Without Truth There Can Be No Love

Without Truth There Can Be No Love

by Colonel Heath “Bo” Bottomly

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

We have a lot of things going tonight, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time with war stories. But I need to tell you one, because it’s a part of our series on values, traditional Christian values. And the value that this story, and the one that I’ll tell you when I finally speak in our last roll call together, will have to do with the quality, the value of integrity. Some of you were probably A.W. Tozer buffs. A.W. Tozer wrote a book, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with, called The Attributes of God. And shockingly, though it may be to some of us, the attributes that A.W. Tozer found in our high God was, first of all, integrity. Before even love. Before holiness. Before righteousness. Because A.W. Tozer says, and I tend to believe in, that without truth, there can be no love. Now, I know that’s kind of a deep one to ponder. But I believe that’s true. Without truth, without honor, without integrity, there isn’t anything else that’s worthwhile at all. And I want to spend a minute this evening describing to you a kind of a story about many veterans’ experience in Vietnam. Because it is my feeling that although we all served in different places, in different roles, at different times, almost all of us had the same kind of central experience that was unique to the normally honored military in the United States of America.

And when you see or know a Vietnam veteran, I think that this story, in its essence, will probably explain why they’re where they’re at and why they feel the way they do about the Vietnam condition. And I pray every night that this country will finally, at least the newspapers, radios, and televisions of this country will finally put that war to bed and bury it instead of keep bringing it up and flashing our hideous experiences before our eyes again and again. But I, because I love you, I take the privilege of bringing it up in its form that affected me one more time because it has so indelibly imprinted in it the value of integrity. When I was first in Vietnam, as you probably saw from the movie, I brought over to Vietnam in five huge Air Force transports, C-5s, the airplanes and the ground crews and all the pilots of 25 A-37 airplanes that we were going to combat test in Vietnam and see if they were a good airplane for combat. They cost us nothing, as you recall, I told you, because we dug them out of the boneyard sand in Tucson, Arizona, took them back to Cessna plant in Wichita, Kansas, and magna-fluxed all of the members and replaced those that were aberrant.

We put two J-85 engines in each one, which was twelve times more powerful than the engines they were supposed to have. Under each wing we laid three bomb, rocket, or gun racks, and one in the nose, which gave us seven forward-firing rockets and machine guns. It was a crackerjack little airplane. You could almost lift it. It was so light. But I found out as we tested it at England Air Force Base in Alexandria, Louisiana, that you could do some amazing things because of the incredible power of the engines. You could take off and go straight up because it was very light without any bombs or guns or anything. You could just go straight up. If it was loaded, of course, you couldn’t do that. But it also stopped in the air. If you played with the throttles very carefully going straight up, you could stop the airplane like this in the air. And I made the mistake of showing the inspector general who came down from Washington to certify us that you could do that. And an F-100 came by us from another base and saw this thing standing still in the air like that. And he made a bad landing and wrecked his airplane nearby at an airfield. So I got demerits for that.

We didn’t do that anymore. When we got to Vietnam, the idea was to try this little airplane, these 25 airplanes, but this little airplane with these pilots and these ground crews in a variety of roles from forward air controlling to fighter bombing to reconnaissance to everything, and keep it all computerized. We had a massive computer and a guy who knew how to run it and the staff. And I picked out all of the pilots.

And we had a whale of a time. We landed at Bien Hoa in the fall of 1967. And we stayed there for a year. And I came back and reported to the Secretary of Defense. And then I went back over with the F-105 unit, which you saw me flying with out of Takhli, Thailand. But while I was testing the A-37, while we were there at Bien Hoa, testing the A-37, some incredible things happened. First of all, one day, a young pilot that I’d known at West Point, he was an underclassman of mine, and I’d kind of groomed him, and we’d known each other here, there, and yonder like you do in the military, many, many different places. But he was a man of incredible intelligence. A real creative kind of a fighter pilot. More profound than most sort of superficial fighter pilots like I was, that just wanted to fly and fight and drink and fly some more and fight and drink some more. We learned that from the RAF, by the way. We didn’t… We learned that from the Royal Air Force. We picked that up in World War II in England. And it’s dreadful. But this young guy, his name was Zack Butler. I chose Zack Butler, and he was in a fighter wing in Europe. But he came home to fly with me on this mission. Well, Zack Butler came in to me. I’m going to go quickly into the story so I don’t give you any slush in background. Zack Butler came to me one day. He was missing. His airplane was missing. And when a guy is missing, everybody in the squadron ups their attention about 20 degrees. And a lot of people drift down toward the flight line to watch the sky. For reasons known but to God. But we do that. We just kind of hone down and start kind of praying. Even if we aren’t praying people subconsciously, we start praying. Because one of our birds is missing. One of our boys has not come home. And his time is running out. And I immediately left the red telephone and the desk where I had my headquarters. And I walked down toward the flight line watching the sky. Hoping to see some guy come in on the periphery and make a… Maybe a victory roll and tell us that he was all right.

Well, he was late, but he finally came in. And when he landed, he only had about a cup of gas. And so after I lectured him about keeping a safe amount of fuel so that he could make it and go to an alternate if it was weathered out or something like that. You always have a reserve. I gave him quite a chewing for that. And then he told me, he says, “Colonel Bo, I have discovered something of terrible significance.” He said, “I was flying, looking for an artillery position just beyond the DMZ.” Which you know went across the middle of Vietnam. Just beyond the DMZ. And there the Abenine Mountains form a kind of a flat cliff. And then there’s a sloping agricultural area, rice paddies, and the ocean, South China Sea. He said, “I was trying to find this artillery place, which I was briefed to strike. And it was on my map. But there were clouds up against, blown in by the diurnal drift against the mountain. And I couldn’t find it. And finally, on my last try, I spotted it, but was under the clouds. And the base of the clouds was exactly a thousand feet above the ground. So I decided, I was low on fuel. I hadn’t done anything of any great responsibility recently. I would do, get that target if it killed me. And Colonel Bo, it almost did.” He said, “I flew straight into the cliff. And when I got to the target, I released my bombs. And then I pulled straight up short of the cliff and over the top. And I never went into the clouds.”

And I said, “Come on. You’re kidding me.” He said, “No. This airplane will loop in 1,000 feet.” Shocking news. Because we always, in the F-105 and the F-100 and the F-4, you roll in on a run from 20,000 feet. And it takes you about 10,000 feet to pull out. And if you want to do a loop, you get way up high. Because a loop takes a lot of Gs. But down low, with that heavy, dense, tropical atmosphere, he discovered that he could pull about eight Gs and make that airplane loop out, or Immelmann out, below the clouds that were leveled at 1,000 feet. I immediately went back and made an entry in the computer, because that was a fantastic aeronautical discovery. I didn’t pat him on the back, because he had made several mistakes in leading up to it.

Very shortly after that, a strange thing happened. And you Vietnamese people, or people who have been over there will remember, that there was a sudden terror that struck the South Vietnamese Air Force and the American Air Force, that the North Vietnamese, or the Viet Cong, had put together nine AK-47s around a drum and made a Gatling gun, which is an incredibly fast-firing weapon. We still use 20-millimeter and 30-caliber Gatling guns, because they fire… and all of the tubes fire, and that makes you be able to put out nine times as much lead in the air, and you can really destroy things that way. They heard, or intelligence told us, a prisoner told us, that they had a Gatling gun and were coming down the east coast along the South China Sea, and they were going to shoot up any airplane they found on the land or in the air, and they began to shoot up F-100s. One dropped out, and we didn’t hear anything. The pilot was killed. Another one, the pilot parachuted. He was ejected out. And he said, “I was just flying over the jungle when a huge hole and branches and leaves came up, and the next thing, I have exploded in the air.” And then there was somebody down in the Delta that heard that the Gatling gun was on a barge, and they were coming up the Mekong River, and they were going to attack Saigon.

Well, all Saigon went ape. As Vietnamese can do, if they hear a rumor, they go wild. And the streets were filled in riotous condition, and Bunker, who was the ambassador over there, pleaded with General Momyer to get the Gatling gun. Well, I happened to be in staff meeting one day, which I attended periodically to see if he had any special instructions, and he told me, he said, “Bo, if you ever want a distinguished medal for valor, get that gun.”

General Momyer’s nickname was Spike, because he was as cold as steel. And I walked back to my guys, and I said, “Hey, you’ve heard the rumor of the Gatling gun. Let’s get it.” And they, these young kids began to figure out how to do it, how to do it. And we got together with forward air controllers, and about less than a week later, we got a rumor from a, from somebody who was flying that had heard from a forward air controller that he had the Gatling gun spotted, and he was circling over it down near a little Vietnamese village on the Delta, in the Delta, just a little way south of us, maybe a half hour flight. So I grabbed Zack Butler, and I said, “Let’s give it a try. I want to get the Distinguished Service Cross before I go home.” Bad. Bad motivation. But a good idea.

But a good idea. Because Zack could probably get one too, and he deserved it. We took off, we loaded ourselves with rockets and two 500 pound bombs, and three mini guns, which were automatic machine guns that fired 30 caliber bullets. 30 caliber bullets. Remember that.

We went south, flew straight south. I called this guy on the radio, the forward air controller, and asked him if he was still there. Yes. Did he have the thing in sight? Yes. I said, “Okay, we’ll come underneath along the river and hit it. You tell us exactly what the coordinates are.” And he gave me the coordinates. We went way out to sea, and the clouds were just a little over a thousand feet. And I thought, Zack, if you’re wrong, we’re dead.

I signaled him, we’re on radio silence. I signaled him to take spacing. So he got behind me about five airplane lengths to see what I would see. That way, when I fired my guns, it would put their heads all down so they couldn’t shoot at him. He would drop his two 500 pound bombs. We’d explode the Gatling gun and go home and get our medals.

That’s the way fighter pilots think. They think they plan… They’re already in front of the president getting six stars. I was right on the water. Greenish kind of water in the Delta and Mekong River. I flew flat up against it. And up ahead, very shortly, I saw a raft. And I could identify on the top of it what looked like a gun emplacement. And I said, “That’s it.” So I went… Now, brrr probably doesn’t mean anything to you. But all the stations’ switches are right there in front of you as you fly. And they all have green and red lights above the toggle switches. They’re all green as long as they’re safe. That’s so when you taxi out and whatnot, if you happen to drop a bomb, it won’t explode and close the airport. Until you hit the switches up. But watch this. The Air Force realizes that fighter pilots are not too smart. So they put in a safety factor. A very large red master bomb and gun switch, which is right down here. And after you hit… And we didn’t pick them up one at a time, because you can’t look down anyway. You’re trying to fly. You’re almost on the water. You’re trying to get the sight, which comes on a round red circle like you saw in the movie, right in front of your windscreen.

You try to get that on the target. So instead of reaching down and putting up switches, you go brrr with your thumb. And then when you have time, you glance and you see all red. That means everything’s okay. Then when the target that you’re aiming at is within the target on your windscreen, when it is in there, in that circle, you bam the master bomb switch, and then you’re ready. You can punch bombs, or you can pull the trigger and fire rockets or guns. So I came in, I spotted it, I put it in the circle, I went brrr, I glanced down, they were all red. I went bam, down here, and then I pulled the trigger.

Nothing. Silence. I thought to myself, God, Zack is not… My duty is to protect Zack, not to explode any bombs or ruin any target. He does that. My job is to protect him. And I’m not. I don’t know what’s the matter. I look at the… All the lights are red. I pull about nine Gs. I black out, pulling it up. And halfway up as I’m coming over the top, what we’re going to do is follow each other over the top. That means that the guy down here is protecting the guy up here when he comes down, and he comes off. We make three passes and then get out of there and let somebody photograph the result. When I pulled off, for some reason up in here, when I was blacked out at about nine Gs, I thought, what’s wrong? And then I hit the master armament switch again to make sure, because I wasn’t sure that I’d hit it, because you’re not really… You just knew everything so automatically.

I was up in here somewhere, and I decided I’d try again to test my guns. Shoot in the sky anyway. Brrrr! I hit it. Brrrr! Everything shot. Almost immediately, Zack yelled, “Boss, I’ve been hit! I’ve been hit!” I let out on the stick so that the blood could come back into my head, and I could see, and the blue out became clear, and I was headed down right for Zack’s airplane. I thought, you dumb SOB, you have shot down your best friend wingman. If there’s ever a fighter pilot’s rule, is you never fire your guns unless you’re on the target.

I violated it, and I was paying the price. I’d hit him. He was rolling like this, and there was smoke coming out of his left engine. And I said, “Zack, kick right rudder! Kick right rudder and level up!” He said, “I can’t, boss! I can’t! I’m hit in the right leg! I can’t push with it!” And a moment later, he rolled over on his back, and boom! He hit in the barge in a great explosion, and a million pieces flew into the air of everything. Pieces of gun and wood from the barge and steel hunks and pieces of airplane and everything filled the air. Well, you can imagine the shock I had. And the sudden surge of overpowering guilt that I had shot him down, and he had destroyed the target. And I had done it in violation of the basic rule that a fighter pilot learns his first day in training.

Well, I leveled out my airplane, and I circled around. I didn’t know what to do. It was all just foaming smoke. There was a big hole in the over… in the many-layered jungle below, and I could see the river, and I could see the barge was totally destroyed. So I flew back, and I didn’t even call into the tower. I felt so guilty, so shocked, and grief at the loss of my… Probably since Marsh Kyle, the best friend, the real… A young guy that I was mentoring to come up and be chief of staff of the Air Force. He was such a splendid young man. And to just see him explode in the air. Because of my not being able to… Apparently, I didn’t hit the master armament switch when I thought I did, or I didn’t make it make contact. And I just… I flew around. I didn’t want to land at home. I didn’t know what to do. I was just out of it. I finally got low on fuel and landed at Bien Hoa. And of course, I was alone. So everybody came out to see. Because everybody loves each other. They’re like us. A squadron is like a family. They care for each other. They all came out to see. And they ganged around my airplane when I cut off the switches and let it idle down.

They ganged around my airplane. “Where is… What happened? Where’s that? Where is…” I said, “I will report it, and then I’ll come back and tell you.” Well, I ran into the intelligence… I walked into the intelligence shack, which was right on the revetments, among the revetments on the flight line. And the intelligence officer grabbed me and he says… With his report on a board, and he began to write. He said, “Okay, tell me what happened. One loss.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, what’s the narrative?” And I said, “Well, we spotted the raft, or the barge, and I saw the gun, and we flew in, and we destroyed it. And they got sacked before we destroyed it.” And I thought, that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened. But he said, “Yes, sir, thank you.” And he grabbed the red telephone to make the report in the 7th Air Force Headquarters. And I walked back out to talk to the troops, to tell them that we’d lost Zack. He was our first loss. We’d had a perfect record. And the guys all ganged around, and some of them cried, because he was a very popular, splendid, all-American kind of kid.

As I went, finished talking to the guys that had gathered around, my adjutant came running out of the headquarters and said, “General Momyer wants to talk to you on the telephone.” I thought, oh, God. He’s a four-star general. He knows everything. I went in, picked up the red telephone. He says, “Bottomly, I want to talk to you in my office in 15 minutes.” Well, it was about 20 minutes by Jeep to Tan Son Nhut, which is where his headquarters was. So I immediately commandeered a sergeant’s Jeep and raced out onto the highway and headed for Saigon in 7th Air Force. When I got into 7th Air Force, General Momyer was in his office. The door was ajar and his executive officer was standing there like this, telling me to get right on in that he had been waiting for me. I was a little late. I walked in and I stood at attention in front of General Momyer. He didn’t look up. He was tough.

I stood there for quite a while. Pretty soon I cleared my throat. Clicked my heels. He didn’t look up. And this intensified the feeling within me that he knew what had happened and I was going to get it. Well, after a while he said, “What happened?” And I said, yeah, he knows. And so I started to tell the story. I said, “We found the Gatling gun. It’s on a barge in the Mekong. A FAC pointed it out to us. We went out to sea. We came underneath the clouds. We spotted it. We destroyed it. But they got my wingman before we got in.” And I thought, that’s not what happened.

This is important. This is not an intelligence report. This is the four star boss that holds your entire career in his mitts. You tell him the truth. I felt like I was rising out of myself up into the air above the desk in a kind of an out of body feeling because I was so scared. And the emotions in me from the loss and from this shock and everything were so overpowering I couldn’t handle it. And I heard myself as if I were another person listening tell the same story again. I was like a train that’s on a track and somebody threw the switch. And when I get to that point, I go on the sidetrack and cannot tell the story right.

He didn’t say anything. I stood there for about 10 minutes. He didn’t say anything. Finally, I saluted and went out. I went back and I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought about it. And then one of my very good friends from the third wing fighter base was talking to me in the officers club and told me, you know, if you make an intelligence report, he was talking with kind of with me and another guy. He said, “If you make an intelligence report and you find out later that you made a mistake, you can make a correction. You go to your intelligence officer and say, ‘I want to make a correction to that report I sent in last week or the other day,’ and they’ll make a correction. And that’ll take care of it.” I thought, that’s what I’m going to… I have to do that. So I went to my intelligence officer. I went into his office and I said, “Eddie, I’ve got to make a correction on a report.” He says, “Fine. What report?” I said, “The one where we lost Zack.” He says, “Okay.” He took out and it’s titled up about errata for report. And I sat down beside him and I told the same story. I could not tell that I had misfired in protecting him and I had violated the rules by test firing my guns in the air and accidentally I had hit Zack and he flew into the barge and exploded, which is a simple, straightforward story.

But I couldn’t tell it. I couldn’t say it. Well, you can imagine this on a guy who’s building a pretty good reputation for honor throughout the service and was my honor representative at West Point. All of these things began to work inside of me and bug me and badger me.

And things like this, things kind of like this happened to all of us in Vietnam. And I didn’t know what to do. Finally, General Momyer was relieved. He ran out his time and a new four star general came who was General George Brown, who wrote the foreword to my book. He and I used to play tennis together at the Army Navy Country Club in Washington. He was a friend of mine, although he’d shot on far beyond me. He was at West Point while I was there, but he was a far upperclassman from mine. And when he came in, I thought, here’s my chance. I’ll go and tell George Brown the story and then he’ll take care of it. Well, after he’d been there about three days, I went over, I drove over and we shook hands and had a great time, hugged each other. We were old friends. He says, “Come on in. Sit down.” In his office, which is very elegant. And I sat on the sofa and he sat right beside me. And he reached out and he touched my knee and he said, “Bo, I understand you lost a very dear comrade.” He said, “Don’t worry about it. Those things happen in war. I lost my West Point roommate in the Battle of Lady in World War II.

So I know where you’re at. But don’t let it affect your performance. Just hang in there and it will fade away.” He said, “If it would help you, tell me what happened.” I thought, thank God. Here, this can happen. And I sat there and I crossed my knees and I took a deep breath and I looked up at the ceiling and then I looked him right in the eye and I told the same story.

Can you imagine? I could not believe that I was who I thought I was. Well, it wasn’t long before I rotated. The year was up and I’d finished my test. I went back and reported to the Secretary of Defense and we gave him all of the computer work and whatnot. I got a Silver Star award for my great valor in my tour of Vietnam. And I got ready to come back over and take command because of my excellent performance of the greatest, biggest fighter wing in the Southwest Pacific in Takhli in Thailand. My son, who led me to Christ, was at this time commander of flight training at Valdosta, Georgia. Primary flying school. He invited me to come by. I’d never flown with my son because I’d been in Vietnam when he graduated from the Air Force Academy. We’d always been separated, but we talked to each other over the great MARS radio network and whatnot. And he was very close to me. He was the Christian that led me to Christ. When I came back, I thought, I’ll go see him. We’ll fly together. And we’ll refresh our old beauty together. And while I was visiting with him and he had led me to Christ, he was really my father in the Lord. Although he was my son.

He was my father in Christ. He was my minister. I thought, I’ll tell him. And we will pray together. And this will be all right. He will suggest that I make a special report to the Air Force headquarters that I had made a mistake in a report overseas and it’ll all be corrected.

We flew together and we had a great time. And I stepped into the pilots ready room to say goodbye to him and whatnot. And he grabbed me by the arm. He said, “Dad, let’s sit down for a minute.” He said, “I know you and Zack had a great relationship. And he was killed on a flight with you.” He said, “Would you like to tell me how it happened?”

I thought, God, You are so great. And I told him exactly the same story. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t explain it. I just came down the railroad track like a locomotive and something sidetracked me. I could not admit that I had made a major and incredibly stupid, simple, utterly primitive mistake. And it had cost a buddy his life. I could not go there for some reason.

Well, time passed, but it didn’t heal. And time passes for all of the Vietnam veterans and things don’t heal. And then, not long ago, I think a year ago, at Christmas time, I got a mailer. This mailer. And it was from a Susan Broadhurst who lives at 101 Seaside Dunes, Charleston, South Carolina. It meant nothing to me. And I opened it up, and immediately upon opening it, fell out this hunk of steel.

It’s an AK-47 bullet. And the note inside, I would like to read. It’s from 101 Seaside, Charleston, South Carolina, 2nd of December, 1988. “Dear Colonel Bo, you won’t remember me, but I met you a long time ago during combat crew training at Alexandria, Louisiana. I was the wife of one of your Combat Dragon pilots and close friends, Zack Butler. You may remember he was killed on a mission you led in November 1967. He was carried as missing until his ashes were returned by the MIA group that went to Vietnam in August.” Remember when we sent that group over to settle the MIA problems in 1988? “The village at Sang-Ta had cremated his body and turned over a little urn containing his ashes, his dog tags, and the AK-47 bullet that killed him.

We buried him here on a pretty hillside in Arlington. The boys and I flew up. For some reason, I could not bury the bullet with him. It just didn’t go. You were a sort of an idol to Zack, and many of his letters spoke of your adventures together. All autumn, I have been sensing that this tiny icon may have unusual value and meaning to you. Here it is. Treasure it in memory of your beloved wingman and friend and my beloved husband. Sincerely, Susan Broadhurst.”

Can you imagine the relief? See, the United States government would never send any money to Susan Broadhurst if her husband had been shot down by friendly fire. He got full pay and allowances for God knows how long until she was ready to die if he was shot down by enemy fire. So the difference was total. She didn’t know until they brought back his remains. And I had gone all those years because I had violated a primitive fundamental rule and my buddy had been shot down and I saw him in my sight. And out of all of this milieu of circumstances, I drew the conclusion that loaded me with guilt for almost 22 years.

And I was freed by the miracle of this woman caring enough to send the evidence to me. How often, I wonder, do we create evil when there is no evil? But I learned a lesson in honor out of that experience. I learned a lesson that has really helped me working with teenage kids. And that is to not let it pile up and hide it. Share it with one another and pray with one another. And God only knows, God only knows, God only knows why He wouldn’t let me tell the other story except that it wasn’t true. The truth was, he was shot down by the enemy Gatling gun and my shots had gone off into the river and done no damage at all. But nobody knew that because I kept it clutch inside of me in dishonor.

So I asked God to forgive me and put it behind me and think about it no more until every once in a while some ex-senator or somebody hits the front pages with a Vietnam story of dishonor. And then we live it all through again and wash and bathe in it once again and die a little bit once again. Don’t let that be a part of your experience. Let’s bury that one. Let’s bury that one. And go on. And hold our heads and promise that we will do our best in the power of the Holy Spirit to live the life that He wants us to live. And be free and open. And loving. Let’s pray.

Father God, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we come before You this night to worship, to listen, to remember that You gave Your life that we could be free. God, help us to be free. God, help us to be free. To maintain our freedom. To not enchain ourselves. God, we ask You to help us to hold high the value of honor. Of integrity. Of simple truth.

And I’ve asked You before, but I ask You now, forgive me again for burdening myself with what I thought was the story. And not being able to come face to face with You for almost a quarter of a century. Until You liberated me when You were ready. When You knew that I had had enough of that. Oh God, I pray to You that You cleanse our nation. Of the guilt of that unfortunate war. And let us reign with You forevermore. In Jesus’ name. Amen.