THE REAL LAST GUNFIGHTER
By Jim Towers, M.J.A., J.D.
Houston Heights Independent
The last gunfighter A-7 Corsair.
I was riding the Honda CB 1100 on a back road west of Waring. Some beautiful Hill country rides back there riding down along the St. Mary's river, cutting through some of the horse pastures. Enjoying the wildlife along the road, and that's when I saw it.
I love riding the old country roads.
Along the river.
They're lucky it's not hunting season.
You don’t expect to see a Navy attack aircraft in a Hill Country pasture. You don’t expect to see anything out there except cedar, caliche, and the occasional white-tail standing in the brush like it owns the county. But there she was, behind a barbed wire fence, nose pointed at nothing, cockpit faceing to the sky. A real life real world A-7 Corsair II. Engine pulled and standing upright in the grass beside her like a headstone.
He said the A- 7’s were the real last gunfighters because they actually had guns on them. They came after the F-8s. They were slow and low not supersonic. They weren't interceptors. So they actually flew against ground target that actually needed gun runs.
I got off the bike.
A man came out of the barn. Davis. He moved like a man who had spent decades outdoors and had no intention of stopping. We talked across the fence the way you do in the Hill Country: unhurried, no agenda, two strangers with nothing to prove.
He had flown off the USS Oriskany. Yankee Station. Gulf of Tonkin.
He flew Iron Hand missions, the ones where you go in first, alone, to suppress the SAM’s surface-to-air missile sites before the strike package arrives. The SAM radar’s locks onto you on purpose because that’s the job. You are the bait. The Air Force called it wild weaseling. Their motto for this particular job was the first words muttered by a young pilot after the generals explained what this new mission strategy was gonna be. He looked at the generals and said “you gotta be fucking shitting me?”! Ever since then the motto on the patch of every U.S Air Force wild weasel squadron is ”YGBFSM!” Of course Davis was U.S. Navy and he did it better in the Air Force ever could.
He flew against the Thanh Hóa Bridge.
The dragon Jaws bridge, Photo from Smithsonian Institute naval war archive.
The Dragon’s Jaw.
If you know the name, you already know what that means. If you don’t: the North Vietnamese ringed that bridge with more anti-aircraft artillery than almost any other target of the war. American airpower flew against it for years and lost aircraft and crews in the attempt. It became a symbol of everything the war was and wasn’t: of limits, of cost, of what it means to fly into a wall of fire at low altitude and try to come out the other side.
SA- 2 Soviet Sam” surface-to-air missile”. system. Photo : Smithsonian Institute naval warfare.
Davis told me it was the worst air battle he’d ever been in. Planes in every direction. Fire so thick you could not escape it. Every time you rolled in, you knew it was gonna be a gun fight. And the worst things were the flying telephone poles of death, the nickname they gave the SA-2s surface air missile systems they used against American aircraft. He said it quietly, the way men say things they have said before only to themselves.
He lost friends there, a man from Annapolis like him, from his own squadron. Shot down over the bridge. Never came home.
Well out on rides all over Texas especially enjoy riding the hill country I had the interesting experience of finding a few different me 17s all over Texas? I'm not sure why they're here or how they got here but these are the exact of plane that he flew against during the war. Odd that they would both be sitting in fields somewhere in Texas.
MIG - 17 what they flew against.
He said he knew John McCain and had met him several times.
I stood there at the barbed wire and let him talk.
This one sits in a field outside of round top Texas.
He had bought the Corsair at auction after the Navy retired her. His plan was to restore her, get her into display shape, and have her place somewhere in the local community, Front of a high school, or out by the war memorial, or in front of a park. Seen a lot of F -4 do that but he felt that the A-7s with a real heroes, and never got enough credit for it.
What are the odds? What are the odds that both planes would be sitting in a field in Texas?
But as fate would have it, the money ran out. The dream stalled. The engine covering came out of the airframe and stood in the grass beside it.
A-7 sitting in a field somewhere in Texas.
Davis called her The Real Last Gunfighter. The A-7 was built for one job: find the target, hit it, come home. She flew toward the fight, and more often than not she flew alone. He said the sevens were the real last gunfighters because they actually had guns on them. It came after the F8 and they were slow and low not supersonic. They weren't interceptors, so they actually flew against ground targets with guns that shoot back at them. what he called a real gun fight.
Pilots come home. Wars end. Things that seemed permanent turn out not to be.
Davis is gone now. I went back in 2016 looking for the airplane. The field was empty. The barn was still there. The Corsair had disappeared: scrapped, sold, or hauled off in pieces. She does not appear in the public record of surviving A-7 Corsair IIs. There are no aviation spotters, no forum threads, no drone footage. Whatever paperwork exists in a Navy archive somewhere is the only other documentation.
What remains is a conversation across a barbed wire fence on a back road west of Waring, and the frames I shot that afternoon. There's something melancholy and sad about the end of an era. The end of something greater than yourself. A part of incredible history that shaped the world for the next 55 years. Something that shaped aviation, how bombing missions work, how smart bombs and modern warfare and tactics it all developed and comes from here. This comes from a guy who survived it all, and then, returned to the farm and tried to live the rest of his life in a quiet little piece of the world. He spent his time tending his land, riding his herds, and attempting to live out the rest of his life in peace.
And I was fortunate enough to be just a guy on a motorcycle, who stopped when he didn’t have to, And sat with a man in the shade of an old oak tree on the side of a country road in Texas. I was fortunate enough to have the honor and privilege to hear his story. - For Davis.
Jim Towers, Houston heights Independent.
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