Bill Barry - A Trash Hauler in Vietnam: Memoir of Four Tactical Airlift Tours, 1965-1968

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

Photographs are from the collection of the author unless otherwise credited.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

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e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-5223-1

2008 Bill Barry. 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.

On the cover: Bill Barry on a C-130 ramp with sleeping co-pilot; background Vietnam forest on fire 2008 Shutterstock

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

This book is dedicated to all of the crews who professionally flew the Tactical Airlift, or trash hauler, missions during the Vietnam War, to their wives and children, and most especially to those whose lives were lost in carrying out such missions.

The following survivors and casualties of the war, not all trash haulers, are particularly important to me in remembering the times, the missions, the base locations, the good times and the bad: Al Storey, Art Steinhauer, Bill Helker, Bill Olson, Bob Boelke, Bobby Doyle, Bruce Ferrier, Cal Roulson, Charlie Mills, Chris Dixon, Dave ODonnell, Dave Rickel, Dave Weingartner, Dick Callahan, Don Lehtola, Don Lewis, Don Wadsworth, Ed Batten, Ed Kato, Ed Rotz, Gary Bennett, Jerry Sherrill, Hans Ulrich, Irv Lott, J. C. Richards, Jack Ryan, Jim McClure, Jim McKenzie, Joe Lanahan, John Stewart, Jon Greenley, Ken Lawrence, Kent Gibson, Nelson Neil, Norm Sauvage, Paul Gilbert, Phil Collier, Phil Hughes, Reed Mulkey, Robert Whitlatch, Ron Dorcy, Sammy Ionnetta, Scott Fisher, and Tom Dempsey.

I am also most grateful to my daughter, Sara Devine, and my youngest son, Sam Barry, without whose proofreading and mastery of English this work would not be readable.

The Vietnam War has been over for more than thirty years now. As it is with many other veterans of it, this war is still alive in my memory. I often have had thoughts of writing about it, or at least of my experience in it.

My thoughts of writing about Vietnam were always centered around how the war changed each time I went back to it, the various unsuccessful attempts to define a winning strategy, the eternal pace and face of war, and the lies and falsehoods told by the U.S. government while the war was ongoing.

I thought I remembered when and how things happened, but twenty years after the war I found my old flight logs in the attic. In them I had recorded the days I flew, where we went, and the landing and takeoff times at each base. By scanning these entries, I soon learned that my memories, like those of most other after-the-fact biographical writers, were warped. Things that I thought happened in a certain sequence did not. Events which I thought may have been linked were not. But now, with the flight logs, I at least had the time lines correct.

I have put my memories into the time line of my flight records and have woven them as best I can into a logical recollection of a bygone period. I apologize for errors in data, dates, descriptions, names and spellings. I cannot assure you that every specific incident truly happened at the place and time that it appears in this writing. I know for sure that on a given date and time I was at a specific place. I have then put my recalled incidents into the places it seems they best fit. If we stopped at a field to on- or offload at a given date and time and it took an hour or less, we probably were flying passengers, did a rapid offload, or had no onload. Stops greater than two hours probably meant a delay because of a lack of loading equipment (forklifts), a broken airplane which needed maintenance, refueling, explosive ordnance loading, or other types of delays.

What follows are four separate sets of remembrances dated between 1965 and 1968, plus comments reflecting on those events, and stories and impressions gathered along the way.

It was the spring of 1962. As a junior at the United States Air Force Academy, I sat listening to an army major from the Pentagon brief our squadron on the Kennedy administrations military policy. The world was a troubled place, with the U.S. as the leader of the Free World facing off against the Soviet Union, the champion of Communism. Nuclear warfare was the major threat, but it was a threat so ghastly it left neither side with any hope of winning. The most likely scenario, according to this Washington pitchman, was going to be between the free and communist worlds in the Far East, between the capitalist West and the underdeveloped world. Sides were being taken between India, a would-be champion of democracy, and China, Russias counterpart in Asia.

All of this, of course, was a change from the previous Eisenhower administration, which had favored a nuclear buildup against the Russians as a way to maintain defense without breaking the back of the United States with regard to massive conventional force levels and defense spending. John Kennedy and company were going to do a back step of sorts and bring conventional warfare forward again.

According to the major, the most likely threat we as young American military men would face was that of unconventional, or guerrilla, warfare, based on the Chinese model as laid down by Mao Tse-tung. It would be a real test, but we were ready for it with our newly created Special Forces, a Kennedy-favored counterinsurgency force built around the armys Green Berets.

The major commented that there was considerable resistance in the military establishment, both in Washington and elsewhere, to some of the ideas he was presenting. He also admitted that there was also considerable military opposition to President Kennedys defense secretary, Robert Strange McNamarahe of the slicked back hair, thick glasses and zeal for mathematical solutions to all problems and the quantification of results. As the major spoke, I decided he was a McNamara man, and later in the briefing he said as much. At the end of the discourse, Vietnam appeared as the majors choice for the most likely testing ground for the forthcoming conflict between East and West, democracy and communism. Victory in Vietnam was a noble goal that he was sure we could win.

A question and answer period followed the briefing, but few of us lowly cadets felt like matching wits with this experienced and knowledgeable Pentagon insider. Even our senior, and usually all-knowing, first classmen seemed hesitant to disagree too strongly with the majors central theme or points of view.

It had now been some eight years since the U.S. and a smattering of its allies had been fought to a draw by China and the North Koreans in the Korean War, but no mention of that was made in the course of the afternoons discussion. I remembered how Americas actions in that conflict had continually been hampered by concerns for the potential widening of the war, escalation to nuclear weapons and direct Soviet intervention to go along with the surprising Chinese participation. I, therefore, dared to ask the major a question concerning his assumption of a just and certain victory in a counterinsurgency conflict in Vietnam. What, I asked, if we enter such a conflict, defeat the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong? What will we then do if the Chinese or the Russians rush to their aid and intervene militarily?