Philip Chinnery
A vignette from America’s Vietnam War, 1960–1975. Ten miles from the Laotian border, Kham-Duc was a Special Forces base which, on 12 May 1968, was overrun by NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and accordingly evacuated. Except, by a military blunder, three American special forces soldiers were then inserted back into the camp. Their rescue won a Medal of Honor for pilot Colonel Joe M. Jackson.
As the advancing NVA infantry took over the camp, a near-tragedy occurred. A C-130 flown by Lieutenant Colonel Jay Van Cleef was inexplicably instructed by the airborne control centre to land the three-man combat control team which had already been evacuated earlier in the day. Van Cleef protested that the camp was almost completely evacuated, but the control centre insisted that the team be returned and left.
Obediently Van Cleef landed his aircraft, and the three controllers ran from the ship towards the burning camp. He waited patiently for another two minutes for passengers expecting to be evacuated, and when none appeared he slammed the throttles open and took off. He duly notified the control ship that they had taken off empty, and was shocked to hear the control ship then report to General McLaughlin that the evacuation of Kham Duc was complete. His crew immediately and vehemently disabused the commander and pointed out that the camp was not evacuated, because they had, as ordered, just deposited a combat control team in the camp. There was a moment of stunned radio silence as the reality sank in: Kham Duc was now in enemy hands – except for three American combat controllers.
Meanwhile, Major John W. Gallagher Jr. and the other two controllers took shelter in a culvert next to the runway and started firing at the enemy in the camp with their M-16 rifles. The command post asked a C-123 to try to pick the men up, but as the aircraft touched down it came under fire from all directions. The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred J. Jeannotte Jr., could not see the team anywhere and jammed the throttles forward for take-off. Just before lift-off the crew spotted the three men, but it was now too late to stop. The C-123 took to the air and, low on fuel, turned for home. Jeannotte later received the Air Force Cross for his actions.
Technical Sergeant Mort Freedman described how he, Major Gallagher and Sergeant Jim Lundie reacted when the last Provider took off, leaving the three-man team behind. “The pilot saw no one left on the ground, so he took off. We figured no one would come back and we had two choices: either be taken prisoner, or fight it out. There was no doubt about it. We had eleven magazines among us and were going to take as many of them with us as we could.”
The C-123 behind Jeannotte was being flown by Lieutenant Colonel Joe M. Jackson and Major Jesse W. Campbell. They had left Da Nang earlier in the day to haul some cargo, while Jackson went through the bi-annual check flight that is mandatory for all Air Force fliers. They had been recalled and sent to Kham Duc, arriving as the command ship requested that they make another pick-up attempt. Jesse Campbell radioed, “Roger. Going in.”
Joe Jackson had been a fighter pilot for twenty years before being assigned to transport duty. He had flown 107 missions in Korea and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross. He knew that the enemy gunners would expect him to follow the same flight path as the other cargo planes and decided to call upon his fighterpilot experience and try a new tactic. At 9,000 feet, and rapidly approaching the landing area, he pointed the nose down in a steep dive. Side-slipping for maximum descent, and with power back and landing gear and flaps full down, the Provider dropped like a rock. Jackson recalls: “The book said you didn’t fly transports this way, but the guy who wrote the book had never been shot at. I had two problems, the second stemming from the first. One was to avoid reaching ‘blow up’ speed, where the flaps, which were in full down position for the dive, are blown back up to neutral. If this happened, we would pick up even more speed, leading to problem two – the danger of overshooting the runway.”
Jackson pulled back on the control column and broke the Provider’s descent just above the tree-tops, a quarter of a mile from the end of the runway. He barely had time to set up a landing attitude as the aircraft settled towards the threshold. The debris-strewn runway looked like an obstacle course, with a burning helicopter blocking the way a mere 2,200 feet from the touch-down point. Jackson knew that he would have to stop in a hurry, but decided against using the reverse thrust. Reversing the engines would automatically shut off the two jets that would be needed for a minimum-run take-off. He stood on the brakes and skidded to a halt just before reaching the gutted helicopter.
The three controllers scrambled from the ditch and dived into the aircraft as the surprised enemy gunners opened fire. At the front of the aircraft Major Campbell spotted a 122mm rocket shell coming towards them, and both pilots watched in horror as it hit the ground just 25 feet in front of the nose. Luck was still on their side, however, and the deadly projectile did not explode. Jackson taxied around the shell and rammed the throttles to the firewall. “We hadn’t been out of that spot ten seconds when mortars started dropping directly on it,” he remembers. “That was a real thriller. I figured they just got zeroed in on us, and that the time of flight of the mortar shells was about ten seconds longer than the time we sat there taking the men aboard.” Within seconds they were in the air again and one of the combat team recalled, “We were dead, and all of a sudden we were alive!”
General McLaughlin, who had witnessed the event from overhead, approved nominations for the Medal of Honor for both pilots, who landed safely back at Da Nang to discover that their C-123 had not even taken one hit! In January 1969 Colonel Jackson received the Medal of Honor in a ceremony at the White House; Major Campbell received the Air Force Cross, and the rest of the crew were awarded Silver Stars.