Thud Ridge

by Jacksel Markham Broughton

  Since our superiors had managed to control away almost all the fighters we had previously assembled, I figured I had better get with the program in a hurry. I split my flight into elements of two to search more effectively and headed for the coordinates that were supposed to represent the spot where Joe was down. I knew that, unless someone climbed out of the tanker and tied him up with a rope, Tomahawk would be back in with the one wingman he had left, and I hoped we could have something good for him to cover and perhaps we could still use the Spads and the choppers. As I entered the new area, I knew even more than before that time would be a big factor. It was a fantastic looking spot. The hills rolled up into small mountains and further south leaped into the sheer saw-toothed karst that dropped violently to the winding riverbed far below. The sawtooths were already shading the huge trees rolling from ridge to ridge underneath them, and my first thought was of two big hopes. I hoped he hadn’t landed on top of one of those sharp knobs and I hoped we had a good gutty chopper driver sitting in the wings. I hoped half right.

  I swung my element a bit north of due west and started a gradual turn that would allow me to get a good look at the land below and would bring me out of the orbit about over the sharp peaks to the south. There were a few trails showing in the jungle carpet, and the ground appeared to roll gently toward the delta to the east. Meager terraces had been scratched out where the land was level enough to cultivate; there were a few groups of dwellings, but nothing big. I gave a little test on a couple of them but I could not see that anyone fired at me or seemed to care that I was there. There was a fire burning in the jungle a few miles away and if I was in the right spot, that would probably be some portion of the aircraft that had gone its own way either before or after Joe left it. The stuck beeper had faded to the lonely north and the air was still and intense as four Thuds worked against the clock, the jungle and the elements of the air war in the North. I did not have long to wait, and halfway through my first turn a new, strong and definite rescue beeper came up on the inside of my turn. I grabbed a quick directional steer on him and called my number two man who verified both the beeper and the steer. We wrapped those Thuds around to the left like we were driving midget racers, and although the force of the turn nearly knocked them out of the sky, we were able to roll straight and level before we got to the spot on the ground where the beacon was telling us our fourth downed comrade of the afternoon was waiting for us and for the help we could bring.

  As I approached the spot, I skidded my steed to the right and got as slow as I could get and still stay airborne, rocked the left wing down and looked long and hard at nothing but trees. The steering needle swung to the left and then to the tail and I knew I had him pinpointed. “Tomahawk four, Tomahawk four—this is Waco on emergency. If you read me turn your beeper off.”

  Like the cut of a knife the screecher shut off and the small clear voice said, “This is Tomahawk four. I read you loud and clear, Waco. I am OK and awaiting pickup.” I was so pleased, I almost forgot my business, and in my anxiety to get a better look at the area, I almost pulled my beast into a stall as I told the world on the radio that I had found Joe. “Waco two, I’ve got his position spotted. Get up to altitude and get us some Spads and some choppers in here on the double. Tell them no sweat on Migs Bind tell them we have to hurry. We’re far enough south so they ought to be able to get the job done without making it a big production.” I swung around for the spot and yanked my sweaty map out from under my left buttock, which is still the best map holder ever devised for a fighter plane, and prepared to get some good coordinates for the rescue guys. “Joe, turn your beeper on now.” I fixed right over the beacon and said, “OK, Joe, turn it off, and if I just flew right over your position, turn it back on for two seconds, then back off.” The reply was just like the survival movies and I knew that I was right and that Joe was both in good shape and as sharp as he could be.

  I relayed the coordinates, and since the rescue system had been alerted by Tomahawk lead on his way out for fuel, it was not too long before a pair of Nomads arrived on the scene and went to work like a couple of old pros. They took over and my job reverted to that of top cover. The memory of the fiasco of an hour ago was with me as much as my aching seat and my weary head and back, but this one was already farther ahead than the other one had ever been and these Nomads were doing it properly.

  “OK, Tomahawk four-—Nomad here. Turn your beeper on for ten seconds.” He lined up arid said encouragingly, “OK, good steer, I’m lined up on you. Turn your beeper on and leave it on till I tell you to turn it off.” Completing his pass, he got a good low-level swing and was able to bend his little bird around in a tight turn that allowed him to keep the area in view. “OK, Tomahawk, beeper off. Are you on top of that ridge I just flew over?”

  “Nomad—Tomahawk. I am on the east side of the ridge you just flew over, about halfway down to where it levels off into a little plateau. I have plenty of flares. Over.”

  “Rog, Tomahawk, hold your flares.” The flares are a good spotting device and can be a big help to the searcher. By the same token, they can be a big help to those searching from the ground. We have lost people by the premature use of flares that have allowed the bad guys to get there before the rescue people. Sometimes it is necessary to use them, but they are better held until the choppers are on the way or until the Nomad feels the area is clear enough of enemy to use one to pinpoint the downed man in the thick tree cover, so that the Nomad can set up a quick in-and-out run for the choppers. The multiple layers of trees go as high as 200 feet, and a man gets pretty small under them. “Spread your chute out as well as you can, Tomahawk. I’m on the way back in.”

  This Nomad showed a completely different picture of the rescue pilots than the one we had just attempted to work with. He was’sure enough of the position and condition of his man and knew how critical the time was, so he called the controllers on his second radio and directed that the choppers start inbound on the now relatively short trip that they had to make. All the terrain there was relatively high as far as ground elevation was concerned, which would make the choppers’ job more difficult, but all in all, things smacked of possible success. Pulling up abruptly over the suspected spot, Nomad announced, “Rog, Tomahawk, think I’ve got you. The choppers will be here in a few minutes. Get ready for pickup and give me a red smoke flare now so I can be sure I get them to the right spot from the right approach direction.” Joe, like many of us, figured that those flares and the radio were two of the most valuable pieces of cargo you could carry, and he had several extras strapped to the outside of his anti-G suit. He took one out, carefully selected the end that would emit a thick red smoke that would float up through the

  (trees to stain the twilight sky and momentarily show both his position and the direction of the wind before it drifted away into nothing, held it skyward and pulled the lanyard. “Rog, Tomahawk four, I’ve got your smoke. Sit tight for a couple of minutes.”

  But the minutes dragged, the sun sank lower, and the haze thickened. I had been stooging around on the deck for quite some time and could not delay too long before departing for the night rendezvous with the tanker that I now had to have, or else I would have to park this bird of mine in the jungle. But I knew the tankers would be there. I knew it because Tomahawk lead and two were on the way back in and told me so. Joe should be picked up by the time Tomahawk got here and I could blast for the tanker while they escorted the rescue troops out. Where in hell were those choppers?

  ’Tomahawk four—this is Nornad. I hate to tell you this, old buddy, but one of the choppers thinks he has a rough engine and has turned back and the other one has decided he will go with him hi case he has any trouble. We can’t get another one up here tonight so I guess you better pull up a log and try and get some rest. We will try and get back in the morning—and by the way, there is a stream about fifty yards downhill from you if you get low on water. CHI Dooey, old buddy.” At least the Spad driver got right to the point. He knew we w
ere screwed and so did Joe.

  “Roger, this is Tomahawk four, understand. Thank you. I’ll be waiting for you in the morning.”

  I couldn’t believe it. So what if one of the choppers did have a rough engine—we’d had rough engines all afternoon. If the first one decided he was going to crap out, so what— why did the second one want to go back in case of trouble? We had trouble we hadn’t used yet right here, and we had the rescue in our hip pocket. I still can’t believe it. I try to think nice things about the situation and about the actions and decisions I saw that day, but I can’t.

  Tomahawk lead couldn’t believe it either but it was dark and the deed was done. He headed for home with his still goodly fuel load and I stumbled off to find the tanker that would give us what we needed for the trip back to base. But we weren’t through yet. Nomad’s wingman split the evening ether with “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday—Nomad lead is hit and on fire.” He had wandered too close to someone on the ground, and once again unseen small arms had scored a bit.

  Oh, boy, what next! I knew that Nomad was far slower than we were and the only place that he could be was behind us, so I forgot the fuel and wheeled 180 degrees and back we went.

  “Nomad—this is Nomad four. You’re on fire. Bail out, bail out, BAIL OUT!” I was ready to commit us to another attempt at cover, knowing; before It started that this one would not have a chance. When an airman in trouble calls, you have no choice, and one of our people was in trouble. I got a feeling of encouragement from the next two transmissions. The wingman repeated his call, “Bail out, you’re on fire.”

  With lots of calm, Nomad came back and said, “Negative.” Not negative because he was not on fire, but negative because he was not about to park his Spad over the dark noplace where he knew four fellows had withered in the sunlight. He was not about to leap into what would have been either death or prison, knowing there would be no rescue for him that night. He knew what the odds were, and he was going to take his chances with the machine. He had apparently wandered into the wrong area at the wrong altitude as he egressed from the messed up effort that had left the guy he had located and talked to and even flared sitting on a stump waiting for the bad guys to pick him up. He knew that there was no rescue this day and he was not about to become number five if he could help it. There is little doubt that he knew he was on fire. Iff a bird like the 105, you cannot see the wing, and besides the wing seldom burns. In the Spad you can see the wing, and he was burning severely from the wing root. Very close to the sort of thing that causes wing separation and rapid departure from the scene. His judgment was swift, and I am sure that his head was filled with many thoughts of things other than himself as he made his move.

  He rolled his flaming Spad over onto her back and dove for the deck. His wingrnan got the natural impression that he had lost control of the machine and that resulted in a few more panic-stricken calls in the black unfriendly night. Down he went, pointed at the hills, the hills he could not see but those he knew were there. If he got the ancient warrior going fast enough he could blow the flame out. He could starve the fire, he could divert the airflow, and the fire would go out and he could limp home. And if not—why not try. He did, and it worked, and while it was working the remaining Tomahawks and Wacos and Nomad two marveled and wondered what the next step would be. The next step was a big batch of silence and lots of hard breathing. After what seemed like four hours and could not possibly have been more than a minute, the not-so-calm-but-ever-so-pleased voice of Mr. Nomad announced that the fire had gone out, that he was pulling the nose up, and that he had plenty of fuel to get back to his homedrome. The night was black, but not nearly as black as my thoughts. I wheeled once again, and more than seven hours after I left Takhli I touched down on that remote piece of concrete and unstrapped from the belts that bound me to the machine. I was beat but I was not through fighting.

  You have no idea how tired you can get from a physical and mental ordeal such as that, but tired or not, you don’t quit. You couldn’t quit even if you wanted to, because you have to talk to people, you have to analyze, you have to debrief, you have to make the next plan, and you have to sign off on a bunch of administrative details to the families of four brave men and that hits you right in the gut.

  I got on the hot line to the big bosses as soon as I got into the operations building and found them ready to talk. They were, of course, anxious to hear what had happened from my view, and I told them. I was anxious to know what had happened from the rescue guy’s point of view, but nobody was ever able to explain that to my satisfaction. My big points to them, as you can’t live in the past in this racket, were let’s get Joe out—we know he is there—and let’s go clean house on those lousy Migs. We had been forced to set ourselves up like a bunch of pigeons that afternoon, but I wanted to go back in style and clean their clocks while we got Joe out. The weather was rolling into that area and things did not look overly promising, but I did get a guarantee that the electronic types would keep a watch on the area all night and there would be visual and electronic help in the morning at first light. I got an acknowledgment of understanding of my request for a sweep against the Migs but that was all I got for the moment.

  While I cleaned up the details and grabbed a bite to eat, we got the word “go” on rny proposal for a combination rescue effort and Mig sweep for the next morning. It was close to midnight already and morning meant something like 4 A.M. for this one, so the press was on again. All the aches and pains faded rapidly in the light of the new challenge and I set to work with my maps and my planners. We sectioned the area we wanted to cover where we thought we had the best chance of hammering the Migs and of protecting the primary searchers while we did a bit of searching on our own. We picked our flight lineups carefully, charted the routes and pinned down the timing. We decided to leave the bombs at home since we weren’t after ground targets on this one and we wanted to go clean. About 2 A.M. I started to get the wearies badly, so once I had the plan going the way I wanted, I turned it over to some of my troops who would not be flying in the morning and went to the trailer for a quick two-hour snooze.

  Morning came quickly, but the challenge pushed aside the need for rest. The weather in the area where Joe had parked was as advertised—rotten. The clouds had stacked up against the hills and the electronic guys who had been watching the spot all night reported no signals, but cloud right down to the deck. There was little possibility of visual search that morning, but we could still run our part of the plan and perhaps wax some Migs and hope we would keep them away in case the rescue effort could get in gear with an unexpected weather break. It was an eager bunch that launched that morning—eager to look for some of our troops and eager to shake up the Migs. And shake them up we did. They expected to charge into a string of lumbering, bomb-laden Thuds and have their normal easy game of commit if it is favorable or run back to the home-free area if things don’t look too good. They waded in and were no little surprised. There were Mig fuel tanks jettisoned all over the area and once they discovered the name of the game, they were not at all eager to play, but they found it a bit difficult to turn loose of the first of us they engaged. I can recall the enthusiasm of one wingman in the middle of the fast,’swirling fray as the action went right down to the treetops and erupted in a blast of fire and dust when he hammered his Mig and drove him exploding into the hillside: “I got one I I got one!” His flight leader beat me to the mike button to say, “Shut up and go get another one.”

  But when the first Mig flights discovered pur intent, the rest stayed on the ground. We made another swing over the entire area but they wanted nothing to do with us. Why should they come up and fight when they were safe in their havens to wait for another day? The weather stayed bad in the area where Joe was, and although we strained our ears and eyes, we added nothing to the rescue effort. It was a fun mission, though. When I landed, I had logged twelve hours of single-engine jet combat time in the past twenty clock hours. When you consider the incidentals th
at went with those flights, that leaves nothing but a few quick bites of food and those two hours of sack time I squeezed in. I wasn’t very sharp that afternoon, but none of us could relax because we could not forget the halfway job up north that needed to be completed. Despite the fact that Joe was in a rather lightly populated region, there are very few areas up there that don’t have enough people to give a downed airman a rough time. There was little doubt that they knew exactly where he was, and his chances of getting out were diminishing by the hour while the weather that hampered us made it that much easier for the bad guys.

  When nothing good had been reported by Tuesday morning we realized that if we were to do any good on the now slim hope that Joe was still on the loose and still waiting for us, we were going to have to get the ball rolling ourselves. The afternoon mission seemed to provide a good vehicle and I loaded it with our best people again. It was an interesting one as it was headed for one of the better targets right in downtown Hanoi and although everyone knows that your chances of coming back from one of those are not the greatest, there were always people crawling over each other trying to get on them. That is something about a fighter pilot that is both unique and hard to describe. Tell him you are going to send him to hell, and that things will be rougher than he’s ever seen, and he will fight for the chance to go. He may be petrified half the time but he will die rather than admit it, and if he gets back, most of the time he will tell you that it might have been a bit rough but not so rough that he doesn’t want to go back and try to do it just a little bit better next time.

  This mission was especially attractive as we were to be allowed to provide our own Mig cover flight for a change. On an approach somewhat similar to the sweep of the day before, we were to take one flight without bombs whose only job was to fly like the normal strike aircraft but go get the Migs if they showed. I was forced to take that flight in the face of the wails of my three squadron commanders. My flight call sign for this one was Wabash, and I picked myself three sharp flight leaders from the squadron and put them on my wing. That’s how I wound up with Ken on my wing as Wabash two. We charged around the course despite the fact that the weather forecast was quite dismal. (The weather is seldom what you would call really good, but there was quite a bit of doubt that we would get in that day.) We got down into the Migs’ backyard but they did not rise to the bait. They knew better than we did what the weather was downtown, and figured we were just spinning our wheels and would not be able to get in to our primary target; there was little sense in exposing themselves. They were right. We had to divert about three-quarters of the way down the Ridge and eat another frustration pill.