Dagger Four Is OK: Brigadier General Norman C. Gaddis POW Memoir

By Bill Norris

At the age of eighteen, armed with a dream of flying and the desire to serve his country, Norman Gaddis enlists in the Army Air Corps in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After twenty-four years of service and seventy-two combat missions, he is shot down while in flight in an F-4 Phantom over Hanoi. He spends the next 2,124 days

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nekko Books LLC
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780991540945

Book preview

Other books in the Vietnam series by Bill Norris

Flying Into The Storm

Dagger Four Is OK

Brig. Gen. Norman C. Gaddis

P. O. W. Memoir

By

Bill Norris

Copyright © 2015 Bill Norris

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the author.

ISBN 978-0-9915409-3-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015906377

Published by Nekko Books LLC

www.nekkobooks.com

Email: [e-mail]

Edited by C. E. Wertheimer

Cover art by:

Sheila Norris

Nekko Books LLC

Cover:

Original photo taken by the North Vietnamese immediately upon the capture of Colonel Norman C. Gaddis, F-4 Pilot, on May 12, 1967. General Gaddis was asked by the U.S. Government in the early 1990’s to review a batch of photographs retrieved from the North Vietnamese to see if he recognized anyone. He was amazed to discover his own photo. He knew it was taken immediately since they stripped him of his flight suit as soon as he was taken prisoner.

Acknowledgements

To Charley Wertheimer, Editor. Your friendship, patience and determination were invaluable in the completion of this most worthwhile and historical project.

To Sheila Norris, my wife and life partner. Your loving belief and support keep the words flowing.

POW Lament

Sitting alone in this dark place, have no one here to share my space,

Have no pillow for my head, just one thin blanket for my bed;

Nobody here to keep me sane, there’s no one else to feel my pain.

How can it be so cold when it’s just a summer rain?

It’s been so long since I felt love, no smile or sign from the Lord above;

I’m in need of a human touch, never knew that it could mean so much.

Just need someone to give me a hand, need a shave but don’t think I can;

My body aches, my back is bent, yet I know a doctor won’t be sent.

To get to this place I felt such a fool, how can my world be so cruel?

Now as I sit here in the cold, I can feel my body growing old;

I can only see the gloom, as I stare at the four walls of this room.

A thousand days and long lonely nights, I need a friend to share my plight.

When I feel I can’t go on, there’s a glimmer of light in the crack of dawn,

For in my dreams I can see my past, and know this current hell won’t last.

I reach for you, arms open wide, I’ll be a man and keep my pride;

I lean on my faith to carry me through, and I hope it will bring me back to you.

But for now, how can it be so cold, when it’s just a summer rain?

-Bill Norris

Dedication

For her devotion, her undying love, her strength, her wisdom, her unshakable faith in Him and me, for her days and months of agony, for her steadfastness in shaping the lives and values of our two sons, for constantly rejecting the idea that there can be no tomorrow, I dedicate this work to my wife, Hazel Lee.

Norman C. Gaddis

Preface

This is my personal account of my military career and my experiences as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for almost six years. The facts are true and no effort has been made to embellish them. I have long wanted to document my experiences while I was confined in the infamous North Vietnamese Hoa Lo Prison, facetiously named The Hanoi Hilton by my colleagues, some of whom arrived there almost three years before me.

I was successful returning to society and even in resuming my military career after my release. When I retired from the Air Force, Hazel and I purchased a lot next to the thirteenth green in Bermuda Run, a gated community near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On that lot we built the home I had carefully constructed in my mind while enduring one thousand days as a POW in solitary confinement. Designing and building that home in my dream world helped to maintain my sanity.

After my retirement, my private goal of writing the story of my capture and captivity kept eating at me. While I was able to write down experiences, I was finding it hard to bring it together in a readable manuscript. In the midst of my struggling, I was fortunate to be able to renew my friendship with Bill Norris.

Hazel and I met Bill and his wife, Sheila, back in the early 1990’s when they moved into Bermuda Run. Bill was also a Vietnam veteran and Hazel and I became immediate friends with them. They subsequently moved to Florida, but we stayed in touch.

In March of 2014, Bill published his book, Flying Into The Storm, which documents his experiences as an infantryman. Having shared many of our stories with each other when we were both in Bermuda Run, he sent me an autographed copy. I was mesmerized by his straight forward writing style that took me with him through his year in combat. My own memories flashed through my mind as I was reading and my desire to share my experiences with others was reinvigorated.

I wrote Bill a letter complimenting him on his book and sharing with him how energized I was by reading it. After receiving my letter, Bill called and asked if I would like to have him tell my story for me. He said it was a story that needed to be told.

I gratefully accepted Bill’s offer because I had been incentivized by two significant events to share my experiences. The first was the completion and dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It seemed to signify to veterans like me of that unpopular war that America was, in a strange sort of way, trying to say Thank you for your sacrifices. Rarely has any monument to America’s veterans evoked such emotions as we watched relatives and friends search the long, black, V-shaped marble monument to find the name of a loved one who died half a world away.

The second event was the final interment of the remains of a Vietnam veteran in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. One could not witness that solemn ceremony without feeling compassion for the family who would never know that their loved one was honored on that day and for the families of the twenty-four hundred Americans still missing in Southeast Asia. I harbored the knowledge that my family could easily have been a member of that terrible club. I know first-hand from the accounts from my family that the months and years spent not knowing is the most grueling and punishing experience one can endure short of being themselves missing or in captivity.

The passage of time is a desperately welcomed healer that has the ability to take our most difficult memories and lock them away in our minds’ secret vault, allowing those of us who served the opportunity to move forward and live our lives as normally as possible. However, the harsh realities of war and the price we pay both individually and as a nation must be remembered and acknowledged for all time by those who are empowered to decide the fate of our men and women who dedicate themselves to the service of their country.

Hopefully, this work will help others to remember and reflect on the consequences of sending our sons and daughters off to war.

I was born to fly.

I should have been delivered into this world with wings attached.

I guess God must have wanted me to earn them.

Chapter 1

The latter part of 1964 saw American involvement in Vietnam intensify. The North Vietnam insurgents sent troops and equipment into Cambodia and Laos and began to establish regular troop and supply movements up and down what would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail that wove in and out of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The South Vietnamese were incapable of holding off the insurgents from North Vietnam who were attacking targets near Saigon.

President Johnson authorized American ground forces to engage the insurgents. Boots on the ground, the United States was now immersed in the conflict. American pilots who had been flying rear seat as advisors to the ARVN (Army Regular Vietnam) pilots were now flying the attack airplanes with South Vietnamese pilots sitting in the back seat. It was a necessary role reversal if air superiority was to be maintained.

In February of 1965, the U.S. began to bomb targets in the southern part of North Vietnam. To implement the change in strategy, America began a massive buildup of U.S. Army and Air Force units in support of its rapidly escalating involvement.

At that point in time, I was completing a tour of duty in the Pentagon which would end in July. While I had not given much thought as to where I would be assigned next, it was rumored that I was being considered for a staff assignment at NATO in Oslo, Norway. Coincidentally, in July, before I had received new assignment orders, the Air Force announced its list for the Senior Service Schools. I was selected to attend the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. It came as a complete surprise to me since I was a very junior Lieutenant Colonel. The National War College was for mid-level managers and senior military officers and I had not held a command position, such as a Wing Commander or Base Commander. I was pleasantly surprised. The real up side was that our family could remain in Falls Church.

The class consisted of one hundred thirty-six men from the Armed Forces and at least one person from each of the major government agencies. It was a diverse group of people with an assigned curriculum in the field of International Relations.

There were no foreign students in the class although our primary speakers were from International Military Organizations such as NATO and SEATO, diplomats from the U.S. State Department and world trade organizations. We, the students, were required to write a thesis on a subject related to our studies. I chose to write on the subject of Australia and Its Strategic Importance to the Unites States. Circumstances in Vietnam prompted our program directors to add Southeast Asia to all of our assignments.

A feature of the class was to break out at midpoint and travel to countries involved in our thesis along with other students whose subject focused on the same region. Our Australia-Southeast Asia focus group consisted of forty students and instructors.

In December, before our Pacific trip would commence, Mother called to tell me that Dad was in the hospital with severe kidney failure and he was not expected to survive. Two days after Christmas he had slipped into a coma. I notified the college of his condition and was allowed to take an emergency leave. Hazel and I arrived in Knoxville just before he passed away on December 29, 1965. Dad was only sixty-three years old.

When we returned home to Falls Church on January 4, 1966, I departed on the War College trip to the Pacific Area that would last almost three weeks. Our focus group traveled to Hawaii first to attend a general military briefing on the state of the entire Pacific area. The primary focus of concern was the ongoing conflict in South Vietnam.

After Hawaii, our trip included conferences in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand. Lastly, we attended a special briefing and assessment of the Vietnam situation during our final stop in the Philippines. There were few words of encouragement regarding the military outlook or hope for any kind of favorable early resolution to the conflict.

Upon completion of our travels and as graduation approached, I had high hopes that I would get the rumored NATO assignment in Norway. However, when the orders list was released, I was assigned to the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing at Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam. I later learned that Colonel Jones E. Bolt, the commander of the 12th Wing who I was stationed with at Neubiberg, Germany from 1950 to 1952, had requested me. He was a seasoned Wing commander having commanded a fighter wing in Okinawa for three years.

The news of an overseas combat assignment at this point in my career was not what I hoped for either for me or my family. When war broke out after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I had gladly volunteered for service. I fully expected to fly prolonged fighter missions in that war and was disappointed that my training took too long for me to be included, especially after the death of my brother who was killed during the invasion of Omaha Beach in 1944.

I knew that the purpose of my years of training as a fighter pilot was to prepare me to represent my country in war. I truly never expected that my military path would lead me to Southeast Asia to get involved in a war in an obscure country that had a history of prolonged and unresolved conflict.

The hardest call I ever made to my wife, Hazel, was to inform her of my news about Vietnam. It was more than the fact that I would be going off to war. More importantly, we would be separated for an extended period at a stage when I felt that our family needed me the most. The death of my father weighed heavily on me and I knew my mother would fret terribly for a second son to be going into harms’ way.

Once the initial shock of the news began to ease, it was time for us to plan for Hazel’s and our son Tony’s life without me for the coming year. With Steve, our other son, now in college at Duke University, there was no compelling reason for her to remain in the Washington area. It would be more practical for her to be near family. Therefore, we decided Hazel and Tony should consider moving to Winston-Salem to be near her Mom during my absence.

Before we could get comfortable with a decision, we learned that Hazel’s mother, Lola, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. At the same time, I learned that I would need to go to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa for eighteen weeks of training to fly the F-4C airplanes since I had not qualified in them.

We drove to Winston-Salem to visit with Lola and to meet with her doctors. Their unfortunate diagnosis was that she could be expected to live for two or three more years at most. There was no longer a question where Hazel needed to go during my absence. At the same time, learning that Lola’s circumstance did not require Hazel to be with her right now, it allowed Hazel to accompany me to Tampa for the first few months of my training. We immediately requested that the Air Force place our furniture in temporary storage for ninety days.

I started thinking about Hazel’s needs while I would be away. Our car was six years old so we decided to purchase a new Pontiac Tempest. I would feel much better knowing she was driving a reliable car.

Starting in the latter part of May, I was scheduled to be in flight training at MacDill for about four and a half months, so we rented temporary housing in an apartment at Madeira Beach near St. Petersburg. I cherished every hour I was able to spend with my family knowing that when this training assignment ended, I would be leaving them for a year.

Tony had to be registered for school by late August so we invited Steve to come from Durham to spend two weeks with us before Hazel had to leave for Winston-Salem and Steve had to be back to start the fall semester at Duke. We rented a small trailer for our belongings, and Steve helped me with the drive to Winston-Salem. Hazel’s step-father rented us a three-bedroom apartment near Tony’s school. As soon as they were settled in I returned to MacDill to finish my training and moved into the Visiting Officers Quarters. The training moved along smoothly. By October 1, 1966, I had flown over seventy-five hours in the F-4C.

Shortly thereafter, the Air Force promotion list came out and I was promoted to Colonel effective on October 20. I was both stunned and humbled. In eighteen years, I had