The Phantom was the fastest war plane in the world when Peterson flew.

Shot down twice, and still around to talk about it

Larry Peterson is a high energy guy.
When he describes how his F4 Phantom was shot down in Vietnam in 1967, he has to stand up to show the gyrations of the aircraft as the pilot tried to muscle the jet fighter to the sea.
With his arms flying and his legs hopping, the 69-year-old former school teacher recreates the last flight of his plane as it plunged and soared its way to the coast. Both pilot and co-pilot expected at any moment that the plane, with its left wing and left engine on fire, would blow up.
For Peterson, it was an introduction to the Vietnam War that is burned in his memory. It was his first mission. It was his first taste of combat. It was almost his last.

Larry Peterson grew up in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, attending high school at Alden, Minnesota, and graduating in 1960.
He went to Gustavus Adolphus College, and, in 1963, concocted a plan with a buddy where they would hitchhike across America to Nova Scotia, work their way across the Atlantic on a Yugoslavian freighter, and then tour around Europe for a year. He would then return for his final year at Gustavus.
The plan only had one flaw. The U.S. government didn't agree. Peterson had been deferred from the draft as long as he was a college student. "They told me if I left the country, don't bother coming back."
Peterson's next option was to join the military. "I wanted to be a pilot, even though I had never flown. Not unless you count the two-cents a pound flights at the Albert Lea Airport. I knew I didn't want to be a Navy pilot because I knew I didn't want to try and land on a postage stamp in the ocean."
Peterson passed his tests and was sent to officer training school in Texas in September 1964. From there he did flight training in Arizona and other locations.
"I had been assigned to Germany, but I could read the handwriting on the wall. I said, 'Oh, hell, I might as well volunteer for Vietnam and get it over with.' As it turned out, it didn't make much difference. My friends who didn't volunteer were in Vietnam two or three months after I was."
There was more training in Florida. Peterson had been assigned as a co-pilot in the F-4 Phantom, meaning he sat in the back seat. "We had a stick and could fly the airplane, we just couldn't see very much."
In the Air Force slang of the time, Peterson was a GIB, or "guy in back." The pilot was called a MFWAIC (miff-wick) or, in language not allowed in a family newspaper, the person in charge.
The main job of the rear-seater was to let the pilot know when to use his armament. If Peterson had ever followed through on his orders to Germany, this would have included nuclear missiles.
While still in training, Peterson got a small taste of Vietnam when he and another pilot ferried a brand new jet fighter to the Air Force base at Da Nang. "We flew this beautiful, clean new plane in, and they gave us this dirty, crusty plane to fly out. Everything in the plane sort of rattled. I didn't think we'd get off the ground."
The short in-and-out opened up his eyes. "We could see stuff going off in the distance. It gave us a little inkling of what was going on."
When it was his turn to report to Vietnam, Peterson flew in a converted Boeing 707, that, in his estimation, was clearly overloaded. "I was looking out the window, and the wheels broke free of the runway just as the stripes marking the end of the airstrip went by."
The plane did make it to Vietnam, and Peterson reported to the 480th Tactical Fighter Squadron. "But I had this foreboding. I was a bachelor and a pretty free spirit, but I got my affairs in order before I left. It was very uncharacteristic of me. I was assuming that I wouldn't be coming back."
Peterson had no rose-colored glasses about his duty. Nearly all of his flights would be over North Vietnam where the anti-aircraft fire was heaviest. He would have to do 100 missions before coming home. There would be a mission almost every day.
His first mission was fairly routine to start. "We were just going to protect some 'ranch-hands' in their C-123 when they were spraying Agent Orange. Nothing happened, so when the mission was complete, we still had our armament.
"We heard from the forward air controller in his O-1 Bird Dog that there was some activity along the demilitarized zone. His voice was kind of shaky, I thought. Maybe it was because he was in a propeller plane, but it just seemed shaky to me."
Lt. Peterson's Phantom, skippered by Maj. James Hargrove of South Carolina, screamed along the tree tops and fired at some barges and a bridge. "We made multiple passes because we didn't see any anti-aircraft fire. Later, when we saw the gun camera film from the other Phantom, the air was full of stuff. Oh, well, ignorance is bliss."
A large "fwooomp" hit the left side of the aircraft. "I looked and our left wing was on fire, and our left engine was on fire. We were initially in control of the aircraft, and we decided to head for the sea."
The pilot and co-pilot had only seconds to make several important decisions. "Usually, you would bail out instantly in that situation, but we knew that we would be captured at the very least if we went down there. We had just been firing on and killing these people. We didn't think they'd be very friendly. We could see the ocean, and it was only about three miles away. Plus, the Phantom didn't have a reputation like some other planes of blowing up."
The pilot's control of the Phantom ended quickly when the hydraulics suddenly quit working. With the fins at the rear of the aircraft locked into a down position, the fighter immediately went into a climb straight up. "The stick just came straight back, and the two of us together couldn't budge it. We just went up and up and up until we lost air speed. Then we did a hammer head and started coming straight down."
Hargrove told Peterson it was his option to bail out if he wanted. The plane was equipped with ejector seats that would blast them free if activated. At the same time, Hargrove told Peterson, despite their precarious situation, "I think I've got this airplane."
Peterson decided to stay. "There were two reasons. I knew Jim Hargrove. I had trained with him. I knew what kind of pilot he was, and if he thought he had control of the plane, I trusted him. The second reason was I knew what was waiting for me on the ground if I bailed out now."
Hargrove's plan was to hit the afterburners. "This was counter-intuitive to say the least. We were already heading straight down, and this would just increase our airspeed. But he figured that if we got enough airspeed, the tail would take over."
The plan worked, sort of. The plane stopped heading toward ground and instead starting soaring straight up again. Again, it topped out and began dropping back to earth. Again, Hargrove hit the afterburners. Around this time a secondary problem began to surface. Because the ailerons were stuck, the plane would start heading in a direction that was not toward the sea. Hargrove would have to muscle it back on course.
"All this time, I was just sitting there going through my prayer beads, and I'm not even Catholic," Peterson said. "I was just along for the ride."
And what a ride. Up went the Phantom, and down came the Phantom. Up and down, up and down. Each up was a little less high, and each down came closer to the earth.
It took 10 minutes for the plane, which can cruise Mach 2, to make it three miles to the coast and then seven miles out to sea. But the problems were not over.
"We started to go into a spin on our way down one time. Watching this, the pilots in the other plane thought we were dead. Hargrove said that the next time we got up, if we got up, I should punch out."
Hargrove did get the fighter headed skyward again, and at about 3,000 feet, as the plane flipped over again, Peterson ejected. On the next loop, Hargrove ejected. They were now far enough out to sea that coastal guns and North Vietnamese boats should be unable to reach them.
"At that altitude, everything happens automatically. It blasts you out of the plane, pauses, separates you from the chair, pauses, and then deploys your parachute. I never opened my eyes until the chute deployed."
He was in time to see the F-4 make a fiery crash into the sea. And he could see Hargrove's chute, lower than his because he had bailed out at a lower altitude.
"My first thought was how beautiful everything was. It was a clear blue sky, and the ocean was an emerald green. It was beautiful."
Despite his dreamy appreciation of nature, Peterson knew he had to get busy. He got his life raft inflated, got his Mae West life vest inflated, and he got on his radio to report that his chute had opened and he was okay.
"I was enjoying the scenery, but when I could see the waves, I knew I was getting close to the water. As soon as we hit, we were supposed to release the chute so it didn't get tangled with the raft."
As it turned out, Peterson was able to release one shoulder strap, but didn't free the other one. "I got my knife out, but I was afraid to cut at the strap because I thought I might puncture the raft. Besides, I knew that in a few minutes, a trusty para-rescuer would be there to do it for me."
Peterson could hear a steady "whoomp, whoomp, whoop," in the distance, and he feared it was the engine of a North Vietnamese patrol boat. But it turned out, it was a Marine helicopter come to pick him up. A horse collar was lowered to the water on a rope.
"I was thinking, where's that para-rescuer who's going to help me? But all I got was that rope."
Peterson put the horse collar around him, and began his journey upward – still dragging his parachute by that unhooked strap. "The helicopter was about 75 or a hundred feet in the air, and the higher I went, the more the chute was dragging me down. I finally looked down, and it wasn't tangled or anything, it was just inflated by the rotor wash. I said, 'What the heck.'"
A few feet from the door, the chute won out and ripped Peterson from the horse collar. Back into the water he went, quickly buoyed up by his Mae West. "This time I didn't fool around. I just got my knife out and cut off the chute. I also waved off the chopper and pointed to Hargrove to pick him up. So they went and got Jay."
Soon, the chopper was back and this time the hoist was successful. "I finally figured out that this was a Marine combat chopper and didn't have para-rescuers. I didn't care anymore. I've always had the greatest respect for the Marines. They've saved my life more than once."

Peterson had been wounded during the ordeal, probably by being ejected from the aircraft. He spent several days in the hospital along with Hargrove, whose back was also injured. "But then somebody told us that if we went back to our outfit, we'd get sent on a plane to the Philippines for some R&R.
"Instead, the day we got back, we were scheduled for another mission. Oh, well, like I told somebody at the hospital. Only 99 missions left to go."
The missions each had their danger level. "If we got up by Hanoi, there was so much flak, it looked like an overcast. We had to fly through it on the way down, and then come back up through it again."
The 13th mission had its problems. "We were flying in what they called the 'extreme west DMZ.' We were flying over Laos. You didn't know we flew over Laos, did you?"
The mission was to shoot up trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and also to spot enemy guns when they fired at them. "But they would never fire at you on the way down, when you could mark their position. They would only fire when you were on your way out. Was that fair? There were times on a night mission that I could read a newspaper from the light of the tracers going by the cockpit."
On that mission, although neither pilot felt anything, a fire light came on in the fighter, "indicating there was a fire where there shouldn't have been." The pilot immediately reset his course for Thailand. On their way, another Phantom did a barrel roll around their plane and informed them there was no fire showing.
"Oh, well, we got to go to Thailand and get out of the war for a day."

On the 26th mission, Peterson again lost an aircraft. "We were just coming back into Danang over the mountains when the plane died. We'll never know for sure what happened because there was nothing left to the plane after it crashed. We figured it was what we called the 'golden bb,' which is what we called small arms fire that brought down a plane. The Air Force, though, called it an accident.
"In any case, it was a catastrophic failure, and we only had a second or two to decide what to do. We ejected. The plane was in the ground before the parachute deployed. It made a hole bigger than this building."
Peterson hit the ground hard. "I forgot all my training and came down stiffly. I came down in the world's hardest rice paddy. It was dry. I landed right on my tailbone and I couldn't move. I said out loud, 'You can have me. I'm just not going to move.'
"Just then, I heard six shots fired nearby. I counted them, one, two, three, four, five, six. I said out loud again, 'Disregard that last statement. You can't have me.'"
Peterson got out his .38 pistol and got into a sitting position. "I got over that backache really fast. That's what adrenaline will do for you." A battle was going on about a quarter mile away between the Marines and the Viet Cong.
A helicopter landed about a hundred yards away from where the pilot had gone down. "I wasn't going to wait for them to come for me. I just took off. When I dove inside that door, the crewman said, 'Wow, I've never seen anybody run that fast with combat gear on before.'"
This time, there was no hospital stay. "You just wanted to suck it up and get it over with."
Still, in only 26 missions, Peterson had crashed twice and had one close call. "By this time, I was the scheduling officer for the squadron. I used to tell people that they'd better be nice to me, or I'd schedule myself to fly with them."
The crash did leave Peterson with some serious mental wounds, however. "The Marines went into the crash site to destroy any missiles that might be there, and one of them got killed doing it. Later, they talked to the pilot and I and asked if we'd tried what they called a RAT, or ram air turbine on that mission. We might have been able to regain control of the plane if we had done that. And that Marine would not have died."
After about 50 missions, Peterson decided to give up his back seat and try something new. The Air Force was asking for volunteers for FACs, or forward air controllers.
He was assigned to a Korean squadron, and his role was to fly his single-engined light plane over enemy territory and find targets for the bigger, attack planes.
"The O-1 Bird Dog was a tail dragger, and it was mainly flown by recycled fighter pilots. In training, I think I did about 142 landings. They wanted to make sure you could land on anything.
"All I had was a quarter-inch boiler plate below my butt, a shortened AR-15 and my .38. I also had six smoke rockets I could shoot at a target. On a good day, I tell the other pilots to 'hit my smoke.' On a bad day, I'd have to say, 'attack at 3 o'clock from my smoke, or six o'clock from my smoke.'
"You'd just fly over the tree tops at 80 miles an hour. You were kind of a sitting duck. The one thing you had going for you was that if the enemy fired at you, and they missed, they'd reveal their positions."
Peterson completed his 11 months in Vietnam as a FAC, and then headed back to the states. He served in Minot for a couple of years, flying F-106s, and got his discharge after six years of service.
He had earned a Purple Heart, the Air Medal with 10 oak leaf clusters, two Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Bronze Star.
He went back to school, taught for a while, and then he and his wife lived what Peterson calls a "hippie-wannabe" lifestyle for several years. Eventually, he got back into teaching and ended his school career by teaching special education children at Mountain Lake, Minnesota.
He knew that he had problems after the war, but was reluctant to seek help. "I just thought I couldn't accept help. I was trying to be a teacher. Who would hire you with that label?"
But the problems never got better, only worse. The symptoms were classic for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: depression and violent anger outbreaks.
"It was just catching up with me more and more. I was running on adrenaline, and at some point, you just run out."
Peterson finally did seek help, and how has regular treatment at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. He also volunteers his time to talk to school children, and he drives hundreds of miles from his home in Wells to do so. He and his wife, Ruth, have one grown son.
He says his message to the children he speaks to is anti-war.
"I don't have any argument with my fellow combat veterans. We all had our different experiences. It's just that I feel I have an obligation to convey to others what I've learned along the way. I want to help them from doing the same thing.
"I teach the kids about the Pledge of Allegiance, and I have to explain what allegiance means. I tell them it means loyalty. But does that loyalty mean that you never question your leaders? No, you should always question your leaders so that they do what's best for our country.
"We're in charge. We the people.
"I think the real heroes of the Vietnam War were those veterans who spoke out against it. They did a lot to end the war, and it needed to be ended.
"I tell the kids that the adults just need to work things out. War is not a video game."

Larry Peterson in training with the Air Force.

Larry Peterson today

While in the hospital after his first crash, Peterson explains to visitors the dramatic ups and downs of the Phantom as the pilot tried to maneuver it to safety. The person in the middle is Marshall Thompson who was then starring in the TV series "Daktari."