Fighter Pilot

by Christina Olds

  With three tanks and a full load of missiles we normally grossed out over 50,000 pounds at takeoff. Now, with only 190 pounds under the right wing and 2,200 pounds under the left wing, the unbalanced load might make takeoffs interesting. Nobody had done it in an F-4 before but we would have to start now. For the future we had to figure out how to move the tiny ECM pod from the outboard to the inboard pylon and be able to keep the right wing tank. But for now, the asymmetric load was going to be a fact.

  The pod itself got power from a generator powered by a small propeller-driven turbine in the pod nose. It didn’t need to draw on aircraft power except for controlling it on and off. We still needed to get it connected electrically. My lead avionics NCO, Ernie, checked the diagrams and schematics, then looked at what kind of umbilical and cannon plug were required. We had suitable power to the outboard pylon but still no connectors. We sent messages to the Air Material Command headquarters in Utah, only to discover that the power was dedicated exclusively for nuclear weapons. We weren’t supposed to have access.

  “So? Let’s get it done,” I said.

  Ernie explained, “Boss, I’m with you, but we need and don’t have a certain cannon plug that is controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission back at Sandia. We could jury-rig something if we had that plug, but not without it.”

  “Well, who do we know at Sandia?” I asked.

  I got on the phone and finally talked to someone and explained our need, giving him the part number of the cannon plug in question.

  “How many do you want?” was his only reaction.

  On Christmas Day, a C-141 departed the States with forty-eight adapter kits and an engineer from OAMA (Ogden Air Material Area). The aircraft arrived at Ubon on December 27 and brought us a crate full of the needed items. Not one piece of paper was exchanged in the transaction and my maintenance guys soon had every jet wired ready for the pods to be hung on the right outboard. It wasn’t a permanent fix, but it worked! Eventually correct parts would have to be engineered and manufactured if we were to carry the pods for missions after Bolo. That guy at Sandia was a shining example of what good people did when the chips were down.

  As part of the mission secrecy, the frag order to “borrow” the pods from the F-105 wings was hand-carried from Ubon to the other wings. Thanks to the effort of all the ground crews and many people all the way back to depots in the States, a C-47 arrived on December 30 with all the jammers we needed.

  Maintenance worked around the clock. So did supply, mess, fuels, munitions, electronics, everyone. We had to maintain our regular flying schedule in addition to preparing for Bolo. Our normal daily ops plan, fouled up by Rapid Roger, meant sixty-four missions every twenty-four hours required an overall maintenance effort geared at producing armed and loaded aircraft as needed. Now all of a sudden the maintenance and armament troops had to generate more than thirty in-commission F-4s all at the same time.

  We still had to maintain secrecy about any kind of plan and/or execution date. The last few days of December, I canceled all leaves and postponed the New Year’s Eve party. The rumor mill got into full swing. I went out on the flight line in the wee hours to see how the troops were doing. The place was a beehive of activity, men working far beyond their normal shifts. I saw one young airman hobbling about on crutches and asked his line chief about him. “Fell off his bike the other day and busted his leg. But he’s all right. I’m watching him. None of us know what’s really up, but he said his bird is going to go, whatever!”

  God, how I loved those men! The sarge made me realize it was high time to cut the men in on our plan, at least as much as I dared tell them. Briefings for the pilots weren’t given until absolutely necessary—that was December 30, when the flight crews were chosen. Since the normal twenty-four-hour-a-day flying schedule was still in progress, we had to conduct two aircrew briefings per day to cover the entire spectrum. There were seven briefings conducted between December 30 and January 1. It was ridiculous to think we could pull this off in absolute secrecy, but I was sure the rumor mill was responsible for the extra energy and dedication seen everywhere.

  The planned day arrived and we stood by for the execute order from the 7th. It didn’t come on January 1. We were put on hold because of bad weather in the Pack VI area. That night, every man felt tense. We briefed again the next morning and then sat and waited. Stormy wasn’t helpful when he informed us that the weather up north was the same as the day before, solid cloud coverage with tops at 7,000. That wasn’t good. We couldn’t see any SAMs launched our way until too late to dodge the damned things. But what the hell, we’d worry about that when the time came.

  There was little talk as we waited for the word on January 2. Come on, come on, we were all thinking, when one of the men from the combat operations center stuck his head in the door and shouted, “You’re on! EXECUTE!”

  “OK, Wolfpack, go get ’em!” I yelled as a recollection of Hub Zemke’s famous send-off to his guys suddenly blazed into memory. The Wolfpack was reborn.

  We rushed to the squadron personal equipment rooms for our gear, donned harnesses and G suits, grabbed our helmets, and headed out to the jets. This last walk across the ramp was solemn for everyone. I smoked a final cigarette on the way. Would this be the last time we saw one another, saw Ubon, saw home? I felt a searing pain in the pit of my stomach and was already drenched in sweat by the time I reached my bird. When I stamped out the cigarette, my jaw was so tightly clenched that my teeth hurt. The pain blended well with my grim mood. Dear God, please let me lead these wonderful men into a successful battle and safely back home.

  As I taxied out of my parking place I saw the young airman with the broken leg stretched out on the concrete with his head on a wheel chock. He was dead to the world, exhausted. I wondered how many hours he had spent out there getting his bird ready. I’d make sure to find out when I got back, if I got back.

  Our Ubon package refueled on Red track and topped off, and on my call the tankers headed out of orbit northbound to lead us all the way to 20 degrees north, well into Laos. Six tankers stacked in trail, each dragging a flight of four Phantoms refueling all the way to get us as far north as possible with a full load of fuel. I waved at the boom operator of my tanker and dropped my flight away, then pushed up the throttles to 480 knots, starting to do my best F-105 impersonation. We switched over to the mission strike frequency along with Ford and Rambler flights. The rest would follow in about fifteen minutes.

  Solid undercast greeted us as we crossed the Black River and I checked slightly right to head to the Dog Pecker, a conspicuous bend in a Red River tributary a bit east of the riverside town of Yen Bai. I kicked the rudder back and forth to signal Olds Flight out into combat spread, not our usual wide fluid four, but the more compact 1,500-foot spacing of a Thud flight in pod formation. “Olds flight, clean ’em up, green ’em up, start your music” was the unfamiliar combat preparation call of the F-105s. We were in character.

  Past the Dog Pecker and then onward to Thud Ridge, right turn and down the east side of the ridgeline, which is a gigantic finger pointing directly at Phuc Yen airfield. According to plan we are missile-free and anything ahead of me will be hostile. My GIB or guy-in-back, Charlie Clifton, is sweeping the area with his radar, searching for the MiG orbit we had predicted would be over the airfield. Solid undercast at about 7,000 feet beneath us and no MiGs! Chappie is coming behind me and then J.B. I’m over Phuc Yen and nothing yet. A few miles past and I’m forced into a reversal, back toward Ford and Rambler flights. I cancel the missile-free condition and we revert to mandatory visual identification before firing anything.

  Ford flight arrives on time. Chappie calls a MiG-21 on my flight that has popped up out of the undercast beneath us. I break hard right just in time to see another MiG at my eleven o’clock. We’re set up for radar missiles and he’s right at min range. Clifton hears my call and aims the radar that way and is locked on almost immediately. I squeeze the trigger and launch one, then another Sparrow.
They zoom away but apparently aren’t guiding. I slap down at the missile switch on the panel ahead of my left knee and hear the growl of my first Sidewinder. I shoot again. Nothing! It heads abruptly toward the undercast.

  MiGs are popping out of the cloud deck everywhere. Chappie’s flight is engaged and his wingman, Ev Raspberry, gets the first one. Meanwhile, I’ve got another 21 engaged. I get a growl and fire. As the missile leaves the rail, the next Sidewinder is already howling, I shoot again. Splash! The MiG’s right wing comes off and he snaps right and down. My wingman, Ralph Wetterhahn, has slid behind a second MiG that had been attacking us, and he snaps off two Sparrows, which hit. Three down now! Olds Four, Walt Radeker and Jim Murray, have got a MiG-21 in front of them attacking Olds Three. They shoot. We’ve got four now!

  Rambler Flight gets on the scene. The battle has now been swirling for almost ten minutes. J. B. Stone and Cliff Dunnegan are engaged almost immediately. J.B. fires first in Rambler Flight and takes one. Rambler Two, the two Larrys, Glynn and Cary, get yet another. Major Phil Combies in Rambler Four chalks up the seventh MiG. His claim is a “probable” but later confirmed. The MiGs have had enough and suddenly the air is still. Olds, Ford, and Rambler flights head outbound exuberantly. The second wave from Ubon of Lincoln, Tempest, Plymouth, and Vespa flights find nothing. The Da Nang force is destined for Haiphong and hopefully the MiGs of Kep airfield abort their mission because of even worse weather on the coast.

  The mission took a huge toll on the small fleet of new MiG-21s. It also proved the ability of the F-4 and its missile armament to effectively engage the enemy aircraft. A gun would still be a priority for future models, but we could accomplish the mission with what we had. The pods had worked well for us with only five SAMs seen during the entire mission and virtually no 85 mm radar-directed flak from beneath the clouds. Our tactics, our teamwork, our planning, and our training could always be improved, but we could prevail if given the opportunity. We returned home triumphant.

  18

  Rolling Thunder

  Activity on base was hectic through the rest of January. Everyone was energized by Bolo. I was proud, happy, and busy just going through my daily command activities over the weeks that ensued, but totally unprepared for the public-relations firestorm the mission had created. Good God, why couldn’t they just let us get on with our business? It’s not the war that wore me down, although by then I’d had four months without any time off; it was the people who ran the blasted thing from their perches on the various dead tree boughs between SEA and the hallowed halls of that empty “headquarters.” My diary for January recorded over three hundred visitors to Ubon, a daily stream of “do-gooders” and “fixers” one by one or in various-sized groups. It was difficult to avoid the feeling that over half of these people were just hangers-on, longing to be near the thrill of action in the hopes that it rubbed off on them. Not a good attitude, I know, but hardly anyone in that constant stream of “VIPs” seemed to have a real purpose for being there. By purpose, I mean to contribute and help, not to take or to suck some of the 8th Wing’s high energy for themselves. Protocol demanded I temper my growing reputation as a maverick; I had to give each visitor the proper time. Reporters and so-called journalists showed up from all over. I lost track of the interviews. How many damn times did people need to hear the same story? I knew their reports would have inaccuracies, exaggerations, and omissions, all impossible to control after the fact. It drove me nuts. Often I’d hear Chappie chuckling and snorting on the other side of the vine-covered trellis between our desks. If his amusement became too great, he’d suddenly pretend he was on the phone. That drove me nuts, too. He was also doing quite a bit of grandstanding with the VIPs when he thought I wasn’t watching. There was little I could do about it. We were too busy. On the positive side, letters and calls flooded in from folks I knew and respected around the world offering their support. A telegram came from Bill Kirk, still at Davis-Monthan: “OK, you’ve got yours, now save one for me!”

  Evenings at the O club were great fun. The “Wolfpack” had taken on a life of its own. A new spirit and camaraderie evolved. One evening I sat at the bar talking to a young guy named John Harris, who sported a nice, neatly trimmed, regulation mustache. I asked him if he thought I’d look good in one. What did I expect him to respond, “No, Colonel”? Starting that day, I grew my mustache. When it had respectable growth to the edges of my mouth (still correctly trimmed) I decided the David Niven look wasn’t for me. What the hell, I’d look a whole lot better with a full Tommy Burne–type World War II mustache, so it grew well beyond the regulations. What was anybody going to do—send the secretary of the air force over to knock me out, sit on me, and shave it off? It became the middle finger I couldn’t raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.

  High morale and focus were needed, but occasionally the activities became excessive. Phil Combies was irrepressible. A knock came on my trailer door one night. Glancing sleepily at my watch I saw it was about 0245. Thank God I wasn’t scheduled on the first go in the morning. A captain dressed in typical off-duty civvies stood there, looking a bit nervous.

  “What’s up?” I muttered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

  “Colonel sir, you’d better come down to the club. Your wingman is raising hell and we can’t get him under control.”

  Oh shit, I thought, it’s Phil. “What the hell is he doing now?”

  “Sir, he’s tearing the place apart and—”

  I cut him off. “Go back and tell ’em I’m coming. And for Christ’s sake, all of you back off till I get there.”

  I put on a flight suit, pulled on a pair of flight boots, headed the two blocks to the club, and walked into the bar. The place was a shambles. There were two or three guys facing Phil, who had fortified himself behind the bar. Broken glass littered the floor. One window was broken out and a barstool was destined for the junk pile. Phil was raging, cussing at the top of his voice and daring any bastard to come closer. I assumed that included me, so I went over, walked around the end of the bar, and approached him. Now there was one drunken, angry Irishman! God, he was a mess and smelled like a busted beer keg. He started to raise a fist, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it, so I grabbed him, whirled him around, got him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants, and propelled him out onto the sidewalk.

  Phil ranted something about a damned nonrated SOB who tried to keep him from pouring himself a drink. He’d show that SOB. He was going to wipe up the whole base with his nonrated ass. I told Phil that would have to wait; now he’d go to bed. No such thing. He raved and struggled to get back into the bar, where he was going to kill someone. I shook him and said, “Get your ass to bed, Combies, NOW!” It took a while for that to have an effect, but finally he stumbled away with my parting order for him to report to my office in uniform at 0800.

  Since the day had already started for me, I went to my trailer, shaved, redressed, and headed back out. There were plenty of troops on shift and I spent some happy predawn time drifting around the shops along the flight line. After breakfast at the club I went to my office, arriving at about 0840.

  There sat Phil in the outer office in fresh 1505s looking like death warmed over. I ignored him, pretended to busy myself with the morning’s in-basket, and exchanged a few pleasantries with Chappie. Finally I had Phil ushered in.

  He marched the length of my office up to my desk and saluted. “Major Combies, reporting as—” He stopped as I stood up and lit into him.

  I roared, “Shut up, Major! You are a disgrace. Your behavior last night was inexcusable. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Combies seemed to be struggling to get out the usual “No excuse, sir,” but what came out of his mouth was a defiant “Sir, you’re forty minutes late!”

  It was all I could do to keep a straight face, especially when I saw and heard Chappie c
hoking behind the ivy. Trying to be the stern disciplinarian, I glared at Phil and issued the worst possible punishment I could have devised for him. I told him, “You are grounded. Furthermore, you will report to the club each evening and stand duty in the bar. Your instructions are simple. You are to maintain order and discipline. You will not drink, and if one, just ONE, glass is broken during your watch, I will send you back to ADC forthwith. UNDERSTAND?”

  “Yes, sir!” He saluted, about-faced, and marched off, not quite steadily.

  He took his punishment like a man, did as he was told, and took an unmerciful ribbing from the rest of the pilots without as much as a murmur.

  I don’t remember how long I let the situation stand, but it wasn’t too long. I needed him in his invaluable role as a combat leader, and often as number Three in my flight. He was one hell of a pilot and a good man. The North Vietnamese soon put a $5,000 reward out for his pink body. I had to remind him not to get too big a head, because the bounty on me was $25,000.

  The MiGs seemed to be hiding after Bolo. Guess we really got to them. We wouldn’t see any again until the middle of March. It was OK; there was plenty to do. Properly configured parts arrived from Ogden to replace the jury-rigged wiring from the cockpit to the QRC pod from Bolo. Our ECM pods arrived and we flew missions into Route Pack VI with pods thereafter.