300 Missions Over Vietnam – Stewart Cranston

It was like watching a singular green light in a gray fog. Presently, I keyed my mike and said, “Lead, go dim steady and turn on your formation lights.” Formation lights were spotlights embedded in the upper wing surface and oriented to shine on the fuselage to give depth perspective to the wingman.

After a pause, the green light stopped blinking and became a steady, dim green point in the gray fog. “Formation lights are on,” Lead said. Actually, they’re not, I thought to myself. This is going to be a long night if we stay in this weather. I tightened my focus on the green light and hung on. After we leveled off at 20,000 feet, Lead called, “Saber, fuel check. Lead’s eight thousand, tanks dry.” I glanced quickly at the fuel gauge, located on the bottom center of the instrument panel.

The needle seemed to be near the five o’clock position or just below the 8000 mark. As I remained concentrated on the green light, I dared not fumble for the switch that would confirm the drop tanks had fed out. I replied, “Two is seven eight hundred, tanks dry.” We settled in for the remainder of the flight to our target area. At least the air was relatively smooth until we reached the frontal boundary south of Da Nang.

The turbulence was mild at first, little bumps that rocked the airplane. These bumps progressed to sharp, jarring motions and the green light bobbed and weaved as I struggled to keep it centered on the side of the canopy. “Easy,” I said to myself, “Don’t over control.” My concentration became intense—and as the turbulence increased, I slowly began to lose my sense of orientation in the real, ­three-dimensional world. From my physiological training I knew that spatial disorientation occurred when the various sensors in the body, particularly the ­semi-circular canals in the ear, are confused by banking and climbing/diving motions of an aircraft.

Visual cues normally override these false sensations, but in the absence of a clear visual horizon, the other bodily senses prevail. The result is an inability to accurately tell your orientation to the physical world. In extreme cases, a tumbling sensation can result. Spatial disorientation is typically a major factor in fatal, loss of control aviation accidents. This knowledge was not comforting.

But it did emphasize the urgency of keeping sight of the limited visual cue I did have, Lead’s green wingtip light. The tension now became palpable. Sweat beads formed on my forehead and I could feel dampness under my flight suit. The ­F- 100 had no weather radar, so we basically had no choice but to plunge ahead into the gloom. Occasionally, flashes of lightning would illuminate the entirety of Lead’s airplane, but against the grey background of clouds they did not provide the visual cue I needed to fight my worsening spatial disorientation.

A powerful feeling crept in that we were no longer flying straight and level.

Library of Congress cataloging data are available Library of Congress Control Number 2025027543 © 2025 Stewart Cranston. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image: author by his ­F-100D, suited up, ready to climb into the cockpit (author’s collection).

Printed in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com 1kitap1.com/en To all those left at Home in a time of war who sustain the connection to the Real World and, all too often, must bear the loss. 1kitap1.com/en Acknowledgments I would like to thank Margaret Cranston for her invaluable help in completing this project.

She is my collaborator and chief critic. She has an incredible eye for detail coupled with a mastery of syntax, grammar and punctuation. She was relentless in searching out errors, large and small, in my manuscript. She is a talented artist in a number of mediums and lent an artist’s touch to my visuals. And she is an accomplished writer in her own right, having just published her second book, Home in All Seasons.

I’d also like to thank Dr. David Vaughan, the senior editor for McFarland’s Voices in American Military Aviation series, for his help and encouragement with this project. From the moment I contacted him about the book idea, he was enthusiastic and encouraging. He was a patient critic in straightening out my introductory material and in correcting spelling of Vietnamese place names.

In all of this he gently pushed me forward with the project. 1kitap1.com/en Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction One Beginning Two Troops in Contact Three Settling In Four Bullpup Training Five Attacked Six Just a Routine Combat Sky Spot Mission Seven Bombing Halt (or “Who the hell is Richard?”) Eight Anticipation Nine Hawaii Ten Battle Damage Eleven Ho Chi Minh Trail Twelve Times Are Changing Thirteen Loss Fourteen Looking Ahead (or Slipping Away?)

Fifteen George Sixteen Fini and Home Epilogue Military History of Stewart E. Cranston Bibliography Index of Terms 1kitap1.com/en Map of South East Asia showing the location of Tuy Hoa, as well as other principal air bases in South Vietnam (Air Force Office of History). Preface In the fall of 2022, I came across a packet of letters in an old trunk that I had stored away many years ago.

The letters, 130 of them, were my correspondence with people back home while I was stationed in Vietnam as an ­F-100 pilot in 1968/69. In April 2024, I became aware of McFarland’s series, Voices in American Military Aviation.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9781476697772, 9781476655925
• Pages: 271
• Language: English (en)

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