May 30, 1971

This post and the following should have been posted on Memorial Day, but we had several power outages, and then I had chemo yesterday.

May 30, 1971 40 years ago today, I took off from DaNang Air Base, South Vietnam on what I thought would be a routine psyops mission dropping leaflets on known and suspected North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong positions. The US and South Vietnamese Army Intelligence units identified the locations and developed leaflets for each target. For example, they may have safe conduct passes for the Viet Cong units since they were from the local area. For the North Vietnamese Army units, they would develop leaflets such as the Wandering Soul that played on the Vietnamese belief that if you died and were buried away from your home, your soul would wander forever and you would have no peace.

We left DaNang and headed north to the town of Quang Tri and then turned west and flew along the DMZ, dropping 10,000 - 20,000 leaflets per target of which there were around 80. At Quang Tri, we turned west and flew along the DMZ towards Khe Sanh where there had been numerous battles including a 3-month siege by the NVA against Marines manning Khe Sanh. We were nearing the Laotian border and turned south towards the A Shau Valley. The A Shau Valley ran along the border with Laos and was a major infiltration route for the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. It had also been the source of numerous battles dating back to the mid-60s.

As we entered the valley, I was looking down at the pock marked valley floor when I noticed some red tracers coming towards us. A tracer is a pyrotechnic round that allows the person firing a weapon to see where they are shooting and make adjustments. There is typically one tracer for every 5 rounds of ammunition. The red tracer told me it was from a small arms weapon such as the AK-47. We were flying at 2,000 feet above the ground at 120 knots, so we were a pretty easy target.

As I turned to tell the other pilot that we were taking small arms fire, a stream of white traces was coming at us from the front of the aircraft. Then a stream of yellow tracers came up from the right side of the aircraft. At about that time, the loadmaster called from the rear of the plane and said, “you won’t believe what is coming at us from the rear. It looks like a fireworks show.” We were obviously under fire from 4 or 5 antiaircraft artillery (AAA) sites. If they got our altitude, airspeed, and heading right, we were in big trouble. So, the best thing we could do was to make that difficult to do.

We began a series of violent maneuvers climbing, diving, hard left turns, right turns, and speed changes. We kept that up for 10-15 minutes until we were able to exit the southern end of the valley.

We decided to skip the rest of our targets and return to DaNang. Upon landing we discovered holes in the tail, fuselage, and wings, but nothing that would cause serious damage. That was the beauty of the C-47. It would take a direct hit on an engine, in the cockpit, or an exploding round into a fuel tank to cause serious damage. Our squadron put me and the other pilot in for the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the aircraft and crew. Although I have no proof, I believe the guy who opened fire on us with the AK-47 probably caused the other AAA sites to start firing before they were done computing our position so that they could put their rounds right where we were headed.