Every veteran has a good story to tell, you do too.
Reflections on Defection - Episode 2
A student at the U.S. Naval Academy is called a Midshipman. The term is derived from the Royal Navy where the most junior officers, although not commissioned, were called Midshipmen because they were normally stationed amidship, the middle of the ship. At the U.S.Military Academy and the U.S.Air Force Academy the students are called Cadets. That term comes from England’s Royal Army and Air Force. Ironically, students at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy, a maritime school, are called Cadets, not Midshipmen.
When a student graduates from the Academy, the student becomes a commissioned officer called an Ensign. This term is also derived from the Royal Navy and Army where the most junior commissioned officer was assigned, when in battle, to carry the ship’s ensign or the regimental ensign, the ship’s flag or the regiment's flag.
At the Naval Academy a visitor would find, under the Main Chapel, enclosed in a glass case in a beautiful marble and bronze room, the sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, the “Father of the American Navy.” This man was born in Scotland as John Paul. He learned to sail at an early age and worked for a living as a sailor on merchant ships, became a skillful navigator and tactician, in Scotland and England, eventually becoming a junior officer.
It is probably appropriate that the nascent Continental Navy in 1775 would commission as its first 1st Lieutenant this rogue Scotsman. It seems that while serving on a British merchantman in the Caribbean, John Paul was brought up on charges for having a man flogged so much that he died 5 days later. Nothing came of that event, but within a year, John Paul killed a sailor in a sword fight over wages. Even the government of Tobago could not ignore this event and John Paul fled to Virginia to his brother’s farm. Here, he changed his name to John Jones to avoid capture.
But the newly assembling Navy in Philadelphia was in need of experienced officers and put Lieutenant Jones on the schooner USS Alfred (30 guns and 300 men), where he served under Commodore Esek Hopkins, the Navy’s first Commander in Chief.
Midshipmen even today have to know the seven ships commanded by Captain John Paul Jones. First year midshipman at the Naval Academy were known as Plebes, short for Plebeian, the lowest class of citizens in Ancient Rome. All entering Plebes were required to memorize a plethora of minutia, a litany of obscure facts, some of which changed each day. But knowing the Alliance, Alfred, Arial, Providence, Ranger, Serapis, and the Bon Homme Richard, the seven ships that John Paul Jones commanded was required. And if you were asked, What did John Paul Jones say, while engaged in battle, to the British Captain of the Serapis when he asked Captain Jones if he was ready to surrender, you must know that he said, “I have not yet begun to fight!” And, indeed, Jones went on to capture the HMS Serapis, and make it the USS Serapis. Since his own ship, the USS Bon Homme Richard was badly damaged, he left the “Bonnie Dick” to his Executive Officer, and thus he became the Captain of the larger Serapis.
Later, when the American Revolution concluded, Captain John Paul Jones returned to Virginia where ennui set in and Jones left to serve the revolution in Paris. He eventually was asked by Catherine II of Russia to serve in her navy in 1788. She made him an Admiral and, once again, he served heroically in battle against the Turks. He returned to Paris in 1790 and died in 1792 at age 45 (it is rumored that he died of syphilis.).
It is the service of John Paul Jones, first serving America, and then in the service of Russia and having said “I have not yet begun to fight!“ that causes me to remember the life and times of Ensign Ben Forrest, U. S. Navy.
I have brought out the fact that Midshipman is the most junior rank in the Navy, but that is a misstatement of fact, because, during times of national exigency the Navy invokes the position of Cadet for purposes of expediency. When the military is at war, as they were in the 1960s in Vietnam, and when they run out of pilots, they resurrect a training program and name the students in this special program, cadet, naval cadets (NavCads).
And this is where our story begins. After you read the story you will know why I have changed the name of the protagonist. Ensign Ben Forrest is not his real name.
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The Naval Cadet program tests enlisted men and young men with a high school degree to see if they are smart enough to go through the flight school curriculum. If they go through the program and become a Naval Aviator, they get commissioned as an Ensign. But while they are going through flight training, they are not treated as officers, and they are called Naval Aviation Cadets (NavCads).
NavCads go through the same aviation flight program as new officers do. They do a separate but equal program at Pensacola. This is where I met Ben Forrest. He was a navy enlisted man, a sailor, who wanted to learn how to fly. He passed the test and became a NavCad. He went through the flight program and progressed in parallel with me. We got our wings together, he became a commissioned officer, an Ensign, and we got the same assignment to learn how to fly Douglas A-4 Skyhawks in Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida. At about this time I was promoted to Lieutenant (Junior Grade.)
We finished the last of our flights in the Training Command after 18 months of training. For both of us our last Training Command flight was in February, 1966. We had a few days of leave and arrived in Jacksonville’s Cecil Field on February 25th. Together with about 28 other students we started ground training, sitting in classrooms, learning all about the A-4 Skyhawk. We learned about the hydraulic system, the oil system, the engine parts and pumps, the air conditioning system, the ejection seat, the weapons systems, and the flight controls. And among other things, we learned rules of flight in the Jacksonville area, area radio and navigation frequencies, restricted areas where we could perform our over-the-head maneuvers, formation flying, and bombing. These areas were protected from all other types of aircraft, particularly commercial air flights and private aircraft. Only military aircraft with prior approval could enter this airspace.
But, most importantly, we learned Emergency Procedures. We memorized Emergency Procedures. We got in the mock aircraft training cockpits and learned where every switch in the cockpit was located. In the end we had to be able to reach and touch every switch while blind folded. This drill simulated the actual need of a pilot to reach every switch at night with out cockpit lighting. Over and over again we trained for and drilled emergency procedures such as Loss of Engine procedures, Engine Fire procedures, Loss of Hydraulic procedures, Loss of Oil Pressure, Loss of Generator, and Loss of Pressurization procedures.
We had to know everything before our first flight, I mean everything. It was not like the Training Command. In the Training Command you almost always flew with an instructor in the back seat. In the A-4, at that time, there were no back seats. The first time you climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit, you had to know about every eventuality. You, and you alone, had to do whatever was required. You could not panic, you had to deal with any emergency by yourself, or risk ejecting from a $6,000,000 aircraft. The Navy did not like pilots ejecting from aircraft that they should be able to land. You had an ejection seat, but use of it was to be as a last resort.
My flight logbook, which I still have, shows my first flight, by myself, occurring on 18 March, 1966, at age of 24. I flew an A-4E, serial # 150008, on a training flight. Total pilot time shows 1.3 hours, I made 6 take-offs and landings, all at Navy Cecil Field. It does not tell me who the instructor was who flew along with me in another aircraft, watching me from afar.
Ben Forrest flew the same day. The first time was the most tense, the most frightening. My second flight was three days later. Ben flew his second flight before me. He was going out on his third flight when I was going out on my second flight. He seemed to me to be more confident having had two flights when I only had one.
The A-4 has several variants. The first one made was in 1954 and was called the A-4D, the A standing for Attack, the 4 meant it was the Navy’s 4th kind of Attack airplane and the D standing for Douglas Aircraft the company that built the 4th Navy Attack aircraft. Douglas eventually built 2,960 of these aircraft. Every few years a newer model was made with bigger engines and better avionics. The first A-4 to see combat was in North Vietnam on August 4, 1964. It was a very important bomber in the Israeli Yom Kippur war in 1973 when it bombed the Sinai and Golan Heights areas. The Navy’s Flight Demonstration team, the Blue Angels, flew the A-4 from 1974 to 1986, a period of twelve years!
The variation that was the newest in 1966 was the A-4E which I was learning to fly. Ben was flying the A-4C, a slightly older variant. He was assigned to fly this airplane because the squadron that he was assigned to flew the C model. Likewise the squadron that I would be assigned to was flying the E model. The newer model had a slightly larger engine with a better fuel pump. The C model was known to have problems with the fuel pump quitting, and losing electrical power at the wrong time, among other things.
Later that day I learned that while Ben was out flying on his third flight, the fuel pump stopped working and the engine flamed out. He was at about 18,000 feet when this happened. Ben called the instructor following him who talked him through the relight procedure. The Emergency Procedure has only three steps to memorize, pull the throttle back to the shut off position, put the nose down to reach an airspeed of 250 knots, then move the throttle forward while moving it outward to scrup the ignition switch and then watch the engine instruments for the engine to start (relight).
Ben followed the instructor’s instruction and nothing happened. He told his instructor the engine had not shown any indication of re-lighting. Slowly the instructor went through the re-light procedure as the aircraft descended through 14,000 feet. Once again, nothing. The Navy Operational Training Manual calls for a pilot to eject if the engine is not operating at 10,000 feet. The instructor called for Ben to try the procedure one more time, which he did with the same results. The instructor then talked him through the procedure for ejection and Ben ejected as the aircraft passed 10,000 feet.
Ben landed in a swampy area about 50 miles west of Jacksonville. A helicopter was dispatched from Cecil Field to pick up the downed pilot. The crewman aboard the helicopter wanted to record the event and took out his personal camera and proceeded to take pictures of the rescue. Ben was picked up without incident and transported back to Cecil Field for medical evaluation. A board of investigation found that all procedures had been followed precisely, no error could be found, and that the fuel pump had apparently failed. Medically, Ben was found to have no harmful effects from the ejection and he was given permission to continue flying.
About two weeks after this incident, a sailor from the helicopter rescue unit came into our Squadron ready room. He said he was the crewman on the helicopter and he wanted to show us the pictures he had taken of the rescue. They were black and white photos, 8” by 10”in size. The first photo, from a distance, showed Ben standing on a small island in the swamp. There were some tall grasses and a log on the island. As the helicopter came closer, the pictures became more clear and everything looked the same except the log had moved. In the third photo it shows Ben looking up at the helo and waving his arms, and the log is now closer. The final photo shows the sling from the helo being grabbed by Ben and now it is abundantly clear that the log is an alligator less than six feet away. Ben is safely pulled into the helicopter and the alligator looked terribly unhappy.
Ben’s incident is the only exciting thing that happens to our group of 30 pilots. We all finish our familiarization flights, learn instrument flying, formation flying, bombing and then things get interesting again. In the Training Command we learned how to land on an aircraft carrier. That was all very exciting and the source of great satisfaction and gratification. Landing on the aircraft carrier was the last thing we did to become proven Navy Carrier Qualified Aviators, and enabled us to get the fabled wings of gold pinned on our chests. That was the real deal. We were no longer pretenders who can only land on 10,000 feet long runways.
All of that excitement had diminished in the shadow of the biggest, most exiting, most exacting performance required of a Naval Aviator......landing on an aircraft carrier At Night!
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Here I will jump ahead two years. On my first cruise to Vietnam, I flew off of the USS Constellation CVA-64. While operating in the Yankee Station operating area, some doctors arrived on the ship on an aircraft flying from the Philippines. They were from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. They were conducting experiments on stress. They wanted to know about adrenal response, heartbeat and pulse during occasions of high stress. At that time they had records from the Mercury series of space shots. They were currently working on the Apollo series preparing for a flight to the moon. Initially, they started the experiment by wiring up police officers and firemen. Now they wanted to know about pilots getting shot at by SAMS and Anti Aircraft guns.
Who they chose, and how they were chosen, was unbeknownst to me, however I was chosen to participate in this experiment. In order to get the best readings of the heart, blood pressure and adrenal responses, it was necessary to shave the hair off of the chest and around the arm. The pilots selected went on their normally scheduled combat flights, day and night, and used a small recorder to record the information. This went on for three weeks and the doctors were airlifted off the ship, back to Cubi Point in the Philippines.
A year later I was again in Vietnam, but this time on the USS Coral Sea CVA-43. About half way through that cruise a single doctor arrived on our ship from the Philippines. He was there to give us certificates of participation for our prior cooperation with their experiment. He had a slide show that he said was the same one they had presented before Congress in Washington. The certificates were humorous, signed in red by Doctor Blood and in Yellow by Doctor Urine. Very funny. But the slide show was real and very interesting. It showed that the most prolonged adrenal response was not from a rocket blast into outer space, not a policeman getting shot at, nor a fireman engaged in fire-fighting, nor was it a pilot getting shot at by a surface to air missile. The winner of the experiment was every pilot while waiting to come in to make a Night Carrier Landing! That was more scary than getting shot at! Having been a pilot waiting to land on the carrier at night, I can truly say I was always scared. You never get used to it.
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Now, back to VA-44, the Navy A-4 training squadron in Jacksonville. We had all passed all of the courses necessary to be sent out to the fleet, except for our carrier qualification. The training is called CQ training, for Carrier Qualification. The instructors used for this training are unique. After all, you need very special training to stand on the aft (back) end of an aircraft carrier, look out into the darkness that only the open ocean can provide, look at an arriving aircraft, tell whether the airplane is too high or too low, whether he needs to be lined up more to the left or more to the right, but even more importantly, whether he is going too fast or too slow and whether he has too much power on, or not enough power on.
The people who do this are called LSOs. That stands for Landing Signal Officers. There are normally two LSOs in each squadron. One is the primary LSO. The other is the LSO under training. You cannot teach a person to become an LSO by reading a book. Or, in the abstract, you cannot simply tell him how to be an LSO. There is only one way to become an LSO and that is to watch hundreds or thousands of airplanes land on either the field or on the ship. There are no shortcuts. You spend many nights watching airplanes land using the Optical Landing System. It is on the aft end of the ship adjacent to the arresting wires, the wires that engage with the hook hanging from the back end of the aircraft. The wires that stop the plane on the deck of the aircraft carrier.
What the student will be trying to do is learn to fly on the Optical Landing System. The system is composed of a set of horizontal green lights, four big green spotlights on each side of a set of vertical orange spotlights with a Fresnel lens covering each orange light. The Fresnel lens focuses the beam of light into a narrow path in the sky referencing an imaginary path taking the pilot directly to a spot on the deck of the moving carrier.
If the pilot sees the top orange beam of light it will show that he is above the horizontal row of eight green lights. If he sees the next lower orange light beam it will show him closer to the vertical green row. If you see the next lower orange light, it will show you in perfect position aligned with the green horizontal row. The perfect position on the glide slope to land. If, however, you see an orange light below the green lights, you are below the glide slope. If you get below that......you see a bright red beam of light that indicates you will collide with the stern of the ship causing you to have a really bad day.
It is as simple as that. Once you come around the racetrack pattern, you look for the Optical Landing System lights. The orange beam of light will tell you exactly where you are on the optimal glide path. And....you have a backup. On the ground or on the ship, next to the Optical Landing System is an LSO. A pilot who has trained to look at an aircraft and tell where it is in reference to the glide path. A pilot who can look at the aircraft and know if it is too far right or too far left, and whether it has too much power on the engine or not enough power. AND you get to talk to him on your approach, or rather, he Will talk to you. He will say, “You are a little too high, ease it down.” or “You are too fast, ease it back a little.” or a hundred other things.
If the pilot is all screwed up and scared and frightened and panicky and looks like he is going to hit the stern of the ship, the LSO will press a button on a cord he is holding and he will politely scream at you to “Wave Off, Wave OFF”, and the button he pressed will cause all of the lights to go out on the Optical Landing System except a whole bunch of bright red lights that will flash over and over again indicating Do Not Land.
It is as simple as that. When you are in the racetrack pattern and turn on to final for landing and you see the orange ball, called the meatball, the pilot would then initiate contact with the LSO by saying the ship call sign, then his call sign, then the amount of fuel he has in hundreds of pounds, and he must confirm that his hook to catch the arresting wire, is down. For example, one might say, “Warchief, this is Silver Fox 502, I have the ball (meatball) with 6 point O, Hook down.” All of that meaning the pilot sees the meatball, and acknowledges he has six hundred pounds of fuel on board and he has placed his hook handle to the Down position. The LSO would then say words you love to hear, “Roger, ball.” Somehow the voice of the LSO is always reassuring. It means there is someone on the ship who is himself a pilot and he wants to help you catch an arresting wire to complete your landing. Those words are very comforting, “Roger, ball.”
I was asked to become an LSO for my squadron. It takes a long time to become an LSO. Once you become an LSO you are invaluable, simply because it takes so long to train, to get the eye to evaluate the situation of each arriving aircraft. Because, if you don’t like what you see, you simply push a button on your controller that flashes the bright red “Wave Off” lights on the Optical Landing System, and the arriving pilot must pull nose up, add full power and head out for another trip around the ship to get into the landing pattern. This happens most often at night.
The pilot in the aircraft who was not flying well according to the LSO, who just waved him off, has added full military power, raised his landing gear (wheels), and is climbing straight into the omniscient darkness over the ocean. And everyone knows that the pilot just screwed up. All approaches to the carriers are recorded on television cameras built into the flight deck. They are accompanied by audio between the pilot and the LSO and presented on television screens in every squadron’s ready room and to the ship’s Captain.
It is somewhat ironic that even though the LSO is most often a Lieutenant, he is the direct representative of the Captain of the ship. The LSO has the power to say “yes” or “no” about whether you can land on the Captain’s ship. As an LSO, if your squadron Commanding Officer is approaching the ship and it is a bad approach, you, although very much junior to your Commanding Officer, can turn on the Wave Off lights, and tell him he cannot land on the ship until he makes a better approach. The Captain of the ship is watching on his television. The Air Wing Commander is watching on his television. The Commanding Officers of all of the other Squadrons are watching. It is the ultimate humiliation to screw up an approach to land on the moving deck of these enormous platforms, these moving runways. So this is the kind of pressure involved in the psychological thought process of pilots while waiting at night behind the ship for their aircraft number to be called to start the approach for landing.
The young pilots of VA-44 know that the next three weeks will be the biggest challenge of their young lives. They will prepare to make the dreaded Night Carrier Landing. No body talks about the night. We all prepare for day carrier landings. That in itself is hard, but we all did it before in the Training Command. We have all done it six times.....but we all did it during daylight hours. None of us has done it at night. It is as inviting as the prospect of having a wet blanket on a cold night. It is the initiation requirement to join the fraternity of elite aviators. Though I fly threw the valley of death, I fear no evil, for I am a Navy Carrier Pilot. Well....that is what we hope will happen.
We start our practice on out lying fields that are nothing more than a concrete runway out in the Everglades. Away from highways, away from shopping centers, away from homes. Out lying fields, called Auxiliary Landing Fields are chosen for their remoteness. They are chosen so that at night time, there are no lights in the area, so that it is as dark as can be on the land. They are chosen to simulate what you will see at night in the middle of the ocean.
Few people travel across the ocean by ship anymore. It is routine now to fly from New York to Rome on a Boeing 747 or 767. You take off in JFK in the early evening, fly for eight or nine hours, sleeping most of the time, get served breakfast and land at Fiumicino Airport outside of Rome. If you had taken a ship, it would have taken five or six days. Then you could go out on deck at 11:00 o’clock in the evening and seen and experienced the vastness of the ocean, but more importantly how seriously dark it is when you are a thousand miles from the nearest lights. Trust me on this, it is very, very dark in the middle of the ocean at night. And approaching an aircraft carrier that looks as small as a postage stamp, and has no lights turned on to ruin your night vision, is like flying into a bottle of black ink.
Even during the day,. while flying your airplane over the ocean, you really have no depth perception. Studies have shown that pilots who eject from an airplane and are told to release the parachute when they get 5 to 10 feet above the ocean, so the parachute will sail away and not cover them with nylon and shroud lines, always misjudge the height they are above the water, sometimes releasing the parachute when they get a thousand feet above the water. It is terribly difficult to judge height above an ocean. You can imagine how the problem becomes exponentially more difficult at night.
The pilots of VA-44 do not talk about this. They do not need anything more to frighten themselves. They practice landings at the auxiliary fields, first for several days in a row during daylight hours, but then they must learn to fly the exact same patterns at night. The enormous danger becomes the lack of perception of height. The pattern flown during both the day and the night is 500 feet above the ground. During the day that is not a problem. You glance at your altimeter once or twice to verify your elevation and then you focus on the end of the runway where you will touch down, apply full power and climb straight ahead to 500 feet. Then you will turn left in a racetrack pattern for another touchdown. This type landing is called a “touch and go” landing. You do this over and over again.
Whether the pilot is at an out lying field or actually landing on the carrier, as soon as he touches down on the runway or the carrier, he immediately moves the throttle with his left hand all the way forward to full military power. He does this in case the hook on the airplane does not catch an arresting wire. That way he will be up to power enough to resume flight out into the darkness to make another attempt. Missing the wire is called a Bolter. And if you bolter, you must Go Around, meaning get back in the landing pattern. This, too, is observed on the deck mounted television camera and is a symbol of less than perfect mastery of the proper carrier landing procedures making you slightly inferior to those who never miss the arresting wire. Another source of humiliation for the macho Naval Aviator.
Strangers of the Night
Looking at my log book shows that on June 1, 1966, I made 28 touch and goes during daylight, called Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLPs) during the days ending on 11 June. During that same period, I made 87 night FCLPs. 115 practice carrier landings. Ben did almost exactly the same number, and together we were signed off by the LSO to be land qualified, a meaningless term, but was necessary for us to fly out to the USS Lexington in the Gulf of Mexico on 13 June 1966 in the year of Our Lord.
The ready room in Cecil was filled with excitement. We knew we were going to fly out to the ship and make two touch and goes. To do a touch and go, you simply do not put your hook down, so you can’t possibly catch a wire. This is merely a confidence building exercise. On our third approach we would make the call to the LSO, report our aircraft number, amount of fuel and be sure to say, Hook Down. Then we would make a series of six daylight carrier arrested landings. If you are lucky enough to catch a wire, you retard your throttle to idle, taxi up toward the catapult, get fired back into the air and try again until you get six traps ( we call the full stop landing from 140 mph to 0 mph, a trap.) Once you had completed 6 traps, the pilot would taxi to an assigned area to park and be chained down to the deck to spend the night on the Lexington. Looking now at my log book, it shows I had 2 touch and goes, 6 arrested landings......and one Bolter.
During the next two days we practiced more landings on the Lady Lex. But, on June 15th, 1966, we were to get our six required night carrier landings. Of all the traditions of the British Royal Navy that we did not continue, the practice of having four pints of rum each day for each crew member, was no longer honored by the United States Navy. We were going to fly this mission without anesthesia. No one slept well the night before. In the ready room, where we met for coffee in the morning, there were false laughs, hesitant conversation, no one mentioning what was to happen that evening. We were all junior officers, none of us had ever done this before. We, quite frankly, did not know how to assuage our fears. Some people paced up and down, some, I noticed, did not appear for coffee and confined themselves to their staterooms. We did not have a commanding officer there to tell us how simple this was going to be.
The late afternoon briefing in the ready room by the Senior LSO was very professional. He assured us that he had observed us landing at the auxiliary fields at night, that he felt confident about all of us. He told us that it is perfectly normal to be anxious, but not to let that interfere with our procedures. He said we knew everything a fully qualified Navy pilot knows, it was just a matter of going out there, putting your fears aside, and fly the pattern. Somehow that was reassuring. Deep down inside you knew that if you flew the pattern like it was an FCLP, and you were certain you could do that, then you would succeed.
All of us that night completed our mission. We all got six arrested landings. On our last catapult shot we were given a heading to take us, not to Jacksonville, but to Pensacola, the home of Naval Aviation, where we first started pilot training. We all would go to Pensacola Air Field, land, and as fast as possible go to the Officer’s Club to celebrate. What better place for a completely Carrier Qualified pilot to go to celebrate! It was awesome.
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Seven of the thirty pilots had already received orders to proceed immediately to the West Coast, to San Francisco to be transported to Subic Bay, Cubi Point in the Philippines. We had seven days to get to San Francisco. I flew the next day back to Rhode Island to see my mother and father and my brothers. They knew I was on my way to Vietnam, so it was somewhat of a restrained few days. My father had been on aircraft carriers during World War Two. He knew that war was not fun and games. The daily newspapers were reporting the deaths in Vietnam of American soldiers, Marines and airmen. I made peace as best I could and left for San Francisco.
I stopped in North Dakota to pick a friend of mine, Tom Spizter, one of the six pilots going with me. We then went down to South Dakota to pick up another, Bob Hegstrom. We ended up with the others in San Francisco, Ben Forrest included. We partied that night and the next day we were on a chartered 707 heading across the Pacific Ocean.
We arrived in Cubi Point anticipating the next leg of our journey to Yankee Station. Three of our group were assigned to squadrons on the USS Oriskany. Ben was one of them. Tom Spitzer was one of them, and a friend of mine from the Naval Academy was also going there. The second night we were there, the three destined for the Oriskany were told they would do practice FCLPs to freshen their skills that night by the ship’s LSO. That evening they went out and practiced over Subic Bay at night. My friend from the Naval Academy flew his airplane into the water and was the first victim of the seven of us. The official Naval report claimed night time disorientation and erroneous depth perception. Little did I know then that only Ben and I would survive the cruise, Ben, who had already ejected from an A-4 in Jacksonville.
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Soon we split apart. Ben went aboard a ship that was destined for trouble, as was Ben.
In a squadron each pilot is assigned with a team mate, the more senior being the leader and the more junior flying on his wing. Ben, because he had been a NavCad, was the most junior of us all. When he joined his squadron he, the most junior, was assigned to be the wingman of the most senior, the Commanding Officer of the squadron. It was thought that the most senior was the most experienced and he would instruct the least experienced. And so it was.
Like me, Ben was assigned to the squadron to replace a pilot who had been shot down. The ship was already at Yankee Station and Ben’s first flight was into North Vietnam, just like me. And, just like me, about four flights later President Johnson decided to bomb the biggest cities in North Vietnam. For some foolish reasons the squadron commanders like to fly on the most difficult missions. I think it is because the highest awards and medals go to those people. Ben’s leader, the Skipper; we always call the commanding officer Skipper, chose to go on one of the more dangerous missions right away, in spite of his wingman’s inexperience.
The flight encountered heavy resistance. Lots of flak, lots of missiles and some MIGS. North Vietnamese gunners always try to get the lead airplane. They know that he is probably the highest ranking officer, and his loss may send the strike group into disarray. Such was the case on the day in question. The skipper got shot down. When a plane gets hit it is the duty of his team mate to stay with him, hopefully to help him get out to sea to bail out. The skipper’s plane headed out but was on fire. Soon the fire caused the flight controls to loose effectiveness and Ben watched as his leader ejected over North Vietnam.
Ben followed the skipper’s parachute down to the ground. It was Vietnam’s answer to farmland. It was a rice paddy. There did not seem to be any hostiles around so Ben called back to the Oriskany to set up a rescue operation. He was too new to know that rescues in North Vietnam did not happen....too dangerous. But Ben stuck around circling the site hoping to hear about the rescue. It did not happen and Ben now looked at his fuel gauge and was surprised to see a low fuel state. He immediately called the ship and asked to rendezvous with a Tanker aircraft to get more fuel. The ship told him where the tanker was and Ben headed in that direction out over the Tonkin Gulf.
As luck would have it, Ben could not find the tanker and subsequently ran out of fuel. He ejected about 100 miles from the ship. The ship sent a helicopter over to rescue him. It was an uneventful ride back to the ship. The executive officer of the squadron now moved up to be the new Commanding Officer of the squadron and he was furious. That was shear stupidity, he said. Incompetence, he said. That is the second airplane you have ejected from in six months, he said. If you weren’t so junior and inexperienced, I would have you court martialed, he said.
Ben was assigned to another pilot to be his wingman. He flew for another six weeks without incident. It was the monsoon season. Lots of nasty weather. Low ceilings called for rendezvous below the clouds at sometime less than 1000 feet, normally the pilots would rendezvous at above 10,000 feet.. The pilots would be catapulted off the bow, stay low and slow until their wingman could join them. Once together they would get in a very tight formation, literally three or four feet apart, and then climb together up through maybe 20,000 feet of clouds until they reached the cloud tops and then relax a little while they headed maybe to Laos or Cambodia where the weather was suitable for bombing.
Ben was on just such a flight one morning. He joined his leader under the clouds, got in tight formation and together they started climbing through the thick, rainy clouds. As I have previously mentioned, A-4C was notorious for having mechanical problems. Ben was flying as close as anyone would, but we are told to occasional glance at our instruments to see that everything is normal. Ben did this, several times while climbing out. As they passed 18,000 feet, where you reset your altimeter to 29.92, Ben noticed he had lost all electrical power to his airplane. He was stunned. He looked back to follow his leader, but his leader had disappeared in the clouds. Ben looked back into the cockpit. His main instrument, his attitude gyro had tumbled offering him no help to tell him what the airplane attitude was. He was in the clouds, he did not want to collide with his leader, he had no reference telling him whether he was still climbing or turning or anything. Then he noticed his altimeter was going down quickly and his airspeed was increasing quickly. He knew he was going down rapidly, but he did not know where the horizon was. He had vertigo, his world was tumbling.
For the third time in less than a year, Ben ejected. He did not send out a distress call. He fell into the Golf of Tonkin for the second time. As it turned out another airplane came out of Vietnam shot up. He was losing altitude and he was going to have to eject. He called the ship and they sent a helo out to pick him up. As fate would have it, the helo found Ben and returned to the ship. No one on the ship knew that Ben was down. Meanwhile, the pilot who called for rescue was not found until the next day, very angry that someone had confiscated his taxi home.
Needless to say, the Commanding Officer was not at all pleased with his new-guy. He told Ben that he would be Court Martialed. Ben did not wait for the Court Martial, he pulled the wings of gold off his chest and said, “ I quit.” This was the best of all possible worlds for the Commanding Officer. “I quit”, did it for him. And the rest of Ben’s life was just beginning.
If Ben quit and was sent back to the United States, that might trigger a mass of resignations. Quit and go home. No way, Jose. Ben was sent to South Vietnam to the Navy’s River Patrol Squadron. River boat patrol was a very, very dangerous business, perhaps more dangerous than flying in North Vietnam. Sending Ben to that duty sent a strong message about quitting
Ben was sent with orders to complete his Vietnam tour of duty and then be sent home for discharge. When I finished my first tour in Vietnam I went back to the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, California. I was surprised to see Ben Forrest out at the pool sunning himself. He had completed his tour and was sent back to the United States for discharge. Ben had completed his River boat duties, received several high awards for bravery and was now going to be a civilian. At this time in the mid-sixties it was hard to get men to enlist in the service with the unpopular war going on. When Ben went to the Administration Office to get discharged he was surprised to learn that the Navy wanted him to stay in service. They offered to send him to duty in Washington, but Ben was unmarried, wanted to travel and offered to be a Naval Attaché someplace in Europe. There happened to be such a position in the London Embassy. Ben signed up for two more years.
Vigilante Justice
Two years later his tour completed, Ben put in his papers to resign. The Navy was hurting for pilots and offered him a position in the Training Command as an instructor pilot. He would get his wings of gold back and he would fly again. Ben jumped on that, another two year commitment of flying every day! After two years Ben put in his papers to resign again. This was in 1970, I think. The Military was still in an even more unpopular war so they offered Ben a prime job, flying the RA5C, Vigilante.
This was the fastest airplane the Navy owned and it could fly higher than anything else. It was a two-man crew, the pilot and Bombardier Navigator, who sat in an enclosed station well behind the pilot. It was supersonic with two J-79 GE turbojet engines. It was built to be a supersonic attack airplane with a linear bomb bay design specifically for dropping an MK-28 nuclear bomb carried inside the airplane. As it turned out it could not accurately drop bombs while flying above Mach One (the speed of sound). The bomb would get deflected as it passed through the supersonic shock wave, or even worse would be carried along with the airplane by the shock wave. There were only 158 of these airplanes built. It did, however, prove to be a very effective reconnaissance airplane. Loaded with no external weapons, enclosed cameras, and swept wings, the clean airplane could outrun the F-4 fighters and all Russian Migs. Years later the Russians did build two different fighters that looked remarkably like the A-5 Vigilante.
This, too, was an assignment that Ben could not pass up. He was given orders to proceed to the RA5C training squadron in Sanford, Florida. A friend of mine was in the squadron at that time as an instructor. He told me that Ben was a good pilot and was almost finished with the program, had only one flight left to complete the syllabus. On a Sunday morning he was to fly his final flight, a routine flight down to Key West then up the west coast of Florida over to the Navy’s bombing range south of Jacksonville and return to base…. At least that was the plan.
Ben was still a bachelor. He liked being in Sanford because his only living relative, his father, live in Florida. His father had been in the Navy for his whole career and retired as a Navy Chief, similar to being a Sergeant in the Army. Ben lived in the Bachelor Officers Quarters (B.O.Q.) on the base in Sanford. His back seat guy, the Bombardier Navigator also lived in the B.O.Q. Ben and his BN agreed to meet at the Officer’s Club for dinner and drinks to celebrate their last flight. As frequently happens, the boys drank too much hooch. When they left the club they returned to the B.O.Q. Ben, the older more experienced pilot assure the BN he would wake him in the morning.
What the Navy learned soon enough was that Ben had no intention of waking the BN, but rather got him super inebriated. So it was only Ben that appeared on the flight line for the morning flight. He forged the BN’s sign in sheet, went out to his aircraft, did the walk around inspection, chatted with the enlisted men, told them the BN was already in the plane, and then got in himself. He took off alone. He flew the RA5C south to Key West and then continued south descending into a Cuban Air Force base near Havana.
The next morning the Commanding Officer of the squadron convened an All Officers, closed door, meeting of all pilots, BNs, and instructors. He said there would be no Accident Investigation Board for the missing airplane. He also said that what happened that Sunday was TOP SECRET and that no one was to say anything, even to their wives. There was speculation that Ben had been contacted by Soviet agents in London while serving at the embassy. There is speculation that Ben had bad blood feelings because of his treatment on the Oriskany. No one knows for sure, but the Air Traffic Control records show the airplane flew on a straight course for Havana. No wonder that the Russians built two different fighters that looked almost identical to the Vigilante.
Post Script-- Irony
On 26 October, 1966, after Ben left for South Vietnam, the USS Constellation was steaming quietly in Yankee Station in company with the USS Oriskany. It was a warm sunny day in the Gulf of Tonkin. Both ships were on Stand Down duty, no scheduled flight operations for the next two days. During the daylight hours helicopters would fly back and forth between the ships with supplies, meetings between ship’s personnel, and exchanging movies, mostly Clint Eastwood movies.
I went up to our communications department and asked to send a message to Tom Spitzer. I invited him to get on a helicopter and come over to see what a supercarrier looked like, the Oriskany was smaller and much older. We soon received a message that he would get on the first helo in the morning of 27 October, a Sunday morning.
When I awoke in the morning I went up on deck and saw black billowing smoke and flames on the Oriskany. Early in the morning a sailor was handling a Magnesium Parachute Flare when the flare ignited. The young sailor should have thrown the flare over the side of the ship, but instead he dropped it into the Flare storage area which ignited all of the flares. The extremely intense fire burned through the steel hanger deck floor and continued down five stories. Magnesium flares burn under water. Sea water could not be used to extinguish the fires. The ship burned all day. The Junior Officer bunk room was located directly below the flare locker. Tom Spitzer died in the fire along with another of the original seven pilots in our group of Night Carrier warriors. A total of 44 officers and men died in the fire. Had Ben not left, he too would have been sleeping in the Junior Officer bunkroom.
When a student graduates from the Academy, the student becomes a commissioned officer called an Ensign. This term is also derived from the Royal Navy and Army where the most junior commissioned officer was assigned, when in battle, to carry the ship’s ensign or the regimental ensign, the ship’s flag or the regiment's flag.
At the Naval Academy a visitor would find, under the Main Chapel, enclosed in a glass case in a beautiful marble and bronze room, the sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, the “Father of the American Navy.” This man was born in Scotland as John Paul. He learned to sail at an early age and worked for a living as a sailor on merchant ships, became a skillful navigator and tactician, in Scotland and England, eventually becoming a junior officer.
It is probably appropriate that the nascent Continental Navy in 1775 would commission as its first 1st Lieutenant this rogue Scotsman. It seems that while serving on a British merchantman in the Caribbean, John Paul was brought up on charges for having a man flogged so much that he died 5 days later. Nothing came of that event, but within a year, John Paul killed a sailor in a sword fight over wages. Even the government of Tobago could not ignore this event and John Paul fled to Virginia to his brother’s farm. Here, he changed his name to John Jones to avoid capture.
But the newly assembling Navy in Philadelphia was in need of experienced officers and put Lieutenant Jones on the schooner USS Alfred (30 guns and 300 men), where he served under Commodore Esek Hopkins, the Navy’s first Commander in Chief.
Midshipmen even today have to know the seven ships commanded by Captain John Paul Jones. First year midshipman at the Naval Academy were known as Plebes, short for Plebeian, the lowest class of citizens in Ancient Rome. All entering Plebes were required to memorize a plethora of minutia, a litany of obscure facts, some of which changed each day. But knowing the Alliance, Alfred, Arial, Providence, Ranger, Serapis, and the Bon Homme Richard, the seven ships that John Paul Jones commanded was required. And if you were asked, What did John Paul Jones say, while engaged in battle, to the British Captain of the Serapis when he asked Captain Jones if he was ready to surrender, you must know that he said, “I have not yet begun to fight!” And, indeed, Jones went on to capture the HMS Serapis, and make it the USS Serapis. Since his own ship, the USS Bon Homme Richard was badly damaged, he left the “Bonnie Dick” to his Executive Officer, and thus he became the Captain of the larger Serapis.
Later, when the American Revolution concluded, Captain John Paul Jones returned to Virginia where ennui set in and Jones left to serve the revolution in Paris. He eventually was asked by Catherine II of Russia to serve in her navy in 1788. She made him an Admiral and, once again, he served heroically in battle against the Turks. He returned to Paris in 1790 and died in 1792 at age 45 (it is rumored that he died of syphilis.).
It is the service of John Paul Jones, first serving America, and then in the service of Russia and having said “I have not yet begun to fight!“ that causes me to remember the life and times of Ensign Ben Forrest, U. S. Navy.
I have brought out the fact that Midshipman is the most junior rank in the Navy, but that is a misstatement of fact, because, during times of national exigency the Navy invokes the position of Cadet for purposes of expediency. When the military is at war, as they were in the 1960s in Vietnam, and when they run out of pilots, they resurrect a training program and name the students in this special program, cadet, naval cadets (NavCads).
And this is where our story begins. After you read the story you will know why I have changed the name of the protagonist. Ensign Ben Forrest is not his real name.
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The Naval Cadet program tests enlisted men and young men with a high school degree to see if they are smart enough to go through the flight school curriculum. If they go through the program and become a Naval Aviator, they get commissioned as an Ensign. But while they are going through flight training, they are not treated as officers, and they are called Naval Aviation Cadets (NavCads).
NavCads go through the same aviation flight program as new officers do. They do a separate but equal program at Pensacola. This is where I met Ben Forrest. He was a navy enlisted man, a sailor, who wanted to learn how to fly. He passed the test and became a NavCad. He went through the flight program and progressed in parallel with me. We got our wings together, he became a commissioned officer, an Ensign, and we got the same assignment to learn how to fly Douglas A-4 Skyhawks in Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida. At about this time I was promoted to Lieutenant (Junior Grade.)
We finished the last of our flights in the Training Command after 18 months of training. For both of us our last Training Command flight was in February, 1966. We had a few days of leave and arrived in Jacksonville’s Cecil Field on February 25th. Together with about 28 other students we started ground training, sitting in classrooms, learning all about the A-4 Skyhawk. We learned about the hydraulic system, the oil system, the engine parts and pumps, the air conditioning system, the ejection seat, the weapons systems, and the flight controls. And among other things, we learned rules of flight in the Jacksonville area, area radio and navigation frequencies, restricted areas where we could perform our over-the-head maneuvers, formation flying, and bombing. These areas were protected from all other types of aircraft, particularly commercial air flights and private aircraft. Only military aircraft with prior approval could enter this airspace.
But, most importantly, we learned Emergency Procedures. We memorized Emergency Procedures. We got in the mock aircraft training cockpits and learned where every switch in the cockpit was located. In the end we had to be able to reach and touch every switch while blind folded. This drill simulated the actual need of a pilot to reach every switch at night with out cockpit lighting. Over and over again we trained for and drilled emergency procedures such as Loss of Engine procedures, Engine Fire procedures, Loss of Hydraulic procedures, Loss of Oil Pressure, Loss of Generator, and Loss of Pressurization procedures.
We had to know everything before our first flight, I mean everything. It was not like the Training Command. In the Training Command you almost always flew with an instructor in the back seat. In the A-4, at that time, there were no back seats. The first time you climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit, you had to know about every eventuality. You, and you alone, had to do whatever was required. You could not panic, you had to deal with any emergency by yourself, or risk ejecting from a $6,000,000 aircraft. The Navy did not like pilots ejecting from aircraft that they should be able to land. You had an ejection seat, but use of it was to be as a last resort.
My flight logbook, which I still have, shows my first flight, by myself, occurring on 18 March, 1966, at age of 24. I flew an A-4E, serial # 150008, on a training flight. Total pilot time shows 1.3 hours, I made 6 take-offs and landings, all at Navy Cecil Field. It does not tell me who the instructor was who flew along with me in another aircraft, watching me from afar.
Ben Forrest flew the same day. The first time was the most tense, the most frightening. My second flight was three days later. Ben flew his second flight before me. He was going out on his third flight when I was going out on my second flight. He seemed to me to be more confident having had two flights when I only had one.
The A-4 has several variants. The first one made was in 1954 and was called the A-4D, the A standing for Attack, the 4 meant it was the Navy’s 4th kind of Attack airplane and the D standing for Douglas Aircraft the company that built the 4th Navy Attack aircraft. Douglas eventually built 2,960 of these aircraft. Every few years a newer model was made with bigger engines and better avionics. The first A-4 to see combat was in North Vietnam on August 4, 1964. It was a very important bomber in the Israeli Yom Kippur war in 1973 when it bombed the Sinai and Golan Heights areas. The Navy’s Flight Demonstration team, the Blue Angels, flew the A-4 from 1974 to 1986, a period of twelve years!
The variation that was the newest in 1966 was the A-4E which I was learning to fly. Ben was flying the A-4C, a slightly older variant. He was assigned to fly this airplane because the squadron that he was assigned to flew the C model. Likewise the squadron that I would be assigned to was flying the E model. The newer model had a slightly larger engine with a better fuel pump. The C model was known to have problems with the fuel pump quitting, and losing electrical power at the wrong time, among other things.
Later that day I learned that while Ben was out flying on his third flight, the fuel pump stopped working and the engine flamed out. He was at about 18,000 feet when this happened. Ben called the instructor following him who talked him through the relight procedure. The Emergency Procedure has only three steps to memorize, pull the throttle back to the shut off position, put the nose down to reach an airspeed of 250 knots, then move the throttle forward while moving it outward to scrup the ignition switch and then watch the engine instruments for the engine to start (relight).
Ben followed the instructor’s instruction and nothing happened. He told his instructor the engine had not shown any indication of re-lighting. Slowly the instructor went through the re-light procedure as the aircraft descended through 14,000 feet. Once again, nothing. The Navy Operational Training Manual calls for a pilot to eject if the engine is not operating at 10,000 feet. The instructor called for Ben to try the procedure one more time, which he did with the same results. The instructor then talked him through the procedure for ejection and Ben ejected as the aircraft passed 10,000 feet.
Ben landed in a swampy area about 50 miles west of Jacksonville. A helicopter was dispatched from Cecil Field to pick up the downed pilot. The crewman aboard the helicopter wanted to record the event and took out his personal camera and proceeded to take pictures of the rescue. Ben was picked up without incident and transported back to Cecil Field for medical evaluation. A board of investigation found that all procedures had been followed precisely, no error could be found, and that the fuel pump had apparently failed. Medically, Ben was found to have no harmful effects from the ejection and he was given permission to continue flying.
About two weeks after this incident, a sailor from the helicopter rescue unit came into our Squadron ready room. He said he was the crewman on the helicopter and he wanted to show us the pictures he had taken of the rescue. They were black and white photos, 8” by 10”in size. The first photo, from a distance, showed Ben standing on a small island in the swamp. There were some tall grasses and a log on the island. As the helicopter came closer, the pictures became more clear and everything looked the same except the log had moved. In the third photo it shows Ben looking up at the helo and waving his arms, and the log is now closer. The final photo shows the sling from the helo being grabbed by Ben and now it is abundantly clear that the log is an alligator less than six feet away. Ben is safely pulled into the helicopter and the alligator looked terribly unhappy.
Ben’s incident is the only exciting thing that happens to our group of 30 pilots. We all finish our familiarization flights, learn instrument flying, formation flying, bombing and then things get interesting again. In the Training Command we learned how to land on an aircraft carrier. That was all very exciting and the source of great satisfaction and gratification. Landing on the aircraft carrier was the last thing we did to become proven Navy Carrier Qualified Aviators, and enabled us to get the fabled wings of gold pinned on our chests. That was the real deal. We were no longer pretenders who can only land on 10,000 feet long runways.
All of that excitement had diminished in the shadow of the biggest, most exiting, most exacting performance required of a Naval Aviator......landing on an aircraft carrier At Night!
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Here I will jump ahead two years. On my first cruise to Vietnam, I flew off of the USS Constellation CVA-64. While operating in the Yankee Station operating area, some doctors arrived on the ship on an aircraft flying from the Philippines. They were from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. They were conducting experiments on stress. They wanted to know about adrenal response, heartbeat and pulse during occasions of high stress. At that time they had records from the Mercury series of space shots. They were currently working on the Apollo series preparing for a flight to the moon. Initially, they started the experiment by wiring up police officers and firemen. Now they wanted to know about pilots getting shot at by SAMS and Anti Aircraft guns.
Who they chose, and how they were chosen, was unbeknownst to me, however I was chosen to participate in this experiment. In order to get the best readings of the heart, blood pressure and adrenal responses, it was necessary to shave the hair off of the chest and around the arm. The pilots selected went on their normally scheduled combat flights, day and night, and used a small recorder to record the information. This went on for three weeks and the doctors were airlifted off the ship, back to Cubi Point in the Philippines.
A year later I was again in Vietnam, but this time on the USS Coral Sea CVA-43. About half way through that cruise a single doctor arrived on our ship from the Philippines. He was there to give us certificates of participation for our prior cooperation with their experiment. He had a slide show that he said was the same one they had presented before Congress in Washington. The certificates were humorous, signed in red by Doctor Blood and in Yellow by Doctor Urine. Very funny. But the slide show was real and very interesting. It showed that the most prolonged adrenal response was not from a rocket blast into outer space, not a policeman getting shot at, nor a fireman engaged in fire-fighting, nor was it a pilot getting shot at by a surface to air missile. The winner of the experiment was every pilot while waiting to come in to make a Night Carrier Landing! That was more scary than getting shot at! Having been a pilot waiting to land on the carrier at night, I can truly say I was always scared. You never get used to it.
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Now, back to VA-44, the Navy A-4 training squadron in Jacksonville. We had all passed all of the courses necessary to be sent out to the fleet, except for our carrier qualification. The training is called CQ training, for Carrier Qualification. The instructors used for this training are unique. After all, you need very special training to stand on the aft (back) end of an aircraft carrier, look out into the darkness that only the open ocean can provide, look at an arriving aircraft, tell whether the airplane is too high or too low, whether he needs to be lined up more to the left or more to the right, but even more importantly, whether he is going too fast or too slow and whether he has too much power on, or not enough power on.
The people who do this are called LSOs. That stands for Landing Signal Officers. There are normally two LSOs in each squadron. One is the primary LSO. The other is the LSO under training. You cannot teach a person to become an LSO by reading a book. Or, in the abstract, you cannot simply tell him how to be an LSO. There is only one way to become an LSO and that is to watch hundreds or thousands of airplanes land on either the field or on the ship. There are no shortcuts. You spend many nights watching airplanes land using the Optical Landing System. It is on the aft end of the ship adjacent to the arresting wires, the wires that engage with the hook hanging from the back end of the aircraft. The wires that stop the plane on the deck of the aircraft carrier.
What the student will be trying to do is learn to fly on the Optical Landing System. The system is composed of a set of horizontal green lights, four big green spotlights on each side of a set of vertical orange spotlights with a Fresnel lens covering each orange light. The Fresnel lens focuses the beam of light into a narrow path in the sky referencing an imaginary path taking the pilot directly to a spot on the deck of the moving carrier.
If the pilot sees the top orange beam of light it will show that he is above the horizontal row of eight green lights. If he sees the next lower orange light beam it will show him closer to the vertical green row. If you see the next lower orange light, it will show you in perfect position aligned with the green horizontal row. The perfect position on the glide slope to land. If, however, you see an orange light below the green lights, you are below the glide slope. If you get below that......you see a bright red beam of light that indicates you will collide with the stern of the ship causing you to have a really bad day.
It is as simple as that. Once you come around the racetrack pattern, you look for the Optical Landing System lights. The orange beam of light will tell you exactly where you are on the optimal glide path. And....you have a backup. On the ground or on the ship, next to the Optical Landing System is an LSO. A pilot who has trained to look at an aircraft and tell where it is in reference to the glide path. A pilot who can look at the aircraft and know if it is too far right or too far left, and whether it has too much power on the engine or not enough power. AND you get to talk to him on your approach, or rather, he Will talk to you. He will say, “You are a little too high, ease it down.” or “You are too fast, ease it back a little.” or a hundred other things.
If the pilot is all screwed up and scared and frightened and panicky and looks like he is going to hit the stern of the ship, the LSO will press a button on a cord he is holding and he will politely scream at you to “Wave Off, Wave OFF”, and the button he pressed will cause all of the lights to go out on the Optical Landing System except a whole bunch of bright red lights that will flash over and over again indicating Do Not Land.
It is as simple as that. When you are in the racetrack pattern and turn on to final for landing and you see the orange ball, called the meatball, the pilot would then initiate contact with the LSO by saying the ship call sign, then his call sign, then the amount of fuel he has in hundreds of pounds, and he must confirm that his hook to catch the arresting wire, is down. For example, one might say, “Warchief, this is Silver Fox 502, I have the ball (meatball) with 6 point O, Hook down.” All of that meaning the pilot sees the meatball, and acknowledges he has six hundred pounds of fuel on board and he has placed his hook handle to the Down position. The LSO would then say words you love to hear, “Roger, ball.” Somehow the voice of the LSO is always reassuring. It means there is someone on the ship who is himself a pilot and he wants to help you catch an arresting wire to complete your landing. Those words are very comforting, “Roger, ball.”
I was asked to become an LSO for my squadron. It takes a long time to become an LSO. Once you become an LSO you are invaluable, simply because it takes so long to train, to get the eye to evaluate the situation of each arriving aircraft. Because, if you don’t like what you see, you simply push a button on your controller that flashes the bright red “Wave Off” lights on the Optical Landing System, and the arriving pilot must pull nose up, add full power and head out for another trip around the ship to get into the landing pattern. This happens most often at night.
The pilot in the aircraft who was not flying well according to the LSO, who just waved him off, has added full military power, raised his landing gear (wheels), and is climbing straight into the omniscient darkness over the ocean. And everyone knows that the pilot just screwed up. All approaches to the carriers are recorded on television cameras built into the flight deck. They are accompanied by audio between the pilot and the LSO and presented on television screens in every squadron’s ready room and to the ship’s Captain.
It is somewhat ironic that even though the LSO is most often a Lieutenant, he is the direct representative of the Captain of the ship. The LSO has the power to say “yes” or “no” about whether you can land on the Captain’s ship. As an LSO, if your squadron Commanding Officer is approaching the ship and it is a bad approach, you, although very much junior to your Commanding Officer, can turn on the Wave Off lights, and tell him he cannot land on the ship until he makes a better approach. The Captain of the ship is watching on his television. The Air Wing Commander is watching on his television. The Commanding Officers of all of the other Squadrons are watching. It is the ultimate humiliation to screw up an approach to land on the moving deck of these enormous platforms, these moving runways. So this is the kind of pressure involved in the psychological thought process of pilots while waiting at night behind the ship for their aircraft number to be called to start the approach for landing.
The young pilots of VA-44 know that the next three weeks will be the biggest challenge of their young lives. They will prepare to make the dreaded Night Carrier Landing. No body talks about the night. We all prepare for day carrier landings. That in itself is hard, but we all did it before in the Training Command. We have all done it six times.....but we all did it during daylight hours. None of us has done it at night. It is as inviting as the prospect of having a wet blanket on a cold night. It is the initiation requirement to join the fraternity of elite aviators. Though I fly threw the valley of death, I fear no evil, for I am a Navy Carrier Pilot. Well....that is what we hope will happen.
We start our practice on out lying fields that are nothing more than a concrete runway out in the Everglades. Away from highways, away from shopping centers, away from homes. Out lying fields, called Auxiliary Landing Fields are chosen for their remoteness. They are chosen so that at night time, there are no lights in the area, so that it is as dark as can be on the land. They are chosen to simulate what you will see at night in the middle of the ocean.
Few people travel across the ocean by ship anymore. It is routine now to fly from New York to Rome on a Boeing 747 or 767. You take off in JFK in the early evening, fly for eight or nine hours, sleeping most of the time, get served breakfast and land at Fiumicino Airport outside of Rome. If you had taken a ship, it would have taken five or six days. Then you could go out on deck at 11:00 o’clock in the evening and seen and experienced the vastness of the ocean, but more importantly how seriously dark it is when you are a thousand miles from the nearest lights. Trust me on this, it is very, very dark in the middle of the ocean at night. And approaching an aircraft carrier that looks as small as a postage stamp, and has no lights turned on to ruin your night vision, is like flying into a bottle of black ink.
Even during the day,. while flying your airplane over the ocean, you really have no depth perception. Studies have shown that pilots who eject from an airplane and are told to release the parachute when they get 5 to 10 feet above the ocean, so the parachute will sail away and not cover them with nylon and shroud lines, always misjudge the height they are above the water, sometimes releasing the parachute when they get a thousand feet above the water. It is terribly difficult to judge height above an ocean. You can imagine how the problem becomes exponentially more difficult at night.
The pilots of VA-44 do not talk about this. They do not need anything more to frighten themselves. They practice landings at the auxiliary fields, first for several days in a row during daylight hours, but then they must learn to fly the exact same patterns at night. The enormous danger becomes the lack of perception of height. The pattern flown during both the day and the night is 500 feet above the ground. During the day that is not a problem. You glance at your altimeter once or twice to verify your elevation and then you focus on the end of the runway where you will touch down, apply full power and climb straight ahead to 500 feet. Then you will turn left in a racetrack pattern for another touchdown. This type landing is called a “touch and go” landing. You do this over and over again.
Whether the pilot is at an out lying field or actually landing on the carrier, as soon as he touches down on the runway or the carrier, he immediately moves the throttle with his left hand all the way forward to full military power. He does this in case the hook on the airplane does not catch an arresting wire. That way he will be up to power enough to resume flight out into the darkness to make another attempt. Missing the wire is called a Bolter. And if you bolter, you must Go Around, meaning get back in the landing pattern. This, too, is observed on the deck mounted television camera and is a symbol of less than perfect mastery of the proper carrier landing procedures making you slightly inferior to those who never miss the arresting wire. Another source of humiliation for the macho Naval Aviator.
Strangers of the Night
Looking at my log book shows that on June 1, 1966, I made 28 touch and goes during daylight, called Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLPs) during the days ending on 11 June. During that same period, I made 87 night FCLPs. 115 practice carrier landings. Ben did almost exactly the same number, and together we were signed off by the LSO to be land qualified, a meaningless term, but was necessary for us to fly out to the USS Lexington in the Gulf of Mexico on 13 June 1966 in the year of Our Lord.
The ready room in Cecil was filled with excitement. We knew we were going to fly out to the ship and make two touch and goes. To do a touch and go, you simply do not put your hook down, so you can’t possibly catch a wire. This is merely a confidence building exercise. On our third approach we would make the call to the LSO, report our aircraft number, amount of fuel and be sure to say, Hook Down. Then we would make a series of six daylight carrier arrested landings. If you are lucky enough to catch a wire, you retard your throttle to idle, taxi up toward the catapult, get fired back into the air and try again until you get six traps ( we call the full stop landing from 140 mph to 0 mph, a trap.) Once you had completed 6 traps, the pilot would taxi to an assigned area to park and be chained down to the deck to spend the night on the Lexington. Looking now at my log book, it shows I had 2 touch and goes, 6 arrested landings......and one Bolter.
During the next two days we practiced more landings on the Lady Lex. But, on June 15th, 1966, we were to get our six required night carrier landings. Of all the traditions of the British Royal Navy that we did not continue, the practice of having four pints of rum each day for each crew member, was no longer honored by the United States Navy. We were going to fly this mission without anesthesia. No one slept well the night before. In the ready room, where we met for coffee in the morning, there were false laughs, hesitant conversation, no one mentioning what was to happen that evening. We were all junior officers, none of us had ever done this before. We, quite frankly, did not know how to assuage our fears. Some people paced up and down, some, I noticed, did not appear for coffee and confined themselves to their staterooms. We did not have a commanding officer there to tell us how simple this was going to be.
The late afternoon briefing in the ready room by the Senior LSO was very professional. He assured us that he had observed us landing at the auxiliary fields at night, that he felt confident about all of us. He told us that it is perfectly normal to be anxious, but not to let that interfere with our procedures. He said we knew everything a fully qualified Navy pilot knows, it was just a matter of going out there, putting your fears aside, and fly the pattern. Somehow that was reassuring. Deep down inside you knew that if you flew the pattern like it was an FCLP, and you were certain you could do that, then you would succeed.
All of us that night completed our mission. We all got six arrested landings. On our last catapult shot we were given a heading to take us, not to Jacksonville, but to Pensacola, the home of Naval Aviation, where we first started pilot training. We all would go to Pensacola Air Field, land, and as fast as possible go to the Officer’s Club to celebrate. What better place for a completely Carrier Qualified pilot to go to celebrate! It was awesome.
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Seven of the thirty pilots had already received orders to proceed immediately to the West Coast, to San Francisco to be transported to Subic Bay, Cubi Point in the Philippines. We had seven days to get to San Francisco. I flew the next day back to Rhode Island to see my mother and father and my brothers. They knew I was on my way to Vietnam, so it was somewhat of a restrained few days. My father had been on aircraft carriers during World War Two. He knew that war was not fun and games. The daily newspapers were reporting the deaths in Vietnam of American soldiers, Marines and airmen. I made peace as best I could and left for San Francisco.
I stopped in North Dakota to pick a friend of mine, Tom Spizter, one of the six pilots going with me. We then went down to South Dakota to pick up another, Bob Hegstrom. We ended up with the others in San Francisco, Ben Forrest included. We partied that night and the next day we were on a chartered 707 heading across the Pacific Ocean.
We arrived in Cubi Point anticipating the next leg of our journey to Yankee Station. Three of our group were assigned to squadrons on the USS Oriskany. Ben was one of them. Tom Spitzer was one of them, and a friend of mine from the Naval Academy was also going there. The second night we were there, the three destined for the Oriskany were told they would do practice FCLPs to freshen their skills that night by the ship’s LSO. That evening they went out and practiced over Subic Bay at night. My friend from the Naval Academy flew his airplane into the water and was the first victim of the seven of us. The official Naval report claimed night time disorientation and erroneous depth perception. Little did I know then that only Ben and I would survive the cruise, Ben, who had already ejected from an A-4 in Jacksonville.
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Soon we split apart. Ben went aboard a ship that was destined for trouble, as was Ben.
In a squadron each pilot is assigned with a team mate, the more senior being the leader and the more junior flying on his wing. Ben, because he had been a NavCad, was the most junior of us all. When he joined his squadron he, the most junior, was assigned to be the wingman of the most senior, the Commanding Officer of the squadron. It was thought that the most senior was the most experienced and he would instruct the least experienced. And so it was.
Like me, Ben was assigned to the squadron to replace a pilot who had been shot down. The ship was already at Yankee Station and Ben’s first flight was into North Vietnam, just like me. And, just like me, about four flights later President Johnson decided to bomb the biggest cities in North Vietnam. For some foolish reasons the squadron commanders like to fly on the most difficult missions. I think it is because the highest awards and medals go to those people. Ben’s leader, the Skipper; we always call the commanding officer Skipper, chose to go on one of the more dangerous missions right away, in spite of his wingman’s inexperience.
The flight encountered heavy resistance. Lots of flak, lots of missiles and some MIGS. North Vietnamese gunners always try to get the lead airplane. They know that he is probably the highest ranking officer, and his loss may send the strike group into disarray. Such was the case on the day in question. The skipper got shot down. When a plane gets hit it is the duty of his team mate to stay with him, hopefully to help him get out to sea to bail out. The skipper’s plane headed out but was on fire. Soon the fire caused the flight controls to loose effectiveness and Ben watched as his leader ejected over North Vietnam.
Ben followed the skipper’s parachute down to the ground. It was Vietnam’s answer to farmland. It was a rice paddy. There did not seem to be any hostiles around so Ben called back to the Oriskany to set up a rescue operation. He was too new to know that rescues in North Vietnam did not happen....too dangerous. But Ben stuck around circling the site hoping to hear about the rescue. It did not happen and Ben now looked at his fuel gauge and was surprised to see a low fuel state. He immediately called the ship and asked to rendezvous with a Tanker aircraft to get more fuel. The ship told him where the tanker was and Ben headed in that direction out over the Tonkin Gulf.
As luck would have it, Ben could not find the tanker and subsequently ran out of fuel. He ejected about 100 miles from the ship. The ship sent a helicopter over to rescue him. It was an uneventful ride back to the ship. The executive officer of the squadron now moved up to be the new Commanding Officer of the squadron and he was furious. That was shear stupidity, he said. Incompetence, he said. That is the second airplane you have ejected from in six months, he said. If you weren’t so junior and inexperienced, I would have you court martialed, he said.
Ben was assigned to another pilot to be his wingman. He flew for another six weeks without incident. It was the monsoon season. Lots of nasty weather. Low ceilings called for rendezvous below the clouds at sometime less than 1000 feet, normally the pilots would rendezvous at above 10,000 feet.. The pilots would be catapulted off the bow, stay low and slow until their wingman could join them. Once together they would get in a very tight formation, literally three or four feet apart, and then climb together up through maybe 20,000 feet of clouds until they reached the cloud tops and then relax a little while they headed maybe to Laos or Cambodia where the weather was suitable for bombing.
Ben was on just such a flight one morning. He joined his leader under the clouds, got in tight formation and together they started climbing through the thick, rainy clouds. As I have previously mentioned, A-4C was notorious for having mechanical problems. Ben was flying as close as anyone would, but we are told to occasional glance at our instruments to see that everything is normal. Ben did this, several times while climbing out. As they passed 18,000 feet, where you reset your altimeter to 29.92, Ben noticed he had lost all electrical power to his airplane. He was stunned. He looked back to follow his leader, but his leader had disappeared in the clouds. Ben looked back into the cockpit. His main instrument, his attitude gyro had tumbled offering him no help to tell him what the airplane attitude was. He was in the clouds, he did not want to collide with his leader, he had no reference telling him whether he was still climbing or turning or anything. Then he noticed his altimeter was going down quickly and his airspeed was increasing quickly. He knew he was going down rapidly, but he did not know where the horizon was. He had vertigo, his world was tumbling.
For the third time in less than a year, Ben ejected. He did not send out a distress call. He fell into the Golf of Tonkin for the second time. As it turned out another airplane came out of Vietnam shot up. He was losing altitude and he was going to have to eject. He called the ship and they sent a helo out to pick him up. As fate would have it, the helo found Ben and returned to the ship. No one on the ship knew that Ben was down. Meanwhile, the pilot who called for rescue was not found until the next day, very angry that someone had confiscated his taxi home.
Needless to say, the Commanding Officer was not at all pleased with his new-guy. He told Ben that he would be Court Martialed. Ben did not wait for the Court Martial, he pulled the wings of gold off his chest and said, “ I quit.” This was the best of all possible worlds for the Commanding Officer. “I quit”, did it for him. And the rest of Ben’s life was just beginning.
If Ben quit and was sent back to the United States, that might trigger a mass of resignations. Quit and go home. No way, Jose. Ben was sent to South Vietnam to the Navy’s River Patrol Squadron. River boat patrol was a very, very dangerous business, perhaps more dangerous than flying in North Vietnam. Sending Ben to that duty sent a strong message about quitting
Ben was sent with orders to complete his Vietnam tour of duty and then be sent home for discharge. When I finished my first tour in Vietnam I went back to the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, California. I was surprised to see Ben Forrest out at the pool sunning himself. He had completed his tour and was sent back to the United States for discharge. Ben had completed his River boat duties, received several high awards for bravery and was now going to be a civilian. At this time in the mid-sixties it was hard to get men to enlist in the service with the unpopular war going on. When Ben went to the Administration Office to get discharged he was surprised to learn that the Navy wanted him to stay in service. They offered to send him to duty in Washington, but Ben was unmarried, wanted to travel and offered to be a Naval Attaché someplace in Europe. There happened to be such a position in the London Embassy. Ben signed up for two more years.
Vigilante Justice
Two years later his tour completed, Ben put in his papers to resign. The Navy was hurting for pilots and offered him a position in the Training Command as an instructor pilot. He would get his wings of gold back and he would fly again. Ben jumped on that, another two year commitment of flying every day! After two years Ben put in his papers to resign again. This was in 1970, I think. The Military was still in an even more unpopular war so they offered Ben a prime job, flying the RA5C, Vigilante.
This was the fastest airplane the Navy owned and it could fly higher than anything else. It was a two-man crew, the pilot and Bombardier Navigator, who sat in an enclosed station well behind the pilot. It was supersonic with two J-79 GE turbojet engines. It was built to be a supersonic attack airplane with a linear bomb bay design specifically for dropping an MK-28 nuclear bomb carried inside the airplane. As it turned out it could not accurately drop bombs while flying above Mach One (the speed of sound). The bomb would get deflected as it passed through the supersonic shock wave, or even worse would be carried along with the airplane by the shock wave. There were only 158 of these airplanes built. It did, however, prove to be a very effective reconnaissance airplane. Loaded with no external weapons, enclosed cameras, and swept wings, the clean airplane could outrun the F-4 fighters and all Russian Migs. Years later the Russians did build two different fighters that looked remarkably like the A-5 Vigilante.
This, too, was an assignment that Ben could not pass up. He was given orders to proceed to the RA5C training squadron in Sanford, Florida. A friend of mine was in the squadron at that time as an instructor. He told me that Ben was a good pilot and was almost finished with the program, had only one flight left to complete the syllabus. On a Sunday morning he was to fly his final flight, a routine flight down to Key West then up the west coast of Florida over to the Navy’s bombing range south of Jacksonville and return to base…. At least that was the plan.
Ben was still a bachelor. He liked being in Sanford because his only living relative, his father, live in Florida. His father had been in the Navy for his whole career and retired as a Navy Chief, similar to being a Sergeant in the Army. Ben lived in the Bachelor Officers Quarters (B.O.Q.) on the base in Sanford. His back seat guy, the Bombardier Navigator also lived in the B.O.Q. Ben and his BN agreed to meet at the Officer’s Club for dinner and drinks to celebrate their last flight. As frequently happens, the boys drank too much hooch. When they left the club they returned to the B.O.Q. Ben, the older more experienced pilot assure the BN he would wake him in the morning.
What the Navy learned soon enough was that Ben had no intention of waking the BN, but rather got him super inebriated. So it was only Ben that appeared on the flight line for the morning flight. He forged the BN’s sign in sheet, went out to his aircraft, did the walk around inspection, chatted with the enlisted men, told them the BN was already in the plane, and then got in himself. He took off alone. He flew the RA5C south to Key West and then continued south descending into a Cuban Air Force base near Havana.
The next morning the Commanding Officer of the squadron convened an All Officers, closed door, meeting of all pilots, BNs, and instructors. He said there would be no Accident Investigation Board for the missing airplane. He also said that what happened that Sunday was TOP SECRET and that no one was to say anything, even to their wives. There was speculation that Ben had been contacted by Soviet agents in London while serving at the embassy. There is speculation that Ben had bad blood feelings because of his treatment on the Oriskany. No one knows for sure, but the Air Traffic Control records show the airplane flew on a straight course for Havana. No wonder that the Russians built two different fighters that looked almost identical to the Vigilante.
Post Script-- Irony
On 26 October, 1966, after Ben left for South Vietnam, the USS Constellation was steaming quietly in Yankee Station in company with the USS Oriskany. It was a warm sunny day in the Gulf of Tonkin. Both ships were on Stand Down duty, no scheduled flight operations for the next two days. During the daylight hours helicopters would fly back and forth between the ships with supplies, meetings between ship’s personnel, and exchanging movies, mostly Clint Eastwood movies.
I went up to our communications department and asked to send a message to Tom Spitzer. I invited him to get on a helicopter and come over to see what a supercarrier looked like, the Oriskany was smaller and much older. We soon received a message that he would get on the first helo in the morning of 27 October, a Sunday morning.
When I awoke in the morning I went up on deck and saw black billowing smoke and flames on the Oriskany. Early in the morning a sailor was handling a Magnesium Parachute Flare when the flare ignited. The young sailor should have thrown the flare over the side of the ship, but instead he dropped it into the Flare storage area which ignited all of the flares. The extremely intense fire burned through the steel hanger deck floor and continued down five stories. Magnesium flares burn under water. Sea water could not be used to extinguish the fires. The ship burned all day. The Junior Officer bunk room was located directly below the flare locker. Tom Spitzer died in the fire along with another of the original seven pilots in our group of Night Carrier warriors. A total of 44 officers and men died in the fire. Had Ben not left, he too would have been sleeping in the Junior Officer bunkroom.
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Comment by Michael Foley on April 10, 2008 at 2:15pm - This is about 14 pages long. Might be better to print it.
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Comment by John Foley on March 22, 2008 at 1:15pm - Wow! That is crazy. I look forward to reading more posts like this. Thanks for sharing.
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