Not all of the ship’s officers were of the same caliber as the squadron commanders. Some, such as the ship’s operations officer and air officers, in key department head spots, were former squadron commanders who were getting in their mandatory shipboard tour of duty. Others, such as the combat information center officer, aviation ordnance officer, and aircraft handling officer were Navy pilots who had failed to screen for a command but were hoping to recoup their chances with a good performance on board the Enterprise in combat. All of them were committed and, in fact, inspired. There were a couple who turned out to be incompetent, however. They were unable to run their divisions or organizations at the level of performance essential for the extraordinarily high tempo combat operations that would be encountered. In these cases, either the executive officer or captain stepped in to troubleshoot the problems and provide special guidance to the officers. That, in most cases, along with constant supervision and good assistants, sufficed to boost the division’s or department’s performance.
All in all, the Enterprise was ready for combat when the carrier arrived at Point Yankee and reported for duty to commander, TG 77.0 on 2 December 1965. The combat veterans among the ship’s company were confident and the commander of the task force was hopeful. Not that any of that really mattered. We were there, committed to joining the battle. There was no other choice. It was our responsibility and ours alone to be ready.
11
The Enterprise
In a priority dispatch from the Gulf of Tonkin, South Vietnam, Rear Adm. Henry Miller, USN, the embarked task group commander, advised the secretary of the navy, “I have the distinct honor and pleasure to announce to you that on the second day of December 1965 at 0720H, the first nuclear-powered task group of your Pacific Fleet and the United States Navy engaged the enemy in South Vietnam.”
The Enterprise had commenced air operations at 0700. The wire service covering the occasion reported that the “carrier’s bridge and every available spot on the superstructure was covered with newsmen and military observers watching this unprecedented first in the history of war on the seas: the use of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in combat operations. With Enterprise’s entrance into combat, a new era was opened before the world.”
The Enterprise marked her combat debut by launching twenty-one Phantoms and Skyhawks in a strike against Vietcong installations near Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. There were rough spots in that first day at war for the “Big E.” A Phantom pilot, obviously shaken by his first exposure to combat, was forced to eject after making seven unsatisfactory landing approaches and then being unable to plug into an airborne tanker for emergency refueling. The pilot was picked up by the carrier’s plane guard helicopter and returned to the Enterprise. He was uninjured in the parachuting but was flown off on the first available carrier on-board delivery transport for transfer back to the States and a naval career in an assignment that did not involve flying. A second Phantom was lost when a premature bomb explosion put holes in the fuel tank and the pilot and radar intercept officer (RIO) ejected over South Vietnam when the tanks ran dry. Soldiers of the Army Special Forces group at Hon Quan arrived thirty-five minutes later and brought in an Air Force rescue helicopter to evacuate the aircrew. By the afternoon, operations had smoothed out and the Enterprise and Air Wing 9 had completed every mission on the daily flight schedule. CVW-9 flew 125 strike sorties on that date, unloading 167 tons of bombs and rockets on the enemy.
THE WAR IN VIETNAM
The United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War was a process of long gestation, quite unlike the immediacy of our sudden and complete immersion in Korea, where the decision to join in a full-blown war against a well-armed, veteran North Korean army was made by the president in a matter of hours.
Our interest in opposing communism in Vietnam began as early as September 1950, when President Truman decided to establish the small U.S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon in tacit support of the French effort to suppress the Communist Viet Minh, who had gained control of the rural and mountainous areas in that part of French Indochina.
Then, early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy directed a major expansion of U.S. military presence in the country, which grew to seventeen thousand advisors in 1963 and included the use of U.S. Army helicopters for the tactical deployment of the South Vietnamese troops against the Vietcong and the invading North Vietnamese.
On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attempted to attack the U.S. destroyer Maddox, which was on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin. With the intervention of aircraft from the carrier Ticonderoga, the torpedo boats were driven off. Two nights later the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy reported being under attack again by hostile torpedo boats while conducting a patrol in the gulf. Radar targets were taken under fire by the destroyers, but darkness and bad weather hampered the search by aircraft dispatched from the Ticonderoga and led by Cdr. Jim Stockdale, CO of VF-53. No visual sighting of enemy craft was made, raising the question of whether this night attack had actually taken place.
Based upon the initial reports of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” President Johnson reacted immediately, ordering the Navy to retaliate. The next day, in Operation Pierce Arrow, the carriers Constellation and Ticonderoga launched sixty-four strike sorties against the torpedo boat bases of Hon Gai, Loi Choi, Quang Tri, and Ben Thuy and the oil storage depot at Vinh. This carrier task group was the only force immediately available for timely retaliation. Ninety percent of the oil storage facility at Vinh was destroyed, in addition to twenty-five P-4 type torpedo boats, more than half of the entire North Vietnamese operational inventory. Two strike aircraft were shot down; an A-1 in which the pilot was lost, and an A-4. The Skyhawk pilot was Ens. Everett Alvarez, who became a prisoner of war (POW) and was repatriated after the Paris Accords in 1973. This was the start of offensive air combat operations over Vietnam, which included Flaming Dart in 1965, Rolling Thunder from 1965 to 1968, and Linebacker in 1972. It was Linebacker II in 1972 that forced Hanoi to sue for a cease-fire. The carriers participated in all of these campaigns and flew more than half of the combat sorties.
Concerned that an air campaign alone might be insufficient to stem the advance of the North Vietnamese military forces into South Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson agreed to deploy U.S. combat ground forces into South Vietnam to prevent the imminent collapse of the army of South Vietnam. In July 1965 he ordered 175,000 combat troops — soldiers and Marines — into South Vietnam.
THE TWO WARS
The United States’ concept of operations for military operations in Southeast Asia was perhaps most succinctly characterized by Gen. William Westmoreland, USA, as “fighting two separate wars.” One war was the engagement in South Vietnam, in which U.S. ground forces, consisting of soldiers and Marines and supported by Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force tactical air, joined the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN), their U.S. advisors, and the South Vietnamese air force and Australian and South Korean troops to battle Communist ground forces. Initially these were the Vietcong, best described as guerrillas: South Vietnamese farmers by day, soldiers by night. But early in this war the North Vietnamese began inserting regular North Vietnamese army troops, replete with heavy artillery and armor, into South Vietnam, where they directly engaged the U.S. and ARVN forces.