Friendly Fire Notebook

My challenge has never been that historical compilation is inaccurate.
I've been contending that as long as we have first person accounts
available, we can integrate the "official" record with the live
on-scene experiences to get a considerably more accurate account.

Not in all cases however. If I were to interview the two B-52D tail gunners
credited for the two MiG kills, I would conclude that they actually shot down
the two jets. If I expand my research and interview you and other F-4 MiGCAP
guys, I would get a completely different version. If I then go to the the
Vietnamese themselves, ask them to show me their records and discover that not
only were no MiGs reported lost in the area in question, but that there were no
MiGs airborn in that area during the time in question, I can reasonably
conclude that no MiGs were shot down by B-52s.

In
many instances, availability of first-person recollections will result
in correction of the historic records.


As you can see above, as many times as it can set the facts straight, it can
distort them.

The real issue here is that on the one hand you are eager to discount
first person US recollections on intensity of the fighting and
simultaneously accept the NVN statements.

Because the U.S. Marine is not really in a poistion to make an accurate
statement regading NVN supplies, the NVN officer, and the NVN documented record
is. Conversly, I would disregard NVN speculation about U.S. force issues and
rely on the U.S. accounts and records.

And, do you really mean to
say that the NVA operating from the tunnels and jungle caves deep into
SVN, short of "munition, food and POL" were devoting their time to
meticulous record keeping?

Not only did they keep good and accurate records, but nearly every solider kept
a personal diary. If you've ever read Hal Moore's "We Were Soliders Once and
Young", he can attest to the fact that nearly every enemy body recovered in LZ
X-Ray had a personal diary on it.

This while the massive US bureaucracy of
MAC-V was simply doodling away on French cuisine and Eurasian whores?

Maybe if the VC and NVA units had French food and whores their records would
not be as meticulous as they are

Long bomb trains walking up to and over discrete targets
with one, two or three bombs out of the string possibly hitting the
target---or in some instances ending before the target, starting after
the target or paralleling the target but missing cleanly.

I didn't mean to infer it was as easy in 1972 as it was in 1999, many
improvements had been made to the BUFF release system that allowed us to drop
very tight trains today, but it also wasn't so difficult that an airfield
needed to be attacked by over 25 jets of all types. The runway at Bac Mai was
unuseable after night #4 but BUFFs went back there the next night and the
runway also received attention during the day. Perhaps it was "maintenance"
bombing Ed, but that excuse doesn't hold true for the non-airfield targets.
Khin No Railyard and vehicle repair complex was a total loss after night #2,
but BUFFs went back there at least 4 more times. Khin No received over 4,000
weapons from B-52s alone and IIRC A-7s also visited there...and this was after
LB I when it had also been hit...several times!

Ahhh, Checkmate..."John Warden? I knew John Warden. John Warden was a
friend of mine. And, frankly, Senator, you're no John Warden...."

Nothing personal to your friend Ed, but I take that as a compliment.

Read about Chuck Horner's dismissal of John Warden when setting up the
offensive team for Desert Storm in Clancy's collaboration, "Every Man
a Tiger."

I have, great stuff, go Chuck!

"blue-on-blue kill in 1971"? Sounds like some of that great
history---no ops going in in MiG country in '71.

Than it must have been '72, I'm reciting this from memory.

The
positions in the illustrations are wrong. The sequence of events is
wrong. The ranges between aircraft are wrong. Even the location
relative to the target and other flights is wrong.

Now define; "wrong"...is it possible Ed, that you recalled it incorrectly. I'm
not choosing sides in this one, just pointing out, as in the case of our
fameous B-52 tail gunners, sometimes the participant is wrong.

The only interview
conducted to establish the definitive historic account was done eight
months after the event with the flight lead in Wichita KS.

Than I would conclude that unless one of you wrote it down immediately after
the fact and verified it with other potential witnesses, that there is no way
of knowing for sure what happened. You may be right...or he may be right, but
as someone who was 4 years old at the time I can not accept either account as
fact.

No other
participants were interviewed and the flight lead was not in a
position to witness the entire engagement. Yet, that becomes the
historic record.

I believe much of the Air Force historical record is like that. A few months
after ALLIED FORCE ended I got to read in the "Lessons Learned" about how B-52s
required air refueling in order to provide a 2-hour XINT presence. Interesting
since only one crew ever even saw a tanker during the entire operation, and
that was so he could extend his *3-hour* XINT orbit to 5 hours. Whoever wrote
that section confused B-1s and B-52s, but now that is documented Air Force
history. By the way, the participants at the Lessons Learned conferance were
all OAF participants as well....

For several years after LB II, Carl Jeffcoat who I mentioned earlier
as being downed by a MiG 21 near Kep, believed that he was shot down
by a member of the Hunter/Killer flight rather than an enemy aircraft.

Maybe this was the case Checkmate looked at in the 80s? I know that the
official Air Force history held it as fratricide until Checkmate concluded
their study. Another F-4 driver, "Lucky" Anderreg led the study, but I don't
think he was in LBII.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

On 21 Apr 2004 23:03:01 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:


Ahhh, Checkmate..."John Warden? I knew John Warden. John Warden was a
friend of mine. And, frankly, Senator, you're no John Warden...."

Nothing personal to your friend Ed, but I take that as a compliment.

Poetic license. John Warden was not a particular friend of mine. He
was stationed at Torrejon when I arrived there in '73. He had a combat
tour in the R/C/P and then moved to the front seat. No NVN experience.
He was a pompous ass.

Read about Chuck Horner's dismissal of John Warden when setting up the
offensive team for Desert Storm in Clancy's collaboration, "Every Man
a Tiger."

I have, great stuff, go Chuck!

Good! Note for your background that Chuck was an F-105 driver and
participated in the first disasterous SAM site raid along with Roger
Myhrum and Dick Pearson, two old friends of mine and IPs when I qual'd
in the 105.


The
positions in the illustrations are wrong. The sequence of events is
wrong. The ranges between aircraft are wrong. Even the location
relative to the target and other flights is wrong.

Now define; "wrong"...is it possible Ed, that you recalled it incorrectly. I'm
not choosing sides in this one, just pointing out, as in the case of our
fameous B-52 tail gunners, sometimes the participant is wrong.

Since you haven't yet read When Thunder Rolled, I'll excuse you for
not acknowledging the details of the situation, but suffice to say
that when you wind up in a five-ship with a MiG-17 in the middle of
your flight and the conclusion is the MiG trapped at six hosing your
brains out with his 37MM the memories are very explicit.

The only interview
conducted to establish the definitive historic account was done eight
months after the event with the flight lead in Wichita KS.

Than I would conclude that unless one of you wrote it down immediately after
the fact and verified it with other potential witnesses, that there is no way
of knowing for sure what happened. You may be right...or he may be right, but
as someone who was 4 years old at the time I can not accept either account as
fact.

Since it was me engaged with the MiG and not the flight lead, I'll
lean heavily toward my perceptions as correct.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Poetic license. John Warden was not a particular friend of mine.

Wheeew..

He was a pompous ass.

Can I get an AMEN?

Note for your background that Chuck was an F-105 driver

Yep, he had bomb load envy as well when I met him for the second time at KBAD
in '96

MiG trapped at six hosing your
brains out with his 37MM the memories are very explicit.

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

Since it was me engaged with the MiG and not the flight lead, I'll
lean heavily toward my perceptions as correct.

Unless coroborated by other eyewitnesses, you may have the edge in accuracy,
but not good enough to be used as a factual reference.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Buying your book this weekend.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

If that is the case, then that tends to negate all the firsthand interviews in
all the books on the war.

Conversely, my Linebacker recollections are among the most vivid in my life.
Some of the exact details are a little fuzzy but it diesn't take much to recall
them. As far as Ed goes. he is one of those guys with a steel trap memory the
rest of us wish we had. I'd take anything he said to the bank.

Ed, you can send payment for my endorsement to my bank account, # to be sent in
a privagte email.

Steve

On 23 Apr 2004 02:21:58 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:


MiG trapped at six hosing your
brains out with his 37MM the memories are very explicit.

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection. To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour, but six years later during my F-4
combat experience I have much less vivid recollections of the tour.
Quite often I can't recall the members of a flight or even who was in
my back-seat on a given day. Some of the missions are very clear
(particularly the LB II,) but other droners into Laos, lower Route
Packs or SVN just didn't register with the same intensity.

Since it was me engaged with the MiG and not the flight lead, I'll
lean heavily toward my perceptions as correct.

Unless coroborated by other eyewitnesses, you may have the edge in accuracy,
but not good enough to be used as a factual reference.

That's a leap in logic. Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished. If no
one else sees the event, does it somehow lose factuality?

Buying your book this weekend.


BUFDRVR

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour

And I can close my eyes and see and hear my first strike against Belgrade, but
according to some shrinks, what I remember may be far less accurate then what
really happened.

Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished.

If you were watching from the safety of your bed room window into an alley,
according to shrinks, you're right. However if the murder you witnessed was of
the guy right next to you, odds are your description of the assailant and the
circumstances and details will be inaccurate.

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.

How many pages?


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

On 23 Apr 2004 21:57:13 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

And, I stayed last night in a Holiday Inn Express. Seriously, the
eyewitnesses to crimes comparison isn't relevant with regard to the
recollection of details by an experienced combat operator. Certainly
on the first trip or so there might be some elements of "buck fever"
but the level of efficiency goes up and the tendency for tunnel
vision goes down over multiple exposures.

If you go to the woods on day one, there's a good chance you won't see
a lot of the deer that are there. By day four of the hunt, you spot
the flick of an ear, the tip of an antler and suddenly realize they've
got you surrounded.

Part of what makes a survivor in aerial combat is much the same as
what air traffic controllers have---situational awareness or the "big
picture" view. Your mind integrates the plan, the clock, the view, the
radio calls, etc. into a three dimensional structure. You know your
position and the relationship of your flight to the others relative to
the ground and the mission timeline. You integrate MiG calls from
Disco or Teaball with location, direction and even intention. You know
from the RWR which radar is looking at who and when missiles are in
flight you know whether they are a threat or not.

To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour

And I can close my eyes and see and hear my first strike against Belgrade, but
according to some shrinks, what I remember may be far less accurate then what
really happened.

What you remember, if your "big picture" was as well developed as
mine, is probably a whole lot more accurate than what some ACSC
plastic-shoed slick-pocketed staff puke gleans from reading the Op-Rep
4s and the frag order.

Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished.

If you were watching from the safety of your bed room window into an alley,
according to shrinks, you're right. However if the murder you witnessed was of
the guy right next to you, odds are your description of the assailant and the
circumstances and details will be inaccurate.

If you'd logged a dozen or so witnessings, your ability to recall the
details will be pretty darn good.

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.

How many pages?

Pages? My gawd, I've been working with community college students for
so long, my expectations are down to words not pages.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Ed Rasimus wrote:

On 23 Apr 2004 21:57:13 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

And, I stayed last night in a Holiday Inn Express. Seriously, the
eyewitnesses to crimes comparison isn't relevant with regard to the
recollection of details by an experienced combat operator. Certainly
on the first trip or so there might be some elements of "buck fever"
but the level of efficiency goes up and the tendency for tunnel
vision goes down over multiple exposures.

Oh, damn. Here I've been unable to reply for almost a week, and the discussion has
moved on so far, with so much back and forth, that there's no way I can ever get
back in sync with the rest of you if I go back and reply to old posts replying to my
old posts. My apologies to all who I haven't replied to (You, John, and anyone
else). I hate it when that happens.

I will say that personal perceptions are just that, and while training and
experience can influence their accuracy, so does an individual's biases and
outlook. "Rashomon" applies. There's a reason that accident investigators want to
see the recorded and physical data instead of relying on eyewitness accounts. The
latter are almost always wrong, wholly or partially so, no matter how experienced
the witnesses are. Kind of like when they installed gun cameras in fighters; they
were finally able to compare reported results as to target type, range, angle,
effects etc., with those captured on film; only the latter could be objective.

If eyewitness accounts were considered accurate, there would be little reason for
the elaborate recording devices found in modern combat a/c. Only when you have a
large number of independent accounts in essential agreement, FROM ALL SIDES, with
no opportunity for the witnesses to be influenced by other people's accounts prior
to giving their own, can you assume accuracy. Even then it should be considered
unverified if you lack direct hard evidence of the event. Once you add in the
further effects of time and outside influences on memory, the accuracy degrades even
further.

The one constant I've found when trying to correlate accounts of the exact same
occurrence is that if two accounts agree completely in all essential details, one of
them was based on the other. I could, for example, give you both Steve Ritchie and
Chuck DeBellevue's accounts of the same double kill mission (Paula 01, 8 July 1972),
with the two men separated by six feet or less; even so, their recollections of the
order of events, colors, spatial relationships etc. differ slightly, and the
accounts of each man change slightly depending on the audience and the passage of
time, no doubt influenced by hundreds of tellings, and hearing each other tell the
story. And that doesn't even get into the accounts of the 3 other U.S. crews
directly involved, or those of the Vietnamese side, etc.

I've heard some of the radio tape of Cunnigham/Driscoll's 10 May triple MiG kill
mission, as well as read their accounts. When it comes to timing of events, who
said what when, etc., the tape's 'memory' is completely accurate, the men's
perceptions and memories are of lesser accuracy. Why should this be a surprise?

OTOH, when I read Keith Rosenkranz' book "Vipers in the Storm", where he gives exact
times, radio calls, altitudes etc., I'm going to put the highest accuracy as far as
those items are concerned, because he had copies of his mission HUD tapes and used
them when writing the book; if you go to his website you can watch and listen to the
tapes yourself. Here's one from the big attack on the nuclear complex at Osirak:

http://www.vipersinthestorm.com/html/chapter_24.html

But anything that isn't on those tapes and which he didn't personally experience and
have 'non-volatile' evidence of, gets a much lower reliability rating pending
similar confirmation.

Guy

Ed Rasimus wrote:

If you'd logged a dozen or so witnessings, your ability to recall the
details will be pretty darn good.


The NTSB puts very little value in eyewitness reports and I'm
inclined to put a rather high value on their opinion. That said I
agree that the less stress the more reliable your witnessing will
be (to a point of course) one tends to be a poor witness again
when boredom sets in.
--

-Gord.