Rescued Pilot’s Survival Story
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77-year-old Jim Lloyd of Placitas, NM appears on episode #760 of Hometown Heroes, airing November 19-24, 2022. A California native, Lloyd comes from a long line of identical twins, and in his case, both he and his twin brother are Purple Heart recipients.
Jim and his brother, John, were both wounded during the Vietnam War. For more photos, visit the Hometown Heroes facebook page.
Their father had served in the Army during World War II, spending most of his time in the Aleutian Islands. Twins Jim and John went to college together at Humboldt State (now known as Cal Poly Humboldt) in northern California, with John joining the Army one day before Jim became a Navy man in 1967. John would become a Green Beret and deploy to Vietnam, where he was seriously wounded in an ambush by the enemy. What happened to his twin brother was on Jim’s mind when he headed overseas in preparation for his first combat missions.
“There was a little bit of vengeance,” you’ll hear Lloyd remember. “I wanted to go back and have an opportunity to pick up where he left off, and go after them for what they did to him.”
Twins John (left) and Jim Lloyd together during the Vietnam War.
After completing his training, he flew A-4 Skyhawks before transitioning to A-7 Corsair IIs. You’ll hear his memories of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) Training, and how it became relevant in North Vietnam later on. Flying off the deck of the USS Saratoga (CV-60), he initially flew missions over South Vietnam before bombing missions resumed over North Vietnam, which you’ll hear him say was “a whole different story.”
“The bombing halt north of the 20th parallel allowed North Vietnam to refortify, with the help of China and the Soviet Union, and they were waiting for us,” he explains of the 4-year moratorium on bombing that area. “Basically you could write a movie for almost every flight we were over there, it was pretty hot.”
Jim in front of an A-7 Corsair II aboard the USS Saratoga in 1972.
His typical missions lasted about 90 minutes, with roughly an hour of that spent over enemy territory, and he remembers being fired upon on nearly every mission he flew. A wide variety of enemy weapons posed hazards, but “the scariest of all” in Lloyd’s memory were the “SAMs,” surface-to-air missiles that would travel at three times the speed of sound. You’ll hear him describe an “Alpha Strike” mission in which his aircraft was malfunctioning and two F-4 Phantoms came to his rescue. Both of those planes were eventually shot down, the pilots becoming prisoners of war, but their efforts in defending Lloyd’s A-7 against enemy MiGs enabled Jim to make it back to the carrier.
“No doubt in my mind I would’ve been hit and gone in,” he says of certainty of his ending up in the ocean without those F-4’s heroics. “I was an easy kill.”
