Dartmouth Veterans: Vietnam Perspectives

Observe, Analyze, and Respond

Observe, Analyze, and Respond ---------------------------------------------------------stanley c. herr : u.s. air force I selected this title because it is sometimes employed as a simple set of actions that a combat soldier should use as a checklist before firing his or her weapon. It is a reaction to the old “shoot first, then bother to find out what was going on around you” mentality of the Wild West gunslinger. But I never served in a combat zone. During my forty-­ four-­ year career of military-­ related efforts I worked in research laboratories and prototype systems development environments (R&D). That being noted, my entire career was also based on those three military activities: first I did reconnaissance, four years later I added intelligence analysis, and four years after that I moved on to the response phase by developing countermeasures. But that is getting ahead of the story. My military-­ oriented career started as a freshman at Dartmouth when I joined Basic Air Force ROTC. My brother, five years my senior, had gone through Air Force ROTC while majoring in mechanical engineering. He was assigned as a heating and air conditioning engineer doing R&D at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) outside Dayton, Ohio. At the end of my freshman year I was able to visit him and toured several of the research laboratories there. When I returned to campus in the fall, I talked to the commandant about my visit to the Wright Field Laboratories. He said he could promise me a WPAFB laboratory assignment if I signed up for Advanced ROTC. Since I was majoring in physics, I was hooked. Reconnaissance I reported to the Optronics Branch, Reconnaissance Division, of the Air Force Avionics Laboratory on August 31, 1964, a day after my twenty-­ second birthday. I was told I would be part of a new group working on Stanley C. Herr : 145 the use of infrared detector technology to detect and track ICBMs, either at Soviet test ranges or, eventually, as a part of a missile defense shield. This was all very new stuff, especially since semiconductor detector devices only became an operational reality in the mid-­ 1950s. This office was clearly doing some very important and challenging programs. Looking back to a major aspect of my Dartmouth experience, I worked for three summers and two school years in solid state physics basic research funded by a National Science Foundation grant under Professor William Doyle. Thus, my first Air Force assignment looked like an ideal fit for my background and interests. I had been in the laboratory less than a month when everything changed. On August 2, 1964, four weeks before I reported for active duty, a U.S. Navy destroyer had been attacked by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. While no real damage was done, it resulted in Congress’s passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This act basically authorized President Johnson to enter and conduct a land war supporting South Vietnam against North Vietnam. By late September 1964 the Department of Defense initiated planning for moving hundreds of thousands of Army, Stan Herr and T-33 trainer 146 : dartmouth veterans Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force troops and weapons to Thailand, South Vietnam, and the South China Sea. It also initiated a large number of new R&D demands throughout the Air Force Laboratories. For the Reconnaissance Division this meant better reconnaissance cameras and film, but it also meant development of new solid-­ state infrared detector technology that would be needed to allow our forces to see enemy activity and targets at night. Suddenly, I felt like I was part of the war effort and that I was going to be providing an important advantage to U.S. soldiers. Our team of new college graduates was enrolled in a multiweek, intensive training course about infrared technology, taught by a team of physicists and electrical engineers from the University of Michigan faculty. Their course material was so new it was provided as mimeographed notes, equations, and graphs in three-­ inch, three-­ ring binders, one for each week, three or four in all. This cadre of academics eventually produced the first infrared handbook, and its newer editions have been the bible of this specialized technology for decades. Back in the lab we measured the performance of various detector chips, worked on bias circuits and amplifier stages, determined if we could get sufficient sensitivity from thermoelectrically cooled indium antimonide detectors, or whether we needed liquid...