(triumphant music) - When we first started flying into North Vietnam, they got clobbered.

- You rolled at 135 degrees, put nine G on the aircraft, and went to the deck.

They didn't have to hit you, if they got within 100 feet of you, they could probably blow you out of the air.

- I looked down, between my feet, I saw the airplane blow up right between my feet.

- We had about 3,000 of us that were killed in combat.

- When you go to war, you see life in a totally different perspective.

- The legacy is wars are really easy to get into and wander into and they are not easy to get out of and they are not necessarily easy to win.

- [Narrator] Air power during the war against communist North Vietnam was crucial to the United States military.

Helicopters played an increasing role, supporting and transporting American troops.

Fixed wing aircraft bombed, strafed, and spied on them.

Arizona, due to its friendly flying climate, played a pivotal role supplying qualified men to pilot those aircraft.

They trained mostly at Luke and Williams Air Force Bases in Phoenix.

- After I started flying, then at Phoenix College, I applied for the Air Force.

I wanted to be a pilot.

After I went through a series of schools and ended up getting my wings, then I was selected to go on to advanced jet training and that was done at Williams Air Force Base, and flying the F-86.

And, of course, wow, is that cool because not only was I flying F-86s but I was doing it in my own home, backyard.

- [Narrator] Not all pilots were so lucky to have their first assignment right next door to where they grew up.

Many of them, the ones transferred to Arizona from cooler climates for training, had memorable first impressions of the state.

- After I got my wings, I went to Luke and got my first assignment to F-100s, so that was six months of training at Luke.

We were not used to the hot temperatures, coming from Montana.

You just acclimate to it and figure out how to live in it and go down and buy another swamp cooler and point it at the bed so you could sleep at night.

(laughs) - Luke was hot (laughs).

I had bought a Volkswagen Bug.

It had no air conditioning, no radio, and I drove it in three-and-a-half days from New York to Los Angeles and then to Luke in July and we stopped in Gila Bend for iced tea, driving, it's about noon, 105 degrees, 106 degrees.

Go out the airplane, you couldn't hardly touch the airplanes.

I ain't never been a big fan of Phoenix.

- [Narrator] There wasn't much handling of the aircraft at Luke Air Force Base in the middle of June 1968.

The temperature was a record high of 115 degrees for three days straight.

That was quite a change from the Rocky Mountains.

Several years earlier, Don Shepperd had come to Colorado Springs to attend the Air Force Academy and become a pilot.

- My dad told me when I graduated from the Academy, he said, "Marriage is a really serious thing.

"You need to make sure you're doing the right thing, "don't rush into it."

And so I waited two whole hours after I graduated from the Air Force Academy and married my wife and we've been married now almost 55 years.

At Luke, there were only seven fighters available and I was lucky enough to get one of the F-100s.

I finished high enough in the class, so went from there right over to Luke Air Force Base to train in F-100s, then headed for Europe.

- I don't want to fly buses, I want to, you know, move and have control, and, so, I got the F-100 assignment and I came to Luke.

- I started working with the Tucson Air Guard.

They had F-100s at the time and they had an air defense job.

So I would be, kind of, a liaison.

I'd come down here and fly with them and I went to summer camp with them.

All the plans said that the war in Vietnam was gonna end in the summer of '67, and this was in '66.

So I think, "God, this war's gonna go on, "here I am, now I'm a fighter pilot..." And I would've never seen a bomb or a gun.

- In those days, everybody trained for nuclear missions and conventional missions were secondary and you didn't spend a lot of time doing it.

But about six months before we deployed, we didn't know we were gonna deploy.

The emphasis turned from the nuclear training to conventional training, so we spent a lot more time dive-bombing and skip-bombing and strafing and that sort of thing, firing air to surface missile systems.

We lost our first guy the second day we were there.

We lost six guys out of the 20 pilots that were deployed in that four month deployment.

The war came home to rest very, very quickly.

You knew that mistakes ended in other than happy ways.

That was '65.

We were learning a lot of lessons, rewriting the books on what we had to be doing.

So I was 30-years-old at that time.

I had been in the Air Force about five years.

So, I was still a young guy, a new captain.

- [Narrator] There was plenty to learn when piloting jet fighters in a war zone, given the diverse nature of the air war.

Pilots flew many different types of missions.

- I wanted to go to Vietnam, volunteered for it.

By the time I got there, it was 1967, and so the war was well underway at that time.

There was a lot of combat going on in the south and then also we had also, by that time, starting in 1965, we'd started bombing the north.

So there was a lot of combat in both the south and the north.

And I ended up doing both.

The stuff in the south was supporting our soldiers on the ground.

And so, you had to do bombing, a lot of it very close to our soldiers, under the control of forward air controllers who marked targets for you.

But you had to be very careful what you were doing so you didn't kill our own troops and you had to be very accurate with the bombs.

We also, sometimes, escorted the spray airplanes that were spraying over there.

They were spraying defoliant, trying to defoliate certain areas over there.

It was the Agent Orange, if you will, that they were spraying.

Everything over there was sprayed by Agent Orange, our bases were sprayed by Agent Orange, they were also sprayed with insecticides, I mean the whole place just smelled like insecticide, as well as everything else.

Our missions lasted four to six-and-a-half hours with either two to three refuelings.

And we were shot at constantly.

The other thing that happened was that we very often would lose airplanes.

About 28 percent of our pilots got shot down, some of 'em twice.

But when somebody got shot down, there were no rules.

We did whatever we had to do.

We would go down, we would strafe, we would strafe 'til we were out of bullets, we would fire rockets 'til we were out of rockets, we would make low passes and hit the afterburner, we'd pickle off our fuel tanks if that's what it took on the guys, we'd do anything we could to protect the guy on the ground and get him rescued, and sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't.

- [Pilot] Okay, just stand by, we're coming in to get you, stand by.

- The helicopters, who were the bravest of the brave guys in the whole world, let me tell you.

I've seen these guys do things that were incredible, just sit there and hover for several minutes, just getting hit all the time by ground fire and they're amazing and heroic guys.

It was truly, truly dangerous.

And I'd tell you, I just cannot take my hat enough to the rescue forces, the A-1s, and the Jolly Green Guys that did this, they were unbelievable.

The Sandies and the Jolly Greens were the heroes of the war.

- [Narrator] Navy helicopter rescue forces were sent to retrieve downed Air Force pilot Bob Barnett.

As luck would have it, they were then diverted before they could accomplish his rescue.

On their way to Colonel Barnett, they were ordered to recover a downed Navy pilot and didn't make it back in time.

Barnett spent five-and-a-half years as a POW.

- My name was released, I was MIA.

And then Ho Chi Minh died in '69 and then they started changing the, they started easing off a little bit.

And they started allowing us to write.

That's the first time I wrote.

And my wife got my first letter in 1970.

And that's the first time they knew I was alive, still.

She wrote, "I don't know whether you're dead or alive," and that's the way it was.

But they wouldn't release our names, so they wouldn't parade us around but there was obviously several that they, they paraded around.

And then there was 12 that came home early which we, not too happy with them.

They made statements that they shouldn't have.

We was supposed to go home in order, that's what our, our mission was supposed to be.

Return with honor.

And those guys did not, I don't think, so.

They're not a part of our group.

But that was their choice.

I was, like, Rip Van Winkle.

You know, the miniskirts had come and gone.

And I kinda complained about that a little bit.

I lived a monk's life for a long time.

- [Narrator] The army had their share of pilots, too, flying transport and attack helicopters.

- I left Fort Polk after basic combat training and a class wasn't ready immediately and I spent three weeks at Fort Polk, Louisiana cleaning pots and pans.

I couldn't quite understand how that was related to my flying activity.

But the Army thought that's what I should be doing at the time, so that's what I did.

- [Pilot] Now, this is Kilo, we'll make a-- - You took every reasonable precaution by timing your approach to take into consideration terrain that would mask your approach, speed that would reduce your sound signature, and then you had your weapon support on both sides to prepare the landing zone.

Occasionally used indirect fires from artillery to prepare the landing zone prior to landing.

Well, I'm here to tell you that all armies are alike in some degree.

They have people in their armies, just like we have in our own who are less proficient than others and one of the ways that we hunted was we had a first-light mission and a last-light mission.

We would launch before the sun would come up and we would put the sun behind us, in a position that we could watch the last little wisps of campfires as the enemy was having breakfast and closing down their encampments from the night before for their daytime hiding.

And you would engage that enemy and you'd get out of the area as quickly as you could, after the engagement.

Then you would return to try to find his friends, taking care of him, administering first aid, or evacuating a casualty or the body, whatever it may be.

Then you would engage them and you'd leave again.

Then you would come back.

It's a curious thing about war, it's something that I learned, those that practice it on a regular and frequent basis get better at it and your chances of survival go way up.

War is a very, very dangerous and confusing and chaotic activity where men pit themselves against one another.

But it's also an acquired skill.

- [Narrator] Pilot survival wasn't dependent solely on their own skill in the cockpit.

Unfortunately, planes could be brought down by causes other than enemy fire.

- We attacked one target on 27th of July, 1965.

The first time a surface-air missile site was attacked.

We had 28 aircraft on the attack, we lost six of 'em that day, on that attack.

We were attacking with ordinance that had not been tested.

Some of those aircraft that I talked about being lost were the result of your own ordinance going off and going through your tail section of your aircraft.

Anyway, that was a tough mission.

- I got sent over in late '65.

When we first started flying into North Vietnam, they got clobbered, we started losing five, six airplanes.

The F-100 flew more missions in South Vietnam than all the other planes combined.

We had a light and when the red light went red, that meant look for a puff of smoke in that direction because a mach-3 missile is gonna be coming at my mach-1 plane.

And, so, then, so I danced.

They were coming, you waited until they got a couple thousand feet away and then you broke like crazy because with its little rings it was gonna be a little bit behind.

And, hopefully, it would go by you but they were very good.

They changed their tactics and we changed our tactics.

I remember one night in Korat, that's where we flew out of and the officer's club... Was silent.

I looked over to the right and at the bar there were four guys drinking whiskeys silently.

And I knew what was gonna happen the next morning, early.

There's gonna be a JCS strike and 40 planes are gonna come down to shoot, dictated one shoot.

And I felt, right then and there, and they felt, too, that two or three of them would be dead the next day.

Two of them were dead the next day.

- [Officer] Aim!

Fire!

(gunshots) - [Narrator] 26 Arizonans were among the over 2,500 Air Force casualties during the war, nearly all from Tucson and the Phoenix area.

Many pilots arrived for their Vietnam service as passengers, which presented some unexpected difficulties.

- You rotated over to Vietnam on commercial airplanes, as an example.

And we would have people, we were, one, banned from wearing our uniform going, initially you had to wear your uniform when you went overseas.

Eventually they said, "Go in civilian clothes "because of all the demonstrations "and the people throwing paint on you and things like that."

So, I think 1969, 1970 was really the beginning of the end, if you will, of our love affair, if you will, for fighting and Vietnam.

The good news about the Air Force is we train the way we're gonna fight.

So, you practice the tactics out on ranges like here in Arizona, of course, we have the Gila Bend Complex, Barry Goldwater Complex now.

That's what were we do a lot of our training.

So, when you're out out there, you make it as realistic as you possibly can.

In those days, because we're flying from Thailand, and we flew over Vietnam, but not very often.

We were primarily over Laos.

We were supporting the CIA in those days.

We had a lot of weather stations up in the mountains and run by the Lao oceans and Americans and they would resupply those areas and sometimes they would be engaged and when they were engaged, we would go in and provide top cover for them.

And that's what that mission was all about while I was in Thailand that first time.

We would have forward air controllers who would go in and mark the targets and then various fellow fighter pilots would come in in-country, that is, in the southern area we worked with, with forward air controllers who were flying light airplanes.

These people would roll into a target, they would mark the target with smoke rockets and then the fighter pilot follows in after that and puts his bomb where he's directed to put his bombs or other weapons if it isn't bombs.

- [Narrator] Some of those forward air controllers had observers sitting beside them who had an intimate knowledge of the country.

The observers were allies, members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, ARVN, citizens of democratic South Vietnam.

- [Narrator] That protection of Saigon only lasted until the end of April 1975, two years after the withdrawal of American combat troops.

The communist North Vietnamese finally overwhelmed the ARVN and took control of the entire country.

Soon, retaliation against the soldiers on the losing side became widespread and brutal.

- [Narrator] Eventually, members of the former South Vietnamese Army and their families escaped and made the perilous journey to America, some to Arizona.

- [Narrator] The journeys, the experiences of those Arizonans who fought and served in Vietnam were different for each of them.

What they had in common was a changed sense of the world, a change that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

- At the time that I was an aircraft commander and aeroscout team leader in Vietnam, I was 20-years-old.

But, yet, I was entrusted with the lives of hundreds of men, in directing them, in large, complex operations that involve lots of moving parts.

And I learned, I gained a sense of self-confidence in my own ability and discovered, in myself, talents that I didn't know I had.

And I would have never had that opportunity had not the Vietnam War placed me under those circumstances at that time.

So, I'm incredibly grateful for that.

- The wives took on a role that made what you were doing possible, in my mind.

They never get enough credit for what they do and the support they provide to the men and women that are fighting away from home.

So, I would say that every opportunity you get to offer somebody thanks for their service, thanks for her service as well.

- I met some of the greatest guys in the world.

Made me stronger, I think.

Make me appreciate things more.

- It wasn't hard, I didn't have PTSD or anything of that sort, but it was a strange, strange feeling that none of these people around me, none of these people around have experienced what I've experienced, or understand.

(radio chatter) Everybody had their own war.

The helicopter guys had their war that I couldn't relate to.

The fighter guys down south had their own war they could relate to, fighter guys up north had their own war they could relate to, the grunts on the ground had their own war they could relate to.

But you really didn't talk much to each other because there was so much to explain.

I never did anything with aero that I'm ashamed of and I've had people ask me, young kids ask me, "Did you ever kill anybody?"

And my answer to them was, "I never killed anyone "that wasn't trying desperately to kill me.

"I didn't violate any rules, I didn't bomb any villages, "I didn't do anything that I was ever, "ever ashamed of, at all.

"So, I don't have anything."

But I believed in what I was doing and I believed in what we were doing was worthwhile.

- [Narrator] In many ways, the Vietnam War divided American society and opened wounds that seem to be still healing.

But though the pain of Vietnam is deep and lasting, there is hope that it will produce lessons that prove, also, to be deep and lasting.

- We made the same mistakes in the Vietnam War that the Union had made in the Civil War.

And we allowed exemption from service by privilege.

In the Vietnam War, we provided certain classifications in draft wars were corrupt in that the people that were of privilege could always find a way to be exempted from service, if their number was called.

I don't think, in my heart, that people in America protested the Vietnam War as much as they protested the fact that they may have to serve in it.

- When you go to war, you see life in a totally different perspective.

I don't think there's anybody that can go to war and not be changed.

There's never been a good war, never will be a good war.

There are no winners in a war, you don't win a war.

You might end it, but there are never really any winners.

- Many decades later, it's so stupid that we did not understand why we got involved with.

But I believed the whole time that it was worthwhile what doing that I was.

- Gradually, over time, I've realized what a mistake the war was and realized that we should not have gotten ourselves into what, essentially, was a civil war in Vietnam, over there.

And we ended up losing and the reason we ended up losing was because the American public figured out that it wasn't worthwhile sending their kids and grandkids into a war that was endless over there, with, really, with no end in sight.

- I don't feel that we need to ever have troops in combat unless we have the full support, trust, and confidence of the American people that provide them the tools and the understanding that we're there to win.

Because losing doesn't feel good.

I'm incredibly proud of my service and the opportunity to serve the country.

And given the chance to do it again, I would do it again.

(triumphant music)