Seven years later, an SA-2 knocked the right wing off of John McCain’s carrier-based A-4 Skyhawk, forcing McCain to eject and parachute, badly injured, into Hanoi’s Trúc Bach Lake, where he was fished from the water and taken prisoner. In 1960, an SA-2 brought down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union. North Vietnamese soldiers prepare an SA-2 for action. The 5,000-pound missile had an effective range of about 21 miles, streaking toward its target at more than four times the speed of sound, up to an altitude of 90,000 feet to deliver a 430-pound fragmentation warhead that could shred anything within its nearly 300-yard maximum blast radius. combat crews likened the two-stage, 35-foot-long SA-2 to a flying telephone pole. “I was fulfilling my responsibility to the nation.”Īmong the many weapons in North Vietnam’s anti-aircraft arsenal, few were more feared than the type of missiles Phiet commanded: the Russian-built S-75 Dvina (the SA-2 “Guideline,” in NATO parlance). “The Americans were disturbing our freedom,” he says in Vietnamese as we sip tea from delicate china cups at his dining room table. More than 40 years later, sitting in his comfortable Hanoi rowhouse, the wizened, soft-spoken Phiet, 76, a retired lieutenant general and former deputy commander of Vietnam’s air defense force, shows little emotion when recalling those deadly days. raids on and around Hanoi in December 1972. As a young North Vietnamese military officer, his SA-2 rockets were credited with downing four of the giant Boeing Stratofortresses during U.S. What does it feel like to push a button, launch a surface-to-air missile, and blow a B-52 bomber out of the sky? Ask Nguyen Van Phiet.
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