Eugene Red McDaniel - Scars and Stripes: The True Story of One Mans Courage Facing Death as a POW in Vietnam

EUGENE RED MCDANIEL

CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES NAVY

withJAMES L. JOHNSON

The True Story of One Mans Courage
Facing Death as a POW in Vietnam

before honor is humility.
Proverbs 18:12

To my Bombardier-Navigator,
Lieutenant James Kelly Patterson,
and others like him who did not return.

SCARS AND STRIPES

WND Books, Washington D.C.

Copyright 2012 by Red McDaniel with James L. Johnson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
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Written by Red McDaniel
Book Designed by Mark Karis

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-936488-47-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-936488-94-0

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I awoke to the short, raucous jangle of the phone on the wall over my head, giving me a rude jab as if to say I ought to be ashamed that I was caught sleeping.

I fumbled for it in the semidarkness of my quarters and picked it up. On the other end was the voice of the duty officer, Rod Bankson.

You have a brief in a half-hour, he said shortly. Concise, to the point, as all duty officers had to be.

I cleared my throat, conscious of the light roll of the carrier Enterprise under me, gently tipping me right and left as if I were in a bassinet getting the rock-a-bye treatment.

Whats the target? I asked, and the sound of my voice was carrying maybe just a trace of apprehension above the hoarseness of sleep.

Its an Alpha Strike, Bankson replied in a straight, unemotional tone, as if Alpha Strike were nothing more than delivering mail to a company of Waves at Waikiki. Actually, an Alpha Strike meant a maximum effort into North Vietnam planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.

Where? I asked Bankson, hoping it might be a well-plowed target with not too much flak concentration.

Van Dien.

I didnt say anything to Bankson for a long ten seconds, it seemed; I hung onto the receiver, wanting to argue, feeling the familiar rumble of Enterprises power plant around me. I had already flown eighty missions over Vietnam, fifteen of them Alpha Strikes. Only two days ago, May 17, I had gone on an Alpha Strike to Package 6 to knock out a bridge south of Hanoi. It was VFR (Visual Flight Rules) all the way, which meant the VC ground gunners had us zeroed in on the entire run over the target. It was tough. When I got back after that, I figured I had a breather coming. Instead, I now had Van Dien on the menua truck repair center just south of Hanoi, a place we called Little Detroitand the odds were the VC would be throwing everything they had at us.

Yet, as I sought for something to say to Bankson, I was caught in the dilemma that every naval pilot faces: I had to keep going up on the Alpha Strikes as well as the milk runs if I intended to get my command. And, whats more, if I could get in ninety-one or ninety-two missions, I would be rotated out of the combat zone.

So I said, Okay, and hung up the phone. It was a little after six in the morning; I got up and went through the motions of preparation for the Alpha missions inside North Vietnam. I shaved first, but did not use after-shave lotion or deodorant. In case I were shot down, as the regulations had it, the VC, who did not use body lotion or deodorant, could smell it for hundreds of yards and zero in on me. But, even as I finished shaving, I did not consider being shot down and taken prisoner. The chances of being killed were more real, and for this I had to prepare my mind every morning. For one thing, getting hit in an A-6 jet, carrying all those thousand-pounders under the wings, did not offer too much time to blow canopy and parachute down. And it was the bombing approach where the flak was heaviest and the chances of getting hit were the highest. If I was hit, chances were that I would either blow up with the aircraft or ride her down, unable to get out. Death, then, was the real risk of the maximum efforts into North Vietnam, not the possibility of living or being captured, though there were those who had lived and been captured.

So now, having finished the shave, I ran my fingers over the smooth skin of my face and took a few minutes to reflect. I was thirty-five years old, still showing the reddish-blond hair that had pegged me Red since the year one. The blue eyes were clear enough yet, though there were little crinkles beginning to show underneath that said I was a veteran military man in more ways than one. I was still in good shape physically, keeping my weight evenly distributed across my six-foot three-inch frame through disciplined exercise, a habit I had carried over from my athletic days in high school and college. My twelve years in naval aviation had also drilled into me the need to stay on the line mentally and physically, so I really didnt have to back off to the younger men in the squadronat least not yet.

For some reason on this day, however, I kept feeling a nagging kind of doubt. I was the father of three children back in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I had a beautiful wife, Dorothy, whom I had courted in college and who was everything I needed to complement my life. But today I felt some grittinessmaybe uncertainty?about the mission coming up. Like all combat men, I supposed, after so many maximum missions, exhaustion begins to dig in. Or maybe right then I missed Dorothy more acutely; I felt the need to be home with her and the kids like other fathers who had banking or real estate jobs. But here I was, preparing for my eighty-first mission countdown, ten thousand miles from home, with the nibbling fear that maybe death was waiting for me today, that I would not see my family again and somehow I wanted my death to be worthy of them.

I felt disturbed by these feelings, because I never allowed myself to think along such lines. I was, after all, a military man; I had chosen it for my career. In choosing it, I lived by the demands of itit was a fraternity of men who stuck by the spirit and the rule, ours not to reason why, ours but to do and (sometimes) die. We believed in our commanders, in our President, and in the cause, no matter how marginal or confusing at times, and every military man since the beginning stuck by that and delivered the goods as best he could. I believed that what we were doing in Vietnam was right, that we were trying to contain Communist aggression. And even if the South Vietnamese didnt particularly care whether a democracy or a dictatorship ruled their lives, the point was that the United States was trying to draw the line here for the Free World. Only history could determine whether it was right or wrong.

I had come to that conviction a long time ago or else I wouldnt have eighty combat missions behind me. So why was I feeling doubts about it today? I had been chafing for a couple of days now; maybe it was a kind of growing resentment at having to take so many missions deep into North Vietnam. The more experience I got flying those Alpha Strikes, the more missions I was asked to take, and, though I knew that was the natural order of things in the military combat strategy, each new deep penetration into North Vietnam increased my chances of getting shot down. Each mission lately was marked by heavier and more accurate anti-aircraft fire, including the dreaded SAMs (surface-to-air missiles).