Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (14 page)

Kuddles on the bridge with
Ranger
’s commanding officer, Captain Leo McCuddin.
U.S. Navy.

Dockside at Leyte pier,
Ranger
commenced taking on fuel for the air wing’s planes. More than one type was required because the jets and propeller planes did not use the same fuel. After that, a barge came alongside and
pumped for hours to fill the carrier’s bunkers with the heavy fuel oil for the eight Babcock and Wilcox boilers; these boilers provided steam to four turbines that each ran a shaft to propel the ship (top speed, thirty-four knots, or forty miles per hour) and provided electrical power throughout the ship.

A large ammunition barge tied up to the carrier’s port side and a crane lifted pallets of bombs and rockets onto a lowered elevator at the end of the angled deck.
Ranger
had four such aircraft elevators—open platforms, each the size of a tract house—used for moving planes and ammunition to and from the hangar deck to the flight deck. Aviation Ordnancemen loaded the munitions onto handcarts and rolled them into the hangar bay, where they were pushed onto smaller elevators and sent many decks below for storage.

Fresh produce and other stores were brought to the dock in large trucks, unloaded, placed on a conveyor belt, then sent up to a lowered aircraft elevator on the starboard side. Sailors lifted the boxes and crates and placed them on raised aluminum rollers that snaked through the hangar deck into other compartments. Along the meandering line, men stood by pushing the supplies forward until they reached their destination.

With everyone working long hours, preparations for getting under way were completed in three days. A rotating three-section duty schedule for the 3,500 officers and men who made up ship’s company (permanent crew), along with the 1,500 air wing personnel now aboard, allowed two-thirds of the men to go ashore every night while the other third stayed aboard with the duty. Like all navy ships,
Ranger
was tightly compartmentalized for watertight security, although most hatches between spaces remained open unless the crew was called to battle stations. The ship’s company had its own berthing quarters and work spaces, as did the air wing. There was little mixing between the two groups; the crew’s main job was to keep the ship operating, and the air wing was responsible for the planes and pilots.

For the next month
Ranger
would be at sea continuously, and would receive all supplies by underway replenishment—known as unrep—a method of transferring fuel, munitions, and stores from one ship to another at sea. First developed by the U.S. Navy in the late 1930s, the technique was used extensively during World War II, and gave ships increased range and striking capability without the need to put into port for supplies.
Ranger
, with its large storage capacity, would unrep its own escorts—usu
ally two destroyers—with fuel oil and stores in between rendezvous with tankers and supply ships.

As the crew continued to make
Ranger
ready for departure, many of the air wing’s pilots attended a one-day jungle environment survival training program (JEST) at Cubi Point naval air station. In addition to highly trained navy instructors, the school was staffed with a contingent of Negritos, an ethnic group native to the Philippine jungles. During World War II, Negritos were greatly feared by the Japanese—doubtless the Negritos’ custom of leaving the heads of their enemies impaled on stakes marking their territorial boundaries caused much trepidation among the occupiers. Skills taught to the pilots at JEST included making utensils out of bamboo, boiling rice inside bamboo, and finding food and medicinal plants in the jungle. Samples of food prepared by the natives—including bats, ants, and snails—were served. Unlike some pilots who were more finicky, Dieter tried everything. His attention was piqued by the vivid description of what a pilot downed in the jungles of Southeast Asia would face: he could expect to be surrounded on the ground by an experienced and determined enemy who was being bombed round the clock. A U.S. pilot could not expect the enemy to show compassion or forgiveness; rather, he would be hunted down like an animal. To survive, the pilots were told, they would have to utilize animal instincts.

Early on the morning of January 12—after a civilian bar pilot came aboard to take the carrier out the narrow channel into the bay that led to the South China Sea—
Ranger
cast off all lines and swung away from the pier with the assistance of two tugboats. On the bridge the bar pilot “had the conn,” meaning he was responsible for the movement of the ship. As such, he gave orders to the helmsman, who steers the ship. The bar pilot is entrusted to keep the ship on course to conform to the depth and shape of the channel. The bar pilot’s responsibility for
Ranger
would be brief, lasting less than thirty minutes until the carrier reached open waters; then he would leave the bridge, climb down a rope ladder thrown over the side of the ship, and step onto the deck of a tugboat alongside.

As the bar pilot gave orders at the conn, McCuddin sat impassively in his chair. A ship’s captain has ultimate responsibility for his vessel and crew no matter who has the conn, so the skipper could have overruled any orders if he believed
Ranger
to be in jeopardy. Personnelman Third Class Stewart
Hunter, twenty-three, of Ontario, California—the 1JV phone talker on the bridge who passed along the orders of the captain to other sections of the ship via the sound-powered phone circuit—could see that the skipper was keeping a “very close watch” on everything. The civilian pilot also appeared to be taking in everything: the dolled-up mannequin, the captain’s leopard chair, the holstered handgun—all unusual sights on the bridge of a navy ship.

“What’s the gun for, captain?” asked the bar pilot, apparently more comfortable inquiring about the firearm than the other trappings.

McCuddin, without any trace of a smile, growled, “Pirates.”

The pilot left the bridge soon thereafter, and McCuddin had the conn.

Seven hundred miles to the west lay the coast of Vietnam.

JANUARY
16, 1966

“
Gray Eagle
, this is
Overpass Nine Zero One
. Thirty miles out.”

“
Nine Zero One
,” responded air-traffic control. “Proceed to marshal.”

Radio calls signs had been assigned to
Ranger
—aka
Gray Eagle
—and the air wing’s squadrons. The reconnaissance squadron—RVAH-9 Hoot Owls—was
Overpass
, and the three-digit side numbers on its RA-5C Vigilantes all began with the number nine. In that way air-traffic controllers aboard
Ranger
knew what type of aircraft they were directing—important information, given the varying speeds, weights, and flight characteristics. The call signs were classified, as it would have been useful to the enemy to know what types of aircraft were coming their way.

Ranger
had arrived a day earlier at Dixie Station, a designated point in the South China Sea 100 miles off the coast of South Vietnam. From here, for two days, the carrier’s planes had been flying air support for friendly ground forces engaging enemy guerrillas in the south, missions that afforded pilots a decent chance of ditching or bailing out without being taken prisoner. The navy kept one carrier at Dixie Station: often the latest carrier to arrive in WestPac, with the air-support missions serving as a warm-up for the more intense bombing runs over North Vietnam, where there were no friendlies on the ground.

The ship’s air-traffic controllers worked in Air Ops, located in a darkened twenty-by-thirty-foot compartment one deck below the flight deck. Along the walls were several Plexiglas status boards, and behind them enlisted men with headphones wrote on the boards with grease pencils. Since they stood behind the transparent boards, which were read by people on the opposite side, they wrote every number and letter backward. The heart of Air Ops was a line of radar screens giving off a greenish glow. At the radar consoles sat enlisted air-traffic controllers—mostly chiefs or first-class petty officers. Their function in directing and controlling aircraft was one of the few instances in the navy of enlisted personnel giving orders to officers—orders that were to be promptly obeyed. The only other lighting in the room came from low-wattage bulbs illuminating the status boards. The noise level was low, with no idle chatter when controllers were working aircraft. The “scopes and radios emitted a low hum,” and the air in the room—kept cold by air conditioning for the benefit of the electronics—had an “electric ozone smell” mixed with the stench of stale tobacco, as nearly everyone in the room smoked.

The Vigilante was setting up for a nighttime trap, which usually meant a straight-in approach. (Daytime approaches, by contrast, were flown in a left-hand racetrack pattern that circled the moving ship.) When the Vigilante reached its assigned orbit holding pattern, known as marshal, the pilot checked in again. An assigned altitude had been given to him before he left the ship. Other planes lining up to land had their assigned altitudes; planes were separated by increments of 1,000 feet to avoid collisions. Each was given a precise time to arrive over the carrier, called charlie time, which gave spacing to the landing planes. It was up to a pilot to enter the approach lane and start his glide slope in order to arrive on time.

When it was time for the Vigilante, the pilot, Lieutenant Commander Charles Schoonover, thirty-four, of Indianapolis, Indiana, a 1954 graduate of Annapolis, radioed: “
Nine Zero One
, pushing over.” The Vigilante began descending toward the ship at 700 feet per minute as its landing gear, tailhook, and wing flaps were lowered.

The experienced Schoonover was flying one of the largest, fastest, and most complex planes in the navy. In the backseat of the tandem-seat, twin-engine Vigilante was someone at the opposite end of the experience scale:
Ensign Hal T. Hollingsworth, twenty-three, of Grace, Idaho. Hollingsworth was enclosed inside a rear section of the cockpit with only a small window on either side, but his view of the outside was less important than the world of screens and electronic systems he monitored as the reconnaissance attack navigator (RAN). Both positions had ejection seats, which could be fired separately; the pilot could also fire both together.

The Vigilante, in service for five years, had been built as the navy’s main carrier-based strategic bomber for delivery of nuclear weapons to targets inside the Soviet Union and China. Strategic bombing—as opposed to shorter-range tactical bombing, which might target a bridge or railroad tracks—called for a knockout punch to a distant target for the purpose of destroying an enemy’s capacity to wage war. The supersonic Vigilante was agile and fast, with a top speed of 1,320 miles per hour; but the design of the bomb bay in conjunction with the requirement on long-distance missions to carry two disposable fuel tanks in the same space led to problems. Also, this aircraft arrived at a time when the navy was emphasizing submarine-launched ballistic missiles in place of strategic bombers. As a result, the Vigilante was soon switched to an unarmed reconnaissance role, and loaded with airborne radar, infrared scanners, electronic intelligence systems, and sophisticated camera packs—all operated from the backseat position while the pilot was busy with the stick and throttle in the front seat. He was
very
busy, especially during recoveries, as the Vigilante’s fast approach speed of 140 miles per hour—to prevent stalling—and its weight (it was more than twice as heavy as an A-1 Skyraider) made landing aboard the deck of a carrier challenging for even the most skillful pilot, and flat-out dangerous for an inexperienced or unwary pilot.

Air-traffic control informed Schoonover when radar showed him three-quarters of a mile from the ship, and added: “Call the ball.”

“
Nine Zero One
, no ball. State, thirty-five hundred,” said Schoonover, advising the controllers that he did not yet have in sight the orange meatball on the optical landing system (OLS) that would indicate the position of the Vigilante on final approach, and that he had 3,500 pounds of fuel remaining—enough to make several more landing attempts if his first approach had to be aborted.

The Vigilante now came under the control of the landing safety officer (LSO) standing on a platform at the aft port corner of the flight deck. Monitoring the plane’s glide slope as it approached the carrier, the LSO—who was able to speak to the pilot by a handheld telephone over the ship’s radio frequency—could order corrections, depending on whether the plane was high or low or not lined up on the imaginary centerline of the deck. The LSO made the call as to whether the plane was good to land. If he decided no-go, he would “pickle the trigger” in his right hand, activating two vertical rows of flashing red lights on either side of the meatball to order a wave-off. The plane would then have to pass over the ship, climb to 600 feet, and go around for another try.

The LSO saw why the Vigilante pilot did not see the ball. “You’re low.”