In January 1967, America was already deeply embroiled in the destructive quagmire of the Vietnam War. Operation Rolling Thunder, the enormous and sustained bombing of targets in North Vietnam, had been launched in March 1965; the campaign progressively escalated and moved northwards towards Hanoi due to the US policy of ‘graduated response’.

As hundreds of thousands of young Americans took to the streets in demonstration against President Johnson’s escalation policy, the number of American troops in Vietnam grew from 50,000 in early 1965 to 535,000 in early 1968. Meanwhile, US planes dropped more than three million tons of bombs on the war-torn country. The air war over Vietnam eventually ignited more explosions than Allied planes set off in Europe and Japan during the Second World War.

It was against this terrifying backdrop that American Lieutenant Commander Richard Schaffert found himself embroiled in one of the fiercest bouts of dog fighting of the entire Vietnam War. In his F8 Cruiser, he battled countless North Vietnamese pilots in the bloody skies over Southeast Asia. In 1967, he became engages in a struggle to the death with four agile MiG-17s. We relive the terrifying moment that all of his guns jammed on the first burst. Schaffert also ran out of missiles, yet the defenceless pilot continued to fight for ten minutes - minutes which must have felt like hours.

We also relive the gut-wrenching dogfights conducted by skilled fighter jocks like Paul Speer and Phil Wood, who followed Schaffert’s lead in facing the MiGs. The victory’s of pilots like Schaffert, Wood and Speer were instrumental in improving the flagging morale of American pilots, and an increasingly war-weary US public. Their courageous aviation antics convinced them, albeit incredibly briefly, that the war in Vietnam was not already lost.