A hail of bullets whizzed past the cockpit. Fred Platt peered down at a blanket of farms and rice paddies where a unit of Viet Cong — VC, in the sh

Ho Chi Bear & The Ravens

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2021-06-06 05:00:04

A hail of bullets whizzed past the cockpit. Fred Platt peered down at a blanket of farms and rice paddies where a unit of Viet Cong — VC, in the shorthand of the tiresome war — stood in open country pointing rifles at his small, slow, unarmed airplane, a two-seat Cessna better suited for short hops between cities than the rigors of battle. The Cessna’s thin aluminum skin might as well have been tin foil where bullets were concerned, but in spite of the obvious peril, Platt smiled and circled back toward the source of the firing to keep the enemy soldiers in view. As he did, he called in a request for approval to mark their location.

This was Platt’s job. He searched for enemy convoys and encampments and blasted them with special smoke-marking rockets, which told American Air Force fighter pilots where to aim when they screamed through in jets. Forward Air Controllers were like scouts, bird dogs trained to find and point out the enemy. They flew in slow unarmed planes that frequently took fire, and they had a reputation for being brave sons of bitches, or at least crazy flyboys with more than a few screws loose. After spotting the enemy and marking them with smoke, Forward Air Controllers had to stick around dodging bullets until the Air Force strike came. They had some of the highest casualty rates of any pilots in the war. Platt was good at his job, one of the bravest in the country, but dodging incoming fire was only half the battle. Everything in the military followed a protocol, and Platt was one of the last rungs in an excruciatingly long chain of command. As the VC soldiers took pot shots at his racing plane, he had to sit tight and wait for approval to mark the target.

Platt’s first instinct was to throw all three of his radios overboard. Instead, in frustration, he pulled away and headed back to base. This was not the war he dreamed of fighting. Like so many young men born in the wake of World War II, he had heard tales of the great fighter pilots duking it out for control of the skies. Platt dreamed of joining them and earned his wings one year after graduating from college. Boisterous and blunt, his swaggering personality was the embodiment of his home state of Texas. His love of cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats was matched only by his hatred of bureaucracy and contempt for the word “no.”