Art Cornelius USAF, F-100D, 1965
{ Date Of Hire By Western Airlines: 10/7/1968 }
Delta closed Western’s San Francisco pilot base about 2½ years after the merger, in October 1989, and I began to commute to Los Angeles as a B-727 First Officer. One of the first Captains I flew with was Art Cornelius. The coincidences that have come up in these stories are legend, but the connection with Art is truly amazing. It so happened that I had just started reading the book The Ravens by Christopher Robbins that month. Unknown to me, Art had been a Raven FAC in Laos and is prominently mentioned in the book. As I read further I saw a poem that Art had written to pay tribute to his friend and fellow Raven, Sam Deichelman, who was killed in Laos. The poem is found on page 361 and is read at the annual reunion banquet for the Ravens. It is described as follows in the book: “…it has become a ritual to read it in memory of the Ravens who never returned. The poem was written by Art Cornelius after the death of his friend Sam Deichelman. Unashamedly emotional and written immediately after the loss, the knowledge that it is not the work of a poet but the heartfelt tribute of a warrior to a fallen comrade gives its words a poignant authenticity.”
The second coincidence is that Steve Deichelman, Sam’s younger brother, was a classmate of mine in Air Force pilot training, Class 68E at Williams AFB, Arizona. Steve was killed in a mid-air collision in 1971, flying the A-37, and I remember him well because his father was a retired Major General and a veteran of WWII and Korea. To lose two sons in the Vietnam War must have been a terrible blow to a father who had survived two wars.
Art, Raven 48, inscribed and signed my copy of The Ravens and agreed to write a story about his experience in Laos for the first volume, which is Chapter 23 in Vietnam to Western Airlines. Full of surprises, when I went to visit Art after the first book had been released I saw F-100 photos and memorabilia in his office at home. I learned that he had a first tour flying the F-100 in 1965. Over the last few years I have urged Art to write a second story about that tour and he finally agreed. This story is non-stop combat, with Art’s explanation of the types of ordnance used, delivery methods, and mission types. The stories don’t get any better than this.
Meet Art Cornelius, a fighter pilot and a warrior.
I was born 21 April 1939 in San Diego. After I graduated from Helix High School I attended UCLA where I lettered in wrestling, but left college to enlist in the Air Force Aviation Cadet program. I was commissioned and earned my wings in September 1960 and was assigned to fly the F-100. After completing the F-100 Advanced Gunnery training course in 1961 I was based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK for three years.
In 1964 when I returned from a three-year assignment to the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing at Lakenheath, I was assigned to a TAC (Tactical Air Command) rotational squadron at Cannon AFB, New Mexico.
The mission of the “rote” squadrons was to deploy to an overseas location to sit alert, usually involving nuclear delivery but sometimes conventional air-to-ground, air defense or air superiority. These rotations were nominally six months in duration but every one I was involved with lasted longer. The first thing my new squadron commander asked me when I reported was, “When can you go to jump school?” At the time, every fighter squadron in TAC was expected to have at least two jump-qualified FACs (Forward Air Controllers) imbedded among the pilots so that if the squadron was assigned to support an airborne army unit, one of the pilots could jump with them to control air strikes. I went to Fort Benning along with two other newly assigned pilots to attend jump school. When we returned to the squadron we joined about eight other jump-qualified pilots in the unit. We had not, however, been to Air Ground Operations School (AGOS) so we three were not qualified FACs.
The squadron departed in March 1965 for a three-month rotation to Misawa Air Base, Japan, with further deployment forward to Kunsan Air Base, Korea, where we sat 15-minute alert in the nuclear strike mission. While we were there, the North Koreans attacked an RB-47 flying over international waters off the east coast of North Korea. The next day we deployed most of the remainder of the squadron from Misawa to Kunsan to provide air cover for subsequent reconnaissance flights of North Korea. At the time the conflict in Vietnam was expanding and TAC was in flux, trying to make the Air Force presence in Vietnam transition from three-month temporary duty (TDY) to 12-month permanent change of station (PCS) assignments. Consequently we were extended by about a month-and-a-half.
When we returned to Cannon we expected the usual six-month break in rotations in order to fulfill training requirements at the home base. We were assigned a new squadron commander and settled in for the break, which was not to be. The Army was deploying thousands of troops to Vietnam and the Air Force needed to provide Forward Air Controllers to support them. The pilots in my squadron had just returned from an overseas deployment and so expected to be, for the most part, exempt from the 6-month TDY FAC assignments that were coming down. Unfortunately, roughly a dozen of them were tagged with those assignments, and if I had been a qualified FAC I would have been among them. Since I wasn’t qualified, I was sent directly to AGOS. I was certain that when I returned I would be going directly to a FAC assignment in Vietnam.
Fortunately, when I returned from AGOS, the immediate demand for FACs had been filled. This was done by disbanding one of the two fighter wings at Cannon and sending their pilots to Luke AFB to be instructors at the TAC Fighter Gunnery School. The instructors they were replacing at Luke were virtually all sent PCS on 12-month tours in Vietnam as FACs. That other wing, however, had one squadron deployed TDY to Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam and had been stripped of about half of its pilots who went to Luke, so they needed fillers. I was one of those fillers and in October 1965 joined the 429th Tactical Fighter Squadron Yellow Tails at Bien Hoa. The squadron pilots lived in huts with louvered walls having screens inside to keep out insects while letting air blow through and provide ventilation. The average temperature was in the nineties, as was the humidity, so it wasn’t real comfortable but it was better than tents, and we all adjusted.
Operationally, South Vietnam was divided into four geographic areas with a separate Corps designation. I Corps was the northern part of the country, adjacent to the border with North Vietnam and the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). II Corps was the mountainous central part while III Corps was the area around Saigon. IV Corps was the rice-growing Mekong Delta, a land of rice paddies and mangrove swamps.
Each Corps area had its own GCI (Radar) site which we would contact for vectors to an airborne FAC and a contact frequency for him. Call sign for I Corps radar was Panama, II Corps was Peacock, III Corps was Paris and IV Corps was Paddy. While terrain elevations varied widely through most of South Vietnam, the Delta was flat as a table top and the only thing higher than ten feet above sea level was Seven Sisters Mountain, just north of the center of the area.
My first sortie was an airstrike with a FAC in IV Corps. Our target was a VC area along a canal near Seven Sisters Mountain and I was number two flying on the squadron commander’s wing. At that time in our deployment we would launch a flight of four on every preplanned strike, but soon cut it back to three since we had a shortage of ordnance and our higher headquarters wanted to get the highest sortie count possible with the assets available. They would probably have had us launch flights of two, but if one aborted they didn’t want us going out single-ship. For ordnance we had old, fat M-64 500-pound bombs left over from WWII, which had been carried in B-17 and B-24 bombers. At that time we carried them on the outboard stations and carried 750 pound napalm cans on the inboard stations along with 800 rounds of 20mm High Explosive Incendiary (HEI) ammunition loaded in the guns. I had never before fired HEI and when I first fired it in combat I thought the sparkling detonations of the 20mm was ground fire coming at me, but by the end of the strike I figured it out. One advantage of firing HEI was that you could press normal cease-fire range and not be at (much) risk of taking a ricochet from your own rounds.
The 429th had been together for several months and many had flown at least one tour in another unit, usually overseas. The result was a relatively high F-100 time among the pilots and we would rotate the flight lead among all of us. We also had a relatively high number of Fighter Weapons School graduates and all of us had been flight leads before. Mission planning was fairly simple since we worked almost every strike with a FAC. At the time, the doctrine in TAC was to use the checklist, a small book about an inch-and-a-half thick, for every step of every mission. My flight commander, a man with a wonderful sense of humor, said that if the Russians wanted to immobilize TAC, all they had to do was issue each pilot a checklist, a scarf and a hat and require that he keep track of them. When I got to Vietnam, I put all three in my mailbox and took them out when I left!
We would also occasionally be configured with a variety of different ordnance including M-117 750-pound bombs, M-65 1,000-pound bombs, CBU (Cluster Bomb Unit) dispensers and rocket pods. That big M-65 bomb would create quite the halo in the humid air when it detonated. The old M-series bombs had lugs welded onto the case which were the connection to the rack upon which they were carried and dispensed. The problem with that arrangement was that the welds would periodically break, leaving the pilot carrying a “One Lugger” which sometimes would not release normally. If the bomb lug didn’t break completely off, and we could not drop the bomb in an unintended location or jettison in a safe area, it was sometimes necessary to land with it. The problem with that arrangement was that sometimes the remaining lug would break with the impact of landing and the pilot would race the bomb down the runway. Ideally the bomb would not be armed and I never heard of one exploding during the race, but it would create a certain pucker factor for the pilot.
As the Air Force logistics organization began to catch up to the ever-increasing ordnance demands of air activity in Vietnam, we began to carry the “Mark” series bombs which were much more streamlined, lower-drag bombs with lugs that screwed securely into the case of the bomb itself. The Mk-81 bombs were 250-pounds, the Mk-82 500, the Mk-83 1,000 and the Mk-84 2,000-pounds. While I was in Vietnam the F-100s of the 429th carried only the Mk-82 bomb, both in the low drag and Snake-Eye (Retarded) configurations. The retarded bombs were intended for a low altitude, low angle delivery while the low drag, or “slick” bombs were for dive bombing since a low altitude delivery would tend to frag the delivery aircraft itself.
If we were carrying the usual mix of 500-pound bombs and napalm, along with 20mm, our desired sequence of delivery would be to dive bomb to get the enemy’s heads down, then deliver the napalm in a low altitude skip bomb delivery, and finish up by strafing with 20mm. One day Paul Martin, a colleague with whom I had served at Lakenheath, set up his switches to dive bomb first, but the FAC asked for napalm first. Paul forgot to reset his switches and came in on a low-angle, low altitude pass and dropped the bombs. Now, because the napalm would tend to tumble upon release, they were force-jettisoned off the rack and the pilot could feel the release. The bombs would simply be released to fall with the force of gravity. When Paul hit the release button on the stick, he felt no thump from the force jettison he was expecting and knew immediately what had happened. He tried his best to pull the airplane up out of the bombs’ frag pattern, but was unsuccessful. He not only damaged the airplane, losing one of his hydraulic systems, but he damaged himself by taking a piece of bomb fragment in his foot. He managed to land the airplane but had no nose-wheel steering because of the disabled hydraulic system, and departed the runway, collapsing the nose gear. It took several weeks to return pilot and airplane to service.
On the preflight of the airplane and ordnance before launching, we would check the arming wires and the connections to the bomb rack. The bombs had two fuzes, one in the nose and one in the tail. The tail fuze was simply a back-up for the nose fuze on the slick bombs, so the pilot would select “Arm Nose and Tail” on the armament panel. On a Snake-Eye, arming the tail fuze would deploy the retarding fins so if you wanted to drop the bomb in the retarded configuration you would arm the tail fuze. If you wanted to dive-bomb the Snake like a slick bomb, you just armed the nose fuze. We would also check the delay setting on the fuze and look for about ten seconds to enable the aircraft to escape the fragmentation pattern from the bomb. As a consequence, if the pilot pressed the attack and released low, a dud could result. The Viet Cong would dig out these duds and fashion a very effective Improvised Explosive Device. One day I dropped a thousand-pound dud M-65 and was admonished by the Operations Officer for releasing low. Now, by releasing just a tad low one could improve accuracy if using the proper corrections, either in sight settings or in sight placement, so I wasn’t going to worry about a release slightly low. I started setting two second delays on the fuzes and I never dropped another dud, nor did I ever take frag.
Because Bien Hoa was just outside of Saigon, we were the closest F-100 unit to the Mekong Delta where there was a lot of enemy activity. We flew frequent strikes in the Delta and many of the targets were adjacent to the rice paddies that covered most of the Delta. Another pilot and I were launched off alert one day and contacted the FAC who gave us the target specifics, like description, orientation, elevation, proximity of friendlies, direction of run-in and ordnance sequence. The target was a primitive structure on a dike surrounded by rice paddies. We set up high and lead rolled in on the target to drop a single bomb. I rolled in far enough behind him and came in from a different direction so that enemy gunners would not have had the opportunity to track us both in the same trajectory. Lead dropped a bit long and hit in the rice paddy, throwing up a huge geyser of muddy water right in front of me. I had a choice of aborting my pass or continuing to fly right through the geyser. Since I didn’t want to make an extra pass and give the gunners another shot at me, I continued my pass, dropped and pulled off right through that muddy water. My windscreen was immediately covered by an opaque layer of mud. Since friendlies weren’t a factor on this target, I continued the release sequence for the rest of my ordnance by looking out the side and flying curvilinear passes. I did not strafe.
Coming off the target to return to base we checked each other for battle damage and went looking for a rainstorm through which I could fly to wash off my windscreen, but on this of all days we couldn’t find one. I was comfortable planning to land on lead’s wing so I did, flying a straight-in approach to the runway instead of the 360 overhead pattern, which was the norm. Once safely down on the runway with my drag chute deployed, I slowed to turnoff speed, raised the canopy, adjusted the rudder pedals to the rear and pushed my backside up on the seat so I could see over the obscured windscreen. Taxiing back into the fueling pits my crew chief waved me into the parking spot with a look of chagrin on his face. He knew he would have to tow the airplane to the wash rack before it could turn for another sortie. As he came up the ladder to take my helmet I apologized profusely and promised to come out and help as soon as I finished debriefing. I also brought him a case of beer.
Shortly after my arrival in Vietnam, we began to carry the bombs on the inboard station and the napalm outboard. Because of the previously mentioned tendency of the napalm cans to tumble upon release they would periodically impact the stabilator and sometimes even hang up on the leading edge. To my knowledge no airplanes were lost as a result but the tail would be damaged, mandating an easily avoided repair. Dropping the bombs first off the inboard stations meant the weight of the napalm cans outboard would create a slightly aft center of gravity due to the sweep of the wings but if the pilot was careful on the pullout we learned that it was not significant.
After about two weeks in-country I was assigned alert at night with an older pilot, Vito Thomasino. Vito had been a grunt Marine in Korea and resolved to try to avoid further ground combat. He transferred to the Air Force Aviation Cadet program and got his wings and commission, and an assignment to F-100s in the late 1950s. He graduated from the Fighter Weapons School and was one of the stalwarts of the 429th. We had no more than pre-flighted our aircraft when we were scrambled to a FAC covering a unit of Vietnamese infantry in the Delta. As we checked in with the FAC, light was just fading at dusk, but he put down a smoke rocket and told us to “Hit my smoke.” Vito and I had minimum visibility in the fading light, but we set up for the attack and rolled in, Vito leading and me taking spacing. We dropped our bombs and napalm, then came around for about four strafe passes down the canal along which the enemy was dug in attacking the friendlies. After we finished and called “Winchester” (out of ammo) the FAC was ecstatic over the radio saying we had neutralized the enemy attack and his troops were clear. We felt real good about having performed our mission despite the lousy light, and once we debriefed went back on alert with the airplanes reloaded and cocked.
Night air-to-ground gunnery had become a TAC-wide training requirement in late 1964, so even though we were not tasked with night preplanned strikes we would often launch off alert at night. The task was to drop visually under the light of two-million candlepower parachute flares dropped from a C-47, C-119, C-123 or C-130 flare ship. The flares would burn for about a minute or so, so we would try to time the flare drop so we would have good light for the entire delivery, then miss previously dropped burned out flares and chutes when we pulled out of the dive. As good as we were at close air support our accuracy at night was not the best. The usual pattern at night was to simultaneously launch a pair of F-100s and a pair of propellor-driven A-1 Skyraiders.
The jets would speed to the target and start attacking, often in defense of a Special Forces camp, in order to give them some immediate relief. The A-1s, much slower, would arrive as we were finishing expending our ordnance and proceed with very accurate bombing and strafing, staying on target for an hour or two. Trying to stay clear of the ubiquitous clouds and the terrain at night, and pulling up from the extremely bright flare light into pitch black after losing night vision always resulted in increased apprehension, but we knew that any night launch was important and we were usually defending Americans.
One of the jump-rated pilots from my squadron at Cannon, Tom Fussell, had been sent to a six-month TDY assignment as a FAC with the 101st Airborne Division. He sniveled some flights with the 429th on a break from the Army and launched one night to defend a Special Forces camp against an attack. The enemy was performing human wave attacks on one side of the camp and the flight dropped all their hard ordnance and then strafed the onrushing assault force. After Tom was “Winchester” he made one more pass and jettisoned his fuel tanks into the attackers in an effort to break the assault. We learned the next morning that the camp was still functioning so Tom’s effort may actually have made some difference. Tom was not, however, invited to fly with the squadron again.
Airstrikes in the Delta could be demanding if the FAC was unable to mark the target and had to try to talk our eyes onto it. I launched one afternoon with “Fearless Fred” Ferguson, my flight commander, and Jerry Hicks. The three of us had been in the same squadron at Cannon and had deployed together to Japan and Korea six months earlier. Ferg, at the time, was in his early thirties but looked like seventy and his vision was not what it had been. Ferg led, Jerry was two and I was three. We were sent to Paddy, the radar site for IV Corps who gave us contact information for the FAC. The FAC was out of rockets and smoke grenades, so we went through the “talk your eyes onto the target” routine. Since the Delta was pretty much all varying shades of green, this process was difficult. We were working below and around broken clouds in the target vicinity and poor Ferg was playing supersonic cheerleader, zooming across the target but unable to turn tight enough to avoid the weather and still line up on the target. Jerry and I had expended our heavy ordnance on a target the two of us were able to acquire visually but the FAC wanted our strafe runs on a hooch he believed contained ammunition. It was a green hooch against green rice paddies, and neither Jerry nor I could pick it up. Ferg was effectively out of the fight for the moment.
Jerry and I started making dry passes across the general area where we thought the hooch was located, and on about the third pass I saw it. I told the FAC I had it, padlocked my eyes onto it and pulled up to roll in for a strafe pass. I usually would dive on a strafe target at fifteen degrees and try to cease fire at about 2,000 feet slant range. When I came off the trigger I looked up for the horizon, expecting it to be about fifteen degrees up. It was more like thirty. Right away I knew I had a problem. I was clocking about 500 knots and started pulling back on the stick as hard as I felt I could without going into a high speed stall. I picked up ground rush in my peripheral vision, pulled harder and the nose came up above the horizon but the airplane kept mushing toward the ground. I was as scared as I had ever been and wondered if I was going to bounce high enough to eject. I felt a slight bump and to my immense relief the plane started to climb. As my altitude increased I couldn’t believe I had survived, and the airplane was still flying. I checked that the pitch and roll functions were still normal, all three hydraulic pressures were holding, and engine temperatures were normal.
Then I thought, “Just like falling off a horse, you have to get right back in there or you’ll be scared forever.” I continued around the pattern and rolled in again, not nearly as steep, fired down to about 2,500 feet and scared myself again on the recovery. I guess all that overlapping green made depth perception difficult. The hooch was much easier to see on that pass because I had blown off the roof on my previous pullout. By then I was Winchester and Ferg had finally located the target. Jerry and I held high as Ferg made one pass, dropping all his ordnance on that one pass since we were all at Bingo Fuel (time to go home). We joined up, checked each other for battle damage, and headed for Bien Hoa.
As we were returning to base I thought, “I may have damaged my drag chute doors and so probably would have a no-chute landing. I flew a careful pattern, took extra spacing on Jerry and touched down close to the first brick. Sure enough, mobile control called “Three No Chute.” Not a big deal as I had aero braking and 10,000 feet of dry concrete. I got slowed down without even passing Jerry and taxied in to the refueling pits. My crew chief’s eyes got big as I pulled in and he stopped me short of the spot, disappearing under the airplane. After a couple of minutes he again appeared in front and continued to wave me in. I shut down and he put the ladder up and climbed to the cockpit with a stricken look on his face and said, “What did you do to my airplane?” I confessed that I had gotten a bit low on one pass and without further comment he took my helmet and descended the ladder. I climbed down after him and took a look at the airplane. This had been one of the new camouflaged paint jobs but now the airplane was green all over the bottom as well. There were pieces of bamboo stuck in the gun ports, the gear doors, the split line, the tail hook and the drag chute doors. How Jerry had missed this condition on his battle damage check I don’t know.
I apologized profusely to the crew chief but promised I’d come out to help clean up after I debriefed. I jumped in the crew van and went through the debrief. When it was over Jerry looked over at me and said, “You got a little low there on one pass, didn’t you?” Ferg had not been aware of the event and asked what that was all about. I told them to come with me, we went out to the flight line and I showed them the condition of the airplane. I also bought the crew chief a case of beer and helped dig the vegetation out of all the orifices in the bottom of the bird. I then went with him to the wash rack when he dragged the airplane over there and helped clean off the chlorophyll.
As the middle of December approached, our replacement squadron arrived to be part of the newly deployed 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing. The squadron scheduled a last flight for the twelve aircraft remaining at Bien Hoa before we turned them over to our replacements. We put them all up at about the same time and following the airstrikes returned to join up for a farewell flight over the base. Once we had all landed the pilots and maintenance folks posed for a picture. We then learned that the squadron personnel would be redeployed to Cannon via C-130 transport via Okinawa, Midway Island and Travis AFB. I asked the squadron commander for permission to deplane at Travis, take two weeks leave and return to Cannon in January. My request was granted and I spent Christmas 1965 with my family. I had no idea that less than two years later I would be back in Vietnam, this time as a FAC with the 101st Airborne Division.
It was on Art’s FAC tour with the 101st Airborne Division that he was recruited to fly as a Raven FAC in Laos. Due to the secrecy of the Raven program Art’s story of that tour, “Raven, He No Surrender”, is listed with Anonymous as the author and is Chapter 23 in Volume 1. There are photos from his Raven tour in the photo section at the end of this volume.