General Wilson had one policy that could have been borrowed from one of those antiwar comedies. All of the airplanes due for maintenance in my wing were on a tail number schedule. That meant I had to predict one month in advance, and in the middle of a damned war, exactly when a particular airplane would be needing maintenance. If an airplane was shot up or shot down, the schedule went to hell. General Wilson would park his staff car at the taxi strip and read off the tail numbers of airplanes parading past him from a master list. If fighter 397 failed to show up at the precise time and date when I said it would, he wanted to know why. Man he was driving me nuts. I couldn't schedule an airplane to get shot down. Maybe 397 was hit by a SAM three days before, and that's why 399 was taxiing out instead
Finally, in desperation, I got together with another colonel named Ernie White, who ran the maintenance for my wing, and we devised a plan to beat Wilson's system. By God, if he expected to see 397 leave our maintenance hangar exactly when we said it would, then we would give the general what he wanted. Before an airplane left the maintenance hangar, we repainted the tail number to conform to the general's master list. That way, 397, which may have been blasted out of the sky a week earlier, came sailing past the general's sedan and was checked off. General Wilson never did catch on and later gave me one of the best officer-effectiveness reports I ever received. I'm sure the records never did get straightened out, but I got out of there with my whole skin.
Bud Anderson was also over there as a wing commander, stationed at Okinawa, but he spent most of his time with his squadrons based in Thailand where the living conditions weren't exactly posh. So whenever I flew in to visit, I loaded about two thousand pounds of fruit, grain, and vegetables into the bomb bay of my B-57, and when I landed his crews would laugh and say, "Here comes Yeager in that C-57," which was a cargo plane. As soon as I opened the canopy, the guys would shout up, "What's today's special, Colonel?" I'd say, "Avocados, papayas and rice. And you bastards better eat it all."
Andy and I had earned our share of medals in World War II, so we became kind of cynical about medal awards ceremonies in Vietnam. Christ, that country was about to sink under the weight of bronze and brass. If we flew ten missions in World War II-a six- or seven-hour combat mission each-we earned an Air Medal. If a Vietnam helicopter pilot flew ten combat missions-meaning ten takeoffs and landings with forays into combat zones in between-he also received an Air Medal. And because those pilots could take off and land a dozen times a day, some of them were collecting enough Air Medals to become scrap merchants. Lots and lots of people got many many medals for accomplishing less, if you care to look at the end result. As Andy put it, "Vietnam was a place where you could get a medal or a court-martial quicker than any place else."
Man, that was true. Not long before my tour ended, the Air Force filed court-martial charges against a bird colonel named Jack Broughton, who was a deputy wing commander of F- 105 Thunderchiefs that were fighting in the north. Jack was a helluva commander and a great combat pilot. His guys loved him. A couple of them had come in over Haiphong harbor as a Soviet freighter was off-loading weapons. The Soviets opened fire on them with a deck gun, and Jack's guys fired back. When they returned to base, they told Jack what they had done, and he, in turn, made a serious mistake. He destroyed their gun camera film-the evidence-and told his pilots to keep it quiet.
Meanwhile, the Russians filed a formal complaint, claiming American jets had attacked one of their ships without provocation. The White House queried General Ryan, then Air Force commander in the Pacific, and he launched an investigation. When the Air Force finally confronted Jack, he confessed, and the brass decided to court-martial him and his two pilots. When it came down to finding a colonel who was senior to Jack to head his court-martial board, every bird colonel in Southeast Asia ducked for cover.
Four or five colonels begged off, claiming they were too close to the war, flying up north themselves, to be objective. It was a damned mess and no bird colonel, hoping to be promoted to general some day, wanted to be involved. Everybody from the Joint Chiefs down wanted to nail Broughton and his pilots to make them examples. Nobody wanted to displease the Chief of Staff, but nobody wanted to nail Jack, either, because most of us sympathized. They finally came to me. I had no excuse. I wasn't flying in the north, and my date of rank preceded Jack's by several months. I wouldn't have minded being a general, and I didn't want the Chief of Staff mad at me, either, but somebody had to give Jack a fair shake.
Nobody was proud of his cover-up, but I didn't think he should be made the Air Force's whipping boy. The punishment should fit the crime. And the punishments in this case. could range from the ultimate disgrace of a dishonorable discharge to a fine and a letter of admonishment. To me, the heart of the matter was not what Jack had done, but what his pilots had done, and why.
Fighter pilots would go crazy with frustration watching Russian freighters unloading SAM missiles in Haiphong harbor, knowing that the rules of engagement prevented them from doing a damned thing about it. If those two guys in Jack s outfit had just said, "Screw the rules,' and hit that ship out of sheer anger, then Jack was really stretching things trying to protect guys like that. But if it could be proven that the Soviet ship fired first and Jack's pilots fired back in self-defense, then Broughton was guilty of bad judgment rather than being part of a conspiracy to cover up a serious violation of the rules of combat engagement. There wasn't a responsible officer in the Air Force who didn't believe that a pilot had every right to defend himself, if fired upon, under any circumstances.
Years before, I had got myself caught in the middle of a controversy involving the B-36 bomber. The Air Force wanted it, but Martin Aircraft lobbied hard against it, siding with the Navy, because it was too vulnerable in daylight bombing. General Boyd sent me to Washington to meet with a group of Air Force lobbyists preparing to testify in behalf of the bomber before Congress. I had flown against it as a test pilot in test exercises. In fact, I had made about twenty successful passes against a B-36 with Russ Schleeh at the controls. But an Air Force general tried to get me to say it was a good airplane. He asked, "What if you had tried to get at it at night or in bad weather" I said, "I probably couldn't find that thing without radar." The general got angry and said, "Then why don't you change your testimony?" I told him that wasn't the way it happened. The weather was good and I never missed finding the B-36. It was a piece of cake. At that point the general gave up in disgust: "You're doing more damage to us than the Navy." I was upset and called General Boyd. He told me to come on home. "Never compromise your integrity," he said. "Tell it the way it is."
That's exactly what I did in the Broughton case. A court-martial is not run by civilian rules of law but by the military code of justice. Together with four other officers, we sat as a five-judge panel, with a representative from the Judge-Advocate General's office on hand to advise us on the rules of procedure. The Air Force had conducted a thorough investigation, and the two-star general in charge appeared for the prosecution to recount the details of how Jack had destroyed the gun camera film. But when the young captain defending Jack tried to question the general about other matters, including making the entire investigation available to the court, the twostar refused. I said to him, "General, we're here to conduct a fair trial. You can't pick and choose what information you are willing to share with this court." The general reared up and said, "The hell I can't." It was that bad on the Air Force side. I said, "The entire Air Force report must be submitted to this court." Not only did he refuse, but he got up and stomped out.