In bass speak it's a short scale airplane, its sporty handling invited pilots to do things they should better not do. It certainly wasn't a warhorse or -bird. If those things had been used in Nam, they wouldn't have been grounded most of the time and not stood a chance against the rugged and forgiving MIG 17.
Did any F-104 ever have aerial combat anywhere in the world? I doubt it. That plane was both engineering- and acquisitionwise a vanity project. Erich Hartmann, the no 1 German fighter ace of WW II, was against purchasing the Starfighter and lost his job for the post-war Luftwaffe over it (he resigned). And Franz Josef-Strauss, the corrupt Minister of Defense who pushed it through against the advice of nearly every pilot who had flown the darn thing, was on Lockheed's pay roll.
