D-M 'boneyard' brings together pilots, their harrowing memories

Dillon, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1984, started out in T-33 trainers and flew many other planes parked and packaged at AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center). He spent 12 years in F-105 Thunderchiefs, an elegant workhorse of the Vietnam War.

That's one of the things he and Barnett have in common; they both flew many missions in 105s during Vietnam.

But Barnett's last government-issue plane isn't at this boneyard.

Last he saw of it, midafternoon Oct. 3, 1967, Barnett was swinging from a partially opened parachute and watching his F-105 burning far below him in the North Vietnamese jungle.

Barnett didn't have much time to think about that. There was the matter of that "balled" parachute above him as he plunged toward the ground.

Fortunately, the chute started to open before he landed in a tree and made it to the ground at a survivable speed.

If you were just listening to the tone and not the words, you'd think Barnett was describing a parking lot fender bender to his insurance agent. He's soft-spoken, tall and doesn't look 78.

He's sitting in a minivan with the side door open, speaking while Dillon visits with a mothballed A-10 he likely flew while a flight instructor at D-M.

Pam Reed, a Tucson photographer doing a book about pilots being reunited with their planes — or planes like them— at AMARC, is on hand, snapping away.

But Barnett is 40 years away, recalling that he took off from his base in Thailand. There were 20 planes, four "weasels" — planes that were equipped to detect and destroy anti-aircraft SAM (Surface-to-air missile) emplacements en route to a target area — and four groups of four F-105 fighter-bombers.

There's not a speck of drama in Barnett's retelling, and none of the "aw shucks, it was nothin' " movie fighter-jock stuff. Yet, it's totally riveting.

They flew across Laos, out over the Gulf of Tonkin, refueling along the way before turning inland near Haiphong. It was a long haul, with lots of time to think about what was ahead. They were to bomb pontoon bridges about 11 miles northeast of Hanoi to interrupt North Vietnamese supply lines.

They were approaching the target when one of the weasel pilots, Barnett remembers, said it would be "no sweat."

"I'm looking at the target, roll and dive bomb. The weasel turned off."

But Barnett recalls hearing a ping, the audible sign of a "triple A" — anti-aircraft artillery — seeking its own target: him.

Then a SAM exploded 30 or 40 feet behind Barnett's F-105, close enough to damage the plane.

Suddenly he had an indicator light showing an engine fire.

Following training, he started dumping ordnance and headed for water, the harbor he had crossed on the way in.

Then he felt the stick go dead.

"It's all hydraulic," Barnett says of the F-105's controls.

No hydraulics, no control.

But, again, the training kicked in and he manually locked the tail control surface, a provision on the F-105 that allowed for flat and level flight — assuming there was thrust.

"I was still on fire," Barnett said.

He was still nearly 10 miles from Haiphong Harbor when he ejected at 360 knots, 16,000 feet above the jungle.

Surviving his fall from the sky, his next concern was avoiding enemy troops.

"I pulled the chute out of the tree, hid that. Got away," figuring someone on the ground would have seen where he landed.

Barnett said he landed in a "good place to get picked up."

Unfortunately, the Navy helicopter that would have picked him up was rescuing another pilot who went down over Haiphong Harbor, and was too short on fuel to get to Barnett.

He remembers heading for the hills for the night and seeing the chopper that came for him in the morning struck by enemy fire. He learned it ditched in the harbor.

Barnett spent two days on the run, trying to get to the water, sometimes having enemy soldiers nearly step on him.

He had one candy bar and no water. But he had some luck.

He followed a path through the jungle, seeing people occasionally and hiding until they passed.

On the third day, he heard a loud voice and a gunshot and took off running. He ran for about 30 minutes.

"I hid in the bushes, but all of a sudden, (there were) 10 men in loin cloths with spears — and a dog."

The men missed him, but the dog sniffed around and found him in the cover, and bit him on the shoulder.

"They took me to a little village and put me on display."

Barnett says it was like being a display at the county fair.

"They tied me up for a whole night. You've heard about the rope tricks?," he says, explaining that North Vietnamese would bind prisoners' arms and legs in torturous positions and then sit on them.

Eventually they took him to Hanoi, Barnett said.

That started six or seven days of around-the-clock torture and interrogation.

But he was in good company.

"They were shooting down a lot of guys," Barnett recalls of the fall months in 1967.

He was one of 342 prisoners in what the prisoners called "the Hanoi Hilton," during "the early period" — 1965-1967.

He spent more than five years — 1,989 days there; for the first couple of years his wife and family didn't know if he was even alive.

He was released March 14, 1973, 34 years ago. He left the Air Force a colonel.

Reed says all the pilots she's met while taking the pictures for her book and exhibitions, whether POWs or not, have something intangible about them that she finds compelling.

"They're brave, they're wild. They're proud, but they're not big braggers," she says.

If you go

An exhibition of Pam Reed's photos — "Days Gone By: The Aircraft of the Boneyard and the Pilots Who Flew Them" — of pilot and plane reunions at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base's AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center), aka "the boneyard," are on display at Tucson International Airport's Lower Link Gallery through June 1.

You can see some of the photos at Reed's Web site: www.alteregoimages.com