A Vietnam vet remembers the Tet Offensive of 1968

I was the C-130 navigator on our crew of five stationed on Taiwan so we didn't officially count as being in Vietnam. It was the latter part of January 1968, and we had just returned from ferrying a broken airplane all the way back across the Pacific to the depot for maintenance. The plane had a cracked main wing spar — nothing terribly important except that this is what holds the wings on and we had to island hop across the Pacific on minimum fuel loads. Upon returning, we were immediately sent to Nam for six weeks of the war effort.

As cargo haulers, our route was from Taiwan to Manila to Bangkok to Tuy Hoa, Vietnam, from which we would be staging for six weeks. All went well except that out of Bangkok it was past midnight and we were unable to get any kind of clearance from Vietnam because, we were informed, "everyone is in the bunkers."

[Medal of Honor recipients visit Juneau Coast Guardsmen]

Not fully understanding what that meant, we proceeded across Laos with no clearance at all. We were finally picked up on radar by Danang. We positively identified who we were, and we were then advised, and I remember these words specifically, "SAY YOUR DESTINATION BECAUSE THE ONLY AIRFIELDS IN VIETNAM THAT ARE NOT PRESENTLY UNDER ATTACK ARE CAM RAHN BAY AND TUY HOA." No problem. We were headed for Tuy Hoa. As we flew south off the coast, we did indeed see large amounts of smoke rising from almost all our installations.

We were to find out that this was the Tet Offensive, launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army on Jan. 30. This would  be the hottest part of the war, as the outpost at Khe Sanh was under siege and the Marines there were surrounded. Khe Sanh was in the northwest corner, close to the DMZ and Laos. Our daily routine was to fly to Danang and get loaded with ammunition and supplies and try to get it into Khe Sanh without getting shot. After being loaded it was a short flight to near Hue, where we would get into a stack of holding airplanes from 10,000 to 20,000 feet. There was no radar control. We controlled our own stack (in the soup, of course) at 1,000-foot intervals. The plane on the bottom would go in to land, and everyone else in the stack would move down a thousand feet.

[2016 wasn't the worst year, not by a long shot]

From our stack the Khe Sanh runway was a straight shot down a valley and over a ridge to land on the runway, which was sloped slightly upward. There was a good chance that each plane would be a target for mortar fire. So the object was to land, offload and get out as quickly as possible. Total time was approximately three minutes for landing, taxiing through the small ramp at the top left side of the runway, releasing all five pallets of cargo while still rolling, turning right onto the upper end of the runway and taking off down hill. Then back to Danang for another load.

Quite often we would be running low on fuel before getting our load delivered and we would head back to Danang for more gas. The air around Danang was quite congested and several times we found ourselves as No. 3 in the emergency fuel pattern. Hard to believe with an airplane that could carry 63,000 pounds of fuel.

Interesting side note: We were among the lucky ones. The only time we took a little shrapnel, it hit a couple of cases of fruit juice. Imagine grape juice squirting around in the cargo area. But one silver Marine C-130 (ours were camouflage) wasn't as lucky. It was hit on touchdown at the end of the runway and was blown up. I always wondered if anybody got out alive. And 30 years later I actually ran into a guy who was strapped in, riding in the back. He was blown clear of the plane, seat and all, and was OK. We are still friends. It's a small world. And that's what was going on in 1968.

Bruce Headle served in the U.S. Air Force from 1958 to 1979, most of that time as a C-130 navigator. He served in Southeast Asia, Vietnam for the most part, in 1967-68. He retired from the Air Force at Elmendorf as a major, and now lives in Chugiak.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser.