"I Bomb": Malcolm Browne and the Air War in Vietnam

The creation of the North American Aviation company, the F-100 Super Sabre jet fighter earned a distinction as the first U.S. Air Force plane to be able to reach supersonic speed in level flight. With the American buildup to fight the Vietnam War, however, the F-100 often flew strike missions against enemy targets on the ground instead of air-to-air dogfights.

One such mission occurred on October 15, 1965, as a flight of five F-100s took off from Bien Hoa Air Base, located about fifteen miles from Saigon, to bomb a hamlet in the Mekong River Delta that intelligence reports indicated housed 200 Viet Cong guerrillas. For this sortie, however, one of the aircraft on the mission included a two-seat F-100F dubbed Lillian. Riding with the pilot that day was Malcolm W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau, who had been reporting about the conflict in Southeast Asia since 1961.

While he thrilled to the memories of dramatic World War I dogfights and the high stakes of the Battle of Britain during World War II, Browne pointed out that while still dangerous, the air war in Vietnam more often consisted of “dull routine than high drama, and nothing decisive seems to come of it, despite the great hopes America has pinned to it.”

Browne, an aviation fan who constructed his own model airplanes as a hobby, donned a white helmet, a “G” suit, and a parachute before climbing into the F-100F. The tightly fitting “G” suit helped pilots from “blacking out” due to high centrifugal forces when making high-angle dive bombing runs and steep turns.

The pilots from the 481st Tactical Squadron carefully examined their planes before taking off. “With difficulty, each man climbed the ladder hooked into the side of his plane and swung his legs over into the cockpit,” Browne remembered. “The idea is to stand on the seat first and then slide in.”

Once inside his F-100F, piloted that day by First Lieutenant Rod Dorr, Browne had to spend time buckling himself in, including not only the usual seat belt, but dealing with a shoulder harness, straps around each calf (to secure his legs in case of an emergency ejection), and various fastenings to the ejection seat. “There also is a compressed air coupling for the G suit to hook up to, a communications cable to hook into the helmet for earphones and microphone, and the oxygen tube for the face mask,” he noted.

Once securely strapped into place, Browne said that he felt about “as free and comfortable as a condemned man in the electric chair. Besides the discomfort of confinement, the heat in the cockpit of a fighter waiting to take off from a Vietnamese airfield is nearly unbearable.” One of the pilots confided to the newsman that he regularly lost two pounds every mission due to excessive sweating.

With his helmet secured and earphones in place, Browne discovered that sounds from outside the aircraft were blotted out, especially after the canopy was lowered and locked into place. While the air outside the plane could be rent with “the shattering hypersonic blasts of an after-burning jet engine,” the pilot and his passenger heard none of that. “In the earphones there is almost constant technical chatter between planes, ground control and forward air observers,” Browne said. “Besides that, there is an eerie moaning sound in the earphones, produced by the complicated electronic gear in the plane.” He also reported:

“To hear only the moaning sound, like the sighing of wind around the corner of a house when bomb blasts are erupting and huts disintegrating just below, or when napalm splashes so close below as to scorch the plane’s paint, is a phenomenon pilots call ‘cockpit isolation.’ Outside there is the din and horror of jet-age war; inside there is the calm an quiet of a computer room. The pilots are glad to be spared the sounds they create. I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be better for some Air Force officers to be better acquainted with the ugly cacophony of warfare.”

Dorr and Browne had to wait about ten minutes to take off, as a long line of transport planes and aircraft were ahead of them. When their turn came, each man pulled a set of safety pins from their ejection seats, arming them. Browne learned from his talks with the American pilots that they regarded their ejection seats with “a mixture of gratitude and fear.” While being shot out of a disabled jet might save their lives, it could also “break one’s back, or at least result in permanent injury as the result of severe spinal compression,” he said.

Once airborne, the five planes on the mission grouped themselves into a loose formation in the crystal-clear sky with the Mekong Delta spread out below them. Reaching 15,000 feet, Dorr and the other pilots were in communication with “Beaver 79,” a L19 light plane far below serving as a forward air controller spotting the target. “Beaver 79 had found our hamlet and told us he would indicate it with a smoke rocket,” Browne recalled, “one of several he had on racks under his wings. We broke into a wide circle and watched Beaver 79 sail along a canal firing a puff of smoke into a cluster of thatched huts. From where I was sitting I could see no sign of life. Pilots tell me they rarely see people on the ground.”

The first fighter broke out of the formation and started his bombing run, announcing to the group, “I bomb.” One after the other, the planes made their attacks. “The dive down seems vertical,” Browne noted, “and at one point the ground actually seems to rotate over one’s head.” The reporter could see flames coming from the tiny objects on the ground and Dorr prepared to make a strafing run. “While we still were what seemed to be a long distance above the ground, our cannon began to fire,” Browne reported. “Actually, I heard very little but the moaning in the earphones, but the whole plane vibrated from the firing, like an electric massager.” He could see streams of shells rip into the huts below, as well as flashes of light as the shells exploded.

Browne could not believe how much his body was strained to its limits by dive bombing. He noted that the speed was so great that everything happened within a few seconds. Timing had to be perfect. A dive from 15,000 feet to almost sea level produced "excruciating pain in the eardrums as the result of the terrific air pressure change. This pain persists through the rest of the mission." Also, the downward crush of a pull-out almost paralyzed the lungs, pulled the flesh on one's face downward, and made arms and legs weigh six or seven times what they normally would. "Hands on stick and throttles and feet on rudder pedals become monstrous weights," Browne added, "and it is all a pilot can do to hold them in place, much less keep them under control in the delicate movements required in a pull-out."

Dorr repeated his firing passes several times and Browne observed that the target “looked properly battered.” In his official report about the mission, Beaver 79 indicated that the F-100s had destroyed eight structures, damaged six others, and destroyed 30 percent of the target area.

On the return flight to Bien Hoa, Dorr let Browne take the controls for a bit. The journalist was surprised by the “lightness and responsiveness of the stick. Lighting the engine’s afterburner in level flight produced an exhilarating thrust forward, and I could imagine that the F100 must be very pleasant to fly, or, rather, ‘drive,’ as its pilots insist on saying.”

Upon hitting the runway, Dorr deployed his aircraft's tail parachutes to help slow it down. Taxiing to the flight line, Dorr and Browne climbed out of the cockpit, both drenched in sweat. As yellow tractors hooked up to the F100s to haul them off to a hangar for refueling, rearming, and servicing, the pilots unloaded their gear, reported to their superiors about the mission’s results, and showered at their billeting area. “In the evening after chow at the officers’ mess there would be time for a movie, a few beers and perhaps a letter home,” said Browne.

Miles to the south of Bien Hoa, Browne pointed out that the embers of a Vietnamese community were “still smoldering and the blood was still fresh from the death that had struck from the sky that afternoon.” Pilots, however, rarely thought or talked much about the results of their work, he noted, except in terms of the military targets hit. “Sometimes these raids kill enemy guerrillas. Sometimes they merely kill women and children cringing in improvised shelters,” reported Browne. “Pilots have no way of telling which, and they are at the mercy of forward observers and men sitting at desks who take coffee breaks and make human mistakes.”

Browne recalled that the worst mistakes happened because of map coordinates. On military maps, square sections of land were designated by two letters (for example, WR). “A mention of the two designator letters roughly locates an area,” he said. “Following these two letters are six numbers, three each for coordinates reading across a vertically. A complete coordinate, consisting of two letters and six numbers (i.e., WR825439) locates any spot in the world to within a few hundred feet.”

When a pilot is ordered to bomb a coordinate, he assumes that the coordinate is accurate and marks a military target. Unfortunately, said Browne, sometimes the same “slovenly work attitudes that prevail in the United States extend to the American military, even in war theaters.” If care was not taken, two or more numbers in a map coordinate could be accidentally transposed, which could lead to a pilot being off by a few miles.

Such inaccuracy could lead to tragedy. Browne noted that on one mission such a transposition happened, and U.S. planes swooped down on the village of Lang Vei on the evening of March 2, 1967. Located approximately 400 miles north of Saigon, Lang Vei was “a hard-working little community considered friendly to the Saigon government,” he noted. When relief workers arrived at the village after the bombing raid, they discovered eighty dead and 120 wounded civilians. “America promptly apologized to the South Vietnamese government, and sent blankets and rice for the survivors of Lang Vei,” Browne reported. Sometimes U.S. planes also mistakenly hit friendly troops in the field.

While government officials in Washington, DC, often touted the “surgical precision” of bombing and strafing attacks made by the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in North and South Vietnam, from what Browne observed of the air war, such claims were “grossly exaggerated.”