The Rustics’ biggest problem was language. Few of the Cambodian army units had anyone who spoke English and none of the Rustics spoke Cambodian. Carrying English-speaking Cambodians as interpreters worked, but there weren’t enough of them and not all of them understood aviation terminology. Language was still a barrier to communications.
The solution came as the result of Cambodia’s heritage as part of French Indochina. Most educated Cambodians spoke French as a second language. All Air Force units in South Vietnam were scoured for French-speaking Americans of any rank to volunteer for a highly classified mission. Pilots were particularly wanted.
French-speakers came trickling in as they were located. The usual procedure consisted of an interview with an officer who wanted them to volunteer for something without giving them any idea what it was. He probably didn’t know himself. Those that accepted were interviewed in French by a Cambodian officer to make sure they were actually fluent in French. That was the entire process. There were no application forms, orders, or training schools. The paperwork officially transferring them to the Nineteenth Tactical Air Support Squadron (TASS) would take a while. The next step was issuing them a flying suit, survival vest, parachute harness, .38 caliber revolver, helmet, and a barf bag. That was when they learned they had volunteered to fly combat missions. That was followed by a short briefing on how to climb into the backseat of an OV-10(a little tricky the first time), how to use the radios and the ejection seat, and what things not to touch. Some of them were flying their first combat mission over Cambodia within a few hours of volunteering. That’s how badly they were needed.
For some of them, the barf bag was the most important piece of equipment they carried. The OV-10 was fully aerobatic and could pull as many as eight G’s while maneuvering.1 Air sickness was common until the interpreters became used to the stresses imposed by a high performance aircraft.
Initially, only six volunteers could be found; all enlisted men. Among them were a security police dog-handler, a radio operator, an air traffic controller, a civil engineer, a transportation specialist, and a clerk typist. A mixed group, to be sure, but they shared some common characteristics. They were all volunteers. They were dedicated to their country and the U.S. Air Force. They all fell in love with the Rustic mission and many of them asked to extend their tour of duty in Vietnam. None of them quit.
Sgt. Jerry Dufresne, Rustic India,2 was a radar operator at the radar control facility in Saigon when the word came down the chain of command to find French-speakers. Jerry’s supervisor knew he spoke French and sent him to Seventh Air Force headquarters for an interview. Jerry passed the interview by volunteering for the assignment and demonstrating his French to a Cambodian officer. Next, he met Lieutenant Colonel Lester, the Rustic commander, and was introduced to the pilot he would fly with that evening. Within hours he flew his first OV-10 mission to Kompong Thom.
M. Sgt. Ron Dandeneau, Rustic Foxtrot, was located through the USAF Military Personnel Center (MPC) computer system. The computer knew he was a qualified French linguist because he was tested every three years to maintain his proficiency status. The computer also knew where he was. He was close by in the Traffic Management Office at Tan Son Nhut. He likewise passed the interviews and joined the Rustics. Because of his seniority, he became the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of the enlisted interpreters.
“They were all volunteers and that made my job as their supervisor very easy. Colonel Lester was a great commander and made sure that I got everything I needed for my people.”
T. Sgt. Joseph R. Vaillancourt, Rustic Hotel, was a communications specialist who was recruited in a Seventh Air Force men’s room by a French-speaking USAF colonel. Initially, he was noncommittal, but twenty minutes later another colonel called him and asked him to attend a briefing that afternoon.
After demonstrating his fluency in French and listening to a twenty-minute briefing, he was outfitted with flight gear and introduced to his first Rustic pilot, Maj. Richard Rheinhart, Rustic 02.
“Just call me Dick,” he said casually.
Four hours after his recruitment in the men’s room, Joe was strapped into his first OV-10. Departure time was 1730 and the target was approximately three hundred North Vietnamese regulars caught out in the open in Cambodia. Dick Rheinhart put in two sets of fighters dropping napalm, and then brought in a Shadow (AC-119) gunship who sprayed the area with his guns. Between the napalm and the tracer bullets, it was a spectacular sight.
Joe also learned what it was like to be shot at. The enemy machine gunners also used tracer bullets and he could see them arcing up toward the airplane.
“I had never been so excited in my life! It was like my first time at the circus when I was a kid. I knew right then that I was hooked on the Rustic mission.”
Recruitment took many forms. A1c. Walt Friedhofen and his boss, Sgt. Gil Bellefeuille, were radio operators and roommates at the Third Direct Air Support Center (III DASC) near Bien Hoa. They both spoke French and they were helping establish the Rustic radio relay station on Nui Ba Den mountain (see Chapter 6). They knew the Rustics were looking for French-speakers. Gil was going to spend some time at the relay station and he suggested to Walt that he sign up with the Rustics and find out what was going on. Walt did that and became Rustic Romeo. A month later, he tracked Gil down and got him to join the Rustics, too. Gil was Rustic Tango.
Sgt. Pierre M. Ligondè (Rustic Juliet) was a cook who was recruited right off the Bien Hoa mess hall serving line by another backseater. S. Sgt. George Larson essentially recruited himself. He was a clerk in the Nineteenth TASS orderly room at Bien Hoa when he overheard Ron Dandeneau speaking French with a Cambodian officer. Sgt. Larson introduced himself (in French) and was recruited immediately. He abandoned his typewriter for his new call sign of Rustic Uniform.
Capt. Clint Murphy was the administrative officer of the 504th Tactical Air Support Group (TASG) at Cam Ranh Bay. The 504th was the parent group for all of the FAC squadrons in South Vietnam and Thailand. By August, the Rustics were growing and consuming a lot of 504th TASG resources. Capt. Murphy attended a briefing on their progress, the air war in Cambodia, and their need for French speakers to communicate with the Cambodians. Since he spoke French, he volunteered immediately, but didn’t expect to be accepted. He thought there would be more and better qualified people available. He was accepted immediately and was surprised to learn that besides Lt. Lou Currier, he was the only other French-speaking officer in the Rustics. Because of his rank, he became the officer in charge (OIC) of the backseaters. He moved to Bien Hoa and was assigned Rustic Charlie as his call sign.
As the Rustics grew, the need for interpreters also grew. The entire Air Force was searched for French speakers who hadn’t yet been to Vietnam and would volunteer for a highly classified assignment. Sgt. Roger J. Hamann (Rustic Yankee) was located at Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, where he was driving a fuel truck.
I had taken a French language test in basic training and I had already volunteered to go to Vietnam or Thailand because I was tired of being in the middle of nowhere in Michigan pumping gas into B-52s. Call it ignorance or stupidity, but I just wanted to do something a little more meritorious while serving my country. The next thing I knew, I was going to survival schools, altitude chamber training, and so on, still with no idea as to what I was going to be doing. I never dreamed of actually flying combat missions.
Capt. Hank Keese was an A-37 fighter pilot stationed at Bien Hoa. The Military Personnel Center at Randolph AFB, Texas, discovered that he spoke French and sent him a letter asking if he would volunteer to be a backseater in a secret combat operation in Southeast Asia. Since Hank had already flown combat support missions for the Rustics, he knew exactly what secret operation they were talking about. His A-37 squadron was closing down and he was in danger of being sent to Saigon to complete his tour as a staff officer at Seventh Air Force. Not if he could help it. He knew Lou Currier, knew that Lou’s tour would be up in another month, and knew the Rustics had no replacement French-speaking pilot in sight.
Hank flew two A-37 missions in the morning and went over to the Rustic Operations building still wearing his sweaty flying suit. He found Lt. Col. Jim Lester and asked him for a job. He told Jim he spoke French, but didn’t want to be a backseater. He wanted the job that would be open when Lou Currier left.
Jim shook his head. “Sorry, but we can’t send you to pilot training just because you speak French. It’s the backseat or nothing.”
Hank looked down at his name patch, the one with pilot’s wings on it, to make sure it hadn’t come unstitched from his flying suit. “Sir, I’m already a pilot and I just finished flying two A-37 missions in Cambodia for the Rustics this morning.”
Jim stared at him, blinked once, stood up, stuck out his hand, and said, “Welcome to the Rustics.” Hank was transferred immediately to the Nineteenth TASS and sent to Da Nang for checkout in the OV-10.
Capt. Doug Aitken was also tracked down by the MPC computer. He had been tested for both French and Spanish proficiency in 1965 when he entered the Air Force. In the fall of 1970, MPC found him at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, where he was halfway through Squadron Officer’s School. They tried to pull him out of school and send him to Vietnam as a French-speaking pilot, but wouldn’t tell him what the assignment was. The lieutenant colonel who was explaining all this to him didn’t know either.
“But, sir,” Doug said, “I haven’t spoken French in five years!”
The colonel didn’t crack a smile. “Practice, my son. Practice.” Doug negotiated an agreement that allowed him to finish school and go immediately to OV-10 school. He joined the Rustics in May 1971. By that time, Hank Keese’s tour was up and Doug became the only French-speaking Rustic pilot for several months.
Eventually, the Air Force realized that the demand for interpreters was going to exceed the supply. They began sending pilots to language school at Monterey, California, to learn French before they were trained as FACs. It was late 1971 before those pilots began showing up.
Because of the initial shortage of French-speakers, the group was augmented by English-speaking Cambodians who were sent, usually four at a time, for thirty days of duty with the Rustics. This helped both the Rustics and the Cambodian Army as their radio operators learned how to talk to the pilots and how air support worked. Most of them were young Army Sgt.s who were inexperienced but well educated. They were absolutely dedicated to their country and their quiet dignity was a contrast to the boisterous behavior of the Americans. When the Rustics moved to Bien Hoa, the Cambodians lived in the same hooch3 with the Rustic pilots and the French-speaking backseaters. The hooch bar was a lively place with three languages bouncing off the walls.
Many friendships were formed with these Cambodians. When they returned to their units, it was common to hear them use their Rustic call sign when talking to a Rustic FAC overhead. These Cambodians gave the Rustics a good basic understanding of Cambodia, its people, its government, its military, and its enemies.
This original group of backseaters was absolutely essential to the success of the Rustic mission. Without them, there was no mission. Some of them jokingly referred to the pilots as “those really nice guys who drive us to work each day.”
Although the backseaters were there primarily to interpret, they all got involved in the mission itself and became part of what were very efficient two-man FAC teams. Normally, the FAC job was a one-man operation and the pilots were trained to do it all themselves. Typically, the OV-10 pilot would strap a small clipboard with frequencies, call signs, codes, and whatever else he needed for that mission to his knee. He would keep track of what was going on by writing notes on the inside of the canopy with a grease pencil. His map bag (containing more than one hundred maps) was tucked to the left of the gunsight on the glare shield above the instrument panel. He kept the binoculars and the camera with the telephoto lens to the right of the gunsight. If he was carrying a tape recorder, that sat on the radio panel to his right and plugged into his helmet. He had five communications radios on board and he could listen to any combination of them. He always listened to at least two of them at once and could select whichever one he wanted to talk on just by turning a wafer switch.4 He had learned to do that by feel and could tell which radio was talking to him by the way it sounded. Each type of radio had a distinctive background tone and level of clarity.
The OV-10 was a very stable airplane and the FAC could fly it with either hand or no hands at all while he used the binoculars or camera. Even though the pilot could do it all himself, it was a very busy job. Anyone occupying the backseat was not allowed to just sightsee. He was expected to pitch in and help. The French-speakers figured that out immediately and rapidly became part of the team. Some of the backseaters got so good at it that the pilots would give them the map bag, the camera, and the binoculars and count on them to take notes for the intelligence debriefing. Once the backseaters learned how the mission worked, they realized that the pilot didn’t need a word-for-word translation. He needed an understanding of what was happening on the ground and where the friendlies and the enemy were. The backseaters learned how to read maps, plot coordinates, and get the information the pilot needed.
Because they could communicate, the backseaters formed a strong bond with the Cambodians. During times when there was nothing going on, the conversation between the backseater and the Cambodian radio operator on the ground turned to homes, wives, children, backgrounds, ambitions, and so on. The pilots missed much of this as they were rarely included in the conversations. Eventually, the backseaters and the Cambodians were able to recognize each other by voice alone and seldom needed call signs.
The backseaters also got free flying lessons. One of the best kept secrets in aviation is how easy an airplane is to fly if the weather is good and the air is smooth. Besides, reasoned the pilot, if I’m wounded, having a backseater who can fly the machine home might be a good idea.
Another unadvertised reason for the flying lessons was that they allowed the pilot to sneak in a short nap on a boring part of the flight. Occasionally, but not often, the whole mission was boring. Walt Friedhofen was flying with a Rustic OV-10 pilot over a huge water convoy on the Mekong River. The Mekong could handle oceangoing vessels as far as Phnom Penh and this was one of the methods used to transport supplies to Cambodia. (This is described in greater detail in Chapter 8.) On this day, they had no radio contact with the convoy and there was nothing going on. The pilot turned the controls over to Walt, who flew up and down the river for about half an hour. Suddenly Walt realized that the pilot hadn’t said a word in a while and was probably fast asleep. Walt knew that they burned fuel first from the belly tank so it could be jettisoned if necessary, but he didn’t know if the system would automatically switch to the wing tanks when the belly tank was empty.
He decided he better wake up the pilot, which was a matter of shaking the plane hard enough to get his attention. (He probably could have done it by just pulling back on the power. Sleeping pilots are very sensitive to that sound, or lack of it.)
The pilot came alive just in time to switch fuel tanks and went right back to sleep. It was nice to have someone in the backseat who you really trusted.
Some of the backseaters became very good at VR (visual reconnaissance). VR was an important part of the FAC job as it was a primary source of knowledge about enemy activities. It was best done by someone who flew daily over the area and could note small changes to the countryside and the activities of whoever was down there. That pretty well described what FACs and their backseaters did when they weren’t actively conducting war. The pilots were trained to do it, but it was all new to the backseaters. They actually obtained some manuals on the subject, set up a training class, and taught themselves VR theory and technique.
During airstrikes, the backseaters had a small advantage over the pilots. As the pilot pulled off the target after a marking pass, the enemy would frequently come out of their hiding places to shoot at the plane as it pulled up. Due to the way the OV-10 canopy was curved, the backseater could see more of this than the pilot could. When he told the pilot what was happening behind them, the pilot could roll the plane inverted and pull the nose through (a maneuver called a “Split S” because it looks like the bottom half of an S) and bring his guns to bear on the enemy.
Backseaters also brought with them a set of young eyes. Almost all of them were in their late teens or early twenties. As one of the Rustic pilots, I didn’t wear glasses and I could pass the annual vision test, but I was nearly forty years old. One time we were cruising along at about 3,000 feet when my backseater came on interphone.
“Hey, look! There’s an elephant down there!”
“Where?”
“Right there. To the left. Just north of that road intersection.”
“You’re making this up. I don’t see any elephant.”
“No, really. It’s there!”
I rolled the plane over and pointed the nose at the road intersection. At about 1,500 feet I finally saw the elephant, a really big one. Suddenly I felt old. That kid back there could see a lot better than I could.
One problem was the matter of recognition of the backseaters. The job of interpreter did not exist anywhere on any Air Force list of specialties and it was not one of the authorized aircrew positions. The pilots, as aircrew members, were all receiving flying pay (technically called “hazardous duty pay”) and collecting an Air Medal for each twenty-five combat missions flown. Although the backseaters were told right at the beginning that they weren’t eligible for any of that, it seemed unfair, as they were taking exactly the same risks as the pilots. They were flying a steady six days a week, which should have earned them about one Air Medal a month. Jim Lester tried to solve the problem.
“When I was commander, I requested official recognition for the backseaters. I said, ‘These guys are flying combat missions every day. They should be getting flying pay and wearing aircrew member wings. I went in with a strong written argument to Seventh Air Force, but nothing happened. They were very valuable to us. They were first-class people who did a great job and fully earned the recognition.”
Recognition would eventually come, but it would take a long time. Actually, what they were doing was entirely voluntary. Not only were they not recognized for it, but they couldn’t even explain what they were doing to outsiders. Some of them wrote fake letters to their families telling them how dull it was in Vietnam. They could have just quit, turned in their flying gear, and gone back to their previous job.
None of them did that.