(Ed. note: The following is part one of a two-part article about the military career of Damariscotta resident Vic Macomber. Part 2 will appear in next week’s edition.)
U.S. Air Force veteran Victor “Vic” Macomber, 82, of Damariscotta, flew 119 combat missions during the Vietnam War, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.
For about four months, he commanded a squadron tasked with surveillance of the Ho Chi Minh trail, playing an important role in disabling the enemy supply route.
His year-long tour was just a short period of his 21-year military career.
Macomber was born Aug. 22, 1930 in Rochester, N.Y. Shortly after his birth, he and his family moved to Utica, N.Y., where they would stay throughout his childhood.
As a boy during World War II, he would see formations of fighter planes flying over, en route from a base in nearby Rome, N.Y. to Europe by way of Presque Isle.
He became interested in aviation, studying U.S. Army Air Corps and Navy aircraft and building and attempting to fly balsa wood models of those planes.
Following his high school graduation in 1948, he entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He graduated in 1952 and volunteered for the U.S. Air Force.
He completed a six-month pilot training program at a civilian contract school in Columbus, Miss. He would receive additional training in aerobatics and formations at Air Force bases in Texas before earning his wings.
“I graduated in the fall of ’53 and I decided that I wanted to be a survivor, and I figured the best way to be a survivor was to get some good training in flight instruments,” he said.
He volunteered for a flight instruments school in Georgia. For six weeks, students would sit in the back seat of a T-33 jet with a flight instructor in front.
The students were under a “hood” and unable to see outside the cockpit, forcing them to fly with the aid of flight instruments alone.
Macomber’s next stop, for “a couple years,” was U.S. Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland.
“We were standing alert there and we were supposed to intercept Russian bombers if they flew over or within a range of a couple hundred miles,” he said.
His next home base was in Presque Isle, where he met a nurse by the name of Mary Ellen Roche and asked her for a date.
For their first date, Macomber took Roche downhill skiing.
The relationship, and Macomber’s relationship with Roche’s family, got off to a rough start.
“I met her father after I had delivered her to the hospital with an injured knee from a fall, and she was hospitalized for a couple of weeks with that,” he said. “Her leg was in traction after I left her.”
The young pilot and the young nurse continued to see each other, however, and they married in Presque Isle.
After three years in Presque Isle, the Air Force sent Macomber to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for 18 months of graduate work in mathematics and physics.
His next stop, for a total of six years, was the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., where he studied nuclear safety and worked as a member of a weapons integration system group.
The group worked with defense contractors and the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command to integrate nuclear weapons into aircraft.
In 1965, Macomber volunteered to fly F-100s in Vietnam.
He attended ground school and pilot training at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Ariz. to learn how to fly and attack in the F-100.
He learned how to dive-, glide- and skip-bomb, how to fire rockets and how to strafe enemy targets.
The three bombing techniques present different challenges. During skip-bombing training, a pilot would fly at an altitude of about 50 feet and a speed of 400-500 miles per hour. The pilot would release a practice bomb, the object being for the explosive to skip off the ground and hit a six-foot cloth target.
Dive-bombing might be the most challenging – and dangerous – technique for the pilot.
From a point 3000 feet up, the pilot would dive at a 30-45 degree angle and a speed of about 450 knots. Upon releasing the bomb at a bulls-eye below, the pilot would have to make a sharp recovery in order to avoid damage from the explosion, what pilots call a “low blow.”
In glide-bombing, the pilot approaches the target at a less dramatic angle of 10-15 degrees and releases a bomb with a fin or other “retardation device,” which creates drag and prolongs the time before detonation, increasing the pilot’s chances of avoiding a low blow.
Macomber and his fellow pilots-in-training also practiced air-to-air gunnery. A pilot would tow a target on a 1500-foot cable and the other pilot would fly behind the first pilot and fire at the target.
Macomber’s first stop overseas was at Wheelus Air Base in Tripoli, Libya. His assignment was training pilots at a gunnery range 70 miles southwest of the city, at a Sahara Desert outpost with just 30 troops.
In 1968, after three years in Libya, the Air Force ordered Macomber to Vietnam.
Macomber returned stateside briefly, completing a five-day survival course in the Nevada wilderness.
He and several others were equipped with maps, dropped in the countryside without water and instructed to find their way back to base, traveling at night to avoid capture by fellow troops in the guise of enemy combatants.
“There were a few of us that actually enjoyed the outing, and I was one of them,” he said. “I didn’t mind it, except I was kind of hungry when I got back.”
Macomber and his fellow survivalists-in-training returned undetected, only to immediately start another trial.
“[We] were taken prisoners and thrown into a mock-up of a prison camp and treated the way they thought the North Vietnamese would treat us if we were captured,” he said.
The instructors withheld food and sleep and subjected the students to interrogation.
“It was quite a test,” he said.
Finally, Macomber arrived in Vietnam. For the first months of his tour, he flew combat missions, often across the border into Laos.
“The fact that we were doing combat missions in Laos was classified,” he said. “We couldn’t tell our wives we were flying out of Vietnam.”
Macomber discovered his next assignment, with Detachment 1, 416th Tactical Fighter Squadron – known in the Air Force by its call sign, Misty – through a roommate at base.
Misty’s primary objective, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, was to locate and mark North Vietnamese personnel and supplies moving south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Misty’s forward air controllers, the reconnaissance aircraft known in the military as FACs, would tip fighter pilots off to the location of enemy troops, a supply route or a weapons cache. The pilots, in turn, would bomb or strafe the target.
Macomber, intrigued by his roommate’s account, volunteered, and, in April 1969, he assumed command of Misty at Tuy Hoa Air Base.
(In Part 2, Macomber describes his time as commander of Misty, a fighter squadron specializing in reconnaissance over the Ho Chi Minh trail.)
