Sea Control - Sea Control 315 - Fighter Control over Vietnam with Master Chief (ret) Larry Nowell

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Master Chief (ret) Larry Nowell joins the program to discuss his Navy career, to include his time at Top Gun and controlling fighters over Vietnam. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Groover.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today we have part one of a two-part episode. Part two is going to air Saturday. We'll be doing this in the future whenever we have a longer recording session to try to keep the podcast down to more bite-sized chunks. In this instance, we've got almost 80 minutes of audio with Master Chief Larry Nowell. If you're a Top Gun grad, his name is no doubt familiar to you from Midkiller Sessions. He controlled fighters off the coast of Vietnam, and we're going to hear his story today. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Groover. Speaking of audio editors, we're always looking to add to our team, so if you're interested, please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org with your resume.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back to Board Seat Control. My guest today is Master Chief Retired Larry A. Snowell. Master Chief Nowell was an Air Intercept Control Supervisor during the Vietnam War,

controlled more than 100 fighter engagements. He's credited with controlling engagements resulting in the destruction of 12 enemy MiGs and saving four Air Force F-4s. He's also the only Navy enlisted person to receive the Distinguished Service Medal for Actions in Combat, and he was inducted into the Surface Warfare Hall of Fame in 2005. So Master Chief, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated.

So, Master Chief, I'm going to start with a little bit easier question, but one that I like to ask everyone as someone who's in the business of recruiting now. Why and how did you join the Navy? Well, I was in the National Guard when I was in high school, and I had gone to Army basic training between the 11th and 12th grade up at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. So I kind of knew what the Army was. I had an uncle in the Navy. I admired him very much. And one of my buddies said, let's go join the Navy. And I said, OK.

So a couple of us, three of us went and joined the Navy. And did you choose to become an operations specialist or was it called radar men at that time? Yes, it was called Radarman. And actually, the career counselor that we go through after we've done all of our testing goes through and kind of sorts out. I was guaranteed a school of some sorts because I was a high school graduate. And that's what I signed up my contract for. So they had an obligation to send me to an A school. I had no idea what a Rayarman was at that time in fact I wasn't even

qualified for it because I had failed the the colorblind test doing the flip charts you know you got to get a certain percentage I could get about a half of them but greens and grays gave me a little bit of a problem and I couldn't see the little numbers and they

took me back over to sickbay to have me retested I went back over there and there were three or four corvins standing around and I did waited for him to acknowledge me, and finally they said, what do you want? And I said, well, I gave him the paper and told him that the chief's sitting over there to be retested for colorblindness. He said, colorblindness? What color is this wall? Well, everything in the Navy was pea green at the time, so I was pretty much up on pea green.

He said, oh, you're not colorblind, so he signed the paper, get out of here. And I went back, and that's how I got to A school. And how did you get into the Air Intercept Controller pipeline? You and I were talking just before we started recording. Your dad was actually an Air Intercept Controller as well. Is that correct? My father-in-law was an Air Intercept Controller. And yes.

Well, I was on the USS Hamner initially for about a year and a half. Volunteered, shipped over to go to Radarman B-School, which was up Treasure Island, which I did. And so coming out of Treasure Island, I went to Point Lombard to go to advanced radar school. The training in Treasure Island was more electronics. At that time, they were thinking about making us technicians as well so we could repair our own equipment, such as fire control technicians not only operated their equipment, but they fixed it. So we have electronic technicians to fix our equipment on the ship at that time. They were thinking about making radar technicians as well as operators. So from B-School, I went to the USS Baham in 1960.

And the USS Baham was one of the three naval tactical data ships that were configured with the naval tactical data system to test NTDS for the Navy. So those three ships conducted the test and evaluation of NTDS starting in 1960. It was the Mahan, the King, and the USS Risk. I was on there for six years because, you know, once you start getting that training, they don't want to train someone else from the beginning. And when I went aboard, they were getting ready to go to Westpac. So I didn't have time to go to NTDS school at Port Loma that they had set up for operators. So I went aboard very qualified as a radarman because I'd just been through B-School and studied and learned the most advanced tactics that were present.

So I felt very comfortable in that. I was a watch stander. During that course of that nine-month cruise, I qualified myself as an NTDS operator, NTDS watch supervisor, track supervisor. The only other option really open to enlisted men was air intercept controllers. So that was on my hit list to try to do. And I went to AIC school at Point Loma in 1965. There was about a 45% attrition rate for white hats, which I mean first class and below. At that time, I was a first class.

The attrition rate was really high. the chiefs and officers running the school and it was somewhat of a hack at school they were basically teaching you how to talk on a radio how to give vectors how to track an aircraft how to perform world war ii tactics and using air intercept control so i did air intercept control on the man for about a year and then went back to supervisor school before i qualified for shore duty. So I'm used to a combat information center where the aircraft, once you pick up a radar contract, your system will basically track the aircraft for you unless the radar loses it. Were you doing it manually at that point? Absolutely. Initially, we were only trained

on conventional equipment. We were not trained on NTS equipment. We couldn't set up areas for area control or it was not very user friendly for training environment we had to basically do it without the advantage of having your cursor getting an accurate bearing and range and being able to have the same capabilities as a conventional controller so it was a little bit harder to run basic training intercepts on NTDS than it was on conventional and so that's you You know, the reality and the difference that I had in relation to other air intercept controllers, including the ones aboard the USS Chicago, when I was involved in Vietnam with all the intercepts, I was using the same radar as they were using. We had trackers down below and detecting and tracking.

We had a track supervisor and trackers down there that were responsible for putting in symbols. and they use what we call input consoles and we had as an areas of control we were a user we were using their data so they were responsible for putting in tracks and altitude and the system calculated heading and speed as you updated the tracks none of the aircraft that i ran intercepts with ever ever had a track on them i used a grease pencil you know grease missile plot method i would go up before the flights an hour sit there and plot the as we moved around on stations the mountains returns would move in and out so by the time my flight came up i was pretty familiar with the mountain top returns and i knew where all the uh you know

the airports were that the enemies were stationed at and i could uh pick them up you know by adjusting, I would go down and talk to the other chiefs on the ship, radioman, and look, man, I want the best transmitter you got, I want the highest antenna you got on the ship, I want, you know, I'd go down to the electronic technicians, say, you know, this is where we're going to be, this is, let's tune up this, this radar, and we had old 40, World War II radars on Chicago. And we could sit there and manually control the angles and the elevation on a couple of them. And, you know, it was just perfect, you know, for that type of environment. The Air Force had no coverage. The Navy had no look-down coverage. Our eating targets over land. The

technology was not there for the aviation community to assist the CAPs, the Combat Air Patrol. so we had a sitting on the surface we could look up and if we could interpret uh the neg tracks from the surface tracks the mountaintops then we could in fact you know tell where the tracks were and you know there was some point of being able to tell the size of the aircraft later on i i worked with the electronic warfare technicians, which were able to interpret the frequency that the MIGs were transmitting on. They could get bearing on, and more importantly, bearing drift. The E-8, EW would get on headsets and get behind me. And I would point, he would know that I would want bearing drip and you know what what was critical to us what kind of aircraft it was

hey maybe they were and what's a bearing drip and what does it change because um you know if they start turning very quickly uh that's what the cap want to know you know and it got down to the point where you know i could you see these guys get into a dog fight is what we call it it's very hard for people to understand is once you get into a dogfight even before you get into a dogfight if you you know you're at some point you're committed you're either going to get shot down or shoot somebody down or some variation of that and then go home and hope you've got enough gas to get home well the reality is you only got about 30 to 60 seconds to make this engagement and still have enough fuel to get out of indian territory as we called it get to attack to the ship without taking

as a general rule that I've been in an engagement because when you kick in those afterburners, they start pouring fuel down into the afterburners and it's very difficult for them to have enough fuel. They don't worry about having fuel left. When I went over to Vietnam in November of 71, I was a senior enlisted from Combat Information Center. so i was invited to go to the third fleet briefing on what's going on there as we went over we

stopped in hawaii we got a third fleet briefing and then we went to the gulf and there we would go aboard or they would come to our ship to relieve us we we to the relieve them and get all the packages and information about that station and what's what currently is happening well when was at the third fleet briefing in uh hawaii i noticed on a status board that they had uh the air force control frequency for the air force and i had been to the gulf of tonkin three times before that two times on the hamner i mean on the mahan and one time on the chicago earlier that crew uh in 71 so i never heard about the air force we never talked to the air force Never heard about it here. We've got a frequency that we're supposed to be manning.

We're back up for the Air Force. And I asked the question. They said, oh, hey, we've always been back up for the Air Force. They're back up for us. You know, you got information you share with the Air Force. So I got to the station on the PIRAS station. You're familiar with the PIRAS term and information. so I asked the uh at the meeting there about that frequency and if they had been talking to the air force they said well I never heard of it and besides if we did we don't have enough equipment to put it up anyway so I never heard anyone talk to the air force before that that day

so we had lots of equipment I put it up put it on a speaker and that day I mean you know they were over in the house uh running a uh SAR over there trying to pick up a downed pilot and these MIGs were taken out from just west of Hanoi going over there and their primary tactic was to go over there unnoticed and fire at our guys and turn around and run home and so I said okay these are the bad guys these are the good guys so I started calling them and telling them that, hey, you got some unknown over here. I didn't designate them as a hostile. I didn't have the equipment to do that or the information to do that at that time.

And two guys over there decided, hmm, this is our chance to get a big. So they took off after them. And they started chasing them. And as they got down south of Hanoi, and as quickly as they reported being a fuel, they started to turn around and go, you know, fuel is I got to go home right now or I'm not going to have enough fuel to get home. And so they turned around and started going home. And as quick as they did, they started firing SAMs at them, surface to air missiles from the ground. And as quick as they did that, our flight went low. The Air Force flight went real low to get

away from the surface to air missiles. And I lost communications with them. I continued to give vectors over the net where I thought they were to a tanker that I'd seen over in Laos orbiting over there for their purpose of refueling those aircraft that were working on that surface air rescue so later I heard the lead on top of a mountain he had bailed out he ran out of fuel he was in enemy territory but i could talk to him on guard which was a uhf signal that i could hear in line of sight so he was high enough on a mountain for us to communicate so i called up the air force and asked them uh told them what the situation was and they said we'll come get that to him and a few minutes later the air force came back said no it's too late we'll get him

first thing in the morning tell him to just take cover and uh which i did in about 15 minutes he call back and he says there's i can hear the dogs they're coming after me so i relayed that to the air force the air force told him to take told me to tell him to take cover and they were going to come in and spray the area down which they did with a little um sometimes a smart bomb that when it hit the ground about the size of a golf ball it would uh turn turn the bomb on and then if you stepped on it or something to that effect you would ignite it and it was strong enough to probably blow a dog's leg off or kill a dog i don't know exactly but um he did reports of yapping after that and no other presentation so after that we got him out the next light we

talked to him all night on the on the uh phone and uh you know we got him out the next day So some good things, some bad things happened out of that. Our commander decided that we had run an F-4 out of gas. And so they sent us a two and a half page message about how screwed up we were running Air Force out of gas. And so everything that was done, all the voice circuits, tried to track the NTDS symbols and try to make sense out of those because they were not on there. There were so many symbols up in that area that were just kind of floating around. You know, none of them were really on targets and tracking. And so it made the job a lot harder.

And then finally, the air crew that got out was the lead. And he wrote an after incident report reporting that they were doing 1.6 box south of Hanoi when his wingman reported bingo fuel. and he was so many hundred thousands of pounds below bingo fuel at that time so he had no chance of getting out and his wingman the fuel gauge got down to zero zero

zero zero zero and he was told in training that if you don't want to be in a plane when your fuel gauge gets down to zero zero zero so he told the pilot we need to bail out so they bailed out they could have possibly made it to the water they don't

know you know how far what's glide slope on an f4 what was their altitude and speed i don't know but they were below communications with us but a friend of mine that was a pow knew these guys and i we called him up i talked to him later and uh yeah they bailed out of a flying air aircraft in vietnam came pows but they they were all okay but that was a kind of a wake-up call for me realizing that strange situation there I could uh you know get these guys in trouble real quick I could help these guys out and you know it kind of set the mode for me to be more serious about what I was doing and saying for the rest of that nine month cruise that was supposed to be four months well that's

a short story of how we got into it so yeah let me ask you um because I think I think the audience We'll have picked up a lot of the answer to this next question anyway, but I'm going to ask it. What does an AIC do? Like, what are you doing day to day? Well, basically in school, we were taught to communicate, to track them, to provide assistance in the area control. Make sure that if they were assigned a specific area, that they stayed in that area. They avoided other friendlies or if there were any hostiles or bogeys out there, we would report those to them. we were trained to run particular angle setups which is what they used to work on pacific angles

like head-on or like if you were 90 degrees away from the target how would you get in and get in behind him you know at a range that you could fire a sidewriter missile because the f-4s which were majority of the fighters in vietnam did not have a navy aircraft did not have guns the air force did but uh the navy version did not have guns so we had to get into a mile and a half was ideal for a sidewinder so we were taught to uh assist the aircraft create a mental image of what's going on in the environment relay orders back and forth we weren't there to order this guy around but you know that wasn't our job as an area of controllers we relayed orders you know But we assisted the air crews in any way we could.

What did it take to designate an aircraft hostile at that point? Was that a rules of engagement question or were you just looking for the aircraft's point of origin? Or what were you, how were you making that decision? Or were you making that decision? Were you being told? Aircraft come up in the area of a hostile airport. That didn't qualify to say that that's a hostile aircraft. It could have been one of our aircraft. The reality is the radar blips, if you study them as we had studied them, were different sizes.

We could tell the difference between a MiG-17, 19, 21, as opposed to an F-4 or a flight of F-4s or a flight of MiGs. We could tell the difference. We could tell the difference on the radar. But we could not designate a target as a hostile because designated as a hostile requires certain identification, either from intelligence or from some type of equipment that we may or may not have aboard ship that would possibly identify them as hostile. But as an air intercept controller, we were not able to do that. And can you take me back? I know you described a whole story about the F-4, but what was your first experience controlling fighters live over Vietnam like? Well, my first experience was on the USS Bahan. I had a couple of trips over there before 66. And what happened was we were on the same station, but our job was primarily to keep track of the aircraft going in. And then we had a section of aircraft up there to observe those aircraft coming out and make sure that there weren't any aircraft in those aircraft coming out.

And we would keep track of the ones coming out. So that was the big job. There wasn't a lot of mid-cap, force-cap. We had mid-cap and force-cap and bar-cap at the time. But it had gotten a lot more sophisticated when I came back in 1971 than it was in 66. So we were just basically monitoring and keeping track of and degaussing the aircrafts, the guys coming back when I was there in 66, 65, 66. And then based on your earlier description of the way the process changed, It sounded like it was a very iterative process as far as learning to employ different things on the ship.

Was that fair to say where you talked about bringing in the electronic warfare specialists, the EWs that you mentioned when you talked about choosing which antenna to use that that was all you all evolved that by yourselves on station? Yes, I evolved that down in a cheese mess. basically uh you know it just it just made more sense to me to go talk to the people that were doing the job and get it done the normal chain of command was not working um in an environment where you got 30 seconds to hit the sky or tell somebody else what you're doing or trying to do Our first big engagement on the Chicago with the Navy, we started sending aircraft into predetermined spots. When North Vietnam, one of their primary tactics was to send a single aircraft down in South Vietnam, wander around and find someone, some aircraft tooling around and shoot him down and run home. That was their primary tactic.

he would send a cap to pre-determined station and cut them off so to speak and maybe get a shot at him when on march 7th 1971 my first class was controlling a flight of aircraft that had been sent into let's say station one and they could not see anything and i was sitting there supervising this first class doing this run and i started picking up a feet a very weak target coming in and i said well this you know to myself this bears investigating because this is what we're looking for so i told him to give him a vector to 275 which he did and the ops boss and the evaluator were trying to tell him to we had been given the command i didn't know about it But they had been given the command to bring the cap back out to water.

It missed this cap. There's a mig coming up. And I'm here tracking the mig, trying to get them on to get a visual on this mig. And the command and control is trying to get them back out to the water to go back to the carrier. And finally, I just took over the intercept because the controller seemed very confused. And, you know, the ops boss and the evaluator were screaming at him. So I finally got him around, pointed at what I had as a target. And as it got down to a mile and a half, they still.

And I realized very quickly that they should be seeing this guy. And I said, well, this is this target is very weak. And they're up here. I said, check low as quick as I did. they yelled tally ho and and they started going in for a uh for a shot at him and the lead told his number two his wingman to stay high so he could keep in communications with him and he went in and took a shot at him with a sidewinder but he came in too tight the sidewinder went right past his tailpipe into the ground and unfortunately he had a lot of speed going on and by the time

be pulled back up he was right in front of the nig going very slow kind of like being in in third gear going you know 20 miles an hour you just you know no matter how much cash you give him it just can't can't get going and he was yelling at the wingman to get down there and kill him and uh in fact it seemed like a very long time but he did that's what happened is Gary Wigand got down in position, fired a sidewinder. The MiG never got a shot off. You know, for whatever reason, we don't know. But we were thankful for that.

And that was our first MiG kill. And they got back to the core seat. You know, okay, I got them tanked up and got them back. You were credited with controlling engagements resulting in the destruction of 12 enemy MiGs. Besides the one you just mentioned, are there any that stand out to you in particular? well uh pete pedigree and his uh wingman bob hughes had an engagement with the navy on may 6 that was uh a flight of four they had uh again some of the controller was controlling the section and they were plotting the migs and i was plotting the migs and calling them

and finally had to take over the intercept again and get them in on a visual and they were having a hard time getting a lock on or be able to see the target and I finally realized that you know their target was coming back brighter than they were so I said told them to check high I didn't have any altitude on it because they didn't have any symbols on it you got to get a on it to be able to attach altitude to it so i didn't have altitude information other than the fact that i could interpret a weak signal or a real strong signal so i told them to check high they checked high and there they were they got a visual they went in and got their the uh kill and the first time i went to uh mid killers debrief at top gun after that with uh

pete pettigrew i told pete that uh you're senior to me you go first so pete went in and started talking about his mid kill he said it was one of those nights you knew something was going on something was going to happen and it's not going to be happening for me because my we would go stay up there where he's supposed to he was kept arguing with his wingman about you know he was very nervous and the controller didn't know his ass from the ground is the way he put it And then finally, he says, the voice of God came on the circuit, told me what to do. I did it, got my big, and here he is. That's the way he would introduce me whenever we had an opportunity to go to any kind of mid-killers to brief.

Well, that's a hell of an intro. So, as a little note, Pete Pettigrew became the Navy's technical advisor to the movie, the first movie, Top Gun. And he escorted Debbie Gillison to the officer's club at Miramar. He was a tall, gray-haired gentleman. And he had escorted her and went over to the table. And she went to get her drinks and talked to Tom Cruise. So anyway, he was a very interesting person. You control both Navy and Air Force aircraft.

Were there noticeable differences between the pilots or the way that the airframes behaved? well you know when you say that there was a there was a difference in the attitude you know one of the navy pilots called up one that screamed up one day he says hey i got four guys over here surrounded you know that was the kind of attitude they had you know there's only four of them and one of me i got them you know the air force had four against one they would you know fire everything they had on board and uh you know whether they thought they could get a kill or not but you know i don't want to say anything against the air force it's kind of hard to to make a call on what you would have done in that situation where you're in a situation where

you could be shot down killed just like that you know it's your life or theirs and uh it it's very technical you're up there you pull in as much cheese as you can cunningham almost tore the wings off of a plane when they got it back uh he had borrowed his xos plane for one of the flights he got they got it back to the deck they started shaking the wings they just threw it overboard because it couldn't be fixed and um you know those guys you got to give them you can't take anything away from those guys they're they're the best so that concludes part one of the interview with master chief now we'll be back on saturday with part two so come back then I walked up to the powerhouse counter.

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