OH+Questions

1) How old were you when you first started thinking about being in the military. What motivated you to be in the military? Did you always know that it would be the Air Force?
 * //I fell in love with airplanes first, going back into my childhood. I did not think particularly about joining the military until I arrived at Stanford to register in my freshman year. Registration was in person (we had no such thing as the internet) at the campus gymnasium. There I quickly accumulated 13 units but needed 2 more. The waiting lines at the desks of subjects I was interested in were long, but down at the end of the gym, I noticed the ROTC desks were open. Because I had always liked airplanes, I thought, why not learn to fly - and do it with the organization whose primary mission is flying? Thus, I signed up for AFROTC.//**

2) When you joined the military, did you think that you would ever be likely to see combat?
 * //I'm sure it was amply evident to me from the very beginning that I might be required to go into combat (the oath taken by cadets is quite clear), but I didn't worry much about it - and the prospect obviously did not deter me. Of course, if you've never been in combat, you cannot understand what it might be like. Having said that, even if I could have known then for sure that I would be in combat - and I could have known in advance what it would be like - I'd still have signed up.//**

3) How old were you when you first became a fighter pilot? Did you start to fly missions over Vietnam right away? Or later?
 * //After four years of AFROTC, I graduated and was commissioned an officer (second lieutenant) in the Air Force. I went on active duty almost immediately, and began pilot training in Texas. A year later (1960) I was awarded my pilot's wings and went on to advanced training in the F-100 Super Sabre, at the time the hottest fighter in the Air Force. After completing my checkout in the F-100 in 1961, I was assigned to England, where I flew for four years (I married Aunt Barbie during that assignment). Two years as an instructor in the F-100 in Arizona followed, and then, in 1967, I was assigned to Royal Thai Air Force Base Takhli in Thailand while the Vietnam War was in full flower. There I flew the F-105 Thunderchief, mostly into North Vietnam.//**

4)  Did the North Vietnamese have a good military/air force? **//Actually, they had a large number of MIG-19 and MIG-21 fighter aircraft supplied by the Soviet Union (how's your knowledge of the Cold War?), and they used them aggressively. Having said that, the primary dangers to those of us who were flying into North Vietnam were anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The AAA was both visually aimed and radar aimed, but getting hit was largely a matter of very bad luck. They fired a lot of stuff and, too often, they actually hit somebody. The SAMs, rockets with explosive warheads, were radar controlled and were aimed at specific aircraft. They could be dodged if the pilot who was targeted saw the missile in flight, so most of the hits occurred when the pilot did not see it coming.//** 5) Were you stationed on an aircraft carrier or a military base?
 * //The Air Force does not use aircraft carriers. The US Navy does. We flew from a base in Thailand (as did most of the Air Force aircraft assigned to attack North Vietnam). Many Air Force fighters flew from bases in South Vietnam, though most of them flew their missions in South Vietnam supporting US Army, US Marines, and Vietnamese Army forces.//**

6) How long did you fly combat missions and how many missions did you fly?
 * //I flew from Thailand from September 1967 to June 1968. In those days, once an aviator (not just a pilot, but any flying crew member) had flown over North Vietnam 100 times, he was finished. I flew my 100th mission and shortly thereafter left Thailand to return to the USA.//**

7) Looking back, what struggle or hardship made being in the war the most difficult?
 * //Well, getting shot at wasn't much fun, but the most difficult part of it was being away from my wife and family while I was in a stressful circumstance. I think most of my colleagues from that war (or perhaps any war) would agree. We did not have the easy communications that are available today. We wrote letters to each other, those typically taking 10 days to 2 weeks to make the trip. We had very limited unofficial direct communications through an unreliable telephone connection - and that one connection served the entire base of several thousand people. And, believe it or not, we made tapes in small tape recorders so we could send our voices by mail to the family and vice versa. I still have the tapes I sent and received from Barbie and the girls, Wendy and Holly, during that time.//**

8)  How were people chosen to fly a mission and what was one of the scariest missions you have flown? **//We all flew missions of varying danger; everybody got scheduled to fly without regard to the expected danger. Some missions were easy, some were not so easy, and some were really scary, and most of the time when we briefed and took off, we did not know which category we'd be reporting after we landed. Those missions that were scheduled to go the Hanoi area were generally the most dangerous, but the closest I got to being shot down was on a ho-hum mission in the southern end of North Vietnam, thought to be a relatively quiet area.//**