The warm sun bounced tiny heat waves off the ramp where the smell of aircraft fuel and oil mingled in the light Sunday morning breeze floating across the Scottsbluff Airport. Jerry shadowed every move his father, Reinholdt, made while he poked around the Aeronca C3 aircraft, checking each flight surface. The fifteen-year-old airplane, twice Jerry’s age, had been a bargain created by the overabundance of war surplus planes dumped into the market in the late ‘40s. Jerry’s older brother Reiny looked askance at the narrow seat and muttered to himself that this could not, would not, in any way, be a good thing.
After they climbed in, Reinholdt crouched between the wire bracing under the wing and cinched the canvas belt pulling the boys tightly together in the right seat of the two-seater aircraft. Reaching across, he adjusted the throttle and gave a thumbs up. Jerry squinted, pursed his mouth and snapped his thumb up in return.
“They call it a flying bathtub,” Reiny told Jerry while his father rotated the prop to clear the engine before starting.
“I think it’s like a kite with an engine,” Jerry replied looking up at the yellow wing.
When Reinholdt shouted, “Hit the switch,” Jerry knew exactly what he meant. There was only one.
Once on the runway, Reinholdt edged the throttle forward. The two-cylinder engine responded by replacing an uneven chatter with a frenzied clatter as all thirty-six horsepower struggled to move the cloth, tubing and wire beast down the runway. Then Jerry felt the magic. It sang to him. Looking out the right side, he saw the ground move ever faster, he felt the tail come up, the wind in his face, and he watched the shadow on the ground start to shrink. For the first time in his life he experienced the wonder of flight, and he loved it.
A fantastic combination flooded Jerry’s senses: the feel of the wind tossing the plane from side to side, the view of the North Platt River, the railroad, the orange and grey peak of the Scotts Bluff Monument in the distance and the sight of his house and school below. When his father let him get the feel of the control stick, he felt an authority over his life that he hadn’t known before. When they landed, he wanted to go again and again. From that moment on he knew, when he grew up he would be a pilot.
After Jerry’s Uncle Harry moved to Scottsbluff and bought a T6 war surplus trainer, Jerry became his favorite copilot. Harry was a flight instructor in the early part of the war and later flew missions off Navy aircraft carriers in the Pacific. He showed Jerry every maneuver he had learned in the Navy and a few that he had invented himself. “Grab the stick, Jerry,” he would shout into the intercom, “we’re going to do a roll.”
Moving to Milwaukee was like losing baby teeth for Jerry. The middle class neighborhoods were similar, but the buzz of the larger city hung in the background. His focus on flying suffered until he discovered Billy Mitchell Airfield was less than a mile from his house. The tightly involved circle of friends he found in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) unit gave him an opportunity to catch an occasional flight, but more importantly, it imparted greater purpose for his love of flying. The CAP building that was in the old Flying Tiger Airline’s headquarters became his second home. He excelled in the regiment of the drill team and then developed into a leader as the unit’s Cadet Commander.
Jerry’s classmates were in awe of his self-confidence and sense of direction. No one was surprised when he received an appointment to Annapolis and from there went on to Navy flight training. They saw him when he came for a visit before his deployment to Vietnam, when he explained how important it was to support South Vietnam against communist aggression from the North.
***
The flight of four A-4s from the aircraft carrier, Ticonderoga, began their descent facing the late afternoon March Sun. Jerry retarded the throttle, relaxing into the number four position of the loose trail formation. Beyond the three planes ahead of him, the lazy Mekong River snaked across South Vietnam toward the South China Sea behind his left wingtip. Descending through eight-thousand feet, fluorescent green fields shone through the light haze.
Six-thousand feet below, Beaver, the forward air controller bounced along on the afternoon thermals in his L-19 spotter plane. “Roger Warpaint flight,” he answered flight lead’s call, “You should pick me up starting to cross the river bend heading south. Give me your numbers, ordinance on board and I’ll mark the target when you have me in sight.”
Jerry spotted Beaver and keyed his mic, “At your one o-clock low, Paint one.”
In the target area, the flight set up a left hand circular pattern at four-thousand feet and watched Beaver place a smoke rocket at the edge of a line of trees. “Whoo-ee, it’s hot down there. Warpaints make your runs from north to south on a line about two hundred meters beyond my smoke. The target’s an advancing VC unit trying to overrun the RVN position in the area from the cover of the rubber plantation.”
Warpaint one broke into his run. Jerry watched, waiting his turn. With over sixty missions under his belt, this one appeared routine. Unlike those in North Vietnam, flights in the south were more controlled. Here, the enemy did not have large anti-aircraft guns or a missile threat. The small arms fire that a Viet Cong might try was largely ineffective against the high speed and altitude of the ordinary A-4 mission.
With each successive run, Beaver called the hit and radioed an adjustment for the next pilot to make. After seven runs it was again Jerry’s time to roll in. Disappointed with his first run because he had pickled high causing the napalm canister to sail beyond his aim point, he was intent on making this run a good one.
Turning toward the area still smoking from previous hits, Jerry lowered the nose of the A-4 and pushed the throttle to one hundred percent power. The vents at the top of the instrument panel spit little pellets of ice and vapor made from the humid air. The airspeed indicator wound toward five hundred knots as he established a ten degree dive two thousand feet above ground with the lighted pipper of the gun sight at the bottom of his aim point in the broken line of rubber trees.
Jerry was at the peak of his performance, with nearly a thousand hours of Navy flight time, eighty carrier landings and on a mission that he was trained to do and believed in.
Earthen roads, thatched roofs and irrigation canals flashed into view and disappeared under his wing. He arrived at the release altitude of three-hundred-fifty feet at a speed across the ground of over six-hundred miles an hour. At three-hundred feet above the tree tops his trajectory gave him less than two and a half seconds to pull up. His focus locked on the target, his vision narrowed and time slowed to a halt. A crack appeared in the canopy; the aircraft refused to respond. It’s not supposed to happen like this. The freedom of flight Jerry loved so much turned into an assassin. In that instant, he realized a small round, fired wildly into the air by a terrified Vietnamese on the ground, stumbled into and destroyed his dreams and ambitions. He watched with sadness as the trees began to rip apart his aircraft.
