On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  The van stopped at each of the four planes to let off the members of Pintail flight. There were no protected revetments at Tahkli. Rows of F-105’s lined up like soldiers on flight-line parade. Outside of minor and highly unsuccessful sapper attacks, no Communists rocketed or mortared the Thud bases of Tahkli and Korat.

  Court felt mounting apprehension as he followed Frederick to their camouflaged two-seat F-105F. The crew chief, in fatigue pants and T-shirt, took Frederick’s helmet up the long ladder to the cockpit. Frederick pulled the rolled-up Form One from behind the ladder, found no previous maintenance write-ups, then began to preflight, using his olive-drab Boy Scout flashlight to illuminate dark crevices of the massive airplane. The 25-ton plane stood so tall they could walk under the wings to shake the fuel tanks and inspect the electronic jamming pods. They looked for hydraulic leaks in the aft section. They crouched under the belly of the giant fighter-bomber to check the fuses on the six 750-pound bombs strapped into their ejection racks.

  “See heeyah,” Frederick said, holding his flash on the wires that extended from the rack into each bomb’s fuse, “this ahming wiyah. I found them using the wrong size. Bombs hung. Fixed naow.” They checked the pitot tube, engine inlets, and various other items, until Frederick pronounced the plane safe to fly.

  Both men stood still, their attention drawn to the runway where KC-135 tankers, each weighing a quarter of a million pounds, took off one by one, sounding like runaway freight trains as they used every inch of the runway to get airborne. The noise of their shrieking engines seemed to vibrate the very ground. Ninety tons of their weight consisted of fuel for the strike force.

  “By God, I couldn’t do that,” Frederick said. Court nodded, unseen, in the darkness. They turned back to their fighter.

  It was a long climb, about ten feet, Court judged, from the flight line to the rear seat of the F-105. He settled down as the crew chief helped him strap in. He put on a sweatband, wondering why Hun jocks hadn’t discovered that valuable idea yet, and pulled on his helmet. Frederick made an intercom check, got clearance from his crew chief, then punched the starter button to fire the oversized shotgun cartridge that turned the engine over with a roar, venting acrid smoke into night air. Court looked down into his cockpit and saw the throttle move to idle at 8 percent. The big J75 engine rumbled and whined into life as the gauges moved like tiny semaphores. Court went through the checks Frederick had told him to make. He paid particular attention to the Doppler radar, so vital for navigation in the target area away from fixed Tacan stations.

  “Pintail check,” the force commander transmitted, calling for check-in. His flight and all the rest answered at machine-gun speed.

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Spare.”

  “Harpoon.”

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Spare.”

  And so on with Crab and Waco. Twenty airplanes had checked with their leader in under ten seconds. Any pilot who broke the sequence would buy a lot of beer that night.

  The twenty airplanes taxied to the arming area one after the other, twenty engines blowing gas that could tumble a man at 100 feet, struts chattering and walking back and forth under twenty-five tons of bombs and fuel and airplane. On reaching the arming area, each plane cocked left forty-five degrees and braked to a stop. They formed a long symmetrical row in the harsh glare of the floods. Court saw the armorers and crew chiefs scurry from airplane to airplane, checking, arming, pulling red streamers, and taking a last look. It was here a lowly two-striper airman could signal a full colonel he was not going on this mission in that airplane.

  Two men in khaki 1505’s walked together past the airplanes. They waved at each one, made blessing signs with their hands, and gave each a thumbs-up sign. “Chaplains,” Frederick said, “Baptist and Roman Catholic. They always come by when they know we’re going on double-pumpers. I don’t much go for that. Why ask God’s help to go kill people?”

  “Maybe they’re only asking for help to get us back safely,” Court said. Frederick blew a puff of air into his mike.

  When the checks were completed, the F-105’s taxied to the runway, lined up, and took off at eight-second intervals. Court had no forward visibility from the rear cockpit, but he could see the glow of the blue-and-yellow afterburner flames on the grass along the sides of the concrete runway. Their airplane shook and shuddered in the buffeting jet exhausts of the 105’s in front of them.

  When his turn came, Frederick ran it up, told Court the fluctuating oil pressure was normal for a Thud, and released the brakes. Court saw the throttle move outboard, but there were three seconds of waddling along the runway until the burner lit. When it did, he felt as if they had been rear-ended by a Mack truck. At the same time, Frederick flipped the switch to inject water into the flame tubes, allowing more heat and 1,000 pounds more thrust. At 185 knots on the vertical tape speed indicator, Frederick raised the nose, at 195 they were airborne as the 7,000-foot marker flashed by. In seconds, the water burned out; Frederick had the plane cleaned up, unplugged the burner at 350 knots, and told Court to take control and fly 018 degrees for a rendezvous with the tanker on Green anchor.

  Four minutes later they slid into formation with the other Pintail Thuds. Lead kept his navigation lights at “bright-steady” as as they flew in a loose five-man fingertip formation, Pintail Lead being the middle finger.

  Twenty-five minutes and 140 miles later, Pintail Lead, Two, and Three, Frederick, had taken 1,000 pounds of fuel each from Green tanker as an initial tap to test their systems. Owing to a foul-up in his fuel system plumbing, Four couldn’t receive and was directed to RTB by Pintail Lead. RTB meant Return to Base. He put his lights on “bright flash” and peeled away from the flight to disappear quickly in the night air. They heard him contact radar site Dora, which everyone called Dora Dora, to get a steer for Tahkli. “Good luck, Pintail,” he transmitted before he changed his radio channel. His voice sounded relieved, yet disappointed he was not logging another counter after getting all psyched up and coming so far on this one. “Pintail Spare, you are now Pintail Four.” “Rodge,” the spare transmitted and slid into position.

  When it was his turn, Frederick dropped into position under the tanker for his full load of fuel.

  “Depressurizing,” he told Court over the intercom.

  Frederick opened a valve to the outside, equalizing the cockpit pressure from 8,000 feet to 13,000, the refueling altitude. One of the intakes for the air conditioning system was just aft of the receptacle and would suck in the fuel invariably spilled at disengage. When that happened, eyestinging fuel vapor was drawn into the cockpit, so the pilots shut the system down during refueling.

  The boomer, lying prone in the aft fuselage under the tail of the giant tanker, looked out at the F-105 flying formation a few feet under and behind the giant tanker. He manipulated the controls that extended the telescopic boom, held it steady as Frederick eased his airplane up to the tip, then moved the control handle that operated vanes on the probe to fly the boom to the port in front of the cockpit. He found it, plugged in and started pumping JP-4 fuel into the tanks of Pintail Three.

  Court relinquished the controls to Frederick and felt the plane grow sluggish from the added weight. The pilot had to ease back on the stick, which tilted the airplane to an even higher angle to keep flying as the already heavy F-105 filled up with thousands of pounds of fuel. As he did, he added more power to overcome the increased drag caused by the high angle of attack. The four tanker engines could not propel the converted Boeing 707 through the air at a speed much higher than the stall speed of a fully loaded Thud, resulting in some very delicate flying. Behind Pintail flight were four other tankers refueling their fighters.

  After they topped off, Pintail led his force to Channel 97, known as North Station. Passing the North Station, he signaled the sixteen ships to form into the giant box pattern and headed them
045 degrees toward North Vietnam.

  The glow to the east grew brighter. Below, karst mountains punctuated the green velvet like torn gray boxes. Their shadows pointed west like jagged sharp spears of black.

  0620 HOURS LOCAL, 29 SEPTEMBER 1966

  F-105’S EN ROUTE TO THE THAI NGUYEN STEEL MILL,

  DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM

  “Music on,” Pintail Lead said as they approached the border, which they called the fence, between Laos and North Vietnam. All sixteen F-105 pilots flipped the switch that activated electronic countermeasure devices that radiated energy from the pods (the pilots called them “whizzies”) that hung from their wings. They spread out in formation to maximize the combined ECM to confuse gun-laying and SAM search radars.

  The radiated energy blossomed and bloomed on enemy gun-laying and SAM radar scopes like liquid phosphorus poured down a TV screen. Some of the enemy sites would try to burn through the energy glow by increasing the strength of their own pulses. Others would fire their guns barrage-style into what they judged to be the core of the electronic emanations.

  Then they were over North Vietnam. “Green ’em up,” Pintail Lead transmitted. Sixteen gloved hands reached to the left side of the instrument panel to flip up the red plastic guard and move the MASTER ARM switch on. Now the pickle button on the control stick was electrically hot to drop the bombs in whatever order the pilot had set on his armament panel: single, pairs, or ripple. The Weasels went on ahead to blast the defenses in the target area. On their way in they called the launch of a SAM heading up to Pintail’s place in the sky.

  “SAM, one o’clock, Pintail,” Lead huffed. “Hold it in, let the pods work.” He pushed over slightly to vary the altitude from 15,000 down to 12,000, then back up again in undulations that would never give radar trackers a permanent altitude fix. It wasn’t much of a defensive move, but it was better than holding steady at an altitude that maybe a trailing MiG could radio back to the Hanoi Air Defense Sector. “Another one right behind it,” Frederick transmitted in a ho-hum manner. Court felt his pulse race as SAM’s arced up to them, then seemed to push over. He looked at the airspeed. It registered 540 knots as each pilot had slowly inched his throttle up to stay with the force commander. It was daylight now.

  They flew straight into the fierce glow of the morning sun rising from the South China Sea. At eleven o’clock low, Court saw the high narrow hill called Thud Ridge rise up in razorback menace, perfectly oriented northwest and southeast. He saw two more SAM’s, shining in the morning sun, rise up like smoking javelins thrown by twin hurlers, then three more. They picked up speed as they aligned themselves into a spread pattern. Pintail Lead steadily arced the flight up a few thousand feet. They were close to the rail yards, and he needed the altitude to perform a successful butterfly attack.

  Below, the rail lines shone in the early sun to the left of the formation. The Weasels had dashed about attacking the SAM sites like angry hornets. It was a game of diminishing returns; too many sites, too few Weasels.

  Pintail Lead held the flight steady for a few seconds. The giant box he controlled was a half mile on a side. He had positioned his own flight of four in the left front corner. He turned northerly, toward the yard, causing the giant box to rotate on the same flat plane as his wings. He rolled them out. The target was starting to disappear under the nose of his airplane. He put his thumb on the mike button and pressed.

  “Ready, r-e-eady, SPLIT,” Pintail Lead shouted into his transmitter.

  The eastern eight ships broke left as the western eight broke right, splitting the box down the middle, with each half racing away from the other at a separation speed of 1,200 miles per hour. At the sixty-degree point in each section’s turn, they reversed, pulled up, and rolled in to the rail yards from 14,000 feet on headings exactly opposite from each other.

  Two explosions, so loud and close Court felt the concussion in his stomach, blew his feet up from the rudder pedals. Then flak began to bang and boom around their airplane like popcorn. On each side of them, Court saw the big black-and-brown puffs with fiery red-and-orange centers of the 37’s and 57’s and 85’s as they made multiple layers of steel fragments at staggered altitudes among and below the diving airplanes. Muzzle flashes on the ground made the target area look like New York at night.

  “I’m hit. Waco Two is hit,” a voice shouted over the radio. Court looked back at seven o’clock to see a 105 going down trailing a long plume of black smoke and bright-red flame.

  “Waco, SAM, SAM. SAM at seven o’clock. SAM coming up,” someone shrieked. There was a sudden pause on the radio.

  “Naw, that’s Two going down,” Waco Lead said in a laconic voice.

  After some initial fast stick pumps and rolls, Frederick held the F-105 steady as Court watched the altimeter tape unwind. To improve his bombing accuracy, Frederick had slowed the big craft to 450 knots. Court knew Frederick had his eyes swiftly cross-checking his gunsight pipper drifting up to the target, his airspeed, and his dive angle, which Court saw was pinned at a perfect sixty degrees.

  He had set his command marker at 4,500 feet, the absolute minimum pickle altitude for a Thud in a 60-degree dive over downtown Hanoi. The white altitude tape numbers slid down the dial in a blur. The command marker came and went as the ships on each side released their bombs and pulled sharply up and away from Frederick’s airplane to start their hard-jinking climb back up to altitude. As they shot through 4,000 feet, Court began to wonder if Ted Frederick was alive and if he was, did he have in mind a suicide dive right into the heart of the Thai Nguyen rail yards? Then he realized Frederick was humming the same tune and repeating the same word, “Downtown,” over and over like a broken record.

  At 3,500 feet Court felt the ejector cartridges go off, then almost blacked out as Frederick overstressed Republic’s best airplane since the P-47 by pulling 8½g’s to escape Russia’s best air defense system outside of the Moscow ring. Then he felt the plane leap as Frederick engaged the afterburner for a few seconds to accelerate his jinking maneuvers back up to altitude. Suddenly the radio came alive with calls.

  “Four’s hit.”

  “MiG’s! MiG’s!”

  “Four WHO is hit?”

  “Christ, look at them.”

  “Damn it, where are the MiG’s? Who called ’em?” a voice that sounded like Pintail Lead’s called out in a testy rasp.

  Fighting the g-load and the rapidly rotating cockpit as Frederick jinked left and right, Court looked back over each shoulder for their wingman, Pintail Four. Suddenly, on his left at seven o’clock, he saw an F-105 trailing a long sheet of flame. In the same instant it disappeared in a ball of fire and black smoke, from which the cockpit section somersaulted and small parts arced in all directions, then fell rapidly back. There was no chute.

  “I think Pintail Four just blew up back off our left wing,” Court told Frederick over the intercom.

  “Ay yup, saw it. There’s Lead and Two at our two o’clock. And, ahhh, let’s see, yup, there’s a MiG dropping in on them.” Court looked high and to the right to see what looked like a MiG 19 swooping down from a position high behind the lead F-105.

  “Pintail Lead,” Frederick transmitted, “that was Pintail Four that just blew up. You got a MiG on your ass, and I’m pulling up into him.” Frederick’s voice sounded almost gleeful, Court thought. He looked more closely at the MiG and the airspace behind it. Higher up was a second MiG in position to shoot at anybody who went after the MiG attacking Pintail Lead. He told this to Frederick on the intercom.

  “I don’t have him,” Frederick said. “You keep your eye on him. I’m going to get this first one. With a violent pull he racked the F-105 into a tight climbing right turn to get a quartering head shot at the attacking MiG. Without forward visibility, Court couldn’t see the MiG Frederick was after, although he had a good contact on the other enemy fighter higher in the sky.

  Berrrrrump. He heard and felt Frederick fire a burst. Then another. Suddenly, Frederick slammed the
plane into a left bank so hard that Court’s feet flew off the rudder pedals and his helmet cracked the canopy. Only by snapping his head back and to the right could he keep his eye on the high enemy MiG. Frederick fired again.

  “Hah, got him,” he hollered into the intercom. Court felt the plane jolt as they flew through the debris of the exploded MiG. “Where’s that second one?” Frederick asked,

  “He’s at four o’clock. He pulled up high, off to one side in a modified chandelle, then rolled on his back. I think he’s coming in on us.” Court could just barely make out the enemy fighter.

  “I don’t have him.”

  “He’s rolling in now.”

  “Damn, I don’t have him.”

  “Gimme the airplane,” Court yelled. He had his head bent way back over his right shoulder and didn’t dare look in the cockpit, knowing he’d lose the tiny speck. By feel, he reached down and grabbed the stick.

  “You got it,” Frederick said.

  “Gimme a few seconds of burner while I unload,” Court demanded. He eased off the heavy G-load on the airplane as Frederick plugged in the afterburner long enough to increase the airspeed another 100 knots. “I still don’t have him,” he said. Their airspeed climbed to 525 knots.

  “I’m going to pull around, and put him at your eleven o’clock position, then you take it.” Court knew that when he rolled out with the MiG in front, he would lose sight of him from the rear seat, but by then Frederick should have him pinpointed. Without taking his eyes from the MiG, Court pulled the big fighter almost straight up, quickly using up the speed they had gained from the afterburner. Although he had never flown the Thud, he had the pilot’s innate feel for how far to take a plane before it would stall. He didn’t have to look at the airspeed indicator to know that in a few seconds that point would be reached.