Searching for Meaning to a War Fought Long Ago,
Pilots Find Rice
Paddies and Warm Greetings
By Michael Y. Park
When Dick Rutan, Donald Shepperd, Wells Jackson and P.K. Robinson peered into the 30-year-old bomb crater that had been converted into a shallow pool for farming shrimp, they weren't just any American tourists visiting Vietnam.
There was a chance one of them had helped make that crater.
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The four were Air Force pilots when they flew missions in the Vietnam War. Two of them had been shot down. One of them, Robinson, had been taken prisoner of war and locked up in the dreaded "Hanoi Hilton" for nine months.
And just a month shy of the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the four, along with two of their fellow pilots, Mick Greene and James "Ed" Risinger, were back in the country they had fought in.
"I tried to go to Vietnam and find some bigger meaning to the whole thing," said Rutan, 61, a retired lieutenant colonel. "I wanted to look at the people. I wanted to look at the areas I operated over. I wanted to stand in the sites where the triple-A (anti-aircraft artillery) was firing at us ... where a lot of people died. I wanted to know why we went over there."
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The six men were once counted among the 155 members of the Commando Sabre Operation's Misty Forward Air Controllers, which operated from the Vietnamese highlands from 1967 to 1970. Each flew F100 planes on scouting and spotting missions, flying over heavily defended enemy territory, picking out camouflaged supply convoys along the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail and marking them for bombers.
Through the efforts of the Misty pilots, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong lost countless tons of supplies, vehicles and men. With rocket flares, they targeted jungles, rice paddies and farmlands that would minutes later become as barren as the moon.
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Flying above the action afforded an emotional distance from the drama of dozens of deaths thousands of feet below, the pilots said in interviews with FOXNews.com. Rutan, who has since gained fame for his nonstop around-the-world flights in the Voyager -- an experimental aircraft he designed and built himself -- said he had returned to Vietnam with his five fellow pilots last month to help bridge that emotional gap.
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But when he visited the location of a particular bombing run, and stood where as many as 30 people died in one hit, he discovered that too much time had passed.
"There was nothing there that pointed to where it had been," he said. "It was a rice paddy now. And there was nothing that said anyone had fought there or died there or anything."
Guided by a former South Vietnamese interpreter for a Marine division, the six pilots made their way up from Ho Chi Minh City to the areas just north of the Demilitarized Zone where they had flown most of their missions. Along the way, they saw up close the methods the North had used to keep the war going against the better-equipped U.S. forces.
The men toured caves and elaborate networks of tunnels the North Vietnamese army used to run their underground operations. They were impressed by these diligent, inventive people, who kept their huts immaculate and carved the ball bearings -- which they needed for their boats but couldn't afford to buy -- out of wood.
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"If any one (of us) had been on the ground, we would have said there's no way we could've fought these people," said Shepperd, 60, a retired major general and former head of the U.S. National Guard. "They were very proud, hard-working, very ingenious. There was a real understanding when we got there of how difficult it would've been to keep things from moving through. They even put those spots we bombed to good use: A lot of bomb craters are filled with shrimp and fish."
Despite warnings from the State Department to expect anti-American sentiment in the months leading up to the anniversary of the North's victory, the six Misty pilots found the Vietnamese people determined to forget the past.
"They know terrible things were done by both sides, but you get no feeling of animosity at all, just a desire to get on with their lives and make them better," said Sheppard, who now lives in Alexandria, Va. "It was all ancient history to them."
Along the way, the Misty crew took a sampan on the very same river, now bustling with boats like the one Jackson said he strafed so many years ago. The pilot said he imagined looking up in the sky and seeing an armed American fighter bearing down on him, guns blazing.
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"I saw these people busy working as they do every day, dredging gravel from the bottom of the river for construction, and I thought about that time," Jackson said. "Literally, if I were them, I would want to cut the balls of off every American I could get a hold of."
Jackson said the memories of the low-flying, machine-gun attacks along the Disappearing River, or Song Troc, about 90 miles north of the DMZ and west of the coast, still haunt him.
"One of the things I never did was I never went after people," said Jackson, 59, now the owner of a coffee farm in Panama and a member of the Air Force Reserves stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. "Once I had seen a pass with thousands of workers with hand tools fixing the road. We carried 900 rounds of explosive 20mm. We could've hurt a lot of people, but I didn't fire."
Another time, he said, he did fire on a sampan on the river, and believes he killed seven people on the boat.
"That bothered me a lot, and I've thought about it an awful lot," Jackson said. "The guy didn’t have trucks on board. I think this guy was just a guy going to the market. I'm afraid of that. I'm always afraid of that."
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As the pilots made their journey from Ho Chi Minh City to the highlands of western Vietnam to the eastern coastline, they came across a crew of 20 people working with mine detectors, shovels and picks alongside a road.
"We'd bombed every little stream to make sure we had a choke point so their trucks couldn't get through," Rutan said of the Misty operations.
Now, he said, the people "were there digging up bomb fragments and unexploded bombs. It's 25 years later and they're still digging up bombs. And we'd been in some guy's garden with his wife and kids smiling at us, and they had absolutely no animosity about us looking through these bomb fragments in his garden. There was no animosity at all toward us, and that really bothered me somehow."
But Rutan said he couldn't explain why he felt that way.
That inability to express feelings about the war is something many of the Misty vets must deal with, Jackson explained.
"During the war, there's a lot of emotion all the time, like fear, boredom, anger, excitement," he said. "You get kind of seared to it, and it stops coming up."
The pilots encountered a friendly group of Vietnamese tourists at a mile-long cave hidden on the Disappearing River that is now a popular tourist site in Vietnam known as Phong Na Cave.
"There were some older North Vietnamese women who were having trouble getting up the beach, so we helped them up," Jackson said. "And I thought this is weird, American soldiers helping up North Vietnamese women. If they have any animosity, they don't show it. The generation's that's there now doesn't remember the war, doesn't care about the war."
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Among the most memorable stops in their journey back to the war-torn land, the pilots said, was a small village in the highlands about 90 miles north of what used to be the Demilitarized Zone. The men stopped at a school along the Disappearing River.
"Suddenly, we're mobbed by 1,700 kids, who all wanted to see, feel and touch Americans, who were amazed by our size and the fact that we had hair on our arms," Shepperd recalled.
The principal of the school, an old-guard communist with a Lenin pin in his lapel, came over to speak to the American pilots, Shepperd said. The North Vietnamese Army veteran told the pilots he had been an anti-aircraft gunner in the war.
"We thought 'Uh, oh,'" Shepperd said. "But he invited us to his office for tea, we had tea, put us in front of the 1,700 kids like at a school assembly, and introduced us as the old soldiers he'd shot at. They clapped and sang the Vietnamese national anthem and we left. Very warm people, extremely friendly."
P.K. Robinson, 61, who is now the regional senior vice president for a Las Vegas-based private bank that caters to military installations, said he realized the Vietnamese probably had mixed feelings as well.
"I remember thinking, why are these people so friendly?" he said. "And then I saw that they saw these six old men with gray hair sitting, having beer, and they seem real friendly and nice. But they were probably thinking in the back of their heads that these are also the same guys who strapped on a flight suit and would've dropped a bomb on every one of those people if they thought you were carrying stuff down to the South."
In the end, Rutan said his quest — to find a meaning to the war — went unfulfilled.
"Why did we go over there and fight so hard?" Rutan said. "Why did we expend so much money? Why did we tear our country apart? Was it a waste, or was there a deeper meaning? I really tried to find a deeper meaning, and I went there and got my hands in the dirt and I was unable to. What I did find was the people were very polite and very proud of their country. And as I stood in this area, I said to my colleagues, 'Would these people be worse off or better off if we'd won the war?'"
Robinson said he felt what might have been was irrelevant.
"I was there with five old buddies," he said. "That was the highlight of the trip."
| The trip described in this article was provided by Nine Dragons Travel and Tours |
