A moment of daring ingenuity, a lifetime of lore
Tricky maneuver earned fighter pilot legendary status
COLLEGE STATION — Badly shot up on a mission over North Vietnam, an F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber with the radio call sign Cheetah 4 was rapidly leaking fuel.
A few feet away, Capt. Bob Pardo was flying Cheetah 2 — also damaged — and trying to think of a way to help Capt. Earl Aman and his weapons officer, First Lt. Robert Houghton.
The F-4 was famously fast and tough, but it was heavy and not much of a glider. If it ran out of fuel, it would drop fast, and Pardo knew that if Aman and Houghton bailed out there, they would face either execution by angry civilians or imprisonment in Hanoi.
What happened next became Air Force legend — “Pardo’s Push,” a feat done only once before, in the Korean War, and never attempted since. Pardo and his backseater, 1st Lt. Steve Wayne, pushed Aman and Houghton some 88 miles into
Laos before all four of them ejected and were rescued.
“I had originally thought of flying in underneath him and coming up against his belly and giving him a piggyback ride. But we got within about a foot of his airplane and the nose of mine started trying to come up,” Pardo, 85, recently recalled. “And I said, ‘No, that’s going to bang us into him.’
“About 40 years later I figured out what was happening,” he continued, chain-smoking and laughing at the memory in a recent interview at his home in College Station. “The jet wash from his engine was coming right down on the tail of my airplane. But as I backed out from under him and I saw the tailhook, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got nothing to lose and we’re not going to hurt the airplanes – they’re both dead anyway.’ So I said, ‘Put the hook down.’ ”
Pardo maneuvered the nose of his F-4 so that the tailhook — designed to yank a plane to a quick landing on a too-short runway or a Navy carrier — rested against a bit of metal near his cockpit canopy. Aman had to cut his engines, but it worked. They limped along at less than 300 mph.
The story was celebrated with whisky, beer and talk of a medal, but Pardo had put himself on a collision course with a superior, an Air Force general who had earned notoriety for his early rejection of the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II.
Having rescued two men, Pardo might be decorated. Or he might be court-martialed.
“I know Bob Pardo and I know the story,” said Gen. Ronald Fogleman, a retired Air Force chief of staff and Vietnam War fighter pilot. “And there’s a little bit more to the story than just the event itself.”
The gauntlet
When Pardo awoke at Ubon Royal Thai Air Base on March 10, 1967, it was a routine morning of war. Sometimes the pilots flew bombing missions, sometimes escort duty or combat air patrols.
If Pardo had checked the date and realized it was his birthday, he might not have flown. If he were to be shot down, it would be even harder on his family. But he missed the day’s significance as he and his unit pointed their bomb-laden F-4s toward North Vietnam’s only steel mill.
An Air Force campaign to knock out the mill had lasted more than a week, with North Vietnam raising the stakes by bringing in more antiaircraft guns along the approaches. One morning an intelligence officer told the pilots there were 1,000 guns within five miles of the mill, and surface-to-air missiles as well.
“The intel officer said, ‘I’m not going to brief defenses anymore,’ ” Pardo recalled.
They still had 40 miles to go when Cheetah 4 was hit, but Aman elected to continue after deciding the plane was OK. Off course because of bad weather, they rolled into their attack at a much shallower angle than planned and Aman’s F-4 took more fire. Pardo realized they couldn’t hit the mill and he, too, was struck by ground fire as he began to pull away.
The flight leader called for a fuel check.
“He and the element leader had their standard 7,000 pounds of gas to make it all the way home,” Pardo said. “I had 5,000 pounds, which meant that I had to hit the (aerial refueling) tanker, and Earl had 2,000 pounds, which means he’s not going to make it out of North Vietnam.
“So ordinarily we would have waited until we were probably 20 miles away (from) the target before climbing above 12,000 to 14,000 feet. Earl didn’t wait. He started climbing right away,” he said. “I knew something was bad wrong because of his fuel state, so I started climbing with him. When we got up to, oh, 30,000 feet, he leveled off and he was streaming fuel.”
Joining the Air Force
John Robert Pardo’s life had been in a holding pattern before he joined the Air Force. In 1953, enrolled in the University of Houston, he had acted in a play, doing so well that the head of the drama department offered a scholarship.
Life there was good. Pardo worked three jobs. He ran the switchboard and the billiard room at his dorm, where he “made a pretty good living shooting pool.”
But Pardo quit school and went to work digging pipeline ditches for his father, a foreman for a gas company. His dad warned it would be hard, and it was. When a buddy told him the Air Force was accepting pilot candidates right out of high school, Pardo applied.
He loved it.
He was a natural in the cockpit. Released from the hospital after an illness, he returned to flight training, where his instructor said he need to do so some make-up work.
“He said, ‘Get you an airplane and go out and do this and this and this and this,’ ” Pardo recalled. “What he forgot was, he hadn’t soloed me. And so I said, ‘Yes sir,’ and jumped in my little airplane and went out and did all the stuff he told me to do, and I caught up pretty quick.”
Up until that day, he had flown only three hours with the instructor.
Sticking with his wingman
While he had enough fuel to rendezvous with an airborne tanker, Pardo wasn’t about to abandon Aman and Houghton. Long before he went to Vietnam his dad had told him, “If someone needs help, you help.”
“How can you fly off and leave someone you just fought a battle with?” he asked.
How Pardo might help was the question.
Fifteen years earlier, in 1952, Air Force Brig. Gen. Robinson Risner, a longtime San Antonio resident and Korean War fighter ace, had pushed a fellow F-86 pilot 60 miles to open water. The pilot, Lt. Joe Logan, bailed out but drowned when he became tangled in the canopy lines of his parachute.
An Air Force Magazine account said that Logan, his wingman, had protected then-Captain Risner after he swooped over a Chinese runway north of the Yalu River. Logan’s jet began spewing fuel and hydraulic fluid after being hit by flak.
Risner told Logan to shut down his engine and pressed the air intake of his F-86 into the crippled plane’s tailpipe. Risner later was one of the highestranking POWs of the Vietnam War, but his daring rescue attempt wasn’t well-known.
“When that happened, I was in high school,” Pardo said. “I hadn’t even heard of the Air Force yet.”
An 8th Tactical Fighter Wing history called Pardo’s own attempt in 1967 a “complicated ballet,” but it was less a dance than the repeated bumpy collisions of two 55,597-pound jets, both leaking fuel and at risk of catching fire or blowing up.
Aman deployed his drag chute, with Pardo intending to put the nose of his plane into the chute’s rear port.
That didn’t work, so he tried the piggyback ride, but there was too much turbulence. After telling Aman to drop his tailhook, Pardo inched forward until it made contact with the canopy of his plane.
That lasted all of 15 seconds. “The windshield started to crack and at the base of the windshield there’s a small metal area for hot air to be blown up over the windshield for rain removal, ice removal, so I moved the hook down there and it was much more stable; it didn’t slide as much,” he said.
It worked better, for about 10 minutes, after Pardo told Aman to shut down his two engines.
Then an alarm went off in Pardo’s cockpit at 12,000 feet. His left engine had caught fire. Pardo shut it down and their descent worsened.
“We’re not going to make it to the jungle,” Pardo said, and in a desperate moment re-started the engine.
“You might want to shut that thing down,” Wayne, his weapons officer, said from the back seat a minute later. “It’s 1,000 degrees.” The maximum temperature was supposed to be 600.
They flew another eight minutes on one engine. Barely over Laos, the planes were so low there was only one thing left to do: Aman and Houghton punched out.
“We saw two good chutes, and we turned and headed for a Special Forces camp that we knew of, thought we can at least eject over some friendlies, but we were a little shorter on gas than I realized and we’d only gone about a minute and a half and we flamed out,” Pardo said. “So we ejected.”
Combat search and rescue teams got them back to Thailand. Treated to shots of Scotch in the helicopter, Pardo got a full glass from a flight surgeon on the ground, who found he had broken his back during the parachute landing.
At the base, the word was out. Pardo and Wayne were heroes and would be decorated.
“Everybody thought it was just fine,” Pardo said. “They were already writing recommendations.”
Another rumor, however, was circulating. This one had Lt. Gen. William Wallace “Spike” Momyer, commander of the 7th Air Force in Vietnam, ordering a court-martial for Pardo.
Momyer, who died seven years ago at 95, was once described as one of the Air Force’s greatest tacticians.
In WWII, when Momyer was commander of the 33rd Fighter Group and oversaw the 99th Fighter Squadron, the Air Force’s first all-black fighter unit, he wrote a report that led to media skepticism of the combat skills of African American pilots. The report, based on a single incident, said the 99th pilots’ “formation flying has been very satisfactory until jumped by enemy aircraft, when the squadron seems to deteriorate” and suggested they were cowardly.
It wasn’t a rare sentiment for 1943 and it was backed by other military brass, including the commander of the Army Air Forces, Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who labeled the Tuskegee experiment a failure. But Arnold later conceded that it was unfair to kill the program without more opportunities to fly in combat. The 99th was then integrated with white units and performed well for the rest of the war.
Momyer now commanded all U.S. air operations in Indochina and apparently took a dim view of the risk Pardo had run.
But Pardo had his fighter wing commander in his corner, the charismatic Col. Robin Olds. A triple ace with a waxed handlebar moustache, Olds was famous for luring North Vietnames MiG-21s into a surprise dogfight, shooting down seven of them, by getting his F-4s to use the call signs and flight tactics of bombers.
On leave when Momyer ordered the court-martial, Olds quickly canceled it, went to Saigon and cut a deal with the “big chief,” as some called Momyer. There would be no courtmartial if Pardo didn’t receive a medal.
That didn’t bother Pardo — “I didn’t do it to get a medal,” he said.
‘Earl came home’
Decades passed. Aman fell ill and Pardo came to his rescue again.
“After retiring, Aman was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease and Pardo actually formed a foundation that raised money,” said Fogleman, the retired chief of staff. “And I remember he got him a motorized wheelchair and some other things.”
Pardo also ended up pinning a Silver Star on Aman a few years before he died in 1998. Talk of a medal, so loud after the push, wasn’t even a whisper until the day a military assistant to then-U.S. Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, asked Pardo about it.
Tower recommended Pardo and Wayne for the Air Force Cross, the service’s highest award for valor. They each received the Silver Star, the medal just below it, in 1989, as did Aman and Houghton a few years later.
“I was very surprised,” Pardo said. “I thought it was ancient history.”
It’s a history that still resonates. Gen. Mark Welsh, a former A-10 and F-16 pilot who also retired as an Air Force chief of staff, called the push “an incredible piece of Air Force heritage that people will talk about forever.”
“In the heat of battle, and when something difficult is happening, fighter pilots come up with very creative ways of being successful,” observed retired Gen. Lloyd W. “Fig” Newton, an F-4 pilot in Vietnam who later led the Air Education and Training Command.
Pardo, retired with his wife, Kathryn, still tells the story occasionally. He paused when asked if he had a favorite part of it.
It wasn’t the Silver Star that came to mind. And it wasn’t the daring ingenuity of the push, captured in a painting that hangs at the 12th Flying Training Wing at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph.
He was thinking of Lucy Aman, his wingman’s wife. “Lucy may tell you she thinks it’s wonderful because Earl came home and they got to have two sons,” Pardo said.
“The jet wash from his engine was coming right down on the tail of my airplane. But as I backed out from under him and I saw the tailhook, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got nothing to lose and we’re not going to hurt the airplanes – they’re both dead anyway.’ So I said, ‘Put the hook down.’ ”