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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
In this article:
He was the second of two children and born on 25 January 1940 in Shandon Baptist Hospital in Columbia South Carolina. He, in every way, gave the appearance of a normal, healthy, well-developed kid of average height, slender but not skinny. History would show that he was anything but normal.
His name was John Monroe Smith, and “Roger Ball!” is his story—a tale that should be told. It intertwines the true, firsthand accounts and experiences of a fighter pilot with the significant developments in the fighter community and historical events in which Captain John Monroe Smith, USN, call sign “Hawk” was a part. Finally, it speaks to the men who laid their careers and sometimes their very lives on the line for their shipmates and their country.
Hawk was a legend in the fighter community. During his thirty-year career, he forged a reputation as a skilled and lethal aviator in the air-to-air combat arena, a natural tactician, and consummate leader. To many, he was one of the most essential pathfinders in the modernization of the naval air war arts.
He was just a man, but his story, his life adventure, is a high-fidelity history of personal achievements for naval tactical aviation, devotion to a cause, and service to his nation. It was a time during and shortly after the Vietnam conflict that America became ideologically divided. The military was disillusioned with the intrusion of nonwarriors in the White House over the conduct of the war, and tactical aviation of all the services was struggling to catch up to the realities of the war’s hard lessons. It was a time when the Navy needed leaders and tenacious thinkers to set things right again. It was Hawk’s time!
In December 1974, the chief of the Soviet armed forces, General Viktor Kulikov, met with political and military dignitaries in Hanoi pledging additional military support in the form of more material. The North Vietnamese viewed this as tacit approval to accelerate their occupation of the south.
Two months later, about the same time that Enterprise headed out of the Indian Ocean, four North Vietnamese divisions massed in central Vietnam for a major push to the southern end of South Vietnam. The opportunity for a dignified disengagement had been lost, and the main U.S. objective then became the evacuation of remaining U.S. government officials, military security personnel, and selected Vietnamese and Cambodians.
In late February, Enterprise had cleared the Straight and was a few days out of Subic Bay. It was a gorgeous, crisp morning and one of those days that, for an hour in the air, aircrew would sell their sisters. The only wind stirring was what the ship made; the sea was a deep electric blue and bathtub smooth.
The ship had just completed a recovery. Yellow shirts were re-spotting aircraft for the next launch and with the Boss’s permission, the die-hard runners were out in force running laps on the flight deck and sweating up a storm.
Hawk was still on the platform squaring away equipment when a deepthroated roar in the distance announced the run of a section of VA-97 Corsairs. They were scheduled for a War at Sea exercise, and their target ship was the plane guard destroyer which had taken position four thousand yards off Enterprise’s starboard stern quarter.
Although the aircraft were still five miles away it was no problem picking up the two A-7s. All one had to do was look for the high-speed, twin rooster tails and follow them to the source of the disturbance. Hawk stopped his project and watched the Corsairs approach. They were low. They were well below the flight deck which, at seventy-six feet above the water, meant they were very low.
The section crossed Enterprise’s wake and simultaneously pulled up to a forty-five-degree climb. The lead A-7 immediately rolled inverted and commenced a hard nose down pull toward the target ship. A few seconds later the wingman rolled-in after his leader. At approximately two thousand feet both Corsairs broke off the simulated attack, made a hard nose down turn to the right and headed away from the target ship and parallel to its wake. A few seconds later the Corsairs were hidden by the monstrous rooster tails marking their egress.
Hawk was still admiring the show when he heard someone run up behind him. He turned to his left to see the ship’s safety officer in sweaty jogging gear standing beside him. He was a commander of the P-3 Orion persuasion. There was some long-standing animosity between the patrol community and the TACAIR clan having partly to do with the differences in pay, billeting, and quality of life while on deployment. But there was also a rift in philosophies concerning flying practices.
The P-3 community spewed forth the virtues of crew-concept wherein the crew flew and operated the aircraft and systems as a team. In truth, this was a necessary practice. TACAIR types believed they had taken it too far, however. Some claimed that all decisions in the P-3 were the result of committee action and even determining course changes might take several minutes while votes were counted.
This may have been the first assignment that placed the P-3 commander on a Navy man-of-war, and he was still adjusting to the TACAIR mentality. He knew it was his job to keep everybody on the ship safe, but how could he do that when pilots, like the two fools he just saw streaking just a few feet above the water, weren’t concerned with their own well-being? He decided to enlist help, he went to the wrong guy.
“Hawk,” the safety officer started. He was huffing and puffing, and Hawk didn’t know, after the rather magnificent air show, if it was caused by anger, fear, or he had just run very hard.
“Yeah!” Hawk replied.
“Did you see those two idiots in the A-7s?”
“Sure did, Commander!”
“They were low. In fact, they were just too damned low!”
“Commander, they’re light attack guys. That’s what they do!”
“Well, that’s just not safe. They’re too damned low and I’m going to have to report them to CAG.”
“Well sir, you’re gonna have to wait!”
“Wait? What? Why’s that?”
“You’re gonna have to wait for the next recovery.”
“Why? I don’t get it.”
“He’s flying right now. In fact, that was CAG!”
There, of course, was no follow-up discussion and no report to CAG from the ship’s safety officer.
Photo credit: U.S. Navy
Donald Auten: All articles
