Funny little story from an OV-10 pilot

[jomni]

The reluctance of the enemy to fire was sometimes frustrating to the pilots, who were prohibited by the rules of engagement from attacking certain targets in Vietnam unless the bad guys fired first. So the idea was to get them to shoot. Gordon Evans, a Marine first lieutenant in 1971, remembers flying a patrol 20 miles west of Da Nang when he spotted a group of about 10 North Vietnamese soldiers lined up on a dike. He made a close pass to get them to fire. Nothing. He went around again. “They just didn’t pay me any mind,” Evans says. “They knew what was going on. So I went around to make still another pass, real slow. My backseater got agitated and said, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. We’re gonna get hosed.’ ” But there was still no fire from the men on the dike. “I was all of 24, bulletproof, and knew everything,” he says. “I dropped my gear and my flaps, put all the lights on in the airplane—this is daytime—and went by in a landing configuration” to make the best possible target. He finally elicited a response. “Several guys on the dike pulled down their trousers and mooned us,” Evans says.

 

The rest of the article is here:

http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/Legends-of-Vietnam-Broncos-Tale.html