My name’s Jim Bishop. I’m sixty years old. Born in Parsons, Kansas in 1942, I was an early baby boomer, to a family with three sisters. Grew up in the Parsons area and went to grade school and high school, and then two years of community college there. When I was a kid I was the type that was very adventurous, was a good student in school, was able to make good grades. Had lots of interesting hobbies; and we grew up in a time where the toys where a lot different than they are today. So we would take a toy and make something out of it, like a stick. We would make our own kites.
[I] had an interest in flying from a very early childhood. I’d see airplanes flying over the house and I’d think, “Why can’t one of those airplanes land in my yard and take me for a ride?” When we grew up, we also went to church every Sunday. We were not distracted by a lot of the things that you’re distracted by today. We did not have television. We had radio so we listen to that on Saturday mornings.
When I was in grade school, my grandmother got an opportunity to take a plane ride. So, she asked if I’d like to go with her. One of the church members owned an airplane. So we went out to the little airport there on a grass strip in Parsons, and took off one day and got to fly. I thought that was about the slickest thing. My parents bought me a model airplane, and about three blocks from my house there was a field where these model airplane enthusiasts would fly their planes. So I started flying my model airplane, and had a lot of fun with that. I would sit in class sometimes, and draw airplanes. During the Korean war, some of [my] classmate’s parents, or fathers were involved in that; so there were news about it. I fell in love with a couple of the airplanes, the F-9, F-Panther; and I would go to all the airplane shows I could, and I started drawing that airplane. [That was my] favorite subject to draw, and I drew a lot of airplanes. So, I knew that airplane backwards and forwards.
When I got into college, I had a choice of whether I wanted to go into the air force or the navy. At that time, if I didn’t make a selection, then I would be drafted and I would have probably been a “ground pounder.” Although we played a lot of those kinds of games when I was a kid, uh, that’s not exactly the way I wanted to be involved in the Vietnam War. I decided to go up to Olathe, Kansas and take the naval flight test. I had gotten a ride in a trainer in college, out the Pittsburg airport, and the guy did all kinds of acrobatics. So, I really liked that. I went up to Olathe, took the Navy flight test, and passed it. Went back up for my physical and passed that and was about ready to sign, to go into naval officers training school and eventually into naval flight training. Some of my friends in college were going to the navy and they weren’t getting jet fighters, and I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot. So I decided to take the Air Force test, which I did, and passed that, and passed their physical test and, enlisted in the Air Force. [To enlist you have to have] great vision. 20/20 vision. Can’t be colorblind. You have to have great peripheral vision. Had to have excellent hearing. They take the people that are the top folks that get that position, and there’s a lot of people that barely don’t qualify on something. They’d give anything to fly, but they just had something wrong, and they couldn’t do it. Anyway, at that time [when] you go in to the Air Force, let’s see, ninety days in officers training school. It’s kinda like a boot camp in a way, but you’re going to be an officer at the end of it. You get your lieutenants bar at the end of it. So I was successful there. We had about forty-five guys in our class, I ranked probably right there in the low upper half of that class. So I was able to select the plane I wanted to fly, which was the F-4 Phantom. After getting that selection, [I] took a little time off in the summer and then I reported to flight school in west Texas--Lovett, Texas, at Reese Air Force base. I was twenty-two at the time, and flight school takes about a year; so, that would have been about 1966.
In flight school [we had] maybe thirty guys in our squadron, and they taught you all the basic techniques, in the classroom, and all the health issues in the class room-- G-forces, oxygen levels, and what to expect in certain situations. Then you go out the other half of the day, and you fly. You fly for an hour, to an hour and half, and you spend forty-five minutes to an hour getting ready for that flight; the same amount of time after you fly, debriefing, and figuring out what you did wrong and how your gonna improve. Then when you get out of flight school, you go into combat training and the flying is of course a lot more rigorous. If you’ve seen “Top Gun”, you do a lot of that kind of air maneuvering, you do all kinds of air to ground bomb drops, shootin the gun, you learn how to fine tune your techniques to get ready to go fight the war. [Throughout the year] you fly, at that time, three different airplanes. You start off with a prop plane, like a 172, a Cessna 172. You fly that for thirty hours, then you fly a subsonic jet trainer for ninety hours. Then you go into a supersonic jet trainer, T-38, which is the same as the F-5, which their still flyin’ today. You fly that for one hundred twenty hours, and after you get that you get your wings. By then you’re a first lieutenant. Then I reported to Davis-Monthan in Tuscan, Arizona for my combat training to prepare me to go to Vietnam.
After getting my combat training, then we’d go through survival training and have to learn to survive. They sent us in late 1966, or in the fall of 1966, to Washington, to survival training. In that training you learn how to survive in, tough situations, go through a prisoner of war camp. You learn all those techniques about survival; and then after that, I went from there, I guess I finished up in Tuscon in the spring. Then I got my orders to go to Vietnam. I got married to Nancy in February of 1967, about four months before I left for Vietnam.
When I got my orders for Vietnam, we all got on a big transport, flew to the Phillipines where I went to jungle survival school, to learn how to live in the jungle-- how to survive more in the way of a prisoner of war situation. After we left there we hit Vietnam, and went to our respective base, which was Cam Rahn Bay; and got ready for the real action.
[That first night] all I could think about was, “Gee, am I gonna be involved in a year of bombing? I mean rockets hittin’ the base, and then at night you wonder if those guys are sneakin’ around outside your base, you know?” [ he laughs ] Are we gonna have to sleep with a gun? Every mission I flew, depended upon where I was flyin’, you always had a pistol. Some missions I put as much ammo on me as I could because I knew if I got shot down I might not have much of a chance of even being taken prisoner. The other times, depending on where we flew, I might put tracer bullets in that pistol knowing that it’s a night mission and I might have to shoot a tracer up to give a somebody an idea of where I was. So, we carried a pistol and we carried machetes and knives, and hopefully most of that was gonna be used for survival; and hopefully, you didn’t have to use it. That was the last thing you had to do was get into a gun fight with the people because your usually gonna’ be outnumbered, and their gonna have more firepower than you do.
[But with that aside], you couldn’t have been in a nicer place, in Vietnam. I mean we had our own little peninsula. It was about nineteen miles long so there were several different outfits there. The navy was there and the army. We had our own beach. We had our own squadron area. Each hut had two bedrooms. You had air conditioned quarters. You had your own party hooch. A typical day would be you’d go to your squadron, get your assignment [which could be anytime of the day because] you know you flew all different times. You flew twenty-four hours, different times during the day. But most of the missions were daytime, or nighttime, early nighttime missions. You’d go to the squadron, get your orders. You would then go into a weather briefing. If there where four people goin’ up that day, you’d go into a little room. The intelligence officer would come in and tell ya what to expect over the target. Then he’d tell ya what your best escape routes where, and if you got shot down what the best place to hide would be, and what to expect. Certain areas we knew if we got shot down we had two hours to get picked up or we would not be picked up. Those where usually the Laos missions, or North Vietnam missions. North Vietnam we usually figured we’d get captured if we got shot down, and taken prisoner. I lost two roommates at that time. One of them was a prisoner of war for six and a half years, and the other one was killed. So you know, after you got your briefings, then you go out to the airplane, and depending upon what type of mission it was, you would check your ordinates. Some days you’d go out with hard bombs, other days you’d go out with napalm. You always had a centerline gun with twenty millimeter on it. Some days you’d go out with rockets, and your mission could vary anywhere from bombin’ trees for interdiction routes, to actual missions where you saw what you were shooting, to takin out bridges, roads, helping the ground troupes that where overrun, that needed help, shooting around them to get rid of the enemy. Lots of different missions. Some missions where flyin’ at twenty thousand [feet] dropping bombs from that level. Those were usually pretty boring. The neat things about the type of missions we flew, [it] varied anywhere from the Delta region clear up into the 21st parallel up into North Vietnam.
So we where shot at, and we would shoot back if people where shootin’ at us-- not other planes because you had to get up closer to Hanoi for that, but ground. You had to fly above 4500 feet to escape the small arms fire, and if you did do a dive bomb mission where you’re gonna pull out lower than that, you had to move the airplane around. Pretty uncomfortable ride if you were just ridin’ along. It was damned uncomfortable because you’re jerkin that airplane around. The average person would get sick within a few minutes of just flyin’ in that situation. You might fly in a mission where you find a sand pan goin’ (like a little skiff used to transport weapons) into a beach to offload munitions. At night, they moved a lot of their um, ordinates, and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail. You would catch them in a convoy; and you would shoot at them and bomb them. It was not out of the ordinary to watch secondary explosions go off for several minutes while all the ordinates in that convoy might be blowin’ up. I actually received the distinguished flying cross for a night mission along the Ho Chi Minh trail for catching a pretty large convoy moving ordinates. That was a pretty big honor. The night missions where kinda neat because they couldn’t see ya very well, and so they couldn’t shoot ya. So we all wanted to get as many night missions as we could. I was hopin’ to get my one hundred missions over North Vietnam and come back home in maybe about four months. But after losin’ eleven guys in the squadron in about a three month period, out of thirty guys, they decided that we were all gonna stay there for a year. So I ended up getting, flying, two hundred thirty-eight missions, during the year.
We flew pretty much every day, too. If you had a week you were off on R and R, and you didn’t want that anyway. If you were over there, you wanted to fly as much as you could because it took your mind off of everything else. The more you flew, the more you didn’t think about bein’ home, or your wife, or whatever. So you developed a certain tough mindedness that dealt with your friends getting killed or captured.
After each mission you usually fly underneath the other airplane and look them over. Yeah, there were times when there’d be holes in the airplane. The worst fear would be if any of the ordinates that they were shootin’ at you hit the hydraulic lines because you needed those to fly. Without that, you can’t control your surfaces --rudder, airolons, and all that stuff. You needed that. So you’d watch for leaking hydraulics or other holes; and you’d get them. But I was never shot down, just was one of those lucky people.
[I was in Vietnam from] June of 1967 to June of 1968. [I] was involved in the 1968 Tet offensive. Those were days when you may fly as many as three missions; and in some situations, you would sleep with your G-suit on and all your gear, including your pistol. You would sleep in a cot at the end of the runway in a trailer; and whenever they blew the horn, you had to be airborn within ten minutes. As soon as you get airborn, the control people told you the general direction and area you needed to go to. Then when you got to that area, just like any other mission, forward air controller would take over, and he’d tell ya where to drop your ordinates, or where the troops where in trouble. If you dropped your ordinates and it wasn’t the right spot, he’d tell ya so many meters from that spot--north, south, whatever--and you’d make two, three, four passes and then you’d head back home and get ready for the next mission.
There are lots of good memories though. When you got there, ya always said, “I got so many days in a wake up” ( a term used to say how many days left until you return home ). So the guys that where comin’ in you know, they’d have like three hundred and some days in a wake up. Then it’d get down to one hundred eighty. Every Sunday, on your watch, they were Seiko watches, it was a red letter day. You went to Bangkok and got one. You’d have those red letter days, and when you got down to near the end, that’s when you really got the happiest. Some of the more happier moments where when we would divert into a base along the coastline, and we would land and get refueled; and they’d come out with real milk. You can’t believe how good that was. Halfway through my tour we finally got hamburgers at the Officer’s Club. We got to go to the beach, take our own surfboard, and surf. My roommate who was one of these guys who would trade for anything, traded an aqua lung [scuba tank] for eleven cases of steak--we found all kinds of friends. We built our party hooch, and we had the fanciest party hooch in Southeast Asia. All the generals wanted to come visit our party hooch. Little things like that to distract you from what you were there for, which was to fly and kill the enemy.
We really didn’t get [much] above the DMZ, about the 17th parallel. We flew as high as the 21st parallel. We didn’t get into that. Had we been in Denang we might have had some action; but we didn’t. We were trained for it, we were ready for it. We picked them up, [North Vietnamese] on radar; they looked at us, and we looked at them but we were just too far away to engage.
We would fly [large distances] sometimes, especially if we were going to North Vietnam. We would go out over the South China Sea, pick up a refueling tanker, top off with gas, and fly into North Vietnam. Drop our ordinates, and sometimes have to hit that tanker on the way back, especially if we were doin’ low level road-wrecky work where you would fly fairly low looking for anything that moves. You use a lot of gas like that when you’re low. Every time you pull into a target and pull out you’re hitting the thrusters so you burn up a lot of gas. You hit the fuel on the way out and head back home. Sometimes those missions would get close to three hours, but your typical mission would be like an hour and a half to forty-five [minutes].
Thankfully, I didn’t have any major problems in Vietnam. Well, we did loose our generators one time. We had hung ordinates-- the ordinates wouldn’t come off the plane. We’d had to land with hung ordinates and they’d brought out all the fire trucks and everything, because that’s pretty dangerous. Hung ordinates means you’ve got a bomb or something that wouldn’t come off when they’re supposed to. So they’re still ordinates that could blow up on impact. You had to be real careful about that. Some of the scariest missions would be to fly into low cloud cover in a very hot area with lots of people shootin’ back at ya; and you had to miss the little mountains as you flew around to get ready to go back in, knowing that when you flew in you could see the ordinates comin’ up at ya. They’d fire a sand missile, like a telephone pole. If it gets close to ya, it’s gonna kill ya. You had to learn how to maneuver the airplane, very uncomfortable, to get away from that missile that could blow up your airplane; but I was pretty lucky.
I actually ejected out of an airplane when I came back to the United States. Lost an airplane in a snow storm in New Mexico one night, and spent from 4:30 in the afternoon until 6:30 the next morning on a mountain. I was able to survive it, the guy with me was killed. He didn’t strap into his seat, and your parachute is useless if you’re not strapped because they are connected. He fell to his death. That was probably my most scary experience, but it was after the war.
It was an F-4 [that I was flying at that time]. I was just on a routine mission getting ready to make a landing and my entire platform, which is all my instrumentation, started spinning on me. I couldn’t get it stabilized, and I was in the clouds. As soon as I ejected and came through the clouds and hit the ground, I picked up my parachute and hit the road. I was way out in the middle of nowhere on this mountain plateau, and just started walkin’. Finally, the snow got so deep I just decided to wrap up and gut it out for the night. The only reason I’m sittin here today is because of a six inch candle that I had. I would light [it], and I would play this game. I’d time it, and I’d see how much time I had, and how many matches I had--to figure out how I could live between the matches. I was rescued the next morning by a Chinook helicopter. My hand held radio sent out vectors to let them know of my location. After a situation like that, you are taken off flight status for a month. Then, after that month, you fly a qualifying mission to make sure you’re okay. They want you to be okay so you can get back up flying again. We had parachute training too; so my partner knew what he should have done. The most fun part about the training was we got to parasail. They put us on ejection seats on the ground, and they let us experience that as well. They would shoot you up. Then you’d get to jump off a platform to simulate hittin’ the ground. It’s like jumpin’ off about a ten-foot building. It’s not like the ‘chutes you have today where you can control your descent. So a lot of guys break their leg when they hit the ground. They also taught you how to get out of the parachute whenever you went into water, which a lot of guys did. They got tangled up. They taught you how to release the ‘chute right before impact in order to keep from getting tangled up in it.
There were a couple experiences where I thought I was gonna be in ground combat; I remember one night, we got our base rocketed. We thought they might be tryin’ to come across a small channel to come on base--that happened a couple times. One time, flyin’ back from Bangkok in a C-130, the plane suddenly went down towards the ground and landed out in the middle of the jungle with these choppers flyin’ around and people with their guns drawn. We thought maybe we were gonna have to protect ourselves there. It happened all the time where you’d get over run; but fortunately, all we had to do was back up to another plane and they windmill started the airplane and they took off. They really didn’t tell us what they were doin’, and I wasn’t in control. I was a passenger. That was a little bit frightening. A windmill start is where a plane with its props running, backs up in front of another plane and the air coming off the propellers is strong enough to get the props on the other plane spinning and start the engine.
[When I finally returned home], that was interesting. I remember that day. Goin’ home you fly on a big transport, like a DC-8. They told us, “Now when you get to the United States you may run into people that don’t like you, and maybe you don’t want to wear your uniform when you walk off the airplane because of all the stuff that people where sayin’ and throwin’ at ya.” But most of the people I was with were just the opposite. We were gonna wear that uniform off the airplane. It was a great feeling because you were lucky enough to survive it, and then you got to see your loved ones at home. I was livin’ in Pittsburg at the time. Having been away from home for a year, you almost have to reprogram yourself to the way civilians live because it’s a lot different being in the military than being in civilian life. You learn the culture and how to be a good soldier, and getting out into civilian world you have to be a little careful, especially spending a year in Vietnam. You had to reprogram the way you talked, and thought, and acted around other people.
When I returned home, I had the rank of captain. I planned on becoming a commercial airline pilot. As it turns out, I was about three months late and the companies weren’t hiring. I got an opportunity to get a job selling real estate in 1970 with Coldwell Banker. I took the job, and it seemed an okay fit. Five years later I bought the company, and have owned it ever since.
Being involved in the war has definitely shaped my life. I’m a very patriotic person. I always will be. I know that war is not the answer some times; but, when the government called, I felt obligated to serve and to serve it well. And that’s what I did. I was a good soldier, and a good airman. I’m proud of anybody that decides to make a military career because they are truly dedicated Americans.
*Text in brackets was added by the editor to facilitate understanding.
This oral history was researched and prepared by Kyle Wilkinson, January 2003