The Vietnam war airman who dodged a million bullets
Don Harten survived more than 300 combat missions during the Vietnam war, one of which ended with a ditching in the South China Sea in a super typhoon. In new book Midair, the flyer’s nephew documents a charmed life and a raid that may have ended hostilities before they had really begun
Don Harten says: “I always just assumed I would die in Vietnam. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t.”
As a combat pilot in the United States Air Force, the retired major completed no fewer than five tours of duty during the Vietnam war. Beginning as the conflict itself did in 1965, he flew two tours in the massive B-52 Stratofortress bombers. Harten switched to F-105 fighter jets for two further tours. Having “retired” to become a test pilot, he returned in the war’s final stage to fly the new, but erratic F-111. “I was there on the first day of the Vietnam war, and there on the last,” Harten noted in 2014. That was seven years, 10 months and 26 days.
According to Craig Collins, Harten’s nephew and the author of Midair, a new book about his uncle’s military service, such duration is not just unprecedented but very nearly miraculous. The chances of an F-105 pilot being killed during a single tour of Vietnam (roughly 50 missions) was about one in four. Harten flew more than 165 missions in the F-105 alone (a total Collins believes underestimates the many unofficial sorties his uncle made). Add in 124 B-52 missions and 30 in the F-111, and Harten’s total exceeds 300.
“How he lived is a million-to-one,” Collins says. “I grew up in Nevada where there’s a lot of gambling. I am pretty sure [Harten] is the only living pilot to have been in Vietnam from the very first bomb dropped to the very last. The odds of surviving five tours of duty in Vietnam are minuscule.”
Midair makes a valiant attempt to understand how Harten survived practically unscathed, to argue for the importance of his service and weigh the impact it had on his life. It is tempting – perhaps too tempting – to attribute Harten’s indestructibility to innate talent and self-confidence. How talented was he? If one believes Air Force estimates for 1967 – that an aircraft would be fired on about 10,000 times during a single mission – then Harten dodged more than 1.6 million bullets. What makes this statistic even more incredible is the fact the planes he flew were hit only three times: twice in the tail, and once a minor shrapnel graze of the fuel tank.
He is, I am pretty sure, the only pilot to have had a catastrophic collision at an extreme altitude and high velocity, ejected and lived