 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Tour Through the Eyes of Pyramid 05by Jon
Stacey, diaspora@teleport.com
For some curious reason, more narratives appear for this particular site
on the 505 TCG web site www.squawk-flash.org
than for any other site in SEA. Fonder
memories? Popular site?
Better weather? -- who knows? Ban
Me Thout was a town with a population of approximately 20,000, located in the
Central Highlands (II Corps). The
Call Sign was “Pyramid,” and the site was south of Pleiku (“Peacock,”)
west of Hon Tre Island (“Portcall”) and north of Saigon (“Paris”).
At an altitude of around 2,000 MSL, the weather was considerably cooler
and less humid than most of the other sites in Vietnam.
The environment consisted of red dust (everywhere) during the dry season
and red mud (ubiquitous) during the rainy season.
I served there from 5 Jul 68 (my birthday, whoopee!) to 3 Jul 69. Site Description
The site was located near a small airstrip about a mile from town.
There was a much larger airfield located about eight kilometers away,
named “Eastfield,” which had the TACAN, a much longer landing strip (too
short for jets). The airfield
handled cargo aircraft and was also the home of a number of FAC aircraft.
Our site was a compound approximately 300 x 300 feet in size, located
within an Army Assault Helicopter area which had both Huey and Cobra
helicopters. Barbed wire was strung
around the perimeter, and four small bunkers were located at each corner, with a
larger command bunker located in the center of the site.
When I first arrived, the Ops Center was an S-80 shelter.
The S-80 was later replaced with a cinderblock building with Ops/Admin
offices taking up approximately 25% of end, and the other 75% of the building
being devoted to the darkroom. Two concrete towers (left behind by the French)* approximately three
stories tall were located near the Ops Center.
On one was the radar antenna, and on the other were the UHF antennas.
About halfway through my tour there, a bunker was added to the top of the
radio tower. Separate small
buildings existed for radar maintenance, radio maintenance, and power
production. The comm center was
located in a metal Conex, which got quite hot on sunny days. Halfway through my tour, a new chow hall was built at the
site (prior to that, we ate C-Rations during night shift). *
the concrete
towers were actually built in the spring of 1966 under contract from RMK-BRJ and
went live in the fall of the same year. The Webmaster Site Defense All personnel were issued M-16 rifles, and the officers were issued Smith
& Wesson .38 caliber Combat Masterpiece revolvers in addition to their
M-16s. A few of the M-16s were equipped with the XM-148 40mm grenade
launcher, since replaced by the M-203. We
had six M-60 machine guns -- four in each corner bunker, and one each on top of
the radar and radio towers. The
Supply Section also had a 90mm recoilless rifle, but the Supply Officer refused
to unpack it and set it up anywhere, arguing quite sensibly that nobody was
trained in its operation.
We also had magnesium parachute illuminating “slap flares,” about 1
¼ inch in diameter and ten inches long -- these were really neat, especially if
you had been a fireworks fiend when you were a kid -- they would light up a
really large area. We had two types
of grenades -- both of the old “pineapple” shape.
One had a neural on the spoon and was supposed to have a 7-second fuse,
and one had a plain spoon, and was supposed to have a 4-second fuse. However, since nobody was really sure, we treated them all as
having 4-second fuses.
Many of us were experts in the art of “scrounging” and barter.
I remember we traded two pallet loads of ¾ inch plywood to some Army guy
for a .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun, which was set up on the radio tower
during my tour, replacing the M-60. Later
on, we got some of the “baseball” type grenades, timbers, and steel plating
for our bunkers, all through the barter system.
I have always thought the theory that USAF personnel could somehow
magically be transformed into effective ground troops for self defense
immediately after entering a combat zone was ludicrous at best.
It really strains credulity to think that a 3-day course in the operation
of an M-16 and officer’s annual qualification (stateside) with a revolver was
sufficient training. Besides, USAF
personnel are basically a bunch of highly trained technicians, whether they were
radio maintenance folks or hot-shot fighter pilots.
I suppose that the Air Commandos and the Combat Security Police might
come up to Army fighting standards in a ground conflict, but the Army guys next
door must have been laughing at the rest of us.
Bear in mind also, that the operation of the machine guns and use of
grenades/slap flares was taught during a one-hour “OJT” session during the
first week of orientation at the site.
On the night shift, everyone pulled a 2+ hour guard duty shift, including
officers. However, the officers on
duty during the night shift were lowest-ranking (two per crew), while the senior
officers (“day weenies”) spent the evening in quarters in downtown Ban Me
Thuot. We only had one attempted
ground assault by the VC while I was there, and that occurred on the “outer
perimeter” surrounding the Army helicopter squadron -- they never made it to
our inner perimeter because an Army gunship scrambled and hosed them down with
2.75 FFARs.
That’s not to say we never came under attack.
If memory serves, the site came under mortar attack about every ten days
while I was there. Not me,
personally, because the crews rotated on night shift -- I think I was only at
the site when it came under attack 12-15 times during my tour. We were never
bothered in our quarters, although I’m sure the local VC all knew where we
lived.
You never forget the first time somebody tries to kill you in war.
Fortunately for me, every sphincter in my body tightened up instead of
letting loose during the first mortar attack I went through.
I was virtually frozen in place until I saw all the experienced guys
bailing out towards the bunkers. Once
I figured out what was going on, I played “monkey-see, monkey-do” along with
a healthy shot of adrenalin.
The good news is that the VC were usually trying to mortar all the
helicopter gunships that were lined up on one side of our compound.
The bad news is that they sometimes missed.
Their mortar teams would “walk” the rounds towards their intended
target, so that if they “walked” by either side of our compound we were OK.
However, we knew we were in trouble when we could hear the "whumps”
getting closer and closer…
The main concern was that if the first mortar round hit on the top of our
Ops Center, (no advance warning by sound) it would just blow shrapnel all
through the place. We had chicken wire hung four feet above the roof -- some
cockamamie theory that the round would either not detonate if it hit a hole in
the chicken wire, and if the centerpoint of the round did hit the wire itself,
the shrapnel would be slowed down by the time it made it through the roof.
Fortunately, I never had the pleasure of seeing shrapnel fly around the
Ops Center, so I can’t write about it.
For some reason I’ve never figured out, our squadron headquarters in
Saigon had made a rule that at least one controller had to stay on duty, on
scope, even if the site was under attack. This
made for some major pucker-factor when I had to stay on scope after everybody
else had bailed out -- hoping like hell the mortar rounds would miss, and that
no guys in black pajamas would come storming in.
On one occasion, a pilot asked me if the site was under attack -- I asked
him how he knew (perhaps he was close by and saw the flashes of explosions) --
and he responded: “nope, didn’t see any flashes -- just noticed your voice
went up an octave or two!”
I never got used to mortar attacks to the point where I became
complacent, but after a few, one knows by sound how close or far away the rounds
are hitting -- if further away, you at least had time to make sure you didn’t
stub your toe bailing out. A final note on “fear and panic in Vietnam” -- when I was
at Ton Son Nhut on a TDY once, a mortar round landed at the far end of the
runway while I was in the Pizza Place eating.
Being experienced by now regarding these events, I knew by the sound it
was far, far away. However, all
those REMFs bailed out of the restaurant post-haste while I stayed there, eating
a rare (for me) pizza. What really
torqued my jaws the next day was when I found out every single one
of the “Paris” controllers at the Saigon site had bailed out for the
bunkers, while us poor CRP types in the hinterlands were required to keep a
controller on scope -- I’ve never forgotten that! The Darlac Hotel
USAF had leased the Darlac Hotel and a two-story villa immediately
adjacent to the hotel as quarters. Enlisted
and NCO personnel were housed in the hotel, 2-4 to a room, and the officers were
housed in the villa. Generally, the
field-grade officers had a room to themselves, the senior Captains were two to a
room, and the lowly 2/Lts were 3 to a room.
The hotel had sort of an “all-ranks” club, including a bar and a pool
table -- both got a lot of use! A
reel-to-reel tape deck provided music, with the taste tending towards Country
and Western for the older NCOs, and Rock for the young folks.
The officers had an “honor bar,” but the lieutenants usually didn’t
use it. In back of the main part of
the hotel was a small courtyard with a stage of sorts, and occasionally we would
get a USO troupe or a bootleg group of Thai
strippers come through, but there definitely was not entertainment every
night as was the case at the large airbases where the REMFs were stationed.
Messing was at the MACV compound, and a shuttle was run between our
quarters and the chow hall for all three meals.
However, the food was pretty poor, so some of us bought canned meat at
the small BX, bought rice on the local economy, and just made our own stir-fry
over little propane stoves. (The
trick with the rice was to poor cold water on it first, so the weevils would
float to the top). We’d skim off
the weevils, then proceed with cooking -- whatever weevils remained probably
just added to the flavor and protein. Our
first attempts at cooking yielded a rather bland product, so we started buying
green onions downtown, supplemented with flavoring from “Heinz 57” sauce and
“Tabasco” sauce which, for some strange reason, was stocked by our small
local BX. We never seemed to get it
right until one drunk poured some beer into our dinner as it was cooking one
night, and that was the ticket! Beer-stir-fry
was a pretty common meal after that. I
should mention, however, that a chow hall was built out at our site halfway
through my tour. It offered
excellent food, with the midnight meal being the high point of a night shift.
As I was due to rotate, construction had begun on quarters located at the
site (3-foot high concrete foundation walls were supposed to provide protection
for mortar shrapnel). It is my
understanding that all the troops moved from the hotel/villa out to the site
about 6 months after I left, which would have been around December 1969. Equipment
If memory serves, we had three or more 100 KW generators in the power
production building. The radar set was a MPS-11 with a substantial amount of
waveguide added to it to reach all the way up the concrete tower to the antenna.
We also had a TPS-10D height-finder which worked about 10% of the time.
OK, maybe 15% of the time. As
old radar sets go, the MPS-11 could produce a pretty decent picture if it was
“tweaked” right, and as we had an outstanding radar maintenance crew on my
shift, the air picture was excellent when the equipment was operating.
The darkroom was divided longitudinally into two sides.
Standing on the top dias looking down, the USAF personnel were the left,
and the VNAF on the right. On the
left side, two UPA-35 scopes on the top dias were used by the USAF Air Traffic
Regulation Center (ATRC) personnel (16XX/272X0 AFSCs) for control of civil air traffic and USAF cargo flights.
On the next dias down were the Senior Director/Crew Chief/Control
Technician positions. Next down were the “Duty Controller” and “Flight Follow
Technician” postions,” and on main floor level were the surveillance scopes.
We had the standard plexiglas plotting board, with wing-boards for
weather info, Tactical Mission Display, and Offensive Mission Displays.
The VNAF side was set up about the same, although I believe they had
about two fewer scopes. In addition
to the UPA-35s, we had a HRI scope and a very old OA-99 display.
We also had a GTA-6 communications central which provided point-to-point
“ring-down” comm to two DASCs, the CRC, and two other CRPs.
We had local land-line comm to the Army helicopter guys, and our quarters
downtown. In addition, there was a
“Fox Mike” (frequency modulation) radio on which we received “artillery
warnings” from the Army’s fire bases.
The IFF/SIF system was pretty antiquated -- I can’t remember the
nomenclature, but it wasn’t anything like the fancy GPA-122 decoder sets that
they had at the fancy sites in Thailand. We
had Mode 1 (64 possible codes, I think) and a two-digit (not four-digit) Mode
3/A. No Mode 3/C for altitude.
The Mode 2 decoder inner and outer wheels were set up alphabetically,
thus not permitting a decode capability for the entire spectrum of 4,096 codes.
It was real mental exercise to try and translate the AA through ZZ
spectrum into a digital code, and when we did, it rarely worked.
As a result, we confirmed most of our “radar contact” calls through
“flash,” “standby,” or
bearing/range position + heading confirmations. The Mission
We had three crews: Alpha,
Bravo and Charlie. I was assigned
to Alpha Crew. The crews worked two
10-hour days, two 14-hour nights, and two days off.
A typical Ops crew consisted of a Senior Director, a Duty Controller, a
Crew Chief, a Control Tech, and two to four surveillance operators, one or two
of which might be qualified as Flight Follow Technicians (FFT).
On night shifts the Senior Director had a dual role as “On-Scene
Commander” since all the day weenies stayed in quarters.
So on the night shift, the SD was also “in charge” of the two Air
Traffic Route Controllers (ATRC) -- on the Ops side, more or less, and also the
maintenance crew, usually consisting of one radio maintenance, one radar
maintenance, and one power production guy.
There was also a comm ops guy and upon rare occasions, a crypto
maintenance guy -- however the latter usually only worked the day shift.
So, the crew size at night varied from 12 to 15.
Co-located with us, in the darkroom, was an Army Flight Operations Center
(FOC), which maintained contact with Army fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft by
radio. They had no radar, but
sometimes coordinated with us. They
always passed on the 5-mile impact radius for the B-52 drops to aircraft on
their frequencies. I often wondered
how safe it was for the Army aircraft to whiz around the sky without radar
guidance, but more about that later.
My first impression of the work in the darkroom was quite similar to that
recounted by Lee Dixon in his first hand narrative about “Portcall.”
Bear in mind that I had just transferred from a SAGE site in the U.S.
where the massive SAGE computer kept track of all the tracks, providing gobs of
data relating to IFF/SIF, heading, speed, altitude, Call Sign, which radar sites
were painting them etc. I was amazed
on the first day to see the controllers and FFTs keeping track of 20-30 aircraft
with paper charts and grease pencil marks.
I had only been combat ready in SAGE for about eight months, and had
actually built up a level of confidence. That
flew right out the window when I saw what kind of operations were being handled
on these manual scopes, and my first impression was that I would never be able
to do it, especially without my trusty “light gun” from SAGE.
I learned quickly. The
training method at Det 9 was “baptism by fire,” because the already
overworked staff wanted to get the fresh meat up to speed as fast as possible so
they could have a few more breaks. Seriously
-- I remember “piss cans” next to the scope which were used when the crew
was short-manned and there was nobody to relieve the duty controller or FFT for
a quick run to the latrine.
When you relieved someone on scope, you plugged in and stood behind him
until he briefed you on which aircraft were where.
Then he got up and you sat down in his chair.
As a new aircraft would call in, you would ask him for his altitude and
bearing/range position from the local TACAN.
After you found a blip in about the right place, you asked him to squawk
flash or standby for confirmation. That
usually worked, and you would record the information on a log (rarely was a
Weapons Tech available to do this). After
that, it was a matter of keeping track of the guy on scope through the tried and
true grease pencil method.
In addition to new tracks checking in, there were the usual handoffs to
other sites (usually just a “radio” handoff, as we only did “formal”
landline handoffs on special or TS missions).
Meantime, the Army firebases would be calling in artillery warnings, and
these would be plotted on the scope face as azimuth wedges with a range arc, and
the “max ord” (maximum apogee of the ordnance) altitude inside the box.
We then had to vector aircraft around these boxes if they were below the
“max ord” altitude.
The missions which were the most common:
1) flight-following fighter or recce aircraft, generally north/south; 2)
flight following slow-movers, which could be going in any direction, and 3)
handoffs of CAS missions to FACs. We
generally got one or two special missions per day, the most common being the
B-52 “Arc Light” bombing runs -- these usually traveled in cells of three.
Other special missions included the occasional VIP, SR-71 recce flights,
“Ranch Hand” and “Buffalo Hunter.”
We usually had a frag for all of the special missions, and sometimes they
would be so sensitive that the handoff would be made using encode/decode
authenticators over landline.
The most common type of aircraft we controlled were F-4s, RF-4s, RF-101s
and F-100s for jets; C-47, C-119, C-123, O-1, O-2, and L-19 for props; and
Hueys, Cobras, and Chinooks in the rotary wing group (rarely did we control
CH-3, CH 53, HH-3 or HH-53). We
never controlled a tanker all the time I was there, although I actually
controlled two F-102s on a “bump-heads” practice intercept mission -- once.
The concept of FFTs was new to me, as we only had Weapons Techs in SAGE.
We trained E-5 and up to be FFTs on the spot -- they weren’t required
to have any formal schooling. The
two on my crew were Channler Drawdy and ??? Abernathy, who we just called
“Abbey & Drawdy.” I’ve
always felt that being a good controller was innate -- either you had the
wherewithal to handle the constantly moving three-dimensional geometry, or you
didn’t. Certainly you needed some
technical training to do it, but I don’t think having a college degree made
any difference. I’ve seen
officers who couldn’t control their way out of a brown paper bag.
Abbey & Drawdy were excellent FFTs, better than about half of the
17XX officers assigned to the unit.
One of our supplemental missions was to train the VNAF crew to eventually
take over our mission. This was by
and large just given lip service. However,
once I was promoted from Duty Controller to Senior Director, I concentrated on
this area. It was virtually
impossible to get a lot of missions for the VNAF controllers, since the F-102s
left about two months after I arrived, but we trained the VNAF surveillance crew
intensively, even holding English-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-English classes on
the night shifts to improve communication.
I’m proud to say that when I departed the unit, the surveillance
function was wholly operated by the VNAF. I
didn’t get much support in this area from my Ops Officer, who was quite
ethnocentric (OK, bigoted), but I think our crew got some grudging respect for
the effort at conversion of duties. Remember,
it wasn’t until much later on that Nixon came up with “Vietnamization.” Now there’s a term that probably wasn’t in the
dictionary in the 1950s! Off Duty Activities
There were several good restaurants in Ban Me Thuot.
While not too many of the troops assigned to our unit were interested in
immersing themselves in the local culture, I was.
I had grown up overseas in Africa and the Middle East, so perhaps was
more inclined not to be ethnocentric. I
developed a friendship with Lt. Cam, who was my VNAF counterpart on the crew.
He and I would often meet at various restaurants in town for lunch when
we were off duty, and I developed an appreciation for Vietnamese Cuisine.
He introduced me to a lot of his friends, and I visited his home often.
His wife was an excellent cook! I
ended up being the Godfather of their son (they were Catholic).
Our crew usually organized some sort of party about every second or third
two-day break that we had. Lots of
beer, pop, and some hard liquor -- remember when Jack Daniels was only $3.00 a
fifth? The munchies we had were either from the BX or from
“care packages” shipped from the U.S. by our families. On rare occasions we’d get hold of some bootleg steaks, and
barbecue them in a pit we had. As
the relations improved and warmed up with the VNAF on our crew, we began
inviting them to our parties. I
don’t remember the other crews doing this, but we were fortunate in developing
a good relationship with our VNAF counterparts, which spilled over to off-duty
get-togethers as well.
Ban Me Thuot had its share of bars, just like any other Vietnamese
settlement adjacent to an American military installation.
For some reason, we called them “Huki-Laus,” which I think is a
Hawaiian term. When I first
arrived, my boss took me to one, educating me on how to avoid getting ripped off
(don’t buy “Saigon Tea” just for some fake companionship, etc.)
They usually had good music, and were a good place to relax when the
small bar at our quarters got too crowded.
The officers by and large did not partake in the “Love for Sale”
freely available, and at times our commander would give us a big speech about
not leading the troops into sin -- we certainly didn’t do it by example, and
I’m sure if we had stayed away from these “entertainment facilities,” our
single red-blooded over-testosteroned troops would have found their way there
anyway. VD was a significant
problem. The “hostesses” at
these “entertainment centers” all had numbers, and were inspected weekly by
the Army and USAF medics. We would
get a briefing from our medics every week, somewhat along the line of: “number
14 and 27 at the Imperial have it, numbers 8,10 and 15 at the Dalat have it,”
etc. The medics gave a lot of
penicillin and Gamma Globulin shots to our troops. There was was young sergeant who would catch VD, get cured,
and go catch it again. Constantly
-- to the point where he was only able to pull his shift about 20% of the time.
He was counselled several times, and finally received an Article 15 --
not for partaking in sins of the flesh, per
se, but for being absent from duty without a valid excuse.
It was pretty easy to hitch-hike around the country by air, especially if
you were a controller. Several of us did this during our two days off We just hopped
a jeep out to the main airfield, and would start asking pilots during their
turn-around on the ground where they were headed. Once we found a plane (usually C-9s, C-123s or the occasional
C-130) heading where we wanted to go, we would just advise them that we were a
Pyramid controller, and they always gave us a ride -- except on the C-130s that
had SIGINT crews on board. Our
first two commanders didn’t seem to mind, but our third commander put his foot
down on this sort of in-country traveling -- the logic being that if a plane was
shot down, he would lose one of his “key personnel” (translation:
“controllers”). Gee, what a compliment!
As the two-day break could get a bit boring, especially if one didn’t
want to stay drunk all the time, a number of the enlisted troops and a very few
of the officers started flying on the Army gunships as door gunners.
This avocation didn’t require any special training, and it was quite
exciting. It wasn’t hard to do --
all you had to do was hang around the gunship operations shack and ask one of
the Army door gunners if you could have his slot for that particular mission.
This went on for about the first eight months of my tour, until the
commander (the third one we had) got some paperwork in from the Army awarding an
Air Medal to one of the enlisted troops. He
couldn’t figure out what was happening initially, until the first sergeant
told him about the gunship rides. Another
big speech & edict! Some argued
that they were helping out the war effort, devotion above and beyond, etc., but
the commander’s concern, again, was that somebody would get shot down and our
unit’s “combat readiness” would be degraded.
We had one officer whose
hobby was skydiving; the only person in our unit who practiced this rather
unique off-duty activity. He had a ball, because it was so easy to catch a ride on a
helicopter, and just jump out. Plus,
he didn’t have to pay for the ride, like he did in the States! Vignettes
Summary
Being an SD as a lowly second lieutenant was one thing, but being the
“On-Scene Commander” really gave me a lot of responsibility at a very young
age. As background, I have to admit
that I had the “I’m only in for four years” attitude when I got to
Vietnam. I thought I had had
foresight to avoid becoming cannon fodder by joining the Air Force instead of
the Army, but my intent was just to do my duty as an American male, pay my dues
for four years, and get out. I had
never been a “leader” type in high school or college -- but I was savvy
enough to know what answers they wanted on the questionnaire used for admittance
to OTS, and so became an officer.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the Vietnam experience
changed my whole perspective. I was, for the first time in my life, responsible for the
lives of others when the site came under attack, and I took the responsibility
seriously. Throughout the course of
that year I changed from being slightly introverted to pretty extroverted.
I began taking an interest in the needs and problems of my subordinates,
and we developed into a real team. I
even got to the point that I would fight “City Hall” (the command structure)
when I thought my crew was getting the short end of the stick.
The good thing about serving in Vietnam was that you got an “extra
edge” on choice for your next assignment.
I ended up in Germany, and, as I had learned to like the leadership role,
I was rapidly promoted into positions of increasing responsibility.
I changed my attitude from “only four years” to becoming a career
officer. That lasted until my wife
got tired of the many TDYs and remotes some years later, and convinced me to get
out. So, I never served 20 years of
active duty. However, I joined the
Air National Guard and later the USAFR, ending up my career as a Lieutenant
Colonel with 28 years of service. I
sincerely don’t think that would have happened if I had not had the tour in
Vietnam.
|
|
|
