40 AH January 2016
A
mid the wreckage of one
of the U.S. Army’s worst
defeats in Vietnam—the
Battle of Kham Duc—
acts of heroism shone, none
more brightly than Lt. Col.
Joe Jackson’s rescue of three
otherwise-doomed American
airmen. Kham Duc was an
isolated Special Forces camp
with a single short, narrow
runway, and in May 1968
the base was overrun by the
NVA. A thousand U.S. and
South Vietnamese troops and
many civilians were evacu-
ated from the beleaguered
strip by a stream of Air Com-
mando C-123 Providers and
C-130s. Their rescues includ-
ed extracting the three-man
Air Force combat control
team (CCT) that had been
on the ground coordinating
the evacuation.In a baffling display of
desk-jockey stubbornness,
Saigon ordered the CCT back
into Kham Duc to finish their
job, despite the fact that
nearly everybody had already
been evacuated. The team
was back in Kham Duc just
in time to hear the airborne
command post declare the
evacuation finished.
Fortunately, the C-130
crew that had emplaced
them made it abundantly
clear that three Americans
were still on the ground. A
C-123 landed to pick up the
abandoned CCT, but mortar,
rocket and machine-gun fire
turned the landing into an
immediate touch-and-go.
(Eight aircraft had already
been shot down or destroyed
on the ground.) Colonel
Jackson, also piloting aProvider, was next in line,
and it never occurred to
him to say the rescue was
too risky. To give the North
Vietnamese the least possible
opportunity to target him,
Jackson used what we’d
today call a tactical approach
and assault landing, diving
from 9,000 feet with gear
and flaps down, power at
idle, and then touching down
short and hard. The runway
was blocked by a wrecked
helo, allowing only 2,200
clear feet for takeoff, but the
CCT scrambled aboard and
Jackson was off moments
later—as a 122mm rocket
landed just 25 feet from the
Provider’s nose, but thank-
fully didn’t explode.
For his selfless heroism,
Jackson was awarded the
Medal of Honor.A PROVIDER PROVIDES AN OUT
medal of honor action
Jackson begins turning
around his C-123 (1) to
avoid a wrecked CH-47 (2)
blocking the runway and
pick up the trapped team.
A damaged C-130 (3) sits
just beyond an O-2 (4) that
had also crash-landed.3412