Linebacker II...By Request

The Flying Barrister recalled some comments about Jane Fonda in Palace Cobra in light of the current dismissal of the pre-historic harpy from her PR gig because of her traitorous past. He asked for an excerpt.

The chapter deals with Linebacker II, the Christmas bombing campaign that ran from the eighteenth to the twenty-ninth of December of 1972. It was the effort that should have been unleashed in 1965 and a lot of lives would have been spared on both sides. We were going to Hanoi in large numbers and there was a lot going on.

It was, after all, the holiday season. It was a time of Christmas cheer and finally, even on the flightline without the benefit of the classified briefings and target listings, they knew that this was the real thing. We were finally, after more than eight years of tepid, half-hearted, politically driven war, going to take the war to a conclusion. So, it was only appropriate that these youngsters, slaving on the flightline would send their greetings and wishes to the enemy. They had created Christmas cards for delivery by their pilots. The huge white centerline fuel tanks, sure to be jettisoned on the way in to the target areas were festooned with red and green spray painted sentiments for Ho Chi Minh, Jane Fonda, and Ramsey Clark. Some were traditional Christmas sentiments, sent sarcastically and others were more ribald. There was scatology and insult aplenty, surrounded by artfully sprayed green Christmas trees and red Santa’s sleighs. Some tanks were works of remarkable talent and others were crude scribbling, but every tank on every centerline on every airplane that was going to Hanoi was painted.

It didn’t take long for the word about the painted tanks to get to the wing commander, Colonel Vojvodich. The idea of defacing government property wasn’t one that he could tolerate without demanding some answers. Where did all this spray paint come from? Whose idea was this? Who was in charge of Government Issue spray paint? The answer came quickly. It was Turk Turley, the Field Maintenance Squadron commander. Turk, an F-105 hundred mission veteran from my first tour, was now flying the F-4E as a maintenance squadron commander attached to the 34^th Tac Fighter Squadron. It was FMS that owned the paint locker, and therefore Turk’s responsibility. “Get Turley in my office, NOW!”

“I think he’s flying, sir,” the wing king’s exec responded. “I’ll track him down as soon as he gets back.”

The wing boss knew Turk well. Turk had volunteered to fly his wing on any Pack VI missions, not only as a way of keeping the wing commander whose experience in fast jets was mostly related to reconnaissance flying alive, but also as a way of keeping young lieutenants isolated from “the man” and out of harm’s way. Turk knew he could take care of himself and might even be able to put himself in place to get a MiG if he had to pull the boss’ chestnuts out of the proverbial fire.

Turk reported to headquarters smartly as soon as he got the word. “Yes, sir. What seems to be the problem?”

“Turk, what’s this about your flight line troops misusing government paint and putting all that crap on those centerline fuel tanks?”

“Beats me, sir. I heard something about some markup going on, painting on the bombs and centerlines.”

“You know that’s prohibited. What the hell do you intend to do about it?”

“Well sir, I think I’m going to have to order more paint.” Turk saluted smartly and withdrew.

The skies were clear over Hanoi when we got there. Tendrils of smoke drifted up from targets that had been hit during the night and still smoldered. There was always tenseness as you left the foothills and got out into the flats, but today there was little going on. The A-7s were hitting targets to the north and west of Hanoi while the F-4 bomb droppers were dealing with bridges and storage areas closer to Bullseye. Only one or two SAMs were fired and little was seen of the big guns. A MiG engagement had taken place during the chaff drops and the contrails of the missiles formed a tic-tac-toe game overhead, white against the bright blue sky. The air defense was either overwhelmed from the previous night or had made a conscious decision to horde their resources and wait for the BUFFs to return. Either way, we had a light day.

The second night of the campaign, the B-52s returned with three more waves of bombers. Recce photos showed both the damage and the precision of the campaign. Bomb strings from the huge aircraft walked across the targets and carefully seemed to sidestep residential areas or designated off limits compounds. Intelligence information on probable POW compounds was put to good use and while we may have joked about dropping one on Jane Fonda, we were well aware that a lot of our friends had a front row seat for the battle that was going on.

Jack Van Loan and a lot of his friends had been moved out of Hanoi early during the Linebacker campaign. They had been transported out of the city in mid-May to a new camp they dubbed “Dogpatch” near the Chinese border. Some said it was an attempt to break up the cadre of senior resistance leaders among the POWs. Guys like Jack Van Loan, Robbie Risner, Paul Galanti, Larry Guarino and others had been well organized and with the commencement of Linebacker, they were working hard to integrate the new arrivals to the POW camps into their organizations. Maybe it was breaking up the leadership or maybe it was a way of protecting the North Vietnamese bargaining chips at the peace talks. Either way, they were going to miss the show.

Dave Mott, on the other hand, was still in the center of town. He had been at the Hoa Lo prison, the infamous Hanoi Hilton, from shortly after his capture until early December when he was moved, in apparent anticipation of a possible rescue effort similar to the 1970 Son Tay raid from Hoa Lo to the smaller Plantation in the northeast section of Hanoi. With rudimentary hand tools, they were ordered to dig bomb shelter trenches in their cells, under their rough board beds, large enough to crawl into in the event of attack. The similarity in size between a sheltering trench and a man-sized grave was not lost on the prisoners.