Thomas McKelvey Cleaver - Going Downtown: The US Air Force over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, 1961-75

Contents

Maps

: South Vietnam airfields, and Corps boundaries

: North Vietnam airfields, and Route Package areas

Plates

Heavy combat is brutal, and combat over Hanoi was brutally heavy. You were busy the whole time, dodging flak, SAMs, and the occasional MiG. If you survived, you pieced together what happened during the debrief, after all the flight members had their say. It wasnt always perfect. With Going Downtown: The US Air Force over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, 196175 , Tom Cleaver does his best to separate fact from fiction, and he does it well. Anything less, and you fail to have the lessons learned. For example, lost in the euphoria over the outcome of Operation Bolo is the fact that it really did not accomplish the intended mission, which was to wipe out the North Vietnamese air force. The lesson: if you need reasonable weather to get the job done, but do not have it, you scrub the mission. Another lesson learned the hard way is that once you let the enemy know your trick, you do not soon try the exact same thing again. The newspapers recounted the ruse pulled off by Olds, yet, before the month was out another Bolo was scheduled. Colonel Olds was vehemently against this second effort, but Seventh Air Force was adamant. Colonel Vermont Garrison led the mission this time. He pressed on in with bad weather once again, and the aircraft were met by a flock of SAMs that knocked one of the Phantoms out of the sky. That ended a sorry episode in higherheadquarter stupidity. No MiGs took off.

I think of the words bravery and courage in different ways. With bravery, one is presented with a danger and has to make an immediate choice: run or fight. With courage, there is time. In the case of Robin Olds, courage was the operative word. He was never scheduled for the Hanoi area without his approval. Though his predecessor never once went Downtown, Olds went 54 times, way more times than this lieutenant. And before any one of those runs for the roses, he had plenty of time to find a reason to excuse himself from the mission. Let there be no doubt to anyone who might claim he hogged these missions, every downtown go was a hair-raiser filled with appalling violence and frequent death. Olds was the bravest, most courageous fighter pilot I ever encountered.