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Everyone had a theory: It was a suicide assignment for flyboys with discipline problems, a renegade faction within the American military establishment, a myth, a red herring. But rumors floated around Vietnam that, wherever it was, there was a lot less bullshit.įed up with the strictures of war, Platt began making inquiries. After six months of service in Vietnam, pilots could apply for something called the “Steve Canyon Program.” The name derived from a popular military comic strip about a badass soldier who took on whole platoons by himself, but the instructor never explained what, exactly, the program was … or where it was located … or who ran it. He recalled a mysterious operation one of his instructors mentioned in the final days of training. “We were kind of fighting with one hand behind our back.” The joke around the chow hall was more macabre: Pilots weren’t allowed to kill the enemy until they had the enemy’s permission.Įxasperated, Platt had one ray of hope. “We weren’t really fighting a war,” Platt’s roommate, Air Force pilot Ed Gunter, remembers.
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Pilots like Platt stayed alive by trusting their gut and making quick decisions, but in Vietnam, the rules seemed designed to thwart them. If he flew too high, he risked making a bad call and killing friendlies. If a pilot wanted to get a closer look and dipped lower, he risked court-martial.
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It was safer up there, which meant fewer friendly casualties that upper management had to answer for, but it was also a hell of a lot harder to see anything on the ground. Forward Air Controllers were required to fly at an elevation of at least 1500 feet, high enough to mostly stay out of range of small arms fire. Pilots had a particularly tough time with the rules. Every unintended casualty could now be explained away by those running the war as a simple breach of protocol by some bad actor, and not the inevitable consequence of a prolonged and confused aggression in some far-off land. Instead of protecting civilians and friendly troops, new rules were conceived to cover the asses of politicians and top brass. First conceived to prevent unintended casualties in a complex jungle war, the rules had grown increasingly Byzantine. During training, Platt had to memorize an encyclopedia’s-worth of recently established rules-of-engagement. In Vietnam, a new generation of pilots was forced to toe a strict line. When Platt joined the Air Force in 1963, the glory days of the World War II ace - the ultimate lone wolf dogfighting in the blue yonder - were long gone. He would hear that word a lot in the service. His love of cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats was matched only by his hatred of bureaucracy and contempt for the word “no.” Boisterous and blunt, his swaggering personality was the embodiment of his home state of Texas. Platt dreamed of joining them and earned his wings one year after graduating from college.
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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. This was not the war he dreamed of fighting. Instead, in frustration, he pulled away and headed back to base. Platt’s first instinct was to throw all three of his radios overboard. Finally, the radio came alive: Request denied. As the VC soldiers took pot shots at his racing plane, he had to sit tight and wait for approval to mark the target. Everything in the military followed a protocol, and Platt was one of the last rungs in an excruciatingly long chain of command. Platt was good at his job, one of the bravest in the country, but dodging incoming fire was only half the battle. They had some of the highest casualty rates of any pilots in the war. 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 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. Forward Air Controllers were like scouts, bird dogs trained to find and point out the enemy. 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.