Paul Huber didn’t set out to become a combat veteran. He was a mechanical engineering student at Arizona State who took mandatory ROTC and figured it wouldn’t hurt to see what the Air Force had to offer. What followed was a 23-year career that took him from the flight lines of Vietnam to the Cold War skies over England — and everywhere in between.
In this episode of Ask A Vet, Paul walks us through what it was really like to fly the F-4 Phantom, one of the most iconic jets of the Vietnam era. He describes it as “an engineering masterpiece and a designer’s folly” — a plane so over-engineered it had its pitot tube moved to the tail and wing tips bent upward to make it maneuverable enough to actually fight. Flying 220 combat missions out of Cam Ranh Bay, Paul’s nights were spent on interdiction runs over the DMZ, dropping six 500-pound bombs per wing at targets illuminated by flares, dodging tracers fired at the sound of his engines.
Then came March 15, 1968. Rerouted mid-mission to bomb a road intersection on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, Paul’s F-4 took a hit on the third pass. A fuel line caught fire, the flames burned through the hydraulic system, and control of the aircraft was lost at 10,000 feet. Paul ejected, crashed through the jungle canopy, hit a rock, and sat there with a .38 pistol and a canteen of water while the entire air war above him was redirected toward his rescue. The Jolly Green Giant arrived roughly 45 minutes later. By 2 o’clock that afternoon, Paul was back at Cam Ranh Bay being debriefed by the wing commander. His first request? Permission to keep his already-scheduled R&R to meet his wife in Hawaii. Granted.
After Vietnam, Paul went on to serve as an instructor pilot in Texas, flew F-111s in England during the height of the Cold War, and commanded an ROTC program at Utah State before retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He later spent 16 years at USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory. What he took away from all of it, he says, was a deep appreciation for what Americans have — and a belief that the best part of his career wasn’t the flying. It was the people.
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