Taking Fire by Kevin O'Rourke Joe Peters

Author:Kevin O'Rourke, Joe Peters [Kevin O'Rourke, Joe Peters]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Military, Vietnam War, Asian
ISBN: 9781612001388
Publisher: Casemate Publishers (Ignition)
Published: 2013-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Patrolling the skies of Southeast Asia would be an EC-121 with the call sign of Disco. With large radomes on top and below that housed advanced electronics, the Air Force plane attempted to provide pilots with updated information on the whereabouts of enemy aircraft. However, many Air Force pilots felt the best information often would come from Red Crown, the Navy cruiser, stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin, in part due to better technology aboard the ship.—National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

“As we rolled out right into the turn, we got a warning on the radio to break now,” explains Marshall. The radio call, whose origin wasn’t clear to either Marshall or his frontseat, reported the MiGs were on their tail. After some evasive maneuvering, Marshall still wasn’t able to get a fix on the radar. They were descending from about twenty thousand feet at this point, increasing speed and trying to get to a better altitude for an engagement. Marshall then looked out the cockpit and saw at their 1 o’clock position the MiG. As the MiG passed, it fired an Atoll air to-air missile, missing the members of the flight. Marshall then saw two more Atolls pass over them from a second MiG that had turned tail.

At that point, the wingman called out “bingo” fuel, and the members of the 13th TFS headed back. “That’s what we did,” he said of the 13th. “If someone called bingo, we didn’t stick around or go chasing MiGs.”

When Marshall got back to Udorn, he made a few phones calls and probably cashed in a personal favor or two to find out exactly where the “break now” radio call had come from. What he was most interested in knowing from the person he eventually was put in touch with is why they only got the warning at the last moment. “He said they weren’t allowed to say anything because it would let the enemy know what our capabilities were,” says Marshall.

To add to the situation, once back at Udorn, members of the flight were looking at the radar film from the incident with the 13th’s film interpreter. When they broke right, rather than the expected left turn, the radar indicated MiG-19s on both sides of the scope. “Had we made the normal left turn initially, we would have fallen into the trap by rolling out in front of them, and they would have been in position to shoot us down like sitting ducks,” says Marshall.

While Marshall recognized the need for military secrecy, the incident left him wondering how much more information was there that the aviators on the front line weren’t getting. “People had great information,” says Marshall. “But they sat on it because they didn’t want anyone to know that we knew it.”

By the time he would land back at Udorn on June 27, Marshall would have even more reason to wonder if somebody knew more than Phantom crews were being told.

About ten in the morning of June 27, while

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