The Misty Experiment: The Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Presentation of The Misty Experiment: The Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail has been made possible in part by... [ominous music] DON SHEPPERD: You had a bunch of young guys that were, I don't want to use the word "courageous" because that's a silly word.

But they're guys that would do anything to accomplish the mission we were given, which was an impossible mission; which was to stop the flow of arms and material coming south.

When we couldn't hit it where we should have hit it, which was in North Vietnam at the ports.

When the nation was not willing to take that risk then we tried to pick them off truck by truck coming south and that's the way we lost our guys, lost our airplanes, had people shot down every day.

[ominous music] SHEPPERD: Well Misty was situated in two different places.

First of all when we were attacking targets and directing, directing aircraft on targets in North Vietnam, we were out of Phu Cat, which is up in the northern part of, of South Vietnam.

It was about 30 minutes to get into Route Pack One, which was our area.

Later on, in 1969 the aircraft actually moved to Tuy Hoa, and they operated mainly in Laos out of Tuy Hoa.

Misty was a top-secret operation which meant that word was whispered under the tables in those days a lot, so we knew they had this operation going up over North Vietnam that was looking for targets.

MICK GREENE: Other people besides Mistys didn't have any idea of what we were doing.

So, you know, I couldn't even talk to other pilots about it.

I said-- other than the extent that uh, yeah I was a Fast FAC in North Vietnam and they'd say, "Oh, that's nice."

RAY BEVIVINO: But the Intel guys who went over to work with Misty just gave up in frustration.

It was hard work, long hours.

And, like, my immediate predecessor who was a First Lieutenant thought that they were all crazy.

He just thought they were crazy.

DEAN ECHENBERG: The Misty pilots were really a breed apart.

I'm not saying they didn't have the same kinds of psychological problems that the rest of the pilots had that I saw in Vietnam, but somehow they were tougher.

I mean, you have to understand that the guys that got into the squadron uh, volunteered to be there.

STEVE AMDOR: With very few exceptions, everybody was a volunteer.

You know, and the guys volunteered knowing that 30 percent of the guys got shot down.

CHUCK SHAHEEN: I was approached to be a Misty.

I wanted no part of it.

[laughs] [ominous music] RON FOGELMAN: There were really two different air wars if you will.

I mean, in South Vietnam the primary use of air power was in the form of close air support.

Whereas in the North, it was more of an offensive kind of air power which is where air power was shackled.

P.J.

WHITE: We were aware of what's happening.

We were also aware that the war was being run pretty much out of the White House, and very micromanaged and what was called gradualism.

I don't know whether anybody's mentioned gradualism is the thing where you kick them in the shins.

If they don't bark, you kick them in the-- That is not the way war is fought.

If you're not going to fight the war, well, and we all knew that.

TONY MCPEAK: The Army ran the air war in Vietnam.

The Joint headquarters was MAC V. And that was supposedly a joint headquarters in charge of both the air and ground side.

But that headquarters was an Army headquarters, basically.

There weren't any airmen in influential positions there.

The Air Force tried and tried to get to be the Deputy MACV Commander.

Westmoreland or Abrams deputied to be an Air Force guy.

Never worked.

They always had an Army deputy as well as an Army Commander.

They picked all the in-country targets, the Army Intelligence picked them.

FOGELMAN: You should have been able to pick out the strategic targets, the tactical targets that air power could destroy to to uh, shape the outcome of the war.

When you were not permitted to do that, you were just fighting everything on the fringes.

I'm convinced if we would have been permitted to go in and close Haiphong-- GREENE: But Haiphong was totally off limits for us, for Misty, the main thing was we couldn't hit dams.

We had several dams in Route Package 1 where we were responsible for trying to stop traffic.

And those were absolutely off limits, according to McNamara and his group.

And power plants were off limits.

And the fear was apparently that if we hit too many of those targets it would bring the Chinese into the war and they were very, very reticent to let the Chinese have an excuse to come down and help like they did in Korea a few years ago.

FOGELMAN: So the rules of engagement were pretty stringent and they were designed with a lot of political considerations and not with the idea of how can I apply the maximum amount of power in the shortest period of time to get the desired outcome.

That was never a part of the equation, so... [ominous music] SHEPPERD: We talk a lot about Route Packs and attacking Route Packs and what have you and we were in Route Pack 1 in Vietnam.

This was a-- This was a military organization of the Air War.

To de-conflict military actions we divided it into geographical sections and we divided it up, for instance, the Hanoi area was divided into Route Pack 5 and Route Pack 6.

Again, the Northern Route Packs, 5 and 6, were up North around Hanoi and Haiphong.

And then the Southern Route Packs, Route Pack 1 was just above the DMZ and that was our area as Misty.

BEVIVINO: We were kind of limited to what was called Route Pack 1, essentially the lowest 60 miles of North Vietnam.

ROGER VAN DYKEN: It was a bottom of a funnel.

And so the area of North Vietnam where we were operating consisted of very high, rugged karst mountains that then dropped down into the plain off on to the South China Sea.

BEVIVINO: Mountains on the west.

Ocean on the east.

And you've got to bring the traffic down to, like, a very narrow area to come into South Vietnam.

FOGELMAN: So we had Route 1 close by the South China Sea and it's still called Route 1, which was the main road from Hanoi to Saigon if you will.

And of course it came down to the DMZ and as they came down Route 1 in North Vietnam there were branches that went over through various passes into Laos.

And when I say "they," I'm talking about North Vietnamese regulars.

We're not talking about the Viet Minh, we're not talking about some ragtag civil war kind of thing.

This was an organized national army and they were moving material and men and equipment into South Vietnam using this trail network.

But the whole complex generally from the mountain passes down through Laos and then going into South Vietnam and down even into Cambodia was the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

JACK DOUB: At the time Misty was formed, most of our uh, our air attacks were being carried on in the northern part of North Vietnam up around Hanoi and as much as they would let us around Haiphong.

The North Vietnamese were moving supplies, and notably bombs and bullets, with impunity.

They were driving convoys of trucks in the daytime down to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and then down the trail into South Vietnam.

[ominous music] GEORGE "BUD" DAY: Well, it was a very hairy mission, because what had happened was Russians had moved a ton of service tower missiles into North Vietnam, or the southern part of North Vietnam as well.

And they were moving all these forces, moving all this weaponry and so on and so they were lethal and hairy.

It was a- it was a very scary environment.

ROBERT S. MCNAMARA: The increased importance of petroleum to the enemy's military efforts is further attested by his action to improve the routes of infiltration.

Some of these routes are new.

Some have been widened.

Some have been upgraded for all-weather use.

Bypasses have been built and bamboo canopies or trellises have been built over the jungle road in many places in order to inhibit observation of them from the air.

A result of the greatly increased movement of men and supplies by truck and by motor powered junks, has been a shift from a small arms guerilla type operation against South Vietnam to a quasi-conventional military operation which involves major supplies, major weapons and heavier equipment.

BEVIVINO: Now forward air controlling has been very effective.

Even- even civil war, balloons, you know, the whole bit.

You look down on the guy and you say, "There's the target."

[soft rattling of propeller] Prior to Misty, they were trying to send propeller, we called them slow movers, up there.

and the first couple that went up there were knocked out of the sky within seconds, within minutes.

BILL DOUGLASS: In April and May of 1967, we showed they were losing a lot of airplanes just north of the DMZ.

And they were trying to control this area using a Cessna type of control aircraft and it was just too risky for them.

What was happening is the- as the intensity of moving supplies to the south developed and grew, so did the defenses.

And this is actually why Misty was called into being.

GREENE: You run a slow FAC airplane up there 100 miles an hour, and they were just easy targets.

So, they decided that well, we needed a faster airplane and so Bud volunteered to lead this outfit and-- "BUD" DAY: Someone from 7th Air Force got a hold of me and told me that they were looking at the idea of cranking up a Fast FAC mission probably flying the F100.

And uh, told me that I was going to be the Commander of this.

So, went up to Phu Cat and Bill Douglass, my Ops Officer, had already been alerted.

DOUGLASS: There was about a four-page Ops Order that was cut and it was called the Commando Sabre Test Group.

And that's what established Misty.

Misty was a test group.

FOGELMAN: You're not sure whether this is going to work or it isn't going to work so you don't want to call it an absolute.

You're going to call it an experiment.

So here was this experiment that was classified and they were going to go off and try this concept and see if it worked.

In fact, it worked.

It grew.

It thrived.

[ominous music] [Vietnamese music] BEVIVINO: They said they were looking for people to go up and open a new base at a place called Phu Cat.

And Phu Cat had been an old French base that we had developed up a bit and they were putting down 10,000 feet of runway for jets.

They were going to try to bring the Close Air Support closer to- and central, too, for where we were, which was a really critical area.

GREENE: As a matter of fact, Charlie Neal and I were the second and third guys to land at Phu Cat in an F100.

Then they-- Bud Day started the Misty thing and we said, "Boy, that sounded good."

TONY MCPEAK: Well, Bud was a famous guy.

He'd been in the 20th Wing.

Anybody with any experience in the fighter business knew him.

He actually was in World War II I think as a Marine or something.

I mean, but he had flown in Korea, combat in Korea and he was a highly regarded, respected.

You know, everybody in the business knows who's any good at this and Bud was one of those guys.

So people understood that.

And of course he set up the operation, started it.

DICK RUTAN: And the Misty was started as a way to be more combat effective in an area that was highly... dangerous and they hit some extreme anti-aircraft defenses.

In South Vietnam, most of the defenses were small arms uh, fire and maybe .50 caliber machine guns, but nothing more sophisticated than that.

However, when we crossed the Ben Hai River into North Vietnam all that changed because then they were able to move same sites and large caliber radar control, optically controlled, sophisticated, for the 1960's, sophisticated anti-aircraft.

RUTAN: And to operate in that environment, we had to go really fast.

CHRIS KELLUM: Well, the airplanes determined a lot of it because we had almost all the F-100 Fs in Vietnam, were concentrated at Phu Cat.

DOUGLASS: The F-100 which unbeknownst to them the two seat F-100 was a great aircraft for this.

DOUGLASS: It was very... versatile and in particular the visibility out of that cockpit was just excellent.

BEVIVINO: And it had a refueling boom and the idea started to evolve of, "Wow you could refuel this thing, keep it on station.

DOUB: I think it was harder to see the hun.

The hun was more maneuverable and although we had no bombs, we were driving around with 20 millimeter cannon and we had rockets in the little pods under each wing.

And we used the rockets to mark the target so the fighters could see it.

SUMMERS: We really couldn't do the mission single seat.

There was just too much for one person to do.

So we early on decided you must have a two seat F. And it was a very valuable resource because the Air Force built very few and they were meant to be training aircraft and there was a limited number.

GREENE: We called them Fast FACs, Fast Forward Air Controllers.

And so we would cruise around at 400 knots or more being a much harder target for the North Vietnamese gunners.

[wind blowing] [whistle of engine] "BUD" DAY: It was kind of disappointing to get to Phu Cat because what you saw was a lot of pretty highly improved buildings and in a war that's kind of a bad sign because it indicates to you that no one's got any real plan to get something over with quick.

CHUCK HOLDEN: Most, if not all, of the air crew were living in trailers and mostly two to a trailer, sometimes three.

A couple of the squadrons were still in what we'd call the Southeast Asia hootches, which were, you know, had the wood louvered sides for ventilation and you know, if you don't mind powdered eggs and dehydrated milk or, you know, canned milk it wasn't all that bad.

It wasn't all that good, but it wasn't all that bad.

DOUB: Although if you listen to the guys that the first Mistys were at Phu Cat Sucks, which is the real name of their airbase.

From what they tell me, things were worse over there.

But it was closer to the action.

We were pretty far north so we were close to Laos and North Vietnam.

"BUD" DAY: So getting people together was uh, was a marvelous thing.

I had... Bill Douglass was my Ops Officer and there wasn't really a harder worker or a brighter guy around that anyone could find than Bill Douglass.

DOUGLASS: Bud was getting calls from other people in the theater.

Once they heard about Misty it was a certain gravitational pull for kind of a caliber of fighter pilots that wanted to be in "the real war" up in the North.

MCPEAK: It was really the only way an F-100 pilot could get involved in the out country war because the out country war was being carried by the F-105 mostly, that and some F4s.

So if you wanted to fight in North Vietnam, you had to go to Misty to do it as an F-100 pilot.

SUMMERS: I had trained to be a fighter pilot in combat for about 8 years, 8 or 9 years.

So my goal was the government spent all this money training me, so I should go reward them with flying combat and doing the best job I could.

And that's kind of how the Misty's got Misty pilots.

SHEPPERD: It sounded exciting.

It sounded like an adrenaline rush.

It sounded important.

And so, you know, that's the kind of guys that it attracted.

So we had a bunch of guys up there that were adrenaline junkies and looking for adventure and we sure found it [chuckles] in Misty big time.

DOUGLASS: We ended up running this operation with about 11 or 12 people and we're filling 8 cockpit slots a day.

And this was big.

We're always trying to keep continuity.

I wanted somebody in each aircraft that had been up there the day before.

So I got about a dozen guys.

I'm sending four airplanes a day.

RUTAN: The checkout program was pretty straightforward for everybody and had been, you know, from its inception.

You basically, everyone came in and you flew strictly in the back seat, learning the map book, learning the route, learning... the terrain and the activity that was going on.

And getting into the flow of how we got fighters and who we talk to and all the rest of it.

And then as soon as you had gone through those five sorties in the back seat, then you started alternating front and back.

[roar of engine] "BUD" DAY: We finally got to the point where I went out for the first sortie.

Went to North Vietnam and kind of got a little picture on what things were going to look like and that was a very different, experience.

A lot of guns, very concise area that-- a small area you had to fly into.

And because of the shortage of airplanes we really had to fly some... long sorties.

KELLUM: If you flew a mission, a Misty mission, that was a day.

We're talking a 4-1/2, 5 hours, sometimes longer missions in this F-100 with a 2-hour before time as the briefing, the intelligence briefing for what you're going to expect to see up there on the trail.

And then afterwards you had a debriefing which depending on what you'd found went anywhere from 1 to 2 hours.

KELLUM: And so that was, you know, you got, a lot of the day is gone.

ECHENBERG: You know, the guys that came into Misty, they knew what the job was.

They knew what they were getting into.

I mean, nobody came in there, you know, not knowing that they were going to be flying over North Vietnam, that they were going to be FAC'ing up there, that they'd be flying low and slow looking for targets, drawing fire.

They knew that.

RUTAN: The thing is that everybody understood that this was a high risk mission and so they only required 120 days.

There was a few of them, crazy ones that thought, "Gee, this is so much fun.

How can I go back and bombing water buffaloes in South Vietnam?

This is where the action is.

That's where I want to be.

Please, please let me do another tour."

And there was a few of them that did that and I think like even Jones, he was one of the first ones to actually get 100 Misty missions and he got shot down the 101st mission.

Yeah, my gray beard memory, I was at 105 and I got shot down on the 105th mission.

So they knew that you were only there for a small period of time.

MCPEAK: I flew, you know, all the time.

It's hard to fly 100 Misty sorties in four months.

Very hard.

You have to fly 25 a month, okay.

And these are 4, 5 hour missions.

You fly 25 of them a month and you're constantly under G because you're constantly jinking all the time.

"BUD" DAY: And of course you're spending a lot of time really bending the air playing around, jinking, changing direction, trying to stay alive and uh, missions were tremendously fatiguing.

I can remember I would drink four or five water bottles of water on a mission and I would get out of the airplane absolutely soaking wet and walking back to put my parachute up, I could walk, I could hear my feet squishing in the water in my own boots.

I mean, I would just be absolutely beat and I was in extremely good physical condition back in those days.

SHEPPERD: So I went up there on my first few rides and I thought these guys were crazy.

This is absolutely nuts.

[booms of cannons] SHEPPERD: Up north were the big guns, the real big guns, 37, 57-millimeter and the sky was uh, anytime you were operating it was filled with flack.

And not only could you see it but you could feel it when it came close to your airplane.

It was kind of like a bam-bam-bam hitting on the side of your airplane.

You'd be looking down one way and you'd hear this, "Bam-bam-bam," look the other and tracer would be going by right outside of your head on the right side of the airplane.

So the big difference was I thought these guys were nuts.

I said, "You know, this is crazy."

DOUB: The beauty of Misty was there was no manual.

We were doing something no one had ever done with jet fighters before.

So what happened up there was a whole new mission.

And I think that was the appeal of Misty.

First of all, you knew you were doing something nobody else was doing.

Before you got up there they told you, you assumed that it was going to be hairy.

And then when you got up there, there were no rules.

LANNY LANCASTER: There weren't books of how to be a Fast FAC.

I mean, I didn't know anything about being a Forward Air Controller other than having flown strikes in South Vietnam under their control, so I knew the basics of what they did and how they did it.

But it's quite different from flying around in an 01 or an 02 and flying around in an F-100 doing it, especially when you happen to find yourself over North Vietnam where they really didn't like us to be.

[Radio] Hillsboro, this is Misty 11, over.

Misty 11, this is-- [ominous music] GREENE: It took about 30 minutes from takeoff to get to North Vietnam, maybe a little bit less depending on the weather.

But normally we'd start working within about a half an hour of when we took off.

Then after maybe an hour to an hour and a half we'd go out to the tanker and the tankers were normally over Thailand.

The tanker just has a hose with a basket on the end.

The basket's about maybe 2 feet in diameter and you have to fly the boom-- you have to fly your probe into the basket.

[explosions] So we'd go out and it would take maybe 15 to 20 minutes to hit the tanker, get a full load of gas and then head back into the uh, into North Vietnam.

The standard mission was 2 refuelings but a lot of times we would go uh, 3 refuelings and the one day I flew seven and half hours we had 4 refuelings.

SHEPPERD: Our job was to go to find targets, to mark those targets for fighters.

DOUGLASS: When we first went up there, it took us about 2 or 3 weeks to start generating results.

In other words, we're kind of new guys on the block.

SHEPPERD: Unless you go and look for the same stuff day after day after day, you're not going to be able to do it.

We became masters at finding anything.

[Radio] Misty 1-1, this is Hillsboro.

We have gunfighters launching from the alert pad.

They will rendezvous with you at Delta 15.

Over.

[Announcer] In its role as the Forward Air Controller, Misty rendezvous with strike aircraft and briefs pilots on the target, approaches, tactics, ordinance to use and defensive hazards.

DOUB: We had constant contact with a big airplane orbiting in Laos, or I'm sorry, in Thailand, a C130, and their call sign was Hillsboro.

They were an ABCCC, an Air Borne Command and Control Center.

We could call those guys and they would divert somebody with bombs to us and then we would put them in on the target.

[explosions] So the idea was to find a target and to get fighters overhead and launch a marking rocket that put up a big white cloud of phosphorous smoke.

Once the smoke rocket was launched, particularly if the target was a gun site, there would be bullets coming up towards us.

The most lethal was the 37-millimeter and each one of those rounds had a tracer on it and it looked like a flaming golf ball coming up.

So as soon as we launched the smoke rocket we wanted to get out the way of the flaming golf balls.

And we called it the jinking maneuvers.

DOUB: Every time you were putting a strike in you put yourself at peril.

The minute you picked up, pulled up a little bit and shot a rocket, everybody in North Vietnam knew what was happening and everybody started shooting at you.

SHEPPERD: I got hit on 13 of my 58 missions in Misty and sometimes you didn't even know it till you got back and you saw a hole in the airplane.

And other times there was no doubt in your mind you got hit.

And every time you got hit, you know, you'd question yourself, "Was I doing something stupid?

Was I violating altitudes, was I too slow?

Did I make multiple passes in the target area?"

GREENE: During that time there was nothing automated about this.

Nowadays everything is automated.

You have GPS and you have laser-guided bombs and we had none of that stuff, so it was pilot skill and experience.

DOUGLASS: The Mistys became absolute experts on the AAA, the defenses there, what we call the AAA Order of Battle.

And if you had a battery of AAA over here today, you could count on the fact it's not going to be there tomorrow.

DOUGLASS: If it's fired, it was moving.

This was their order of battle.

And it came down to this, we lived by the guns.

We lived by the guns.

DOUB: With the cessation of bombing in Hanoi, the NVN had moved every gun they had left over down onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the Route Packs.

They told us we were facing the largest concentration of AAAs since World War II and in some areas it was greater than or worse rather than World War II.

CHUCK SHAHEEN: You never wanted to lose your speed because that was of course your survival, keeping your speed up and keeping that airplane turning at all times.

DOUB: I always felt low was life, low and speed.

If you could go fast and low, that was your life's blood.

[ominous music] BEVIVINO: Pilots don't like to really identify themselves with Reconnaissance or Intelligence.

They're fighter pilots, you see.

So when you say that and you get-- I get harassed about it, but the one thing is, this was essentially an Intelligence function.

And what it was, was genuine real time intelligence.

VAN DYKEN: We had regular intelligence reports that we sent out daily and it was called the Disom.

The Misty Disom Daily Intelligence Summary.

That would go out instantly and General Momyer, the Chief of Air Operations in the Theater at the time, that was the first thing that he wanted to hear when he started his intel brief every day.

"What's the Mistys' report?

What's new?

What's happening up there?"

Because this was the-- this was the surgical effort to frontline to try to cut off the flow of supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.

WHITE: After every flight, every pilot comes and sits down with intelligence officers and goes through the battle damage assessment for the entire mission.

And some of these briefings would last 30 minutes and some 2 hours and go into great detail.

And we reported all the flights that came in, what they did and what the targets was, what effectiveness we had, whether we destroyed the targets or whether we didn't destroy them.

Whether they should be struck again.

Greg Avilian was still there.

John Haltigan and Roger Van Dyken, young guys, young second lieutenants, right out of school, right out of Dulles school.

But eager to come up and did a great job.

Working, everybody was working 12 hours a day.

People had 3 and 4 jobs.

VAN DYKEN: There was an atmosphere of innovation, of how can we penetrate these air defenses?

How can we figure out how the supplies are coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

How can we try to get in their minds and see what kind of a logistics system they're using, where the truck parks are?

How can we outthink them?

And then you're sending the guys up day after day after day to probe our theories.

FOGELMAN: We didn't have lots of sophisticated equipment.

We did by virtue of being the guys who spent more time over that trail than any other people, we really got to understand the way they operated and, you know, how they would park their trucks during the day and conceal them and try to move them at night.

Because we really, we virtually made daytime movement impossible for them.

LANCASTER: We're trained to see objects on the ground, that's what we were trained to do.

DOUGLASS: We're developing a vision and you'll hear the expression Misty Eyes and it means that they could see the things that were heavily camouflaged.

RUTAN: The guys told me, like Mick Greene when I first flew with him, he said, "Dick, what you're going to be involved in right now is that you're going to be uh, instituted into a camouflage college."

And I look around and I just saw a jungle and few roads and stuff.

I didn't see anything.

But then he pointed out the little subtleties.

LANCASTER: Nature doesn't like regular patterns.

So if you see a rectangle sitting in the middle of a field, there's a good chance that it's a man-made object of some kind.

KELLUM: And we had a Pentax 35 millimeter with a big lens on it in the back seat and you'd find your target and you'd fly a low-level knife edge pass over the target and snap the pictures.

DOUB: Then the minute we would land an Intel guy would meet us at the airplane, dash off with this camera and they would get the pictures back while we were still debriefing.

You might be in there saying, "I think there were trucks just north of that shore on the east side of the trail."

And then the pictures come back and sure enough, you get pretty good at telling where trucks are because that does not look like a tree.

It's the same color as a tree and it's in amongst the other trees, but that doesn't look like a tree.

RUTAN: But the thing is that when they try to camouflage it, if you think about it, leaves when you turn them upside down are a slightly different color on the top than on the bottom.

KELLUM: One of the biggest strikes we made I think Charlie Sommers found it.

He saw the dust collecting on top of the high trees.

They'd been using this truck park so much that the dust filtered on up and he kind of saw a dust pattern, a different color on the tops of the trees.

SHAHEEN: It was pretty easy to see a gun site.

It looked like a little donut and if it was green filled that was a gun site.

If we saw a gun site that was occupied and we had extra rockets on the way home, we would fire at those gun sites because that meant we had identified them and they would have to move that night.

So we kept them moving all the time.

Which of course pissed them off.

RUTAN: The fact is if they could see from the air what we saw, they would do their camouflage totally different.

DOUB: You got pretty good at looking for signs.

For example, along the lines of the Intel function, if in the morning you would come to a little creek fjord and the right bank had water splashed 20 feet out of it and the north bank had little water, you could figure out most of the traffic was southbound that night.

LANCASTER: The intel team had put together a series of photographs, roads, railroads, rivers, areas that you could logically move quantities of material through depicted on photo mosaic maps.

All of Route Pack 1, our area, all of it was on sliding maps on a big board, a series of big boards.

I don't know how long it took these kids to put that together.

It must have taken them months.

DOUGLASS: I think those maps were the most valuable maps in all of Southeast Asia.

They were a very-- a scale that had a great uh, amount of detail and so they were able to absolutely pinpoint things.

But Ray Bevivino did this, but these beautiful set of maps.

So when somebody came in to brief in the morning, they could see exactly what had happened yesterday and where-- what was going on.

VAN DYKEN: Kind of like a team of Sherlock Holmes detectives briefing one another on the progress that they're making.

And so we really became, the Misty pilots became our best source of intelligence to provide information for succeeding Misty pilots.

BEVIVINO: Recover the first flight.

Debrief it.

Send stuff to Seventh Air Force and pass on the information to the second flight.

So that there was continuous visual real time intelligence, okay.

So the guys going on the second flight, they already knew what had happened in the morning and they were ready to go.

They picked up the, you know, the torch, whatever, and started working the area all over again.

[ominous music] BRIAN WILLIAMS: When somebody's down, everybody comes from whatever they're doing and if you can help, you help.

As Misty pilots we got to do that quite a bit.

SHEPPERD: And it involved all kinds of crazy stuff and trying to trick the guys on the ground to thinking the guy was somewhere else, trying to, you know, keep guys away from him with 20 millimeters strafe at low altitude among big guns.

So it was a dicey, dicey situation.

SUMMERS: Having been on the ground and being there for quite a while before I was rescued, I could really sympathize with... pilots on the ground.

VAN DYKEN: Really on site commanders of those Resc Apps, those rescue efforts, were the Misty pilots who were directing things on the scene.

SUMMERS: So we did an awful lot of rescue because impact one, it was too hot an area for the propeller-driven sandies to come in with the helicopter and find the downed airmen.

So we would find them, identify them and then work the area with fighters to try to suppress the AAA because that would knock a helicopter or sandy down in a heartbeat.

"BUD" DAY: So just when we got over the target we took a [claps] tremendous hit in the aft end of the hun and it just felt like it stopped.

Every light in the cockpit came on and we were doing about 530 knots.

And the flight controls failed and the airplane went into a real high negative G Bundt.

It tried to throw us out of the top of the cockpit.

And the airplane went uncontrollable.

We were really balling the jack, so when I came out it popped a few panels in my chute and I hit the ground hard.

And when I woke up, I realized I had a busted arm and my knee would really hurt.

Instantly, a couple teenagers, probably 14-year-old kids came popping through the brush with an old rifle in their hand and captured me.

ECHENBERG: Everybody knew that he was up in Hanoi and that he was a Prisoner of War so that sort of hung over everybody.

Everybody sort of knew that that was a chance that you might meet up with Bud Day before, you know, before you wanted to.

VAN DYKEN: One mission was B. Willie and H. Willie.

Brian Williams and Howard Williams.

They were in the Mu Gia Pass area, the border between North Vietnam and Laos, a very hot area.

WILLIAMS: I think we'd just gone off and refueled once and came back to the area and clouds were kind of breaking up a little bit so you could kind of see the roads down there.

And there was something that looked like a bulldozer from the altitude we were.

You know, we were probably 4,000 feet.

And so we just made a big wide turnaround to come back and look at that to see what it was, then 'bang,' It sounded like a... sledgehammer hitting the bell of the airplane.

That's how it was, just a big "Bam."

Within about 10 seconds, I could see flames in my mirror behind me, way back on-- It started way back in the fuselage and I, I'm talking 30 seconds total, the fire's up to me, behind me, I'm getting hot in the back seat.

And so I said to him, "I'm going out."

And he says, "I'm right behind you," and I pulled the handles.

VAN DYKEN: B. Willie in the back seat survived.

Howie Williams in the front seat said, "I'm right behind you, B. Willie," and never came out.

WILLIAMS: And of course in the F100 the back seat goes first.

If the front seat went first it would scorch the guy in the back seat.

But the system, the back seat has to go first.

VAN DYKEN: This aircraft went into the jungle somewhere in the Mu Gia Pass.

WILLIAMS: But we immediately went around and started looking for Howie and that was kind of tough because they didn't-- You know, didn't see anything and didn't hear any radio calls.

And we looked around a couple of sites that looked like it might-- There would be a swath through the trees where the airplane had gone in and started taking more hits on the chopper and by that time they're starting to run out of gas, so they had to leave.

And that was a terrible feeling when you're leaving your friend and your comrade up there.

VAN DYKEN: And I'll never forget when we all went out to greet B. Willie coming back.

There was such joy and relief of him coming back.

And yet the look on his face just coming through this harrowing experience was... he was struggling within himself of... the joy and relief at being rescued and the sorrow of leaving a buddy behind.

WILLIAMS: But to have your friend, you know, disappear, it's tough.

I've lived with that all my life and, [laughs] you know, I'll never get over that probably.

DOUGLASS: I was trying to rescue a guy.

He's an F4 guy, down on the ground.

And uh, so I'm right over the guy and I'm circling, okay.

And the helicopters are coming up.

They're offshore, okay.

And uh, I left this guy for about probably up to a minute, about 45 seconds and I pull-- I got the airplane going as fast as I could and I went like this.

I'm headed towards the shoreline to fire a rocket out there.

I said, telling the choppers, I said, "You hit-- See the smoke, turn inland right there.

Come in and land."

And uh... And what happened was as soon as I left him, you know, within seconds, you know, the guy's screaming in the radio to me.

You know, they're coming, they're coming.

So if I hadn't left the guy... [speaking softly] That's life, I guess.

So I feel badly about that.

I hear that guy screaming in the radio, you know.

DOUB: The one that broke my heart was a-- the Jolly Green Helicopter came over a wounded and injured pilot, F105 driver who was in the jungle.

They put the penetrator down and he was too wounded to get on the penetrator.

The penetrator's a metal device that folds out with legs and you get on it and they tow you back up to the helo.

So the PJ, the parajumper, this little 19-year-old probably 3 striper, jumps on the wire and goes down.

Puts the pilot on the penetrator, straps him in.

They drag the pilot up.

Take him off of the penetrator and put the penetrator back down and then they start taking heavy ground fire and they never saw the PJ again.

And they stooged around for hours running choppers in and out and fighters going through and trying to talk to this kid.

Never heard from him again.

RUTAN: On my 105th mission, I think, Misty mission, I was in the backseat with Chuck Shaheen- SHAHEEN: Dick was from a town 10 miles away from the town I went to high school in and his high school and my high school were rival high schools.

And so they said, "That would be really appropriate.

We'll send a big news article back and, you know, two high school rivalries fly a last mission together in Vietnam."

Well, it was my last mission.

Dick was going to try to set a record of the number of Misty missions ever flown.

So we crawl in the airplane together and off we go.

And we were putting in some F100s in a truck park and they were missing the, missing the target.

And I said, "You know, Dick, I'm going to roll in and strafe these things."

RUTAN: For whatever reason, we ended up strafing this truck, at real low altitude, which is really verboten.

We broke all the rules that we were supposed to abide by.

And he strafed the truck and as we pulled off, bang.

We got hit and there was a lot of fire.

SHAHEEN: In other words, fuel was coming out of the airplane and as it hit the aspirator it lit off and it was like a torch in the back.

And as soon as I pulled out the afterburner it went out.

RUTAN: Actually, we were dumping fuel so bad that I didn't think we'd make it.

And we looked up at the coast.

It was about 30 miles away.

And you look at the coast and you see the fuel gage unwind and you look at the coast coming and the fuel gage unwind and you realize there's no fine way that we're going to make it.

[laughs] SHAHEEN: That time, that was my last mission over the North and I did not want to end up up North as a POW.

So I was going to make that coastline and we were going to bail out and we were going to bail out over the water.

Well, we made it out to sea about 10, 15 miles and got up to about 10,000 feet when the thing quit on us and so I said, "You go ahead and go out, Dick."

And a few minutes later I went out.

RUTAN: And after an hour or so in the Gulf of Tonkin a helicopter came and picked me up.

And normally you should be full of adrenalin after something like that happened.

But I finally realized, "Hey, I don't have to do this anymore.

I've already flown, you know, more than I was allocated to.

And I was going to make it.

I was going to go home."

SUMMERS: One morning, McElhanon, who was one of our Mistys, they didn't come back, and I were cruising in as Misty 1-1, which was the early flight in the morning.

So at first light I cruised in low over the coast and it's kind of a chilling feeling.

I heard the voice, "Misty, is that you?"

And I still get kind of-- And I said, "Yes, sir."

And he said, "Well, this is Master 0-1."

I said, "You still there?"

And he said, "Yeah."

I said, "Don't worry.

We'll get you out."

And he said, "Thank you."

And the more I- It's a long story, but we killed guns all day long almost.

And the end result was that a helicopter came in, picked him up, took him out.

Not a shot was fired.

I called the gentleman, lives in Montana, 35 years after that.

And he answered the phone.

I said, "This is Misty 1-1."

He says, "Master 0-1."

And he said, "Thank you."

He said, "I'm living in Montana retired and that's because of what the Mistys did."

So it's kind of, those missions were very rewarding.

I mean, we literally saved lives in my mind, so.

Yeah.

I get kind of misty.

That's a bad thing to be when you're a Misty pilot.

SHAHEEN: There's something about having one of your fellow airmen, you know, on the ground that just really kicks you in the butt and makes you do everything you can to get him out.

DOUGLASS: You know, essentially, I guess the story here is regardless of how hard you're trying to do something, there's still the potential for failure, you know?

And then that case.

And so it's just something that it lives with you.

VAN DYKEN: There's that joy and sorrow intermixed.

To me, that almost became part of the Misty story that almost became part of the Vietnam story.

Wanting to do things for people and having individual successes and... yet leaving so many good people behind.

[ominous music] MIKE HINKLE: We didn't know that we were going to stop when we did.

DAVE THOMSON: I flew the last Misty sortie on the 12th of May, 1970.

I came down from that sortie and walked into debrief it and they handed me a copy of a TWX that terminated Misty.

A hose down occurs on your final flight in that airplane, that unit.

And it usually involves the fire truck coming out and when you get out of the airplane, there's usually, most of your squadron mates are handling the hose and they hit you hard with all the water and you're sort of like a drowned rat.

And then usually there's a bottle of champagne that follows.

MCPEAK: Misty was closed.

The squadron was closed at the end of a 3-year period because we were converting from the F-100 to the F-4, basically.

So the Fast FAC role was picked up by F-4 squadrons, first by Stormy, their call sign Stormy, operating out of Danang.

And later by F4 squadrons operating out of Thailand.

There were several of them.

Falcon FAC, Tiger FAC.

Night Owl was the Night FAC operation and so forth.

At the end of Vietnam all together we no longer operated dedicated Fast FAC squadrons.

We just set up the old-fashioned regular fighter squadrons.

And so we sort of went out of that business.

THOMSON: After about a week of having the Misty mission terminated, two of us were selected and sent to Ubon, Thailand to check out the Wolf FACs who were flying F4Ds.

What was so funny was the Wolf FACs, a great group of people, their tactics were to fly at 3,000 feet above the ground, AGL, at about 450 knots and not a whole lot of jinking.

And so Charlie Huff, my front seater, a good friend, I just asked him how long he wanted to live.

And he said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "This is exactly where they want you to bracket you for AAA fire and ground fire."

And he says, "Okay.

You take the airplane and show me the Misty tactics."

Which I did.

And we went down low and moved the airplane around quite a bit and sure enough we did see some ground fire during that mission.

If anything, we taught them to get down to where they could see things and so we kind of gave them a totally new perspective on what a Fast FAC could do and how they would do it.

MCPEAK: The legacy of Misty is the people who were in it.

This chapter of aviation history is all about the men who did that.

ECHENBERG: You know, at the time, when you're there, and we were all kids for the most part, you know.

I didn't realize how special these guys were.

I really didn't.

I know we stood out from the rest of the guys.

Our job was a little harder.

It was a little more dangerous.

We lost more pilots.

But I didn't really have the sense until many years later about how really special these guys were.

HINKLE: I do know that as you look back at the histories of each person that was in it, 157 pilots, there will be 157 different reasons on why they joined Misty.

THOMSON: We have a reunion every 2 years and I look forward to seeing the Mistys there that could make it.

THOMSON: And I also have some friends that were in other Fast FAC sortie missions and when I get to a military unit and somebody will ask me, "What did you fly?

What kind of sorties?"

you know, that type of typical introductory type questions, I'll just say, "I was a Misty" and the room goes quiet.

SHEPPERD: It was an absolutely amazing group of people all the way from the ground crews that crewed on the airplanes, maintained the airplanes and the armament crews that kept our rockets working.

The intel officers.

The commanders.

We just had a very tight-knit group of people, and really, really smart people.

They knew what they were doing.

They were very, very good fighter pilots.

They knew how to use intelligence.

And they knew how to react in unpredictable situations when things went wrong.

And it was just one of the best groups of people that I've ever worked with.

MCPEAK: The fighter business has always been an all-volunteer business.

And the only people who want to go there is because it's kind of a... chancy thing to do.

So the people who ended up in that squadron were highly selected.

Selection after selection after selection.

Screening after screening.

And it's no mystery that they were a good bunch of guys.

If I had to go today, I mean, I'm in my eighties.

If I had to go up a dark alley today and there was a fight waiting for me at the other end, that's the bunch of guys I'd want to take with me.

[soft calm music] [piano plays] Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree... And I feel like I'm clinging to a cloud I can't understand, I get misty just holding your hand Walk my way And a thousand violins begin to play Or it might be the sound of your hello That music I hear I get misty the moment you're near [piano continues] Can't you see that you're leading me on And it's just what I want you to do Don't you notice how hopelessly I'm lost That's why I'm following you On... my own When I wander through this wonderland alone Never knowing my right foot from my left My hat from my glove I'm too misty and too much in love... Presentation of The Misty Experiment: The Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail has been made possible in part by....