by Ed Cobleigh
***
Weeks later, after a few drinks, my navigator tries to verbally express what we both saw. His imaginative description is all the more surprising coming from him, normally a taciturn and inarticulate man. Imagination is not a quality highly prized among navigators as imaginative navigation is dysfunctional in the extreme. More importantly, when you trust your life to the flying skills of another guy in. the front cockpit, too much imagination can be worrisome. But, from somewhere down deep inside himself, my navigator tells me the fireball impressed him at the time as resembling two vaporous souls trying to hold on to this world, to survive and to not leave it. The mushroom cloud of hot gasses represented the spirits of two human beings unwillingly torn from their physical bodies, but not willing to go quietly into the long night. As the fire burned itself out, he perceived they were at last consumed and lost forever to this world, floating away into the stinking wet air of the Laotian jungle.
***
Also later, during one of the sleepless days that substitute for my nights; I am in my bunk holding the nightmares at bay. In my mind's eye, I see for the umpteenth time the image of a huge gash on the black surface of the night world, opening up a momentary glimpse down into hell itself. I see an earth wounded by the impact of 50,000 pounds of fighter jet. But as I watch from overhead, the gash is healed from below to scab off and close the wound. The peek into an incandescent underworld lying just below the sweating jungle fades with the dying fireball.
Which image is more accurate, the one of my sleep-deprived imagination or that of my navigator's, which he gathered in real time on the spot? I don't know and I don't know if it matters. All that counts is that we both have to deal with what we remember.
MiG Night CAP
A gray-dark aluminum cloud is suspended above me, obscuring the staring stars. It is the night of a full moon and I am flying in the moon's shadow cast by the metal overcast just above my jet. I have stuck my F-4 Phantom underneath and slightly behind the large, dark airplane. While looking upward through my canopy, I am flying close formation on a KC-135A Stratotanker, the military version of the Boeing 707, a flying gas station in the sky. The Phantom is a large aircraft, particularly for a fighter, but as the KC-135 hovers over me in the night, it seems huge by comparison. The 707 is blanking out the moon and stars. But, I can see rays of moonlight illuminating the silhouette of the large transport above me in ghostly pale blue light.
My navigator and I are on a night MiG CAP. Our mission is to fly Combat Air Patrol, or CAP, looking for enemy aircraft. MiGs are known by the acronym identifying the Russian factory where they are built. For us Sewer Doers, used to hurling our pink bodies at the black ground night after night, a CAP mission is a welcome change of pace. We get to stay up at high altitude, use different weapons systems, maybe get into some air-to-air combat, and generally enjoy ourselves. Of course, the ultimate objective of tonight's flight, or any other combat mission for that matter, is to shoot down a MiG.
The North Vietnamese only fly MiGs and only they fly them in the combat zone over their own country, so any one we find is fair game for a kill. The concept of a CAP or of a free-ranging aerial sweep is an old one, dating from the dawn years of military aviation. Biplanes flew the first CAPs during WWI. This tactic was conceived and developed by the likes of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, the original "Fast Eddie", of the U.S. Army Air Service and Col. Manfred von Richthofen, the real Red Baron, of the German Air Force, albeit without the aerial refueling which we are to perform tonight. The weight of flying history is absent and forgotten in the immediate necessity to get my jet filled with fuel at 22,000 feet over northern Thailand at one o'clock in the morning.
Aerial refueling has been the subject of faltering experiments ever since the days of the WWI aces, but was really perfected during the 1950s by the USAF Strategic Air Command. SAC wanted to base its huge jet bombers safely on the U.S. mainland and not on unreliable overseas airfields. However, the bombers of the day couldn't reach the Soviet Union and return to the United States without running out of fuel. There are those of us who believe returning home from a thermonuclear war sortie is quite unlikely no matter how much fuel you have. However, the requirements of aircrew morale dictated that the bomber crews be given a fighting chance to do just that. This concept of operations required the perfection of the techniques of aerial refueling and the development of specialized aircraft to make it possible. Hence, the dark metallic cloud flying thirty feet over the top of my canopy tonight.
Once SAC's bombers and tankers perfected the art and science of refueling in midair, it didn't take the fighter guys long to grasp the possibilities this offered. Always alert for a good deal, the fighter force realized SAC's tankers could allow fulfillment of one of the cardinal objectives of flying fighters; more flying time. You can get more flying time and have more fun doing it if you don't have to land to refuel. Seriously, this new capability reversed a tactical setback caused by the jet age. During WWII, piston engined, propeller-driven fighters such as the P-51 Mustang and the P-38 Lightning had enough fuel to escort bombers almost to the limits of the bombers' own range. This was the fabled "long reach" that gave bombers a fighter escort from their bases in England to Berlin and back, an eight hour mission. In fact, my current outfit, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, the "'Wolf Pack," earned its spurs and nickname on long-range patrols in the European theater of WWII. My ass hurts just thinking about sitting on a lumpy parachute for eight hours. However, things changed radically during the Korean War. The new jets with their greedy fuel consumption reduced fighter missions to an hour or two, not long enough to fly an effective CAP or to satisfy the jocks' need for flight time. So, all modern U.S. fighters are capable of aerial refueling. Whether their pilots are capable of pulling this off is another question.
Aerial refueling is simple in concept, but difficult in practice. It is the hardest thing I have ever tried to learn to do on the short list of things which I eventually succeeded in doing. I never did learn how to play third base well. My plan is to fly the Phantom in steady formation slightly below and to the rear of the KC-135. On the top spine of my fighter, behind the rear cockpit, is a receptacle hidden behind a remotely controlled trap door. I have opened the door and the locking ring of the receptacle is ready. Attached to the rear underside of the KC-135 is a flying boom, a pipe about fifty feet long. The boom is free to move up and down, left and right within certain angular limits. It is flown by two attached wing-like elevons controlled by a crewmember in the tanker, the "Boomer." The Boomer lies on his stomach on the floor of the KC-135 and peers at the action out a window in the belly of the tanker, while flying the boom with his own joystick. The boom also retracts and extends over a fifteen-foot range. It has on its tip a plug-in nozzle that exactly fits into the receptacle on my jet.
Each of us involved in this action has specific duties, which we must accomplish flawlessly. The tanker pilot's job is to hold a steady course and altitude, holding his big plane rock solid in the sky to give me a fixed reference on which to fly formation. My job is to fly precise formation, holding the relative position of my Phantom constant with reference to the tanker, keeping within an imaginary box defined by the reach limits of the boom. The boomer's job is to fly the boom over the top of my canopy without hitting and smashing the Plexiglas. He will then position the nozzle over the Phantom's receptacle. Once we all achieve precise alignment, the Boomer extends the tubular boom, thrusting the nozzle into the receptacle, where the locking ring will grasp it. My navigator's job is to worry a lot and monitor the whole scene. He is the only one not totally focused on a particular flying task and can be alert for danger, of which there is plenty. Once a solid linkup is achieved, fuel flows automatically from the KC-135 through the boom into the F-4's nearly empty fuel tanks.
The sexual analog to this process is obvious and the source of a zillion jokes, most of them bad and all of them old. However, neither sex nor jokes are on my mind tonight, only getting this refueling done and do
ne well.
I will be aided in my formation flying by two rows of lights on the tanker's belly up toward the nose of the KC-135. One indicates my fore and aft formation position relative to the tanker, the other my up and down placement. Unfortunately, these lights take their cues from the boom and illuminate with the hookup. Until then, I am on my own. Also, the boom extension has color-coded bands on it, green through yellow to red illuminated from within the boom, to let me know how much distance I have left for the boomer to plug in. Once hooked up, a lighted chevron in the middle of each track of belly lights and a green doughnut on the boom extension will indicate the formation sweet spot I will try to fly. It is like the perfect sex act, but one designed by the Strategic Air Command.
But, none of this immediate gratification can happen until I get into position. SAC's lumbering bombers and unwieldy tankers have a fixed set of maneuvers, positions, and radio calls that they must perform during the hookup process. They think this is needed to safely fly their huge aircraft in close proximity to each other. We fighter guys think the SAC brass has a psychological need to specify directions to the nth degree, orders for orders' sake. In fighters, we learn to refuel in the States on training missions where SAC requires us to follow the entire set of bomber regulations and procedures. However, once in the war theater and out of the grasp of SAC micro-management, we have distilled the action down to its essentials. All the aerial kabuki dance mandated stateside is no longer operative. We just fly up and get the gas, or at least try to.
Now is the time I have to do just that. The ground-based radar controller, call sign "Lion", has given us vectors to the tanker's fixed orbit, known as the "Orange Anchor." Once released from ground control by Lion, my navigator has used his airborne intercept radar to position us behind the Orange Anchor tanker by giving me verbal steering commands such as "turn right thirty degrees" over the cockpit intercom. When I spot the tanker visually in Thailand's clear night sky he turns the jet's radar to standby; you don't want 300 watts of energy transmitting while flammable jet fuel is flowing between aircraft. I have completed the intercept, matched the tanker's speed and altitude, placing us in the pre-contact position. All I have to do now is move my F-4 a few feet forward into contact range.
Flying formation is an exercise in ignoring all visual and sensory cues but one. It doesn't matter if you are on a training mission over west Texas, flying an air show with the USAF Thunderbirds, or trying to link up with a tanker over Thailand; the technique is the same. My entire focus is on the tanker and all my flying is done relative to the KC-135 and nothing else. The tanker can turn, climb, or descend and I will barely notice. My cockpit gauges are ignored. All that matters to me is my position relative to the tanker.
At 300 knots indicated air speed (about 350 miles an hour), my fully loaded Phantom handles like a clapped-out garbage truck. It feels as if the hydraulic fluid has been drained from the flight control system and has been replaced with molasses. Response by the aircraft to control stick inputs is sluggish and slow. Power delivery, as in all jets, similarly lags my throttle movements by a noticeable amount. I have to plan my position changes in advance and rock the twin throttles, one backward and one forward, to get the precise formation station keeping required. With no position lights yet on to assist in formation flying, my whole world is the moonlit silhouette of the KC-135 above me. I fly solely by reference to the tanker, without noticing or caring about my instruments, the world far below, or anything else.
I'm too far back; I can see too much of the tanker. So I push the right throttle up a hair and pull the left one back a bit. This moves me forward a few feet, but I have to return the throttles back together before I reach where I want to be, allowing for the lag in power change. Now I'm too low and I raise the nose an imperceptible amount to climb up three feet, no more, and stop there. Left and right look good, that is the easy part, no rudder inputs needed. Climbing, getting closer to the tanker is hard to make myself do. Every aspect of my sense of self-preservation wants me to escape the tanker's embrace, to drop away. I get the visual impression that I am flying directly under another giant aircraft only twenty feet way at 300 knots and 22,000 feet. The effect is suffocating, like sticking my head into a dark clay pipe, maybe a sewer pipe. It took me a long time to get used to this feeling. In training, I had to just make up my mind that I was going to stick my plane in under the tanker, no matter what. I learned to ignore the anticipation of an imminent fatal collision, to stuff that fear back into the furthest reaches of my mind and just do what needed to be done.
I modestly believe that I am the best pilot in the squadron, maybe the wing, at flying formation; no brag, just fact. If I didn't believe this, I shouldn't be in the squadron as it is a safe bet that every other pilot member feels the same way, that he alone is the best. But it took me quite some dedicated effort to learn to achieve and hold the contact position smoothly and quickly. Now, I have it nailed and I see the illuminated tip of the boom floating slowly three feet over the top of my canopy. It seems weird that between my head and the boom three feet away there is clear night air flowing past at 300 knots. It looks as if I could open the canopy and touch it. But, I ignore the passing nozzle; you can't fly off the boom, only the mother ship, as the Boomer reaches, reaches for the receptacle. He gets it, thrusts it in, and I feel a faint click as we are, as preachers often say, "joined as one" in another context. Standard procedures dictate that the Boomer transmit on the radio "Confirm good contact" as he can tell by his gauges when fuel is flowing. But we all have done this many times and SAC procedures are once more ignored tonight, maintaining radio silence.
Now, the position lights are on, and I can make small flight corrections to light up both center chevrons and freeze the doughnut at the perfect spot on the boom. It takes imperceptible movements of the stick and throttles to move the few feet required. I relax maybe 10 percent and take a deep breath of the cool, metallic flavored oxygen flowing through my mask. The whole linkup process has taken about thirty seconds, a lifetime. I continue to focus on flying immobile formation on the KC-135 as I feel the jet get heavier and even more sluggish as its weight grows with the added fuel load. Finally, after a few minutes, the boomer notes that fuel flow has stopped. He retracts the boom and stows it. I wonder if he'll call or write.
I can't relax just yet; I have to slowly reduce power and slip back in trail out from underneath the KC-135 before I do anything else. A one percent throttle reduction does the trick and I see the KC-135 getting smaller, invisible in the night. I take a deep breath and feel like I have just pulled my head out of that clay sewer pipe.
The tanker pilot comes on the air and transmits, "'Was it good for you tonight, Satan One?"
That's an old one, but I push my mike button on the inboard throttle and reply 'That's affirmative, thanks for the gas, Satan One is going mission frequency."
I hear in my earphones, "Good luck, Satan One, see you in an hour or so."
I close the refueling receptacle with a toggle switch, confirm that the fuel gauges are reading full, that the drop tanks are feeding, and turn the Phantom north toward North Vietnam and hopefully to the MiGs to be found there.
The tanker navigator is a real pro, despite being crewed with a pilot with a juvenile sense of humor. He has planned his turns so that he has dropped me off at the north end of Orange Anchor right at the border between Thailand and Laos. A less experienced tanker crew could have left me at the southern end and made me use fuel to transit northern Thailand before I got to the CAP zone. It is a pleasure to work with people who know what the hell they are doing.
Before I go to full combat readiness, I have to check in with Bruce in Alley Cat.
"Alley Cat, Satan One is across the fence."
The Mekong River, the fence, is the border between Thailand and Laos even as far north as we are tonight.
Bruce responds with the weather report in the patrol area, severe clear with a full moon, and relays the local altimeter setting. He si
gns off with "Good luck, Satan One" and probably returns to ogling his Playboy magazine.
Laos curves around northern Thailand in an inverted "L" shape. Tonight's CAP position is over the far northern regions of Laos, over the mountains northeast of the Plain of Jars. We will be out of range of radio contact with Alley Cat most of the time. Bruce's good luck wishes are his way of telling us we are on our own and to write if we find work.
As I fly the Phantom northward, the moon illuminates the jungles and plains below with a ghostly pale blue light. Only the brightest stars are visible above, the rest are blanked out by the intense moonlight. It is indeed very clear as Bruce predicted. I can trace the Mekong wandering and shimmering brightly in the moonlight. I see the dark folds of the foothills and patches of ground fog, low-lying, wisp-like, ethereal. It is a great night for an airplane ride. We drift over the Plain of Jars, its rolling, brown grassland a lighter shade of dark, rimmed with low, blue-black mountains. Unlike the Laotian southern panhandle, northern Laos is not pockmarked with the angry fires of war or at least not with many. I see a few dimly lit hamlets tucked into shallow valleys. The visible lights indicate that the inhabitants aren't at all worried about being bombed. Scattered over the Plain of Jars are a few fires, with fewer still in the surrounding mountains. These are probably campfires of the Hmong tribal people, fierce warriors ethnically and temperamentally distinct from the more laid-back Laotians. As we fly farther north, the campfires become fewer and fewer as the terrain becomes more rugged. Now, I pick up the mountains across the border in North Vietnam, silently black, totally devoid of any lights of any kind.
I climb up to 33,000 feet to save some fuel. The cockpit grows colder and I am still soaked with sweat from the effort required for the aerial refueling, so I turn up the cockpit temperature. With little to do but sightsee, I remember that CAPs flown during WWII were at this altitude as well. I have a hard time grasping what it must have been like spending hours on end in an unpressurized, noisy, vibrating, and very cold piston-engined fighter at 33,000 feet. Those old birds were airplanes you had to fly all the time, with no autopilots and no systems to coddle your body. What about those intrepid guys in WWI, flying CAP at 20,000 feet over France in the winter in open cockpits? All they had between them and the elements, a 90 mph slip stream, and below zero temperatures, was some wooden sticks and doped fabric, without even a parachute to sit on. The very thought of such misery makes me turn up the temperature of the air-conditioning another notch.