by T. E. Cruise
Behind Steve were a couple of guys sitting hunched over their drinks at the bar, but otherwise the club was empty. Because the weather had been lousy all day there had been no missions flown out of Muang Chi. That explained the lack of pilots straddling bar stools and hitting the sauce to come off their postflight, adrenaline highs.
It hadn’t taken long for the six pilots who’d shanghaied Steve to get to what was eating them: their profound dissatisfaction with the tactical limits and support they’d been receiving from up the chain of command.
“The way I see it, things here are like what we experienced in Korea,” Steve said. “In those days, we were going up against Stone Age logistical and communication systems with state-of-the-art airplanes and ordnance.”
“You’d think we’d be on top of the situation on account of that,” said one of the pilots, a lieutenant named Dave To-back.
“We figured it would all go our way in Korea, as well,” Steve replied. “But we were wrong, just like you guys. It was like we were trying to take out a hornet’s nest with a tommy gun.”
“Tommy gun—?”
Whispered snickers from a couple of the pilots at the opposite end of the table:
“Who is this guy: Audie Murphy?”
“What war does he think he’s in—?”
Steve chose to ignore it.
“Sure you can blast open the nest,” he continued. “But you don’t kill many hornets doing it, and tomorrow that spit and paper nest will be rebuilt, so what have you accomplished, besides blowing off a couple of clips of rounds?”
“And taken a hell of a lot of stings in return,” Lieutenant Ritchie added, nodding. “Okay, but maybe in Korea you guys didn’t know any better,” he added. “But now we do know better, or at least we’re supposed to, but somebody forgot to tell the brass.”
“You tell ‘em, Linc—” one of the others declared.
“I hear you,” Steve sighed. “I know the Air Force seems to have a short memory. Every time we go into action we seem fated to make the same mistakes, and then play catchup. It happened that way in World War Two, and in Korea. Now it’s happening in Vietnam. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it is.” He shrugged philosophically. “You don’t like it and I don’t like it, but this Air Force happens to be the only one we’ve got. You want to fly Uncle Sam’s jets, you have to take the lumps with the sweet stuff.”
“We all know that, sir,” began one of the other pilots. “We’ve trained to be fighter jocks. We’ve walked the walk and talked the talk, and now we consider ourselves the fortunate few who’ve been given the chance to put it to the test—”
“He’s right,” Dave Toback said. “We’re happy to be here, Colonel.”
“We just don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing,” Lincoln Ritchie picked up. “From the start, we were ready to take the fight into the enemy’s backyard, hitting him where it hurt—at the source of his supplies into the theater—but we weren’t allowed.”
“Come on now,” Steve chided. “It’s gotten better … You guys have been socking it to the enemy’s POL facilities …”
Back in the spring the Joint Chiefs had lobbied Washington to allow the Air Force to bomb North Vietnam’s petroleum, oil, and lubricant industrial facilities. Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson had been hesitant to give the go-ahead because most of the targeted POL sites were in the Hanoi and Haipong areas. The DOD and the White House were concerned that the increased bombing might cause excessive civilian casualties, and might harden the enemy’s resolve. It was Johnson’s strategy that the bombing be taken as a warning: a relatively mild slap that hinted of the knock-out punch being held in reserve. That strategy would crumble if the escalated bombing effort prematurely caused the enemy to have nothing left to lose in his northern home ground. Eventually, however, the bombing was approved. The first POL strikes had taken place at the end of June.
“We hear that Washington is claiming the POL campaign is a success.” One of the other pilots was scowling.
“You guys saying it isn’t?” Steve asked, looking around the table.
“It’s too little, too late, man—” Ritchie fervently began, and then paused, looking worried. “Sorry, no disrespect meant, Colonel, sir.”
“Hold on, son,” Steve said. “I’m wearing these eagles because they buy me the right to stick my nose where I please, and say what’s on my mind. I don’t want them to make you tongue-tied. We’re all on a first-name basis here. We’re all Thud drivers trying to do the job we’ve been handed.”
“All right, then …” Ritchie nodded, smiling slightly. “Like I was saying the trouble with the POL campaign—and this is something we all know, and LBJ is gonna find out—is that it’s too little, too late.”
“Wait a minute,” Steve interrupted, puzzled. “Intelligence is claiming that almost three quarters of the enemy’s facilities have been destroyed, and project total destruction within a few weeks …”
“The Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA don’t understand the enemy any better than LBJ.”
“You saying that hitting those facilities hasn’t crippled the enemy?”
“It’s irritated him all right,” Ritchie said. “But no way has it crippled him. Oh, sure, maybe if we had hit those facilities in the beginning we might be somewhere now,” he acknowledged. “But we didn’t, and in the interim we’ve given the enemy time to decentralize his stores—”
Steve listened closely, aware from his exchanges with the brass in Saigon that this firsthand information hadn’t yet made it up the chain of command. Hadn’t made it, he thought, or had been stifled…
“Now there’s buried POL stockpiles and little oil refineries all over the fucking country,” one of the other pilots said. “They’ve stashed the stuff in towns and villages, where they know we can’t touch it, and so we’re reduced to hanging our asses out over the combat zone. We throttle back, extend flaps, turn overselves into fucking targets for any rice farmer packing a weapon more sophisticated than a bow and arrow, and all that’s just to drop ordnance on any oxcarts and bicycles loaded with a couple of gallons of kerosene that we happen to spot.”
“Meanwhile, the enemy is still importing plenty of POL, thanks to the Russian and other supposedly ‘neutral’ tankers off-loading in Haiphong Harbor,” Lieutenant Toback grumbled. “We can’t touch any of those tankers crowding the harbor, not even if they shoot at us—which they do—unless they’re flying the North Vietnamese flag—”
“Which they don’t.” Another pilot scowled.
“There’s another aspect to all this,” Ritchie said. “The fact that we’re allowed to hit so few enemy targets means that gomer can concentrate his defenses where he knows we’re going to be,” Ritchie said. “We’re taking state-of-the-art stuff: radar-directed AAA, and SAMs …”
“I haven’t yet encountered a SAM,” Steve admitted, frowning, thinking that remote-controlled Surface-to-Air Missiles hadn’t been around in Korea.
Knowing chuckles swept the table. “You’ll encounter them tomorrow, Colonel,” Toback said. “Route Pack Six is SAM country.”
Steve nodded. Back around the end of ‘65, North Vietnam had been divided into six areas called “route packages.” So far Steve had flown missions over the relatively lightly defended Route Pack One: the area near the DMZ separating North and South Vietnam; and Route Pack Five, which was well to the west of Hanoi. Tomorrow would be his first venture into the hottest route pack of them all, number six.
“Tomorrow you’ll be striking at the heart of the beast, man.” Lincoln Ritchie winked. “Tomorrow we go downtown, to the Yen Lam POL rail depot, in beautiful Hannnnoi”
“Right on, brother,” Dave said. “SAM is thick at Yen Lam.”
“What about Iron Hand?” Steve asked.
Iron Hand was the code name given to the anti-SAM search and destroy program run by the “Wild Weasels”: F-105 Thunderchiefs with modified fuselages stretched an extra five feet to accommodate a second man in th
e cockpit. The Weasels flew advance strike escort. Their motto was “First in and last to leave,” and it was true. The twin-seat Thuds were equipped with electronic countermeasure equipment pods designed to lock onto SAM site radar. They’d fly over the strike target just in advance of the strike, acting as decoys to get the SAM site to switch on its radar. If the SAM site did, the Weasels would fire off a radar-homing Shrike air-to-ground missile to keep the SAM crew occupied, while backup F-105s came in with follow-up ordnance, including CBU cluster bomb units.
“The Weasels do a great job,” Dave said. “The best job they can. But the Weasel crews are learning the game as they go along. Meanwhile, gomer is getting all the Soviet-built SAMs he needs, so when we show up he just fires off a volley of the fucking things. If the Weasels manage to take out a few SAM sites in the process, gomer figures that’s just the cost of doing business.”
“I understand that the way to beat the Sams is to fly in low, beneath their effective envelope,” Steve volunteered.
There was more knowing laughter. “Colonel, you come in that low, gomer’s guns are going to shred you,” Ritchie replied. “As a matter of fact, we’ve come to the conclusion that SAM’s main purpose all along has been to force us down low enough to let those guns reach us—”
“Or else get us to jettison our bombs early,” one of the others said.
“In order to have the speed to outrun SAM,” Lieutenant Toback explained.
“I hear the flak around Hanoi is much worse than anything the Germans managed to put up around Berlin,” Steve said.
Toback nodded. “The first Thud drivers were told that there was no way an enemy gun could track a fast mover, and that’s true, as far as it goes, but the Russians and Chinese have given the enemy so many AAA batteries that all he has to do is put up a curtain of fire and let us fly into it.”
Steve grimaced, thinking back on what the flak had been like in Korea. This was going to be much worse. “What about MIGs? I haven’t seen any yet.”
“You’ll see them tomorrow,” one of the other pilots said. “Gomer keeps his fighters up north. It’s MIG-16s and 17s mostly, but now and then a 21.”
“No shit.” Steve smiled, thinking that things weren’t all bad if there was the chance to mix it up with enemy fighters …
“Gomer has a solid radar net up over Hanoi,” Toback was saying. “He sees us coming and sends up MIGs to meet us. The MIGs like it up high. They can’t compete with a Thud down low on deck. Our F-4 Phantom top cover escort does a fine job, but some MIGs always manage to get through.”
“Bet you’re glad of that.” Steve chuckled.
“Come again, sir?” Toback asked, looking blank.
“Well … I mean, aren’t you glad that you get the chance to do a little dogfighting?”
“Sir, the MIGs’ objective is only to harass us into dropping our ordnance early,” Toback began, using that excruciatingly polite tone usually reserved for the elderly or the infirm. “They’ll make a swooping pass or two, but you’ll be too busy setting up your attack dive to do anything about it.”
“We’ll see about that,” Steve said, thinking: Wouldn’t it be something to be a triple scorer? To shoot down the enemy in three wars …?
“Colonel, the MIGs don’t stick around to dogfight,” one of the others was saying. “You almost never see them too near the target. They don’t like mixing it up with their own SAMs.”
“SAM’s like my pecker.” Someone laughed. “Get him fired up and he’ll drill any hot pipe he can catch—”
“And gomer is more than willing to hose off SAMs even if there are MIGs in the vicinity,” Lieutenant Ritchie added. “But then, he’s got plenty of airplanes, since we’re not allowed to hit his airfields.”
“Fuck it, man,” Dave said scornfully. “Even if they let us, they probably wouldn’t let us use the right ordnance …”
“The protests back home are on the politicians’ minds,” Steve said, thinking about how the headline-grabbing demonstrations at Dow Chemical and the other munitions manufacturers had led the government to ban the use of napalm and certain other weapons in the north.
“Speaking of protest demonstrations,” Steve continued, choosing his words carefully. “Maybe they’ve got you thinking that there’s no sense in playing the game all out, if we’re not playing to win …”
“You talking about those reports concerning how some of the guys have been stroking it?” Toback asked, looking sour.
“Yep.” Steve nodded. He was sitting with his back to the bar, but he’d heard the squeak of a bar stool swiveling. At least one of the guys at the bar was tuning in on the conversation. Steve decided to pretend not to notice. If the guy wanted to pull up a chair and join in, he would.
“Look, Colonel. We don’t want you to take what we’ve been saying the wrong way,” Ritchie began. “Most of us do our job the way it’s supposed to be done, but sometimes because of the difficult circumstances under which we’re being asked to operate, some of us get a little sidetracked. Maybe we divert a little attention away from the target, and toward looking out for each other.” He smiled. “I mean since the odds are stacked way against us, if we don’t cover each other, who’s gonna?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Steve shook his head. “If we start concerning ourselves with covering our asses we might as well exchange our ordnance for leaflets telling gomer he’s won this thing, and then turn in our wings.”
“Colonel—” Ritchie tried to interrupt.
“Hold on, son,” Steve growled. “I’m not finished yet.” He looked around the table, drilling each pilot with his eyes. “You guys fly fighters. That means that you make your living by stretching your neck across the chopping block. Of course it’s dangerous,” he spat disdainfully. “Of course the odds are stacked against you. Hell, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it!”
The table stayed silent as Steve paused to light a cigarette. “You know, my father flew a fighter during the First World War,” he resumed, exhaling smoke. “In those days a pilot’s life expectancy was measured in weeks. Things weren’t much better for the men of RAF Fighter Command, back when they were trying to save London from the Luftwaffe—”
“Begging the colonel’s pardon,” Lincoln said evenly, “but you can save the history lesson.”
“Is that right, son?” Steve scowled.
“Yeah, man, that’s right.” Ritchie nodded vigorously. “You’re handing us this stiff upper lip stuff, man, but you don’t know shit about what you’re talking about—” he spat, disgusted.
“Easy, Linc,” Dave warned, casting a worried glance at Steve.
“No, let him talk,” Steve said. “I said I wanted you guys to level with me, and I meant it.”
“Thank you, Colonel, I appreciate that—” Lincoln began, sounding like he was calming down.
“But before you proceed let me also say that I have seen some action in my time,” Steve added wryly. “I was shot down and wounded over the Pacific, and shot down twice in Korea …”
“We all know your record, Colonel,” Lincoln replied. “And I don’t mean to take away from it, but that was then. This is now. By your own admission, all you’ve flown over here so far have been chicken shit strikes. You ain’t danced with SAM—”
“Tell him, Linc—!”
“You ain’t ever seen the flak as thick as summertime flies on spilled honey—”
“Right on, Lincoln, my man—”
“Or heard the call, ‘MIG on your six!’” Ritchie continued. “And you so loaded down with ordnance you know your Thud’s a sitting dead duck.”
He paused, his dark gaze locked onto Steve. When he resumed speaking the strident street patter was gone, replaced by the quiet voice of an intelligent, educated young man who had seen more of hell in his twenty-odd years than most people experienced in a lifetime.
“I don’t care what wars you’ve fought, sir,” Ritchie declared, “because you haven’t fought this war, which means that you
’ve never experienced what you’re going to experience tomorrow.”
“I hear you.” Steve nodded. “And while I’ve been a lot of places, I understand that I haven’t yet been there. That’s why tomorrow I’m gonna strap a Thud to my ass and go leave my calling card with Uncle Ho.”
Steve glanced at his watch: It was midnight.
“Oh, shit,” Dave Toback said hurriedly. “We didn’t mean to keep you up all night, sir …”
“No problem.” Steve smiled. “I enjoyed the conversation.”
“So did we, sir,” Ritchie replied, straining to sound polite.
Tonight I’m an adversary, Steve thought as the table quickly broke up. But tomorrow I’ll be one of them.
He was following the other pilots out when a familiar-sounding voice coming from behind said sarcastically, “… calling card with Uncle Ho?—”
Steve turned. His eyes widened. “Robbie?” he stammered, staring at his nephew.
“Hi ya, Uncle Steve.” Robbie grinned, sticking out his hand. “Welcome to Vietnam, the wholesale hurt capital of the world.”
“Colonel?” Lincoln Ritchie called from where he was waiting near the door. “You going to need a ride?”
“You guys go on,” Steve said, and then turned back to his nephew. “What the hell are you doing here at Muang Chi? I didn’t expect to see you until next month, when I got to Phanrat …”
“The 503rd needed an element leader,” Robbie explained. “So I’m here on loan until they can get one of their own guys up to speed.”
“They needed an old hand, eh?” Steve grinned. “How many missions have you flown, nephew?”
“Depends on who you ask.” Robbie grinned. “Officially, seventy-six.”
“No shit …” Steve nodded, impressed. “Over three quarters through your tour.”
“Yep, but that’s the official tally. Actually I’ve flown over eighty. I arranged for some of my flights not to be recorded.” Robbie blushed. “I guess I kind of like it here …”
“I hear you,” Steve said, laughing. “That’s just great!” he enthused. “My little nephew, an element lead!” He paused. “But do you mean to say you’ve been sitting at the bar this whole time?”