Yen Bai was one of the Thud drivers’ pet dislikes. It has the reputation of being Ho Chi Minh’s hometown and the way they shot from there you’d think it was manned by the Turkish brigade protecting Ataturk’s tomb. Maybe they had a statue of Ho down there—they sure seemed to be protecting something. I have been there many times and from the air it seemed that all you were battling was the guns. The rail line was dumpy and beaten up and the roads were dirt, as they are most everywhere in North Vietnam (don’t let those lines on the map representing roads fool you). Regardless of what they were protecting, Yen Bai was not the spot to wander over, or even near. If you came within a few miles, they would shoot and shoot hard, whether they had the slightest chance of hitting you or not. I swung about 3 miles north of there while inbound to a target one day and they opened up with everything they had despite the fact that we were far out of their range. The situation gave me the opportunity to study the ground defense pattern with relative impunity and I believe they were simply shooting straight up in the air. They unleashed volley after volley and the muzzle blasts of the big guns sparkled clearly from all sides of the town and from the center. The smaller-caliber guns spat from around every house in town and the place looked like a giant short circuit, yet all the bursts were directly over the top of Yen Bat and far from us. They were still shooting as they faded behind us and I often wondered how much of that jagged metal fell back on top of their heads. Maybe that was why they were always so mad up there—they shot straight up and clobbered themselves.
From Yen Bai the Red swings south and nuzzles up to the karst—a geologist’s word meaning sharp, rough hills—and breaks away to take the big dip past Phu Tho. Phu Tho was pretty much the start of the big circle that surrounded the hot area—the area that was always dangerous. You could fly near it one day and not see a puff while the next day the sky would blacken at your approach. You could never relax for an instant from there into Hanoi, and you always had to be prepared for drastic action. Continuing to the southeast, the Black swings up from Hao Binh, a dandy little center of activity for people and supplies located on busy Route 6; passes the airfield at Hao Lac; and then flows past the reservoir and joins the Red just before the series of curves, bends, and twists that identify Viet Tri from 20 miles out on a clear day. There were not too many clear days, but those river junctions were a welcome crutch in solving tough navigational problems. Once past Viet Tri the hot area spreads southward following the karst to about Nam Dinh and thence due east to the Gulf of Tonkin. You couldn’t be very comfortable along the coast up past Haiphong to the edge of the buffer zone around He Ba Mun, unless you could take solace in all the big, fat boats of many nations rolling contentedly as they awaited their turn to unload in the harbor. It was amazing how familiar some of those flags looked. That must have been a lucrative shipping business.
Starting inland from the Gulf of Tonkin side of the buffer zone, the truest outline of the hot area runs past the Mig air base at Kep, thence past Tha’i Nguyen and back to Yen Bai. The long mountain ridge that originates about halfway between Thai Nguyen and Yen Bai and stretches out like a finger pointed to the southeast and aimed at Hanoi is Thud Ridge. Thud Ridge because so many of our trusty mounts have flown their last into its side? Thud Ridge because it pretty well split the delta and pointed to Hanoi? Thud Ridge because it stood out clearly in that hostile land where highspeed low-level fighter pilots needed an anchor, and where that corner of the war was reserved almost exclusively for the Thud driver? Take your choice. I am sure the North Vietnamese have their name for it, but Thud Ridge it shall ever be in the annals of the fighter pilots.
2. Veterans Day
On Veterans Day my amigo Art drew a target way up there and we all knew it could be rough. Mine was south of his and we led separate flights. From the forecast we knew the weather would be sour, and he drew the roughest weather to match his rough target. It was the long way around and the best that could be expected was a grueling trip both ways with the stiffest of opposition at the midpoint. You can hear almost everybody in the world on the aircraft radio, and even though you are intent on your own job the old mental computer subconsciously keeps track of the entire effort; this day it all sounded bad. All elements of the defenses were up and there was sheer panic in many of the voices issuing from the area of Thud Ridge. When you are in the middle of the action you don’t notice how tense everyone sounds, but they always sound bad when you are not quite there or when you have left and it is someone else’s turn in the barrel. As Art’s section turned inbound from the coast, it became brutally clear that things were very tense. Anyplace where there wasn’t a cloud, there was gunfire.
Art and his wife Pat are two of my favorite people. They are the kind of people that I only need to meet once to know that they are my kind of folks. Art and I were assigned to the wing in Japan together for a while and Art was assigned to almost every unit within our wing at one time or another. Whenever things were in a state of change, which was most of the time, he was one of those I would move from hot spot to hot spot and he always did the job the way I wanted it done. I guess he and I shared many of the same likes and dislikes and had lots of the same prejudices during that time period, so we got along just great. Both families are Episcopalians and that tie also brought us together on several occasions.
Pat, a nurse prior to their marriage, had the formal handle of Mary Ann and there is a lusty fighter-pilot ballad, by way of England and the Royal Air Force, called “Mary Ann, Queen of All the Acrobats.” It happens to be one of my favorites, goes well with the uke and is known and sung by most of the fighter troops throughout the world. It is always interesting to introduce her as Mary Ann and watch the sly smiles of the singing fighter troops and it was only natural that this lovely gal found the name Pat more to her liking.
Pat is a wonderful mother, a good-looking doll and as fine as they come. This in itself did not always make the social pathways of our intricate and to me often nonsensical Air Force society the smoothest for her. Any Air Force base that has more than one married officer plus an officers’ club has a formal organization for the ladies, and this officers’ wives’ club can be quite a vicious and irritating little circle. As an example, Pat and the wife of one of our leaders had been fast friends for a long time and, prior to my arrival in this particular unit, had again been good buddies. A group of the other females seemed to take offense at this close friendship and the resulting association between a colonel’s wife and a Jowly captain’s wife. Things got so bitter that the big man’s wife had to shy away from a fine friendship to protect the personal and professional feelings of all concerned. When I arrived in Japan, AJ (my wife) and Pat became the best of friends and as they both had a talent for minding their own business, I was pleased. Lo and behold, the same monster raised its ugly head again and became all the more irritating as I rotated Art from one good spot to another to help me out in the business end of the game. I had the distinct pleasure of announcing my distaste for the situation to a few of the more prominent female barb throwers, and when Art made major I again had the chance to blast most of them by announcing my interest in closer association among the field-grade wives. It seems like a minuscule nit at the moment but at the time it was most irksome. It gave me a chance to utter my repeated thought that the military ladies’ club lost much of its import with the invention of ready-rolled bandages back in the cavalry days. They must have been awfully important prior to that time, and if we could now only confine them to the relaxed social side of the ledger, life on a base would be a whole lot pleasanter. This happy state is not likely to occur, however—the ladies have too much head start, too much money and steam built up.
Art had been down south in Thailand before on some temporary duty stints and had a fair number of missions under his belt when I left for reassignment down there. He was trying as hard as I was to get back to the action and get his full tour in before rotating back to the States. He was most happy for me when I got my orders and, I
am sure, twice as determined to break loose and join me. Art and Pat were most helpful as we packed up and went once again through the normal idiot act that accompanies any military move.
Just before we left Japan, AJ and the kids heading for Hawaii to sweat it out for a year and I heading back to Thailand, we spent the evening with Art and Pat hi their home. We had a few cocktails, and as Art and I were both stereo fiends we examined his newest equipment and bickered about the best combinations of speakers, tape decks and the like. After a great meal AJ and I left for home amid the familiar farewells exchanged between pilots’ families. Art handed me an envelope with two sheets of paper in it. One had the addresses of the wives of several of our mutual buddies who had been zapped into an unknown status while flying missions down south; the other sheet is one of the most valued treasures that I own. Written in his own hand was his token to me, his true friend launching into a new effort. It is an old prayer of the Church of England, from the Middle Ages. As we stood in the dim yellow light of their front porch, Art bowed from the waist in the most polite oriental fashion and wished AJ well. AJ was a bit misty-eyed as we walked home. She has not seen Art since.
The clouds increased and all flights except Art’s were forced to turn back. He thought he could make it and he thought it was his duty to try, try, try. He pressed, despite almost insurmountable obstacles, and he got to his target—only to find it obscured by cloud. He still wouldn’t quit and arched his flight up through the high cloud above to gain the altitude he would need to establish a steep and fast dive that would assure maximum accuracy. Then over and down at 500 knots plus into the gray murk, and the big question was, where is the bottom of the clouds and where is the ground and where are the guns. They broke out of the clouds and there was the target. But there also were the gunners with a perfect altitude reference provided by the base of the clouds, should some stupid American be brave enough to try them that day. The gray murk of overcast cleared long enough to put the bomb aiming device on the target, then gave way to the black and orange overcast of the predicted 85-millimeter barrage, but the hurtling beasts were delivered of their bombs, which sought, found, and detonated squarely on target as the flight relit the burners, picked their way between the clouds and the mountains to avoid the still-pursuing guns, and dashed for the coast.
The perfectionist with the indomitable will had done it again, but something was wrong. The egress was too low. The clouds were too close to the hills and the aircraft were too close to the guns, too close to the small-arms fire. Suddenly Art commanded, “Take it down.” Why? That is a reaction you would expect from a SAM launch against you. Nobody else had a SAM indication and there were no SAM calls at that moment. Did his equipment indicate a launch? Did he see something on the ground that indicated SAM launch to him and automatically triggered the response to seek the cover of the hills to protect his charges? Who knows, but down he went, into a hail of automatic weapons that ripped the belly of his aircraft to shreds. The fuel gushed, torched and covered the aircraft from cockpit to tail pipe; warning lights in the cockpit raced each other to call attention to each system’s plight; the idiot panel turned amber; the fire panel glowed its sickening shade of red; control lines burst releasing their hydraulic lifeblood and one by one the sytems began their methodical bleeding countdown to imminent control seizure and explosion.
But the old pro was not done for yet. He lit the burner and—clouds, SAMs and Migs be damned—scratched for every ounce of altitude and speed he could get. Now the coast was only 30 miles away—the coast with the possibility of water bailout, Navy rescue craft and another chance. He got to 18,000 feet and 600 knots, and he could glide from there. He must have thought, If only the engine can outlast the fire for another minute—if only the last hydraulic system can scavenge enough fluid to let me steer for two minutes—if only. But the systems wouldn’t hold. Violently she rolled to inverted position and the nose snapped through toward the hills far below. The safety of the water moved from under the nose and in front to under the belly and to the rear. She was all done.
I had not been in position at Takhli too long when Art got a chance to come down on temporary duty from my old fighter wing in Japan and finish up his one hundred missions. We were desperately short on flight leaders and the personnel pipeline just couldn’t hack the course. He had previously flown with the same squadron I was assigned to, and I managed to engineer the assignments so that he rejoined the same unit. It took him no time whatsoever to get back in the swing of things and he and I flew together often—in fact, we got my first Distinguished Flying Cross of this war together. (Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you get those things by ^yourself in this facet of the air-war business.) He was most precise in all that he did, and I liked to fly with him because we would alternate the lead position from day to day and he would always be the best critic in the business.
There is always room to improve combat techniques and when you stop trying to learn ways to do it better, you are asking for trouble. What a shame that this spirit seems all too often to be throttled beyond the individual operating tactical unit. If only we could keep something of this fresh desire for better ways alive, if only we could accept the fact that the doers have both sense and ideas, and if only we could keep the military channels to the top open and active—how much better we could be. How often has a brilliant thought or concept been ruthlessly destroyed by the convenient retort that the swine in the field do not have all the facts and do not understand the big picture. We find it difficult to accept the fact that we, in the officer corps of today, are not dealing with kids in the street. We are dealing with sharp, progressive young men who are voluntarily putting their lives on the line for what they believe to be right. The odds are great against those who would push, those inclined to stand behind firm if unpopular thoughts, those unafraid to accept responsibility and make a decision. But if a young, eager thinker and doer is smart, he needs only a few severe lumps on the head to reconsider his approach. Accusations of constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth sting deeply when vindictively delivered, and the stifling of progress by our own hand can be a simple and rapid process.
Art and I nit-picked each other until we were two of the best in the business. We generally did it over an exhausted cold beer in the sweaty squadron lounge. Sometimes we could not wait for that and I can clearly recall Art’s rebuke on the radio one day as we moved and sought targets at 600 knots; “Get your butt back up—you’re five hundred feet low.” He was a perfectionist, and a good one.
As he headed into the stretch for the magic one hundred missions that would send him back to the States, Art took a five-day R and R and caught a ride back to Japan to spend a few days with the family. It seemed most appropriate, especially since a typhoon had ripped the roof off his house while Pat and the children huddled in the corner. Nobody was hurt and repair and replacement were not too difficult, but I am sure the entire thing was scary for a gal in a strange land with her guy in an even stranger one.
When I was up there in gayer times my fetish for parsley was usually good for a giggle at squadron and wing parties. I just like the stuff, and I have ever since we used to get beef blood and parsley soup on the training table during football season. It became apparent that I was one of the few who gobbled up the parsley from the shrimp cocktail or the steak and soon I was receiving donations at each dinner. It became a monster, and there have been times when I had more parsley ceremoniously passed to me than I had steak. I tried to keep up the front for a while but finally had to admit that there was more parsley served in the officers’ club than I could possibly eat. Art came back from that R and R all full of pep and ready for the stretch dash. The rest had been good for him, but the big stimulus was the fact that he had received the assignment he had requested and was going to Nel-lis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, to work for an old friend, John Black. He was overjoyed, and as each mission ticked off he would rerun the plans—when he would finish, when he wou
ld pick up the family, how long it would take to clear the quarters in Japan.
Pat had sent me a present—a carefully wrapped tin container with some number one cookies and, for her old parsley-eatin’ buddy, fresh parsley sealed against the trip in waterproof bags. I don’t think I have ever been more touched by a present, whatever its magnitude. But the timing was wrong, the elements were too strong, the flower had wilted, the parsley was rotten, and everything turned sour.
Off came the canopy and he got out with a good chute and a good beeper, the screeching electronic emergency signal that is activated when the chute opens. The guys followed him down and stayed as long as they could without losing another one to fuel starvation or enemy fire, and the Navy rescue guys gave it their usual superior college try, but we couldn’t get him.
This was the curse of the Thud. She would go like a dingbat on the deck and she would haul a huge load, but she was prone to loss of control when the hydraulic system took even the smallest of hits. There is just no way to steer her once the fluid goes out, and I can tell you from bitter experience that you can lose two of the three hydraulic systems that run all of your flight controls by the time you realize you have been hit. Once they have a vent they are gone. We had been agitating like mad for a simple backup control, just something that would lock the controls in some intermediate area and give you a chance to keep her in the air by changing engine power. We didn’t care about precision flying at this stage of an emergency, we just wanted something that would sustain flight to a safer bailout area. We finally got just such a system but too late in the game. If we had had such a modification at the start of this war we would most probably have at least one hundred fine pilots still with us who are now statistics. The modification came through too late for Art, and for want of a few thousand dollars worth of gear and some combat engineering and planning forethought, another prince was lost.
Thud Ridge Page 4