“It is not intended that the foregoing become . . . a basis for a great literary work, but simply a record and exercise for the mind. The events that are impending as one sets out for distant shores excite the imagination. Therefore, when experience and imagination are reaffirming or denying one another with each passing day . . . it is my desire that a pen and paper be there to record, if not for later entertainment, then for future comparison.”
With those words, 24-year-old Lieutenant (junior grade) Malcolm H. Tinker began documenting what would become one of the defining periods of his life. As days passed into weeks, the pages of his diary became canvases for reflection on the momentous experiences of a combat carrier pilot, and also a refuge when frustrations over questionable targets and losses mounted.
When Tinker, an A-1 Skyraider pilot in Attack Squadron (VA) 115, departed the United States on board the USS Kitty Hawk (CVA-63) on 19 October 1965, the United States was in the early stages of the escalating conflict in South Vietnam, with the mass war protests that defined the era still in the future. Some 60 percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup Poll earlier that year believed that it was not a mistake to send combat troops.
As the carrier headed west, Tinker was mindful of the legacy of those who served. “As one reads books and histories of WWII as it was fought in these waters and islands, a feeling of respect and awe descends,” he wrote on 18 November, while the Kitty Hawk was off Okinawa. After the ship arrived in the Tonkin Gulf, she steamed first on “Dixie Station” off the coast of South Vietnam, where she would launch her air wing against less heavily defended targets before steaming north to “Yankee Station” off North Vietnam.
On 26 November, Tinker strapped into his Skyraider and roared off the flight deck for his first mission against the enemy. The target was “a small section of dense jungle” identified only by coordinates on a chart. The attacks he and his wingman made left “from all I saw some treeless holes in [the] jungle from our bombs and angered monkeys with our 20mm. At no time did we see the enemy. My baptism in combat, though light, was complete.”
Subsequent missions struck more meaningful targets, in the form of Viet Cong command posts, all leading to the fateful day when the Kitty Hawk altered course and steamed north. “Our apprehension rises as we head north to Yankee Station and deadly North Vietnam,” Tinker recorded on the first day of December. “The in-country missions have been sort of fun, these against N. Viet Nam are for keeps—flack [sic] automatic weapons, SAM-2s, MIGS, weather, and the people; all hate America.”
In the skies over North Vietnam, U.S. Navy carrier aircraft joined Air Force and Marine Corps warplanes in executing Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic bombing campaign of northern targets. Other air campaigns included Operations Steel Tiger and Barrel Roll, which involved missions along the Laotian border and in-country interdiction of North Vietnamese troops moving into South Vietnam.
The A-1 Skyraiders flown by Tinker and his fellow pilots in VA-115 were in the twilight of their venerable careers. Introduced shortly after World War II, the aircraft had come of age in the Korean War, where they achieved a reputation as among the finest close-air-support planes ever built. By the time of the Vietnam War, the propeller-driven Skyraiders, known universally as “Spads,” found themselves increasingly out of place on carrier flight decks dominated by jets.
On 20 June 1965, Skyraiders from VA-25 off the Midway (CVA-41) had engaged and shot down a North Vietnamese MiG fighter, but the relatively slow speed of the A-1s made them more vulnerable to enemy aircraft and the antiaircraft defenses surrounding some targets. Thus interdiction missions, both day and night, were the order of the day. But as the Spad drivers discovered, there was danger lurking when they headed inland, and they increasingly filled the charts carried in their cockpits with hastily scribbled notations marking known sites of antiaircraft guns.
For Tinker, one of the scariest moments of his wartime cruise occurred not facing enemy fire but during the inherently dangerous business of making a carrier landing under less than ideal conditions. On 3 December, after concluding his second combat mission in North Vietnamese territory hunting for enemy junks, Tinker returned to the Kitty Hawk amid “blinding rain showers” that made holding formation impossible.
We were vectored about in the turbulence and driving rain for what seemed an eternity as the jets made their attempts at getting aboard. As the fuel drained away I made my first attempt, but never saw the ship. My second try permitted me a look at the flight deck, but I was unable to see the ball [light indicating his plane’s position relative to the carrier deck] because of the “water screen” in front of my vision.
With his apprehension mounting as he watched his fuel supply dwindle, the third pass was called off when another Skyraider fouled the deck, its pilot having smashed the landing gear while coming aboard. Ordered to “bingo” to Da Nang in South Vietnam, Tinker found the weather there even worse; what he thought were runway lights on his initial landing approach actually was a street. Pulling up, he eventually set his Skyraider down on the wet and slippery runway after more than six hours airborne.
“By 2:30 AM I was checking into the BOQ, if that is what you call it. It was 110% humidity and pouring rain. I slept with my .38 pistol by my side and the sound of gunfire in the distance,” he recorded in his diary. “Life is exciting and a precious quantity.”
Excitement again abounded during a rescue combat air patrol (rescap) on 22 December, a night that triggered fear and reflection on the cost of war.
During the rising of the dawn, as the stars diminished into deepening blue, I saw from 30 miles away the face of death— SAM’S [sic]. “Missiles away—BF4” came over the radio, but they had already started to come. We were 27 mi SE of Haiphong orbiting when they surfaced above the cloud deck and exploded—either by contact with an A/C or by self-destruct. . . . The fear at the moment of the explosions was indescribable. Again, all of a sudden with stark reality and terror, we were at war.
This mission came amid a period in which three Kitty Hawk–based aircraft fell to enemy fire, prompting Tinker to reflect, “When a man dies in this war, as far as his family is concerned the casualties are 100%, not light, moderate, or heavy.”
Three days later, those on board the Kitty Hawk celebrated Christmas. “Presents were opened and compared almost like we were all once again kids on the block,” Tinker wrote as the ship headed toward Japan. “Each Christmas I have spent has passed in review, it seems. This is what one draws on for stability—the pleasures and memories of joys past. Toward the future and 1966 we look with grave uncertainty, but the past is a refuge in which to soothe the soul.”
Even in the midst of combat, the beauty and allure of Asia was not lost on Tinker. A night combat air patrol prompted reflection on the “silky softness of the cloud tops in the light of the December Asian moon. What beauty there is high above the horror below.” The Kitty Hawk’s arrival in Japan only heightened the young aviator’s feelings. A brief trip to the scenic city of Nikko brought mountain snow far removed from the heat and jungles of Vietnam. “I regretted that we were limited to a one night stay in this beautiful land . . . Asia is my intrigue.”
Tinker rang in 1966 at a nightclub on the arm of a date, noting in his diary that the “shore patrol ended my night ungraciously. HAPPY NEW YEAR.” On 9 January 1966, the Kitty Hawk left Yokosuka. “The ship departed at 4:00 PM and cruise life settled in like an evening fog. Japan, with its sacred beauty and oriental mystique here and there destroyed by westernism slipped away to a memory bank. My enjoyment was complete. I’m ready to go back to our job at hand.”
As the carrier steamed toward Vietnam, Tinker’s thoughts increasingly focused on his impending return to combat. “I have omens or shall I say more precisely sense portents toward our upcoming days on the line. . . . I feel that Feb. will see the resumption of ‘A’ [Alpha] strikes with unholy losses on our part. There is no basis for my thoughts—just feeling. This war is going to stop shortly or go on forever. . . . It is frighteningly true.”
The new year brought the same dangers. VA-115 continued flying interdiction flights into the night, the carrier having been assigned the midnight-to-noon operational cycle. On 18 January, while flying east of the ancient city of Hue, future scene of a landmark battle during the 1968 Tet Offensive, Tinker and his wingman got more than they bargained for during a strike against a suspected truck convoy.
“Suddenly the sky filled with tracers & 37mm ‘puff-balls,’” Tinker penned in his diary. Maneuvering their aircraft, the Spad drivers got into position to attack.
4 rockets went and the site quit firing. I rolled off to the right, added power, and started a climb to altitude. Meanwhile, Cliff ducked behind the hill and set up to fire rockets at the sites which would open up on me in my dive. All worked according to plan and the flak whizzed by my a/c as I started the dive. . . . Jinking and turning like a wild man I came off target and headed away. . . . We each aged 10 years.
VA-115 had its first pilot shot down on 31 January; Lieutenant (junior grade) Brian Eakin’s A-1 Skyraider was hit over Laos and the “lucky and God-protected man” was pulled from the jungle by a rescue helicopter after he parachuted from his burning plane. Tinker flew in the same area often, on one mission regretfully arriving too late to assist Special Forces under attack at a camp at A Shau,two miles from the Laotian border. “Thus with a sense of personal loss and anguish we diverted . . . to bomb a road,” he reflected. “How brutal and savage that land is on the Vietnam/Laos border. The politics that flows across it must be affected by the terrain.”
Tinker experienced a mission of relative safety and satisfaction on 12 March. “Kal and I spent 4.9 hours on a rescap today. Nothing exciting. To unload our rockets, we decided to gun a radar site near Vinh on the coast. We found it with no problem and put our ordnance on the target. What a feeling it is that grips heart and innards as one hunts along enemy territory.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he recorded the news of a special visitor to the carrier: “Oh, yes, Ann Margret took Kitty Hawk by storm. What a charge of dynamite!”
The beginning of April brought the opportunity for Tinker to experience life in-country with the Air Force as part of an exchange program. Accustomed to life on board ship, where space was finite and the view consisted of water stretching to the horizon, the young carrier pilot arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where he boarded “a venerable old C-47 camouflaged for the trip . . .”
He flew to Cam Ranh Air Base via other locations that included Pleiku, Nha Trang, and Phan Ranh. The year before, a North Vietnamese attack against Pleiku had prompted President Lyndon Johnson to inaugurate Operation Flaming Dart and escalate the air war in Southeast Asia, which Tinker was now waging. The flight “provided a great chance to see a cross section of the air effort at these fields.” Hopeful of being able to fly a mission in an F-4C Phantom II, Tinker was dismayed to learn that Air Force rules prohibited it.
Instead, he was flown to Nha Trang to catch a ride with a forward air controller (FAC) in an O-1E Bird Dog. Originally built by the French, the base retained vestiges of the period of colonial rule in the form of a building that served as headquarters for South Vietnamese air force units, including those that flew Skyraiders.
Soon it was time to experience for a moment the life of an Air Force FAC.
We left at 1600 for our target area, putting along in the O-1E. . . . The view from this a/c is very much different; one sees the land. He pointed out his previous targets and other points of interest in the province assigned him. We arrived at our area, a bunch of good ole’ jungle trees & trails. The F4C’s came and I witnessed the event in which I have been a member so many times. Our little plane started running a bit rough, hence a bee-line for home.
A C-130E hop to Cam Ranh Air Base revealed the workings of Air Force cargo operations, and Tinker’s return to the Kitty Hawk concluded an experience to remember. The following day he was back in the cockpit, dropping bombs over the jungle landscape he had viewed up close just days before.
By 17 April, the Kitty Hawk’s air wing, CVW-11, had lost 16 men, and on that day they added the first VA-115 pilot to the list of casualties.
This is a sad day. Bill Tromp, my roommate, did not come off target on a night bombing run. “I have an emergency” was his last transmission. Then silence. Bob Simonic, flight leader, searched the area. Manny Benero & I were dispatched to the SAR effort. We went over & over the areas up & down the coast at 700’ in the inky blackness trying to find something. Shore batteries of guns opened up just plopping shells in the general area Bill was lost. Though declared Missing in Action, it looks bad. This room is foreboding. An unopened letter from his wife screams out at me on the desk. He was here 5 hours ago—now gone. It’s hard to believe. We are all glum.
The loss of a squadronmate in an air war with restrictive rules of engagement and an elusive enemy produced frustration. “Still no sign of Bill,” Tinker wrote the day after his friend’s shootdown. “Some possible wreckage sighted, but otherwise mute depressing silence. We wonder at the cost this effort is exacting and the results it is producing. Instead of hurting their effort, the N. Vietnamese are getting more guns, more missiles, more resourceful. The menial targets were [sic] rehitting evidence a pitiful effort. Why? Why? Why? Our spirits are low.”
Lieutenant (junior grade) Bill Tromp would never return, and on 22 April, the loss of another friend, Lieutenant (junior grade) William B. Nickerson of VA-85, created more anxiety. “Flew into Laos on a twilight mission. . . . Managed to crater a road segment. . . . Secondary damage was knocked down teak trees! I dwelt on the loss of Nick, finding it hard to realize he was gone so quickly. Our conversation of the afternoon haunts me. WHO’s next?”
Yet the war did not wait, and day after day the flight schedule sent pilots off of the Kitty Hawk’s deck into the hostile skies over North Vietnam. On 26 April, Tinker witnessed a Fighter Squadron (VF) 114 crew eject from their F-4 Phantom II after coming off a target that Tinker and a wingman were slated to attack.
I headed toward the target in the setting sun feeling the greatest fear I’ve yet known and the awesome spectre of impending doom. . . . Cliff spotted the target junks & barges & in we rolled. Half-way in the run, they opened up. We were committed to the napalm run. I carried it to 200’, dropped & broke right hard. Jinking my way out to sea at 100’, I skimmed the palm trees to avoid the thatch of flak above my head. We made it with no holes and vowed not to be on this type of mission again. Upon our return CTF [commander, Task Force] 77 staff debriefed us and CAG [commander, air group] gave us a shot of whiskey. It watered my eyes.
On 28 April 1966, the Kitty Hawk departed Yankee Station for an in-port break, ending one of the most trying periods of the cruise. “The anxiety of the past two weeks melts under the influence of upcoming freedom,” Tinker wrote in his diary. On return, CVW-11 would lose just one plane, its crew rescued by an Air Force helicopter.
That June, after launching 9,223 combat and 1,485 support sorties, the Kitty Hawk set course for home. Eight months earlier, as the ship departed on her westward cruise, Tinker had written, “We all thought of who would and would not ever be returning to the homeland again, but these thoughts were deep.” In the days that followed, those deepest thoughts came to the surface, the written word baring the soul of a man tried by the fires of war.
The Versatile, Durable Skyraider
By Norman Polmar
Every aviation era has featured a few outstanding aircraft. But rarely does a top combat plane from one era continue to serve as a first-line aircraft in another. The Douglas Skyraider did exactly that; it was a first-line Navy attack plane in the Korean War and in the Vietnam War more than a decade later.
The Skyraider was the ultimate piston-engine attack plane and was probably the most versatile combat aircraft ever developed in the United States. Douglas aircraft engineers—led by legendary designer Ed Heinemann—set out to produce a carrier-based attack plane to succeed the highly successful SBD Dauntless dive bomber. Compared with contemporary attack designs, the new aircraft would have
• reduced takeoff run
• increased rate of climb
• increased range
• increased payload
• reduced pilot fatigue through im-proved aircraft stability and control.
The result of their efforts was the XBT2D-1, which made its first flight on 18 March 1945.
With the appearance and the agility of a fighter and a top speed of 375 mph at 13,600 feet, the new plane could climb at 3,680 feet per minute and had a service ceiling of 33,200 feet. It could carry the maximum payload of a four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress. Below about 20,000 feet—without bombs—it could outperform the famed F4U Corsair.
Navy officials were impressed, and production was ordered only a month after the first flight. After VJ Day the order was reduced, and in 1946 the plane was redesignated AD?1, as attack was substituted for the torpedo- and dive-bomber categories.
Deliveries of the production Skyraiders began in November 1946—242 AD-1 “straight” attack aircraft and 35 AD-1Q models modified to locate, identify, and jam enemy radar. A total of 3,180 Skyraiders would be delivered, the last in 1957. Variations would include 6- and 12-place transports and a 2,000-pound-load cargo plane as well as antisubmarine warfare, utility, drone control, ambulance, airborne early warning, night-attack, and nuclear-attack configurations—the last being the first single-engine aircraft to carry an atomic bomb. (The U.S. Navy employed the planes in a carrier-based nuclear-strike role from 1952 to 1965.)
During the Korean War, U.S. carriers operated with a Skyraider attack squadron as well as AD detachments of night, electronic countermeasures, and airborne early warning aircraft. Carrier-based Skyraiders and Marine-piloted ADs flying from land bases were in action day in, day out. After Army Rangers and B-29 Superfortress bombers failed to destroy a dam in North Korea, Skyraiders from the USS Princeton (CVA-47) breached it with Mark 13 torpedoes—history’s last aerial torpedo attack.
Skyraiders—redesignated A-1 in 1962—also operated from carriers in the Vietnam War, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin strikes flown from the Ticonderoga (CVA-14) and Constellation (CVA-64) in August 1964. Beyond their attack role, the planes shot down two North Vietnamese MiG-17s. The U.S. and South Vietnamese air forces also operated Skyraiders during the Vietnam conflict, and the British, French, and Cambodian air forces flew variants of the aircraft.
Marine attack squadrons flew the Skyraider until 1958. The Navy flew attack and special-purpose variants until 1968.