Free Fire Zones

The Seventh Air Force ran the air campaign in SEA (South East Asia)and passed us our targets in a fragmentary portion of the daily Air Operation Plan or 'frag'. Sometimes we would get very specific targets based upon reconnaissance or intelligence, but usually we would get a 'free fire zone', an area several kilometers square in which there was known or suspected enemy activity and no friendly forces or civilians. Supposedly it was our private hunting ground and anybody we found in there were bad guys. The local GCI site kept track of traffic and warned us when anybody was getting too close, usually. Our confidence was shaken one night when an Aussie Canberra zipped right past our nose, both ships completely dark. All we heard on the UHF was "Opps--sorry mate. Just taking a little short cut". The GCI controller gave the other pilot quite a stern chewing when he figured out what had happened, but it was a very near miss for us.

Another night we were working a target when a huge bolt of lightening came down from above passing right between the fuselage and the starboard engine, so bright it nearly blinded us. Actually, it wasn't lightening but a long burst from the AC-47 'Puff' working the same target from about 1000 feet above us. The 'lightening' was a stream of tracers from one of his gattlings, and they may not have been as close as we thought, but they were definitely close enough to give a couple of pilots nightmares. It turned out he was working with another controller on a different frequency.

On a third mission we really got lucky; we had discovered a string of seven WBLC's in our free fire zone. They were in the middle of a long straight canal with little cover and nowhere to go. We marked the first craft with a napalm then positioned ourselves to come right down the canal using the downward-firing 40 mm's and the 20 mm's in the rear. As we passed over successive craft, the secondary explosions indicated that they were laden with fuel and ammo, just what we were looking for. As we neared the end of the procession we heard a lot of screaming on the VHF-FM and the seventh craft started launching flares of every color. A Navy Swift boat from the Riverene Forces was following the 6 WBLC's to find their weapons cache and we nearly smoked him.

Each of these incidents resulted in higher levels of coordination and communication and each was a stark reminder that in war the enemy is not the only danger. - Story submitted by Capt. Ron Whittiker.