

Another interesting mission I was involved in was maintaining a somewhat experimental air drop system for C-130's known as AWADS. "All Weather Air Drop System". It used what was essentially a bomb-navigation system for cargo, where a ground based controller projected a signal similar to an instrument landing system beam. The computer equipment on the supply bird would intercept the signal, compute the plane's altitude and ground speed, and punch the cargo out of the back of the plane at the appropriate time. It was supposed to be able to hit a designated drop zone 100 yards in diameter, even if the supply ship couldn't see the ground. We had our own little operating area, tucked away near the end of the runway at U-Tapao Thailand with barracks, maintenance facilities, and even our own beer bar. The main ops were run from Clark AFB Philippines, with aircrews and maintenance people on 60 day TDY's to Thailand. One advantage to that arrangement was a steady supply of San Miguel beer, brought in on the weekly resupply plane! We were supposedly dropping food and ammo to guys who "weren't there" outside of Viet Nam. We referred to ourselves as the "Cambodian Gunrunners"- - - - -one load of rice, three loads of ammo!

Years later I was shooting the bull with a friend who had been a member of some sort of black ops team, doing super secret spook stuff in places they weren't supposed to be, and I happened to mention those AWADS flights. He commented "So you were the guys who missed the drop zone on a regular basis!" Small world!
Jerry

Yep. My unit had quite a bit to do with that fracas and we lost some good boys in the process. I rotated back to the states just about the time it reached a full boil.

The world is indeed tiny, HR. I mentioned the Green Hornets of the 20th Special Ops Squadron up above. VERY small unit, VERY covert, as were we. One day a while back, I struck up a casual conversation with a couple walking past my driveway. Both Air Force. Both pilots. Both 'Nam. Where at? "Nowhere you've heard of" we both said. "Ban Me Thuot." Long stares. He was a Green Hornet. A year before me, but still...

Jerry, in my experience the AWADS crews were stunningly precise with placement. The only miss I saw was intended for the top of a razorback ridge and was off about 50 meters. It landed on the slope over a NVA underground field hospital. Our grunts stopped counting bodies in the north side of 400.

Small indeed! When I took my Marine grandson to the USAF museum at Wright-Patterson, I showed him the B-52D on display there. I remember working on that plane when it was at Okinawa- - - -remembered the tail number. There was a diagram showing the battle damage repairs that had been made on the plane- - - -some of which I remember being done by the sheet metal guys at Kadena. About a year later, I met the next door neighbor of my sis-in-law in Dayton Ohio whose late husband had been a navigator on that plane!
Jerry

Dan, did you ever see a C-130 do a LAPES run? ("Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System") The idea was to fly low over an area too shot-up to actually land, and yank the cargo out of the back of the plane with a parachute. One pilot I knew who ran those missions claimed he couldn't fly low enough with the landing gear down, so they always went in gear up, and usually under fire, to make the drop. Guys like that probably need a wheelbarrow to carry their balls around with!
Jerry

Wasn't me I flew my last missions a month prior to Ripcord but could have been several of our remaining aircraft since we had three at Phucat when I left.. Two were constantly up on airborne night watch and the third was on the ground for standby alert perimeter defense if needed however there were several 119's just activated so trading tail #'s. with our sister base at Pleiku was SOP of that timeline.

Jerry, more than a few times. Extra large wheelbarrow.

One of the evolutions of the war came to pass with the onset of the Spring Offensive in ‘72. The nature of our ops changed dramatically and the maneuvering that led to AA traps was replaced with full blown in-your-face use of AA and AAA throughout SVN. 12.7, 23 & 37mm augmented by SA7 missiles was the new deal. If you came home without green stains in your skids you were flying too high.

One of my buddies took out a ZSU23-2 on his own with an OH6 and a minigun. Any of you fellas that know anything about the ZSU’s capability will understand that what he did was impossible. At least that’s what Nguyên thought.