The Longest Dogfight and a Six-Year Test of Survival: Colonel John “Hoss” Mulligan’s Vietnam Story

Episode 56 of Military Tales brings us the incredible account of retired Colonel John Joseph Hoss Mulligan, U.S. Air Force, offering a gripping look into aerial combat during the Vietnam War and the brutal realities of being a prisoner of war. Colonel Mulligan takes us back to a historic day in 1967 and shares the harrowing details of his survival.

On May 20, 1967, Colonel Mulligan was part of a large mission involving about a hundred aircraft, targeting the Kep railroad yards northeast of Hanoi. His role, flying an F-4 Phantom out of Ubon Air Base, Thailand, was to provide MiG CAP (Combat Air Patrol) for the F-105 fighter bombers. He was flying on the wing of none other than Colonel Robin Olds, a legendary World War II and Vietnam War Ace with 16 official kills.

The mission quickly turned into a chaotic and historic aerial battle. Mulligan’s flight of four F-4s unexpectedly flew directly into the middle of 32 MiG-17s. Despite being vastly outnumbered – at one point, Mulligan found himself in a dogfight with 10 MiGs simultaneously – the US F-4s faced a critical disadvantage: they were only armed with missiles (Sparrow and Sidewinder), which were useless at the close ranges of the fight (no more than 350 yards), while the MiGs had guns.

Colonel Mulligan describes the fight as an “old-fashioned World War II whifferdale”. In the chaos, his F-4 lost its radio, making coordination difficult. When Robin Olds attacked two MiGs and immediately had two on his tail and firing, Mulligan’s crew fired a Sparrow missile across the MiGs’ path to scare them off, which worked. In an almost unbelievable turn of events, a Russian heat-seeking missile fired at Mulligan’s F-4 locked onto the hot exhaust of the Sparrow missile instead of his aircraft’s tailpipe, trailing it over the horizon. Despite this moment of luck, two more MiGs immediately got on his tail. After evading those, two more attacked from the 2 o’clock position, hitting his main fuel tank. With the aircraft hit and controls frozen, Colonel Mulligan and his aircraft commander, Major Jack van Loan, ejected. The dogfight lasted an astonishing 15 minutes, believed to be the longest in jet aviation history.

Tragically, Mulligan’s F-4 was the only aircraft lost that day. The mission was ultimately successful, with seven MiG-17s shot down by the F-4s.

Ejecting through the fireball of his burning jet, Colonel Mulligan suffered severe third-degree burns on his forearms and first/second-degree burns on his face and neck. Upon landing on a mountain peak, he sustained a complete tear of the ligaments in his right knee – an injury compared to one that ended NFL player Joe Namath’s career. Despite the excruciating pain, he was forced by his captors, indigenous tribespeople, to climb down the mountain with bayonets at his back, driven by the will to survive. They were separated from his aircraft commander to ensure each group of captors could claim a bounty.

Colonel Mulligan then spent six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. He describes the conditions as miserable, involving torture, beatings, disease, and lack of medical attention. Food and water were scarce and often contaminated. Cells were filthy, infested with rats, and offered no protection from the cold winters or the brutal summer heat, which could reach an estimated 140 degrees.

He shares chilling details of the severe injuries sustained by himself and four cellmates: one with broken vertebrae and mangled limbs, another with a large shrapnel wound, broken femur, and shrapnel-riddled arms (who laid naked for a year due to Vietnamese belief he wouldn’t survive), a third with both femurs snapped during ejection who received inadequate medical care. Mulligan’s own injuries included dislocated shoulders from torture and nerve damage. Most graphically, he recounts treating his severely infected burns using a method learned in survival school: allowing maggots to clean the dead tissue and then flushing the wounds with Midstream urine as sterile fluid. He used strips of his lucky Batman t-shirt to dress the wounds, which eventually healed, later baffling dermatologists who thought it was excellent skin grafting. Another cellmate ruptured his eardrum during torture and, in maddening pain from infection, rebroke it with a rusty nail for relief.

Despite these horrific conditions, 90% of American POWs in North Vietnam survived, which Mulligan considers miraculous. He attributes this high survival rate to several factors: their strong communication network (“prison grapevines”), conducting themselves as a military organization with adherence to the chain of command, and crucially, faith and hope – faith in God, faith in each other, and faith that their country would not leave them behind.

Colonel Mulligan also touches on specific aspects of his captivity, including the brief improvement in treatment after the death of Ho Chi Minh and the significant morale boost provided by the Sante Raid, which, while not improving treatment directly, consolidated prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton and enhanced communication. He shares a humorous anecdote about using coded language (“thank you” sounding like “FU”) when forced to bow to guards. He describes learning the names of nearly 600 fellow POWs, memorizing them alphabetically, and dumping this vital intelligence upon release. He confirms that Senator John McCain, who was in the same prison camp and communicated with Mulligan, was not treated differently than other POWs, and likely faced harder conditions due to his family’s status. He also highlights the courage and equal standing of the four enlisted POWs, including Navy Seaman Doug Hegdal, who memorized the names of POWs using the tune of “Old MacDonald” to provide critical intelligence upon his early release.

Major Mulligan was finally released on February 18, 1973, part of the wave of POWs freed after the resumed bombing of North Vietnam, which a Vietnamese officer admitted had left them without the means to continue fighting. His story is a testament to resilience, the bonds of military service, and the enduring human spirit in the face of unimaginable adversity.