by Tom Clancy
★ Meanwhile, Horner and Myhrum took up their jobs as duty officers in the one-room Wing Tactical Operations Center (though it had a divider that split it into something like two rooms). For security, it was surrounded with a barbed-wire fence. The security was necessary because that was where the Frag — the term for Fragmentary Order, now called the Air Tasking Order — was received from Saigon. The Frag order was a computer listing of all the data associated with the next day’s air operations. It told pilots who would fly where, when, and drop what ordnance on what target, what tanker would be used and what off-load (that is, how many pounds of fuel each pilot would get from the tankers). It would also contain the call signs of the MiG CAP[10] and other information.
Each pilot, if he was any good, and certainly the lead pilot, would go through the pages of the Frag the way he might go through a telephone book and find his unit — say, the 388th Tac Ftr Wing (Provisional). There, listed by call sign, were all the sorties the 388th was expected to fly the next day. After the call sign was further information: for example, Teak, 4 F-105s, Vinh Oil refinery BE12356778. This last was the bomb encyclopedia number, or BE number. This told pilots where to look up information about each target (which in fact intelligence had already done for them, since they also got the Frag). The pilots would then go to intelligence, and be provided with whatever information intelligence had available: this might be printouts of microfiche film of the target, drawings or maps, or only a verbal description. The pilots would certainly get latitude and longitude coordinates and probably DMIPs (Desired Mean Impact Point) and weapons-effects data: e.g., for 90 percent destruction, use this number of weapons of this type.
If intelligence had a photo of the target, the pilots would study it, so they could recognize it and know exactly where they should put their bombs, then they might divide up who targeted what. The flight would also plan the mission so that the debris from one aircraft’s bombs would not obscure the target for those behind him. Usually first bombs were dropped downwind of the other aim point(s).
Maps and pictures were additionally used by the pilots to “go from big to little.” Let’s say they were hitting a power station, a small target that might be hidden by trees. First they would plan their ingress route, based on weather, enemy defenses, terrain, etc. Then they’d look for large visual reference points — a bend in the river, a rail line, a bridge. Once they had one or more of these, they’d start looking for other reference points, so they could walk their eyes onto the target. Thus, after the bend in the river comes a large triangular rice paddy, and then on the east corner of the paddy there is a small canal that runs north and south, with a patch of jungle just south, and then the power station is two football fields’ distance to the south of that on the east bank of the canal.
Many of the targets Horner’s people were tasked to hit required this type of planning: they were so insignificant that they couldn’t see them until just before they released their bombs at about 4,000 feet above the ground; and so they flew to where they knew the target was located, and when it appeared they had barely enough time to adjust their flight path. If they were good, it appeared under their pippers (the red dot in the gun sight) at the right altitude, airspeed, and dive angle for their bombs to hit the target. On the other hand, if they had a good target — such as a railyard full of boxcars — then advance planning didn’t matter, since they could find the target from fifty miles away, and when they rolled in there was so much target that their pippers would be on something worth bombing regardless of their dive angle, airspeed, and altitude of release.
The Frag would also provide tanker information — that is, it told the pilot his air refueling contact time and which tanker track he’d be flying to — e.g., “Shell 30 at Orange anchor.” And finally, the Frag would provide a Time on or over Target, which was the time the bombs were scheduled to hit the target (all the other aircraft involved in a mission — MiG CAP, RESCAP, radar surveillance aircraft, and later Wild Weasels and support jamming — planned their efforts based on a pilot making his TOT).
Working the Frag was harder for the flight leader than for the other pilots. First of all, he had to ask himself how long it would take to reach the target from the tanker drop-off point. He would then call the tanker unit and tell them where and when he wanted to be dropped off. Then he would figure out how long it would take to fly to the tanker and refuel, and that would tell him what his takeoff time would be. He would then give this to the wing ops center, who would pass the word over to maintenance and also “deconflict” his flight from the other flights taking off around that time, in order to avoid midair collisions.
Meanwhile, he would need to look up other information: Who was pulling RESCAP that day? What was the call sign and frequency? Were there special instructions (such as: Avoid Phuc Yen airfield by ten miles… so as not to really disturb the enemy)? What were the flight call signs and targets being struck in the same time frame (so he’d know who was in the air when he was, where they were, and doing what)? And what were the code words for the day (such as for recall)? The better the flight leader, the more capable he was in reading the Frag, extracting all the relevant information, and then briefing the flight in such a way that a precise image of the coming reality was created and everyone could fly the mission in his mind before he set out. In that way, when he flew the mission he had already reduced the confusion and fog of war to the minimum.
★ Horner’s and Myhrum’s job was to break out the Frag order, and outline those items that applied to their base: missions, call signs, times for takeoff, refueling, and Time over Target. They would receive the Frag around 2200 at night (it would usually arrive on a T-39 executive jet that flew over from Saigon), with first takeoffs at 0600 in the morning.
In the beginning, the Frag was a nightmare to decode because the Frag team in Saigon would send the entire thing, which was a huge, complex document. Later the planners in Saigon separated out the information that didn’t change (such as tanker tracks, radar control unit information, frequencies, and so forth) into a separate Frag that was kept in operations, and the daily Frag contained only information that was new.
Once they’d broken out the Frag, Horner and Myhrum would give the details to intelligence, so they could dig out target materials, and to maintenance, so they could load the jets with munitions and get them ready to fly.
Once these arrived, the two of them passed the info over to the squadron duty officers, who would wake up the flight leaders so they could plan the missions.
It didn’t take them long to get into the groove of life at Korat.
During the day it was fiercely hot, but in the late afternoon or early evening, a thunderstorm would pass through and the air would cool off. That made sleeping at night very comfortable, and there was the squawking of the geckos — small, very loud lizards — to lull you to sleep. The roads were dirt, and red clay dust was everywhere. When it rained, they got muddy with red clay mud; but everything dried when the sun came out. They had common showers, where the maids also did the laundry and washed the sheets and clothing during the morning. And most had outdoor toilets.
For a swimming pool, they used a twenty-man life raft filled with rainwater. In the heat of the day, the pool water was cool and welcome. If you were flying and were sent on the early mission, you could find a place in the pool when you landed. But if you were flying a later mission, you had to wait until someone left the pool before you could sit in it.
★ After enduring a week of the confusion and frustration that goes with being in the military, Myhrum and Horner informed the two fighter squadrons at Korat that while they had been sent over to serve as staff officers and help plan missions, they still wanted to fly.
No one heard them. They kept getting the runaround: “Well, not today, but maybe tomorrow.”
Fed up, finally, Myhrum gave a call to a friend at Ta Khli. “Sure,” he told him, “we’re looking for pilots. Come on over.” Without telling anyone in authority,
the two men packed their flight gear, arranged for someone to cover them in the command post for a couple of days, and went out to board the Klong Courier. But as they approached the ramp door of the C-130, Major Pete Van Huss of the McConnell squadron ran out to intercept them. “You can fly with us after all,” he said. “You don’t need to go to Ta Khli.” So they started flying. (Later, when the McConnell squadron rotated back to the States, they were handed off to the new squadron, who needed their experience.)
Chuck Horner’s first combat mission came in May 1965, when he flew as number two in a flight of four F-105s, each loaded with eight 750-pound general-purpose bombs. They’d been sent to destroy a gasoline storage area and pumping station at Vinh, North Vietnam, which was a hundred miles south of Hanoi. More eager than nervous, he accomplished what had become “the routine” of preparation, briefing, preflight, taxi, takeoff, aerial refueling, and formation flying to the target… “routine,” because as the duty officer breaking out the Frag, he had already helped plan many sorties and he had also planned and executed practice missions for years.
It was early morning as they refueled over the Thai rice paddies, neat brown and green squares waiting to be planted or harvested… a stark contrast with Laos, which they crossed next. Laos was mostly mountainous jungle, wild and beautiful. Everywhere was a dark green canopy of trees, and here and there were small mountain ridges and karst — limestone mesas whose sides consisted of sheer cliffs thrusting sometimes a thousand feet up from the jungle floor, their tops a dark green cap of jungle. Next they flew across the high, narrow, north-south-running mountain range that separated Laos from North Vietnam. Beyond lay North Vietnam itself, a narrow strip of peaceful, beautifully green land, with the mountains on the west, the sea on the east, and a scattering of islands along the coast. Near the coast were numberless rice paddies, and near the mountains were low foothills, usually covered with jungle. Several rivers flowed from the mountains and snaked to the east and the ocean. In the morning, the land was calm, with fog in the low spots. During the day, rain clouds built up, especially over the mountains, and produced much lightning and heavy rain until well into the evening. As the pilot approached the coast, he saw more roads, and more towns and villages. These tended to be a cross between Oriental and French. Most buildings were wooden, with tin roofs, and raised on stilts off the ground. More solid structures, however, were occasionally left over from the French, usually large, made of white concrete, with red tile roofs.
According to the usual practice, they crossed North Vietnam at its narrowest around the finger-shaped lakes between Vinh and the South Vietnamese border (hence the name Finger Lakes), then flew out to sea and proceeded north until they returned inland to hit a target.
As they roared in from over the South China Sea, they could see the target from fifty miles, huge white petroleum storage tanks and a large pumping station to the west on the north bank of the river that ran out of the city toward the sea. They came in from the east at 15,000 feet above the ground. The air was crystal clear, and the sun was behind them. The leader rolled over to his right and pointed his Thud at the storage tanks.
Horner waited fifteen seconds and followed him down, offsetting to the west so he wouldn’t get hit by enemy ground fire shot at the leader. It was absolutely calm as Horner watched the lead’s bombs set off two of the storage tanks in a violent orange and black maelstrom. He eased his aircraft’s nose to the right, checked his dive angle, airspeed, and altitude; and when his gun sight crept up on the huge pumping station, he depressed the bomb-release button on top of the control stick, then reefed back on the stick to keep from hitting the ground, and watched over his right shoulder as his bombs struck dead center on the mass of pipes and buildings that had once been a petroleum-pumping station.
With his head twisted completely around over his right shoulder and the nose of his jet now pointed toward the sky, he somehow saw red fireballs stream past on the left side of his canopy. Someone is trying to kill me, he thought abstractedly — the way we might think, It’s raining out. Meanwhile, he racked his jet toward the sea and tried to see the lead, who was just fifteen seconds ahead. Then he realized that he couldn’t see the leader because both of their jets were surrounded by greasy black smoke with orange centers making whoomp whoomp noises that rocked his jet. At that point, he put his jet into maximum afterburner, to get as much speed as possible, and started to dance around in the sky, to kill any tracking solutions the gunners might be working out.
It’s just like the World War II and Korea veterans said it was, he thought, as he flew out over the sea. And instantly he was a veteran.
Later, AAA too became part of the routine. If he looked down at the ground, he could see the red flame from the barrels of the AAA as they shot up at him. He could tell when the big guns were shooting at him because of the black greasy puffs. The 57mm guns were arranged in a circle and would fire in salvo, so what he saw was a circle of fire. And then if he looked to the other side of the formation and above the flight, he could see the black smoke of projectiles exploding. The smaller-caliber weapons featured tracers that snaked up from the ground and then curved behind the flight. In reality, the tracers didn’t curve; they appeared to because of the movement of his aircraft. Orange tracers were the sign of 37mm guns. The projectiles from these weapons exploded in gray-white smoke… All in all, fascinating to look at.
After the excitement and skill of an attack and evading AAA, the trip home was easy — a thoughtful time. When a man is filled with adrenaline, he thinks fast, but on the way home he has time for meditating about what he has just done.
As he flew back to Korat that day — no longer a virgin — Horner realized that war is not the glamorous heady adventure described in song and story. He wondered what those gunners on the ground thought of him. He was pleased that they’d missed him, and glad that he’d frustrated them, but he took little joy that he and his companions had wrecked so much of their homeland and probably killed some of their countrymen.
As Horner accumulated missions — killing more people and destroying more property — he began to accumulate an abhorrence of war. For him, this abhorrence was a complex emotion:
He always felt the pain of the people he was attacking… but not enough for him to stop what he was doing. He hated the stupidity and immorality of war… but he loved being shot at and missed. He loved taking part in the struggle, the excitement, the high. He was afraid of being killed… yet unafraid (like most good fighter pilots, keeping his fears in a box). When he would sit in the arming area waiting for his flight to go, a little voice would whisper in his ear, “You are not coming back from this mission.” Yet he would shrug it off and fly. Once he was on the mission, he was so busy that he didn’t have time to be afraid. Afterward, sometimes, his hands would shake — probably, he claims, from fatigue as much as anything else.
“I love combat,” he says. “I hate war. I don’t understand it, but that’s the way it is.”
During the next two months, Horner flew forty-one combat missions.
Most often the F-105s would fly in pairs into North Vietnam, conducting road reconnaissance — looking for trucks — with a fixed alternative target such as a bridge. They dropped a variety of munitions, most often 750-pound bombs; but they also carried antitank rockets and were sometimes Fragged to hit a bridge with them. These would punch small holes in the bridge floor, and repairs could be made in hours. The best missions were against stored petroleum, freight cars in rail yards, and big bridges. The worst were what they called “Whiplash Bango Alert,” during which they’d sit on the ground in their Thuds and wait for orders to scramble in order to provide CAS for clandestine operations in Laos. When they finally scrambled, it was usually at the end of their vulnerability period — during the two hours from 1000 to 1200, they were “vulnerable” to a scramble; the jet was cocked, they had to wear G suits, and they sat around close to the jets so they could get airborne quickly — and the target was usually suspec
ted troops in the jungle. Meaning: they bombed the jungle.
★ All the pilots soon came to realize that they were not fighting the war in the most efficient manner.
For the most part, the planning aim was to make it difficult for North Vietnam to help the Vietcong with logistical support, which was a reasonable goal. Within that aim, however, so many restrictions were placed on the pilots that very little of that aim was actually achievable. Robert McNamara’s strategy was one called Graduated Pressure, and its aim was to persuade the North Vietnamese to give up rather than going all out to defeat them. As a result, the pilots were saddled with politically selected targets, rules of engagement, buffer zones, target exclusions, and all sorts of other counterproductive arrangements. Unlike the Army, the Air Force wasn’t caught up in measuring success by counting bodies; however, the Air Force measures of merit, such as numbers of sorties flown, hardly made better sense. Any sortie might well have been useless, due to the lack of decent targeting or munitions; yet it was seen by headquarters as just as important as a sortie against a good target. Finally, the planning aim was to avoid gaining control of the air (for the sake of Graduated Pressure), and there was no serious thought given to destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war and his will to fight.
When Horner first went to Korat, most pilots counted all of these oddities as a sign of the fits and starts and inexperience that go with fighting a new war. Still, it was hard to overlook the inefficiencies, and not to ask why their efforts appeared to be so fragmentary, and without the conviction needed to win a war. It all seemed like such a limp way to hit the North Vietnamese. If you’re going to hit them, then hit them.
In time the pilots came to realize that it wasn’t just an efficiency problem; it was a stupidity problem. And then in time they came to realize that it was more than that, it was a matter of lies and betrayals. That realization — for Chuck Horner, anyhow — was not to come until later, but in the spring and summer of 1965, he could not fail to register oddities such as the following: