FAC'ing in the Bronco

[HiFlyer]

Wait...I just re-read your question. What is this "old days" poop? That was only a few years ago...well, only four decades...well, okay, so it was a while back...

I was talking to a few old P-38 guys at my father-in law's WWII fighter squadron reunion (402nd FS, 9th AF...9th AF, by the way, did the CAS mission, while another NAF did the bomber escort mission) a couple of years ago and was struck by the similarity with the way they went about their missions. Different era, different airplane, different ordnance (similar, I guess, guns, bombs, and napalm, but much earlier versions). At any rate, the way they described their daily missions was remarkably similar. They even used some Army L-19 observation planes to assist them, much like the FACs did in Vietnam. The rest of the time they used one guy to "FAC" the rest of them in to maximize their effectiveness. Their day-to-day routine was very similar to mine, except they flew more missions during the day (frequently double-turned) and their loss rates were much higher (in the 16 months they were in Europe, they lost all but two of their original twenty-something pilots...in my 12 months, we didn't have a pilot get hit).

Edited February 23, 2010 by HiFlyer

[JarheadBoom]

It is awesome to hear about this stuff straight from the source, when it hasn't been "dumbed down" by some publishing company executive or editor that's never served a day in his/her life. I may not understand it 100% at first, but Google can be a great learning experience, and I don't need a third party deciding which details are important to the story and which aren't.

Thank You, HiFlyer.

[HiFlyer]

It is awesome to hear about this stuff straight from the source, when it hasn't been "dumbed down" by some publishing company executive or editor that's never served a day in his/her life. I may not understand it 100% at first, but Google can be a great learning experience, and I don't need a third party deciding which details are important to the story and which aren't.

Thank You, HiFlyer.

Its hard to write without throwing in a few acronyms or ops terms from a while back that seem perfectly clear, but it happens. If something confuses you let me know and I'll try to clarify it.

[lloyd christmas]

Well, organization-wise all the FACS belonged to the 504th Tac Air Support Gp which was located near Saigon (Bien Hoa AB or Tan Son Hut AB...I can't remember which). The group had four squadrons, three in country (19th 20th and 21st TASS) and one at Nakhon Phanom (NKP), Thailand (22nd TASS). The NKP guys only did out-country work on the "trail" and were not assigned as FACs to an army unit for CAS work (I'm not saying they might not have occasionally done some for other people, but they weren't assigned to a standard ground unit). Each of the in-country squadrons then had a detachment at their assigned ground units. I was a 20th TASS guy, with the squadron at Danang. The 20th TASS had OV-10s at Chu Lai AB, the HQ for the Americal Division (my unit). There were more OV-10s up at either Hue Phu Bai or Quang Tri airfield outside Hue, north of Danang, to support the 1st Cav. The 20th also had O-2s at several other locations (Danang, Tam Ky, and up at Hue somewhere) to support the ARVN and US Special Forces units. That way, each Army Division had a FAC unit co-located at or near its HQ, and an ALO permanently assigned to the Division, who also served as the location commander for all the unit's FACs. I was at Chu Lai, assigned to support the northern most Americal Bde...the 196th Inf Bde (Light). Chu Lai was the dividing line between the center and northern Bdes so we could support both from the same location, but the third Americal Bde (198th Inf Bde) was farther south at Quang Ngai, so we kept two or three OV-10s down there for quicker response.

First, you have to remember that this was the 60s and early seventies. It was largely a daytime war on our part, so we didn't worry too much about night time support for our grunts...the basic companies in the field pretty much hunkered down in the evening and didn't engage much. The OV-10 could fly about 3.5 hours on a mission when loaded for in-country CAS. That was four LAU-79 pods with seven 2.75" rockets each (two white phosphorus (willie pete) pods and two HE pods) and four M-60 (7.62mm) machine guns in the chin pods. We would plan to take off at first light, and fly four sorties during the day, which generally put one airplane in the air over each Bde's AO at all times. Sometimes we staggered a little to avoid becoming predictable. If you had an area of visible activity every morning, we'd occasionally take off an hour early and try to catch the bad guys before they hid for the day (or take off late to save gas, depart on schedule, then suddenly return late in the evening and try to catch them)...and it sometimes worked!

As for CAS, it was a mixed bag. There were two basic kinds of support...Pre-plans (PP) and TIC support. For PPs, every day the Army woud review its intel and submit requests to 7th AF (thru each Corps "Direct Air Support Center" - DASC) for pre-planned strikes. Those were usually either hits on places the Army thought were bad guy locations, and LZ preps..strikes in advance of an attack or insertion. The former were notoriously bad ...the intel was frequently a report that "Six VC were seen at grid coords xxxxxxxx", or "A source says there are a dozen VC camped at grid coord xxxxxxx". Of course, by the time the sortie was actually fragged, it was two days later and even if the report was accurate (a rarity, in my opinion) they were long gone by then. But, the process allowed 7th AF to equitibly divide up the daily frag to give every unit a fair share of the action each day, and both the DASC and the FAC had the authority to move the strike if the Army changed plans or the six guys didn't cooperate and stay at their former location waving red flags or if there was a more important need somewhere else (TIC being one of those).

So, each day I would get up and report to the det's ops center about an hour prior to take off. I'd brief with our Ops Officer and then go to the division's Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to get a tactical update from the duty officer. I'd note the latest recorded position of all US and foreign (usually only ARVN) units in the field (I say "recorded" because they were frequently moving and there was no real time reporting in those days) and get a list of all the fragged activity (my PPs during my time on-station). I'd then get a ride down to the aircraft, pre-flight, and launch. It was all pretty casual...as a FAC, we ran our own war and there wasn't too much on-scene supervision in a "single seat" airplane (the OV had two seats, of course, but we flew alone except for an occasional demo ride for a visitor). Given that we flew in the same geographic area supporting the same guys against the same enemy about five days a week, the process didn't need a lot of formality...we knew our business and we knew what everybody else was doing, too. We always had a few "hip pocket targets" we knew needed some attention, even if the tasking chain didn't. Besides, if we had air and didn't use them, they'd be out of gas in ten minutes and dump their load in the ocean anyway. In my case, the AO bordered the Marines to the north (the "Hostage" FACs flying marine OVs) and we'd frequently talk to them to exchange information about the activity on our respective sides of the line, particularly valuable because the enemy wandered back and forth a lot and getting the Marine Regiment and the Army Bde to formally exchange info was an exercise in futility. The FACs spoke the same language, however, so that worked well. Generally, I'd fly into the AO...about a 10-15 minute flight from Chu Lai...and do a quick recce of known positions or reported activity. If I had PP scheduled I'd talk to our radio operator at the Bde CP and get an update on what was going on to determine if I needed to move the PP to another location. If so, I'd have him notify the DASC (it was supposed to be a "request", but I generally didn't phrase it that way. He may have...) and I'd go put in the strike at whereever I determined was the most useful location. Most of my air was AF F-4s from Danang or F-100s from Tuy Hua, and Marine F-4s, A-4s and A-6s from Chu Lai and Danang.

On the other hand, if a TIC erupted, the rules changed a little. If I had a PP already inbound, I'd divert it. Then I'd call for assets (via the radio operator at the CP) and the I Corps DASC ("I DASC") would first try to divert airborne assets for my use, or last, they'd launch alert aircraft if nothing was readily available. This was when it got a little interesting, because you might have a TIC with close contact and I DASC would send you four F-4s with 2000lb slicks (mk84s) previously enroute to hit the trail. As you might imagine, a mk 84 slick is not the most effective CAS weapon in the inventory, but it was the closest. When this happened you had to improvise. I might look at the ground and try to estimate where the bad guy's leadership might be supervising from...the crest of a nearby hill or a thick stand of trees a few hundred meters away...and dump the mk 84s there. If it didn't do anything else, it got their heads down and their ears bleeding. By the time that was over, maybe (usually) someone better suited would show up. We had A-1s at Danang and if we had a TIC we frequently got some of those. They were great, particularly because they were always loaded for anti-personnel missions (supporting SAR) and they had a couple of everything in the inventory onboard...20mm, 7.62, nape, mk81 (250lb) high drags, CBU, 2.75' rockets, and the ever-reliable .38 cal pistol the pilot would shoot out of the cockpit in a final act of defiance when he ran out of everything else (which took a while with A-1s!!). Not only that, but their slow speed made them incredibly accurate compared to a jet.

In the course of a week, we usually flew four or five days, spent one day as the temporary ALO at the 196th HQ, and had one day off. When we were at the Bde, I'd check in with the Bde S-2 (Intel) and S-3 (Operations) and then hop a chopper ride out to a firebase to talk with they guys in the field. They frequently knew a lot of little details that didn't make it up to the Division or Brigade level and we'd work out "deals"...sort of like trick plays we'd work on the bad guys. We knew they monitored our radios, so we worked out little codes for special things. For instance there was a little hill that one guy swore had a one or two man observation post on it, but it was hard to predict when the guy was out of his hole. We had a code that we set up that alerted me when the Platoon leader thought the observer was up. I then called in and said I was out of fuel and ammo and was going home. I then casually headed in the direction of Chu Lai until I flew over the hill, then dumped the nose and fired everything I had at the top of the hill. I never saw anything, but the platoon leader later said he never saw movement again, so we either got him or scared him off, I guess.

Finally, yes, we did go trolling for contact occasionally. It wasn't necessary most of the time, but if things were really quiet and boring, you could go out to a few of the places you knew were heavily visited by bad guys, and fiddle with the pitch to get the props a little out of sync. The resulting sound really grated on your nerves, so the bad guys would sometimes get pissed and fire a few shot at you. They weren't much of a threat, but now you had a valid "FAC under fire" situation and that was always good for a few flights of fighters from I DASC. They were mostly fighter guys, so they imagined 37mm or 57mm AAA blasting away at you. In our case it was usually a pissed off VC with a rifle or AK-47, but I didn't have to tell DASC about that. I had fun, the fighter guys who were also bored had fun, and the VC that survived had their fields plowed up for the spring planting. Everybody wins (well, almost everybody...not the guy with the AK and a few of his close friends, unless they ran fast for a ways before the fighters got there).

All this fun and games was ruined by a bunch of eggheads in the research labs who came up with SPAAGs and MANPADs. Mobile 23mm stuff ("ZPU-23-4" in my day) and SA-7s changed the rules a lot. No more slowly hanging around at 1500' watching for the bad guys. What a shame. It was really a great mission!

Incredible stories. Keep them up and thank you for your service.

[Wolf424]

HiFlyer, it would be a shame if you ever had to buy your own drinks at the bar. Cheers, and thanks for the great stories!

[HiFlyer]

HiFlyer, it would be a shame if you ever had to buy your own drinks at the bar. Cheers, and thanks for the great stories!

Happens all the time, but I don't drink that much any more so I don't mind.

[Square]

HiFlyer, thanks so much for the stories.

What amazes me is that we sometimes it feels like we're doing something new with CAS and integrating with the Army. Instead we're just reinventing the wheel.

[HiFlyer]

HiFlyer, thanks so much for the stories.

What amazes me is that we sometimes it feels like we're doing something new with CAS and integrating with the Army. Instead we're just reinventing the wheel.

Sorry Square, I dumped your PM by mistake. Plz resend. And yes, we do a lot of the reinvention stuff!!

Edited February 25, 2010 by HiFlyer

[Guest]

Wait...I just re-read your question. What is this "old days" poop? That was only a few years ago...well, only four decades...well, okay, so it was a while back...

I was talking to a few old P-38 guys at my father-in law's WWII fighter squadron reunion (402nd FS, 9th AF...9th AF, by the way, did the CAS mission, while another NAF did the bomber escort mission) a couple of years ago and was struck by the similarity with the way they went about their missions.

Pay attention boys and observe HiFlyer's expert demonstration.

Respect. HiFlyer you have all of mine and then some.

[HiFlyer]

Pay attention boys and observe HiFlyer's expert demonstration.

Respect. HiFlyer you have all of mine and then some.

Thanks, but I just did my job like you guys do yours. I just enjoy talking about it.

Edited February 27, 2010 by HiFlyer

[tac airlifter]

Thanks, but I just did my job like you guys do yours. I just enjoy talking about it.

I enjoy listening, thanks for the responses here.