- 5/17/2025
For educational purposes
Among the first in combat in Vietnam, the McDonnell Douglas A-4 Skyhawk flew more missions, and paid a higher price, than any other naval aircraft.
It has been in service longer and seen more combat than any other fighter in America's arsenal. Like a super-charged sports car with wings, the Skyhawk endured a decade of fierce ground attack to become one America's longest-serving combat planes in operation today.
In-between catapulting off the air craft carrier Oriskany and slamming down on its flight deck, Skyhawk pilots flew thousands of low-flying, ground-strike missions braving intense flak and enemy fire in support of beleaguered GIs.
Get a first-hand aerial perspective on the Vietnam War from the fighter pilots, deck crews and commanders who were there.
Experience dramatic tales of bravery and brutality from POWs, including retired admiral James Stockdale and U.S. Senator John McCain.
Among the first in combat in Vietnam, the McDonnell Douglas A-4 Skyhawk flew more missions, and paid a higher price, than any other naval aircraft.
It has been in service longer and seen more combat than any other fighter in America's arsenal. Like a super-charged sports car with wings, the Skyhawk endured a decade of fierce ground attack to become one America's longest-serving combat planes in operation today.
In-between catapulting off the air craft carrier Oriskany and slamming down on its flight deck, Skyhawk pilots flew thousands of low-flying, ground-strike missions braving intense flak and enemy fire in support of beleaguered GIs.
Get a first-hand aerial perspective on the Vietnam War from the fighter pilots, deck crews and commanders who were there.
Experience dramatic tales of bravery and brutality from POWs, including retired admiral James Stockdale and U.S. Senator John McCain.
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:30Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present America's 26 newest naval aviators.
00:47Just two weeks ago, these student pilots of the Naval Air Station at Meridian, Mississippi
00:54flew their A-4 Skyhawks over the ocean for the first time.
01:01First Lieutenant Sherry Carrick qualified in the A-4 on board USS John F. Kennedy.
01:07They approached an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast of Florida.
01:12Lieutenant J.G. Michael C. Crisp, call sign Critter.
01:16Remembered to drop their hooks.
01:20Lieutenant J.G. Bartell was named to the Commodore's list during the advanced stage of warfare.
01:24Slammed onto the deck at 150 miles an hour and caught a wire.
01:35In the Navy's oldest airplane, they have become the newest members of the elite tailhook fraternity.
01:42It's 90% attitude and 10% ability, by the way.
01:49To each and every one of the new wingies, I wish you all the very best in the days ahead.
01:57It will be at least a year before these men are truly ready to face the test of combat.
02:05But in the plane they fly, the A-4 Skyhawk, and in the tactics they use, they confront
02:12every day the history of one of the Navy's longest battles.
02:17In 1966, our country was already becoming embroiled in the conflict in Southeast Asia,
02:24a small country by the name of Vietnam.
02:32We went out to win the war.
02:34We fully expected to win the war and get it over with.
02:38We didn't drop our bombs and go home.
02:41We dropped our bombs and went and looked.
02:45We were out there to find some trucks to blow them up, to find the barge and sink it.
02:56We wanted to get a little hate and discontent in the game.
03:01In 1967, at the height of the air war over North Vietnam, Brian Compton commanded an
03:09A-4 attack squadron called the Saints on the USS Oriskany.
03:23The attack pilots of the Oriskany saw more action and suffered more combat losses over
03:29North Vietnam than any other group in the Navy.
03:35The ball game is a different one once you go into combat.
03:39You've got to use all the instincts you have to become an elusive, sure-footed fighter.
03:54Jim Stockdale is probably best known today for his 1992 debut on the national political
04:01stage.
04:03In 1965, he was leading the pilots of the Oriskany into combat for the first time.
04:10The ability to improvise and to know that all of that peacetime stuff is out the window.
04:17A lot of people give that up very, very hesitantly.
04:27Jim started off, you know, working fairly low to the ground.
04:33You can get it so high, you can't hardly see Vietnam.
04:36As a matter of fact, some of those guys, I think, would have lost the bombs in from the
04:40coastline if they could, but, you know, his attitude was to get in there and to hit the
04:47target.
04:54On board the Oriskany, under Jim Stockdale's command, 120 pilots and 70 planes, including
05:01F-8 Crusaders and A-4 Skyhawks.
05:05The plane that flew more bombing missions into North Vietnam than any other naval aircraft.
05:21The A-4 was all business.
05:23I mean, you were going to be down there on the ground looking at flak.
05:34And that's where I thought I should be.
05:37And that's where I was the day I got shot down.
05:49From its base in the Tonkin Gulf, 100 miles off the coast of North Vietnam, the U.S. Navy
05:55was trying to cut supplies flowing to communist guerrillas fighting in South Vietnam.
06:02For years, North Vietnam had sent weapons, ammunition, and even people to the south in
06:10a drive to reunite the two countries.
06:17In support of South Vietnam, President Johnson, in 1965, ordered the U.S. Navy and Air Force
06:24to begin bombing the north.
06:28He called it Operation Rolling Thunder.
06:38I've read since that Rolling Thunder, when it was programmed, was to be something like
06:44we saw in Desert Storm.
06:47Remember those couple of weeks of dashing air power?
06:53But it strung out.
06:55It strung out and was just a fancy name for very routine, occasional alpha strikes.
07:05Our mission will be an escort and flak suppression.
07:09In the parlance of Rolling Thunder, alpha strikes were multi-plane missions against
07:15North Vietnam's militarily significant targets.
07:21In such a rural country, U.S. military leaders, in 1965, counted just 94 of these targets.
07:34That list became known as the Alpha or A list.
07:39In Operation Rolling Thunder, the decision to strike the A list targets came from Washington
07:46and not from commanders on the ships.
07:51Paul Engle was Jem Stockdale's operations officer.
07:55You know, go right by that steel plant, go right by that big production concrete plant,
08:00go by all of the kinds of facilities that would aid and abet the enemy's success and
08:05bomb the jeepers out of the outhouse and come home, having gone through all the fire.
08:11It was a mess.
08:13We frequently had to wait until way up the late hours of the night into the morning hours
08:18before we knew what ordnance to put on airplanes because we didn't know what we were going
08:22to be striking.
08:25The only exception then was running up and down the roads looking for trucks.
08:34Tanks and trains became the most common targets, while Hanoi and the port of Haiphong, where
08:42Soviet war supplies arrived almost daily, remained, for the time being, untouched.
08:50In 1965, Washington refused to grant the Navy permission to attack most of the targets on
08:57the Alpha list.
09:03So what we were doing was making them mad, but we weren't taking away the wherewithal to fight.
09:10That was the sadness of it.
09:12And Rolling Blunder was part of it, you know, continue, I'm going to hit you a little bit
09:17harder if you don't do what I tell you.
09:19It's kind of an arrogant approach.
09:23You had a man, Secretary of Defense, he was a smart man.
09:28He was so smart, he thought he could make two and two come out five.
09:31That is a very dangerous thing for a smart man to do.
09:36We thought there was a language of deterrence out there, that fighting was really a kind
09:41of rough form of communication.
09:47We were making gestures with our airplanes.
09:59That's quite different than the Vietnamese thinking.
10:02We thought they would respond with gestures, but they didn't think of it as a gesture.
10:07They wondered what we thought we would accomplish by doing that.
10:15On September 9th, 1965, Jim Stockdale flew his A-4 Skyhawk over a familiar railroad yard
10:22in North Vietnam.
10:28I'd been over that the day before and didn't get any flack at all.
10:33This day, I heard the darn gun, and I looked down there, and here came these fireballs.
10:41It had been brought in the night before, 57 millimeter.
10:46That plane was on fire and upside down, and there was no getting away from that.
10:57I knew I was the only wing commander to live through an ejection.
11:03I remembered the code of conduct, Article 4, if I am senior, I will take command.
11:10So I was giving myself a pep talk.
11:12I said, you're going to take over the leadership of that prison, and everything you've done
11:18here before is nothing in comparison to how you handle this next period of your life.
11:27I saw no hope.
11:30In fact, coming down my parachute, I said, five years down there at least, and that turned
11:35out to be wrong.
11:37It was nearly eight.
11:41Jim Stockdale was quickly captured.
11:44He became the first prisoner of war from the Oriskany, shot down in an A-4 Skyhawk.
11:55The A-4 Skyhawk is small, simple, and inexpensive.
12:01Fully loaded to 24,000 pounds, the Skyhawk weighs half what most Navy jets weigh.
12:09Designed in 1954, the Douglas Aircraft Company built the Skyhawk with landing gear tall enough
12:15to fit a single nuclear bomb under its belly.
12:28In Vietnam, the maneuverable Skyhawk gained fame as the sports car of attack planes.
12:35Capable of firing missiles or rockets, it most often dropped bombs, two tons of them,
12:42every day of the Vietnam War.
12:52In 1965 and 66, the North Vietnamese began building much tougher defenses.
13:02Most formidably, radar-guided surface-to-air missiles, SAMs.
13:13Still, not until 1967 would the A-4 pilots from the Oriskany find out just how strong
13:22North Vietnamese defenses had become.
13:26In 66, I think I saw a total of three SAMs, and those weren't even SAMs that were shooting
13:38at me.
13:39And I tell you, there's a difference.
13:40A SAM that you see and one that you see chasing you are two different SAMs.
13:49In 1966, the Navy did begin to outfit the Oriskany's A-4s with radar detection equipment.
14:01Pilots would hear an alarm when a radar-guided missile was heading their way.
14:05They crammed all the electronics in the belly of the airplane, and then they said, don't
14:13fire your 20mm cannons, because if you do, you're likely to shake those electronics to
14:20pieces.
14:21So we were constrained in the use of our 20mm cannon.
14:26We could use them in an emergency, but we were told, don't use it unless you have to.
14:37In 1966, the Americans began picking up the pace of their attacks, with Skyhawks flying
14:43300 miles round-trip to strike Haiphong and the outskirts of Hanoi.
14:51The flow of supplies south continued unabated.
15:07While on the line in 1966, the Oriskany launched and recovered groups of planes for 12 straight
15:14hours, from noon to midnight, or midnight to noon.
15:21They rested for 12 hours while another carrier took over, then went back at it.
15:41We were undoubtedly operating an aircraft carrier like it had never been operated before.
15:50The captain of the Oriskany was John Iribido.
15:53After the 12 hours of flying is over, then the people still have to refuel the airplanes,
16:00repair them, rearm them again for the next day.
16:03And that takes a couple more hours, so that's 14 to 16 hours that these kids are working.
16:11In October of 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited the Oriskany.
16:22His first question to me was, what is the strike pilot ratio?
16:32I told him we had a certain number of pilots on board, we had a certain number of missions,
16:39and in order to fly those missions, we had to use the pilots more than one and a half
16:44times a day.
16:47I don't think he was really worried about the pilots being overworked, he was worried
16:52more about his numbers than anything else.
17:01Missions flown, ordnance dropped.
17:04These were the measurements of success in the air war over Vietnam.
17:14The pilots of the Oriskany were now dropping 300,000 pounds of bombs every day on North
17:21Vietnam.
17:30I had the feeling towards when we got on the line that it was more important to measure
17:36how much ordnance went over the bow than how effective that ordnance was.
17:41That was very disturbing.
17:42We were under intense, continuing, pressed, press on, on and on operations.
17:50And part of that whole pressure is the reason, in my mind, that we had a fire.
18:03Two weeks after McNamara's visit, disaster struck.
18:09At 7 a.m. on October 26th, an inexperienced sailor stacking magnesium flares in a locker
18:17accidentally triggered one.
18:20The flare began to burn and the sailor panicked, threw the burning flare into the locker and
18:26slammed the door.
18:27Ideally, of course, if he could have, he should have taken the thing out and thrown it over
18:33the side.
18:34But I believe he was scared and I believe that most people would have been.
18:44The flare ignited more than 600 other flares in the locker, sent a fireball rolling across
18:51the ceiling of the hangar deck, scorching several A-4 Skyhawks and igniting two helicopters.
19:04The biggest enemy of a ship at sea is fire and you don't have a fire of that magnitude
19:11without somebody getting hurt.
19:16Toxic smoke and heat poured through the ship's ventilation system and into the officers'
19:21quarters where A-4 pilot Dave Carey was sleeping.
19:27I remember hearing the fire alarm, waking up and I opened the door to my stateroom and
19:34it was like there was a, it was like walking into a bag of flour.
19:39The whole passageway was white.
19:44Paul Engle led a number of junior officers to safety.
19:49We managed to get out of there and get up the hangar deck and then we started loading
19:53bombs, picking them up, manhandling them.
19:56There were people picking up thousand-pound bombs, four or five guys running in, picking
19:59them up and throwing them over the side.
20:02We could have lost the ship easily with that fire raging.
20:09Paul Engle then joined one of the search parties going through every space in the forward
20:14part of the ship where officers slept.
20:19Three hours after the fire began, Dave Carey was found in the ship's administration office.
20:25I remember walking forward and the guys from the squadron seeing me and they come running
20:29like, there you are, there you are, you know, and they were delighted to see me but I didn't
20:32realize, you know, why, because they knew about all these people that were missing and
20:37they're bringing up bodies and there, but for the grace of God, went I.
20:44It took four hours to put the fire out.
20:50Forty-four men were dead, eight sailors and thirty-six officers, including twenty-four
20:57pilots.
21:01Most of them died of asphyxiation, there were two or three that died from burns.
21:12He was my air operations officer.
21:17It was a very, very difficult ceremony to go through.
21:27It was his wish that he be buried at sea.
21:29All the others were sent home.
21:48When a rebuilt Oriskany returned to the Tonkin Gulf in July of 1967, its sailors would stand
21:56mortified and watch as an eerily similar disaster consumed the USS Forrestal.
22:13As a morning launch was getting ready to go, a rocket in an F-4 Phantom fired inadvertently
22:20and hit the fuel tank directly beneath the seat in the A-4 where John McCain was sitting.
22:30There was a huge fire.
22:34I shut down the airplane and went out on the refueling probe and rolled through the fire
22:40that was already there on the flight deck and ran across the other end of the flight
22:43deck.
22:44I turned and looked towards the airplanes where the fire was at that time and I started
22:50The moment I did, the first bomb cooked off and exploded.
23:01It was the worst disaster aboard a Navy ship since World War II.
23:08One hundred thirty-four men died.
23:12Sixty-two planes were damaged or destroyed.
23:22With the Forrestal out of commission, John McCain elected to join the Saints, an A-4
23:29squadron on the USS Oriskany.
23:42Drawing from lessons learned in the Vietnam War, the Navy now builds much safer ships
23:49and much safer ordnance.
23:54Still, an aircraft carrier remains a tightly packed steel container of people, airplanes,
24:02jet fuel and munitions.
24:05The virtual floating bomb.
24:10Sure it happened again.
24:12It's almost unavoidable because the weapons are dangerous.
24:15They're made to explode.
24:16They're made to destroy things.
24:18Bottom line is, flying combat is dangerous.
24:22These tensions are up.
24:23Safety's in place.
24:26Even in peacetime, the naval flying profession is one of the most dangerous in the world.
24:36A naval aviator is five times more likely to die in his plane than in his car.
24:42The ship is always moving.
24:44It's not a stable platform.
24:46It's very small.
24:47And a pilot has to learn to fly through a box that's about the size of his airplane
24:51and not much larger.
24:55The carrier landing strip is just 120 feet long, less than the distance across a baseball
25:02diamond from home plate to second base.
25:10It is so narrow, pilots must hit the line running down the middle of the deck.
25:18Deviations are deadly.
25:2930 feet too high or too fast and you've missed.
25:36It's a boulter.
25:3830 feet too low and too slow and...
25:41Power, power, power.
25:54202, ball, 9-2, couple.
25:56It's a ball, couple.
25:59There's only one way to land most Navy jets on an aircraft carrier, and pilots practice
26:05it incessantly.
26:10You kind of get used to it, but it's never routine.
26:12Every landing is very intense and you're real keyed up for it.
26:16The biggest thing about ball calls is a lot of people are calling it early.
26:20At the Naval Air Station in Meridian, Mississippi, it's Chris Rollins' job to teach the Navy's
26:27to land on an aircraft carrier in the TA-4 Skyhawk.
26:37Once ubiquitous in the fleet, the A-4 Skyhawk, with an extra seat for an instructor, is serving
26:44its last years in the Navy as a training plane.
26:48You know, we joke and say that the most technologically advanced thing in an A-4 is the digital watch
26:54you're probably wearing on your wrist.
26:57But this one is all manual.
26:59It's just you and the plane.
27:11At their base in Meridian, a hundred miles from any ocean, the students fly the pattern
27:16for shipboard landings almost 80 times before they ever see the ship.
27:43When we get out to the ship, in theory, it's everything that we've experienced before,
27:48and you stick to the basics and it'll all work, supposedly.
27:53I can't believe they're going to let us go. I can't believe the taxpayers are going to let us go.
28:02On their initiation flight, the students follow their instructors out to the ship.
28:16And then just out of the blue, you see this tremendous wake, and then at the peak of the wake
28:21is this little tiny black piece of steel, and then they tell you that's where you're going to land.
28:27The whole time I was just shaking my head, no, sorry, I can't do it.
28:36Six hundred feet above the water, the students fly down the port side of the ship.
28:43With a wide left hand 180 degree turn, they line up with the stern of the ship,
28:50moving away from them at 25 miles an hour.
28:57We call it squeezing the black juice out of the stick. I was squeezing so hard in the control stick.
29:02It's a pretty incredible experience, circling over that little carrier down there
29:07and thinking you're by yourself and you better do it right. You've got one chance.
29:14With their eyes on a lens box, they descend, aiming for the three wire,
29:20the third of four wires from the ship's stern.
29:23If the landing signal officer, the LSO, sees a plane too low, too slow,
29:30too wide or too high to land safely and catch a wire,
29:37he turns the green signal lights red. It's a wave off.
29:45I lost a bet with my LSO on no wave offs, bolters or one wires.
29:51First bolter, first time around, is the bet out the window.
29:57My third time with the hook down is when I finally got aboard.
30:02I don't care about anybody winning, so it's rigged.
30:09I caught a one wire, which was not good.
30:15Flying off a carrier is as dramatic an experience as flying on.
30:21Some think it's more dangerous.
30:24Catapulted off the USS John F. Kennedy,
30:27the Skyhawk will accelerate from zero to 150 miles per hour in two seconds.
30:36If his plane malfunctions, the pilot has just a split second to eject.
30:43One of the scariest parts was taking your feet off the brakes and going to full power,
30:49looking at the ocean in front of you and only 200 feet of steel.
30:53Check all the engine instruments once, check them again, check them again.
30:58And then when everything's okay, you roger the cat officer with a salute,
31:02put your head back in your seat.
31:06And you're pushed back into your seat, and the first time,
31:09it really forces the air out of your lungs,
31:12and everybody's natural reaction is to scream as they go off the end.
31:16And I screamed on every single one of them, all ten cat shots.
31:22Ten arrested landings and ten catapult shots later,
31:26and these young men have reached the end of a year and a half of work.
31:31772, trapped.
31:35They will now move on to learn to fly the Navy's current fleet airplanes,
31:40including the F.A. 18 Hornet and the A.V. 8B Harrier.
31:46Then they will fly on and off a carrier at night,
31:51once dreaded by even a seasoned combat veteran.
31:55On a small deck carrier like the Ariskany, for example,
31:58we didn't have a heck of a lot of lights that would help us line up,
32:02so it was kind of like flying into a black hole.
32:22In July of 1967, when the repaired Ariskany returned to its battle station,
32:28its attack pilots found themselves flying against Alpha List targets
32:33in Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong for the first time in the war.
32:40So we were doing that three times a day,
32:43going into very heavily defended areas
32:46that was really beyond the experience base
32:49of the guys that had been on the cruise the year before.
32:55Jim Busey joined the Saints, one of the Ariskany's attack squadrons, in 1967.
33:0360 to 70 percent of the squadron, 24 pilots in the squadron,
33:07did not have combat experience, in other words, we hadn't been shot at before.
33:11So in a case like that, the only way you gain experience is on the job.
33:20In the summer of 1967, there were missiles in the air all the time.
33:26And lots of black, it looked like something out of a World War II movie,
33:30with little black puffs around everywhere.
33:35We were losing airplanes right and left.
33:38At least in my recollection, we were just losing airplanes like crazy.
33:44This is the forearm directly over you.
33:46I have the man on the parachute in sight.
33:48That's 8 to 9 o'clock.
33:515-3, we're about to land.
33:53Roger.
33:54And this is...
33:56In just its first week on the line,
33:58the Ariskany lost 5 out of 30 Skyhawks
34:01to combat from both the Saints and its sister squadron, the Ghost Riders.
34:07Okay, climb and drop 5-0-6-2.
34:11Okay.
34:15Rescue crews picked up 4 of the 5 pilots.
34:19The other was captured.
34:23Brian Compton led the Saints.
34:27When you lose 5 in a week and you say,
34:29well, you're going to be over here for 26 weeks,
34:31you realize that you had just turned over the air wing before you got through.
34:36Our arithmetic wasn't as fast as McNamara's, but it was that good.
34:41We knew it was a different ballgame.
34:47By the end of August, the Saints and the Ghost Riders had lost another 5 planes.
34:53Six Skyhawk pilots were gone.
34:57I saw a very almost macabre kind of an attitude.
35:02We were out doing what we thought was right.
35:05Led, of course, by Brian Compton, who was...
35:09John McCain, now a U.S. Senator from Arizona,
35:13joined the Saints as a replacement pilot in October of 1967.
35:18And yet, behind the bravado and the macho kind of attitude,
35:26I did see a great sadness when we would lose a pilot.
35:31But when it happened, I think it gave us renewed vigor
35:38and renewed our efforts to do as much damage.
35:43One of the things we used to say,
35:45if we destroy this target, then we won't have to go back.
35:52I don't think we really changed tactics.
35:55In other words, we didn't back off.
35:57We had some ground rules.
35:59We would not go below 3,000 feet, ordinarily.
36:04The ground rules, they're not laws.
36:07We would not make a second run on a target.
36:10You know, ground rules, not laws.
36:13Launch!
36:271967 brought more action in Alpha Strikes.
36:34It also brought a new weapon into the war.
36:38The first TV-guided smart bomb, the walleye.
36:44The pilot locked a camera in the nose of the walleye on the target.
36:49The bomb then followed its line of sight to detonation.
36:55As soon as you've released it, you can get out of there.
36:59It likes maximum contrast, so if it's a white building window
37:05and the windows look dark, it will go for that point of contrast.
37:19And they're very good, they do it.
37:25When the Saints arrived in the Tonkin Gulf,
37:28they requested to use the walleye to take out the Hanoi thermal power plant.
37:33Located near a circular peninsula on a lake in downtown Hanoi.
37:39A very heavily defended target, very high up on the A-list.
37:47We don't want to kill innocent civilian people if we can avoid it.
37:52And obviously if you're going to drop some bombs on a power plant in the middle of town,
37:57there's a fair probability that some civilian casualties will occur.
38:01And so there's an effort made to try and prevent that.
38:04One of them is, don't go there.
38:14I think they probably had a little spinach concern,
38:17but our concern was on the target.
38:20There were no registered Alabama foreigners there that I knew of.
38:25Three weeks later, approval finally came through.
38:31Using the highly accurate walleye,
38:33the Saints chose to strike with just six A-4s,
38:37with F-8 Crusaders for fighter cover.
38:46The Air Force ran a diversionary strike against a MiG base northeast of Hanoi.
38:52Leaving their Crusaders outside to watch for MiGs,
38:56the Saints approached the city alone.
39:01At 10,000 feet, they fanned out.
39:05Descending.
39:07At 450 miles an hour,
39:10they glided in.
39:12At a 15-degree angle,
39:16all at once,
39:18from different points on the compass.
39:22They found the power plant shrouded in smoke.
39:26From smoke pots the North Vietnamese placed around the plant
39:30to fool the MiGs.
39:34The Saints were forced to retreat.
39:37From smoke pots the North Vietnamese placed around the plant
39:41to fool the walleye.
39:45Jim Busey flew in from the north amid fierce anti-aircraft fire,
39:51and the first of 28 surface-to-air missiles.
39:58I remember being head down in the cockpit on the Sony scope
40:03to get the weapon locked on my window,
40:06the window that was assigned to me on the power plant.
40:09And just as I locked on,
40:12the airplane was thrown off of that lock.
40:16And instead of looking at the thermal power plant,
40:19I was looking at the Paul D'Aumure Bridge,
40:22which was the main bridge across the river in downtown Hanoi.
40:27And I was upside down.
40:30Hardly missing a beat, Jim Busey righted his airplane,
40:34re-locked the walleye on the power plant,
40:37and let it go.
40:50He looked up to see two surface-to-air missiles.
40:54The C-2 surface-to-air missiles.
40:57And I looked out the right wing and saw that it was on fire,
41:01that I'd had some anti-aircraft fire going through the wing.
41:06Dodging the missiles, Busey escaped to a higher altitude
41:10where thinner air doused the flames engulfing his wing.
41:19When he landed back on the Oriskany,
41:21he counted 127 holes in his airplane,
41:25a testament to the survivability of his tiny Skyhawk.
41:30But other than that, it really was a nice flight.
41:33We didn't lose an airplane, so that was a big plus.
41:39Five of the six walleyes, including Jim Busey's,
41:43hit the target, knocking out power to downtown Hanoi.
41:49Brian Compton led the strike.
41:53They didn't put out any lights that night.
41:55We were talking to the registered voters of Hanoi.
42:00Brian Compton received the Navy Cross,
42:03the Navy's highest honor.
42:06Jim Busey also was awarded a Navy Cross.
42:11Brian's approach was from the south,
42:13and after he released his weapon,
42:15he went over the power plant and circled it
42:18at least twice, taking pictures, before he headed on out.
42:25In all, Brian Compton took 17 photos of the bomb damage
42:29to the Hanoi power plant.
42:33Yeah, it's kind of against the rules, but, you know,
42:35what are you going to do, send him back to Hanoi?
42:37He's already been there.
42:41To the members of his squadron,
42:43indeed, to all the members of the air wing,
42:46Brian Compton was developing a reputation as invulnerable.
42:51I have very vivid memories of a flight that I was on
42:54with Brian Compton when I was the number three person,
42:57and the number two person was shot down
43:00and crashed inside of Haiphong.
43:06And Brian Compton was concerned about trying to find out
43:11whether the pilot survived or not,
43:13and so he kept circling around the city of Haiphong
43:16at a very low altitude, around 2,000 feet.
43:20They were firing everything.
43:22Missiles, anti-aircraft guns, I'm sure rifles.
43:27Everything was being fired at us,
43:29and he kept circling around, and we'd go...
43:31John is exaggerating.
43:32He said, I took him over Haiphong seven times.
43:35And then I'd see him turn back in, and I'd gulp,
43:38and we'd go back in.
43:40He must have made eight or nine trips.
43:43You can't but trust these politicians.
43:45Honey, they'll lie to you every time.
44:00The Saints of the Arispany had many successes
44:03that summer and fall of 1967.
44:10They blew all the major bridges around Haiphong,
44:14temporarily isolating the port city
44:17from the rest of the country.
44:26Ten days after the power plant strike,
44:29Brian Compton was leading a mission
44:31against a Haiphong railroad bridge
44:34when the SAM alarm sounded in his cockpit.
44:41If I see that missile,
44:43I'm convinced that I can outmaneuver that missile.
44:48And when you got to the right time,
44:50you know, you maneuvered violently.
44:55I generally prefer to go up,
44:57but you can make the movement in any direction.
45:00And basically, if you did it at the right time,
45:04you could outmaneuver the SAM.
45:06In other words, the SAM could not pull enough Gs
45:09to track you through that maneuver.
45:12If you screwed up, you know, you got tagged.
45:19On this fateful day,
45:21a missile headed straight for Brian Compton's flight
45:24of four planes.
45:28Brian did what we called a pitch-up to the right,
45:31away from the bridge.
45:33What we called a pitch-up to the right,
45:35away from the rest of us.
45:38And Dave Carey and Al Stafford were with him,
45:42but the SAM came up and caught them.
45:45It went right, it detonated right between them
45:48and blew them both out of the sky.
45:55I remember there being a huge explosion.
45:57My airplane just stayed on its back
45:59and it started spinning and tumbling and gyrating.
46:02It was shaking so bad that nothing would focus.
46:04And I'd try to look inside at the panel
46:06and see what was going on.
46:07The instrument panel was just a blur in the cockpit.
46:10About the time that I was about to yell,
46:12the jet...
46:16a chute came out.
46:23All of a sudden, everything was very quiet,
46:26except I could hear airplanes, I could hear guns,
46:29I could hear anti-aircraft fire,
46:31I could hear a lot of shooting,
46:33and I'm hanging in the parachute,
46:35look down and I land in the middle of a small
46:37North Vietnamese village.
46:39He came up on the radio,
46:42and it was a little handheld emergency radio,
46:46and I asked him if he was all right.
46:50And he said,
46:52you know, we cannot come and get you.
46:55At which point I couldn't think of anything clever
46:57to say anymore, and Dean said...
46:58There was no way I could bring a helo in
47:00to try and extract him.
47:02And besides, he was surrounded by people,
47:05so if we did try to fish him out,
47:08they'd have shot him anyway.
47:10So...
47:12So I told him, well, there's nothing I can do, Dave.
47:14I'll see you.
47:18And he flew away.
47:20And I stood out there in the middle of that rice paddy.
47:23It was like I was the only person
47:25in the entire world, universe.
47:27I was by myself, alone, out there.
47:32And that started what turned out for me
47:34to be a little longer than five and a half years
47:36in prison in North Vietnam.
47:47Running very low on pilots and planes,
47:50the Saints cast about for volunteers.
47:54John McCain, on the forestall
47:57when fire consumed that ship, signed up.
48:02On October 26, 1967,
48:05less than a month after he arrived on the Oriskany,
48:09John McCain volunteered for a strike
48:12on the now-repaired Hanoi Thermal Power Plant,
48:16the same destination as the Saints'
48:19award-winning mission of August.
48:24He did want to go on that strike,
48:27and since I was the ops officer and wrote the flight schedule,
48:30he did come to me and insist on going on that flight,
48:33so I stuck him in there as a wingman.
48:36My nickname for him was Gregory Greenass
48:39because he was a new boy, hadn't been in combat before.
48:43Most of us felt, as I did,
48:45that it was very, very unlikely that I'd be shot down.
48:50As I released the bombs,
48:52I had just started to pull back on the stick
48:55when the surface-to-air missile struck the right wing
48:58and it gyrated very violently straight down,
49:01and I ejected, and according to reports,
49:05my chute opened just as my feet touched the lake.
49:12Unconscious, John McCain landed in a lake
49:16in the center of the city in the middle of the day.
49:21And so when I hit the water,
49:23it woke me up and I went down to the bottom
49:26and I couldn't get up to the surface.
49:29I tried to use my arms and I couldn't,
49:31and I reached down with my teeth
49:33and was able to get my teeth around the toggle
49:36and pull it and inflate the life vest.
49:39Came to the surface and there were Vietnamese swimming out.
49:44McCain broke both his arms and his knee,
49:48ejecting from his A-4 Skyhawk.
49:51The mob that pulled him from the lake
49:53stabbed him and broke his shoulder.
49:56He was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton,
49:59where Jim Stockdale had spent the last two years.
50:05He was probably more beat up when he got to prison
50:08than anybody that had ever lived through
50:10a rough ride and a rough treatment after he got picked up.
50:18McCain was the 16th pilot from the Oriskany
50:21killed or captured since July.
50:26By the end of their 1967 deployment to Vietnam,
50:29one out of three members of the Saints
50:32had died in combat or been captured.
50:35Of their 15 original planes, not one remained.
50:53In the three years of Operation Rolling Thunder,
50:56the Oriskany had lost 38 pilots and 60 planes,
51:00including 29 Skyhawks, to combat.
51:04The highest loss rate of any carrier in the war.
51:08In the fall of 1967, the Navy sent a safety team
51:12to investigate the tactics of the pilots.
51:16They were very quick to see that what we were doing
51:19in the summer and fall of 1967
51:22was significantly different than what had been done before.
51:27It didn't have anything to do with tactics or equipment
51:31or new weapons on the part of the enemy.
51:34It was just the fact that probability and statistics were hitting us.
51:41But the one thing we didn't do, we didn't back off.
51:44And maybe that was wrong.
51:47Maybe my leadership was defective because I had not given people...
51:52I didn't offer that as an option.
51:54The option was, we came to fight and that's what I expect you to do.
51:58Yeah, he was aggressive.
52:00Yeah, he went in and did the job that we had trained for.
52:04But so did the sister squadron, their CO and their XO.
52:12And I don't think there was any pattern there,
52:14so I can't give you an answer.
52:16I don't know why it turned out that way. It just did.
52:20Operation Rolling Thunder
52:25When the bombardment failed to deter the North Vietnamese,
52:29President Johnson ended Operation Rolling Thunder in 1968.
52:41Five years later, in 1973,
52:45John McCain...
52:49Dave Carey...
52:53and Jim Stockdale came home.
52:57Jim Stockdale was awarded the Medal of Honor.
53:01During his eight years in prison in Hanoi,
53:04he led American prisoners of war in near-unanimous defiance of their brutal captors.
53:11Operation Rolling Thunder
53:16In 1993, the remains of the last Oriskany pilot
53:20and the last saint to die in Operation Rolling Thunder came home.
53:2824-year-old Ralph Foulkes was an A-4 Skyhawk pilot
53:33killed on a routine road reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam
53:38on January 5, 1968.
53:43And I tell you here today that I stand before the company of heroes
53:48and future heroes in our Navy and our Marine Corps.
53:53May you always fly a center ball.
53:56May you never forget to drop your hook.
53:59The men who lead the Navy today were the youngest officers in Vietnam.
54:06The last of a generation torn apart by war,
54:11now teaching the lessons of that conflict
54:15to the first generation born too late to remember it.
54:21Don't worry, I'm a naval aviator.
54:36Operation Rolling Thunder
54:40A production of the U.S. Department of Defense
54:44U.S. Department of Defense
54:48U.S. Department of Defense
54:52U.S. Department of Defense
54:56U.S. Department of Defense
55:01U.S. Department of Defense
55:06U.S. Department of Defense
55:11U.S. Department of Defense
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