| Date: 22 April 1970 |
| Aircraft type: AC-130A Gunship II |
| Serial Number: 54-1625 |
| Military Unit: 16 SOS, 8 TFW |
| Service: USAF |
| Home Base: Ubon |
| Name(s): |
| Maj William Leslie Brooks (KIA) |
| 1Lt John Cline Towle (KIA) |
| Lt Col Charlie Brown Davis (KIA) |
| Lt Col Charles Stoddard Rowley (KIA) |
| Maj Donald Garth Fisher (KIA) |
| MSgt Robert Newell Ireland (KIA) |
| SSgt Thomas Yuji Adachi (KIA) |
| SSgt Eugene Fields (Survived) |
| SSgt Stephen Warren Harris (KIA) |
| SSgt Ronnie Lee Hensley (KIA) |
| A1C Donald Michael Lint (KIA) |
| In the early hours of the 22nd an AC-130 Spectre gunship (call sign Adlib 1) took off from Ubon on a Commando Hunt mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos. The gunship was later joined by two fighters to form a truck hunter-killer team and the aircraft started work over Route 96A about 25 miles east of the town of Saravan. As the attack proceeded the AC-130 was hit by 37mm AAA and the port wing caught fire near the wing root. Some of the crew attempted to fight the blaze but the fire was too intense. Sgt Fields groped his way forward through darkness and smoke but found the gunner’s position vacant and a hatch open. Fields strapped on a parachute and abandoned the aircraft. Killer 2, one of the accompanying fighters, made voice contact with one of the crew who identified himself as Adlib 12, which was Maj Fisher’s call sign. Sgt Fields had suffered burns on his face and hands and his parachute snagged on a tree. He eventually climbed down and hid until morning when he was rescued by a HH-53. As has happened in several incidents, various rumours and claims relating to the missing crewmembers have persisted since the war. Returned POWs claimed to have seen Maj Fisher and Lt Col Rowley in prison camps but none of this information was ever substantiated. However, in November 1993 the remains of the missing crew were recovered from the wreck site near Ban Tang Lou and identified at the US Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The remains were buried in a group burial plot in Arlington National Cemetery on 8 November 1995. Even then some families did not accept proof of death as not all crew members were thought to be represented by the 1,400 small fragments of bone and teeth that were returned from Laos and that barely filled a single coffin. The name of SSgt Harris was omitted from the gravestone in Arlington at the request of his family. Like most of the AC-130s that served in Southeast Asia this aircraft was painted with distinctive nose art and carried the name ‘War Lord’. |
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