The Liberators | Part 12

About 100 miles north of Las Vegas, there's a clump of wild grass and cotton with trees called the Green Spot. Not much to look at from the ground, but from 30,000 feet above the brown Nevada desert, it stands out for hundreds of miles. In the mid to late 50s, a fighter pilot could earn himself a quick 40 bucks and perhaps a nice steak dinner in Vegas, not to mention everlasting renown, which is to fighter pilots what oxygen is to us lesser beings. By meeting over the Green Spot at 30,000 feet and taking position just a thousand feet behind an arrogant and unpleasant man with precisely zero air to air victories to his credit. Now, from that perfect kill position, when you were ready, you would yell "Flights on!" and if that sitting duck in front of you was not on your tail with you and his gun sites in 40 seconds flat, then you would win the money, the dinner, and best of all, the fame. It'd be challenged in such a manner as an irresistible red flag to fighter pilots and certainly no less of one, because the challenger was a rude, loud, irreverent braggart who'd never been victorious in actual air to air combat. And yet, that $40 went uncollected, uncollected for many years, against scores of the best fighter pilots in the world. That's more than luck. That's more than skill, that's more than tactics. That level of supremacy is the result of the ability to see things in an entirely new way. It's the difference between being in sine amaze versus looking down on one. By the mid-1970s, the Cold War had fossilized into the form it would retain right up until the very end. Now, of course, there's always some fraying around the edges when you try to take something immeasurably complex and boil it down to a few words, but nevertheless, there it stands. The remainder of the Cold War would be a simple contest between quality versus quantity. An American public sick to the core from the war of attrition in Vietnam would not have the stomach for the kind of losses that the Russians had always seemed to be willing to endure. American technology and American money would be what would finally tell the tale from this point forward, America's strategy for the duration would be to spend treasure in order to save blood. Soviet conventional arms were very good and getting better by the year. For the United States to win the Cold War, it would have to move out of the era of lead sleds and smoking thunder hogs into an entirely new agile and lethal air-land battle doctrine where one American fighter would not only have to be able to out-shoot its Soviet opponent, it would have to out-shoot five or seven or ten enemy planes for everyone that we lost. At sea, fewer American hunter-killer subs would have to be far quieter and therefore bar more deadly than the much larger submarine fleet that the Soviets would hurl at resupply convoy's crossing the Atlantic should the Cold War suddenly find itself going very, very hot indeed. The same was true on the ground. Matching the numbers that the Red Army could mass on the eastern side of the Iron curtain was simply not an option. In order to hold the line against the land invasion, each American tank would have to be able to kill many of the best Soviet tanks and keep on fighting. And if the previous war had shown anything, it had proven that of all the possible variables in an upcoming World War III battlefield, air superiority was without question, the single greatest key to either victory or defeat. Not only would American fighters have to be far, far better than they had been in Vietnam, but the United States and NATO's quality over quantity strategy would rest upon what would become known as force multipliers. If one American jet was expected to counter multiple Russian ones, flying radar dishes called AWACS, that's airborne warning and control aircraft, sort of Johnny on the spot air traffic control system, would be needed to relay intercept vectors to those NATO fighters, air-to-air refueling tankers would have to be in constant service and so on. The communist possessed a military sledgehammer. The west would respond with a light, fast and deadly rapier, and the outcome of this quality versus quantity formula for the apocalypse would depend in very large part on who is perhaps the most important man you've never heard of. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. "I'm in his room, of course, the system of international control and conformity." You and I have a rendezvous with them. Never give in. Never, never. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. Many who knew him called him the greatest fighter pilot of all time. He would have agreed enthusiastically. He was rude, abrasive, insubordinate, ornary and unpleasant. He was in many ways the negative image of Robin Ols. He was not a great leader of men. The few friends he had said that he ate like a woodchipper. He could and often would make instant enemies of important men who might have proven allies had he not been so arrogant and dismissive, and most telling of all, the greatest fighter pilot who ever lived had not a single air-to-air victory to his name, not one. Because John Boyd, Pope John, the high priest of the fighter mafia, the mad major, later the ghetto Colonel, 42nd Boyd, challenged over 100 of the best fighter pilots in the world to one-on-one combat at 30,000 feet over the green spot at Fighter Town, USA, Fighter Weapon School at Nellis Air Force Base just outside of Las Vegas. The challenge was always the same. Boyd would fly straight and level until his opponent was in a perfect firing position, a thousand feet behind him and right at his six o'clock. When Boyd's opponent was ready to pull the trigger on the gun camera in the wing route, he would radio "Fights On" and then Boyd would disappear. His beefy, not particularly agile and extremely up-to-earth F-100 Super Saber pilots called it "The Hun" would perform a maneuver that surely must rip the wings right off. Boyd was simply gone. And then, usually around 20 seconds later, but never, not once, less than 40 seconds later, Boyd's voice would be yelling "GUNS, GUNS, GUNS" through their helmet headphones with a crackling laugh just to make it sting even more. And sure enough, there he was, right on the six of the best fighter pilots in the Air Force, then later the Marines, the Navy, and then the best fighter pilots in all of NATO. 40 second Boyd never lost his bet, not once. That's because Boyd was not, in fact, the greatest fighter pilot of all time, he was much more than that. Men like Robin Olds were warriors, true leaders of men. John Boyd was a warrior poet. He seemed to prefer to be alone and most of the few people close to him also seemed to like it that way. He was also a profoundly deep thinker. That's not the primary trade associated with a fighter pilot type. He was much, much more than just a good stick. He would become the first fighter pilot to understand through physics and mathematical equations that he himself would write. Why one airplane was better than another? Through endless nights in his shabby house in a ghetto neighborhood, he would work out for every airplane in both the US and Soviet inventories, what its flight characteristics were, why it behaved that way, where it would be most and least effective when to turn into a fight or to run away and above all how, how to lose to it, how to beat it, and even how to build it. If the entire second half of the Cold War had run on an equation different than quality versus quantity, then spending time on things like aircraft design wouldn't be worth a closer look. But it did, so it is. On a battlefield where whoever owns the air wins the war, John Boyd and his underground Pentagon accolades called the fighter mafia, led the United States Air Force out of the suck and would eventually give the West control of the skies and with it the battlefield and then the war. You know it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and again and expecting a different result. I don't know about you, but there are many times when I feel like I'm following some kind of script that I don't want to have anything to do with. 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So visit betterhelp.com/saw. That's better h-e-l-p.com/sa-w and join the over 800. 100,000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. And there's a special offer for the Cold War listeners. You get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/sau. In the early 60s, an aerospace engineer named Harry Hilliker was working for General Dynamics maker of the brand new F-111, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Cuscutting All-Purpose Next Generation Fighter, which the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps would use to keep the Russian Bear at bay. It would be an air superiority fighter, a carrier-based fleet interceptor, a close support ground-attack aircraft, and a nuclear bomber. Designed by bureaucrats, when it first rolled out, it was kind of a wonder that the Department of Agriculture hadn't insisted on pesticide nozzles along the trailing edge of the wings so that it could also function as a crop duster. The F-111 had a crew of two, but unlike previous two-seat fighters where the pilot and weapons officer sat in tandem one in front of the other, the F-111 R-DVARC had them sitting aside by side. But the major innovation was the first use of the variable geometry wing, better known as the swing wing. They would extend out sideways for better lift at low speed and then tuck back into a sleek delta-shape when the F-111 got up to speed. It was big. It weighed 85,000 pounds. A decade later, when Boyd would get a chance to design his masterpiece, it would weigh one quarter of what the F-111 came in at. The F-111 was Harry Hilliker's baby. He had been the lead project engineer for General Dynamics. When the first F-111 arrived at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, for preliminary evaluation and testing out over the Gulf of Mexico, Hilliker seemed pretty proud of his team as they entered the officers' club at Eglin for the first time. But after a few moments, a bullet-headed, angry-looking man strode across the room, stood entirely too close to Hilliker for comfort and said, "My name is John Boyd and I'm a fighter pilot and I understand you work on the F-111. And what I want to know is why you guys built a goddamn 85,000 pound airplane and called it a fighter." It's a fighter bomber, replied Hilliker, who needless to say found himself slightly off-balance. He took a long puff on his cigar and started poking Hilliker in the chest, hammering words into the engineers if he were bucking rivets. Yeah? Well, the last time I looked in the F in front of the airplane, it was a fighter. That thing is a piece of shit. It's too big to be a fighter and with that goddamn little wing it's got, it must take two states to turn the thing around. Well, no doubt by now, Hilliker was trying to back away, but 42nd Boyd was on his six and he was determined to hose guns, guns, guns. I'll tell you something else said, boy. The pilot can't see behind and he can't see out the right window. He asked it to pin on his co-pilot to tell him what's out there. It's too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It's just not worth a good goddamn. Boyd pressed even closer. How much extra weight does that swing wing add to the airplane? 20%. The entire weight of that wing goes through that pivot pin and you hide it all in a big glove. You'll be getting fatigued and stress cracks in that f*cker before it's got even 500 hours on it and the amount of drag you've created is aerodynamic bulls. That pivot adds weight and degrades performance plus you can't swing the wing back fast enough in combat to make a difference. The low speed performance is lousy, the high speed performance is worse, and the f*ck thing just won't maneuver. Harry Hilliker, lead project engineer for the Pride of the Air Force, the shiny new F-111 looked at Boyd for a moment. And then he did one of the bravest things that anyone has ever done for this country. Harry Hilliker pulled out a chair and said, "Sit down, John." And within a few minutes, the two men had cleared a table at the officers club at Eglond Air Force Base. They started frantically scratching out notes on cocktail napkins, drag pullers, thrust to weight ratios, lift coefficients. To Hilliker's amazement, this was not just some loudmouth fighter-jock. Boyd was talking to him in mathematics he was speaking engineer-ish. To Boyd's amazement, Hilliker was not some puffed up company hack. He too wanted to build the ultimate fighter aircraft and knew full well that his F-111 was absolutely wrong for every single reason that Boyd had flung at him. Now all they had to do was convince the Pentagon, the Congress and the President that their brand new, long-awaited, gold-plated F-111 was in fact a piece of shit, and that if the West were to have any chance against huge numbers of better Soviet planes, they would have to start again from scratch. On a Thursday afternoon in the fall of 1964, Major Boyd got a call from a staff officer in the Pentagon. The general has heard of your briefing said the Colonel referring to the revolutionary energy maneuverability presentation that Boyd had been giving to anyone who would listen. He would like you to deliver the brief Monday at 0800 in his office at Langley. "Yes, sir," said the Major. The officer who wanted to hear the EM briefing was General Walter Campbell-Swaney Jr. And he was the top officer in the tactical air command. In military parlance, that meant that Swaney owned all of the fighters in the Air Force inventory. He had long before prepared a series of slides for his EM brief, but being Boyd, he was always tweaking him, adding some and removing others as his work on energy maneuverability progressed. He spent the weekend agonizing over which slides to include and which to discard when he was satisfied. He called one of his accolades and told him that he was coming with him to help with the brief. He flipped the charts and advanced the slides, and I'll give the brief explained Boyd. Now that accolade had been one of Boyd's best students at fighter weapons school back in Nevada. He was Captain Everett Raspberry. In two and a half years into the future, he would teach the rest of Robin Old's Wolfpack the counterintuitive opposite direction maneuver Boyd had taught him. By then it would be called the Raspberry Roll, and it would account for half of the MiG-21 kills on January 2nd, 1967 during Operation Bolo. Boyd and Raspberry hopped into a dual seat F-100F for the flight from England Air Force Base in Florida to Langley just outside of Washington. Now Boyd's EM brief would usually take from 4 to 6 hours, but just before entering the briefing room. Boyd was told that he'd been allocated 20 minutes in which to give the brief. That was it. To get 20 minutes of a four star general's time was an extravagance to allow a lowly major that much time was almost unheard of. The briefing room slowly filled with more brass than either Boyd or Raspberry had ever seen in one place. And at 8 o'clock sharp, the commander of the United States Air Force's tactical air command entered the room sat down and said, "You may begin the brief major, Boyd." Boyd began slowly, quietly. He explained that his energy maneuverability theory was simply a way to quantify a fighter aircraft's performance. His slides compared American fighters to Soviet ones. Air speed and altitude ranges where the American jets were superior, boyd to shown in blue. Where there was red, the Russian jets were better. Appoint the slides. This spoke with utter confidence. This was his life's obsession. He knew the material backwards and forwards. He'd been challenged on and defended every possible data set. And he was calm at a ease. General Sweeney on the other hand. We were progressively more fidgety. Every time a new slide came up, he would grimace even more. Each slide showed enormous swaths of red. And then at 8/20 precisely, Raspberry nodded to Boyd and Boyd said, "Thank you, General, unless you have any questions that will be all." Sweeney looked up like a man being pulled out of a nightmare. "Where do you think you're going?" he asked incredulously. Sir, your aid said we had 20 minutes replied, "Boyd, we've used up our time." Sweeney stared at him for a moment and then back at the data showing that the Russians, a bunch of vodka-swilling, commy peasants, had jets that were enormously better, in virtually every part of the flight envelope. Continue the briefs at Sweeney, we then turn to his aid and added, "Cancel my appointments for today." Boyd's brief continued all throughout the day. He was constantly challenged by staff officers, the career kernels and generals that had approved the lead sled and the smoking thunderhog and the flying edgel that were being torn to pieces by North Vietnamese aces, and which would become so much shredded aluminum and flying hamburger if and when they encountered the veterans of the red air force. That boyd had data, reams and reams of the Air Force's own computer printouts to back up every claim he made. By late afternoon, General Walter Campbell, Sweeney Jr. had seen enough for one day. He ordered Boyd to return the following morning at 8 a.m. in order to continue the brief, but just as Boyd was preparing to pack up his slide projector, Sweeney mentioned a boyd that "know where" in the brief were there any slides regarding the F-111. Did Boyd been able to run the data on the Air Force's proud new warbird? Boyd had been waiting for just this moment. He advanced the projector several places and both men looked up at the screen at the EM diagram for the General Dynamics F-111. Boyd didn't say a word, he didn't have to. The F-11 data was listed next to every jet in the Soviet inventory. The slide was solid red everywhere, against everything. No matter the altitude, no matter the airspeed, no matter what model of Russian airplane it went up against, the F-111 would lose and lose badly. If this two-seat, swing-wing, overweight, and over-engineered flying edgel ran into an enemy fighter, it was going to be shot down. Unlike many, many other highly decorated officers, Walter Sweeney had the moral courage to see what was actually there, not what he wanted to be there. Major said, "Come, we based on your extensive research. Do you have any recommendations regarding this aircraft?" Well, General replied 42nd Boyd, "If it were up to me, I'd pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the gump thing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed taxi." And with that, in the space of what would become the single most important briefing in US military history, John Boyd and his fighter Mafia had won the Cold War. Ever since Korea, the Air Force had procured aircraft based on point design. How fast, how high, how far? The result was fast, high-flying, long-range aircraft aircraft that couldn't turn or accelerate or slow down nearly as quickly as their Russian counterparts, and were therefore useless in combat. Boyd's energy maneuverability theory had put into irrefutable, mathematically flawless data, what had been up to that point nothing more than a tinkling sensation in the seat of the Pants of a fighter pilot. Bigger, faster, higher, had nothing to do with it, nothing. Through long, unglamorous, and thankless years of teaching himself physics, and math, and engineering, Boyd had painstakingly shown that the only thing that mattered in air-to-air combat was the ability of a fighter aircraft to rapidly change its energy state. If 300 knots was the best turning speed for an adversary, and the American Jets best turn rate was 450 knots, then all that really mattered was how quickly could an American Jet take the fight to 450 knots and keep it there. One day soon, Boyd would tell his defense contractors, "The Air Force will tell you that we want to have a sustained 5G capability up to 35,000 feet." Or, if we're doing.9 Mach at 10,000 feet, we want enough excess power to climb at 500 feet per second. Now in the years to come, this design strategy would pay fantastic dividends, but John Boyd's genius and Walt Sweeney's intellectual and moral courage began paying dividends right away. Using Boyd's EM slides, frontline fighter pilots in Vietnam could now see the great swath of red where the MIG was a better airplane, but also. The narrow blue bands were aircraft like the F for phantom excels. From that point on, they would try to get the fight into those thin envelopes of air speeds and altitudes where the Americans had an advantage or at least parody. If they could not do that, then they would use their superior straight line speed and just bug out. Immediately, the miserable US air-to-air kill rate, which had been about 12 to 1, with the nimble F-86 in the skies of Korea, went from 2 to 1, some said it had gotten as low as 1 to 1, in Vietnam, to 7 to 1, in a matter of a few months. Boyd couldn't contain himself when word came back that his friend and student, Everett Raspberry, had given up trying to outturn a pack of lightweight nimble MIG 17s in the skies over Vietnam. Putting into practice what he'd seen so many times on Boyd's EM slides, Raspberry broke out of the turn, Firewall the throttle and took the huge F-4 smoking thunder hog right down to the deck at 200 feet above the ground that's a 20-story building, and severely supersonic at nearly 1,000 miles an hour. Raspberry bore sighted a notoriously unreliable AIM-7 sparrow and sent it up the tailpipe of the slightly higher North Vietnamese jet in what remains the lowest level missile kill in aviation history. Boyd could not have been more proud if he'd shot down the jet himself, which in a sense he did. If that MIG was only a 300 feet, Rasmus had been down in the weeds when he launched said Boyd. God damn F-4 is a Navy airplane, it's not a fighter. They give a f*** for airplanes and we win anyway. The Navy's heavy, underpowered swing wing F-14 Tomcat was already under construction. The first US fighter jet to be a product of Boyd's fighter mafia input was the F-15 Eagle. It was still too heavy for Boyd's taste, but the F-15 had a phenomenal thrust-to-weight ratio. It was the first production aircraft that could accelerate while pointing straight up. And it had the big wing that Boyd had insisted on the entire top of the fuselage is weighing a lot of wing. Enough wing to generate the lift necessary to pull the Eagle through incredibly tight turns. In fact, the F-15 has so much reserve lift that when an Israeli F-15 suffered an air-to-air collision, the pilot was able to nurse it back to base only to exit the aircraft and discover that the entire right wing, all of it, had been torn away at the route. The F-15 had come home, not only one wing. And what about the quality versus quantity equation? Could this new jet outfight the MIGs and Sukhoys that the Russians would throw against it in the remaining two decades of the Cold War? Well, as I write this, the F-15 has flown against virtually every fighter aircraft in the world. And in the year since the first flight of an F-15A on July 27, 1972, the F-15 has a record of 108 aerial victories against zero defeats. Nearly 50 years old now, the jet the John Boyd completely redesigned has literally never been beaten not once. But Boyd's dream fighter, the light agile rapier that he and Harry Hilliker had sketched out on napkins in the officers' club at Eggland Air Force Base, has been even more successful. Manufactured by the same company General Dynamics that had produced the sluggish and obese F-111, John Boyd's masterpiece would be the F-16. Officially known as the Fighting Falcon, it's universally known to its pilots as the Viper. It was the first fighter in the world to feature fly by wire, where stick inputs are sent to a flight computer, which then optimally moves the control surfaces. It was originally nicknamed the Electric Jet. This revolutionary control system did have its teething problems, however, it took a while for the nickname given to the F-16 and the early days of test flying to eventually fade for memory. Due to its tendency to depart controlled flight and head straight for the dirt, the early F-16 pilots had called it the "Londart". Continually upgraded like its older brother, the F-15. The F-16 is in service in 25 nations. Since they continue to be built in large numbers, it's hard to get an accurate total and even if you did, it would be obsolete in a few weeks. But as of June 2018, 4,604 F-16 fighting Falcons have been built. One of Boyd's accolades, Pierre Spray, took Boyd's ideas and was responsible for the astonishing A-10 Warthog, the world's best ground attack aircraft, which first flew a few months before the F-15 and is also approaching its first half-century of utter dominance. To win the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies needed aircraft of such quality that it could outfight large numbers of anything the Soviets could throw against it. John Boyd gave the West the philosophical and engineering foundation to build the matchless 108-0 F-15 Eagle, and then just for good measure added another astonishingly capable light and inexpensive fighter, the F-16, which would be so versatile and so relatively cheap to produce that it would win in the quality category and then go on to win in the quantity one as well. Boyd's inexpensive light weight rapier, the F-16 Viper, is the most common, fixed-wing military aircraft in the world. As Lenin himself once said, "Quantity has a quality all its own." Nothing, the Soviets would develop for the remainder of the Cold War could sweep these aircraft from the skies and without control of the skies, the ground battle was as good as lost, and so it was never fought. The single most important military figure of the Cold War died of prostate cancer on March 9, 1997, he was 70 years old. He died in obscurity and near poverty, unknown to all but a steadily shrinking number of associates. In his final days, he would weep from despair not about his own imminent ending, but rather surrounded by his books, afraid that his name and all of his work would just disappear into the shadows of history. He was, for once, only half-right. He does lie largely unremembered and unknown at Section 60, Brave Number 3660, in Arlington National Cemetery. But for a half century now, the booming thunder and the tearing canvass sound up air being ripped apart by the wings of the airplanes he had imagined and then created have split the skies over Arlington in the missing manformation whenever a fellow American fighter pilot flies west for the final time. Now back in the jungles of Southeast Asia, signs of liberation from the fossilized military doctrine, strategy, and tactics that marked the first half of the war were beginning to appear. Robin Olds in Operation Bolo had shown what the Air Force was capable of when led by men of vision, skill, and daring. Similar revolutions in the American way of war were slowly taking root on the ground as well. Throughout the Vietnam War, both the NVA and the Viet Cong had been elusive enemies, experts in concealment and camouflage. American patrols following doctrine laid down in Europe and Korea would come through the jungle like a herd of elephants, American tactics depended on the concentration of firepower, stealth and concealment were commy tactics. But toward the end of 1966, North Vietnamese forces had something new to worry about. American helicopter assaults high altitude B-52 arc light strikes and the sudden appearance of low-level American fighter bombers laying down lines of liquid fire had always been deadly, but now something completely different was beginning to make its presence felt. At first, the NBA and VC officers thought that the reports coming in were the product of over-active imaginations on the part of overwrought centuries. Communist troops began to whisper about a deadly demon they had named Long Trang, only a few had ever caught a glimpse of him, but when their comrades suddenly started to drop dead one by one, the dreaded name Long Trang became repeated more and more frequently. Those few who had caught a glimpse of him or it, and managed to survive, spoke of shadows in the thick undergrowth than a quick flash of snowy white, the Long Trang or white feather, tucked into the demon's headband. Long Trang was no myth, the white feather was terrifyingly real. He'd been born in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 20th, 1942, and he learned how to hunt as a young boy largely to help feed his dirt poor family. He would imagine himself as a US Marine silently gliding through the backwoods of Arkansas, hunting the Japanese out in the Pacific. His name was Carlos Norman Hathcock Jr, and his exploits as a marine sniper in Vietnam would change forever the way the US military came to view what would eventually be known as special forces. Hathcock's career was far too remarkable to be able to do it justice here officially. He ended his career with 93 confirmed kills, but these were only the ones that could be independently verified. Given the solitary nature of white feather's style of combat far behind enemy lines, independent confirmation was a rare luxury. Hathcock himself never kept score, but he did estimate his actual toll on enemy forces fell somewhere between three and four hundred. That'd be three to four hundred people, felled not by artillery or machine guns or napalm, but rather through a single trigger pull of a bolt action rifle. His supernatural patience and ability to focus was legendary. Hathcock called it "being inside the bubble," a state that he had described as "utter absolute concentration." His most famous example of this occurred just a few days before his tour of duty was to end. Hathcock was offered a dangerous mission when it could not be disclosed to him unless he accepted it, which needless to say, he did instantly. His objective was to kill a particularly high-level NVA general and he would have to do it far behind enemy lines at the general's own headquarters. Aware of the looming threat of long-trang, the North Vietnamese had cut down all the vegetation out to 1,500 yards in all directions. Hathcock had vast experience of moving silently through the thick jungle, but in order to achieve this mission, he would have to cross almost a mile of open ground and do it undetected. A marine patrol escorted him to the edge of the clearing, where Hathcock covered every inch of exposed skin with camouflage paint adding more yellow than usual to help cover him in the dead grass surrounding the compound. And for this one mission, just this one, he removed the white feather, he kept in his headband for good luck. He stuffed his pants, jersey, and cover with as much vegetation as they would hold, and then shortly afternoon he began to move. Move wasn't really the word for it. He simply dragged himself forward virtually imperceptibly. The first day he spent inching forward on his side because it would leave a narrower trail out of the thicked undergrowth. By the time darkness fell, he had moved a grand total of 30 feet. Shortly after dark and enemy patrol approached, Hathcock was already so covered and sweat he was afraid that they would smell him, but the North Vietnamese were certain that the threat would come from the tree line, and with flashlights trained ahead of them, the patrol passed him just a few feet away. He continued to crawl through the night. Real sleep was a luxury he couldn't afford, but over the years, Hathcock had trained himself to grab small, 10 minute catnaps with his eyes wide open. By morning, he was hungry and tired. His entire body covered in biting ants. He wondered to himself just how many ant bites a man could take before it killed him. He crawled past the outer line of gun emplacements. He could easily hear men laughing and the smell of breakfast cooking made him even hungrier. But long-trang stayed in the bubble and inched onward. By the end of the second day, he had advanced 500 yards that's just five football fields. He crawled through the second night. Dawn on the third day came, couriers were constantly coming and going in and out of the headquarters building up ahead. Now Hathcock's greatest worry was that he had urinated on himself so many times that the centuries would be sure to detect him by the stink. Patrols continued to be sent out to the tree lines, his face pressed to the dirt. He could hear the crunch of footsteps and the dry grass just a few feet away. His worst moment came when he found himself face to face with a deadly bamboo viper. Hathcock and the snakes stared at each other until finally the snake gave up and slithered away. He finally reached his best range which was 1,000 yards. But white feather spent several more hours inching another 200 yards closer just to be sure. Then finally a white sedan appeared. The NVA general emerged but was immediately surrounded by his aides. Hathcock was deep, deep in the bubble now. His breathing was slow and even, his eyes watching the smoke of a nearby cooking fire to gauge the wind. Hot air was rising from the ground. He'd have to factor that in as well. He kept his crosshairs on his target, who was still surrounded by staff officers and then for a moment he wasn't. Hathcock pulled to trigger. It took Hathcock 5 hours on the way out to cover the same ground that had taken him 3 days to cross on the way in. As soon as he'd fired, patrols raced out to the tree line far beyond him. The idea that the sniper had been so deep inside the perimeter in broad daylight was apparently too incredible to have entered the enemy's minds. But Hathcock had seen the NVA general go down, seen him lying on the ground with blood gushing from his chest right over the heart. Long-trang had disappeared without a trace. Carlos Hathcock's exploits were so spectacular that even the Pentagon had to notice. The solo mission to kill the NVA general had been an exception, Hathcock deeply believed in the concept of sniper teams. His favorite partner was Corporal Johnny Burke. Working together, they had spotted an entire NVA company heading south to engage their fellow marines. Hathcock and Burke opened fire, forcing the entire enemy company to take shelter behind an earth berm. For the next five days, the Marine sniper team picked off the North Vietnamese usually one at a time as they poked their head above the earthworks to see if Long-trang was still there. Turns out he was. When they finally decided to disengage, Hathcock and Burke had wiped out an entire company of NVA troops, one enemy soldier had survived. The North Vietnamese would often put bounties on key American and South Vietnamese officers and politicians. They usually ranged from anywhere from about $10 all the way up to $2,000 for top American generals. But by the time White feathered hit his stride, the personal bounty on him was a mind-blowing $30,000. Entire teams of enemy snipers hunted him, he and Burke killed them all. And when the regular marines heard that enemy sniper squads were in the area, they would all put White feathers in their headbands to help protect the man who did so much to protect them. Hathcock's combat career came to an end when his armored personnel carrier hit an anti-tank mine on September 16, 1969. He managed to pull seven marines from the burning vehicle, sustaining severe burns to his face and hands. After returning to active duty, he helped establish the Marine Corps Scout sniper school. His knowledge, but more importantly, his example led the ossified Doctrineur Pentagon of the 1960s to re-examine everything they had taken for granted at the beginning of the war. Hathcock, like Boyd, was liberating the US military from themselves. These fundamental changes would pay enormous dividends a decade later as the Cold War entered its final and perhaps most dangerous phase, but it would not come in time to save the situation in Vietnam. I want to talk to you for a minute about home security. Now I know what you're thinking. After six weeks of lockdown, you just assume see the place burned to the ground, but that will change and soon. 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There had been hope. On June 10, 1968, Lyndon Johnson removed the lackluster William Westmoreland and his war of attrition. His replacement was Craten Abrams, a soldier's soldier, in what looked like to be a rerun of Matt Ridgeway's electrifying elevation to command of UN forces in Korea back in April of 1951. Both Ridgeway and Abrams had fought with great distinction during the Battle of the Bulge and both of them were a refreshing change from the stiff formality of their predecessors, Douglas MacArthur in Korea, and of course Westmoreland in Vietnam. Abrams was a tanker, and while he maintained a good deal of the attrition strategy he had inherited from Westmoreland in his heart, he wanted to turn Vietnam into a war of mobility. Where Westmoreland had depended on search and destroy missions to rent up the enemy body count, the catastrophic losses suffered by the North Vietnamese Army and especially the Viet Cong during the Tate Offensive meant that the war was turning more conventional, more direct contact between US forces and the regulars of the NVS. And less of the hit and run style of warfare that had been the signature of the Viet Cong. And he got in there sooner, things might have been very different, but after Tate it was just plain too late. Johnson had lost the support of the heart of the American people. He had lost the support of his Democratic Party as well, split four ways as the election year of 1968 progressed. Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey still had a strong ground game in terms of union support, but anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy had leapt out of the primary gate with a surprisingly strong showing a new Hampshire. Traditional Democratic Party stalwarts like Catholics, Hispanics, and Blacks were breaking heavily towards Bobby Kennedy. And significant numbers of Southern Democrats, the people that had been Johnson's most solid demographic, were so incensed at Johnson's liberal civil rights record that they jumped ship completely to join George Wallace and his American Independence Party. But when it was all said and done, the agony of Vietnam had taken the fight out of landslide-landed. Years of ever-increasing street protests chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" were never far from his mind. Johnson himself didn't think he would survive another term. But no one was prepared for what Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America, had to say as he concluded the speech he gave on March 31, 1968. "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." Robert Kennedy had just scored a huge primary win in California, but was assassinated while addressing his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, just a few hours after the polls closed. At the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, but lost to Republican Richard Nixon in the general election that November. Nixon had spent his political career as an anti-communist hawk, he could not simply walk away from Vietnam and hand the North Vietnamese communist the victory. Nixon believed that the only viable path out of Vietnam was through a policy of Vietnamization. US forces would begin a massive drawdown, handing more and more of the military burden to the arven, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. He retained Abrams as US commander, Crate and Abrams got half a chance to turn the war from attrition to maneuver, but only half of one. US forces numbered 543,000 when Nixon took office in 1969 by June of 1972, Vietnamization had reduced that to a mere 49,000, less than a tenth of what Abrams had started with. He launched a plan to aggressively pursue the NVA all their way to their bases and supply lines in Cambodia with the goal of rolling up the communist forces all the way back to Hanuy. But the arven forces, poorly trained and badly demoralized, were simply not up to the job. Many have wondered what the outcome of the Vietnam War might have been had Crate and Abrams launched as offensive with US forces just two or three years earlier. There were peace negotiations, but they'd been dragging on for years with Hanuy stalling and dragging its feet, hoping to simply outweigh the Americans. On Tuesday, November 7, 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected in a blowout, defeating Democrat George McGovern with a tallie of 520 electoral votes to the Democrat 17. It was the biggest win in Republican Party history, but it was a record that wasn't going to stand for very long. With the election win safely in his pocket, Nixon decided to try something that had not been tried in the entire 10-year history of the American presence in Vietnam. Unlike Operation Rolling Thunder, Operation Linebacker, which were aimed at interdicting enemy forces in the field, on December 18, 1972, the United States launched Linebacker 2, the full-scale bombing of the North Vietnamese capital of Hanuy and its only major seaport Haifong. For the first time during the entire Vietnam conflict, America decided to fight the war as if it meant it. Over the course of 11 days, 741 B-52 sorries were flown, dropping 15,000 tons of ordnance on 18 industrial and 14 military targets in North Vietnam. Navy Commander James Stockdale had flown one of the four US Navy F-8 crusaders against North Vietnamese torpedo boats during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Shutdown in September of 1965, he was the senior naval officer at the infamous Prisoner of War camp in Hanuy, known as the Hanuy Hilton. Stockdale led the resistance to the brutal Vietnamese interrogations and was routinely beaten and tortured. When he realized that he was to be paraded in front of North Vietnamese cameras for propaganda purposes, Stockdale slid his own scump with a razor blade in order to disfigure himself to discredit any photography. When the Communist covered his head with a hat, Stockdale beat himself in the face with a stool until his face was swollen beyond recognition. After eight years of torture, mockery, beatings, cruelty and humiliation at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, Stockdale recalls the change that came over his guards immediately after the linebacker two bombings came to an end. Over night, these same guards became polite, respectful, obsequious even. They immediately ceased the beatings and started treating the Americans with deference and respect. President Richard Nixon called a halt to offensive operations against North Vietnam on January 15, 1973. Eight days later, Hanuy agreed to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords and four days after that. The agreement was signed by both parties and the American War in Vietnam was over. Things would get worse before they got better, but the stage was set for the entrance of the three individuals who would together free half the world. He had been a lifeguard and a cheerleader, two character traits that would never leave him. Starting in age 15, over the course of seven summers at Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois, the friendly, muscular kid in the one-piece swimsuit had saved the lives of 77 people. Nearly 40 years later, in the full suit, tie, cufflinks shirt and expensive shoes appropriate for his role as governor of the state of California. He was hosting an event near the large swimming pool on the grounds of the governor's mansion. Surrounded by press and politicians, favor seekers and social climbers, he shook hands cheerfully and flashed the toothy grin that people had talked about even back in his days at Dixon. He was a very, very busy man but somehow and likely without even being aware of it. Despite the buzz surrounding him, he managed to always keep an eye on the water. Out beyond the edge of the party, a sunny, faced, bucktooth-young African-American girl named Alicia Berry leaned forward to pull a raft towards the edge of the pool, thinking it might give her a chance to enjoy the water even though she couldn't swim. But she lost her balance, pitched forward and sank straight to the bottom. Dutch didn't see her fall in but somehow, in the middle of all of this back-slaping conversation, the governor of California knew that he was a head short, someone was missing. Walking and then trotting to the edge of the pool, he looked down and saw Alicia struggling near the bottom and without a moment's hesitation, he dove straight into the water, suit, tie, watch, shoes and all, and returned with Alicia in his arms, bringing his lifelong total to 78. The crowd found all over him, of course, commending him on his quick thinking and bravery, but Ronald Dutch Reagan brushed this off as he always did, anyone could have done it, he said. After this liberator had won the Cold War, a lot of people said that anyone could have done it, but the bottom line is. No one else did. On March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler's Vermacht, crossed into Austria without protest, as a matter of fact, crowds of cheering Austrians through flowers in the path of the Germans. This was the honest-less, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany needless to say. Not every Austrian greeted this news with cheers and flowers. Shortly thereafter, the Germans imposed the The infamous Nuremberg laws on the Austrian Jews stripping them of their citizenship and other legal protections. Things got much worse during the night of November 9th when mobs attacked Jews throughout Germany and Austria, smashing so many shop windows that the orgy of intimidation became known as "crystal knock", meaning "the night of broken glass". All but one of Vienna's 42 synagogues were burned to the ground. Eight thousand Jews in Vienna were placed under arrest and five thousand were immediately sent to the concentration camp at Dockho. Edith Mulebauer was 17 years old at the time. She was stylish, sophisticated, glamorous, and Jewish. She was scared. Her family was scared. In desperation, Edith sent a letter to a pen pal of hers, a girl named Muriel Roberts living in England. She asked if she could possibly come and stay with her for a while. The Roberts family agreed, but neither family had the money needed for the trip, so Muriel enlisted the help of her 13-year-old sister Margaret and together, they saved what little pocket money they had and canvassed the neighborhood for donations. After a great deal of effort, the two English girls had managed to raise enough money for a one-way trip from Vienna to their home in Grantham, England. Edith was shocked by her new home. The Roberts family had not a single one of what were then called "modcons" that would be modern conveniences. They didn't even have a flush toilet. Edith was not the only one shocked at the encounter, though. Muriel's little sister was horrified to hear the stories of repression and humiliation that Edith had experienced in Vienna under the Nazis. But somehow, the Roberts family and Edith Mulebauer did what the British have always managed to do. They set a stiff upper lip and they carried on. And many, many years after the war was over. A reporter managed to find Edith Mulebauer who was then living in Brazil. Virtually every one of her friends and family that had remained in Vienna had been murdered in the extermination camps. If Muriel had said, "I'm sorry, my father says no, then I would have stayed in Vienna and they would have killed me," whispered Edith. Now of course this was just one of tens of millions of stories to come out of the Second World War. A reporter had gone to the trouble to find Edith Mulebauer 50 years. After her life had been saved by two English girls she had never met before being welcomed into their home. Muriel had gone on to live a quiet life. She married a man who had originally dated her younger sister. She became physical therapist and died in December of 2004. Her younger sister would attend Hunting Tower Road Primary School, where she would learn to play the piano, recite poetry, spend time swimming and playing field hockey. She became head girl in 1942. She would go on to attend Oxford University where she would specialize in X-ray crystallography and graduate with a degree in chemistry. She had been a quiet, serious student keeping mostly to herself. She read Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom which described how economic intervention on the part of the government could become a toehold for a totalitarian state. Now this fascinated her as much as Edith Mulebauer's first hand accounts of Nazi oppression had done. She joined the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. When a post-war Labour Party leader referred to conservatives as "lower than vermin" a few years later, she immediately helped form the vermin club, an ad hoc collection of conservative torres each proudly wearing chrome badges featuring a rat with the word vermin underneath. Someone who brought in ten new members was elevated to "viral vermin" status, those that brought in 25 or more, gloryed in the title of "very viral vermin." Young Miss Roberts rapidly rose through the ranks to become "chief rat." That pugilistic, damn the torpedoes attitude never left her. In 1980, just one year after becoming the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, her privatization campaign and all-out war with the trade unions that had held Britain in the state of perpetual labour strikes since the end of World War II had caused her labour opponents to repeatedly call for her to make a "you turn." At the 1980 Conservative Party Congress, Margaret, accompanied by her husband of 29 years Dennis Thatcher, who had worked for years to put Margaret through legal school, addressed the "you turn" issue the way she'd addressed everything else. Head on. So those waiting with baited breaths for that favourite media catchphrase "the you turn," I have only one thing to say, "you turn if you want to." The ladies not are turning. No, no she was not. It had been a life filled with hardship and suffering and sorrow and woe. The boy, youngest of three children, never knew his older sister who had died before he was born. When he was eight years old, his mother Emilia died of heart and kidney failure. She'd been a schoolteacher. He was a sturdy, athletic kid. He played soccer relentlessly, becoming a formidable goalkeeper, protecting and defending came naturally to him and these attributes would never leave him. He'd been raised to Catholic and football matches between Jews and Catholics were common. Jews made up about a third of his classmates and Jewish players were often in short supply relative to the Catholic majority. On such occasions, he was always the first to volunteer to play on the Jewish team. With his father striving to support and also tend to the family, he came to worship his older brother Edmund and the two grew very close. 13 years older, Edmund had become a doctor and when the dreaded scarlet fever returned to his village, Edmund dashed into the heart of the epidemic to do what he could. When word came back that Edmund had died of scarlet fever, the boy felt as if he'd been hit by a truck and that's a feeling he would get to know very well in later years. In 1938, he and his father had moved to Krakow where he enrolled at Jagalonian University. He had an affinity for languages as a student of philology. He would learn to speak Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, English, Ukrainian, Serbo, Croatian, Slovak and even Esperanto in addition to his native Polish. The ability to speak 12 languages would serve him very well in later years working as a voluntary librarian at the university. He was nevertheless required to undergo compulsory military training. He complied but he refused to fire a weapon. In 1940, not long after the Nazis had invaded and ravaged his native Poland, he was struck by a tram suffering a fractured skull. In order to avoid deportation of Germany, he took a job splitting rocks in a limestone quarry. There's a photo of him with the rest of his work crew taken during a momentary break. He's sitting on a rock apart from the others with his broad chest wide shoulders and impressive biceps, his crude shovel resting against his leg and even in the blurry photo, the impatience of the uniformed officer in the high-peak cap is unmistakable. While working in the quarry, he was struck again by a truck, the primitive medical care given to workers and Nazi occupied Poland meant that he would forever walk with one shoulder higher than the other and with a pronounced stoop. His father, who had been an officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack the following year. Forty years later, he would say, "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death. At 20, I had already lost all the people I loved." His father's death pushed him into a decision he'd been long contemplating. In October of 1942, he simply knocked on the door of bishops, palace, and crack out and asked to be allowed to study for the priesthood, which, given the barbarity that the Nazis put into suppressing the Catholic Church, was an act of genuine heroism. He became active in the clandestine underground seminary run by Adam Stefan Archbishop of Krakow. In early 1944, he was hit by a truck for the third time, resulting in another severe concussion and further injury to his already damaged shoulder. He took his survival from three head-on encounters with the truck to be a confirmation of his calling. On August 6, 1944, Nazi troops entered Krakow to brutally suppress an uprising inspired by the resistance in Warsaw. The young priest, hidden the basement of his uncle's house as German troops searched a few feet above his head when he emerged shortly thereafter. He found that the Germans had taken 8,000 men and boys, and none of them were ever seen again. When the retreating German army finally left the city on January 17, 1945, he and his fellow students reclaimed the ruin seminary and began by using picks and shovels to remove the piles of frozen human excrement. Like the young English girl from Grantham, he too would save the life of a young Jewish girl also named Edith. Having escaped from a Nazi labor camp, Edith Zyra had collapsed on a train platform. The young seminary student lifted her into his arms, carried her aboard the train, and stayed with this utter stranger for the duration of her trip to Krakow. She was not the only Jew whose life had been saved by this young Catholic priest during the Nazi occupation. A young Jewish child had been sent to a Catholic family in order to escape the death camps at Troublinka and Soba Bor. Both of the children's parents were murdered in the gas chambers, but when the adopted parents took the infinite. to the priest to have him baptized in the Catholic faith. The young priest then known simply as father Carol Voityua, who would eventually become Pope John Paul II, simply refused to do it. He said the child should be raised in the Jewish faith of its parents and saw to it that the infant was safely evacuated to be raised by Jewish relatives living in the United States. Shortly after his death, the state of Israel would bestow upon him the title of righteous among the nations. Like the lifeguard from Dixon, Illinois, he would know how it felt to be struck by an assassin's bullet and like him, he would endure it and the long recovery with grace and humor. And like the chief rat of the vermin club, he would stand like a granite cliff against what appeared to be the inevitable eternal cruelty of communism. These three, the lifeguard, the chemist and the goalkeeper, would do what had seemed impossible for two entire generations. They would not launch a military attack on the Soviet Union, but a moral one. They would endure the howls and insults of their own people and somehow resist the atomic horror that had embraced and imprisoned the entire planet. In the end, it would not be nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, fleets of bombers and tank divisions that would end World War III. It would instead be these three voices, three champions of moral clarity, toughness and compassion that would save the world from decades of nuclear terror. The Cold War, what we saw is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Coromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production, copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020.