David Kirk Vaughan - Runway Visions: An American C-130 Pilots Memoir of Combat Airlift Operations in Southeast Asia, 1967-1968

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Vaughan, David Kirk.
Runway visions : an American C-130 pilots memoir of combat airlift operations in southeast Asia, 19671968 / by David Kirk Vaughan.
p. cm.
Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-0488-9

1. Vaughan, David Kirk. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975 Personal narratives, American. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975 Aerial operations, American. 4. Airlift, MilitaryVietnam. I. Title.

DS559.5.V38 1998
959.704'3'092dc21 98-15150
CIP

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data are available

1998 David Kirk Vaughan. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

Dedicated to

all those who flew, are flying, or will fly the Lockheed C-130, one of the classic aircraft of all time, in any of its configurations

and to those who flew the C-130 in Southeast Asia, especially to those who died in the line of duty,

and to the following individuals,
who were important to me personally in my flying career: Al Williams, Larry Fordham, Virgis Hill, Jerry Coleman, Irving Torchinsky, Les Fredericks, Sidney Richardson, Kirk Waldron, Gomer Lewis, Howard Dallman, Ross Kramer, Horace Horse Pemberton, Frank Passarello, Bill Knipp, Tommy Lee Butler, Edgar Bill Lorson, Elmer Dusty Watkins, Frank Kricker, Ed Scholes, Mike Brown, Mike Jones, Roger Wright, and Don Greenwade

and most especially to the memories of
Karl Klein and Dave Risher

VISIONS OF RUNWAYS

The old head told the story of the South

Vietnamese guard who stood high in his fox

hole at the end of the coastal runway.

One of our crews, low on short final, bounced

their main gear off his helmet. I grinned then.

Later, on a day blue in rain, heavy

with doubt, I landed badly on that thin,

wet strip and my leg shook with a movement

of its own. In the alligator house I danced

once on that runway. But only once. Those

hard, dark runways, with names like a two-step

cadence: An Khe. An Hoa. Kham Duc. Phan Thiet.

Dak To. Khe Sanh. Their visions now, as then,

dryness in the mouth, tightness in the lip.

When I was flying in Southeast Asia from February of 1967 until April of 1968, I did not keep notes of my experiences. I have wished often since then that I had. The letters I wrote home were for the most part void of the details of my specific flying tasks and experiences. My comments were typically something like this: Just got back from flying the shuttle for sixteen days in Vietnam. Glad to be able to take a long, hot shower. Going to fly again in two days, to Naha, Clark, and Bangkok. But who had the timeor the capacity for self-analysisto adequately describe the full range of experiences those words summarized? Sometimes I used small reel-to-reel tapes. Talking into a microphone was easier than sitting down to write. It was also therapeutic. But the content of those tapes was superficial also. I suppose I viewed my messages home as evidence of my continued safe existence and slow but steady passage of time until my tour of duty was up and I would return to the States.

It did occur to me in the final hectic months of my tour that detailed accounts of my experiences might provide interesting reading. But I realized that if I were to write about my experiences in Southeast Asia, it would take time, time that I obviously did not have then. I told myself that I would undertake that task, fill in the details, after I returned. But when I returned to America, life in Southeast Asia seemed increasingly remote, and it did not seem important to revisit those experiences then. Besides, some of my experiences were not the sort that you could talk about easily. About some of the more hazardous flying experiences, you could say, if you were willing to admit it, I was nervous, but even that brief thought conveyed little of the range of sensations or events involved.

And how could you describe the activities of your off-duty hours, when those activities were the kinds of things you were not supposed to do, not if you were a conscientious husband and upright son of proud if worried parents? Some details better left undescribed, perhaps? But those off-duty activities were important because they helped you maintain your emotional equilibrium. They constituted a part of the total account and were as important as the activities it is more acceptable to discuss, the events that occurred inside an aircraft.

Flying in combat changes you; the more intense or frightening the experience, the more profound the changes are. Although the military system and society itself try to condition you to encounter stressful experiences and not show change, change does occur, and if you are to survive in something like a state of psychic wholeness, you do what you need to do to compensate for stress. Its not a planned thing, your compensating activities, you just do them. And the things you doyour actions, behaviors, motivationsmay not be the kind of things you have been conditioned to do or tell others about. Nor are you able, if you are honest, to be particularly proud of all of the things you have done, inside the aircraft or out. But if you hope to relate anything like a truthful account, you must describe all aspects of your behaviorthose you would readily admit having done, and those you would rather not admit having done, those activities that make you uncomfortable, that make you squirm a little as you write about them.

To accommodate possible discomforts of the truths of combat, some writers describe their experiences in the form of a novel. Novels allow writers to manipulate experiences, to say things that might be embarrassing in an autobiographical work. But I did not want to write a novel, not about what I felt and experienced when I flew C-130s in Southeast Asia. To me that would misrepresent, trivialize, or sensationalize the experience. And so I have tried to tell what life was like for me when I was on-duty and when I was off-duty, when I did my job pretty well and when I screwed up. Fortunately for me and those with whom I flew, I did my job mostly successfully and my screw-ups caused minimal distress.

In telling my story, I have tried to illuminate the flying activities of the crewmembers of the C-130s that flew in Southeast Asia, the A-model men, the B-model men, and the E-model men. Most especially, however, I recall the efforts of the E-model men who flew with the 345th Tactical Airlift Squadron and the other two squadrons of the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing, the 50th TAS and the 776th TAS, at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base, Taiwan, with whom I flew for the better part of 15 months in the hazardous skies of Southeast Asia. The names of many of these men appear throughout the narrative that follows. Some names appear briefly, others appear more frequently. Some names have slipped away from me. A few names I have changed.

Although I made no notes of my experiences in Southeast Asia, I did keep a personal log of mission numbers, aircraft numbers, departure and landing times, and airfields visited. I wish I would have had the foresight to jot down more detailed notes of the cargo we carried. I also collected various other kinds of documentation that helped to jog my memory: some squadron crew lists, flight orders, duty rosters, a few clippings from the base and division newspapers.