C-130 did safely land and then take off again with evacuees. Part of its success was due to smoke from Buch- er’s still-burning wreckage partially obscuring this second Hercules from enemy fire. Te third C-130 to arrive that
day was Lt. Col. John Delmore’s; to say it had a lot of trouble getting down would be a grave understate- ment. Flight mechanic Tech Sgt. John McCall remembered the attempted landing, stating, “Bullets from ground fire were hitting our plane, and they sounded like sledgehammers. Smoke was curling through the cockpit. Te bullet holes that were appearing [in the plane] looked like we were being opened by a can-opener.” With its hydraulics shot away, Delmore’s Her- cules slammed into the runway. All five crewmen survived but were now out in the open on the airstrip not knowing which way to run for cover— all the while being targeting by the enemy. Tankfully, U.S. ground forces managed to provide enough direc- tion by waving, and enough covering fire to get the five survivors safely off the runway. Towards late afternoon, some-
how three more C-130s landed safely despite the remnants of two burning aircraft on or near the runway as well as the tremendous volume of enemy fire from the bush-covered hills above the landing strip. Tese three Hercu- les planes, which came in after 4 p.m., provided the bulk of the seats that got more than 600 military and civilian personnel out of Kham Duc. While doing so was quite an achievement in these terrible conditions, three Air Force combat controllers—Maj. John Gallagher, Tech Sgt. Mort Freedman, and Sgt. Jim Lundie—still remained behind on the ground. Each had an M-16 assault rifle to
defend their position in a ditch near the runway. However, they knew they couldn’t last there for long: In addi- tion to drastically outnumbering the three controllers, the enemy troops
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had recently breached the airstrip’s perimeter fences and were advancing on their position. At the same time that evening,
Lt. Col. Joe M. Jackson and his crew were en route to Kham Duc aboard a C-123 Provider to attempt to extract these USAF combat controllers. Jack- son’s Provider was actually the second C-123 into Kham Duc that evening; an earlier C-123 had landed, but its crew was unable to locate the three men stranded on the ground and was forced to take off again. Jackson, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross as a fighter pilot dur- ing the Korean War, had his wits and considerable skill with him that night as he successfully landed the aircraft amid enemy fire. Firing from the hip, the combat controllers ran towards the aircraft. After all three scrambled
Loadmaster Sgt. Alan Hawson, stripped down to just his undershirt, helps Vietnamese civilians exit a C-130 at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, in 1970. Many civilians also were evacuated from Kham Duc during the 1968 operation. (Sgt. William Diebold photo)
AMM SPOTLIGHT
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