Manifest Destiny - Episode 3

[Michael Foley]

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary the term manifest means:
Adjective
1 : readily perceived by the senses
2 : easily understood or recognized by the mind: OBVIOUS

And the term destiny means:
Noun
1 : something to which a person or thing is destined: FORTUNE
2 : a predetermined course of events often held to be an irresistible power or agency: synonyms see FATE

The Mirriam Webster definition of Manifest Destiny is:
Function: noun
Usage: often capitalized M&D
: a future event accepted as inevitable ; broadly : an ostensibly benevolent or necessary policy of imperialistic expansion

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Advocates of Manifest Destiny believed that expansion was not only good, but that it was obvious (manifest) and certain (destiny.)….often used as a synonym for the territorial expansion of the United States across North America toward the Pacific Ocean.” Wikipedia goes on to say, “The term fell out of usage by U. S. policy makers early in the20th century, but some commentators believe that aspects of Manifest Destiny, particularly the belief in an American “mission” to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, continued to have an influence on American political ideology.” So it may have been “a necessary policy of imperialistic expansion” that lead the United States to war in Vietnam.

I was eighteen years old when I received an appointment from President Dwight David Eisenhower to go to the United States Naval Academy in 1960. When President John Kennedy was sworn to be the 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1961, the whole Brigade of Midshipman traveled to Washington to march in the Inaugural Parade. The new president was a friend of the Navy. He had served as a decorated Naval officer in World War II. He often made the journey 35 miles east of Washington D. C. to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Relatively few young Americans get an opportunity to shake hands with an incumbent president. I had two such opportunities. In those years of Kennedy’s magical presidency, Roger Staubach was the quarterback of our football team. President Kennedy came over to Annapolis to watch the football team practice. I was manager of the football team, and the President stopped to shake the hands of the staff and players, including me. It was for me an iconic event.

In his inaugural address, President Kennedy implored the nation to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” I was very proud to know that I was in a position to serve my country in the Navy as John Kennedy had done. Tragically, President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Again the Brigade of Midshipmen marched in Washington. This time we marched in the funeral procession directly behind Kennedy’s family and the horse-drawn caisson bearing the young dead President. The cadence of that march is alive in the memory of millions of Americans who watched on their black and white television sets and to those of us who marched in the State funeral.

Upon graduation in June of 1964 I applied for Flight Training, and was soon sent to Pensacola, Florida, to learn to fly. Upon completion of primary flight training, I was selected to go to jet training in Meridian, Mississippi. I was assigned to be the first student for a new instructor, also from the Naval Academy, named Lieutenant John McCain. I flew my first 12 jet flights with Lt. McCain. The Naval Air Station in Meridian is called McCain Field, named after John’s grandfather. His father, Admiral McCain, was the commanding officer of the U. S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet during the Vietnam War. Two years later, I was flying over North Vietnam when John McCain, flying off of the USS Oriskany, was shot down and captured in Hanoi. His father was still commanding the Seventh Fleet, and the North Vietnamese prison guards knew that.

A future event accepted as inevitable. Manifest Destiny. Some people get shot down, others don’t. Was it inevitable that I survived two tours in Vietnam? To know the answer to that question you might ask some of my flight instructors in the Training Command. They might say, “Well, he sure wasn’t the Ace of the base!” In fact, I was mediocre at best. Many students, maybe most students, can go through the entire 18 months training syllabus without getting a Down. In the syllabus the student pilot is expected to perform certain maneuvers and do them well. If the student does them poorly, not to the satisfaction of the instructor, then that student gets a down, and must try again on the next flight to perform the maneuvers acceptably. I was given a down twice during my flight training, maybe three times, I’m not sure. On each occasion I was able to perform the maneuvers properly on the additional flight. In Vietnam, a pilot generally does not get a Mulligan, a do-over, or a second chance. But for me, manifest destiny, the luck of the Irish, God’s will, Allah, or the little Leprechauns were watching out for me, because I did some things that normally only end in an ugly fashion, and yet I survived. For example…..

Flying the tanker

One skill that every Navy pilot learns while in the Training Command is a maneuver called In-flight Refueling, or air-to-air refueling. The very first air-to-air refueling occurred in 1923. Pilots learn this skill for a variety of reasons, but none more important than to keep from running out of jet fuel! Therefore it is necessary for a jet pilot to know how to rendezvous with a “flying gas station.” Of course we don’t call it a gas station, we rendezvous with another aircraft that has in-flight refueling capability, capable of transferring fuel from one aircraft to another. It is commonly called “The Tanker”.

The Navy and the Air Force each have their own systems of in-flight refueling. Most of the time the Air Force uses a fixed boom, called a flying boom, on the aft end of very large tanker aircraft. These big jets carry large quantities of fuel for the specific needs of all Air Force aircraft. Big tankers, like the KC-135, are far too large to land on an aircraft carrier. The Navy must use smaller tactical aircraft capable of landing on the ship to do the in-flight tankering mission.

The Navy uses what is called a probe and drogue system. Pilot slang for the drogue is “the basket”. The tanker aircraft extends a flexible hose from under the plane out to the receiving aircraft. At the end of the hose is the drogue, which looks like a conic basket. The pilot flying the tanker flies a steady course at an assigned airspeed, usually 250 knots. The receiving aircraft, maybe a flight of four fighters, comes up behind the tanker and one at a time the fighters line up on the tanker and approach the basket very slowly. All Navy tactical jets have a refueling probe. Sometimes, like the A-4 and A-6 it is fixed alongside of the nose of the aircraft in front of the cockpit. Sometimes it is internal and is extended when needed.

Whenever there were air operations off an aircraft carrier there would almost always be a tanker aircraft in the air, or ready to launch. On all major strikes the tanker would launch with the strike group and enter a holding pattern off shore. Tankers did not cross the beach. Some people liked flying the tanker because it counted as a combat mission and the pilot was at very low risk since they did not go over the beach. Normally, the Commanding Officer of the squadron, the skipper, would ensure that all different kinds of missions were shared equally, so all pilots periodically had to fly the tanker.

In my A-4 Skyhawk squadron we would carry two 300 gallon drop tanks with jet fuel. The tanks looked like big rockets or bombs, but in reality they were big hollow aluminum fuel tanks, one hanging on the left wing and one on the right wing. The in flight refueling mechanism was enclosed in something that looked like a fuel drop tank also, and it hung on the aircraft centerline bomb rack. The airplane then looked like it had three fuel tanks and when fully loaded it approached the maximum catapult weight allowed on the A-4. It was very heavy.

Here I must tell you of a quirk in the aerodynamic flight controls of the A-4. On all aircraft that I have flown, commercial and military, the pilot controls the flaps and slats using a lever in the cockpit. On the A-4, the flaps on the trailing edge of the wing are controlled by a flap lever, but the slats, located on the leading edge of the wings, are not controlled by the pilot. The slats on the A-4 are aerodynamic slats, and they are not tied to each other. They are held up by air pressure predicated on air speed. At low speeds they fall out to provide additional lift for the wing. They are independent. They are supposed to come out at the same time, but occasionally they may come out on only one side. If only one slat comes out, that wing gets a lot more lift on that side of the aircraft, and it is possible to cause the aircraft to flip over, or at least bank sharply away from the wing with the slat down. Fortunately, it is a rare phenomenon it only happened to me once.

I was the scheduling officer for my squadron. In conjunction with the Operations Officer and the skipper, I would type out a flight schedule each evening after I received the targets and scheduled launches for the next day from the Air Wing Commander. As I mentioned earlier, the skipper wanted all pilots to share the tanker duty. Normally, I did not like flying the tanker because it was boring, but on October 28, 1966, I scheduled myself for tanker pilot duty because October 29th was my 25th birthday, and I did not want to get shot at and die on my birthday! I scheduled myself for the 11:30 AM launch for a strike group going to a target near Hanoi.

The next morning after sleeping in and then having breakfast, it was time for the pre-strike briefing done by the Air Wing Air Intelligence Officer and the Senior Strike leader. After that we returned to our squadron ready room and continued the briefing, discussing how were going to role in on the target, what direction we would use, frequencies, and individual missions. For example, some of us might carry Shrike missiles that are used in tracking the enemy fan song radars and destroying the radar site preventing missiles from being launched there. Normally, we would have two planes doing SAM suppression using Shrikes. These two pilots would go in ahead of the strike group, try to lock on to a fan song radar and launch the Shrike. Another four pilots might be in the attack group, and the tanker pilot (me) would be off shore in case a plane needed fuel. The A-4 carried fuel in its wings. If you got hit in the wing you may lose the fuel in that wing and desperately need the tanker, or, if you were in a fighter and got in a dog fight with a MIG fighter, you would have to use your afterburner and that uses a lot of fuel, another reason for the tanker.

The 11:30 launch started normally, and soon all the aircraft were launched, had climbed to 15,000 feet, rendezvoused, and headed out toward the northwest at 300 knots. The tanker stayed behind the strike group and climbed to 17,000 feet. The strike group started descending and picking up speed to 360 knots as they crossed the beach. I started circling with nothing to do for a while.

I was looking at the coast and noticed a very small island just off shore. It’s funny, I had never notice the island before. I headed for the island and descended down to 5,000 feet to get a better look. I slowly circled the island, but there was not much on it. It looked abandoned. Something flashed off to my right and I turned to see what it was. It was apparently the sunshine reflecting off the windshield of a truck. Wait a second. You don’t see trucks driving around in the daylight because they are too easy to be destroyed by aircraft. Then I noticed that it was not one truck, but maybe twenty or more trucks in broad daylight on the main road that goes along the coastline. They were Army trucks heading toward South Vietnam.

To verify what I was seeing, I crossed the coastline to get a better look and count the trucks. The highway in this area was less than a mile from the shoreline, so I did not feel like there was much danger. I could certainly get out quickly. I passed over the trucks and turned sharply right to get offshore. But I forgot how heavy the airplane was and I had ignored my airspeed which was too slow. As I made the right turn, the left slat came out and the right slat did not. Since I was in a right turn, the increased lift on the left wing caused the aircraft to flip upside down and nose down. I was too slow to maneuver. I was at 5,000 feet, nose down and started to loose altitude rapidly. I let the airplane fly upside down and I added full throttle to gain airspeed. With all of the tanks on the airplane there was a lot of drag and the airplane did not accelerate as fast as I would have liked.

I could jettison all the tanks and pull out easily, but then I would be ostracized for disobeying an order not to cross the beach. So, I did not jettison the tanks. I accelerated enough to turn the aircraft right side up. Then I pulled the nose up, but was still descending. To land on an aircraft carrier, a pilot does not use airspeed as a reference, the pilot uses an angle of attack indicator. The angle of attack indicator is attached to a small vane outside of the airplane. The vane is configured to show the pilot the best lift over drag (L/D) speed considering both the weight and speed of the aircraft. So I pulled the nose of the aircraft up to the best speed for L/D according to the angle of attack indicator, but the aircraft continued to descend.

As I passed 500 feet and descending, the nose of the aircraft was pointed above the horizon. The aircraft was very heavy and not accelerating very well. I could hear the soldiers in the trucks shooting at me. At 200 feet I thought of ejecting, but us Navy guys always said, “It’s better to be dead, than to look bad.” Well, I didn’t want to look bad so I stayed with the airplane. It felt like it had enough airspeed now it should be climbing. That’s when it hit the ground. Actually, it wasn’t the ground, it was a rice paddy, a field of rice filled with about a foot of water. The three drop tanks acted like flotation devices. I bounced off the water and continued flying just above the water’s surface but gaining airspeed.

Finally, I could climb, but I did not. I continued to accelerate away from the Army, then I climbed like a scalded dog, heading off shore, back to altitude and circled at 10,000 feet.
All of that made me feel grateful and lucky, but, I needed more luck. Thankfully, the Air Group came back from an uneventful strike. Nobody needed more fuel.

We flew back to the ship. All of the airplanes land before the tanker. The tanker is always last. When I landed I followed the Plane Directors signals to my assigned spot. My plane captain put chocks around my tires, and then chained the plane to the deck. I then shut the engine down. The plane captain excitedly brought the ladder to the plane so I could climb down, but he rushed up the steps and said, “Mr. Foley, Mr. Foley, you have all kinds of grass on your tanks!” I told him to take off all the grass and throw it over the side and I would buy him a case of beer when we got ashore. Don’t tell anyone, I said.

I went to the debriefing area. Normally the tanker pilot has nothing to report so he doesn’t go to the debriefing. When the strike leader had finished his report I told the group about the trucks. I said I could clearly see them from off shore. They seemed pretty excited and they redirected the next strike to try and find them while the sun was still up. The trucks were found and destroyed. The Air Wing Commander told my skipper about my sightings and about the successful dispatch of the trucks. My skipper nominated me for a Navy Commendation Medal. No one found out about the grass.

Fate? Fortune? Manifest Destiny? Or just a close call? Quien sabes?.