Retired Lt. Col. Louie Lovitt stands near a P-38 aircraft at Randolph Air Force Base. Photo by Richard McFadden

Flying a P-51 aircraft underneath the Golden Gate Bridge was neither appropriate nor safe for retired Col. Louie Lovitt, whose 20-year military and contracting career was filled with compelling work in this country and abroad.

During a sequence in the early 1960s with the 308th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Lovitt, who now resides in northwest San Antonio, took part in numerous air attack and support missions during the early days of the Vietnam War.

He flew missions with U.S. forces in Korea and earned a Distinguished Flying Cross award. His career began in earnest when, as a 13-year-old boy living in Illinois, he caught a ride in a Porterfield trainer and decided he wanted to learn to fly.

An eventual Bronze Star recipient, weapons expert and combat veteran, Lovitt did some of his earliest training at Randolph Air Force Base in 1949. He celebrated his 80th birthday with family and friends during the July 4 weekend and reflected on some of the unique assignments he carried out.

“I was at Homestead Air Force Base, near Miami, during the Cuban missile crisis and we came awfully close to something big happening,” Lovitt said. “I think a lot of people understood, too, how close we came.”

Lovitt was commander of the 308th Tactical Fighter Squadron, based at Homestead during the 1962 crisis and his squadron was set to fly F-100s on first-strike sorties, had circumstances dictated such maneuvers.

“We would have gone in and taken out the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), which were anti-aircraft weaponry,” Lovitt said. “There would have been more fighter jets right behind us, to deal with the nuclear-tipped missiles that were also on the ground there. We never got the call to do the mission, but we were awfully close.”

Over a span of two weeks, then-president John Kennedy delicately maneuvered through an international stand-down with Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev after missile silos and equipment were detected on the island of Cuba by U.S. air surveillance.

Retired Lt. Col. Dale Shaffer was also at Homestead then and served with Lovitt at various times in his military career.

“Louie is the kind of person you’d want alongside you if you had to engage in any kind of aerial combat or aerial mission,” Shaffer said. “He took his job seriously and he understood how to do it.

“We didn’t have to go in for air strikes in Cuba but we’d trained over and over and we would have performed well. We understood the mission and could have carried it out with no problem.”

Lovitt had been stationed in the Philippines in 1954, when French troops were routed in Southeast Asia at Dien Bien Phu by communist Vietnamese forces. The U.S. later became heavily involved in Vietnam and Lovitt’s time in that theater helped shape his modern point of view.

“I hope that someone will have the sense enough not to pull out of there too quickly,” Lovitt said of today’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan. “That would only empower the enemy. We need to help get the people there and their military up and walking, then withdraw with honor.”

Shaffer said U.S. forces, specifically the Air Force, have proven, time and time again, to be world leaders in militaristic capability.

“I think we proved that in Korea, when our F-58s dominated the MiG fighter jets that China and the Koreans threw up against us,” Shaffer said. “The United States military leads the way. We are trained as well as any force and we’re more powerful than any force.”

Having joined the Army Air Corps in 1946 and being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the brand-new Air Force in 1949, Lovitt was enrolled in helicopter mechanic school at Keesler Air Force Base before coming to Randolph.

It was in Texas that he met his wife, Bettie Surver, though they didn’t marry until many years later. Having recently celebrated their 30-year anniversary, the couple has seven children between them.

Lovitt’s military career included service on four continents after enlisting at age 17.

In Vietnam, Lovitt and others in his squadron flew in assorted aircraft – often Cessna O-1 Birddogs – that smoke dispersal and other visual effects as a means of marking enemy positions for allied ground troops. They also manned planes for missions using various sizes of ordnance and munitions, napalm and assorted firepower.

“The F-100 had an air-to-ground role,” Shaffer. “We carried 250- 500- and 750-pound bombing ordnance loads and the planes were equipped with 20-millimeter-cannon weaponry.

Leaving the Air Force in November 1969, Lovitt earned a college degree and worked in the private sector as an accountant, insurance agent, investigator and auditor.

“I still keep in touch with a few people I knew in the military and I like to stay current on what’s happening in today’s military and world events,” Lovitt said. “I’ve had a wonderful life doing many enjoyable and rewarding things.”

That would have to include the flight beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, when the colonel was still a lieutenant. He’d seen a movie with the historic “China Clipper” aircraft flying under the Golden Gate and the Oakland-San Francisco Bay bridges, headed to or coming from Hawaii and the Far East.

The span of depth on the Golden Gate Bridge is between 200 and 220 feet, depending on tides and water levels. Lovitt called what he did “crazy” and admits he shouldn’t have done it.

“He’d get in trouble today if he pulled that sort of stunt, but I remember when he left Randolph and flew low one day over my hometown of Christine, Texas, and got a bunch of people sort of hot,” Bettie Lovitt said.