Tango Uniform (Vietnam Air War Book 3)

by Tom Wilson

  When he reached the vehicle, he stopped and could not help turning and watching the takeoff. A moment later he crawled in and started the engine.

  "C'mon bruddah," the lieutenant's voice echoed in his brain. "Le's ged gone fum heah."

  Thursday, April 4th, 1700 Local—VIP Quarters, Hickam AFB, Hawaii

  Colonel Tom Lyons

  His call was patched to Lowry Air Force Base, in Aurora, Colorado, then to his parents' home in Cherry Hills. His mother answered and was alarmed at the discouraged way he sounded. "Are you okay?" she asked.

  "I need to talk with Dad," Tom said, trying to firm up his voice but not succeeding.

  She paused, then dropped her voice. "He's still not happy with you, Tom. The thing over Margaret, you know."

  "I'm in trouble, Mom." His voice caught.

  "I'll try," she said, but she sounded dubious.

  Tom waited, praying softly to himself.

  His father finally answered in a gruff tone. "What's wrong this time?"

  "They've got me confined to quarters, Dad. Some classified papers were found in the bar at the hotel with my name on them."

  "Jesus," his father muttered. "Can't you stay out of trouble?"

  "I wouldn't be calling, but they're talking about a summary court-martial."

  "I don't think you're going to learn, Tom. How many times is this going to make that you've wanted me to pull you out of the crapper?"

  "This is the last time I'll call for help. I promise."

  "That's what you said last time."

  "Dad, I swear I didn't leave the papers there. I swear it to heaven."

  "Tom, I'm going to do you a favor. Something I probably should have done a long time ago."

  Lyons breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks, Dad. You won't regret it."

  "I'm going to let you get out of this one all by yourself."

  The telephone went dead.

  1945 Local—O' Club Dining Room, Takhli RTAFB, Thailand

  Captain Manny DeVera

  Manny motioned their waitress over.

  "I thought you were getting married?" he asked her.

  The cute Thai puying smiled, her pencil tucked behind an ear as she'd seen in some old American film. She didn't answer, just shrugged and smiled wider, then hurried off toward the kitchen.

  "No Hab's fiancé just left for the States," Manny explained to the base Red Cross representative.

  She murmured something low about how she wouldn't let Manny get away if he proposed. She was starry-eyed with newfound love, and Manny wasn't in much better shape. He was certain he'd never felt this intense about a woman.

  "Ready to go?" he asked.

  "Whenever you are." Her eyes followed him as he got to his feet and came around to get her chair.

  It was going to be another great night, Manny thought happily. As they started toward the entrance, Penny Dwight came in with her red-headed major, and Manny nodded pleasantly but drew no response.

  Friday, April 5th, 1850 Local—Las Vegas, Nevada

  Major Benny Lewis

  Benny let himself in and immediately smelled the aromas of her cooking.

  "Hi, hon," he called toward the kitchen.

  "You're late," she fussed.

  They normally had a glass of wine and conversation before eating at seven. Benny went in and found her peeking into the oven. He put his arms around her and kissed the nape of her neck.

  "Mmm." Her whiskey voice. "If you want dinner, you'd better stop that, Benny Lewis."

  "I'm back on flying status." Benny said it casually, as if it were no big thing.

  She squealed with delight and turned to hug him.

  He grinned. "I bought a bottle of wine. Good stuff."

  "I can get Pam to watch the baby if you want to go out to celebrate."

  Benny shook his head. "I'd rather just stay home with my two women."

  He didn't have words to tell her how happy he was every night when he came home to them. He'd come a long way to find precisely what he had.

  "Benny?" Julie started as he began to open the bottle of wine at the counter. She said his name as if she wanted to tell him something she'd spent some time thinking about.

  "Yeah?"

  "When we get married next week, I want you to know that I love you more than anyone or anything in the world. There'll be no more ghosts between us."

  He began to turn the corkscrew into the cork, thinking how wrong she was. The ghosts would be around for the rest of their lives. Not between them, he hoped, but they'd be there.

  Julie would try, but she'd not be able to forget. He knew he could not.

  "I want you to know I'm not giving you half my love," she said.

  He pulled out the cork and sniffed it. "Good stuff," he repeated.

  "I just thought you should know," she said awkwardly.

  He thought of her husband, who'd been his closest friend. About so many others whose lives had been wasted because a group of politicians and generals thought they could fight a war without trying to win. Such an awful, terrible waste of fine men.

  As far as military contests went, the war in Southeast Asia was minor, Benny thought. More combat losses had been suffered in single battles of other conflicts. But American fighting men had never before been more dedicated than those who fought this one, and never so utterly betrayed by their leaders.

  Since the morning after the President had made his announcement, Benny's work telephone had been busy. Calls from the different fighter bases, from the Pentagon, and from the various headquarters. Others who thought like him, who were terribly discouraged, and suddenly so determined. They made a quiet pact. To hell with promotions, careers, or whatever the generals or politicians might want. They'd work together to change things.

  There was much to be done before they could be certain that it could never happen again.

  The telephone calls would continue, and their numbers would keep growing, encouraged by the memories of the men who had fallen.

  The ones who lived couldn't afford to forget.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  In April of 1968, following the speech by the President of the United States of America, an entirely new spirit was perceived among American fighting men, who had come to realize they were not in the war to win.

  An embittered headquarters puke at Seventh Air Force Headquarters in Saigon, a lieutenant colonel whose spectacle lenses were so thick they looked like Coke-bottle bottoms, shelved the no-longer sensitive details of an OPlan that had initially been called Total-Forces Utilization, the phonetic initials for which were Tango Uniform. Later the program had been changed to Line Backer Jackpot, but the Tango Uniform name seemed more appropriate.

  A master sergeant in his office joked humorlessly about the OPlan at the Tan Son Nhut NCO club.

  "This whole fucking war," he growled, "has gone tits up."

  The Seventh Air Force headquarters lieutenant colonel was reassigned to Tactical Air Command, at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, as General Moss's Chief of Plans and Programs. Captain Moods Diller, from Nellis Air Force Base, was also assigned to TAC, to work in the Requirements Directorate. Lieutenant Lucille Dortmeier was approved to attend the University of Virginia, to finish her law degree. Upon graduation General Moss promised her a position on the TAC headquarters legal staff.

  At PACAF Headquarters, as General Bomber Joe Roman prepared to leave for the Pentagon, he ensured that his own most trusted staff officers would follow him. Colonel Tom Lyons was not among that group.

  At Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, the F-105 Thunderchief pilots continued to fly combat missions under the superb guidance of Colonel Buster Leska, but only in South Vietnam, Laos, and cautiously selected targets south of the twentieth parallel in North Vietnam.

  With reassurance that the Americans would no longer bomb targets near Hanoi and Haiphong, the North Vietnamese, under the canny leadership of General Xuan Nha, deployed SAM and AAA defenses to the mountain passes and troop build-up areas where
the fighter-bombers were now attacking, and the killing skies were moved southward.

  In the Spring of 1968, Madame Li Binh traveled to Paris. A few months later she was joined by Le Duc Tho, and together they orchestrated the first official meetings with American negotiators. For more than a month they argued vehemently about the shape of the table.

  And in the musty cells of prisons in and around Hanoi, more than four hundred pilots were repeatedly beaten and told they were common criminals, and tried hard to reject the idea that they'd been forgotten by their countrymen.

  TRUTH & FICTION

  Missing Man Formation

  TRUTH & FICTION

  The characters herein are fictitious. Descriptions of bases, units, and locales are generally accurate for the period. While Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base is the setting, the air-combat stories are adaptations of war tales of men stationed there as well as Korat, Ubon, Udorn, Danang and other airbases. A number of the Hotdog tales were related by men of the U.S. Army Special Forces, as well as aircrews of Air Force Special Operations.

  The awful songs? Yeah. They're real, and we still sing them at gatherings—too loudly perhaps, but of course always on key.

  Laser-guided bombs—proven around the period of the novel—were the brain child of a canny engineer at Texas Instruments, promoted by two Air Force officers whose intelligence quotients made the rest of us look like Stone-Age bumpkins. I have simplified the weapons system and the grueling development test and evaluation process, and moved test locales for purposes of the novel. The most telling combat test was at the heavily defended Thanh Hoa Bridge, which had survived the attempts of hundreds of Air Force and Navy fighter pilots using gravity bombs. The bridge was dropped using a single smart bomb.

  American women were finally assigned to Takhli in November of 1967. I've taken great liberty here. The real-life ladies were intelligent and lovely, and quite understanding of the crazy fighter pilots they so graciously endured.

  The Linebacker plan was not new. Aircrews were told to prepare for such a contingency in 1965 and several times thereafter. By the time of Tango Uniform, the conflict was dividing America by being allowed to continue entirely too long, and there were strong indications that a plan such as Line Backer Jackpot was about to be implemented. Polls indicated that the American people would overwhelmingly (more than sixty percent) support such an option. In late 1967 President Lyndon Johnson visited the war theater. Whether he spoke privately with the Commander of Seventh Air Force, I do not know, but rumors proliferated that something very big was afoot. Finally, confused by barrages of conflicting advice, L.B.J. chose to trust the word of the North Vietnamese, who had relayed (through U Thant) that they would negotiate if the bombing was stopped without precondition.

  Tango Uniform (with Termite Hill, and Lucky's Bridge) completes the fictional trilogy about the F-105 Thunderchief and the resolute pilots who flew her in combat during the intense air war years of 1966 and 1967. I have studied war and have never known, and cannot imagine, braver men. I also cannot think of a more honest war steed than the Thud.

  The period was a bleak one for the military, and not only because they were forced to look on helplessly as American politicians almost gleefully engineered our first major military defeat. Enlisted families lived below the poverty line, and yearly were told that pay raises were again deferred due to the high costs of the Great Society and the Vietnam War. Acquisition of new weapons systems were also delayed. Since the USAF knew they must wait for new aircraft to challenge the superb MiG designs coming off Soviet production lines, they looked desperately at the alternative: to upgrade an older model. The choice was narrowed to two fifteen year old designs. Republic Aviation promoted a lighter, more maneuverable version of the rugged F-105 Thunderchief, while McDonnell Douglas fought for an improved version of their versatile F-4. The Phantom had two pilots and two engines, and a thunderous voice went out from the Pentagon that the redundancy made it safer. As is done entirely too often, arguments for the single-engine, single-seat Thunderchief II (F-105G) came to be viewed as heretic, and proponents within the Air Force found their careers in jeopardy. The following decade became the era of the Phantom, extolled as the multi-mission champion of the free world.

  In December of 1972, when Linebacker II was finally initiated at the direction of a bolder President, F-4 crews used laser-guided bombs to destroy point targets in downtown Hanoi, and no damage was done to adjacent civilian housing. B-52 crews took out area targets with their massive bomb loads, and P.O.W.'s reported that the earth shook and their North Vietnamese captors were terrified. After only eleven days of intensive bombardment, North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris acquiesced to American demands. The agreement was signed shortly thereafter, and the P.O.W.s brought home. It is easy to play what-if: like what if we'd done it in 1965. Would we have avoided those other years of conflict? Would America now be a quite different country? Who knows. It did not happen. But what if . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TOM "BEAR" WILSON was a career United States Air Force officer with three thousand hours of flying time, mostly in fighters. During his five hundred hours of combat flying, he earned four Silver Star medals for gallantry and three Distinguished Flying Crosses for heroism. He also served in various roles as instructor, flight examiner, tactician, staff officer, and unit commander. After leaving the military, Wilson enjoyed diverse careers, including: private investigator, gunsmith, newspaper publisher, and manager of advanced programs for a high-tech company in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wilson was the author of several novels including Termite Hill, Lucky's Bridge, and Tango Uniform.