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USAF ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #650
Major Frank J. Gorski, Jr.
Eglin AFB FL. 5 Feb 1973

SCANNED BY ISA

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

ORAL HISTOHY PROGRAM

Interview #650

'"

of
Major Frank J.

Gorsk~.

t
By

LTC V. H. Gallacher & Maj Lyn R. Officer

Date

5 Februarr 1973

Location

Eglin AFB FL

The pen and ink changes have been made by the editor.

Guide to Contents
Major Frank J. Gorski, Jr.
Interview
Page(s)

Subject

Early career in the Air Force

Switched from multi-engines to single-engine aircraft

Trained in T-28 aircraft at Stead AFB and Hurlburt AFB

Assigned PCS to Bien Hoa, South Vietnam

Flew missions with FARM GATE personnel

Fire fight in IV Corps described

Flew all models of T-28

10

South Vietnamese rode in backseat of T-28

11

Engaged in many night missions

13

Command and control structure described

16

Types of radios on T-28 aircraft

17

Types of ordnance carried on T-28 aircraft

20

Size of napalm cans carried on T-28 aircraft

21

Weight of ordnance carried on T-28 aircraft

22

Rules of Engagement in Vietnam

22

Only worked with airborne FAC

23

Did not support any particular unit

25

Tactics employed in target area with close air support

26

Dive angles and release altitudes described

GORSKI
Page(s)

Subject

28

CEA estimated using hard bombs

30

Background experience of T-28 pilots

32

Training of South Vietnamese pilots

33

Quality of South Vietnamese pilots

35

Rules of Engagement and effectiveness

37

Departed South Vietnam in August 1964

38

Became involved in B-26K program

39

Trained at Hurlburt and England AFB

40

Worked out of Nakhon Phanom with the 603d during 1966

41

Primary mission was interdiction

42

Operated mainly in STEEL TIGER east

42

Flew single ship missions

43

Crew makeup on the B-26's

44

Number of B-26's operating

45

Supported infiltration and exfiltration teams in Laos

46

Teams were under PRAIRIE FIRE programs

50

Ordnance carried on the B-26

51

Use of star-light scopes

51

B-26 as a close air support vehicle

53

Use of trucks in truck killing operations

55

Dive angles employed in dropping ordnance

56

Differences in Rules of Engagement from one tour to the

next

ii

GORSKI

Subject

Page(s)
57

FAC not required for close air support role

58

Operations in ROUTE PACK 1

59

Intense antiaircraft fire in ROUTE PACK 1

62

Insufficient number of B-26's in SEA

66

Did not work with Army units

66

Involvement in search and destroy missions

67

B-26 ideal for night missions

68

First BARREL ROLL mission considered most significant

event of second tour

69

Intelligence not considered good

71

Intelligence people assigned to unit

72

POW's in Laos

74

Future of the Special Warfare Mission

79

Trained in the A-37

80

Fate of the A-26's

81

Closer cooperation between Army Special Forces and Air

Force Special Forces needed

82

Too much turnover in the Special Forces

84

Proper role of the gunship discussed

iii

Oral History Interview #650

Date: 5 February 1973
SECRET
Taped Interview with Major Frank J. Gorski, Jr.
Conducted by: Lt Colonel V. H. Gallacher and Major Lyn R. Officer

Ga:

Major Gorski, let's begin the interview by reviewing your early

career in the Air Force and leading up to how you got into
Special Operations Forces.

Go:

Yes, well, okay.

guess.

We have got to go back twenty years almost, I

I came in the Air Force in 1954 in the old Aviation

Cadet program.

I was one of the few people they took at that

time without a college education.

When they opened the doors

for a while it was in the Korean War and they wanted warm bodies,
and I was one of the warm bodies.
program at Lackland.

And I went through the Cadet

I went to Enid, Oklahoma, Vance AFB, for

multi-engine training and then down to Randolph for advance

training.

My first assignment in the Air Force was with the Air

Defense Command out in Yuma, Arizona, Yuma County Airport, the

Tow Target Squadron.

I was a "rag dragger."

started getting shot at.

Kingdom in tankers.
all my life.

Tha t 's when I

Then I spent a tour in the United

I was kind of a frustrated fighter pilot

It was sort of a conflict of interest when I first

GORSKI

came in; one, I figured on a very short military career, and I

was planning on getting out and flying for the airlines.

That

is one reason I went to basic multi-engines to get a multi-engine

rating and all this kind of stuff.

I fell in love with the Air

Force more or less and decided this is what I wanted to do.

So

one of my primary aims was to get back in a single-engine or

fighter business.

After my three years of tankers over in United

Kingdom, on my way back--my next assignment was another KB-50

outfit, England Air Force, Louisiana.

I stopped at the Pentagon

and asked them haw I could switch over.

I had an interview with

one of their personnel officers that said that the flying game
is done.

Got to start thinking missiles.

This was back in 1960.

If I wanted to get in on the ground floor of the missile program,

that would help me out.
business.

I didn't really want to get in the missile

So he recommended as an alternate that if I had got a

mechanical background, to go ahead and go to school and become

an aircraft maintenance officer, which would assure me continuity
with the Flying Program.

Apparently at that time they were

seriously considering holding all the airplanes up and just

flying missiles.

This was prior to Nam [Vietnam] and a few

other things that happened since then.

So I went to maintenance

school and wound up at El Paso, Texas, in another KB-50 outfit,

only this time it was as a maintenance officer instead of a
pilot.

And I had a kind of unusual circumstance happen.

I was

running short of crew chiefs and I was down to two and three
2

GORSKI

levels cre-v.ring these old birds.

I can't remember exactly when

it was, about 1961, 1962, they had this JUNGLE JIM program.
had fired an application in on that.
here.

And a short mixup--episode

I was on the phone to TAC fighting for crew chiefs.

needed something besides three-levels.

I had

I
guy

personnel~-the

assured me, as he always did, that there would be more crew chiefs
coming~-five-levels, seven-levels-~anything

hang on.

that I desired.

Just

While I was talking to--maybe he was a sergeant--I don't

remember now--anyway, he was talking about the assignment.

I'll

never forget the guy's name.

He

His name was Captain Clutch.

was at TAC personnel at that time.

JIM program.

I asked him about this JUNGLE

He sort of made some funny sounds for a while, and

then he said, "Well, where are you and what are you doing?"

said, "Well, I'm out at El Paso--tankering." He said, "Forget

it.

You've got that - -you're s'carce as hen's teeth.

tanker pilots."

We need

I said, "Well, I'm in maintenance now." And he

just about corne unglued over the phone.

I said, "I'm a maintenance officer.

He says, ''You're what?"

I'm just wondering what

happened to my JUNGLE JIM application." He said, "You can pick

'-26, T-28 or C-47."

I said, ''Wait a minute.

Slow down." He

says, "Can I consider your JUNGLE JIM application for worldwide?"

And I gave him the order in return.
C-47."

I says, "T-28 and B-26,

"Report down at Hurlburt pretty quick," he says, "Okay,

I'll fire out a message on the machine." The guy gave me all of
two weeks to get to Hurlburt.

I had a wife and family.

3

This I

GORSKI

thought I could hack, but the next day I got a message to report
to Stead [APB, Nevada] before I go to Hurlburt for training.

So

instead of going to Hurlburt, I got on an airplane heading for

Stead and told the wife we'd take care of all this somewhere in
route.

And I got down to Hurlburt and personnel gave me additional

few days to take care of my family.

checkout.

Then I completed my T-28

I was in the first batch of PCS pilots to be sent over

to Vietnam.

Until that time, they had been TOY from Hurlburt.

We were the initial cadre of T-28 pilots assigned PCS to Bien

Boa Airbase.

Ga:

You got there in 1962?

Go:

1962.

Ga:

Would you describe the significant aspects or highlights of your

I stayed for a year and went back ln 1964.

tour in 1962?

Go:

Definitely.

There was a lot of highlights in my tour.

subject we could talk about for maybe a year in itself.

try to be very candid and brief where possible.

It's a
I'll

Initially we

were assigned to Bien Hoa and we were under the old Second Air
Division, 34th Tactical Group.

We were the 1st Commando Squadron.

We had, depending on losses, attrition, and everything else, we

had a handful of B-26's, and 7-11, I guess, T-28's--the Air Force
4

GORSKI

E models.

Primarily most of my flying was done out of Bien Hoa

or Soc Trang dawn in the Mekong Delta down in IV Corps.

my~-pulled

I started

my first combat mission on the 10th of September.

Ga:

You were in FARM GATE?

Go:

No, we were with the [garbled].

That's where the thing split.

In fact, the people that gave us the dollar ride or area checkout
every month were FARM GATE types.

For instance ~ my first combat

mission, I flew with Captain Bill Potter, a FARM GATE pilot.

And we went over somewhere west of Bien Hoa, as I remember, and
dropped a bunch of bombs in among some VC, trees and went home.
That was my initiation into the program.
mission got a little more interesting.

[Garbled]

The second

I took off--oh, prior to

the first mission, of course, I was in pre-combat training, area

mapping, checkout program in III Corps here, flying around Bien
Hoa learning the local area.

[Garbled]

all this kind of good stuff.

So as I say, the first mission

was kind of routine.

Don't go in areas and

The second day was a mission from alert

with Lt Shernak--lst Lieutenant..

I was a captain at the time.

Of course, you serve your apprenticeship under the old hands,

pick up experience on your own.
you switch over to lead.

Twenty or thirty mission point,

Tom had been an old head there.

had been there a couple or three months already.

me on, as I later on led other people.
5

He

He was leading

We took off on a

GORSKI

helicopter escort mission around the Tay Ninh mountain area

there.

Apparently some Viet Cong had shot up some government

troops there the night before and they wanted to air evac some
people from there to Saigon to the hospital.
an escort mission.
recall.

Took off and formed

We were carrying napalm and

rockets~

as I

Tom checked in with PARIS control at Saigon there and

asked him if he had anything to spend the ordnance on and he said,

"Take off to coordinates umpty ump, umpty ump, whatever they were,
which was way down in IV Corps." We proceeded south and very
shortly I flew off my map into IV Corps.
competent leader so no sweat.

Well, I had a good,

We pressed on.

over the radio where we would be recovering.

I casually asked
He said, "Soc

Trang." Well, I had no idea where Soc Trang was.

We went on

down there, and Tom proceeded to get shot down.

So we had a

regular old fire fight going there as I recall.

He got hit by

ground fire and bellied into a rice paddy.

out all right.

Nobody got hurt.

No problem.

We lost an airplane.

He got
But I

remember circling my downed leader, wondering where and what to

do next.

My initial thought was to head east because I knew

there was a coast out there someplace and then head north, which
would get me back on the map.

But I called rather blindly over

the radio and said, "Does anyone know where the nearest air
patch is?"

Some fellow who I--didn't know who he was at the

time--I turned my head and I saw him sitting out on my wing in

another T-28.

A big moustache, connnando hat--looked like "Terry

6

GORSKI

and the Pirates"--Bob Necap(?)1 Cap as they called him.

So I

said, "Well, you look like a friendly old cuss so I'll just hang
on." He said, ''We're going home to Soc Trang." So I said,
"Thanks.

Good.

I'll finally find out where this place is."

That was Jim [garbled].

off at Soc Trang.

He is now a full bull.

He dropped me

It got really hilarious at that point because

I landed and nobody knew me, a new guy and I didn't know where
anything was.

So after much taxiing around in circles and

whatnot [garbled]

The crew chief didn't even know who I was and

if I needed fuel or not.

''What do I do next?" He said, "Go

talk to the man in the hut." The man in the hut was a Lieutenant
Kingman who was equally surprised at my arrival.
everybody wanted to know where my leader was.

Of course,

I said, ''Well,

last I saw him, he was down in a rice paddy and the Army had
picked him up."

It got really hilarious because this guy wanted

to know where this all happened and I had no way of telling this
guy where this all happened because I didn't have a map.

Back

in the early days you started asking things like, ''What time did
this happen?" Well, I didn't have the presence of mind to look
at my watch, you know.

This all happened rather rapidly at that

time, so it was really hilarious.

Finally, somebody came in--I

don't remember who it was now that knew me--and said, ''What are
you doing here?" And I tried to explain it to him and all again.
It got funnier every time I told it.

But that was sort of my

initiation into early combat in Vietnam.

7

From there it went

GORSKI

pretty much the routine.

Soc Trang, Bien Hoa.

We would rotate Bien Hoa to Soc Trang?

We more or less set up three flights but

we rotated the flights.

We had a Bien Hoa flight> a Soc Trang

flight, and a more or less off and duty flight.

AOC there at Bien Hoa.

We ran a little

So if you weren't flying either Bien Hoa

or Soc Trang or rotating between? then you were either pulling

duty in the AOC or you were downtown Saigon goofing off.
how pretty much the year went.

That's

There are times when we were

covering pretty much of III and IV Corps with maybe three or four
airplanes trying to keep all the corners nailed down, which is
obviously sort of not quite working.
I think.

But we did do a good job,

It was probably the most interesting flying I have done

in my career.

The people I worked with were probably some of the

most versatile people I've worked with.

There was a esprit de

corps at that time that was just fantastic.

it.

You couldn't believe

What you see in the Air Force today looks a little bit shaky

compared to what you saw then.

You really saw people with sparks

flying out of their butts, just weird.

We took our losses; we

took our lumps; we did some fantastic flying.

A sidelight, there

was an article published in Life magazine during that year about

this Lieutenant Shank who wrote his wife about how bad things were
at various times.

I turned up in Life magazine with a misspelled

name on that one, but he has been criticized by several people ln

the Air Force.

I know this guy real well.

letters led him to be.

He is not what his

But then, too, you never know a person

8

GORSKI

really.

But as far as a man that was doing his job and everything,

Jerry was right there all the time.

We needed equipment.

didn't need sophisticated airframes, F-4's, F-III's.

some more hardware, I believe, similar to what
newer models, new equipment.
The wings were peeling off.
good reason at all.

We

We needed

we had, only

The stuff we had was getting old.

People were getting killed for no

Now we have such a thing as the Yankee extrac-

tion system which we have got a lot out of our people out of 28's,
for instance.

This is how I got out of my airplane last year, or

a year and a half ago.

The state of the arts improved.

talking about an AX now which is too many years late.

over.

We could have done something earlier.

We were
The war is

I'm sure we could

have.

0:

Which T-28 did you fly?

Did you fly the one with the big engine

or the small engine?

Go:

I flew everyone of them.

model made I guess.

T-28's I'm an expert on.

I flew every

We had the D series, which was the old A

model airframe with a Navy engine on it with the Air Force instruments.

During my tour, I had a chance to fly B models, some of

the Vietnamese CIS.

We had the Guppy version, the Camera versions.

We had the--at that time, there were D's, B's and CIS over in
Vietnam.

Later on they came out with the D-IO series which is

later--not the latest one--there is another one besides that now.

GORSKI

We had a bunch of Navy B's later on.

All the airframes were

turned over to the people in the WATER PUMP program just after
the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which happened just prior to my
rotation.

In fact, we all got nailed for an extension.

turning our aircraft over to WATER

P~,W

at that time.

We were
In fact,

I made two runs up to Udorn.

Ga:

Were you involved in any training?

Go:

The only training we did is we carried a guy in the back seat

who was a little Vietnamese airman.

Of course? if you are familiar

with the 28 at all, the gun triggers and bomb buttons and everything
are in the front seat.

They give this cat a couple of piasters

a month just to ride along.

He is an airman basic, usually.

spoke no English; I spoke no Vietnamese.

story at that time.
airplane.

Ga:

He

He was part of our cover

They went in; there was two bodies in the

Supposedly we were advising.

You were still then continuing the FARM GATE cover of being
advisors and training?

Go:

Yes.

We did on occasion work with the local Vietnamese squadron

in terws that we were supposed to give them a little instrument

training.

So about once every two weeks or

10

something~

we would

GORSKI

catch a mission with one of these guys.

and maybe shoot ADF's.

We would take them out

Electronic equipment, navigation equipment

at that time was very primitive and nonexistent in-country.

You

had PARIS control, which is one radar site there in Saigon.

At

Bien Hoa at that time, I think we had an old 25-watt, ADF homer
that was left over from the French days.
weather.
went.

We didn't bother with it.

We just got on the deck and

If you wanted to get someplace, you just picked up a canal

and went.
tance.

We flew in all kinds of

That was your navigation system.

Flew time and dis-

Kept one eye on the fuel and one eye out the window and

pressed on.

Night or day, it didn't make any difference.

We did

a lot of night work, flare support, a lot of hamlet defense, some

pretty interesting flying, I must say, sort of a cross at being
an old time mail pilot and sort of a modern day aviator.
a cross of everything.

It was

The experience level that you attained

very rapidly was just a matter of survival.

Ga:

How about going into some detail on a typical night mission that
you might fly?

Go:

Okay, a typical night mission.

I'll get back a little more on

this Vietnamese training business, a real interesting story

there.

I guess a classic would--I don't remember when it hap-

pened, but I remember a night fort under attack somewhere down

11

GORSKI

at IV Corps.

We responded out of Soc Trang.

after takeoff, I lost my gyro.

The moon was out.

we arrived at the fort.

Right

So I turned it over to number

two, and we pressed on to the target area.

nice night.

I was lead.

It was a fairly well--

We just smoked along.

The fort was under attack.

I remember
You could

see a fire fight going on, but the darn thing was shrouded ln
i
I

1
'1

fog.

They had the old fire arrow down there that they had inside

the fort where they would point to which side the bad guys were
on.

We could circle above this dude and pick up the fire arrow,

but as soon as you tried to get some sort of angle on it, you
lost it.

Of course, the flare ship was dropping flares and they

would go down in the fog and that would really play havoc with
your sight.

So we stooged around, and I remember trying to get

up the river for a while until I saw some palm trees coming at
me pretty quick.

So I got out of there, and came back up.

remember as I looked back, I could see a--looked like a motorboat

trail through the fog that I made.

I said, "That was a dumb

stunt." But we would try everything we could because we had a

limited resource, and we did things that maybe now we would say
were a little bit hairbrained or foolish.

But the guys that were

involved at that time all believed in what they were doing.

still believe in what we did over there.
try anything.

They were willing to

That was maybe not a typical mission, but it was

a classic in a sense that we took off and you had a good reason
to abort but you went on anyway.
12

Even when you got there and you

GORSKI

saw it was weathered

in~

you still tried a little more to accom-

plish this thing.

Ga:

Could you go back and say how you got alerted for this, the command and control structure?

Go:

Okay.

Command and control, at that

IV Corps.

You had your

hamlets~

usually tied in by PM radio.

time~-well~

we'll take say

some which were very

Okay.

remote~

were

They used the priority system

because the better part of III and IV Corps was also covered by
artillery range.

They had it pretty well staked out.

If you

ever seen an artillery plot overlay of a country like that, they

can pretty well survey their pieces and cover it a lot better
than you can do it with air.

The only advantage you've got is

you can see what is going on right now.

You're working real

time where they were working an abstract point and space in time.
But as far as coverage, they've got--see, they would use their
artillery range as their basic defense.

Only when a high priority

hamlet or position was being attacked would they call for air
because air at that time was a very limited resource.

So we

would more or less--by the time we got the message, it had already
been established who had the priority and where to go.

Ga:

Who is establishing this priority?

13

~.

GORSKI

Go;

This would come out of the AOC at Saigon and would pass all the
way up through there and then back out again.

Even so, our

reaction time once we got the word was like twenty or thirty
minutes in anyone of the Corps because, you know, the country
is long and skinny.

If you've got an airfield centrally located,

you can get around pretty well.

It was broken up in four Corps

which made it pretty well--pretty nice setup.

it by telephone.
out on an PM.

So we would get

Like I say, initially it would probably go

It would be authenticated through the AOC.

AOC

in turn would relegate the resource by phone and then we would

respond accordingly.

Once we took off from Soc Trang, we stood

f

~e$'

Operational direct"~; at that

alert at Soc Trang and Bien Hoa.

time were to recover at Bien Hoa, always, because of the length

of the runway and the lighting.

Soc Trang was the old 3,200-foot

Jap Zero base, is what it was, from World War II.

We had no field

lighting other than the Army had a couple of bean bag lights out
there.

In an emergency, we had one or two guys pull it back in,

but normally once we took off, launched out of Soc Trang, we

were on mission.

Then we would recover at Bien Hoa, spent out

the night there, rearm and refuel.

chain rotation.

We worked sort of a daisy

You came up just by order.

through the missions that way.

We just kept going

While you were on this week of

flying, or two weeks, wherever you were, at Bien Hoa or Soc Trang,
you just flew in rotation continuously.

14

We pulled night alerts.

GORSKI

Then you would have the next day off, of course.

Then you would

be back into the daisy chain again the following day until your
tum was back up at night again.

I would

250 hours of combat time, as I recall.

say~~let' s

see, I had

I would say probably 50

to 75 hours of that was night, something like that.

Of course,

a lot of that nighttime was to-from or holding, waiting for a

strike to get off.

Ga:

Did you work with FACs at that time?

Go:

Our FACs at that time would be the flare ship.

It initially was

the gooney birds and then later on it was the C-123s.

They

carried supposedly a--well, they did--they carried a Vietnamese

interpreter and a liaison who would authenticate a position who
was under attack, what it was.

Ga:

Okay, so he was talking to somebody on the ground?

Go:

On the ground.

And then once he established the communication--

very seldom did we talk to anybody on the ground.

We always

talked through the gooney bird or the 123, through the FAC, the
flare ship.

Same thing during the day.

always worked with a FAC, the old

were FACs.

L~19

If we were working, we
BIRD DOGs, O-l's that

We had a couple of screwy rules at that time.

could only work with Air Force FACs.

15

We

We couldn't work with

GORSKI

Anny FAG;.

This was when the Anny and the Air Force had a little

bit of a ''Who was going to run the ground support business" going.
In fact, I got my tail in a crack one day because I did strike a
target with an Anny FAC.

One of the rules we also had was that

you had to have a qualified Vietnamese observer aboard.

assured me he had an observer.

This guy

It was too good of a target to

pass up and we went ahead and hit it.

That was down near Pha Xi

Hoa down on the west coast down in that area, I remember.

Anyway,

we were very seldom in touch with the man on the ground.

It seems

like, as I recall, later on in the year there was one or two

engagements where they had some pretty good fire fights going
on the ground that we actually talked to Army commanders or Army
liaison types who were assigned with Vietnamese units.

Those

calls were usually, 'Bey, are you guys sure you know where the
friendlies are?" We assured them that we saw their panels and
all this kind of good stuff because there had been one or two
occasions along the line where, as in any war, somebody shoots
the wrong side.
about that.

I guess the guy on the ground is pretty sensitive

I wouldn't blame them.

Rightly so.

0;

What radios did you have in the aircraft?

Go:

We carried Air Force UHF, VHF and then later on our models had
PM for direct conummication.

But nonnally we were working UHF

and Victor [VHF] was a backup VHF.

16

I don't care what they do

GORSKI

with the airplanes in the next couple of years, but if there is

going to be any kind of cooperation in the services, this is
almost a must, this UHF, VHF, FM combination.

I have listened

to some of Ritchie's tapes coming back from his missions up

north where he got everybody working the same UHF channel, and
oh, it's maddening, where here we could just select.
so beautiful.

I have used it over water.

combat, and it is just the clearest thing.

And FM is

I have used it in
It has got a real

tone to it and everything, no static, really tremendous.

0:

What kind of ordnance did you carry along with you on these
missions?

Go:

Okay.

We had a more or less of a standard load.

You hear some

funny things about ordnance, but our standard load in the daytime
would be 100 pound white phosphorous, WILLY PETE, and it's a
small kind of size, gray things.

Then we would carry an iron

bomb, usually anywhere from a 250 GP to a 250 frag to a 500

pounder.

We also had some of the old--I forget the designation

now, but 120 pound frag clusters.

type frag bombs clustered together.

We had these six World War II

It was a very effective

weapon.

Our night loads primarily were consisted of napalm and

rockets.

We would use the napalm to give us a light, which is

what we wanted, and the rocket and machine gun from there on.
Our T-28's had the tub modification at that time.
17

It looked

GORSKI

like a big suitcase hanging on the wing with a gun barrel

sticking out of it.

That was a 750 round pod.

Of course, the

Vietnamese had some of the 100 round practice pods, but we had
the big tubs that were developed dawn here at Hurlburt to give
us the extra fire power.

We had some very old anrnuni tion.

We

would get some of this 50 caliber once in a while that would

really light up the sky.

I don't know what it does, but the

API apparently coming out the barrel would ignite in the barrel
maybe through burrs or something and it would get flashes coming
out of this gun, something hilarious, sparks flying out ahead.
You wondered what was going toward the target, if anything.
used straight API.
diary.

I'm a booster of API,

We

armor-piercing incen-

It leaves no tracer, but it gives you where you're hitting.

At night you can--reca11 one night we were just sort of working

over a little hamlet the bad guys were supposedly in.
walked this stuff around.

You just

You could walk it up a door, down

again, and move it a11 over the street, just fantastic, yet you're "/Urf'
leaving off any tracer.
it gives you hits.
fire beautifully.

In the daytime, it's bright enough that

Every hit you can see, so you can adjust your

Rockets, unfortunately for a while there we

were getting armor-piercing rockets.

These were a mess because

down in IV Corps in the Delta during the wet season, you'd fire
one of these Joses and it would land say three feet from a guy.
This thing went so deep into the mud that all it would do is

18

GORSKI

squirt mud back out at the airplane coming through.

We used to

come back with mud on the windshields once in a while.

During

the dry season when the Delta dries out for instance, it is hard
and it would explode on contact.
the Philippines, the
why~~some

C~bic

So we finally got through to

[Subic] Foint there, and asked them

Jose was using a chart from Korea where he said we had

so many hard targets and so many locomotives to go after.

Our

ammunition at that time was more or less being programmed on

what they used in Korea, bunkers and concrete structures and all
this kind of stuff.

Well, we informed them that we didn't have

any bunkers and no railroads and no engines and no tanks.

This

was very low profile guerrilla war at that time, and we wanted
quick~fused

stuff, stuff that would go up in treetops and put

shrapnel down where you wanted it, in the holes.

of the beautiful advantages of WILLY PETE.

This is one

It blows up and it

gives you the vertical arc and then it drops down.

If you've

got a guy in the hole, it's going to go right down with him.
It's pretty nasty stuff. Napalm is good, but it just covers a
very limited area.

As a daytime weapon, I don't know; I prefer

many things besides napalm unless you have got a specific target
that you want to burn out like a cave or something like that.
But at nighttime, it's a necessity actually because it gives you
lights on the ground, which is what you want to orientate
self from.

19

your~

GORSKI

0;

What size napalm cans did you carry?

Go:

We had the old 500 pound napalm tanks.

ment where we had some 250's.

develop~

Again, I don't remember the

designator for these things anymore.

But there were some devel-

Initially our napalm was basically the old soap-gasoline

opments.
mix.

They had a later

If you let it set, it would separate.

Then if you dropped

it, you would get a vertical fireball, everything going straight

up in the air.

One of our guys was playing around with that

adding charcoal to it and pieces of rubber and everything else

and keeping the cans rotated for purposes of keeping it burning
longer and make the fire burn on the ground rather than a vertical
fireball.

He later on got involved down here at Eglin in the R&D

business--this was Colonel Morris Brooksmore--and did fairly well.

He has come up with some real good ideas.

Later on we had the

napalm B, the sticky stuff that had a pretty good shelf life and
everything else.

But initially we had a lot of problems with

some of that stuff.

We are recovering a lot of ground that they

had forgotten about since Korea and World War II.

things like this?

Why did we do

Somewhere along the line the light bulb would

come on and say, "Ha, that's why we did something like this back
then."

Let's face it.

Prior to our involvement in the Vietnam,

initially, we were pretty well strategically orientated.

Every-

thing was either the missile or the long range bomber, and we
would never fight a conventional war again.
20

I can remember those

GORSKI

words way back someplace, that everything would be "nukes" from

here on
dive

o~t.

The next thing you know I was going downhill on a

bomb/v~ing a T~28 with an old World War

;/

II iron bomb.

It's

just sort of strange how it turned itself around.

0:

How ITUlch ordnance, weight-wise, could you carry on the T-28?

Go:

On the models we had there, we could carry--well, we tried it--

four or five hundred pounders.

awful screwy out there.

But, God, those wings would look

They would start bending, and it was

5~'Zi"z;:.

just a bear to taxi them, because the shock stress would be

bottomed out and everything else.
stresses on the wings.

It was putting hellacious

So we normally, if we went 500 pounders,

we carried two, and then we would carry two 50 or 100 pound

WILLY PETE on the outboard.
wing.

Then we had the tub.

So we had two

!CaI

points on each

Overall, they came up with spar

straps later on and everything else, but I still think the airplane just wasn't designed as a fighter bomber.
as a trainer.

It was designed

Although it turned out to be a tremendous little

weapon--you could really thread the eye of the needle with that
thing--like I say, this is where we goofed--this is where we
should have stopped, right back in 1964 and said, "Hey, this is
great.

Now we need something like it.

a fighter or a

fighter~bomber,

not a trainer converted." We are

still living with that hangover.

21

Only let's make it like

We pull the A-l's out and they

GORSKI

say, ''Well, here's the answer." Well, here we had another old
airplane.

0:

We played with old airframes right along.

What kind of restrictions did you have as far as bombing in

Viet~

nam at this time? What were your rules of engagement?

Go:

Well, rules of engagement were

without a FAC.
target.

strictly~~we

could not operate

He had all the responsibility for validating a

Once we showed up on the scene, if the FAC wasn't there,

we didn't strike.

We had ordnance disposal areas, finally.

They

were free bombing areas, but they were very limited and very well
plotted.

If you were going to drop your junk off your wings

before you came home, you had to use one of these spots.
really controlled; there was no

free~lance

0:

Did you ever work with the ground FAC?

Go:

No. Never.

0;

Always an airborne?

Go:

Always an airborne FAC.

We were

work at all.

Again, one of the requirements there was

that he had this Vietnamese observer who did the authenticating.

I guess that's what you call it, authenticate the target.

22

GORSKI

Ga:

Were you supporting any particular Vietnamese unit?

Go:

No, just . . .

Ga:

Just on call?

Go;

On call, and like I say, we roamed from I Corps through IV Corps,

but primarily my flying was all done in III and IV, with a little
bit in II Corps.

I went up there on one or two escort missions.

We would support the popular government forces, the local

militia.

If they were validated and they had a priority, they

got our air power.

We might be out with--a classic happened

right along the river here, second river down in the IV Corps
area, the big one [Song Hau Giang].

They had a Viet Cong, sup-

posedly, supply area where we flew some cover for a landing

craft that had some small boats.

And they landed a party, and

they went in burned down a bunch of hooches.

We just orbited.

After it was all done, they got back in their boats and went
back out to sea, and that was it.
river patrols, also.

This was in the early days of

I remember this last river way down south,

they had a--Iooked like a destroyer escort or something, some

sort of a small Vietnamese gunboat in there one time.
him up the river and back.

We clocked

A lot of our work was escort work.

Some government unit would be pulling out or advancing into an

area and we'd sit up there and orbit.
23

A lot of it was helicopter

GORSKI

escort.

We worked primarily at Soc Trang with the l2lst Army

Aviation Company.
initially.

They had the old Flying Bananas at that time,

Then they went over to Eueys.

and supply all the outposts and hamlets.

But they would go out

Well, we'd drive along,

and when they would make their approach and landing into whatever
hamlet it would be, we would sit out there and orbit.

We would

also cover some of our gooney birds and our l23's when they were
out on these recent flying missions.

Whenever they got into

what they called a hot area, we would be sitting out there with
them.

One or two occasions when the spray flights were going into

highly suspect areas, we would fly escort for the spray aircraft.
So we ranged from escort missions.

We would run the rail line

escort between Bien Hoa and Phan Thiet on the coast, helicopter
escort, Army and Air Force, of course, Air Force 123, gooney bird
escort, some Navy escorts up and down the rivers.

I remember

sitting capping a line of the troops walking out one day.

remember exactly where it was.
Corps.

I don't

It was somewhere down there in IV

We would have armed recce missions, which we would go

out on and more or less hunt around until we found a FAC who had
a target.

Then we would go find the target.

Ga:

That was armed recce?

Go:

That was armed recce, yes.

This is what we would usually pick up

after we finished an escort mission.

24

We would declare minimum

GORSKI

fuel ~ we're going home ~ and we'd call in to any FACs armmd ~ any
work.

0:

They'd give us a target and we'd go and expend on it.

Could you tell us a little bit about the tactics you actually used
in the target area and also the delivery parameters that you used?

Ga:

For close air support.

Go:

For close air support.

was a flight of two.

Well~

our basic composition over there

That's all we could afford.

You had a

flight of two working Bien Boa; you had a flight of two working
out of Soc Trang; you probably had a flight of two in maintenance
at Bien Boa.

That was the extent of your airframes.

we'd have three.

We'd keep them in reserve.

Sometimes

But we'd launch

always in flights of two, never minimum, never below that, no

matter how hot the mission was, always a mag [magneto] check.
You know, as the old airframes were that
the time to run them up.
up.

important~

we took

EVen in a mortar attack ~ we'd run them

I remember one night some mortar rounds come whistling

in there that we launched on.

Anyway, we would take off and

proceed to, in a flight of two, to our target area.

a rutual protection.

Then it was

One guy in and one guy high, and they'd

swap, one guy in and the other guy high, trying to cover each
other as best you can.

Generally we delivered one bomb at a

time for accuracy and a limited amount of ordnance.

25

So I would

GORSKI

say on an average target we would probably need four bomb runs,

probably four straffe runs.

Again, it was just continuous

zigzagging around the target, sort of moving your attack headings

as best as you could trying to cover the man.

When he was in,

you were high, and when you were in, he was high, trying to swap
ends, keep a lookout for ground fire.
couldn't.

During the day, you

First light and last light strikes were very good

that way because everybody that took a shot at you, you could
see his muzzle flash.

You were well orientated because you

had enough daylight.

You can be your most effective at first

light or last light.

This is beautiful because you have got a

horizon.

You can do anything you want.

You don't have to pay

any attention to the instrument panel at all, and you can keep
your eyes open for every little spark on the ground.
out real well.

It works

During the day, of course, there's smokeless

powder and muzzle flash pressures and all this.

Unless the guy

is using tracer, you don !,t know you're being fired at till you
hear that thing that sounds like a marble hitting a garbage can.
Then you say, "Hey, they just put another hole in me here." We
picked up our hits every now and then.

0:

What kind of dive angles did you use? What release altitudes?

Go:

We had a rule of thumb over there going to and from a target

never to go below 1,500 feet unless the weather forced you down,
26

GORSKI

and then as a second best you went right on the

below the trees.

dec~,

Okay, once you got to a target area, we would

be working with a FAC.

We normally climbed to 3,500 or 4,000

on a perch while he was explaining the target and

and we would be orbiting up there.
with either smoke, rocket or

the way.

I mean

what,.have~you

Once he marked the target

grenade~-that

was another must, by

You had to have the target marked with smoke.

Then we

;!

would roll in.

Oh, I guess we were punching them at about, I

don't know, starting say around 4 to 5, around that neighborhood.

We would pick one of them off at 2,500 to 3.

That depended on

the size of the bomb, of course, you're carrying big stuff, jack
it up a little bit.

If you're carrying your 120 pound frag

clusters, you wanted real accuracy, you drive downhill a little

bit, 30, 40, 45, 50, 60, 90 degree dives, roll the other way, do
a roll, come back in on the target, fake the guy on the ground
once in a while, roll the opposite way from the target, just keep
the roll and come out.

It varied.

It really did.

Napalm runs,

I'd dive bomb napalms, I'd just come screaming across the trees
and kicked them off.
what the defense was.

It just depends on where the target and

Some of our later studies that we ran into,

people were trying to set up too much of a pool table environment

in terms of how to set up tactics and all of this.
many factors.

There are friendly people.

trees, weather, sun.

There are so

There is terrain,

It gets back to all the basics, and if you

play them all, there is no such thing as Ita good attack."

27

It just

GORSKI

depends on what the situation is.

Here again 1 the more experience

you gain in combat 1 the sharper you get.

Of course, the more

vulnerable you are I guess to exposure, but you begin to learn

the tricks of the trade.

I guess it's like a good old hunter.

They

go out tracking the first time? you're not too red hot? but by the
time you finally get your bear? then you know what you're doing,

either he got you.

This is a must.

I believe later on when I got in training

I always showed a man the complete envelope of the airplane.

I
I

He has to know his equipment.

He has to know

every corner of his envelope or his equipment.

Then he has to

be taught or exposed to all the various dive angles.

As to come

up with what's constant or a standard, I think that's a bunch of

baloney.

You have got to be able to choose.

You have got to have

the experience and background to choose these things as required.

0:

What kind of CEA's do you estimate you had using hard bombs?

Go:

Pretty good.

The average bear over there was putting his bombs

within SO feet, and I've seen quite a few "shacks."

talking about myself personally.
we worked with.

I'm not

I'm just working with the guys

I remember "shacking" a house one day and having

a square explosion because I must have hit that thing right in

the center.

It was a WILLY PETE, and it came up in a cube and

the walls fell over.

Let's face it.

28

That's one in a million.

GORSKI

Wouldn't want to bet on that one again.

Again, as the guy's

experience level increased, his CEA came down and he would

probably use a particular tactic that fit him well in conjunction

As you flew with these guys, after

with what he was faced with.

a while, you more or less knew what they were going to do.
is an advantage of having a small knit unit where you 've

This

got-~

I think our total force strength was 21 pilots at that time in

the 28 [T-28] section.
mentality.

We knew each other.

You knew the guy's

You knew what he would do, what he wouldn't do.

This was another planning factor in your mission.

real aggressive Joses out

there~

crossed that nobody got hurt.

You had two

you had to keep your fingers

Your best combination is usually

a little bit of a granny and a little bit of a tiger and get

these two cats out there working, and one would temper the other
one.

I remember the night before a good friend of mine got

killed, I kind of thought he was going to get killed because he

was just pulling too many hairbrained stunts.

He was chasing

some VC down a dike with a propeller because he was out of

nition.

I gave him a lecture at the bar that night.

"It ain't worth it.

go home.

It's not worth it.

ammu~

I said,

You should have quit,

Let's get another guy in there." The next day he flew

through the side of a shack or a house or whatever you want to

call it.

Parts of him are still scattered over there.

This is

something a good commander has to recognize in combat also.

is why I'm a firm believer that commanders must fly.
29

This

A commander

GOP~SKI

is not a staff officer.

He is a leader.

He is a combat leader

and this type of thing.

0:

What kind of experience background did most of the people have

in your . . . ?

Go:

God, it came from everything.

Well, take, classically mine,

not classically, but as an example.

Walked in a tanker pilot,

turned fighter-bomber pilot down at Hurlburt in three months, a

lot to learn.

I was green, but I learned it--a lot of--not a

lot of, but some of the guys came out of Air Training Command,
pilot training background, instructor type people, real good
heads, MAC types, SAC types, a couple were actually TAC fighter
types.

(End Reel 1, Side 1)

Go:

We were covering the people and their various backgrounds, and

I guess how they turned out overall.

The key to any people

regardless of what their background is is adequate training.

Obviously, in the fighter bomber business, I guess you could
probably say a certain mentality or personality or attitude is
required.

There is no argument there at all.

You need a person

that is more or less a self-sufficient type, aggressive person.

30

GORSKI

But generally what background they came out of, I would say it
really didn't make too much difference other than maybe initially
In my

it took a little longer for this guy to get up his speed.

own case, I feel that way.

I'm a little bit concerned now.

don't know if we could do this with our modern day pilots training
program because they're running them through this WHITE ZIPPER
program, and I think we maybe are losing some of the fundamental
skills of flying that maybe we learned twenty years ago, back in
the old T-6 and 28 program.

In those days, we had to handle

things like mixture, prop and throttles and think on our feet
while you were doing other things.

Of course, again, the thinking

is why fool with it when you're going to be flying jets anyway.

Well, maybe so, but I don't know.
probably twenty years ago given a

It just seems that we were

better~-we

were trained better

just because of the way we were put through the program.

exposed to more, given more.

The options were there.

We were

In my time

you had the--I started out in T-34's and went 28's and then went
B-25's.

I ran mixture, props and throttles from all kinds of

combinations and configurations.

airplane.

It was easy to convert for each

I think, considering you wanted to do something in the

jet--I had some North American B-45 time, some old "tornado" time.
I got some T-bird time and got about a hundred hours in the A-37.
I'd sit there in a jet and say, ''Well, what's next?" There's
nothing next, so you just sit there and look at the fuel--monitor
your oxygen regulator.

Again, personality and the type of individual

31

GORSKI

is important and what his background is, is not as important,

I don't feel.

I don't think there's such a thing as 1!a fighter

pilot" or "a bomber pilot."

aviators.

I like to look at everybody as

If they are a good aviator, we ought to be able to

train them to do the job we need them for right now.

To attach

some sort of stigma to some guy because he happens to be the one

that the Air Force chose to fly the l4l's across the Pacific and
say, 'Well, we'll never make a fighter pilot out of you because
you are a multi-engine driver,1! I think that's ridiculous.

He

may be the world's best, but he just happens to be in the job

they assigned him to do right now.
his job and he keeps his mouth shut.
into what he wants to.

progress.

0:

As

Then when he can, he gets

It took me seven years to get where I

wanted to go, but I got there.

fairly well.

If he's a good troop, he does

So, overall, they all turned out

I say, it was just a matter of how fast they

Once they got going, they were really all good.

Would you tell us a little bit about your training of the South
Vietnamese?

Go:

Oh, yes.

I mentioned that a little bit earlier.

We would get

involved with these cats about I'd sayan average of--usually

when we pulled alert tour up at Bien Hoa--maybe about once every
two weeks we'd get one or two flights, and the idea there was to
fly instruments with them.

Well, I went in a real unusual

32

GORSKI

situation.

First of

pilots at that time.

why.

all~

let me say this about the Vietnamese

They wouldn't fly at night.

I don't know

Orientals don't want to fly at night for some reason.

were very proficient, or they were lousy.

They

There was no spectrum.

Either had really first class pilots or you had I don't know what.
I had a classic case where we had three airplanes available and
we had three South Vietnamese pilots to go out and do some formation and some instrument and some little tactics.
younger kids as I recall.

These were

I was the third man in the flight.

So

one and two rolled down the runway wing to wing and took off.
Then we gave it the needle and pressed on, and he was flying
the airplane, and I was sitting back there looking at the scenery,
I guess, when I noticed we were kind of--extremely high rate of
closure on this here join up.

So I said, "I've got it," and sort

of eased ourselves out there a little bit, and settled

~~ down

and slid back in.

Gave him the airplane again and he started

allover the sky.

So eased back out.

hadn't been flying for a while.

I figured well, maybe he

So I asked him.

he hadn't flown for a little while.

He said, well,

So that's why I got it for

a while, and I flew for a little bit and found a comfortable

position and then gave it to him.

But every time I'd give him

the darn airplane, he'd just go completely bananas allover the

sky.

I finally called lead, and I said, "I'm going to break

off.

Our man here needs a little stick work--stick and rudder

33

GORSKI

work.

We'll just go out and do some instrument work or something

and let him get used to flying again."

I was under the impression

that he hadn't flown apparently for a long time now.

out and stooged around.

We went

He was okay all by himself, and we

attempted one or two ADF approaches, as I recall, and then landed.

Got to debriefing this kid, and I asked him when he had flown last
and it was like--not that bad, maybe within ninety days or something like that.

So I asked him where he took his training, and

he told me he had flown in the States, I think at Keesler or

something.

I asked him how much time he had.

about five hundred hours.

All the while I was talking to him,

I had a real peculiar feeling.

what it was.

He said he had

I just couldn't put my finger on it

I finally said, 'Well, when was the last time you

flew solo?" He informed me it was way back in the States sometime.

I says. "Hm," and the light bulb started going on.

said, "How much solo time do you have?" He said, "I've got one
hour solo time." So apparently the story unfolded that he was
one of the political pilot trainees that they had put through
the program, wouldn't wash him out.

He had gotten back over there,

and he was still wearing the wings and still, because his uncle
or somebody was somebody in the government--and it's a waste of
money, waste of time.
about losing face.
finish.

But there is part of the old oriental bit

Once you start something, you've got to

Of course, he was in a social structure where his family

34

GORSKI

didn't want to lose face, so they carried him through.

As I

recall, he finally wound up working on the AOC in Saigon which

is where he belonged, some sort of ground job.
ever happened beyond that.

I don't know what

This is an extreme, and of course we

did have the other extreme, the extremely well, highly qualified,
talented pilots that--heck, some of these guys that had been
flying combat for the last twenty years almost.

We sit around

and say, "I've got 500 hours of combat in my two tours." Big
deal.

They've got thousands of hours of this stuff, daily, daily

daily routine, you know.

So I guess the shaky crop or the one

end of the extreme is the new guy without the experience, and the
other guy is the old master, who survived and he's pretty sharp,
that type thing.

0:

Did the rules of engagement affect your effectiveness?

Go:

Yes.

Well, because we were tied to this FAC and tied to the

clearing house supposedly in Saigon at that time.

I remember

specifically one mission that happened right southeast of Saigon,

this mangrove swamp down there.

We had an early morning spray

mission escort where they were defoliating some of the trees down
there.

As they finished their mission--there was a flight of

two of us--we were more or less just climbing.

lighter.

This was a break-of-day mission.

circling and climbing.

It was getting

We were just sort of

God, I spotted what looked like a whole

35

GORSKI

nest of sampans in there.

Of course, the friendlies always

generally put that old red and yellow flag out right away because
they didn't want to get shot at.
yellow and red flags out.

So these cats didn't have any

They also looked like they were trying

to hide these things under the mangroves.

So I figured I had

stumbled across some sort of supply activity or resupply or something.

They probably had a base camp down there and they probably

had--oh, it would be hard to say what they would store in there,

but typically where the Cong would store their stuff, inaccessible,
hard to get at.

When they needed it, they needed it, and go send

a sampan down and get it.

have a FAC.

So I called for a FAC because I had to

Now on that 123 escort mission, I could have struck

if I could identify ground fire.

But because this was a target

that did not fire and because I found it, I couldn't do anything.
So I called PARIS control and asked them to launch a FAC.
said they would, to stand by.
twenty minutes went by.

So I orbited for a while.

It was so obvious.

have been friendlies out on a picnic.

'~lere

Fifteen,

These guys really were trying to bury it.

They were bringing bushes down.

back, and I said,

They

is my FAC?

It couldn't

Well, finally I called

I need this target validated,

authenticated." They said, 'We're trying to get hold of the

province chief," because the province chief was a captain--always
had to say, ''Yes, it was friendly or not friendly." Well, in
this case, it seemed the province chief was sleeping, and nobody
wanted to wake him up.

So in disgust, I led me and my wingman

36

GORSKI

home and wrote it up in the after action report.

It was just

typical of the cumbersome part of their system at that time.

This was the frustrating part of the war.

I guess it carried

through all the way to what is left there now--peace or whatever you
call it.

But they did have this authentication and target valida-

tion system that was political and it was also just hamstrung.
It was just too cumbersome.

There was no speedy way of doing

anything.

Ga:

You left there in August of 1964.

Go:

Yes.

I came back in August of 1964.

Tonkin had just erupted.

Like I said, the Gulf of

For a while, I had an extension there

of about thirty days, but then that was cancelled because we

didn't have anymore T-28's.

They had been turned over to the

people at Udorn for WATER PUMP.

So I came home and was reassigned

to Hurlburt and walked into Hurlburt there and was informed that
the T-28 program was folding.
the last ten years I guess.
of business.

That program had been folding for

But they were just going to be out

So I said, "Good." They were starting the A-I

program--had generated--I said, 'Well, I'll take a shot at that

A-I. "

Somebody said, ' 'You've got some multi -engine background.

Why don't you try the B- 26K program?"

I said, 'Well, you don't

have any." He said, "Well, we'll have some in about two weeks."

37

GORSKI

So with that I got involved in the B-26K program, which is the

()~ rrlA- r?J::..

UHfflarkerrrehab that they did out at Van Nuys, California, which

is a tremendous airplane.

In fact, we had such a new airplane

a t that time that we didn't have a DASH-I.

We had one guy that

went out to the factory, and he saw the airplanes.

our DASH-I.
tions.

So he was

We would stand him in the corner and ask him ques-

If he didn't know, he would callout there and find out.

Ga:

That thing had R-2800's on it?

Go:

Yes.

Ga:

Reversible props?

Go:

Reverse/ADI.

R-2800's.

Again, for corrun we had illIF, VHF, PM and HF.

could talk to the world out of that turkey.

all electric instruments.
instruments.

We

Left side, you had

On the right side, you had all vacuum

That way you didn't have to sweat out electric

failures and things like this.

Some thought had gone into that

machine as far as--what we wanted at that time was counterinsurgency airplane.

Again, it was a step in the right direction,

but the Air Force only bought, I believe, 35 of them.

This is

why the airplane was finally taken out of combat later on in

Southeast Asia.
practical to use.

There was just not enough airplanes to make it

If the Air Force had had some smarts at that

38

GORSKI

time, I think we should have bought 200 of them at least.

There

was 200 airplanes available at that time, and Onmark was ready
to build them.

It cost $340,000 a copy.

Ga:

What was the name of the company that was building them?

Go:

Onmark Engineering, Van Nuys, California.

Ga:

How do you spell that?

Go:

O-n-m-a-r-k. There is a something in there.

Anyway, we checked

out just as--we were stationed at Hurlburt with the 1st Air Commando Wing at that time.
ment, B-26's.

We had the 6th Fighter Squadron equip-

Later on the 603d.

The wing moved from Hurlburt

to England Air Force Base in 1965, right around Christmastime.

It seems to me I got to England right after--the day after or
something like that--Christmas, just before New Years.

I remember

I spent New Years there.

Anyway, we had a pretty good bunch of

troops in this program.

We developed, based on experience from

people coming back from Southeast Asia, the things we had done.
Some of the old B-26 people that were over there assigned to
flying out of Bien Hoa at the same time I was flying T-28's,
formed the nucleus of our unit.

Again, primarily we developed

tactics, polished everybody's flying skills and more or less

trained continuously, maybe without knowing it, towards the
39

GORSKI

night role.

We did a lot of night flying.

We used to fly 200

foot low levels at night, stuff like this, real good training.
I run a little contrary to current thinking in TAe anyway.

I say

if you want a man that will be able to fly again, teach him how
to use the equipment.

I say if you've got to take a loss, let's

take a loss in training, not in combat.

the losses.

TIlat's the place to take

By adding restrictions and letting flying safety

sometimes override our operational training, we don't give this

man the opportunity to develop his skills.

Then we take a loss

in combat, which is not the place to take a loss.

If you lose a

guy in combat, it should be through the hostile activity, not

his flying ability.

Well, anyway, we finally got a contract.

guess we were all looking for it.

over to Nakhon Phanom.

They told us we would be going

Well, they told us we were going over to

Thailand and we'd be working an interdiction program on the Ho

Chi Minh Trail.

Typical military move, we had several force

starts and then we finally went, you know.

Ga:

Was that the 606th?

Go:

603d.

Again, ole Frank was one of the original groups in, and

we deployed with what they called the BIG EAGLE package into
Nakhon Phanom.

I was with the original group of that.

We did,

after two or three day missions--was for more or less area

checkout--went to straight night role.
40

GORSKI

Ga:

Who gave you your checkout over there?

Go:

Initially, we would carry one of the NAIL FACs that were working
out of Nakhon Phanom.

They took us out in the area and gave us

dollar rides and showed us landmarks and where they thought the
bad guys were and where they thought the trail was.

Of course,

the trail was always sort of a nebulous thing, you know.

One

day it's here; one day it's there; tomorrow it's under some
bamboo someplace.
these people.

We flew the average of four missions with

Then we were considered qualified, if nothing

We were certified as FACs

else, to navigate around the trail.

at that time, so this gave us the option to strike at will within

the rules of engagement on the trail.
ment were you couldn't hit a town.

Some of the rules of engage-

If you caught a truck rolling

down the road, if he got into town, he was home free.

You would

either have to wait till he came out the other side of town or
leave him alone.

0:

Was that your primary mission then, hunting trucks?

Go:

Interdict the trail, whatever it took.

If it just took hunting

trucks or if it was hunting "sico10" [bicycle] drivers with bags

of ice, if it was a guy in a sampan, anything moving down from
the north to the south--invo1ved people, trucks, sampans, everything.

41

GORSKI

0;

Did you operate mostly in STEEL TIGER east?

Go:

Yes, pretty much.

We could run all the way to the coast.

I

We

II

were more or less restricted to 1730 north and then, of course,

later on we got up into the BARREL ROLL area in Laos.

I made it

as far as Dien Bien Phu one night just for a looksee, to see
J

what was going on.

,J

Ga:

You did a lot of single missions in this?

Go:

That was all single ship work.

start basically at sunset.

What we would do is we would

We would have what we would call the

early flyer, and he would go out as the NAIL FACs were coming in.
We would try to coordinate with the NAIL FACs, the activity of
the day, whatever they had from high speed traffic, where they
thought they had some bottled up, thought they had a cripple,
something like this.

Using their current real-time intelligence

and in amassing a pretty good intelligence portfolio on your own

as we spent some time

~ver there, we would go out with our early

flyer, who would, while he still had some daylight, try to recce
various areas where there was no activity.

As it got dark, we

would send our airplanes out on basically about two hour missions,
armed reconnaissance.
the

~@LIGHTERs,

That was basically it.

We would work with

the BLINDBATs, the different C-130 or 123 FACs.

Originally the SPOOKYs were out there with us, too, in the C-47's.
42

GORSKI

We carried twelve flares of our own on each wing, and we could

do our own lighting.

Of course, if we had something real hot,

we could bring in F-4's or whatever happened to be available.

I was myself a FAC for some B-S7's that did some good work one
night.

Out of the spectrum of fastmovers--the B-S7 isn't a

fastmover, but he was about the most effective of the whole

shooting match I think.

The F-4's had a tendency to scatter

things just allover creation.

The original B-S2 ARC LIGHT

missions at that time were just--you just backed off and watched
them make splinters.

Ga:

What time period are we talking about here?

Go:

1966.

Ga:

Do you remember the month?

Go:

May.

Ga:

You got there in May of 1966?

Go:

I came home right after Christmas.

that time.

Go:

Okay.

I had a seven month tour

What was the crew makeup on the B-26's?

At that time we had a pilot.

43

In the right seat we had

GORSKI

what we called a pilotgator.

were actually navigators.

They named themselves that.

But most of

They

had dual controls,

them~we

so most of these guys got pretty proficient with the wheel and
the rudders over there.

In fact, all the guys I flew with, as

long as I had them sitting there, an extra set of eyeballs which

was real nice, especially for night work.

I just flat took it

upon myself to give him a little pilot training because I figured

if "old watosh" was ever incapacitated, maybe the kid could get
me back someplace where he could, if nothing else, roll across
the wing and pull the chute.
landing or anything.
got real good.

I wouldn't want him to attempt a

He could keep it going.

Some of these guys

In fact, out of the whole shooting match--I don't

remember exact totals now, but one or two of them were a little
overage.

One guy had bad eyes.

"J
I think the maority
of them all
I

went to pilot training and are pilots in the Air Force.

It worked

out real well.

Ga:

How many "twenty-sixes" [B-26's] did you have?

Go:

Let me think what our package was originally.

Ga:

I believe so.

Go:

I think it was twelve.

Was it twelve?

Yes, I think that's what we were deployed

with was twelve airplanes.

44

GORSKI

Ga:

Did you do any counterinsurgency work in Thailand?

Were you

tied in with that?

Go:

Yes.

No, not in Thailand, no.

We worked with some of the teams

in Laos in terms of infiltration and exfiltration.

out with the choppers and give them cover.
I
~l

We did not at that

time do any counterinsurgency work in Thailand.

level at that time.

It was very low

First incidents were just happening, just

the very first incidents.

We would go

We did some work with some road watch

teams up in the BARREL ROLL area.

Again, like I say, down south

in Sepone [Tchepone], down in that area, were some teams that

were put in and taken out.

We were escorts on a couple of those

missions.

Ga:

Were you tied in with MACSOG?

Go:

No, [not] that I know of.

The name sounds familiar, but I can't

remember where the tie was.

Ga:

The road watch teams, you'd go in with the infil and the exfil
and provide cover?

Go:

Yes.

These were usually last light or early light missions, of

course.

If you're bringing a team in, you want to bring him in

at last light so immediately the team is cloaked with darkness

45

GORSKI

for security purposes.

Usually those would be just at sunset.

We'd drive in with the chopper, and, of course, they had their
predesignated DZs and everything that they would drive to and
drop these teams off.

We'd usually fake our way in different

routes and fake our way out.

Hopefully, nobody observed anybody.

They were actual--the dropoff, you know--it was sort of one of

these things, several phony attempts at landings and this type

thing.

:1

0:

These teams were all under the PRAIRIE FIRE programs?

Go:

Yes.

We didn't work with the teams.

All we worked with was

the pilots on the choppers.

0:

You didn't talk to the teams on the ground once they got on the
ground?

Go:

No.

We were strictly escort for the chopper.

coordination.

We did all the

Had some strange people with strange uniforms

walking around there that you would maybe get to know.

You never

knew what their names were, but you were--the least questions you
asked, the better off you were; let's face it.
to do; you did it.

Ga:

They were all named Bob and Jim.

46

You had a job

GORSKI

Go:

Yes.

Bob and Jim.

Ga:

Typical dogfaces.

Go:

Yes.

All had the gold bracelets, typical.

The old dogfaces.

Apparently an interesting group of

people that I'm sure every military establishment has some that
they don't claim to own, or some house and agency is coordinated
with, maybe local artists out on an outing and paint some pictures,
I don't know.

Ga:

You mentioned the BARREL ROLL, going up there, covering some

road watch teams.

Go:

Yes.

Again, a strange thing, I was one of the first up there.

I remember a Major Robinson had the first mission, and he had

an emergency leave come up.

So I had the first mission up there.

I remember we worked with--RED HAT, TALL MAN and BLUE BOY were
the call signs at that time.

Ga:

The ground FAG!s.

Go:

The ground FAG's.

watch teams.

These, of course, were guerrilla teams, road

We had some very good results with these people

because they were sitting right on the side of the hill.

They

knew where this stuff was parked and hidden and everything else.

47

GORSKI

In fact, the first mission I was kind of dazed because I kicked

a flare out.

I think I was talking to RED HAT.

He says, "Good.

From your flare go 500 meters and drop a bomb where the road
turns or a bend in the river there or something."
down there.

I put a bomb

He said, "Okay, now go 500 meters the other way

and put a bomb there."

I said, "Well, this is getting kind of

ridiculous, 500 meters." He said, Okay, now hit everything

between the two."

I got credit for, I think, two and a half

trucks and a bunch of guys eating rice.

parameters.

He just gave me the

He said, "Now, let them have it."

Ga:

These were more than English speaking FAG's?

Go:

They spoke pigeon English.

In fact, it was really funny because

we had all developed individual call signs while we were there.

We just nicknamed some people.

If we wanted a quick response,

we didn't use our call signs because we'd have a couple of nimrods
up at the same time.

This was our basic call sign.

But if we

wanted to talk to somebody, we normally zapped right to the guy.

We knew he was corning up or where he was going.

Mine, because I

had a moustache and I had kind of let my hair grow a little

long, was Oilcan Harry.

See, I had a little white moustache.

checked in with RED HAT as nimrod whatever it was.

is Oilcan Harry." And he broke up the radio.
was the funniest thing he ever heard.
48

I said, "This

He thought that

I don't know if he had

GORSKI

[/.JA)du;{

C~ nv.... (i~,eJ

ever seen one of the old Wildwood eremol ads or what, but he
thought that was hilarious.

After he gave me these two outstand-

ing corrections for bombs in that area that I was hitting in

between, he said, "Okay, you go home now and they shoot at you."
I said, ''Why?'' He said, "TIley'll shoot at you with 37 millimeter."
I didn't say anything.
make a pass.

Of course, they'd always wait till you

111en they'd hose off at you.

I said, 'Bow do you

know that's 37 nnn?" He said, ''Well, I sold a gun crew some

bananas this evening." Apparently the guy was on his way to work
and he sold the bananas to the gun crew, and he was up there

talking to me.

They're really a strange group, but very effective,

very effective.

Again, in this type of war, this type of environ-

ment, these people and types of things are a must.

have this spooky element, I guess.

They have to

We tend to be too much the

good guys in the white hats, and we sort of look down on things
like this until we get involved in them.
to change our thinking.

111en, I guess, we tend

Our history, as such, we should be

fairly well qualified guerrilla fighters.

You know, not to be

bragging--or outstanding results--but the American Indians gave

us a pretty good run for our money at one time.
learned something there.

We should have

We were the ones that turned the English--

made them turn in their redcoats because they figured that wouldn't
work.

There were some guys behind a stump shooting.

We've got

this background and whether or not we want to get involved in

49

GORSKI

something like this again, I don't know.

This is for the polit-

icals to say.

Ga:

What were you carrying on that 261

Go:

Oh, we could--some madman figured it out one night.

carry 86 bombs or something like that.

We could

The standard load--we'd

either have a heavy load, which was four 1,000 pounders and then
a couple of marking bombs, or we would carry a mix.

We'd carry,

of course, our flares out on our wings, and then we'd carry
maybe one or two tubes of rockets.

We had four hard points

going and maybe a couple of WILLY PETE's or something like this

or some napalm.

Again, with nighttime, usually you had napalm

on the bird someplace.

Then in the bomb bay we'd carry a handful

of 250's or SOD's, however it ranged out.

airplane.
you.

God, it was versatile.

It was a very versatile

Combinations and what have

Then you had those eight 50's in the nose, and you got any-

thing in that pipper and squeezed down, it went.

just fall apart.
we went over.

I've seen trucks

In fact, it happened here on the range before

You could pick an old semi van out there, and if

you hit him at the right angle, you could roll him up on two tires
and just hold him there, you know, with--the impact of the bullets
is just something fantastic.

Ga:

What about night seeing devices?

50

GORSKI

Go:

We again at that time were very early in the program, and we had
some of the handheld star-light scopes and what have you.
was just sitting in the airplane.

It was too close to the canopy

and you'd bounce it off the darn thing.

that airplane.

It

It just didn't work in

Later on I was involved in a project over at

England [APB] after we came back where we had the big Army starlight scope mounted in the bomb bay, and we had an observer back

Ij
I

there.

We got pretty straight and level bombing using his cor-

rections.

Well, 100 meters was good.

If you had 1,000 pound

bomb, if you were trying to rattle some guy's confidence, 100

meters is adequate.

"
Ga:

How was this weapon system as a close air support vehicle?

Go:

Beautiful.

It was just a little bit too big--I'm using my own

experience--for daylight.

If I had to fly day versus night, I

would take again the 28 or the A-I for day.

I'd take the 26

over anything for night, except perhaps the B-57.

I never had

a chance to fly the B-57, but that seems to be a darn fine machine.
I've talked to the guys that were pushing F-4's and that, and
again I think the weapon system is great.

It's just that they're

limited in their training.

Everyone I talked to--we talked night

missions--and they said

do that twice a year whether we have

to or not." And I said,

'~e

'~ell,

you're not going to have any pro-

ficiency, and it's going to be spooky.

51

But if you run down that

GORSKI

nmway a couple or three nights a week, it gets to be old hat."

In fact, I used to dread a full moon.
I like to work half moon or less.

I guess then I was exposed.

That was really nice, you know,

enough light to light our eyes and we didn't have

ally go back in the cockpi t

~l;c

to-~you

gener-

your attitude gyro- -and yet

you felt fairly well secure in your cloak of darkness there.

:1

1
)

Of course, you might see tracers and muzzle flashes and everything
else.

The only thing is at night in that black hole, you can't

quite orientate it unless you've got a marker on the ground.

This

is where napalm would payoff or as the 123' s and 130' s--they were

using these logs after awhile--these smoke markers.

them down and bum them.

They'd put

After I left is when they got the funny

bombs, the thermite bombs and all that.

So, our night load was

strictly a napalm or white phosphorous.

White phosphorous gives

you a fairly good light but then you've got the smoke
tions.

camplica~

If you're after a specific target, the smoke will in

many cases blank it out.

So, overall, napalm at that time was

still a good weapon for giving a good bright light on the ground
and working around it.

Our flare tactics, we would--for instance,

if we caught a runner or a truck, we would get a flare out and

I'd try to position the flare so that it was off the target and
I could work in and out of the darkness rather than under the
flare.

You keep a flare right over the target, and then you've

got to come under for your pass.

52

So it's an offset procedure.

GORSKI

This is what you would try to do if you were working with the 130
that was flaring for you.

You'd try to get him to offset so you

could run in and out of the dark, sort of use the envelope there.
Later on I know we had some people that weren't too happy with
the flares because they said they were getting shot at.
I knew exactly what they were doing.

Well,

They were getting the flare

over the target and they were coming through and everybody was
getting a free whack at them.

They weren't using the darkness

as--again, tactics is the key and you have to know the tricks of
the trade.

0:

Otherwise you're dead.

When you dropped a flare, would the trucks usually stop or would
they try to outrun you?

Go:

It was funny.
underbrush.

Sometimes they'd stop and try to get off into the

In fact, some of the parts of the trail, if you had

a runner--initia11y if we'd see something, we'd kick a flare out

and then we'd try to get into position to--one of the rules of
engagement was you only hit stuff within 200 meters of the road.
But we'd kick a flare out.
to strike.

Then we'd try to get into position

Well, after a while I got to thinking about that, and

what I'd do is throw out a--for instance, the first thing I'd do
is pop out a tube of CBU and then I'd kick the flare off and then
I'd get into position because those little beady-eyed buggers on
the ground--as soon as I squib one off on the wing, they knew

.-.
53

GORSKI

a flare was coming.

Irgave them X number of seconds to get

parked or hid or something.

If you had the CBU coming down at

the same time, chances are by the time he started motoring off
the road, he'd come across the string of CBU.
a few that way.

We caught quite

In fact, I put out a gun one night.

I had a

target and I was on a piece of winding road and I was in a bank.

,j

I kicked out some CBU and I came around a little more and I kicked

my flare out from my offset, and I just noticed a muzzle down

I
,j,

between the engine and the fuselage.

down there winking at me.

I noticed a muzzle flash

It was just blind luck, but as the

flare lit, the CBU walked right through the gun position.
to chuckling.

I said, "I got you, didn't I."

Wrote the airplane up for lack of power.

I got

I came back.

The crew chief the next

morning informed me that I had picked up two rounds in the left

engine.

So it was a trade off.

He got me and I got him.

again, this is something we could talk hours about.

Oh,

It is again

a real interesting bag and very difficult flying and very rewarding flying.

I know, for instance, on my last mission, I said,

well, I'm going to go up tonight and orbit around about 8,000

feet and salvo my load and then go home.

I remember I had a

guy named Demaggio flying with me as a navigator.

About halfway

through the mission, I was underneath about a 500 foot overcast

and I had a 130 above me dropping flares through the overcast
and I was running down near ALPHA and BRAVO, the checkpoints
there, trying to hunt down a truck that I knew was there because
S4

GORSKI

I saw his dust from his tires.

Pete hit me in the arm and he

said, "What happened to this 8,000 foot stuff and orbit tonight?"
I said, ''Well, one more time, you know." Again, training and
proficiency and, of course, confidence comes with training and
proficiency, and then the exposure and as you build up some missions, you begin to temper your experience.

Maybe some of this

stuff sounds a little wild, but you've got a cutoff point.

i
I

There's things you will do and you won't do.

you back off, you know, and say, "It's too IIUlch hell." So you

move off.

There are times

But then there's--so often if you haven't had the guy--

given the guy the opportunity to fly his equipment, to learn how
to fly his equipment, to put him in some of these spooky environments, he'll never know.

He'll start backing off, which is bad.

Again, like I said before, if you take a loss in combat because

of a man's proficiency, that's wrong.

0:

Did you normally deliver the ordnance straight and level?

Go:

No.

Everything from glide bomb, dive bomb, rocket attack, just

about the same as we would during the day.

0:

That's pretty old airplanes for dive bombing.

~,~.

' 1 ) ' ""

fl.t".~nfr/."c'-/

Go:

No.

These were rebuilt.

We had a

SP~.
,

tJl'/-"'':j

<,-,

Oh, crying out loud,

this thing was certified by the FAA as a 1964 model airplane

55

Ir"'/I.,;

GORSKI

when they finished it.

And there ain't too many mil i tary airplanes

that the FM will certify.

There's no reason to.

Onmark was

also at the civilian market, so they said that these airplanes

would all be certified as airworthy by the FM.
the FM certification.

They picked up

They looked like an old Ford spring

they put on the wing spar, and this thing was just tremendous.
The old B models.,.-ones that we had over in Vietnam originally""they were old and we lost a couple of guys just for that reason.
The wings came off.

But with these new Onmark K's, it started

out as B-26K, was the official designation.

The only reason they

changed the name to A's was that there was something in the political treaty with Thailand that we could not bring bomber aircraft
into the country at that time.
said, "Okay.

So to meet this requirement, they

Those aren't B-,26 , s. Those are A-26' s." My form 5

c::::'7/I11 e
reflects this B-26K tltle and A-26 ~t~ all in the same air-

plane.

"p,

But, no, we don't have a picture in the room anymore, but

there's one back in my office.

airplanes I've ever flown.

I think this was the cadillac of

Like I say, we had all the gear in

the world, the electric instruments, the vacuum instruments, the

comm gear to talk to the world, we had TACAN, we had VOR, ADF.
It was just beautifully equipped.

Ga;

What was the difference in the rules of engagement on your second

tour than your first?

56

GORSKI

Go:

Other than the specific fact that--over the trail again within
200 meters of a motorable road, whereas down south it was strictly
wherever the FAC said you could hit.
town Saigon.

This could have been down-

If he cleared you, you went.

Again, unless it was

a validated target, a town couldn't be hit.

That is, RLAF [Royal

Laotian Air Force] validation came up later on where we knew

specific towns were not--there was no civilians in them.
being used for rice storage and what have you.

They were

Well, there's a

couple there--I remember we took on several nights.

So, you were

more or less pinned to a motorable road as a primary criteria.

Now if you found truck lights off the motorable road, then chances
are there was a road there because a lot of times these roads
were trellised under the trees and what have you.
truck parks were hit that way.

Some of your

So the only stretch of the

imagination you had there was to convince yourself or say, 'Well,

could I possibly have a road there? And if I could possibly have
a road there, then I had a target." And then, of course, if you
you were fired upon, a known gun position was a valid target.

Ga:

How about your close air support role? Did you have to have a
FAC for that?

Go:

No, because again we were certified as FAC's.

Now, if we had

one of our late afternoon missions where we had daylight, chances

are we were working with a NAIL.
57

In fact, there was one or two

GORSKI

engagements where we were just west of Thakhek where we worked

with the NAILs because the Pathet Lao were trying to grab towards
Thakhek and what have you.

And they caught them up on some of

the karsts there and did some pretty good work, halted that
advance at that time, I recall.

Then, of course--this was after

I left, but the boys got back down into An Khe Valley.

Again,

they were working with ground FAC's on that one, I guess.

Gener-

ally, we were certified as FAC's and we would either FAC somebody

or we just validated our own targets, providing it was within the
rules of engagement.

Ga:

Did you ever get up into ROUTE PACK I?

Go:

Yes.

Like I say, we'd run up to about 17' 30" north, which put

us [around] Dong Hoi, in that area, and then we would run in the-all the way up through Laos up into BARREL ROLL up in here.

had 39 "counters" for being over North Vietnam using this criteria of going up to 17' 30" north.

There was one road net that

would come through what we called Harley's Valley up there which

was just east of Mu Gia Pass.

We would armed recce that road

down toward Dong Hoi in that area.

Ga:

What were the defenses like?

Go:

It would get rather- -we used to call it API in the sky.

-58

It would

GORSKI

sort of light up once in a while over there.

On the other hand,

in ROUTE PACK 1, you had fairly intense antiaircraft, especially

down around Dong Hoi.

As you got back over into Laos and the

trail, initially, very little resistance, very little resistance

at all, small arms fire at most.

But then as it progressed, and

apparently our effectiveness had improved, then we started running

the 37 and 57.

Of course, the old Sepone sandpile down there from

time to time, depending on the latest rumor, was either protected by

super guns and SAM's and everything else.
there and there was nothing.

Then you would go down

I think--I'm not sure--but right

out of Mu Gia, coming down the road, as I recall it, was about
ten or twenty miles in, I think they were trying to set up a SAM
site.

I'm not sure.

I was scrambled on an early mission--this

was one of my late afternoon missions--one night on an intelligence report that they had spotted some unusual activity.

They

said they didn't know what it was but they loaded me with napalm
and they said, "Look,"--this was old Chuck Piper, our old intelligence officer--he says, "it looks like they're trying to do something there." He said, "They're up against the side of the
karst." And he had some aerial photos that were pretty good,
pretty recent for a change.
a year old.
with napalm."

But he said,

Usually the stuff we had was about

'~y

don't you try to take out this area

It was just a beautiful napalm target.

stretch with trees and what have you.

I said, "Okay."

It was a

I made

my one pass and I kicked off, I think, six cans and came through
59

GORSKI

shooting.
long.

The target burned all night.

Airplanes up all night

The following day we got some real time intelligence, which

were photos taken just before I made my--within a couple of hours-just before I made my napalm runs.

There were four big van type

trailers, and one of them had one of these peculiar radar antennas
on it.

The guy working intelligence, he said it looked like a

SAM site package.

,j

Well, apparently we burned all of those out.

Then just through luck of it, I got a couple of Pathet Laos that

,j

were cooking rice on the other side of a rice paddy--that just

happened as I came through firing, and I was concentrating on my

napalm run,

I had same stray rounds run across the rice paddy

down there.

Apparently they had just bivouacked for the night.

I just scared the hell out of them.

I only got one or two of

them, but I guess they all got up.

In fact, some cat came in a

couple of weeks later--surrendered.

He said he was in the big

raid.

I tried to figure out what their big raid was, and that

was me coming through there.

If nothing else, that was a good

mission.

0:

How did you keep track of the guns?

Did intelligence keep you

informed of where the gun positions were--the heavy guns?

Go:

Again it was this close coordination between the daylight NAIL's

and our night missions.

See, we had the NAIL's right there.

They debriefed and briefed right in the same place we briefed

GORSKI

and debriefed.

We used the same map and everything.

They

would constantly replot the guns and then we would come back
and verify or say, "No, there wasn't anything there, but we got
some here." They would come out the next day and verify where
they had seen guns or antiaircraft and what have you.

So it was

really a beautiful system, again.

I
I

0:

Did you normally try to avoid those areas where the heavy guns
were located?

Go:

Well, I'm sort of a devout coward in a way.

Yes.

not going to go down there looking for trouble.

You know you're

Again, if you

had a specific target, if you could use tactics, terrain, weather,

what have you, to your advantage, heck, you could make one pass.
What's this current phrase they were using there, permissible
environment, for a while?
term.

I think that's probably still a valid

Well, they say this is permissible.

If you always back

off, you were not increasing your effective rating or scope of

control but letting him have his.

If it's a two-bit target

that's worth two-bits, there's no sense.

But if they're moving

something in that's going to destroy your span of control here,

then it's best to go get it.

Another thing I was an advocater

of was experimenting with our ordnance.

I forget what the figures

are now, but a 2.75 rocket fired at 5,000 feet in a 45 degree

climb at 250 knots will go seven miles.

61

If you've got an area

,,<!'

GORSKI

seven miles away that you know is denied to you, you can sure
harass those Joses; just put a squirt in there every now and
then.

Our thinking seems to be we've got to be above it, coming

down the hill, to do it.

Well, that's a bunch of baloney.

You

can do it going around a corner or upside down or going away from

them- -great.

(End Reel 1, Side 2)

Ga:
,

On your second tour, you had a better airplane for the purpose

you were trying to do at least, interdiction, some close air

support.

I gather that your argument would be that you didn't

have enough.

Go:

Yes.

Right. The airplane--here agaln for the mission, permissive

environment--that's that other story.

But assuming we're not

running against the SAM's around downtown Hanoi, but trying to

interdict a large area of land where, at best, they're going to
have mobile gun positions.

They're not going to try to defend

anyone point because if they do, you can get them with a missile
now or something like that.
defense.
low level.

So they're going to be sporadically

We had a reciprocating engine airplane which lives at

TIle lower you are the more economy you get.

could carry a fairly good ordnance load.

airspeed.

You

You had a reasonable

You had about 200 knots to play with there, plus or

62

GORSKI

minus, 300 in a dive.

But you had this loiter capability, which

was one of the essentials allover the trail.

literally hours and hours out there.

You could spend

Max, I guess, would be about

four and a half hours with a full load of bombs.

Like I say,

most of our missions ran about two, two and a half hours, so we
always had plenty of fuel in the hip pocket.

The key there would

have been in the initial purchasing and contracting--this goes

way back.

Initially, twelve of the airplanes that were produced

out at Onmark did not have the deicing systems on, boots or anything else because those twelve airplanes were scheduled to go to
Vietnam, in-country.

This was the size of our thinking at that

time, I guess, when Vietnam was first generating.

allocated twelve airplanes.

They actually

Go fight a war with twelve airplanes.

Well, as this thing ballooned and we needed more and more airframes, then the original contract only called for these 35 when
we should have had 200 of them.

This is where we went over to

Nakhon Phanom with twelve, where 24 would have been ideal, or not
ideal.

What is ideal? Again, it depends on so many variables.

But, say we had had 24 of them, 12 at Nakhon Phanom and 12 down

at, oh, what was that field just south of us there, Ubon.

Then

realistically you split your force and say the Nakhon Phanom
people work the BAPJmL ROLL and the Udorn work STEEL TIGER or
something like this.

You had the airplane with the loiter capa-

bility to go around and--part of interdiction, you know, isn't

whether you kill a truck, but everytime you fly across, if you
63

GORSKI

make that whole line stop, and they do it.

primitive gun method:

They all use the old

one round and everybody stops, two rounds

and everybody starts moving again.

So part of your mission was

just being out there, having those engines heard, so that they're
not moving.
again.

,
I

.1.,

As soon as you fly out of sight, they start moving

They're masters at this type thing, camouflage.

very patient people.

coolie system.

They've got manpower.

They're

You know, the old

But the fact that you're there, make everything

stop, you've effectively stopped them, the supply system while

you're present.

I,

This is where I say, if we had had more airplanes,

we could have split this thing up better, and we could have kept
more cover on it.

I don't think the A-26 is the ultimate in air-

frames, but it was a darn good one.

I'll tell you it's better

than anything I see on the drawing boards right now.

nothing on the drawing boards right now.

There's

Your AC-130's, your

gunship program, this has been a tremendous boon.

Again, if

somebody hadn't taken it upon themselves to start playing around

wi th a few things and saying, "Hey, wait a minute." So what if
it doesn't go 2,000 miles an hour.
goes 2,000 miles an houLhere.
around Hanoi.

We don't need something that

We need it when we're working up

We've got MIG's to contend with.

But here we

need something to go out there slow, take time, be deliberate,

be patient, just like they are.
to stop this thing.

Then you would have something

Come whistling down in one pass with an F-4,

salvoing the whole load, and going home ain't going to hack it.

64

GORSKI

This cat can't come down and orbit.

If he's orbiting at 30,000,

he's not seeing anything on the ground.

You've got to be orbit-

ing about 5,000 to see something on the ground.

little bit high.
nice.

Then you're a

I think somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 was

You'd be almost on a perch then.

You could give a roll

in, give it a real short, quick pass and climb a thousand feet

and come around and come back down.

Yes, you're sticking your

neck out a little bit more down there, but again the environment,

at best small arms, 37 mm--you can actually fly within the cone
of fire with a 37, where his shells--won't arm till they pass

out behind you in that type of airplane.

The 57 the same way.

If you get out a little further, he's got you right where he
wants you, but if he comes on a little closer, you're inside
his ballfield.

He can't even shoot at you realistically.

He

would put a hole through you with a slug just like he would with
a rifle, but not with an explosive warhead.

I think this is

pointed out by the fact that Air America has gotten away with
so damn much over the years over there in their helio couriers
and their old C-46's and stuff.

If the antiaircraft was as

effective as it supposedly is, everyone of them would have been

wiped out.

But they use tactics.

They're low.

to mask their approach and withdrawal.

a little bit of a chess player.

They use weather

Again, you've got to be

You've got to be a viceroy

smoker, so to speak, while you're flying.

If you just go in

with a blind approach and say I'm going to go to point A and

65

GORSKI

make a dive bomb run and come back out, you're not going to
stop anything.

Ga:

Did you ever work with any U. S. Army units when you were flying
the 26?

Go:

No.

Again, after I left, right after Christmas of 1966, the

guys that were over there and did get involved down in the A Shau
Valley fiasco.

I understand they did real good work down there.

I heard some real good reports out of them.

The closest we got

to any surface involvement was with these teams or the road

watch teams.

We were either putting these teams in and taking

them out or actually working with them.

But as far as mass

troop movements or even small troop movements or encounters, no

none at all.

Two of our guys got involved with the push for

Thakhek there where they stopped them on that raid and did a
pretty good job on it.

0:

Were you ever involved in any of the search and rescue missions?

Go:

Yes.

Not as primary missions, just if I happened to be there.

On my second or third--I forget which one it was--I lost a wing

man and he was down.

So I CAPPED him while we waited for SANDY's

and JOLLY GREEN's to come.

Then a little later on an 0-1 went

down--I don't remember the time frame anymore; it was about

66

GORSKI

halfway through the tour--and we CAPPED him.

Again, we acted

more as an available airframe on the spot until the JOLLY GREEN's

and the SANDY's showed up sort of a thing.

Then we would turn

it over to them and hold high in case they needed our ordnance or
something like that.

But we were not part of the SAR effort as

such at that time.

0:

Could the B-26 have fulfilled the same mission as the SANDY's
do you think in the SAR mission?

Go:

No.

I think my better judgment would say I would rather be in

an A-Ion a SAR type mission than I would in a 26.

26 was beautiful for where we used it.

Again, the

It was a night airplane

and you had nUlti-engine reliability, you had all the instrumentation.

It was a good night machine, a good night intruder.

think in the daylight again you want something that whips around
the air just a little tighter and a little faster than the 26,
not that you couldn't do a fairly good job of moving the 26
around.

But, gee, it would tire you out after a while.

I think

for SANDY type work in something like this, probably our AX is

now probably the logical follow-on type airframe.

I still ques-

tion the turbo jet fan arrangements versus possibly turbo prop
powering these things.

We would have made more money with a

turbo prop, I'm not sure.

67

GORSKI

Ga:

Nice to be able to back up

Go:

Yes, that's right.

encounter.

sometimes~

too.

Again, there is no such thing as a canned

There's no such thing as a canned situation.

no such thing as a canned mission.

From the time you're briefed

till the time you get there, too many things change.
a big variable and all these things move.
ary.

There's

Weather is

Things aren't station-

What you went prepared for today probably you're ill pre-

pared for, where tomorrow what you had yesterday probably would
have been the ideal combination.

It's that versatile.

It's a

fluid situation, and the modifying factors continually change.

So again you go back to giving the guy all the basic information
you can and you launch them with what you think is the best weapon
and go from there.

Ga:

What do you consider the most significant event that occurred

during your last tour?

Go:

That occurred to you personally.

Well, I think the one where I worked with RED HAT on that first
BARREL ROLL mission was' kind of funny.
mind because I wasn't prepared for the

It sort of sticks in my

J.

p~een

guess, he wasn't prepared for Oil Can Harry.

to be a fairly effective mission.
that have happened.

English and, I
And it turned out

There are so many funny things

I remember the time big Mitch carne horne and

68

GORSKI

he said he started some bat guano fires.

Then that was turned

in the debrief as such that he had secondary bat guano fires.

A lot of hilarious things.

What he did was got some sort of a

secondary fire going in one of the caves on the karst. The way
he described the flame it sounded like a nitrate flame.

One of

the guys said, 'Well, those caves have been used for years by
i
A
:)

bats.

There's probably a pretty good layer of bat guano on the

floor, and that's probably what his secondary was is bat guano!'

:1

iI

Overall, there's really--like I say, there's so many--the four

vans I got on that one pass that day was sort of outstanding,
I thought.

It was just one of these things that--typically, all

the ducks lined up, and I only needed one pass, only used one
pass.

The intelligence was right.

I had the right load.

It

all worked.

Ga:

Speaking of intelligence, how did you find the formal intelligence

that you received, the standard intelligence?

Go:

Not too swift.

So much of the stuff that we've got out of the

standard intelligence people was passe.

time we got it.

It was too old by the

A lot of the aerial photography we got was a

month old, two weeks old.

It was just too changy for that.

Like

I say, we, the pilots and navigators basically or individually

didn't develop a system but collectively working with the NAIL's,
the people that were working during the day, the people that

69

GORSKI

were working at night had a very real time intelligence thing

going.

I think the trouble was that probably the formal intel-

ligence chain was that it went through so many staff agencies, by

then the big monster had grown in proportion down in Saigon, where
everything was just being delayed in, in and out baskets, I'm
sure.

This is something that, I think, as the war progressed and

the mountain grew and the number of people grew, the more people
that got involved, it just ballooned; it mushroomed way out of
proportion.

We used to say in 1963--when I got over there,

originally, there were 12,000 people in the country as I recall.

I"

We knew 10,000 of them were in Saigon.

than 2,000 that was out in the field.

There couldn't be more

In those days, if you wanted

something done, like if you needed an airplane part or something,

or information, you went around Saigon.

You just called direct.

You bypassed it because if you went through the normal Hchain,"

it would be three weeks before it came out the other side, rubber
stamped and approved.

In the meantime, you had an airplane fixed.

So much of our intelligence was lacking in that same respect that

by the time it had gone through the meat grinder down at Saigon
and came out the other end and was again relayed to the field,
there was just too much time lost.

We were much better off using

what we cou1d--based on some of the formal information, of course,

area studies, past histories and what we would get out of the
formal chain.

The real time daily intelligence was what we lived

on.
70

GORSKI

Ga:

How about your maps?

Go:

Probably the biggest intelligence gatherer that there was because

everybody had a grease pencil and everybody was forever annotating
things and places and happenings.

You would come in and this was

part of your debrief, lay the map out.

pinning the pins on the wall.

The guy would start

We kept it current that way.

Everything that happened, every place you dropped a bomb, we made

a little X on the map.

The first time--any unusual sighting, any-

thing, it went scribbled on the map with a grease pencil.

I
Ga:

Who was debriefing, the intelligence or were you doing your own
debriefing?

Go:

No.

We had intelligence people assigned to us--again, I mentioned

Major Piper, who is now Colonel Piper, was one of our navigators
in the unit, who actually had an intelligence background.

He

worked with the intelligence officers from the NAIL's who in turn
got together with the intelligence officers from the TOC there.
The three of them, plus the staff, several enlisted men, the
photograph interpreter and these types were the ones that built
this thing up.

So it was a combination of people right there

with an intelligence training background.

They weren't just

amateurs, but they had--and then using the information the crews
gave them and the navigators and the day people and the night

GORSKI

people, as we called ourselves.

board up to date.

This continually kept this

We lived off that board.

We knew exactly

where everything was and what was happening.

of course--our debriefs were

alw~ys

This information,

forwarded through channels

down to 7th Air Force and in turn we would come up on the daily
summaries, Ops summaries, as the strikes and everything, but it

Ij

was just so sterile, you know, so many bombs dropped, and nothing

bombs were dropped last night.

to correlate anything with, just sterile IBM runouts.

how, or what.

Big deal.

So many

Didn't say why, where,

But right there in our TOC, we had the how, where,

what and why and everything else, this type thing.

Of course,

we would always--the officers' club bar was usually a good place

to find out who was doing what to whom and where.

You always

had the running commentaries there, what was going on and the
face-to-face--you know, old Joe Blow had been out at noon that
day.

Well, you caught up with him about 9 o'clock in the bar

and you said, "Hey, I heard you were so and so today.

What went

on?" Oh, you know, we ran over this," or "we found some trellising." or ''we think there's a suspected supply place," or something.

So you get right with the guy that saw it.

This again

is the firsthand information rather than the secondhand, which

is real good.

0:

Did you ever get any information on POW's in Laos or people

that were shot down?

---72

GORSKI

Go;

The only thing we got was there was a radio transmitter up in

the BARREL ROLL area.

I don't remember the exact location of it.

They said stay away form it because the transmitter itself was
located right in the middle of the POW compound.
this Navy captain walked out.

Now, we had--

Can't remember his name now.

He

was one of the first guys that broke away from them, a Navy A-I

pilot.

Spent a Godforsaken long time.

Can't recall his name.

'J

,
i

0:

I know who you're talking about.

Go:

But he was current in terms of real time when I was there, and

"'

he had just completed this feat.

So we had that information.

Other than that, we had very little POW information.

some people were held.

We weren't sure where.

We knew

We specifically

were notified to leave hands off that transmitter because apparently they were using that area as a holding--either a compound
or a holding area.

We, of course, didn't want to go in and

shoot our own guys up.

So we kept hands off.

Other than again

the initial intelligence briefing on expected treatment, not too

much.

My thought over there was that it was fairly well dense,

and if a guy could get out, especially at night, get rid of his
chute, and just get back up in the hills someplace and hold out
for a while until he found out what was going on, and then maybe
start moving west, it would be a way to do it.
little E&E plan.

That was my own

Of course, if you went down in daylight, they've

73

GORSKI

got a chute and everything--there's people allover that darn

place.

The thing to remember is that for all the damage we did

to that road, that road stayed fairly well open.

So there was

real--literally thousands of people involved just keeping that

road open.

From time to time we would get plottings on construc-

tion, battalions.

I remember there was one female, one that was

just out of Mu Gia Pass there for awhile.

female.

It was apparently all

They would point [out] the different places and say that

such and such company or battalion--battalion usually is the way

you identify them--was working in this area now.

We would get

down to specific items like there's a bulldozer that keeps coming

out back of the mountain over here.
traps to try to get this one.

We'd set up all sorts of

I remember we chased one bulldozer

there for about a week straight, night after night.

nailed him.

It got that specific.

We finally

It really got that specific.

This again--back to intelligence--was an inhouse--users type

thing.

I'm sure that bulldozer got to be hilarious down in

Saigon when they said, 'Why are those idiots up there chasing
that one bulldozer." Well, he kept repairing the roads that we
kept blowing holes in, we wanted to eliminate that little thing.

0:

What do you think, now that the war is drawing to a close, is

going to happen to the special warfare mission?

74

GORSKJ

Go:

A lot depends on money, I guess, like everything else.

sonally would like to see it retained inbeing.

I per-

I would like to

see it--some of the expertise not scattered to the four winds.

I don't think it has to be as big as it is right now.

Of course,

we're carrying a pretty good training load right now and have
been over the years.

I think you do need a couple of these type

i
!

people around, and I think they are well worth the effort.

Again,

I
j

you've got a good nucleus right now, if you just hold on to a

small nucleus, continually train them, keep them briefed.
think you've got to have them.

money.

Of course, again we're talking

They're going to do some chopping.

chopping coming.
going to chop?

There's a lot of

Who are they going to chop and where are they

I don't know.

We're turning more again to the

strategic environment, I believe.

I think there's been a little

bit said about that in newspapers, TV, radio, everything else

the last couple of weeks now.
biggest chess game.

We're still playing the world's

That's for sure.

a winning hand in any game.

Four 4's and a 44, that's

I hope we keep the 44.

But to

answer your question, yes, I feel there will be a scaling down

of SAW.

If they completely eliminate it, I think they're losing

something invaluable.

I would like to see it retained in the

original concept of the special air war, which was the old commando set up.

We had a group of people that were highly trained,

highly dedicated, volunteer.

Volunteer is a must.

One of our

bigger mistakes I think we made in Vietnam was when we started

75

GORSKI

sending the draftees over there.

country up.

I think it just tore the

This is one of the things that tore the country up.

How do you maintain a force large enough with volunteers?

is trying it right now.
I don't know.

Nixon

Ought to be an interesting experiment.

Then once you have got these volunteers, how do

you get volunteers out of the volunteers to volunteer for a

special unit? You do it monetary?

I don't know.

I always

figured in the Air Force you're never going to get rich.

got a comfortable life.

You've

No sense kidding yourself about delusions

of grandeur, being a millionaire unless you've got a crooked

streak in you.

I guess we've all got a little of that.

boils down to old cornball patriotism or something.

So it

How do you

get the next generation to pick up what you left behind?

I don't

know.

0:

Which specific activities would you like to see or do you think

should be retained?

Go:

If you talk about special air warfare as we stand right now, I

would like to see some sort of program where we combine some of
the skills.

We have to have, for instance, a recce package, unso-

phisticated recce package that could be deployed to someplace.

You have to have again a primitive environment type airframe
that possibly could be used as a recon plane or could be used
for dropping bombs, sort of a combination.

-76

I'm talking about

GORSKI

the A-26 is what I'm talking about.

a hard bomb package.

We had a recce package and

Again, we need something newer though.

need some sort of a transport element.

We

Some of our work gets

into dropping sterile tsetse flies and stuff like that.

So

whether it be chickens, goats, mail, medical supplies, supplies

to the foot soldier, you need some sort of a hauling capability
all designed to operate off of things 2,500 feet long without a
radar environment, without a sophisticated navigation environment,
without too much control, something that's completely selfcontained.

This was part of our original package was to be able

to take say X number of T-28's, X number of

A~26's,

X number of

gooney birds or l23's and deploy a miniature Air Force in a sense,

roll the ball up, roll it wherever you wanted to.
you had a little bit of everything.
use.

When it unrolled,

It was cheap, economical to

It didn't require a big logistics pipeline of some size,

but you didn't need the pyramiding of specialists and super

specialists and everything else.

Again, back to a little bit of

the original concept was that the guy that beat the typewriter
in the office.

Maybe, why not cross-train him so he could maybe

help change a tire out on a line or maybe use a hernia bar to

put a bomb on a wing.

He doesn't have to be a qualified specialist

because if he knows what he is doing and he is supervised properly,

he can do the job.

Again, the original concept required some

people with a little linguistic background.

I took the old com-

mando 40 hour French course, and it was a straight parrot course.

GORSKI

By golly, after 40 hours, if I had have went to Paris, I know I

could have talked to the Frenchmen.

I could have picked it up.

But we got to Vietnam and everybody said, "We don't speak French
here anymore.

We speak English." But we had people that took

a little Spanish, and we had people that had actually had smat,

terings of different languages.

Again, you just can't assign a

j
"

man and then pull him out six months or a year later.

You have

I
1

to have a man that you can assign and you can leave him there
from three or five years, something like this.
realize he'll be doing a lot of TOY.

This man has to

Once you have trained this

man and identified this man, I think he should, no matter what

the AFSe he carries, he should have a shred-out that identifies
him as qualified in this area, so if the thing does balloon later
on, you can pull him back.

But he would have to be in this pro-

gram for a three-year period or a five-year period.

think you want a guy right out of flight school.

I don't

I think you

want a guy that's been out say five years, ten years, in the Air
Force.

He's a little more mature.

a lot of other kind of flying.

He's an older head.

He's done

I'd give him the special course.

That's what I would like to see.

But again we exploded from

that type of unit to a combat unit and then immediately, as soon

as we--when I say we, I'm talking about some of what were the
older air commandos at that time-,-were diverted to trainers,
instructor role.

I have been with SOF, Special Operations Force,

since 1963, almost ten years now.

78

I've got 19 months combat

GORSKI

and the rest of the time has all been instructor time, teaching
people what I knew.

0:

Do you believe that that's an integral part of the Special

Operations Forces mission?

I
1

Go:

Yes, I do, because if you don't have the capability of passing

your information on, you're always redesigning the wheel every
time you go back again.
doing this.

We are notorious in the Air Force for

We go back and start with the wheel.

I.
Ga:

What have you been training in since you came back?

Go:

The A-26 was my biggest bag until it folded in 1968.

transitioned to the A-37.

Then I

I had about 100 hours in the A-37,

and then I went to life support school and wound up at headquarters here in life support section.

So really from 1969 on

I've been sort of a SOF weenie, as we used to call them down

on the line down there.

Although when I was, I guess, classi-

cally, in A-26's, probably started out as a buck pilot, worked

up to flight commander, staneval officer for the squadron and
staneval officer for the wing.

Then we lost the airframes,

but you've got just so many jobs, you know, one operations
officer.

79

GORSKI

Ga:

What did they do with the airframe?

Go:

There's a couple out at Davis-Monthan yet, gathering dust and

sun out there.

Recently when the big buildup came, when they

announced the ceasefire, they showed a picture of three A-26's,

I think, on the ramp at Bien Hoa.

Got me all excited.

But most

of them, I think, are back in the States sitting out at DM [DavisMonthan AFB, Arizona].
over in Asia.

I think they left two or three of them

Originally the contract--when they built them,

they built actually forty of them.

Five of the airplanes dis-

appeared immediately to the other agencies.

The A-26 was used

down in the Congo during that little thing.

We don't have all

failures.

We had the Congo thing that we worked with.

Dominican Republic thing we got involved in.

We had

This was where you

could say, classically, the Special Operations Force went into

this job quickly.

In other words, the political crisis came.

SOF moved in with the Army Special Forces, did their job and then
turned back political on us.

It's gone on.

This is classic.

Vietnam, the political number of least control.

Ga:

Did CAS ever get any of these 26's?

Go:

I guess so.

I don't know.

I guess they did.

of funny ones running around in the world.

got them.

There was a couple

I don't know who has

GORSKI

0:

Do you believe there should be closer cooperation between the

Army Special Forces and the Air Force Special Forces?

Go:

Yes.

Of course, that really is one of our primary reasons to

exist was to support directly the Special Forces.

See, this goes

back to Kennedy's edict when he told the Department of the Army

after the Bay of Pigs that they would develop a group of people
i

that were specifically trained for other than conventional war-

Ii

fare.

At the same time, he directed the Air Force to form a unit

that would support these people, which we were.

original contract.

This was our

This is what we should revert to.

believe we belong under TAC.

I believe we belong under DOD with

Special Forces and SEAL's and maybe the Marine Corps.

that oddball bag.
and marry them up.

I don't

It's just

Take these people that are supposedly trained

As

soon as you put them down under a major

command such as TAC, they become relegated to the second position.

Our second position in this case was just as important as our
parents under certain conditions.

So I feel that to save money

and to realize the potential there, it would almost be a DOD

billet.

People from the Air Force would be assigned to this unit,

people from the Navy and the Army would be assigned to this unit.
They would in turn operate--this is why I say you couldn!t take
kids right out of school.

You'd want guys with good military

background, five, ten years experience.

81

GORSKI

people that came back from like a tour in A~ 26' s and wound up in
SAC flying a 135 as a tanker pilot.
talent and experience there.
need 135 tanker pilots.

There was a lot of real

We felt like--not that SAC doesn't

I'm not saying that.

So consequently a

lot of--and some of these people literally did everything I guess

except stand on the President of the United States' desk on their
head and tried to get back in this.

Once they were assigned

someplace else, they were just frozen.

a tour to do.
job.

That was it.

They had

Well, like good soldiers, they're doing their

God, we lost some talent that way.

or how do we establish this?

Now what criteria,

See, this is where I say the shred-

out on the AFSC--if this guy is qualified maybe give him the
chance, if nothing else in this case, to get back in the outfit.
There were a lot of people that wouldn't want to be in this
outfit, I'm sure, just like I'm a guy that wouldn't want to be
in certain parts of the Air Force.

Well, if you let everybody

do in the Air Force exactly what they want to do, we'd have all
the slots filled and everybody would be happy.
this.

We keep changing everybody around.

But nobody believes

You got to have historians,

right? You've got to have airplane drivers, bomber pilots and

fighter pilots and what have you.
change once in a while.

0;

I believe in letting the guy

If nothing, variety is the spice of life.

My last question deals with the gunship program. Some people

have put forth the idea that the entire gunship program by the
83

GORSKI

Air Force violates Air Force doctrine.

Go:

Well, I don't know.

fight.

0:

The mission of the Air Force is to fly and

Now, how do we violate that?

Do you feel that the gunship program is one of those that should
be maintained as a part of the Special Operations Forces?

Go:

Yes.

I think it's a cop-on-a-.beat type weapon.

He's the guy

that's got the nightstick out there because he's got eyes in the
night.

He's got a scanner, his illuminators to help.

How much

I don't know, but I think we--again there'S a highly sophisticated

piece of equipment.
in the field now.

We've got some people that are really trained

Yes, I think we should retain at least a cadre

of this--this again back to the SOF package, you know, should

be a token of a lot of things.

These are most highly qualified,

most versatile people, training people that come through, low

level, no big deal.

It is just that you have people that retain

this ability, these skills.

0;

Have you ever had a chance to evaluate the use of the TEMIG
beacon, for example, in action?

Go:

No, I have not.

84

GORSKI

0:

That's all the questions I have unless you have something else.

Ga:

Thank: you very much.

Go:

Glad to be here.

We appreciate it.

Again if you've got anything else 1 just let me

know.

8S