When things went right, crews found targets and directed fighters to them with effectiveness. In their day, Blind Bat crews managed to detect a great volume of traffic moving from North Vietnam into Laos and on into South Vietnam. By that time, stronger air defenses had forced USAF to restrict flareship flights to the southern part of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. In the spring of 1966, the flareship mission moved to Ubon. Initially, flights originated at Da Nang, South Vietnam, and routinely overflew the North. The Blind Bat mission lasted six years, from mid-1964 to mid-1970. Later years found the C-130s working with F-4s and other fighters. Whether the group operated over North Vietnam or over Laos, the C-130 crew would “flare” while the B-57s bombed and the EF-10 jammed enemy radars. In the early days, each C-130 operated as part of a four-ship formation, filled out by a pair of B-57 bombers and a Marine EF-10 for electronic-countermeasure support. By early 1966, all C-130 flareship operations in-theater went by the shorthand name Blind Bat. Soon, it came to have a wider meaning, denoting an entire mission. Originally, the phrase Blind Bat was just the call sign for C-130s on forward air controller/flareship duty over southern Laos. Cherry-red tracers sped toward us, shot past our wing, then burst in thunderous explosions just overhead-the nearest of near misses.Ĭlose calls, I learned, were nothing if not routine for those engaged in “Blind Bat,” a colorful, important, yet now almost forgotten Vietnam mission. When they popped into brilliance, bathing the landscape in eerie brightness, we got an instant response. We pierced enemy airspace, skirted flak traps at Mu Gia Pass, and kicked four flares into the void. We in the flareships sought to strip the enemy of this cover by turning night into day. Hanoi, recycling a tactic employed against France, was using darkness as a weapon, one that shielded southbound convoys from attack. Our “target” that night was nighttime itself.
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