TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Second Platoon
Continuation of Toby Grigg's Story....
I wanted to keep flying if I could. There was another
unit in Da Nang that was flying reconnaissance
missions over into Laos. The job was to look for North
Vietnamese military units moving men and equipment
along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and when spotting
them, to call in available air units to attack them to
make their job harder than it already was. This unit
was officially known as Headquarters & Maintenance
Squadron 11, HAMS 11 for short. Their call sign was
“Playboy”. They were operating TA-4F Skyhawks, a
two-seat version of the A-4 originally meant to be a
training jet. I showed up at their Operations Office and
introduced myself and told them I wanted to fly with
them, when not fragging at Wing Headquarters. Boy
Howdy they were eager to suit me up and train me and
put me into the cycle of flying these missions because
they were short of pilots. So, that’s what I did for the
second half of my tour in Vietnam, that and fragging
missions for the grunts when it was my shift at G-3. As
a side story before I get into those missions, the OpsO
turned out to be Larry Atkinson, who was a lacrosse
player at Hobart College, while I was a lacrosse player
at Colgate. He graduated a year ahead of me but in my
junior year I played defense against Larry and he was
one hell of a good attackman . He got one goal on me
and I knocked his a*s down several times during that
game. It was a tough game and Hobart won, by a goal.
But when I told him in Da Nang I was the defenseman
against him in 1965 at Colgate it was a bonding
moment.
Anyway, back to Playboy Operations. It wasn’t long
and I was flying missions over the hill into Laos on a
frequent basis, not every day, but at least 4 or 5 a week.
Some days we saw nothing. Some days it was almost
like an LA freeway. To do this job we had to fly low and
fast. The Laotian jungle was triple layer canopy so in
order to see anything on the ground you had to get
pretty darned low . So you stayed fast. And you didn’t
fly straight and level. You were always zigging and
zagging, never wings level. And you learned not to be
flying in a repetitive pattern, 5 seconds going left, 5
seconds going right, so as to make it easier for the
enemy gunners to hit you. After I’d been doing this for
about 2 months and had been designated as aircraft
command pilot, it was late November and I had a
backseater, John Nellor, who was really a Radar
Intercept Officer (RIO) in F-4 Phantoms and had been
reassigned to a Wing Job like me. We were taking close
looks at the road construction project going on along
the southern end of our operating area and were about
100 to 200 feet above the ground doing about 450
knots.
We came around a bend in the road close to a large
rise in the terrain (not a mountain but about a several
hundred foot rise from the road level below) and there
were 2 men standing there, one in dark green and the
other in much lighter green uniforms. The one in
darker green had a cap on and I could see red trim on
it. So I guessed he was a Chinese officer while the other
one in no hat was either Vietnamese or a junior soldier
to the other.
We came up on them so fast and as we passed them
they jumped into a hole (like a tunnel entrance) on the
side of this hill and disappeared. Wow! I thought. That
2‐64