The Airman Who Saved AC-47 Spooky With His Bare Hands – John Levitow

You cannot stand up properly. The floor is tilting under you, the aircraft wallowing hard right, and there is something warm running down your back and legs that you already know is blood. The cargo hold smells of cordite and something sharper underneath it. Aviation fuel leaking from the right wing where the round hit.

Three of the men you came into the hold with are down. The fourth is Owen slumped against the bulkhead bleeding. His hands are empty. They were not empty a moment ago. He had the flare. You find it before you can think about finding it. A wisp of smoke and its source, a 27-lb metal canister rolling loose across the steel floor.

It was sliding between the ammunition cans. The safety pin was gone. The pin attached to a 10-ft lanyard that when pulled arms the flare for ignition. Your name is John Levitow. You are 23 years old. You are a load master on an AC-47 gunship over Long Binh, Vietnam. You have at most 20 seconds. The Mark 24 magnesium flare burns at as hot as 4,000° F.

At that temperature it will burn through the aluminum floor of the cargo hold in seconds. Beneath that floor run the aircraft’s control cables. In the ammunition cans stacked 2 ft from where the flare is rolling right now sit 19,000 rounds of live load aboard Spooky 71 that night is 21,000 rounds. One ignited flare in a cargo hold like this does not produce a fire. It produces a fireball.

In October 1966, a single Mark 24 ignited in a locker aboard the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany. 44 men d.i.ed. 156 were injured. The flare that started it had been jarred against the locker wall. The Navy’s own analysis would later find that one in every 1,000 Mark 24 flares could ignite accidentally if disturbed.

The locker had held over 250 of them. The one rolling across the floor of Spooky 71 is enough on its own and it has already been armed. You have no way to know how many of your 20 seconds are left. Somewhere in the jungle south of Long Binh, the VC mortar crew that fired the round has no idea what they hit.

They saw the aircraft alert out of its orbit. They may have assumed it was coming down. The mortar crews operating against Long Binh that night elements of the VC 274th and 275th regiments had been targeting the base systematically working through their pre-planned coordinates. They had no way to know they’d hit a gunship.

They had no way to know they’d a flare inside one. They do not know what they set in motion. 26 days earlier John Levatow had no reason to be on this aircraft. He was born November 1st, 1945 in Hartford, Connecticut the first of two children. He grew up in South Glastonbury, went to Glastonbury High School, and enrolled in the Porter School of Engineering and Design in Hartford because he wanted to work with his hands.

The plan had always been the Navy. When the time came he chose the Air Force instead enlisting on June 6th, 1966 about 20 days before he was due to be drafted into the Army anyway. He was not a man who waited to be told what to do. His first assignment was exactly what he had trained for a powerline specialist with a civil engineering squadron.

The job ended when a circuit he believed was dead turned out not to be. He would describe it simply afterward the power was not turned off when I thought it was turned off. He walked away from that, changed his career field, and cross-trained as a loadmaster the man who manages cargo, weapons loads, and flare operations in the back of an aircraft.

He flew C-130s stateside then orders came for Vietnam. He reported to the 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Nha Trang in July 1968 and was assigned to the forward operating location at Bien Hoa Airbase. By February 24th, 1969 he had logged 180 combat missions. The 181st was not his to fly. The regular loadmaster for that crew had covered for Levatow once taking his spot when Levatow was sick.

Levatow returned the favor. He had never flown with this crew before. The mission brief was straightforward. AC-47 gunship Spooky 71, tail number 43, 49770, escort and fire support over the War Zone Ben area, second night of the 1969 Tet Counteroffensive. Nothing about John Leviteaux’s background made him look like what he was about to become.

He was a 23-year-old logistics specialist from Connecticut, filling in for a friend on what should have been a routine rotation. Inside the cargo hold of Spooky 71, routine felt like this. The mini guns don’t fire like a weapon fires. They howl. A continuous electric tearing sound that runs through the entire airframe, through the floor and the walls and your boots and your chest.

3,000 rounds a minute pouring down a rope of tracers into the darkness below. Every fifth round glows. The stream looks solid from the ground. From inside the hold, all you see is the brass cascading across the steel floor in a hot yellow river, while your ears packed solid with the noise. The aircraft holds a constant left bank at 3,000 ft.

Through the open cargo door, always open during a fire mission, you can see the night tipping sideways, the jungle below, the tracer stream reaching down into it. There is nothing between you and 3,000 ft of dark air except the threshold of that door. Your job during a fire mission is to manage the ammunition feed, monitor the gunners, and handle the flares.

A Mark 24 flare is a 3-ft metal canister, 27 lb, with a 10-ft lanyard attached to the safety pin. You set the ignition timer, you attach the lanyard, you hand the armed canister to the gunner. He tosses it out the door. The lanyard pays out as it falls, jerks the pin free, arms the flare, and about 10 seconds later the magnesium ignites.

2 million candle power, a light you can read a newspaper by from the ground, burning for 2 and 1/2 to 3 minutes under a small parachute. This is normal. This is what Leviteaux had done on 180 missions. Cordite biting the back of the throat, aviation fuel underneath it, brass casings across the floor under your boots, still hot.

The aircraft shuddering with every burst, the whole left side rattling in its rivets. The open door a black rectangle you learn to work around without looking at. Night after night over the jungle, this is what normal looked like. On the night of February 24th, 1969, after roughly 4 and 1/2 hours of fire support over the Saigon and Tan Son Nhut area, a radio call came in from south of Long Binh Army post.

American sold.i.ers were under heavy mortar attack. Major Kenneth Carpenter, the pilot and aircraft commander on his very first mission in that role, diverted. Spooky 71 found the positions. On the first pass, the crew destroyed two mortar emplacements. A third was located. Carpenter banked back for another run. Levetow set the timer on the next Mark 24 and handed it to Airman First Class LS Owen.

Owen’s finger was through the safety pin ring. He was waiting for the word to throw it. An 82-mm mortar round came down on top of the right wing and exploded inside the wing structure. Navigator Major William Platt, forward in his compartment, would describe it. Even in the navigation compartment, the flash lit up the inside of the aircraft like daylight.

The aircraft veered sharply to the right and down. In the cargo hold, the explosion ripped through the fuselage in under a second. The official citation records what it left behind. A 2-ft hole blown through the wing and more than 3,500 fragment holes punched through the fuselage. Flight Engineer Staff Sergeant Edward Fuzie, shrapnel in his back and neck, watched it happen and would describe it later.

“I saw Sergeant Bear, Airman Owen, and Airman Levetow go down right away. Everyone in the back of the airplane was hit. More than 40 fragments tore into Levetow into his back and his legs. The official citation would later record over 40 fragment wounds in the back and legs. The feeling went out of his right leg below the wounds.

He would describe the impact later as feeling like being hit by a 2×4. The aircraft lurched into a steep descending turn to the right, roughly 30° of bank, momentarily out of Carpenter’s control. The explosion also tore the flare from Owen’s hands. Owen’s finger had been through the safety pin ring. The pin came with his hand.

The flare was loose on the floor, safety pin pulled, timer running, armed. Levetow got up, barely. His legs were not working properly. The aircraft was still in a hard bank. The floor had blood on it he did not yet realize was his own. Through the noise and smoke he saw one of the gunners bleeding badly down near the open cargo door and sliding toward it with every lurch of the aircraft.

3,000 ft of dark air on the other side of that door. He moved to the man first, not to the flare, the man. He dragged his crewmate forward away from the threshold backward across the tilting floor. The aircraft pitched. He held. He got the man clear of the door. Then he turned and saw the smoke.

The canister was rolling between the number one minigun and the ammunition cans, sliding on the tilting steel, trailing a thin coil of smoke from one end. 19,000 rounds in the cans it was rolling between. Below the floor, the control cables for a crippled aircraft already leaking aviation fuel and isopropyl alcohol from a tank that had not been emptied deployment.

Levetow knew exactly what he was looking at. He went after it. He missed it the first time. The aircraft banked and the canister slid away from his hands. He went after it again. It rolled. He missed again. A third time his fingers found the metal and it pulled free before he could grip it. His hands wouldn’t close properly. The wounds in his back and legs were draining him and the floor was moving under him and the canister would not stay still.

So he stopped trying to grip it. He threw his body onto it. The full weight of him came down on the smoking canister and pinned it to the floor. 27 lbs of arm magnesium as hot as 4,000° waiting to happen pressed against his chest. He wrapped his arms around it. Then he started to crawl. The distance from where the flare had come to rest to the open cargo door is not measured precisely in any source.

It was the length of an AC-47 cargo hold. Call it 10 ft. Call it 12. Every foot of it was steel floor coated in the blood that was still coming out of him, and the aircraft was still in a 30° bank, and Levittow was dragging both the flare and his legs, which were no longer doing what he told them. Major Carpenter at the controls up front knew his gunship was crippled.

He didn’t know yet what was happening in the back. He was fighting to hold the aircraft level leaking fuel in a right bank in the dark over Long Binh. Levittow crawled. He left a trail behind him on the cargo floor, long, continuous, dark. Carpenter would not see it until morning when the light came up and he walked back through the hold and followed it with his eyes from where it started to where it ended at the door.

He would say afterward, “Following the blood trail, Airman Levittow had streaked across the floor of the aircraft. I’ll never know how Levittow managed to get to the flare and throw it out. In my experience, I have never seen such an act performed under such adverse conditions.” The door came into view, 3,000 ft of night below it.

Levittow got the canister to the threshold and pushed it out. The official citation records what happened next in eight words. The flare separated and ignited in the air, but clear of the aircraft. Outside, already burning when it cleared the door, the flash visible from the ground, 2 million candlepower, the sky going white above Long Binh at some time around midnight.

A falling star of burning magnesium that lit the jungle below and meant nothing to anyone on the ground except that the Spooky was still working, still dropping illumination, still up there. Inside the cargo hold, Levittow collapsed. He had used everything he had. Carpenter regained control of the aircraft. Spooky 71 level, assessed the damage, the wing, the fuel, the cargo hold full of wounded men, and turned for Bien Hoa.

He waved off taxi instructions on the ground and got everyone out fast because the aircraft was still leaking two flammable substances. Ambulances were on the flight line. So was a medical evacuation helicopter, its blades already turning. Every man on Spooky 71 was alive. When Carpenter tried to get Levittow onto the medevac helicopter, Levittow refused to board until Carpenter ordered him to.

He had done what he came back for. He was not finished until the officer told him he was finished. Every man on Spooky 71 was alive. 40 shrapnel fragments were removed from Levitow at the Air Force hospital at Tachikawa, Japan between his knee and his hip. He recovered. When he was discharged from Tachikawa, he went back to Vietnam and flew 20 more combat missions before his enlistment ended.

He did not request reassignment. He asked to go back. Nobody told him he had to. On May 14th, 1970, Armed Forces Day, President Nixon placed the Medal of Honor around the neck of a 24-year-old from Connecticut in dress blues at the White House. 12 recipients were honored that day. 11 of them were officers or senior NCOs.

Levitow was an airman first class when he earned it. He was the first enlisted airman in the history of the United States Air Force to receive the Medal of Honor. The precision of that sentence matters. Another enlisted Air Force airman, Airman First Class William Pitsenbarger, performed an act of comparable courage in 1966, staying in a landing zone under fire to treat wounded men until he was killed.

He received the Air Force Cross posthumously. For decades afterward, Levitow was among those who campaigned publicly for Pitsenbarger’s Air Force Cross to be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. Pitsenbarger’s upgrade was approved. The ceremony was scheduled. John Levitow d.i.ed November 8th, 2000 at age 55 of cancer at his home in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

The Medal of Honor was presented posthumously to Pitsenbarger’s father on December 8th, 2000. 30 days later, Levitow had spent years working toward that moment. He did not live to see it. When people asked him in later life how he had done what he did on Spooky 71, he would smile and call it temporary insanity.

He worked 22 years in Connecticut Veterans Affairs. He spoke at Airman Leadership School graduations. He wore the medal to every ceremony because, as he told the historian in 1997, because of this, I can never retire. Today, the John L. Levitow Award is the highest honor presented to a graduate of Air Force enlisted professional military education, the Airman Leadership School, the NCO Academy.

Awarded to the top student, named after a 23-year-old from Connecticut who was just filling in for a friend. He never talked about that night unless someone asked. He was 23 years old. He was a loadmaster. That was supposed to be a logistics job.