Air Force Community - Air Force Times

History: Heroism across the ages

Thirty years ago, it was impossible to visit a base without seeing a sign that read: “The mission of the United States Air Force is to fly and fight, and don’t you ever forget it.” The origin of this entreaty is not clear, but its meaning is unmistakable. The Air Force is about combat in the sky.        Not everyone in the Air Force flies, however. During one pitched battle in Vietnam, predecessors of today’s Air Force security forces carried out the ground fighting while the Army provided air cover. At any Air Force installation, from the main gate to the flight line to the back shops, airmen in hundreds of specialties perform nonflying duties to support the service’s efforts in air, space and cyberspace. To observe one Air Force job that doesn’t involve flying, just descend to the depths of an intercontinental ballistic missile silo.

But there would be no Air Force without flying and fighting, and successfully carrying out a mission always comes down to the actions of individual airmen — performing as they have been trained to do. These six vignettes, one from each decade of the Air Force’s existence, describe what individual airmen did when the going was rough and the odds were stacked against them. Each is a reminder that there is nothing romantic about the Air Force’s work because, ultimately, the purpose of flying and fighting is to wage war. And as each of these stories illustrates, too often, that requires not only courage but sacrifice.

Hung wing tank over Yalu

High over the Yalu River on May 20, 1951, a jettisoned tank refused to drop from beneath the starboard wing of Capt. James Jabara’s F-86 Sabre. There was no misunderstanding the order pilots had been given: If you can’t get rid of a wing tank, break off and go home. But the sky was full of MiGs, a fight was unfolding in this North Korea sky, and Jabara lived in a world where following orders didn’t matter as much as flying aggressively. Jabara later explained that he felt he could fight with a hung tank and that his flying skill was more important than the condition of his plane.

In wartime, the Air Force needed men such as Jabara more than it needed rulebooks. He was Arab-American, with family ties to Marjayoun, Lebanon. He was born in Oklahoma and raised in Wichita; he called himself a “Kansas farm boy.” Just 5-foot-5, he often puffed on a cigar. It looked like posturing, but Jim Jabara had the hand-eye skills that most fighter pilots only envy. He was “supremely confident,” said his wingman, 2nd Lt. (later Lt. Gen.) William E. “Earl” Brown.

Jabara had already shot down four MiG-15s. Few Americans knew it, but Soviet pilots were at the controls of those MiGs, based at sanctuaries across the Yalu in Manchuria. They, like Jabara, were World War II veterans. The aerial campaign between the F-86 and the MiG-15 was a duel of equals.

Jabara flew straight at a MiG in a head-on pass, which meant the two jets were converging at more than 1,000 mph. His hung right tank held fast, impeding his speed and maneuverability. Jabara fired at the MiG without scoring a hit when his wingman called out three more MiGs behind him.

Jabara was at 25,000 feet, moving at 500 mph, when he opened up again with his Sabre’s six .50-caliber machine guns. His gunfire sawed off the wing of a MiG-15. Seconds later, Jabara opened up on a second MiG and blasted it out of the sky.

He had become the first air ace of the newly independent Air Force with his fifth and sixth aerial victories. In a later combat tour, he would raise his score to 15 to become the war’s second-ranking ace.

Hoisted down to the jungle

Airman 1st Class William H. “Pits” Pitsenbarger was a pararescueman aboard an HH-43F Huskie helicopter. On April 11, 1966, Pitsenbarger’s helicopter was called to evacuate American casualties from the jungle 35 miles east of Saigon, South Vietnam. The Army’s C Company, 16th Infantry, was in a long-running firefight with Viet Cong guerrillas. From overhead, Pitsenbarger volunteered to ride a rescue hoist 200 feet down through triple canopy jungle to help the embattled soldiers. It wasn’t his job, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.

Capt. Harold D. Salem, the HH-43F pilot, sensed “Pits” was lowering himself into a maelstrom. “I quickly took a glance at Pits over my right shoulder and caught his eye for just a moment,” said Salem, now a retired lieutenant colonel. “I nodded my head, and he responded by nodding his head. It was my last glimpse of Pits as another crewmember unplugged the mike cord and began to lower Pits to the ground. Pits had a big grin on his face and held onto his medical kit in his left hand and his M-16 in the other.”

Though he could have ridden home in the HH-43F, Pitsenbarger took up arms with the besieged Army infantrymen. Vicious fighting ensued.

“He risked enemy gunfire to gather and distribute vital ammunition to the American defenders,” said Sgt. Charles S. Navarro, one of the soldiers. “Pits” repeatedly opened himself to enemy fire to care for the wounded. “As he crept from one isolated position to another across the broken perimeter,” Navarro said, “Pitsenbarger fired his M-16, gathered ammunition and tended to wounded men.”

Pitsenbarger saved dozens, including a soldier whose body he shielded with his own during the fight. He could not save himself. Viet Cong gunfire found “Pits.” He gave his life in the protracted battle. Pitsenbarger was posthumously promoted to staff sergeant. In 2000, after his role was extensively studied, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Shot down in Asia

If you got shot down during the Vietnam War, you could be killed, become a prisoner of war or nurse your crippled aircraft back to friendly lines and bail out. Even that last option was fraught with peril.

A veteran of combat in Korea and Vietnam, Lt. Col. (later Lt. Gen.) William E. “Earl” Brown returned to the Vietnam theater in July 1969, joining the 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Udorn, Thailand. On this tour, Brown was shot down.

“We flew the F-4D Phantom II, escorting RF-4C reconnaissance aircraft,” Brown said. “This was during the ‘bombing halt.’ You couldn’t bomb a North Vietnamese gun position unless they fired on you. So the RF-4Cs trolled for antiaircraft fire, and then we struck their AA batteries.”

On March 30, 1970, Brown was aloft with back-seater Lt. Col. Len Melton. “We got hit by AA fire,” Brown said. “I turned toward Thailand. We had lost one engine.”

There was a fire in the aircraft. Nearby, providing support was another F-4D flown by Lt. Col. (later Gen.) Richard B. “Dick” Myers, who would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Brown said: “The point came when we knew we had to get out. There was a problem with the ejection sequence. When the rear canopy went, the airstream held down the front canopy. So we got rid of both before ejecting, but the noise was so loud we couldn’t hear each other. I yelled, ‘Go, go, go!’”

They ejected three miles from the friendly base at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, Brown said. Melton’s chute narrowly missed a part of the plane that was on fire.

When Brown’s chute opened, he was so low he could not get rid of his survival kit, which was supposed to be jettisoned. They landed close to each other, discarded their parachutes and waited to be picked up.

“That’s when Melton looked at me,” Brown said. “‘Brownie,’ he said. ‘Yes, Len?’ ‘We’re getting too old for this s---.’”

Strike on Libya

On April 15, 1986, the Air Force undertook its first combat since Vietnam. Twenty-four F-111F Aardvarks took off from Lakenheath, England, supported by electronic warfare aircraft and tankers. The strike leader, a lieutenant colonel (now a retired colonel) flew an F-111F with the callsign Remit 31. He asked that his name not be used.

“If I close my eyes, I can still remember what it smelled like in the cockpit,” the Remit 31 pilot said. “When you go out to fly, you have a card that goes on your clipboard. There, you write down all the pertinent information about that flight — the weather briefing, the callsigns, tail number, frequencies. I wrote the code words we would use when we came out whether we were successful or not: Frosty Freezer was one of them.”

The U.S. was striking Libya in retaliation for attacks by the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, which was supported by Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. Airmen called the raid Operation Eldorado Canyon.

“We’d been planning for four months,” the Remit 31 pilot said. Plans were intensified after the April 5 terrorist bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin that killed two Americans. “We’d hoped the French government would give us permission to overfly its territory between Britain and Libya. It did not.”

One of the targets of the marathon, 14-hour raid was the Al Azziziyah Barracks, called the “Libyan White House” by U.S. officers, prompting some aircrews to believe they were tasked to kill Gadhafi.

Plans for the raid were a poorly kept secret: A skit on the British television satire “Spitting Image” showed U.S. President Ronald Reagan playing in his bathtub with a toy F-111F.

After the raid, a videotape showed Remit 31’s four bombs landing short of Gadhafi’s house but killing the Libyan leader’s infant daughter and injuring others. Other F-111F bombs mistakenly damaged the French embassy but also killed a leading Abu Nidal terrorist.

One F-111F, call sign Karma 52, was lost on the mission along with pilot Capt. Fernando L. Ribas-Dominicci, who was posthumously promoted to major, and weapons officer Capt. Paul F. Lorence. The raid may have deterred Libyan support of terrorism temporarily; but on Dec. 21, 1988, when Pan American Flight 103 went down in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270, Gadhafi was implicated.

MiG kill near Baghdad

Operation Desert Storm began in the early hours of Jan. 17, 1991. An F-117 Nighthawk dropped the first bomb of the war on a headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The next day, F-15C Eagle pilot Capt. (later, Maj.) Rhory “Hoser” Draeger used an AIM-7M Sparrow missile to take down a MiG-29 Fulcrum south of al-Taqaddum, one of the first of 40 Iraqi aircraft that would fall during the 100-day war.

Draeger’s was one of several early MiG kills that established an extraordinary record of success for the F-15C and for the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing, which had deployed from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

On Jan. 26, Draeger got his second kill, a MiG-23 Flogger. In an interview conducted a few weeks after the war, he described his first kill:

“We were sweeping out in front of a strike package. We were a four-ship. The strike package consisted of F-16s, F-4Gs, EF-111s.

“It was a morning mission. We took off from [Tabuk], tanked, and heard AWACS calling MiGs airborne while we were on the tanker. ‘Bandits southwest, Baghdad, medium altitude.’

“The strike package was going to an airfield west of Baghdad. The bandits were there. They were MiG-29s.

“They had been up for a while and we were thinking that they were low on gas, so we’re saying, ‘Oh, man, they’re heading back towards their airfield now.’”

Draeger’s F-15Cs came under heavy surface-to-air missile attack and gunfire. They jettisoned wing tanks (while retaining centerline tanks), and dived to lower altitude.

“The MiGs got just west of their airfield now and it looked like they were turning into it, but in reality they turned towards us. During this time period, we closed from 40 down to 17 miles. And so, when they made their turn back in, at about 17 miles, I locked up the western man and shot him with one AIM-7.

“Sly Magill locked one up and shot him with two AIM-7s.” Capt. Charles J. “Sly” Magill, a Marine Corps exchange officer, was flight leader. Draeger was in the No. 3 position.

“I saw our missiles from the time they left the aircraft until the time they hit,” Draeger said. “That’s unusual.” Draeger and his fellow F-15C pilots went on to shoot down 38 Iraqi aircraft during the war.

Others said Draeger had a bright future in the Air Force. It was not to be. In March 1995, Draeger and F-15C pilot Michael K. Smith were killed in an automobile accident in Oregon.

Rescue on Roberts Ridge

On March 4, 2002, amid furious fighting at what became known as Roberts Ridge in Afghanistan, a rocket-propelled grenade shot down an Army MH-47E Chinook carrying pararescue jumper Senior Airman Jason D. Cunningham.

As described in Air Force Times by reporter Sean Naylor: “Cunningham was a bright-eyed kid from New Mexico who always had a smile on his face. Married with two children, he had only been a pararescue jumper for eight months, but his infectious enthusiasm had already made him popular with his fellow PJs. Even among the highly trained professionals of the special operations world, Cunningham’s dedication to his job stood out.”

When his aircraft went down, Cunningham sought to give medical aid to Spc. Marc Anderson, but the soldier had already died, hit by small-arms fire as the Rangers began to leave the Chinook.

The downed MH-47E had to be a tempting target to Taliban fighters, but Cunningham stayed inside trying to assist other wounded. He was administering medical aid when a burst of gunfire struck him and inflicted a grave pelvic wound. At first, Cunningham told others amid the ongoing battle that he was all right. Later, according to an Internet site that honors him, Cunningham said, “This is bulls---! I can’t believe they shot me!”

Others say that although gravely wounded, he continued to try to help others. According to Naylor’s report, Cunningham moved another wounded man from the helicopter and to a second outside location while air support arrived.

“Those servicemen here familiar with the battle speak in awed tones about the quality of the close-air support provided by the Air Force during the battle,” Naylor wrote. AC-130 Spectre, F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon warplanes brought down withering fire on the Taliban while supporting the embattled Rangers, Navy SEALs and pararescuemen on the ridge.

There is dispute about whether it was safe to order in another helicopter in daylight, amid intermittent fighting. It wasn’t done. Before helicopters belatedly arrived after dusk, Cunningham succumbed to his wounds.

Critics of the Roberts Ridge battle say Cunningham could have been saved. Pararescuemen speak of their pride that he was one of them. Cunningham was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross for his heroism.