Navy pilots, Dowd among them, were sent out day after day for “flak suppression.” The North Vietnamese could move their flak sites around overnight, so that the only way to find them was by leading with your head, as it were, flying over the target area until you saw them fire the cannons. This you could detect by the rather pretty peach-pink sparkles, which were the muzzle explosions. The cannons made no sound at all (way up here) and seemed tiny and merely decorative ⦠with their little delicate peach-pink sparkles amid the bitter green of the scrabble. Dowd and his comrades could not unload on these flak sites just anywhere they found them, however. As if to make the game a little more hazardous, the Pentagon had declared certain areas bomb-free zones. A pilot could hit only “military targets,” which meant he couldn't hit villages, hospitals, churches, or Haiphong harbor if there was a “third-party” ship there. So, naturally, being no fools, the North Vietnamese loaded the villages up with flak sites, loaded the churches up with munitions, put SAM sites behind the hospitals, and “welded a third-party ship to the dock” in Haiphong harbor, as Garth Flint put it. There always seemed to be some neutral flag in port there, with one of North Vietnam's best customers being our friends the British. One day one of Dowd's
Coral Sea
comrades came in for a run on a railroad freight depot, pickled his bombs too soon, went long, and hit a churchâwhereupon the bitter-green landscape
rocked with secondary and tertiary explosions and a succession of fireballs. The place had gone up like an arsenal, which of course it was. Every now and then Dowd would be involved in a strike aimed at “cutting off” Haiphong harbor. This was not to be done, however, by mining the harbor or blowing the docking facilities out of the water or in any other obvious and easy manner. No, this had to be accomplished by surgically severing the bridges that connected the port with the mainland. This required bomb runs through the eye of a needle, and even if the bridges were knocked out, the North Vietnamese simply moved everything across by barge until the bridges were back.
If you were a pilot being flung out every day between the rock and the hard place, these complicated proscriptions took on an eerie diffidence, finally. They were like an unaccountable display of delicate manners. In fact, it was the Johnson Administration's attempt to fight a “humane” war and look good in the eyes of the world. There was something out-to-lunch about it, however. The eyes of the world did not flutter for a second. Stories of American atrocities were believed by whoever wanted to believe them, no matter what actually occurred, and the lacy patterns that American bombing missions had to follow across Hanoi-Haiphong never impressed a soul, except for the pilots and radar-intercept officers who knew what a difficult and dangerous game it was.
If the United States was seriously trying to win the battle of world opinionâwell, then, here you had a real bush-league operation. The North Vietnamese were the uncontested aces, once you got into this arena. One of the most galling things a pilot had to endure in Vietnam was seeing the North Vietnamese pull propaganda coup after propaganda coup, often with the help, unwitting or otherwise, of Americans. There was not merely a sense of humiliation about it. The North Vietnamese talent in this direction often had direct strategic results.
For example, the missions over NâââDâââ. Now, here was one time, in Dowd's estimation, when they had gotten the go-ahead to do the job right. NâââDâââwas an important transportation center in the Iron Triangle area. For two days they softened the place up, working on the flak sites and SAM sites in the most methodical way. On the third day they massed the bomb strike itself. They tore the place apart. They ripped open its gullet. They put it out of the transport business. It had been a model operation. But the North Vietnamese now are blessed with a weapon that no military device known to America could ever get a lock on. As if by magic ⦠in Hanoi ⦠appears ⦠Harrison Salisbury! Harrison Salisburyâwriting in
The New York Times
about the atrocious American bombing of the
hardscrabble folk of North Vietnam in the Iron Triangle! If you had real sporting blood in you, you had to hand it to the North Vietnamese. They were champions at this sort of thing. It was beautiful to watch. To Americans who knew the air war in the North firsthand, it seemed as if the North Vietnamese were playing Mr. Harrison Salisbury of
The New York Times
like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves.
Before you knew it, massive operations like the one at NâââDâââwere no longer being carried out. It was back to threading needles. And yet it couldn't simply be blamed on Salisbury. No series of articles by anyone, no matter what the publication, could have had such an immediate strategic effect if there weren't some sort of strange collapse of will power taking place back in the States. One night, after a couple of hops, Dowd sank back into an easy chair in the wardroom of the
Coral Sea
and picked up a copy of some newspaper that was lying around. There on the first page was William Sloane Coffin, the Yale University chaplain, leading a student antiwar protest. Not only that, there was Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, standing by, offering tacit support ⦠or at least not demurring in any way. It gave Dowd a very strange feeling. Out in the Gulf of Tonkin, on a carrier, one was not engulfed in news from stateside. A report like this came like a remote slice of somethingâbut a slice of something how big? Coffin, who had been at Yale when Dowd was thereâCoffin was one thing. But the president of Yale? There was Kingman Brewster with his square-cut faceâbut looked at another way, it was a strong face gone flaccid, plump as a piece of chicken Kiev. Six years before, when Dowd was a senior at Yale and had his picture taken on the Yale Fence as captain of the basketball team ⦠any such Yale scene as was now in this newspaper would have been impossible to contemplate.
The collapse of morale, or weakening of resolve, or whatever it should be calledâthis was all taking place in the States at the very moment when the losses were beginning to mount in both the Navy and the Air Force. Aviators were getting shot down by the hundreds. Sometimes, at night, after dinner, after the little stewards in white had cleared away the last of the silver from off the white line, after playing a few rounds of acey-deucey in the lounge or just sinking into the leather billows of the easy chairs, after a movie in the wardroom, after a couple of unauthorized but unofficially tolerated whiskeys in somebody's stateroomâafter the usual, in short, when he was back in his own quarters, Dowd would take out his mimeographed flight schedule for the day just completed and turn it over to the blank side and use
it to keep a journal. In 1966 and 1967 more and more of these entries would make terse note of the toll of friends: “We lost Paul Schultz & Sullyâpresumably captured immediately on landing in parachute. Direct hit from SAM coming out of cloudsâsite near Kien An.” Or: “Bill C. got it over Ha Tinh todayâbody seen bloody on ground.”
Or they were about how John Dowd hadn't gotten his: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I think today was a give day. 8 SAM's or so fired from multiple sites and it looked like a few had my no. on them. However they missed their mark & so this entry is made ⦠Doc H. presented those who participated in the âA' strike with a little vial of J. W. Dant cough medicine.”
Â
In light of all that, it may be of interest to note one fact concerning the mission to Haiphong and points north that Dowd has just headed off on: he did not merely volunteer for itâhe thought it up!
For four days, which is to say, ever since Christmas Day, the coastal ports of Haiphong, Cam Pha, and Hon Gay have been socked in with bad weather. Dowd suggested and volunteered for a weather-reconnaissance hop to find out how bad it actually was, to see if the soup was moving at all, to see if the harbors were by any chance clear of third-party ships and therefore eligible for bombing, and so on. If anyone had asked, Dowd would have merely said that anything was better than sitting around the ship for days on end, doing make-work.
But
any
thingâeven playing high-low with SAM over the North?
The answer to that question perhaps leads to the answer to a broader one: How was it that despite their own fearsome losses in 1965, 1966 and 1967, despite hobbling restrictions and dubious strategies set by the Pentagon, despite the spectacle of the antiwar movement building back homeâhow was it that, in the face of all this, American fliers in Vietnam persisted in virtuoso performances and amazing displays of
esprit
throughout the war? Somehow it got down to something that is encoded in the phrase “a great hop.”
The last time Dowd and Garth Flint were out was four days ago, Christmas Day, during the American Christmas cease-fire; and what a little tourist excursion that was. They flew a photo run over Route 1A in North Vietnam, came in under the cloud cover, right down on top of the “Drive-In,” as it was called, fifty feet from the ground, with Garth taking pictures, and the Charlies were down there using Christmas Day and the cease-fire for all it was worth. The traffic jam at the Phun Cat ferry, going south to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was so enormous that they couldn't have budged even if they thought Dowd was going to open up on them. They craned their heads back and stared up at him. He was down so low, it was as if he could have
chucked them under their chins. Several old geezers, in the inevitable pantaloons, looked up without even taking their hands off the drafts of the wagons they were pulling. It was as if they were harnessed to them. The wagons were so full of artillery shells, it was hard to see how one man, particularly so spindly a creature, could possibly pull one, but there they were in the middle of the general jam-up, in with the trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, old cars, rigs of every sort, anything that would roll.
Now, that was a good hopâand Dowd so recorded it in his journal âan interesting hop, a nice slice of the war, something to talk about, but merely a photo hop ⦠and not
a great hop.
There was such a thing as a great hop, and it was quite something else.
Sometimes, at night, when Dowd would write on the back of his flight schedule, he'd make such entries as:
“Great hop! Went to Nam Dinh and hosed down the flak sites around that city. Migs joined in the caper, but no one got a tally. Think I lucked out in a last-minute bomb run & racked up a flak site pretty well.”
The atmosphere of the great hop had something about it that was
warlike
only in the sense that it was, literally, a part of combat. A word that comes closer is
sporting
. Throughout his tour of duty on the
Coral Sea,
no matter how bearish the missions became, Dowd seemed to maintain an almost athletic regard for form. Even on days he spent diving from SAM's and running the flak gauntlets, even on days when he was hit by flak, he would wind up his journal entries with a note about how well (or how poorly) he drove his F-4 back down onto the carrier, and often with a playful tone: “2nd pass was a beauty but only received an OKâwhich was an unfortunate misjudgment on the part of the LSO [landing signal officer].” Or: “Went to Haiphong Barracks. 3 SAM's launchedâone appeared to be directed at yours trulyâhowever with skill & cunning we managed to avoid it, although it cost us our first bombing run, which was in question due to lack of a targetâno flak to suppress. After whifferdilling around we rolled in on a preplanned secondary target. What deleterious havoc this bombing caused the enemy is questionable. However the overall mission was quite successful ⦠RTB good approach except for last ¼ mile. Received
cut
-1 for my efforts.”
A great hop!
With skill & cunning we managed to avoid â¦
death, to call it by its right name. But pilots never mentioned death in the abstract. In fact, the word itself was taboo in conversation. So were the words “bravery” and “fear” and their synonyms. Which is to say, pilots never mentioned the three questions that were uppermost in the minds of all of them: Will I live or die? Will I be brave, whatever
happens? Will I show my fear? By now, 1967, with more than a hundred combat missions behind him, Dowd existed in a mental atmosphere that was very nearly mystical. Pilots who had survived that many games of high-low over North Vietnam were like the preacher in
Moby Dick
who ascends to the pulpit on a rope ladder and then pulls the ladder up behind him.
Friends, near ones and dear ones, the loved ones back home, often wondered just what was on the minds of the fliers as the casualties began to increase at a fearsome rate in 1966 and 1967. Does a flier lie on his back in bed at night with his eyes wide open, staring holes through the ceiling and the flight deck and into outer space, thinking of the little ones, Jeffrey and Jennifer, or of his wife, Sandy, and of the soft lost look she has when she first wakes in the morning or of Mom and Dad and Christmas and of little things like how he used to click the toggles on his rubber boots into place before he went out into the snow when he was eight? No, my dear ones back homeâI'm afraid not! The lads did not lie in their staterooms on the
Coral Sea
thinking of these thingsânot even on Christmas Eve, a few days ago!
Well ⦠what was on their minds?
(Hmmmm ⦠How to put it into words ⦠Should it be called the “inner room”?)