220214 Sentinel, Flying night radar coverage in the gulf of Tonkin.

In the early part of the Vietnam War elements of the Seventh Fleet were operating way up North in the Gulf of Tonkin. The 7th fleet aircraft carriers were still bombing North Vietnam and the closer they could get the better it was for pilots with their passion for having enough fuel to return to the aircraft carriers they were launched from. We were flying even further north of the fleet one night to provide our normal search radar coverage and to give updates on a storm traveling in the vicinity of the island of Hainan, China.

We were just a hundred miles from Hainan when the CIC (Combat Information Center) officer repeatedly told me to keep an eye on Hainan, we didn’t want to get close enough to scramble fighters from the Chinese air base there. We were also keeping a fix on the storm in the area, so I guess he felt he needed to keep explaining the entire mission to me.

In the middle of the night and the impending storm and trying to dodge Hainan Island, I picked up an incoming target on the radar. I watched the blip through several sweeps of the radar, trying to get a quick snapshot of its course and speed. I reported my findings to the CIC officer and the fact that the target was coming from a direction we wouldn’t normally consider a threat, but the target didn’t have an IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) transponder responding to our challenge. The CIC officer looked at the target for a minute and pondered the situation. He agreed that the course was not consistent with our threat area of North Vietnam, but there was no way to rule out the possibility that he could have come out of the underbelly of China somewhere along its coast, so he ordered me to report the contact to the fleet CIC control ship and at the same time warn all of the picket ships of an incoming unknown. I was pretty excited, after endless training I was finally going to report a threat over the radio to the entire seventh fleet task force in the gulf and I was the first operator to spot it!

“Alpha Whiskey, Alpha Whiskey, this is Victor, over.” (Alpha Whiskey was the call sign for fleet CIC control at that time.)
“Victor this is Alpha Whiskey over.”
“Alpha Whiskey this is Victor, bogey, 040, 170 miles, course 220, speed 450.”
“Victor this is Alpha Whiskey, roger, out.”
We watched our intruder approach and waited for word from the fleet. A minute went by, another six sweeps of the radar; a moving blip on the screen progressed closer to the fleet we were there to watch over. We had forgotten about the storm, we were shifted into glory mode. This was what shipboard and airborne CIC people lived for. We wondered if there would soon be two new radar returns launched from the “Ready CAP” (combat air patrol) to intercept the trespasser. The seconds ticked by as we watched the target continuing its course toward the fleet. The radio broke the silence.

“Victor this is Alpha Whiskey, over.”
“Alpha Whiskey this is Victor, over.”
“Victor that bogey is Tiger Airlines flight 203 from Hong Kong, over.”
“Roger Alpha Whiskey, this is Victor, out.”
So ended our moments of glory as we turned our attention back to the approaching storm and our efforts back to avoiding becoming prey ourselves to a pair of Chinese interceptor aircraft from Hainan.

Epilogue: The danger from Hainan was real as the Navy airmen of an EP3E patrol plane found out on April 1, 2001 when two Chinese J-8 interceptors rolled out to play with the Navy plane, 70 miles off Hainan Island.

The P3 was over international waters, but one of the J-8’s still dogged it and ended up colliding with it over the South China Sea. The Navy P3 declared an emergency after falling 8000 feet in an inverted dive before the pilot could regain control of the plane and declare an emergency. He flew into Hainan and landed at the same Chinese air base that launched the J-8 planes to harass his Navy patrol plane. It’s an interesting piece at Frontline story if you would like to read it. The Chinese surrounded the plane with their AK47’s pointed at the pilot, demanding he and the crew deplane and tell where they left Wang Wei the pilot of the ill-fated J-8 that crashed into the ocean after the P3’s propeller cut it into two pieces. That would have been a death sentence for us since we were flying at just 1500 feet that night.