[PEN-L:4605] [PNEWS] ARTICLE: UNACCEPTABLE TARGET/SOUND FAMILIAR?

[Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@xxxxxxx>]

From: David Martin <dcdave1@xxxxxxxxx>


                       An Unacceptable Target

                Told by James Robert "Cotton" Hildreth

        I was sixteen when I went into the Merchant Marines.  I served sixteen
months as a Ship's Radio Officer.  When I became eighteen, I joined the
Army and served a hitch as an enlisted man, then got out of service.  I
was called back into service when the Korean War started.  I went into
the Air Force in 1952 and became a fighter pilot, and it was my career
for the next thirty years.

        For the next ten years, I served as a flight commander in several
fighter squadrons, flying the F-84, F-86, F-100 and F-105.  This was the
most exciting, rewarding, and enjoyable ten years of my life.  During
the hottest period of the Cold War we developed and exercised world-wide
deployment for our fighter aircraft, using aerial refueling, and
responded to numerous military threats with a show of force in such
places as the Taiwan Straits and Lebanon in the Middle East.

        I was assigned to Fighter Requirements in the Pentagon when the
military buildup in Vietnam began, and I volunteered to go.  I think we
all wanted to go.  It was what we had trained to do since we took the
oath.  When my request was approved, I called my friend, Dudley Foster,
in Rated Officer Assignments in Personnel and told him I had been
released from my Pentagon tour and wanted an F-105 assignment to
Southeast Asia.  He told me that since I had not flown F-105 in three
years I would have to retrain in the F-105 and that I would have to wait
five or six months for a school slot.  This was in 1966, and I didn't
think the war would last that long.

        I asked, "Well, what aircraft do you have that I can go over in now?"
And added, "I don't care what it is.  I'm ready to go."

        He said, "I just had a cancellation in an A-1 assignment."

        I didn't know what an A-1 was.  He told me it was a conventional Navy
attack aircraft that the Marines used in the Korean War for close-air
support.  The Marines were converting their attack units to A-4s and
giving the A-1s to the Air Force to use for Air Commando missions,
principally close-air support, search and rescue, and covert mission he
couldn't talk about.  It was really not what I had in mind, but I wanted
to go so badly I took the assignment.

        I arrived at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam as
Commander of the First Air Commando Squadron in March, 1967, and ended
my tour a year later during the Tet Offensive.

        How do I feel about the war in Vietnam?

        I have mixed feelings, mostly bad.  From the onset of the buildup in
Vietnam, it was clear that there was no military solution to the
conflict.  We should never have become so extensively involved.  The
volume of ordnance we expended over an area about the size of California
was more than the total ordnance expended in all the previous armed
conflicts in the history of our country, and it had no appreciable
effect on the outcome in Southeast Asia.  The total of all the targets
destroyed was not worth the life of one of my pilots, and I lost eight
of them in ten months and twelve of my twenty-two assigned aircraft.

        It was difficult to show the bean-counters and political warriors in
Washington positive military results for all our casualties and materiel
losses.  So the American military leadership in South Vietnam determined
that bodies destroyed was a good gauge.  BODY-COUNT became the measure
of a ground commander's success.  It should not then have been
surprising that this policy led to the civilian massacre at the village
of Mylai.

        The vast majority of the A-1 missions were in Laos: flying armed
reconnaissance of North Vietnamese infiltration routes into South
Vietnam, search and rescue missions for downed air crews, and covert
support for special ground forces operations.

        Our aircraft was very slow and heavily armed.  I mention this because
all of my previous experience had been in high-performance jet fighters
where the pilot never really sees the people who die in the target he
destroys.  In the A-1 you actually see the people shooting at you, and,
at the time, feel the satisfaction of knowing you've killed someone who
was trying to kill you.

        One particular mission is as vivid in my memory now as the day it
happened.  I was leading a flight of two A-1s on an armed reconnaissance
mission, but shortly after take-off we were diverted to a target on the
coast of I Corps (northern quarter of South Vietnam.)  On arriving in
the target area, we contacted the FAC (forward air controller) who
pointed out the target.  It was a huge village of three or four hundred
houses, probably twelve to fifteen hundred people.  It was between the
main north-south highway and the ocean, a pretty, clean village.  I
asked the FAC why the village was a target.

        The FAC said, "That is a Vietcong village."

        I said, "How do you know its a Vietcong village?"

        He said, "Well we saw three Vietcong run in there."

        Across the road from the village was a rice paddy.

        He said, "We saw them run out of the rice paddy when we flew over, and
they ran into the village."

        I said, "And you want us to wipe out this whole village to get three
Vietcong?"  How do you know they were Vietcong?  Were they armed?"

        He said, "They had on black pajamas."

        All of the farmers working in the fields had on black pajamas.  That
was their dress.  And they carried tools like rakes and hoes.

        He said, "They were armed."

        I said, "How do you know they weren't carrying rakes and hoes?"

        He said, "Don't argue with me.  I've got the provincial governor in the
back seat, and he says that is a Vietcong village."

        I said, "Well, I'll go down and look around and see if I can draw any
fire."

        So we went down and flew over real low and slow.  There were children
in the courtyard, smiling and waving at us.  This village had obviously
been there for years, and it had never been touched.  I pulled back up;
and I said, "Okay, what are your instructions?"

        He said, "The wind is blowing off-shore; so put your napalm down on
that first row of houses, and the wind will carry the fire across the
entire village."

        So I said, ""Fine."

        I pulled around and told my wingman to come in from one side and I
would attack from the other.  We would start our attack from opposite
corners.  I was coming in toward the corner hut.  I looked up at the
other end, and he had moved over the road and dropped his napalm on the
road.  As I approached my release point, a woman with a tiny baby
strapped on her back, holding the hand of a small child three or four
years old, came running from the hut.  I pulled my aircraft over and
dropped the napalm in a ditch beside the highway.

        The FAC screamed and raised holy hell because he had this governor in
the aircraft with him.  He said, "You know I'm going to report you for
this!"

        I said, "You don't have to.  I'll be on the ground before you are, and
I'll report myself."

        When we landed, my wingman walked over to my aircraft and said, "Sir, I
have three small grandchildren, and I could never have faced them again
if I had followed those orders."  He said he didn't want to fly any more
combat missions.  Later, I had him transferred to a unit with an
airborne command and control mission.

        I went into Squadron Operations and called the Command Center at
Seventh air Force and talked to the director, a brigadier general I had
served with several years before.  I told him what happened.

        He said, "Damn, Cotton, don't you know what's going on?  That village
didn't pay their taxes.  That lieutenant colonel, a provincial
commander, is teaching them a lesson."

        On returning from an interdiction mission several days later, we flew
over the target area.  The village had been totally destroyed.  Nothing
but a large, black, burned area remained.  I'm sure when the FAC got a
fast-mover (high-performance jet) on the target and destroyed the
village the report read: Target 100 percent destroyed, body-count 1200
KBA (killed by air) confirmed.

        I'm a grandfather now, and I can't watch my grandchildren at play or
carry them in my arms without thinking of that village in Vietnam.

>From "Salute to Veterans," Mary Lewis Deans, Editor (Flatrock Books, 15
Goose Creek, Rocky Mount, North Carolina 27804), pp. 63-71

Salute to Veterans 1996: Oral histories from veterans and their
relatives, gathered by the Nash County Cultural Center's Oral History
Project

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