The question of what happened to Bob was unanswered, but the question of the beeper that was stuck was now pretty well answered. Carbine one and two, the two surviving weasels, were out of the immediate rescue area en route to the tanker and they could no longer hear the screeching monster. Leo and his Bear were on the ground and Leo had checked beepers off on the radio. Four was down in the area and one of his beepers was the culprit. If we could have isolated it earlier, who would have filled in for him? Would the shoot-down have gone the same? For sure the Rescap would have gone better without the noise. I wonder if he was fiddling around in the cockpit trying to reach his beeper when he got bagged? I don’t know. Iri. this business it is not too profitable or comforting to think too much about the ifs.
“Royal—Carbine.”
“Carbine—Royal. Go ahead.”
“Roger, I cannot locate my number four man. He was on the wing of number three. I cannot get him to respond. There’s a possibility he’s down in the same area, over.”
“Roger, so that would be Carbine three and four, positively three and probably four.”
“Roger, I only personally saw one aircraft in flames. It went into a spin just as they ejected. I saw two good chutes from number three, that’s a two-seater. Number four was a single-seater with one man in it. I never saw it but I can’t raise him now.”
“Roger, can you cycle off the tanker and go back in now?” Royal wanted Carbine and his wingman to refuel and return to the rescue area.
“Roger, if I can be sure that neither one of our beepers is active. Are you getting that now, four—or two—are you still getting that?”
“Not at the present time.”
“Roger, Carbine one and two can go back in.”
“Roger, you can contact control for a tanker and let us know on this frequency when you come back in.”
Carbine lead switched the surviving half of his flight to the radio frequency monitored by the waiting tankers and began the lonely trip back to refuel. Here for a few minutes he was in a different atmosphere. The challenge is to find the tanker, get the fuel and get back into the fray quickly. Nobody is shooting a.t you out here, but the intermission is not particularly relaxing. You always feel like hell when you lose a guy, and when you lose more than one it is downright grim. In his two-place machine Carbine lead and his Bear groused at each other as they searched for the tank and tried to reconstruct the scene. In the two-place job you chatter at the other guy over a mike that is hot all the time. In a single-seater, you talk to yourself.
“Wonder what hit him?”
“Hmm?”
“Wonder what hit him?”
“Crap, I don’t know.”
“I heard somebody call SAM but they never did give their call sign.”
The tanker rendezvous was going at about the normal pace it always assumes when the air is charged with emergency. You can’t get the right people to talk to you. Carbine lead was bouncing from channel to channel on the radio but none of the tanker control radars would respond and offer the desired steer to contact with the tanker.
“Balls.” But calling the wrath of all the unnamed gods down on the controllers is to no avail and the only thing you can do is press toward the area where you think the tanker will be and try to get in contact with him yourself for a freelance hookup.
A cross volley of curses from front and back seat was interrupted by my call ringing through on emergency channel. I was still back in the area running the low cover and waiting hopefully for the rescue craft I assumed to be on the way.
“Hello, Carbine three—this is Waco. Turn off the beeper if you read me, please.”
Carbine realized that they were probably the only ones who had the answer to the beeper question. “Could be Carbine four’s beeper. You better tell Waco lead.”
“Carbine four is on the ground.”
“That’s what I said, Waco lead and the rest of the people don’t know Carbine four is down.”
The radar control trying to get the tankers and fighters together was coming into focus on the gravity of the problem, but they burst onto normal and emergency channels only momentarily as they and the tankers sought to establish contact. As they talked, I was receiving a call from Leo on the ground and was reassuring him, “Roger, Leo, you’re loud and clear. In about twenty-five minutes we should have some choppers up for you. The whole force is covering you, over.”
“Leo, you need to climb the hill, over.” I thought I had him in ideal position and I knew I had the force necessary to cover the operation. All I needed was to run the fuel shuttle smoothly and wait for those pickup machines.
“Tomohawk—Waco. Relay to Royal again to move the whole tanker fleet up north. Be sure they know we have the whole force in here Rescapping for those guys.”
Carbine lead plodded on, and as it was becoming increasingly apparent that refueling was going to be a problem, the frontseater and the backseater thought out loud to each other.
“Crap.”
“Two stinking airplanes.”
“I’m telling you, I just can’t believe it.”
“Did you plot that on the map?”
“I don’t have a map.”
“How many miles were we out from that place we were going to?”
“I’ve got the coordinates here.”
Back at the scene I ha,d spotted the first of the ground activity and was passing details to the downed crew. “OK, Leo, one of you is on one side of the hill and the other on the other side—just around the bend. You’re OK around the bend, but there’re some houses further down., WATCH OUT, there’s someone walking out on the road!”
I was now very concerned about the somebody on the road but Royal, fulfilling his duties as overall airborne controller of the rescue, broke through the wall of noise on the radio in a desperate search for information. I acknowledged and was shocked at their answer, “Waco, there’s a possibility that the number four man might have gone down too. Would you see if you could get me any information on that?”
“Can we work on another frequency Royal? All I can hear is beepers. You want to go to twenty?”
Many miles to the south, Carbine had wound up working mutual steers with the tanker he had finally contacted on the radio with no help from the ground controller. They had found each other and were setting up the busy pattern of refueling that was to be used again and again that afternoon and evening.
“Rog, Tanker, all I need is gas for one and two. Three and four are down and we need a full load so we can get back in there.”
“Rog, Carbine, we’ll give all we got. Incidentally, nobody has any contact with control.”
“That’s about average. If you can get them, tell them that Waco, the force commander, is going to base all his minimum fuel departures from the rescue area on the fact that all the tankers will be north of the normal post-strike refueling area.”
“Rog, if we can ever get them on the other radio we’ll relay that.”
As they moved into position behind the big bird that was to pass them the critical fuel, I was too far away to hear Carbine flight on the radio, but later review of all of the tapes tied the whole thing together. I was having fits back in the area trying to listen to Leo, pass information to him and keep others off the radio. “Whoever is yakking on emergeney frequency get off. Leo, you’re just too hard to understand. Move that mike away from your mouth a bit and try it again. In the meantime, stay put and stay out of sight. We’ve got somebody coming for you.”
The guys in the two-place aircraft have a different job, not necessarily one that I would care for as a full-time occupation for myself, but they love it and they do a fabulous piece of work. They are strapped in that two-place monster together and where one goes the other goes, unless fate spares only one when things go sour. They realize that they are in it together, even more than any two strike pilots. They work together like a piece of precision machinery whether they like each other or not, and in addition to having to listen t
o everyone else in the sky, they have to listen to each other from engine crank to shutdown. Their hot mike system is installed so that when you want to talk to the other man you do not have to activate any switches or mike buttons. This is great when you need it, but you can get awfully tired of listening to both yourself and your playmate breathing for four hours. The two-place hot mike seems to make two-man aircrews feel they have to talk to each other. While I personally prefer a bit more silence when I have work to do, I will admit it helps to say something or to hear somebody else who may be as confused as you are yourself. The weasels wind up barbing each other constantly just as two close and mutually dedicated friends would do over a casual drink at the bar. Carbine one and his Bear were shook about the time they were refueling, and they talked.
“Four zero—this is Carbine. I’m so damn heavy I can’t keep this beast in the sky back here. How about a little toboggan?”
When you refuel, tobogganing is sometimes necessary as the fighter has to slow down to speeds that are compatible for both fighter and tanker, and any trade of that nature is bound to compromise somebody’s performance. Once a heavy fighter gets into that position, especially if he has any sort of a load on board the machine, he is hanging on the engine. You get into that awkward attitude where you have some of your flaps extended, you have backed way off on the power in order to get into position, and you have killed your flying speed almost completely. You are so close to stalled out that you need full power from the engine so you can hang up there by brute force. Sometimes this is still not enough and you simply fall off the end of the boom and sink.
One remedy is for the tanker to drop his nose to form a more compatible profile so that you are both falling down hill together, or tobogganing. This is fine if weather, altitude separation and all that will allow it, and providing the tanker changes attitude smoothly. Quite often the tanker crew has been allowing George, the automatic pilot, to fly the aricraft because George can actually do a smoother job, and when they cut George out and manually take control, they tend to be too positive. When the ham-handed human pushes the control forward and the nose dumps with that huge mass of metal and fuel rotating up and over its own nose, it gets wild. The fighter pilot is already extended to his maximum control and engine power limits or else he would not have had to call for the toboggan, and when the great beast’s tail rises in his face, the fighter usually manages to porpoise from positive to negative G forces while junk flies around the cockpit and that stinking fuel turns to fiery fingers of fumes that reach into the cockpit and stab at your eyes, nose and mouth. Even with a tight mask and 100 percent oxygen, you can’t get away from those fuel fumes and they just plain hurt. You can feel and taste every raw corner of every sinus in your head and at times you involuntarily cry so hard you can’t even see the tanker in front of you. Anything more than a momentary shot turns your stomach inside out and the sickening dizziness hangs on for some time until your body has purged the fumes.
“Auugh—” over the top they went. “Nice toboggan, chief—gad.” But even the gyrations failed to block the sharp_ reminder spitting over emergency channel, “Orphan Annie— Mickey Mouse,” and the area designator that followed spelled Leo’s position.
“SAMs,” from the frontseater.
“Yeah, and Migs,” from the backseater.
“Crap—that’s all we need up there now is more of those bastards.”
“Carbine,” came from control. “Do you have the coordinates for Carbine four?”
“No, I didn’t even know he was down, but the best we can give you is within ten miles of three. Control, don’t forget Waco is running his fighters based on you getting us lots more tankejs up here. And I’m sure Royal is running his show based on that also.”
Carbine got no reply and internal conversation took over. “Oh, crud. That stinking fuel, I think I’ll puke,” came from the rear seat as the tanks filled and the boomer initiated the disconnect. The fuel in the two systems banged against hy-draulically closed doors and vented directly into the pilot’s breathing and living environment. Beautiful piece of engineering.
“This pig. I’m really falling out of the sky.”
“You know I saw some flak underneath us on the way in.”
“How about holding the stick in this bank for a minute. Don’t let the airspeed get any lower or we’ll sink clean out of sight.”
“I’ll try. Damn—airspeed I ain’t got. How come you always have to blow your nose when the going gets rough. Good thing you got me back here.”
“Crap.”
“You know right over Leo himself we are out of range of all SAMs according to the book.”
“Not by much.”
“Better than nothing.”
A repeat of the Mig and SAM warnings coincided with the other survivor’s full load of fuel and his nasal purge, and Carbine announced, “OK, tanker, we’re both full and we are departing.”
The tanker answered with “Rog. Good luck. We won’t be here when you get back. Wish we could be.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
“Yeah, but I still wouldn’t want their job. What would your wife say when someone asks her what her husband does? My husband makes his living passing gas—”
“Gimme back the stick—” The frontseater resumed control of his aircraft and realigned his radio frequencies with “Carbine, let’s go back to rescue frequency.”
“Tomahawk—this is Carbine on the way back in. Give me a short count so I can home on you.” When you need to find another aircraft you can have him activate his radio transmitter while he counts or talks, and an indicator in your own aircraft will point to his general position.
“Rog, this is Tomahawk holding down. I’m at seven thousand feet.”
“Royal—this is Carbine. I’m back in the area with the two I’ve got left and I’m full of fuel.”
“Rog, Carbine, hold about twenty miles out of the area and 111 call you when I want you to go in.”
The series of transmissions that followed brought the next in a series of shocks for the day. “Royal five, Royal five— Royal two on rescue frequency.”
“Go ahead.”
“Roger, we’ve got everybody in position up there and we’re waiting for some clearance to go. Is there anything you can do to let us know if we’re going to get clearance or not?”
An irritated fighter pilot blurted out “Clearance for what?”—the obvious question as all of us who had heard the transmission blinked in disbelief. The rescue force was not just minutes away from picking our boys out of the paddies. They were orbiting to the south, across the border, while the communicators attempted to explain a situation they could not comprehend to a battle staff and a commander seven hundred miles to the south, and we sat there with all the tools and the know-how to save our guys.
“Roger, Royal two, we’re trying to work on that for you now.”
“Roger, we have quite a gaggle of fighters up there now and we’re having quite a time trying to shuttle them back and forth and the Nomads are all ready to go.”
Frustration was universal. “What the hell—who has to get a clearance?” We all realized for the first time that afternoon that all was not going well.
“Let’s get the crap with it.” We had all the cards we could possibly hold under the circumstances, but things were not going well. We were tied up in our own red tape and each of us could feel that tender something called a comrade getting tougher and tougher to hold onto. Nobody was about to give up and we all talked to ourselves, except the weasels who jollied it up together.
“How in hell did anybody get shot down over a mountain anyway?”
“I don’t even know what they were in range of.”
“Well, fifty-seven millimeter—”
“I know that—”
“Thirty-seven millimeter—”
“He was really on fire.”
“Hmmm?”
“He was really on fire.”
“I got a gun at twelve t
hirty,” and it was back to business as usual. The backseater interrupted the weasel’s own idle chatter with “Moderate intensity.”
The noise was building up to an intense level again, and as the boss in Waco lead, I was having trouble getting my messages across. I had reached a critical fuel state by this time and before I could break my element off and send them scurrying for a tanker I had to yell at the whole tribe again and attempt to keep the unnecessary chatter off the air. I decided to send my element on ahead of me to the tankers and when I dispatched them, they lucked out and got contact with tanker control right off the bat. The last I heard of them for a while, they were getting a steer to one of the tankers pressing northward to accept the thirsty birds. Once they were established outbound and I knew that Carbine was back in the area, I felt free to turn the low cover over to the flight above me and start for fuel myself. As I left the area, I knew that the entire show was not on the road, but I could tell that our portion was in good shape, and I couldn’t understand why the other forces were not in there by now.
“Carbine—this is Royal. Will you attempt contact with Nomad one on this channel and then I want you to escort him and Nomad two into the area.”
The slow prop jobs had at least been cleared into the area. They would now pick up escort from the Thuds and press in on the deck to try and get a visual sighting on the downed crew and sample the ground resistance. If they found the situation workable, they would call the choppers in, try to get them to the spot and attempt the pickup. But it was all too slow, too cumbersome. There should be a better way and there could be a better way, but we never planned or prepared for it.
Why didn’t we have a fast-moving vehicle that could fly reasonably close to us as we entered the area and then respond immediately when needed? Why didn’t we have a fast bird with its own armament that could have been on the scene before those guys hit the ground? Why didn’t we have a rig that could have been there and could have found them as easily as I found them? Why not a machine that could land and take off vertically from the rice paddy or the road with those two precious creatures on board; or even better, why not a machine to snatch their chutes as they floated down for five minutes with the enemy shooting at them? We can snatch the chute and recover an inanimate capsule that has accomplished its directed mission of research in space, but for two humans who have dedicated their lives since adolescence to the service of their country, two highly talented and educated husbands and fathers, for them all we can do is wait and slowly exercise a primitive system, whose chances of success are marginal from the start.
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