Clarke, Colin Arnold

THE RESCUE OF BOBBIN 05 by Doug DeVlaming, LtCol USAF (Ret)

In October of 1972 the 354th TFW deployed with three squadrons of A-7D’s to Korat RTAFB.  I was a Captain in the 356th TFS at the time and told my wife that I would be home by Christmas as Henry Kissinger was in Paris saying that “Peace was at hand”.  That did not happen.

The A-7D Corsair II was a variant of the Navy’s A-7E and well suited to the fight in Southeast Asia.  It was subsonic but could carry four MK-84 2000-pound bombs from Korat to Hanoi, unrefueled, and run in at 480 knots.  The A-7D was tasked to fly deep interdiction to Hanoi (Linebacker II), Close Air Support & Interdiction in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and Search and Air Rescue in all theaters.

When the Wing first arrived at Korat a call for volunteers to fly the Search & Air Rescue mission went out.  All pilots had previous combat tours but very few had experience flying the Search and Air Rescue mission.  The first to volunteer was Major Arnie Clarke.  Arnie was small in stature but a giant in all other aspects.  He was a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot, highly skilled at flying fighter aircraft, courageous, aggressive, and tenacious.  Arnie was born to lead men in combat.  He was my Flight Commander and I wanted to be just like him.

On November 16, 1972, an F-105 Wild Weasel, call sign Bobbin 05, took off from Korat on a mission to escort B-52’s on a night raid.  During the mission Bobbin 05 was downed by a surface-to-air missile, the crew ejecting and coming down 60 miles south of Hanoi, just southwest of Than Hoa, the second largest city in North Vietnam.  The two-man crew hunkered down and waited for rescue on the 17th.  It did not come until the 18th.

I flew on the 17th,, and because I was not scheduled to fly on the 18th, I went to Korat city to have dinner and unwind.  When I returned to my hooch around 2200 the lights were out and my two roommates were in bed.  As I entered the hooch, one of my roommates told me that the Wing was tasked to rescue the crew of Bobbin 05 the next day which would be the A-7D’s first mission in the Search and Air Rescue role.  My roommate told me that I was on the schedule but had to tell the scheduler that I was a volunteer as the mission was volunteers only.  I knocked on the scheduler’s hooch door and told him that I was volunteering.  He told me that I was on the schedule and to be at Fort Apache, our intelligence center, at 0200.  When I said, “0200?!!!”  He said, “do you want to go or not”, and I went to get a quick wink.

We took off at 0400 with tankers filling the sky and red and green wing lights everywhere.  The A-7D rescue force consisted of 8 smoke birds carrying four SUU-7’s loaded with CBU-12 smoke grenades, 4 flak suppression birds with MK 82’s and CBU 38, and Arnie as Sandy lead with his wingman.  I was one of the smoke birds.

When we got to the orbit point we could tell it was going to be a long day as the weather was a low undercast that blanketed the whole of North Vietnam.  The rescue helicopters could not get below the undercast.  They attempted by lowering their penetrators and descending into the clouds only to have the penetrator drag on the jungle canopy before they broke out below the clouds.  Arnie ruled out having the helicopters fly across North Vietnam and descending over the Gulf of Tonkin as the threat level was too high.  We waited as two helicopters ran low on fuel and had to withdraw.  Arnie ordered everyone back to the tankers as fuel was getting low for the entire A-7D rescue force.  The tankers had to move north into Laos and without their efforts, the mission would have failed.  Sitting on the tanker’s wing, waiting my turn to refuel over Laos with the Fuel Low Light staring me in the face, was just the start of what would turn out to be a very, very long day.

Arnie would not give up.  He had been shot down twice before, both times flying the F-100, and he knew what it was like being on the ground, in enemy territory, waiting for rescue.  Arnie decided to trust in the avionic systems incorporated in the A-7D.  The A-7D had a forward-looking radar, radar altimeter, and heads up and a projected map displays.  Using all of these systems Arnie found a valley and descended into it.  He broke out into the clear, finding enough room underneath to maneuver.  Arnie popped up and led the third helicopter down.  The smoke birds let down over the Gulf of Tonkin and joined up with the helicopter laying a smoke corridor to the Bobbin crew.

With the Bobbin crew safely on board the helicopter, Arnie limped into Da Nang with heavy battle damage.  His aircraft could not be repaired in theater and had to be flown back to the United States with the landing gear down.  The aircraft, A-7D tail number 970, is now displayed in the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.  For his efforts that day, Arnie was awarded the Air Force Cross.  As for me, I flew back to Korat after 8.7 long hours in the air.  After landing, most of the rescue force went to the Officer’s Club bar to celebrate, not me, I went to bed.

Postscript:  In 2006 I went to Vietnam with a Vietnamese friend and visited the location of the Bobbin 05 rescue.  It was late in the day and we got as close to the horseshoe-shaped ridge that the Bobbin crew landed on, as we could.  As we stood on a narrow bike path an older Vietnamese man on a bicycle came riding by.  My friend stopped him and spoke to him in Vietnamese.   During the conversation, the man became angry and stomped his foot which prompted my friend to laugh.  After the conversation ended I asked my friend why the man became angry.  He told me he asked the man if any bombs had fallen in the area during the war.  The man’s response was “no, but that two flyers had parachuted onto the ridge”, pointing to where the Bobbin crew was rescued.  He said that, “he and other villagers went looking for the flyers on the ridge”, and that is when he stomped his foot and said, ‘but a helicopter came and took them away.”

Douglas “Chuck” de Vlaming
Lt. Col. USAF (ret.)
Largo, FL

Douglas@deVlaming.com