Former Vietnam War antagonists buddy up during UT Dallas lecture

Pegasus News: Former Vietnam War antagonists buddy up during UT Dallas lecture
It was a surreal scene in the Jonsson Performance Hall at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Saturday afternoon as a trio of air combatants from the Vietnam War came together, embraced like old friends, and traded tales of air combat.

Why surreal? Because one of the airmen involved flew a MIG-21 for the North Vietnamese; one of the American airmen shot him down; and the other American was shot down by him.

Brig. Gen. Dan Cherry, USAF (Ret.) was flying his F-4D Phantom on a combat mission over North Vietnam in April 1972 when he and his wingman became involved in a dogfight with a MIG flown (Cherry later discovered) by Lt. Nguyen Hong My. The ensuing air battle was chronicled in a digital reenactment which aired on the History Channel program, Dogfights (Episode: "Hell Over Hanoi"). During the back-and-forth maneuver-and-shoot engagement, Cherry and his wingman loosed no fewer than five guided missiles at the MIG; Hong My was able to elude all but the last of them, employing a secret strategy practiced by North Vietnamese pilots during their training sessions.

(Speaking through an interpreter, Hong My attempted to explain the evasive maneuver strategy; to the best of my understanding, it involved waiting for the missile to begin tracking one's flight path and then veering sharply away from it. Seems pretty straightforward.)

The final missile launched by Cherry found its target, blowing the right wing off Hong My's plane. (Hong My explained through his interpreter that the reason he wasn't able to evade that one was because he didn't see the telltale flash of the missile's ignition, and thus could not time his evasive maneuver.)

As documented in the History Channel reenactment, Cherry saw the MIG pilot parachuting safely away from the falling aircraft as he flew away. What he couldn't have known at the time was that Hong My's ejection did not go smoothly — both his arms were broken against the frame of his aircraft's canopy as he rocketed clear. Unable to control his parachute, he ended up compressing three vertebrae on impact with the ground. (He spent six months in the hospital recovering, and then went back to flying combat missions.) After the war, Hong My enjoyed a successful career in the insurance business.

Cherry's Phantom (designated 550) went on to serve another pilot on air patrol in Korea, and was eventually retired from service; it ended up standing proudly in front of a VFW post in a small town in Ohio, where Cherry and some friends stumbled across it by happy accident. Sadly, by 2005, the jet was in bad repair, having been more or less splattered beyond recognition by the local bird population. Cherry and his associates resolved to restore his trusty F-4 and received Air Force approval to transport it to his home town of Bowling Green, Ky., where they made it the centerpiece of an open-air museum called Aviation Heritage Park.

It was during their restoration efforts that Cherry and his friends began speculating about what might have happened to the North Vietnamese pilot he shot down back in 1972. Was he still alive? Could there be a way to identify him? Cherry put out some feelers, and before long, a popular TV hostess in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) contacted him to let him know the man was indeed alive and well — and oh, by the way, would Cherry like to come to Vietnam and meet him during a live TV broadcast?

Cherry would, and did, and was later invited to a celebratory dinner at Hong My's home in Hanoi. The two flew by commercial airline over terrain they'd both patrolled during wartime. Hong My toured Cherry around the city; at one point they visited the museum that now occupies the "Hanoi Hilton," which served as a prison for captured American soldiers during the war.

(In a touching reminiscence, Cherry told how Hong My hung back in silent respect while Cherry examined the photographs of American prisoners to see if he recognized anyone. He did.)

During their time together, Cherry noticed that Hong My wore a medal indicating that he'd shot down an enemy aircraft. Before leaving Vietnam, Hong My asked Cherry to assist him with his goal of visiting the United States, and of discovering the identity of the air crew whose plane he'd shot down. Hong My feared that the occupants of the aircraft had been killed.

Using the date and location information provided by Hong My, Cherry was able to track down Lt. John Stiles, USAF (Ret.), who served as navigator aboard the RF-4C Hong My hit with a missile in January of 1972 over North Vietnam. (The pilot of Stiles' plane — Bob Mock — also survived the encounter, but sadly passed away only a couple of months before Cherry began searching for his identity.) Mock and Stiles astonishingly survived a low-altitude bail-out with only minor injuries. Two days after they were rescued by an Air American chopper (whose pilot, Bob Noble, sat in the UTD audience on Saturday, listening to Stiles' account), Mock and Stiles were back in the air flying reconnaissance missions.

Reluctantly, Stiles agreed to meet with Hong My during his U.S. visit. Stiles and Mock had always thought they'd been hit by a surface-to-air missile, but after sitting down with Hong My (and his interpreter) over lunch, Stiles realized that they'd been wrong: Hong My told him things about the incident that only someone who was there could have known. His meeting with Hong My proved a cathartic experience, and — just like Cherry — Stiles found himself burying the hatchet with his wartime antagonist.

Hong My has now visited the U.S. on four occasions. During a recent visit to Bowling Green's Aviation Heritage Park he became the first pilot in history to sit in the actual cockpit of the aircraft that shot him down — Dan Cherry's immaculately restored F-4D 550.

Through his interpreter, Hong My described his emotions while visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., where the names of 58,000+ U.S. service members who died in Vietnam/South East Asia — and those who remain missing in action — are inscribed. He then spoke of his countrymen who died during the war, a figure he estimated at seven million. He invited the audience to stand for a moment of silence in memory of those on both sides of the conflict who fought and died.

I've got to admit, it was more than a little odd seeing an auditorium peppered with U.S. military veterans applauding a North Vietnamese battle veteran. Dan Cherry, who wrote a book about the whole thing, closed the program by emphasizing the futility of grudges when faced with the power of friendship.

Hong My, when he was first handed a copy of Cherry's book, expressed his disappointment over its title (My Enemy, My Friend). As he told Cherry:

"I don't think you and I were ever enemies. We were just soldiers doing the best we could for our countries during a very difficult time."