It was 46 years ago, a different kind of plane, different technology, different circumstances…
We were tasked to a SAR (Search and Rescue) mission. Our ship was pulled off our patrol station and we steamed at flank speed towards the DMZ, It was only a few miles to the west of us. It was night, and I was on mess duty.still wearing my apron and paper hat over my dungarees, so I had no duty station for this evolution. I went up to the signal bridge with a cup of coffee and a deck of Luckies to watch the show.
Our helo had been lost a week or so earlier, a training accident. They had shot off the tip of a rotor while practicing with their door gun and went down (we rescued the crew OK, but the helo had not been replaced yet). So we were to assist a search already in progress, in person. We were the only ship there. Somewhere up ahead, a Phantom returning from a raid in the North had ditched in the sea, about five miles off the coast of Vietnam. There was no point in sneaking up, by the time we got there there was all sorts of activity going on. Helos (we didn’t call ‘em choppers like the Army guys did) were shining searchlights on the water and fixed-wing aircraft from the carriers on Yankee Station were dropping parachute flares all over the place. We rigged our floodlights and slowed down in the debris field, the beams darting and probing the dark.
I hadn’t realized it, but an F4 is mostly plastic. It looked like styrofoam, oddly shaped white chunks of it, each about the size of a man’s head, bobbing around in the greasy calm sea. They were all over the place, and visible easily in the light from the flares and spots. We were only five miles from the coast and if Charlie had any artillery there we were sitting ducks. But there was no shooting. In the dark, without spotters, we wouldn’t have been able to return fire anyway.
After only a few minutes we found a helmet floating in the water. It later turned out to belong to the jet’s back seat guy. He hadn’t made it out. A few minutes after that, we found the pilot, bobbing around on his back in a tiny life raft, like a baby in a car seat, legs and arms dangling in the water. He had managed to bail out and he was uninjured. His radio beacon led us right to him.
The skipper gently brought the ship alongside him, port side to, and Chief Douglas winched him aboard. As soon as he was on deck, a seaman leaned over the rail and fired his M-1 into the raft to send the inflatable to the bottom so it would not complicate our search-or leave the Reds a trophy.
But the pilot must have reported his No. 2 hadn’t survived, because in a few minutes the lights went off, like someone throwing a switch, the planes and helos vanished, we went dark, and we turned abruptly and steamed at flank speed back east, into the sheltering blackness.