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00:00You had a bunch of young guys that were, I don't want to use the word courageous because that's a silly word, but they're guys that would do anything to accomplish the mission we were given, which was an impossible mission, to stop the flow of arms and material coming south.
00:29When we couldn't hit it where we should have hit it, which was in North Vietnam at the ports.
00:34When the nation was not willing to take that risk, then we tried to pick them off truck by truck coming south and that's the way we lost our guys, lost our airplanes, had people shot down every day.
00:59Well, the mystery was situated in two different places.
01:09First of all, when we were attacking targets and directing aircraft on targets in North Vietnam, we were out of Phucat, which is up in the northern part of South Vietnam.
01:21It was about 30 minutes to get into Route Pack 1, which is our area.
01:25Later on, in 1969, the aircraft actually moved to Thuy Wa, and they operated mainly in Laos out of Thuy Wa.
01:34Misty was a top-secret operation, which meant that word was whispered under the tables of those days a lot.
01:41So we knew they had this operation going up over North Vietnam that was looking for targets.
01:46Other people, besides Misty's, didn't have any idea what we were doing.
01:50So, you know, I couldn't even talk to even other pilots about it.
01:53I said, other than the extent that, you know, I was a fast-fac in North Vietnam, and I'd say, oh, that's nice.
02:01But the intel guys who went over to work with Misty just gave up in frustration.
02:06It was hard work, long hours, and, like, my immediate predecessor, who was a first lieutenant, thought they were all crazy.
02:15He just thought they were crazy.
02:17The Misty pilots were really a breed apart.
02:19I'm not saying they didn't have the same kinds of psychological problems that the rest of the pilots had that I saw in Vietnam,
02:25but somehow they were tougher.
02:27I mean, you have to understand that the guys that got into the squadron volunteered to be there.
02:33With very few exceptions, everybody was a volunteer.
02:37You know, and you guys, and the guys volunteered knowing that 30% of the guys got shot down.
02:44I was approached to be a Misty.
02:48I wanted to be a part of it.
02:57There were really two different air wars, if you will.
02:59I mean, in South Vietnam, the primary use of air power was in the form of close air support,
03:09where in the North, it was more of an offensive kind of air power, which is where air power was shackled.
03:18We were aware of what's happening.
03:20We were also aware that the war was being run pretty much out of the White House, and very micromanaged,
03:28and what was called gradualism.
03:30I don't know what anybody has mentioned.
03:32Gradualism is the thing where you kick them in the shins.
03:34If they don't bark, you kick them.
03:35That is not the way wars fall.
03:37If you're not going to fight the war, we all knew that.
03:39The Army ran the air war in Vietnam.
03:42The joint headquarters was MACV, and that was supposedly a joint headquarters in charge of both the air and ground side.
03:53But that headquarters was an Army headquarters, basically.
03:58There weren't any airmen in influential positions there.
04:01The Air Force tried and tried to get to be the deputy MACV commander, Westmoreland, or Abrams' deputy,
04:08to be an Air Force guy.
04:10Never worked.
04:11They always had an Army deputy as well as an Army commander.
04:16They picked all the in-country targets.
04:18The Army intelligence picked them.
04:21You should have been able to pick out the strategic targets, the tactical targets,
04:26that air power could destroy to shape the outcome of the war.
04:31When you were not permitted to do that, you were just fighting everything on the fringes.
04:37I'm convinced if we'd have been permitted to go in and close Haiphong.
04:43But Haiphong was totally off-limits.
04:45For us, for Misty, the main thing was we couldn't hit dams.
04:49We had several dams in Route Package 1 where we were responsible for trying to stop traffic.
04:56And those were absolutely off-limits, according to McNamara and his group.
05:02And power plants were off-limits.
05:05And the fear was, apparently, that if we hit too many of those targets, it would bring the Chinese into the war.
05:13And they were very, very reticent to let the Chinese have an excuse to come down and help like they did in Korea a few years ago.
05:22So, the rules of engagement were pretty stringent.
05:25And they were designed with a lot of political considerations and not with the idea of,
05:30how can I apply the maximum amount of power in the shortest period of time to get the desired outcome.
05:36That was never a part of the equation.
05:45We talk a lot about Route Packs and attacking Route Packs and what have you.
05:48And we were in Route Pack 1 in Vietnam.
05:51This was a military organization of the air war.
05:56To deconflict military actions, we divided it into geographical sections.
06:02And we divided it up, for instance, the Hanoi area was divided into Route Pack 5 and Route Pack 6.
06:10Again, the northern Route Packs, 5 and 6, were up north around Hanoi and Haiphong.
06:15And then the southern Route Packs, Route Pack 1, was just above the DMZ.
06:19And that was our area's MISTI.
06:22We were kind of limited to what was called Route Pack 1,
06:25essentially the lower 60 miles of North Vietnam.
06:28It was a bottom of a funnel.
06:30And so the area of North Vietnam where we were operating consisted of very high, rugged, karst mountains
06:38that then dropped down into the plain off onto the South China Sea.
06:43Mountains on the west, ocean on the east.
06:46And you've got to bring the traffic down to like a very narrow area to come into South Vietnam.
06:53So we had Route 1 close by the South China Sea.
06:58And it's still called Route 1, which was the main road from Hanoi to Saigon, if you will.
07:07And of course, it came down to the DMZ.
07:10And as they came down Route 1 in North Vietnam, there were branches that went over through various passes into Laos.
07:20And when I say they, I'm talking about North Vietnamese regulars.
07:28We're not talking about the Viet Minh.
07:30We're not talking about some ragtag civil war kind of thing.
07:34This was an organized national army.
07:37And they were moving material and men and equipment into South Vietnam using this trail network.
07:47But the whole complex, generally from the mountain passes down through Laos and then going into South Vietnam and down even into Cambodia, was the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
08:06At the time Misty was formed, most of our air attacks were being carried on in the northern part of North Vietnam, up around Hanoi, and as much as they would lead us around Ha Phong.
08:21The North Vietnamese were moving supplies, notably bombs and bullets, with impunity.
08:29They were driving convoys of trucks in the daytime down to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and then down the trail into South Vietnam.
08:38Well, it was a very hairy mission because what had happened was Russians had moved a ton of surface-to-air missiles into North Vietnam, the southern part of North Vietnam as well.
08:57And they were moving all these forces, moving all this weaponry and so on.
09:02And so they were lethal and hairy. It was a very scary environment.
09:11The increased importance of petroleum to the enemy's military efforts is further attested by his action to improve the routes of infiltration.
09:23Some of these routes are new. Some have been widened. Some have been upgraded for all weather use.
09:29Bypasses have been built and bamboo canopies or trellises have been built over the jungle roads in many places in order to inhibit observation of them from the air.
09:43A result of the greatly increased movement of men and supplies by truck and by motor-powered junks has been a shift from a small arms guerrilla type operation against South Vietnam to a quasi-conventional military operation which involves major supplies, major weapons and heavier equipment.
10:02Now, forward air controlling has been very effective. Even Civil War balloons, you know, the whole bit. You look down on the guy and say, there's the target.
10:11Prior to MISTI, they were trying to send propellers, we call them slow movers, up there. And the first couple that went up there were knocked out of the sky within seconds, within minutes.
10:24In April and May of 1967 would show they were losing a lot of airplanes just north of the DMZ.
10:32They were trying to control this area using the Cessna type of controlled aircraft and it was just too risky for them.
10:39What was happening is as the intensity of moving supplies to the south developed and grew, so did the defenses.
10:49And this is actually why MISTI was called into being.
10:54You run a slow-fack airplane up there at 100 miles an hour and they were just easy targets.
11:02So he decided that, well, we needed a faster airplane and so Bud volunteered to lead this outfit.
11:12Someone from 7th Air Force got a hold of me and told me that they were looking at the idea of cranking up a fast-fack mission, probably flying the F-100 and told me that I was going to be the commander of this.
11:30Went up to Phukat and Bill Douglas, my ops officer, had already been alerted.
11:38There was about a four-page ops order that was cut and it was called the Commando Saber Test Group.
11:46And that's what established MISTI. MISTI was a test group.
11:50You're not sure whether this is going to work or isn't going to work, so you don't want to call it an absolute, you're going to call it an experiment.
11:56So here was this experiment that was classified and they were going to go off and try this concept and see that it worked.
12:06In fact, it worked, it grew, it thrived.
12:10They said they were looking for people to go up and open a new base at a place called Phukat.
12:28And Phukat had been an old French base that we had developed up a bit and they were putting down 10,000 feet of runway for jets.
12:36They were going to try to bring the close air support closer to, and Central 2-4 where we were was a really critical area.
12:42As a matter of fact, Charlie Neal and I were the second and third guys to land at Phukat in the F-100.
12:50Then Bud Day started the MISTI thing and we said, boy, that sounded good.
13:00Well, Bud was a famous guy. He'd been in the 20th Wing. Anybody with any experience in the fighter business do him.
13:06He actually was in World War II, I think, as a Marine or something.
13:10I mean, but he had flown in Korea, combat in Korea, and he was a highly regarded, respected, you know, everybody in the business knows who's any good at this.
13:22And Bud was one of those guys. So people understood that. And of course, he set up the operation, started it.
13:30And the MISTI was started as a way to be more combat effective in an area that was highly dangerous and it hit some extreme anti-aircraft defenses.
13:45In South Vietnam, most of the defenses were small arms firing, maybe a .50 caliber machine gun, but nothing more sophisticated than that.
13:55However, when we crossed the Ben Hai River into North Vietnam, all that changed because then they were able to move SAM sites and large caliber radar control, optically controlled, sophisticated, from the 1960s, sophisticated anti-aircraft.
14:10And to operate in that environment, we had to go really fast.
14:14Well, the airplanes determined a lot of it, because we had almost all the F-100Fs in Vietnam were concentrated at Phucat.
14:25The F-100, which unbeknownst to them, the two-seat F-100 was a great aircraft for this. It was very, it was a versatile, and in particular, the visibility out of that cockpit was just excellent.
14:40And it had a refueling boom, and the idea started to evolve of, wow, you could refuel this thing, keep it on station.
14:48I think it was harder to see the Hun. The Hun was more maneuverable.
14:53And although we had no bombs, we were driving around with 20mm cannon and we had rockets and little pods under each wing.
15:02And we used the rockets to mark the target so the fighters could see it.
15:06We really couldn't do the mission single seat. There was just too much for one person to do.
15:11So we, early on, decided you must have a two-seat F.
15:15And it was a very valuable resource, because the Air Force built very few, and they were meant to be training aircraft, and there was a limited number.
15:24We called them fast facts, fast forward air controllers.
15:29And so we would cruise around at 400 knots or more, being a much harder target for the North Vietnamese gunners.
15:37It was kind of disappointing to get to Phuket because what you saw was a lot of pretty highly improved buildings.
15:56And in a war, that's kind of a bad sign because it indicates to you that no one's got any real plan to get something over with quick.
16:05Most, if not all, of the air crew were living in trailers, and mostly two to a trailer, sometimes three.
16:18A couple of the squadrons were still in what we'd call the Southeast Asia hooches, which were, you know, had the wood-louvered sides for ventilation.
16:29And, you know, if you don't mind powdered eggs and dehydrated milk or, you know, canned milk, it wasn't all that bad.
16:40It wasn't all that good, but it wasn't all that bad.
16:43Although, if you listen to the guys that the first Misty's were at Phuket Sucks, which is the real name of their air base, from what they tell me, things were worse over there.
16:56But it was closer to the action. We were pretty far north, so we were close to Laos and North Vietnam.
17:02So, getting people together was a marvelous thing. Bill Douglas was my ops officer, and there wasn't really a harder worker or brighter guy around that anyone could find than Bill Douglas.
17:22Bill Douglas.
17:23Bill Douglas was getting calls from other people in the theater once they heard about Misty.
17:28There was a certain gravitational pull for a kind of a caliber of fighter pilots that wanted to be in, quote, the real war up in the north.
17:37It was really the only way an F-100 pilot could get involved in the out-country war, because the out-country war was being carried by the F-105, mostly Thud and some F-4s.
17:47So, if you wanted to fight in North Vietnam, you had to go to Misty to do it as an F-100 pilot.
17:53I had trained to be a fighter pilot in combat for about eight years, eight or nine years.
18:00So, my goal was, the government spent all this money training me, I should go reward them with flying combat and doing the best job I could.
18:11And that's kind of how the Mistys got Misty pilots.
18:16It sounded exciting, it sounded like an adrenaline rush, it sounded important, and so, you know, that's the kind of guys that it attracted.
18:23So, we had a bunch of guys up there that were adrenaline junkies and looking for adventure, and we sure found it in Misty, big time.
18:30We ended up running this operation with about 11 or 12 people, and we're filling eight cockpit slots a day.
18:39And this was big, we're always trying to keep continuity.
18:42I wanted somebody in each aircraft that had been up there the day before.
18:47So, I got about a dozen guys, I'm sending four airplanes a day.
18:51The checkout program was pretty straightforward for everybody, it had been, you know, from its inception.
18:56You basically, everyone came in, and you flew strictly in the back seat, learning the map book, learning the route, learning the terrain and the activity that was going on, and getting into the flow of how we got fighters, and who we talked to, and all the rest of it.
19:18And then as soon as you had gone through those five sorties in the back seat, then you started alternating front and back.
19:28Finally got to the point where I went out and flew the first sortie, into North Vietnam, and kind of got a little picture on what things were going to look like, and it was a very different experience.
19:43A lot of guns, a very concise area that, a small area you had to fly into, and because of the shortage of airplanes, we really had to fly some long sorties.
20:00If you flew a mission, a Misty mission, that was a day.
20:05We're talking four and a half, five hours, sometimes longer missions in this F-100 with a two hour, before time is the briefing, intelligence briefing for what you're going to expect to see up there on the trail.
20:22And then, afterwards, you had a debriefing, which, depending on what you found, went anywhere from one to two hours.
20:30And so that was, you know, you got, a lot of the day is gone.
20:35You know, the guys that came into Misty, they knew what the job was, they knew what they were getting into.
20:39I mean, nobody came in there, you know, not knowing that they were going to be flying over North Vietnam, that they were going to be facking up there, that they'd be flying low and slow, looking for targets, drawing fire.
20:49They knew that.
20:51The thing is that everybody understood that this was a high risk mission.
20:55And so they only required 120 days.
20:57There was a few of them, crazy ones, that thought, gee, this is so much fun.
21:01How can I go back and bomb in water buffaloes in South Vietnam?
21:04This is where the action is. That's where I want to be.
21:06Please, please, let me do another tour.
21:08And there was a few of them that did that.
21:11And I think, like Eben Jones, he was one of the first ones to actually get a hundred Misty missions.
21:16And he got shot down on a hundred and first mission.
21:20Yeah, my gray beard memory, and that was a hundred and five and I got shot down on a hundred and fifth mission.
21:26So they knew that they were only there for a small period of time.
21:30I flew, you know, all the time.
21:33It's hard to fly a hundred Misty sorties in four months.
21:37Very hard. You have to fly 25 a month.
21:40Okay. And these are four or five hour missions.
21:44You fly 25 of them a month and you're constantly under G because you're constantly jinking all the time.
21:51And of course, you're spending a lot of time really bending the airplane around, jinking, changing direction,
21:58direction, trying to stay alive.
22:01And the missions were tremendously fatiguing.
22:06I can remember I would drink four or five water bottles of water on a mission.
22:13And I would get out of the airplane absolutely soaking wet.
22:18Walking back to put my parachute up, I could walk.
22:22I could hear my feet squishing in the water in my own boots.
22:26And I mean, I would just be absolutely beat.
22:29And I was in an extremely good physical condition back in those days.
22:34So I went up there on my first few rides and I thought these guys were crazy.
22:37This is absolutely nuts.
22:40Up north were the big guns, the real big guns, 37, 57 millimeter.
22:45And the sky was, anytime you were operating, it was filled with flack.
22:50And not only could you see it, but you could feel it when it came close to your airplane.
22:54It was kind of like a bam, bam, bam hitting on the side of your airplane.
22:58You'd be looking down one way and you hear this bam, bam, bam look the other
23:01and Tracer would be going by right outside of your head on the right side of the airplane.
23:05So the big difference was I thought these guys were nuts.
23:08I said, you know, this is crazy.
23:10The beauty of MISTI was there was no manual.
23:14We were doing something no one had ever done with jet fighters before.
23:19So what happened up there was a whole new mission.
23:23And I think that was the appeal of MISTI.
23:25First of all, you knew you were doing something nobody else was doing.
23:29Before you got up there, they told you, you assumed that it was going to be hairy.
23:34And then when you got up there, there were no rules.
23:40There weren't books of how to be a fast fac.
23:46I mean, I didn't know anything about being a forward air controller other than having flown strikes in South Vietnam under their control.
23:53So I knew the basics of what they did and how they did it.
23:57But it's quite different from flying around in an O-1 or an O-2 and flying around in an F-100 doing it.
24:03Especially when you happen to find yourself up in North Vietnam where they really didn't like us.
24:07Hillsboro, this is MISTI 1-1. Over.
24:10MISTI 1-1. This is...
24:12It took about 30 minutes from takeoff to get to North Vietnam.
24:31Maybe a little bit less depending on the weather.
24:34But normally we'd start working within about a half an hour of when we took off.
24:41Then after maybe an hour to an hour and a half, we'd go out to the tanker.
24:48And the tankers were normally over Thailand.
24:52The tanker just dragged...
24:54It has a hose with the basket on the end.
24:57The basket's about maybe two feet in diameter.
25:00And you have to fly the boom.
25:02You have to fly your probe into the basket.
25:08So we'd go out and it would take maybe 15 to 20 minutes to hit the tanker,
25:15get a full load of gas, and then head back into the... into North Vietnam.
25:22The standard mission was two refuelings.
25:24But a lot of times we would go three refuelings.
25:29And the one day I flew seven and a half hours, we had four refuelings.
25:35Our job was to go to find targets, to mark those targets for fighters.
25:40When we first went up there, it took us about two or three weeks to start generating results.
25:46In other words, we're kind of new guys on the block.
25:50Unless you go and look for this same stuff day after day after day, you're not going to be able to do it.
25:54We became masters at finding anything.
25:57Misty 1-1, this is Hillsborough.
25:59We have gunfighters launching from the alert pad.
26:01They will rendezvous with you at Delta 15.
26:03In its role as the forward air controller, Misty rendezvous with strike aircraft and briefed pilots on the target.
26:11Approaches, tactics, ordinance to use, and defensive hazards.
26:16We had constant contact with a big airplane orbiting in Laos, or I'm sorry, in Thailand, C-130.
26:26Their call sign was Hillsborough.
26:28They were an ABCC, an airborne command and control center.
26:32We could call those guys, and they would divert somebody with bombs to us.
26:37And then we would put them in on the target.
26:41So the idea was to find a target and to get fighters overhead and launch a marking rocket that put up a big white cloud of phosphorous smoke.
26:57Once the smoke rocket was launched, particularly if the target was a gun sight, there would be bullets coming up toward us.
27:07The most lethal was the 37 millimeter, and each one of those rounds had a tracer on it, and it looked like a flaming golf ball coming up.
27:16So as soon as we launched the smoke rocket, we wanted to get out of the way of the flaming golf balls, and we called it jinking maneuvers.
27:24Every time you were putting a strike in, you put yourself at peril.
27:28The minute you picked up, pulled up a little bit, and shot a rocket, everybody in North Vietnam knew what was happening, and everybody started shooting at you.
27:38I got hit on 13 of my 58 missions in Misty, and sometimes you didn't even know it until you got back and you saw a hole in the airplane.
27:45And other times there was no doubt in your mind you got hit.
27:48Every time you got hit, you know, you'd question yourself, was I doing something stupid?
27:52Was I violating altitudes?
27:54Was I too slow?
27:55Did I make multiple passes in the target area?
27:57During that time, there was nothing automated about this.
28:00Nowadays, everything is automated.
28:02You have GPS, you have laser-guided bombs, and we had none of that stuff.
28:07So it was pilot skill and experience.
28:10The Mistys became absolute experts on the AAA, the defenses, what we call the AAA order of battle.
28:18If you had a battery of AAA over here today, you could count on the fact it's not going to be there tomorrow.
28:24If it fired, it was moving.
28:26This was their order of battle.
28:29And it came down to this.
28:32We lived by the guns.
28:34We lived by the guns.
28:36With the cessation of bombing in Hanoi, the NVN had moved every gun they had left over down onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the route packs.
28:48They told us we were facing the largest concentration of AAA since World War II.
28:55And in some areas, it was greater or worse, rather, than World War II.
28:59You never wanted to lose your speed because that was, of course, your survival, keeping your speed up and keeping that airplane turning at all times.
29:07I always felt low was life, low in speed.
29:12If you could go fast and low, that was your life's blood.
29:23Pilots don't like to really identify themselves with reconnaissance or intelligence.
29:28They're fighter pilots, you see.
29:30So when you say that, I get razzed about it.
29:36But the one thing is this was essentially an intelligence function.
29:40And what it was, it was genuine, real-time intelligence.
29:43We had regular intelligence reports that we sent out daily.
29:47And it was called the DICEM, the MISTI DICEM Daily Intelligence Summary.
29:52That would go out instantly.
29:54And General Molmeyer, the Chief of Air Operations in the theater at the time, that was the first thing that he wanted to hear when he started his intel brief every day.
30:04What's the MISTI's report?
30:06What's new?
30:07What's happening up there?
30:08Because this was the surgical effort to front line to try to cut off the flow of supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.
30:18After every flight, every pilot comes in and sets down with intelligence officers and goes through the battle damage assessment for the entire mission.
30:25And some of these briefings will last 30 minutes and some two hours go into great detail.
30:29And we reported all the flights that came in and what they did and what the targets was, what effectiveness we had, whether we destroyed the targets, whether we didn't destroy them, whether they should be struck again.
30:42Ray Bovino was still there.
30:43Ray Bovino was still there.
30:45John Haldigan and Roger Van Dyken.
30:47A young guy, a young second lieutenant, right out of school, right out of utility school.
30:52But eager to come up and did a great job.
30:54Everybody was working 12 hours a day.
30:56People had three and four jobs.
30:58There was an atmosphere of innovation, of how can we penetrate these air defenses?
31:05How can we figure out how the supplies are coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail?
31:10How can we try to get in their minds and see what kind of a logistic system they're using, where the truck parks are?
31:17How can we outthink them?
31:19And then sending the guys up day after day after day to probe our theories.
31:26We didn't have lots of sophisticated equipment.
31:29We did, by virtue of being the guys who spent more time over that trail than any other people,
31:36we really got to understand the way they operated and how they would park their trucks during the day and conceal them and try to move them at night.
31:48Because we really, we virtually made daytime movement impossible for them.
31:53We're trained to see objects on the ground.
31:58That's what we were trained to do.
32:00We're developing our vision, and you'll hear the expression, misty eyes.
32:05That means that they could see things that were heavily camouflaged.
32:09The guys told me, like Mick Green when I first flew with Mises Dick,
32:12what you're going to be involved in right now is that you're going to be instituted into a camouflage college.
32:19And I look around and I just saw a jungle and a few roads and stuff.
32:22I didn't see anything.
32:23But then he pointed out the little subtleties.
32:26Nature doesn't like regular patterns.
32:29So if you see a rectangle sitting in the middle of a field,
32:33there's a good chance that it's a man-made object of some kind.
32:37We had a Pentax 35mm with a big lens on it in the back seat.
32:46And you'd find your target and you'd fly a low-level knife-edge pass over the target and snap the pictures.
32:56And the minute we would land, an intel guy would meet us at the airplane, dash off with this camera,
33:03and they would get the pictures back while we were still debriefing.
33:06You might be in there saying, you know, I think there were trucks just north of that shore
33:11on the east side of the trail.
33:13And then the pictures come back, and sure enough, you get pretty good at telling where trucks are
33:19because that does not look like a tree.
33:21It's the same color as a tree, and it's in amongst the other trees, but that doesn't look like a tree.
33:26But the thing is that when they try to camouflage it, if you think about it,
33:31leaves, when you turn them upside down, are a slightly different color on the top than on the bottom.
33:36One of the biggest strikes we made, I think Charlie Summers found it.
33:42He saw the dust collected on top of the high trees.
33:48They'd been using this truck park so much that the dust had filtered on up,
33:52and he kind of saw a dust pattern, different color on the tops of the trees.
33:57It was pretty easy to see a gun sight.
33:59It looked like a little donut, and if it was green filled, that was a gun sight.
34:03If we saw a gun sight that was occupied, and we had extra rockets on the way home,
34:09we would fire at those gun sights because that meant we had identified them,
34:13and they would have to move that night.
34:16So we kept them moving all the time, which of course pissed them off.
34:19The fact is that if they could see from the air what we saw,
34:21they would do their camouflage totally different.
34:23You got pretty good at looking for signs.
34:26For example, along the lines of this, the intel function,
34:31if in the morning you would come to a little creek fjord,
34:36and the right bank had water splashed 20 feet out of it,
34:40and the north bank had little water,
34:42you could figure out most of the traffic was southbound that night.
34:47The intel team had put together a series of photographs,
34:53roads, railroads, rivers, areas that you could logically move quantities of material through,
35:02depicted on photo mosaic maps.
35:05All of Root Pack 1, our area, all of it was on sliding maps on a big board,
35:10a series of big boards.
35:12I don't know how long it took these kids to put that together.
35:14It must have taken them months.
35:16I think those maps were the most valuable maps in all of Southeast Asia.
35:21They were a scale that had a great amount of detail,
35:27and so they were able to absolutely pinpoint things.
35:31But Ray Bevavino did this with a beautiful set of maps.
35:36So when somebody came in to brief in the morning,
35:39they could see exactly what had happened yesterday and what was going on.
35:45Kind of like a team of Sherlock Holmes detectives briefing one another
35:49on the progress that they're making.
35:51And so we really became, the MISTI pilots,
35:55became our best source of intelligence to provide information for succeeding MISTI pilots.
36:01Recover the first flight, debrief it, send stuff to 7th Air Force,
36:06and pass on the information to the second flight.
36:08So that there was continuous visual, real-time intelligence.
36:14Okay, so the guys going up on the second flight,
36:17they already knew what had happened in the morning.
36:19They were ready to go.
36:20They picked up the, you know, the torch, whatever,
36:23and started working the area all over again.
36:30When somebody's down, everybody comes from whatever they're doing,
36:33and if you can help, you help.
36:35As MISTI pilots, we got to do that quite a bit.
36:38And it involved all kinds of crazy stuff.
36:42Trying to trick the guys on the ground to thinking the guy was somewhere else.
36:46Trying to, you know, keep guys away from him with 20mm strafe
36:50at low altitude among big guns.
36:52So it was a dicey, dicey situation.
36:55Having been on the ground and being there quite a while before I was rescued,
36:59I could really sympathize with pilots on the ground.
37:05Really on-site commanders of those rescaps, those rescue efforts,
37:10were the MISTI pilots who were directing things on scene.
37:15We did an awful lot of rescue because in Pack 1,
37:19it was too hot an area for the propeller-driven Sandys
37:24to come in with the helicopter and find the downed airmen.
37:27So we would find them, identify them,
37:30and then work the area with fighters to try to suppress the AAA
37:35because that would knock a helicopter or a Sandy down in a heartbeat.
37:39So just as we got over the target, we took a tremendous hit in the aft end of the Hun,
37:44and it just felt like it stopped.
37:47Every light in the cockpit came on.
37:49We were doing about 530 knots, and the flight controls failed,
37:54and the airplane went into a real high negative G bunt
37:59and tried to throw us out of the top of the cockpit,
38:02and the airplane went uncontrollable.
38:05We were really balling the jack, so when I came out,
38:08it popped a few panels in my chute, and I hit the ground hard.
38:13And when I woke up, I realized I had a busted arm, and my knee went really hurt.
38:24Instantly, a couple teenagers, probably 14-year-old kids,
38:29came popping through the brush with an old rifle in their hand and captured me.
38:35Everybody knew that he was up in Hanoi, that he was a prisoner of war,
38:39so that sort of hung over everybody.
38:41Everybody sort of knew that that was a chance that you might meet up with Bud Day before you wanted to.
38:47One mission was B Willie and H Willie, Brian Williams and Howard Williams.
38:52They were in the Mugia Pass area, the border between North Vietnam and Laos, a very hot area.
38:59I think we'd just gone off and refueled lunch and came back to the area,
39:04and clouds were kind of breaking up a little bit, so you could kind of see the roads down there,
39:09and there was something that looked like a bulldozer from the altitude we were.
39:13You know, we were up probably 4,000 feet.
39:17And so we just made a big, wide turnaround to come back and look at that, see what it was.
39:23It sounded like a sledgehammer hitting the belt of the airplane, that's always just a big bang.
39:33Within about 10 seconds, I could see flames in my mirror behind me.
39:39It was started way back on the fuselage, and I'm talking 30 seconds total.
39:47The fire's up to me, behind me, I'm getting hot in the back seat.
39:53And so I said, I'm going out, and he says, I'm right behind you, and I pulled the handles.
40:01B Willie in the back seat survived.
40:05Howie Williams in the front seat said, I'm right behind you, B Willie, and never came out.
40:11And of course, in the F-100, the back seat goes first.
40:15If the front seat went first, it would scorch the guy in the back seat.
40:19But the system, the back seat has to go first.
40:23This aircraft went in to the jungle somewhere in the Mugia Pass.
40:30But we immediately went around and started looking for Howie, and that was kind of tough,
40:34because they didn't see anything and didn't hear any radio calls.
40:39And we looked around a couple of sites that looked like it might be a swat through the trees
40:44where the airplane had gone in.
40:46And started taking more hits on the chopper.
40:50And by that time, they're starting to run out of gas.
40:53So they had to leave.
40:55And that was a terrible feeling when you're leaving your friend and your comrade up there.
41:00And I'll never forget when we all went out to greet B Willie coming back.
41:06There was such joy and relief of him coming back.
41:12And yet, the look on his face, just coming through this harrowing experience,
41:19was he was struggling within himself of the joy and relief at being rescued,
41:28and the sorrow of leaving a buddy behind.
41:33But to have your friend disappear, spray stuff, I've lived with that all my life.
41:39You know, never get over that problem.
41:42I was trying to rescue a guy.
41:46He's an F-4 guy down on the ground.
41:49And so I'm right over the guy.
41:55And I'm circling, okay.
41:57And the helicopters are coming up.
41:59They're offshore.
42:00Okay.
42:01And I left this guy for about, probably up to a minute, about 45 seconds.
42:09And I pulled.
42:10I got the airplane going as fast as I could.
42:12And like this, I'm headed towards the shoreline to fire a rocket out there.
42:17I said, telling the choppers, I said, you hit, see the smoke, turn inland right there.
42:25I'd come in and, and what happened was, as soon as I left him, you know,
42:35within seconds, you know, the guy's screaming on the radio to me, you know,
42:40that they come and they come and get him.
42:42So, if I hadn't left the guy, it's life, I guess.
42:52I feel badly about that.
42:54I hear that guy screaming on the radio, you know.
42:57The one that broke my heart was a, the Jolly Green helicopter came over a wounded and,
43:04an injured pilot, F-105 driver, who was in the jungle.
43:08They put the penetrator down, and he was too wounded to get on the penetrator.
43:13The penetrator's a metal device that folds out with legs, and you get on it,
43:17and they tow you back up to the helo.
43:20So, the PJ, the para jumper, this little 19-year-old, probably three striper,
43:27jumps on the wire and goes down, puts the pilot on the, on the penetrator,
43:34straps him in, they drag the pilot up, take him off of the penetrator,
43:39and put the penetrator back down, and then they start taking heavy ground fire.
43:44And they never saw the PJ again.
43:47And they stooched around for hours, running choppers in and out, and fighters going through,
43:54and trying to talk to this kid.
43:56Never heard from him again.
43:59On my 105th mission, I think, Misty mission, I was in the back seat with Chuck Shaheen.
44:05Dick was from a town ten miles away from the town I went to high school in,
44:10and, and his high school and my high school were rival high schools,
44:13and so they said, that would be really appropriate, we'll send a big news article back,
44:17and, you know, two high school rivalries fly a last mission together in Vietnam.
44:22Well, it was my last mission. Dick was going to try to set a record of the number of Misty missions ever flown.
44:30So we crawl in the airplane together, and off we go.
44:34We were putting in some F-100s in a truck park, and they were missing the, missing the target.
44:40And I said, you know, Dick, I'm going to roll in and strafe these things.
44:43For whatever reason, we ended up strafing this truck at real low altitude, which is really foreboding.
44:49We broke all the rules that we were supposed to abide by.
44:53And he strafed the truck, and as we pulled off, bang, we got hit, and there was a lot of fire.
44:58In other words, fuel was coming out of the airplane, and as it hit the aspirator, it lit off, and it was like a torch in the back.
45:05And as soon as I pulled it out of the afterburner, it went out.
45:08Actually, we were dumping fuel so bad that I didn't think we'd make it.
45:12And we looked up at the coast, it was about 30 miles away.
45:15And you look at the coast, and you see the fuel gauge unwind.
45:18And you look at the coast coming, and the fuel gauge unwind, and you realize there's no fine way that we're going to make it.
45:24At that time, it was my last mission over the north, and I did not want to end up up north as a POW.
45:30So I was going to make that coastline, and we were going to bail out, we were going to bail out over the water.
45:35Well, we made it out to sea about 10, 15 miles, and got up to about 10,000 feet when the thing quit on us.
45:43And so I said, you go ahead and go out, Dick.
45:47And a few minutes later, I went out.
45:50And after an hour or so in the Gulf of Tonkin, a helicopter came and picked me up.
45:55It normally should be full of adrenaline after something like that happened.
45:58But I finally realized, hey, I don't have to do this anymore.
46:01I've already flown, you know, more than what I was allocated to.
46:04And I was going to make it. I was going to go home.
46:07One morning, McElhannon, who was one of our Mistys that didn't come back, and I were cruising in as Misty 1-1, which was the early flight in the morning.
46:18So at first light, I cruised in low over the coast.
46:23And it's kind of a chilling feeling.
46:26I heard the voice, Misty, is that you?
46:30I still get kind of...
46:32And I said, yes, sir.
46:34He said, well, this is Master 01.
46:37I said, you still there?
46:39He said, yep.
46:40I said, don't worry, we'll get you out.
46:43And he said, thank you.
46:45And the more, it's a long story, but we killed guns all day long almost.
46:52At the end, the result was that a helicopter came in, picked him up, took him out, and not a shot was fired.
46:59I called the gentleman who lives in Montana 35 years after that, and he answered the phone.
47:09I said, this is Misty 1-1.
47:11He says, Master 01.
47:13He said, thank you.
47:15I said, I'm living in Montana, retired, and that's because of what the Mistys did.
47:21So, it's kind of, those missions were very rewarding.
47:26I mean, we literally saved lives, in my mind.
47:30So, I get kind of Misty.
47:34That's a bad thing to be when you're a Misty pilot.
47:36There's something about having one of your fellow airmen, you know, on the ground that just really kicks you in the butt and makes you do everything you can to get him out.
47:46You know, essentially, I guess the story here is regardless of how hard you're trying to do something, there's still a potential for failure, you know.
47:57And in that case, and so it's just something that, it lives with you.
48:02There's that joy and sorrow intermixed.
48:07To me, that almost became part of the Misty story, that almost became part of the Vietnam story.
48:15Wanting to do things for people and having individual successes, and yet leaving so many good people behind.
48:25We didn't know that we were going to stop when we did.
48:36I flew the last Misty sortie on the 12th of May 1970.
48:42I came down from that sortie and walked in to debrief it and they handed me a copy of a Twix that terminated Misty.
48:52A hose down occurs on your final flight in that airplane, that unit.
49:00And it usually involves the fire truck coming out.
49:05And when you get out of the airplane, there's usually most of your squadron mates are handling the hose and they hit you hard with all the water.
49:15And you're sort of like a drowned rat.
49:18And then usually there's a bottle of champagne that follows.
49:23Misty was closed.
49:26The squadron was closed at the end of a three year period because we were converting from the F-100 to the F-4 basically.
49:36So the fast-back role was picked up by F-4 squadrons.
49:41First by Stormy, they're called signs Stormy, operating out of Da Nang.
49:47And later by F-4 squadrons operating out of Thailand.
49:51There were several of them.
49:53Falcon FAC, Tiger FAC, Night Owl was a night FAC operation and so forth.
50:00At the end of Vietnam altogether, we no longer operated dedicated fast-back squadrons.
50:08We just set up the old fashioned regular fighter squadrons.
50:14And so we sort of went out of that business.
50:17After about a week of having the Misty mission terminated, two of us were selected and sent to Yuban, Thailand, to check out the Wolf FACs who were flying F-4Ds.
50:33What was so funny was the Wolf FACs, a great group of people, their tactics were to fly at 3,000 feet above the ground, AGL, at about 450 knots and not a whole lot of jinking.
50:55And so Charlie Huff, my front seater, good friend, I just asked him how long he wanted to live.
51:03And he said, what do you mean?
51:05And I said, this is exactly where they want you to bracket you for AAA fire and ground fire.
51:12And he says, okay, you take the airplane and show me the Misty tactics, which I did.
51:18And we went down low and moved the airplane around quite a bit.
51:25And sure enough, we did see some ground fire during that mission.
51:29If anything, we taught them to get down to where they could see things.
51:35And so we kind of gave them a totally new perspective on what a fast fact could do and how they would do it.
51:44The legacy of Misty is the people who were in it.
51:48This chapter of aviation history is all about the men who did that.
51:55You know, at the time, when you're there, we were all kids for the most part, you know.
52:02I didn't realize how special these guys were.
52:05I really didn't.
52:06I know we stood out from the rest of the guys.
52:08Our job was a little harder, it was a little more dangerous, we lost more pilots.
52:12But I didn't really have the sense until many years later about how really special these guys were.
52:18I do know that as you look back at the histories of each person that was in it,
52:24157 pilots, there will be 157 different reasons on why they joined Misty.
52:33We have a reunion every two years.
52:36And I look forward to seeing the Mistys there that can make it.
52:43And I also have some friends that were in other fast fact sort of missions.
52:51And when I get to a military unit and somebody will ask me, what did you fly?
53:00What kind of sorties?
53:02You know, that type of typical introductory type questions all just say, I was a Misty.
53:11And the room goes quiet.
53:14It was an absolutely amazing group of people, all the way from the ground crews that proved on the airplanes, maintained the airplanes,
53:24and the armament crews that kept our rockets working, the intel officers, the commanders.
53:31We just had a very tight knit group of people and really, really smart people.
53:37They knew what they were doing.
53:38They were very, very good fighter pilots.
53:40They knew how to use intelligence.
53:41They knew how to react in unpredictable situations when things went wrong.
53:46And it was just one of the best groups of people that I've ever worked with.
53:51The fighter business has always been an all-volunteer business.
53:56And the only one people who want to go there is because it's kind of a chancy thing to do.
54:07So, the people who ended up in that squadron were highly selected.
54:14Selection after selection after selection.
54:17Screening after screening.
54:19And it's no mystery that they were a good bunch of guys.
54:24If I had to go today, I mean, I'm in my 80s.
54:29If I had to go up a dark alley today, and there was a fight waiting for me at the other end,
54:36that's a bunch of guys I'd want to take with me.
54:39If I have no...
55:04Who wants to go there?
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