Armed Forces: Operation Jungle Jim

It was an odd leave-taking from Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. The wives were up to date in Jamaica shorts and Capri pants—but their Air Commando husbands, togged out in green fatigues and ANZAC-style campaign hats, looked like something out of a World War II movie. Some of the men stood with their families alongside a flight ramp; others huddled near a waiting Military Air Transport Service C-118. Then, with the call of the roll, the 53 men went one by one into the big transport. It swung around, taxied to the runway, and took off for the first leg of an 11,700-mile flight to South Viet Nam—where the men of the U.S. Air Force’s “Operation Jungle Jim” are carrying out a mission that seems almost anachronistic in a supersonic, missile-oriented world.

The Special Air Warfare Center at Eglin seems like a flashback to 1944, when Colonel Philip G. Cochran’s (the Flip Corkin of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates comic strip) 1st Air Commando Force flew P-52s, B-25s and C-47s across the Burma treetops in support of British General Orde Wingate’s Chindits. The outfit was disbanded shortly after World War II. But today at Eglin, members of the all-volunteer 1st Air Commando Group work with ancient C46 and C-47 transports, stub-nosed B-26 light bombers, and prop-driven, single-engined T-28 trainers. Last month at Eglin, President Kennedy laughed aloud during a spectacular, jet-packed Air Force show when a venerable Air Commando C-47 shot sharply into the sky belching smoke from JATO rocket boosters. But the Air Commandos are no laughing matter: the 1st Air Commando Group is the Air Force’s newest outfit, and one of the few that are actively engaged.

Off the Ground. A major aim of the Kennedy Administration’s defense policy has been to improve the U.S.’s ability to wage limited war—and, specifically, to fortify weaker allies in Southeast Asia, South America and Africa against Red-led guerrilla insurrections. To that end, the Army has souped up its crack Special Forces instruction teams (TIME, March 2). Early last year. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay ordered his staff to figure out how to provide air support for anti-guerrilla operations.

Within two months. Jungle Jim was off the ground, rounding up men and air planes. Each volunteer undergoes three separate psychological interviews, a check of his family situation to make sure he can leave for a risky mission on short notice, and a grueling 21-day survival course at Nevada’s Stead Air Force Base. Each officer and airman of the Air Commandos must know how to do every job in the outfit. The aircraft are picked with equal care for reliability and ease of repair under primitive conditions. The T-28s fly slowly (top speed: 346 m.p.h.) and low enough for pilots to sight and attack elusive guerrilla targets in the jungle. The transports can land on short, rough airstrios. The B-26s haul men, rockets and bombs, and ferret out enemy hide outs with ultramodern cameras.

A Certain Incentive. The Commandos now have 795 men and 64 airplanes, about a third of them deployed in South Viet Nam and at a new Canal Zone center for training South American airmen. The force will be beefed up to more than 5,000 men by July 1963. And for men who are trained to fight, the Air Commandos offer a certain “peacetime” incentive. Says Captain Robert C. Walker, 31, who eagerly left a glamorous Cape Canaveral job as launch officer for Mace and Matador missiles : “I want to fly and fight rather than sit and push buttons.”