Runway Visions: An American C-130 Pilot's Memoir of Combat Airlift Operations in Southeast Asia, 1967-1968

258 Pages·2000·2.47 MB·English

by  David Kirk Vaughan

Runway Visions
An American C-130 Pilot’s Memoir
of Combat Airlift Operations in
Southeast Asia, 1967–1968
by
David Kirk Vaughan
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Vaughan, David Kirk.
Runway visions : an American C-130 pilot’s memoir of combat
airlift operations in southeast Asia, 1967–1968 / by David Kirk Vaughan.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-0488-9
1. Vaughan, David Kirk. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975— Personal
narratives, American. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975— Aerial operations,
American. 4. Airlift, Military—Vietnam. I. Title.
DS559.5.V38 1998
959.704'3'092—dc21 98-15150
CIP
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data are available
©1998 David Kirk Vaughan. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Dedicated to
all those who flew, are flying, or will fly the Lockheed C-130, one of the classic
aircraft of all time, in any of its configurations
and to those who flew the C-130 in Southeast Asia, especially to those who died
in the line of duty,
and to the following individuals,
who were important to me personally in my flying career: Al Williams, Larry
Fordham, Virgis Hill, Jerry Coleman, Irving Torchinsky, Les Fredericks, Sidney
Richardson, Kirk Waldron, Gomer Lewis, Howard Dallman, Ross Kramer,
Horace “Horse” Pemberton, Frank Passarello, Bill Knipp, Tommy Lee Butler,
Edgar “Bill” Lorson, Elmer “Dusty” Watkins, Frank Kricker, Ed Scholes, Mike
Brown, Mike Jones, Roger Wright, and Don Greenwade
and most especially to the memories of
Karl Klein and Dave Risher
Contents
Poem ("Visions of Runways")
Preface
Before
1. New Guy
2. Check Out
3. On the Shuttle
4. Rubber Plantations and Banana Runs
5. Piece of Cake
6. The Golf Course
7. Orbit City
8. Phan Thiet in Blue
9. Long Night Over the South China Sea
10. Dancing in the Alligator House
11. Ground Pounder
12. Gear and Flaps Man
13. Christmas at Khe Sanh
14. Bao Loc in the Fog
15. Tet
16. Rising Dust at Dak To
17. Blind Descent to Kham Duc
18. Low Visibility at Quang Tri
19. Bangkok Shuttle
20. Old Head
After
Poem ("Incident at Tuy Hoa")
Pronunciation Guide
Military History of David K. Vaughan
Index of Terms
VISIONS OF RUNWAYS
The old head told the story of the South Vietnamese guard who stood high in his
fox hole at the end of the coastal runway.
One of our crews, low on short final, bounced their main gear off his helmet. I
grinned then.
Later, on a day blue in rain, heavy
with doubt, I landed badly on that thin, wet strip and my leg shook with a
movement of its own. In the alligator house I danced once on that runway. But
only once. Those hard, dark runways, with names like a two-step cadence: An
Khe. An Hoa. Kham Duc. Phan Thiet.
Dak To. Khe Sanh. Their visions now, as then, dryness in the mouth, tightness in
the lip.
Preface
When I was flying in Southeast Asia from February of 1967 until April of 1968,
I did not keep notes of my experiences. I have wished often since then that I had.
The letters I wrote home were for the most part void of the details of my specific
flying tasks and experiences. My comments were typically something like this:
“Just got back from flying the shuttle for sixteen days in Vietnam. Glad to be
able to take a long, hot shower. Going to fly again in two days, to Naha, Clark,
and Bangkok.” But who had the time—or the capacity for self-analysis—to
adequately describe the full range of experiences those words summarized?
Sometimes I used small reel-to-reel tapes. Talking into a microphone was easier
than sitting down to write. It was also therapeutic. But the content of those tapes
was superficial also. I suppose I viewed my messages home as evidence of my
continued safe existence and slow but steady passage of time until my tour of
duty was up and I would return to the States.
It did occur to me in the final hectic months of my tour that detailed accounts of
my experiences might provide interesting reading. But I realized that if I were to
write about my experiences in Southeast Asia, it would take time, time that I
obviously did not have then. I told myself that I would undertake that task, fill in
the details, after I returned. But when I returned to America, life in Southeast
Asia seemed increasingly remote, and it did not seem important to revisit those
experiences then. Besides, some of my experiences were not the sort that you
could talk about easily. About some of the more hazardous flying experiences,
you could say, if you were willing to admit it, “I was nervous,” but even that
brief thought conveyed little of the range of sensations or events involved.
And how could you describe the activities of your off-duty hours, when those
activities were the kinds of things you were not supposed to do, not if you were a
conscientious husband and upright son of proud if worried parents? Some details
better left undescribed, perhaps? But those off-duty activities were important
because they helped you maintain your emotional equilibrium. They constituted
a part of the total account and were as important as the activities it is more
acceptable to discuss, the events that occurred inside an aircraft.
Flying in combat changes you; the more intense or frightening the experience,
the more profound the changes are. Although the military system and society
itself try to condition you to encounter stressful experiences and not show
change, change does occur, and if you are to survive in something like a state of
psychic wholeness, you do what you need to do to compensate for stress. It’s not
a planned thing, your compensating activities, you just do them. And the things
you do—your actions, behaviors, motivations—may not be the kind of things
you have been conditioned to do or tell others about. Nor are you able, if you are
honest, to be particularly proud of all of the things you have done, inside the
aircraft or out. But if you hope to relate anything like a truthful account, you
must describe all aspects of your behavior—those you would readily admit
having done, and those you would rather not admit having done, those activities
that make you uncomfortable, that make you squirm a little as you write about
them.
To accommodate possible discomforts of the truths of combat, some writers
describe their experiences in the form of a novel. Novels allow writers to
manipulate experiences, to say things that might be embarrassing in an
autobiographical work. But I did not want to write a novel, not about what I felt
and experienced when I flew C-130s in Southeast Asia. To me that would
misrepresent, trivialize, or sensationalize the experience. And so I have tried to
tell what life was like for me when I was on-duty and when I was off-duty, when
I did my job pretty well and when I screwed up. Fortunately for me and those
with whom I flew, I did my job mostly successfully and my screw-ups caused
minimal distress.
In telling my story, I have tried to illuminate the flying activities of the
crewmembers of the C-130s that flew in Southeast Asia, the A-model men, the
B-model men, and the E-model men. Most especially, however, I recall the
efforts of the E-model men who flew with the 345th Tactical Airlift Squadron
and the other two squadrons of the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing, the 50th TAS and
the 776th TAS, at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base, Taiwan, with whom I flew for
the better part of 15 months in the hazardous skies of Southeast Asia. The names
of many of these men appear throughout the narrative that follows. Some names
appear briefly, others appear more frequently. Some names have slipped away
from me. A few names I have changed.
Although I made no notes of my experiences in Southeast Asia, I did keep a
personal log of mission numbers, aircraft numbers, departure and landing times,
and airfields visited. I wish I would have had the foresight to jot down more