Letters From Men Experiencing Korea and Vietnam

by James "Cotton" Hildreth

I was sixteen when I went into the Merchant Marines. I served sixteen months as a Ship’s Radio Officer. When I became eighteen, I joined the Army and served a hitch as an enlisted man, then got out of service. I was called back into service when the Korean War started. I went into the Air Force in 1952 and became a fighter pilot, and it was my career for the next thirty years.

For the next ten years, I served as a flight commander in several fighter squadrons, flying the F-84, F-86, F-100 and F-105. This was the most exciting, rewarding, and enjoyable ten years of my life. During the hottest period of the Cold War we developed and exercised world-wide deployment for our fighter aircraft, using aerial refueling, and responded to numerous military threats with a show of force in such places as the Taiwan Straits and Lebanon in the Middle East.

I was assigned to Fighter Requirements in the Pentagon when the military buildup in Vietnam began, and I volunteered to go. I think we all wanted to go. It was what we had trained to do since we took the oath. When my request was approved, I called my friend, Dudley Foster, in Rated Officer Assignments in Personnel and told him I had been released from my Pentagon tour and wanted an F-105 assignment to Southeast Asia. He told me that since I had not flown F-105 in three years I would have to retrain in the F-105 and that I would have to wait five or six months for a school slot. This was in 1966, and I didn’t think the war would last that long.

I asked, "Well, what aircraft do you have that I can go over in now?"

And added, "I don’t care what it is. I’m ready to go."

He said, "I just had a cancellation in an A-1 assignment."

I didn’t know what an A-1 was. He told me it was a conventional Navy attack aircraft that the Marines used in the Korean War for close-air support. The Marines were converting their attack units to A-4s and giving the A-1s to the Air Force to use for Air Commando missions, principally close-air support, search and rescue, and covert mission he couldn’t talk about. It was really not what I had in mind, but I wanted to go so badly I took the assignment.

I arrived at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam as Commander of the First Air Commando Squadron in March, 1967, and ended my tour a year later during the Tet Offensive.

I have mixed feelings, mostly bad. From the onset of the buildup in Vietnam, it was clear that there was no military solution to the conflict. We should never have become so extensively involved. The volume of ordnance we expended over an area about the size of California was more than the total ordnance expended in all the previous armed conflicts in the history of our country, and it had no appreciable effect on the outcome in Southeast Asia. The total of all the targets destroyed was not worth the life of one of my pilots, and I lost eight of them in ten months and twelve of my twenty-two assigned aircraft.

It was difficult to show the bean-counters and political warriors in Washington positive military results for all our casualties and materiel losses. So the American military leadership in South Vietnam determined that bodies destroyed was a good gauge. BODY-COUNT became the measure of a ground commander’s success. It should not then have been surprising that this policy led to the civilian massacre at the village of Mylai.

The vast majority of the A-1 missions were in Laos: flying armed reconnaissance of North Vietnamese infiltration routes into South Vietnam, search and rescue missions for downed air crews, and covert support for special ground forces operations.

Our aircraft was very slow and heavily armed. I mention this because all of my previous experience had been in high-performance jet fighters where the pilot never really sees the people who die in the target he destroys. In the A-1 you actually see the people shooting at you, and, at the time, feel the satisfaction of knowing you’ve killed someone who was trying to kill you.

One particular mission is as vivid in my memory now as the day it happened. I was leading a flight of two A-1s on an armed reconnaissance mission, but shortly after take-off we were diverted to a target on the coast of I Corps (northern quarter of South Vietnam.) On arriving in the target area, we contacted the FAC (forward air controller) who pointed out the target. It was a huge village of three or four hundred houses, probably twelve to fifteen hundred people. It was between the main north-south highway and the ocean, a pretty, clean village. I asked the FAC why the village was a target.

The FAC said, "That is a Vietcong village."

I said, "How do you know its a Vietcong village?"

He said, "Well we saw three Vietcong run in there."

Across the road from the village was a rice paddy.

He said, "We saw them run out of the rice paddy when we flew over, and they ran into the village."

I said, "And you want us to wipe out this whole village to get three Vietcong? How do you know they were Vietcong? Were they armed?"

He said, "They had on black pajamas."

All of the farmers working in the fields had on black pajamas. That was their dress. And they carried tools like rakes and hoes.

He said, "They were armed."

I said, "How do you know they weren’t carrying rakes and hoes?"

He said, "Don’t argue with me. I’ve got the provincial governor in the back seat, and he says that is a Vietcong village."

I said, "Well, I’ll go down and look around and see if I can draw any fire."

So we went down and flew over real low and slow. There were children in the courtyard, smiling and waving at us. This village had obviously been there for years, and it had never been touched. I pulled back up; and I said, "Okay, what are your instructions?"

He said, "The wind is blowing off-shore; so put your napalm down on that first row of houses, and the wind will carry the fire across the entire village."

So I said, ""Fine."

I pulled around and told my wingman to come in from one side and I would attack from the other. We would start our attack from opposite corners. I was coming in toward the corner hut. I looked up at the other end, and he had moved over the road and dropped his napalm on the road. As I approached my release point, a woman with a tiny baby strapped on her back, holding the hand of a small child three or four years old, came running from the hut. I pulled my aircraft over and dropped the napalm in a ditch beside the highway.

The FAC screamed and raised holy hell because he had this governor in the aircraft with him. He said, "You know I’m going to report you for this!"

I said, "You don’t have to. I’ll be on the ground before you are, and I’ll report myself."

When we landed, my wingman walked over to my aircraft and said, "Sir, I have three small grandchildren, and I could never have faced them again if I had followed those orders." He said he didn’t want to fly any more combat missions. Later, I had him transferred to a unit with an airborne command and control mission.

I went into Squadron Operations and called the Command Center at Seventh air Force and talked to the director, a brigadier general I had served with several years before. I told him what happened.

He said, "Damn, Cotton, don’t you know what’s going on? That village didn’t pay their taxes. That lieutenant colonel, a provincial commander, is teaching them a lesson."

On returning from an interdiction mission several days later, we flew over the target area. The village had been totally destroyed. Nothing but a large, black, burned area remained. I’m sure when the FAC got a fast-mover (high-performance jet) on the target and destroyed the village the report read: Target 100 percent destroyed, body-count 1200 KBA (killed by air) confirmed.

I’m a grandfather now, and I can’t watch my grandchildren at play or carry them in my arms without thinking of that village in Vietnam.

(From "Salute to Veterans," Mary Lewis Deans, Editor. Salute to Veterans 1996: Oral histories from veterans and their relatives, gathered by the Nash County Cultural Center’s Oral History Project)

by richard manning

  March, 1999

....the above : a most timely, honestly eloquent article hopefully giving pause to our people - it's possible for some - about how they might be able to, really should, reflect on our present aggression in bombing Yugoslavia. As we have also bombed thirteen other countries just since World War Two. And consider what may follow when our ‘heroic’ military pilots, and others, from the Philippines 1947, to Korea and Indochina, to several Middle East countries and the Balkans unquestioningly obey orders to carry out bombing operations in predominantly civilian areas.

As safe Americans at home, we keep seeming to forget the lame excuses we heard at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where we hung military and civilian moral cowards who committed crimes against civilians and then excused themselves as only "following orders".

It is from my specific knowledge of targets in the II Corps area of Vietnam where I worked, very like the one described above, that makes me, still today, wonder how it was that so very, very few other pilots even questioned, never mind refused, to bomb the many similar targets we hit in both North and South Vietnam (not counting the slaughter in Laos and Cambodia); and wonder that the enemy we created in Vietnam, from 1947 to 1975, was able to refrain from seriously maltreating or executing the US pilots they shot down while bombing so many civilian targets - targets often not very different than the one herein described, having living there only older people, women and children.

Take my word for it, the infamous My Lai was not a ground attack aberration, to say the least. Just ask our Korean mercenary lackeys, who were specially infamous for efficiently wiping out entire civilian villages…, and who often boasted of liking it, their game of 'totaling' villages, burning everything to charcoal and then bringing in the cover-up bulldozers : so leaving no Mai Lai type evidence behind.

PLUS the number of ‘My Lai's perpetrated from the air as with this above village described by Colonel Hildreth, with several hundreds of dead, happened thousands of times while we were bombing the North and South parts of Vietnam. I repeat, thousands of times, not merely hundreds. That’s how evil our Indochina world record tonnage of bombs was to the people on the ground who never say their killers' faces.

I can tell you from personal experience that the fighter pilot who wrote this article, Colonel Hildreth, was a major exception, for almost all the pilots never were able to get up the moral courage to do as he did; to either fudge, avoid or disobey orders. They preferred another notch on their gun belt and promotion reports.

We had best remember this courageous man's story when proudly listening to the roar of our military juggernaut now attacking Yugoslavia, or whenever we think of other countries we have allowed it to be sent - from Panama to Grenada to Kuwait to Iraq to Sudan to Afghanistan to Kosovo. And to try imaging where will be the next civilian city Eisenhower’s well noted "Military Industrial Complex" wants to send our career pilots and their ships : all those military men, as this present writer quite correctly and eloquently indicates out, who can murder without having ever to look into the eyes of their victims.

Until our country faces up this technocratic war of scheming and aggression now so often perpetrated by our CIA and Military officers - - as they protect and enhance their careers in blindly obeying the corrupt leaders macromanaging our "National Security" designed psychosis of profiteering - - the American ethos will continue to be degraded, and the national commonweal will further rot out from the center of the greedy Enemy Within.

richard manning

NB to Colonel Hackworth of "Defending America", and Admiral Moorer of "Broken Arrow" : your moral responsibility in this situation, as experienced officers now outside government, is even clearer. And of course more critical, maybe difficult. For once a professional like yourself stands morally tall against government lies and corruption, he can not simply rest easy and wait out the most serious challenges to the integrity of the patriotic flag he so avidly waves about. Bon courage in standing up for America.

by David Martin

28 Mar 1999

Richard Manning,

Thanks for spreading the article around with your great added commentary. For your information I am a former ROTC lieutenant who had the good fortune to be sent to Korea, 1967-1968, instead of Vietnam. Even Korea was pretty hot at that time if you had the misfortune of being up on the DMZ, which I was not. Afterwards, I was one of the organizers of the North Carolina Veterans for Peace on the UNC Chapel Hill campus, though I am surely as anti-Communist as the next guy.

The Nash County oral history book, by the way, has at the end of the Hildreth piece a group photo of the 12 small, cute grandchildren of "Cotton" and Beth Baker Hildreth. If you can look at that photo after reading that article without leaving a tear or two on the page, you are a stronger man than I am.

A further personal note. I had lunch at the officers’ club in Kadena AFB, Okinawa, in February of 1968 where I sat down with a couple of Air Force officers. I was on mid-tour leave doing Asian sight-seeing using space-available flights. One of the fly boys expressed great envy of and admiration for the "pacification" techniques employed by our Korean allies in Vietnam. "If they get one shot from a vill, they just level the place," he said. I was young and stupid and they both outranked me, so I just nodded agreement, as I recall. What vicious rot that was!

Oh yes. Korea, too, was quite different from what we have been told. If you don’t know about it already, go to http://www.kimsoft.com and read up on the Cheju massacre of 1948 and see the other revealing things there.

Dave