Carrier Pilot Speaks Out on Vietnam

May 28, 1965 - Comdr. Jack H. Harris (pictured), leader of Attack Squadron 155 aboard the Coral Sea, was explaining how a carrier pilot feels about Vietnam:“I certainly don’t like getting shot at. But this is the top of my flying career, and it’s important I should know about it.

“I really feel I’m fortunate to get the opportunity after 21 years in the Navy of combat experience. I need it to be a real professional.”Harris is leader of 11 other pilots and their ground crews. Since Feb. 7, they have been taking A-4 jets on raids over both North and South Vietnam. Since May 1, Harris has flown and sometimes twice each day with the exception of two days he took off for administrative duties.“Our men are all professionals,” he said. “All of them love to fly. Some of them try to get on every mission. Others are content to take their turns.”The commander said he was quite aware of the risks involved in his work, even though he had made so many carrier landings and take-offs that it was, he said, almost as routine “as backing a car out of a garage.”“But we all have a certain amount of anxiety before a combat hop. There’s not one of us that doesn’t experience this,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say we worry very much. Navy pilots are better trained and better qualified today than they ever were.”Harris, a native of Wisconsin who has a wife and two children in San Diego, said he was 38, which feared was an advanced age for a carrier pilot.

On March 29, after nearly two months of combat flying, he was shot down over North Vietnam while on a flak suppression mission.

“It was the first accident, if you could call it that, I’ve ever had,” he said. “I had never even damaged a plane before. But when I knew my engine was too badly hit to function, I did just what I’d been taught, and I was all right.”After parachuting into the water, he was picked up by rescue craft in 20 minutes. Three days later, he was flying again.

“My training was what I needed to pull it off,” he said. “But I don’t mind admitting that I had to feel there was somebody up there looking after me.”How did he feel about knowing that, even with all the care he took in aiming only at military targets, someone was probably being killed by his bombs?“I certainly don’t like the idea that I might be killing anybody,” he replied. “But I don’t lose any sleep over it. You have to be impersonal in this business. Over North Vietnam, I condition myself to think that I’m a military man being shot at by another military man like myself.”

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