Thud Ridge

by Jacksel Markham Broughton

  I glanced out the side as I rolled, and quickly identified the area, but as I arched upward through 12,000 feet there was no fire from the big guns, only some small stuff from a bit farther north. I couldn’t understand this and” wondered if we had actually surprised them. I could not hope for a fully effective strike unless the guns showed, by firing at me, where they were and which ones were active that day. I floated a little more and when there was still no appreciable action I wondered if perhaps we had really knocked them out for good on the last trip. I was usually quite comfortable in a vertical rolling maneuver or when hanging upside down looking at the ground through the top of the canopy (probably due to my long tour in front of the Air Force demonstration team, looping and rolling my way around the world), but things got a bit sticky on this one. You can only hang upside down and push up for a limited number of seconds before you run out of everything, including guts. I was running out rapidly, all the garbage, including the bombs, wanted to go down, and it was apparent that I was going to accompany them in that direction before too long. I could have fallen through and hit the general area of the guns but that would probably have been a waste of bombs.

  I ran out of everything, with still no show of life from my primary objective and had to make up my head in a hurry. The strike aircraft had been right behind me and had already bombed, and the first billows of smoke and debris from the rail yard testified to their success. While I had not bombed the big guns, I had at least insured their silence while my troops did their job and got out of the way. I found out later that one of my trusty wingmen had knocked out a six-gun 85-millimeter site in one of the other quadrants, while my other two wingmen hammered smaller emplacements, so the suppression job was accomplished. In my awkward position, upside down and with my nose pointed in almost the opposite direction from my preferred attack heading, it would have been most difficult to get a good run on those guns even if they opened up at that stage of the game, and the best I could have looked for was a solo recovery going the wrong way back toward Hanoi. I knew I had an instantaneously fuzed load of bombs that would do little damage to the tracks or to rolling stock, but I also knew that there was a dandy choke point with a bunch of transshipment buildings at the far end of the yards that would be Ideal targets for this load. I let the nose fall through, a maneuver about which I had little choice, and rolled the wings 180 degrees so that I now faced toward the end of the yards. I could trade some of the altitude gained in my previous gyration for much needed airspeed, and I launched on a dive-bomb run as the choke point floated obligingly up into my sights.

  As I floated away from them, those two big sites opened up with all they had and really covered me on my run. Since I had cat-and-moused them until the force was past, they had no other targets, and I think they used their entire daily quota of ammunition on me. It: turned into a surprisingly pretty dive-bomb run, and when I looked at some film later I saw that I had a perfect hit that blew the cluster of buildings to smithereens; the walls of one building south of the tracks traveled through the air all the way to the north side. All the troops had done good work and when we compared notes and assessed damage we found that we had started several good-sized fires, triggered three large secondary explosions, destroyed thirty-five railroad cars, destroyed the two largest buildings in the choke point area, cut the tracks in twelve places and knocked out the six-gun 85-miliirneter battery. The flights at Phu Tho had also done good work and had closed the choke points at both ends of their yards while saturating the tracks and cars in between. Not bad for the start of a day’s work, and we got everybody out without taking a hit.

  I was feeling quite satisfied with the drive and precision of my troops as we headed out of the target area and moved toward the south and west. We were fat on fuel, and the weather looked favorable so I decided to take my boys hunting in my favorite area. We were about halfway to Hoa Binh when my SAM chasers, who were still screening between Hanoi and our flights, began to chatter about SAM launches. Three of the four Thuds in my flight had suffered from equipment problems since takeoff and we were not in shape to take SAM on at this particular moment. When I took a quick glance at the terrain, it was not difficult to see that I was very close to the area where SAM had clipped me before, and I took my troops into an evasive exercise just on general principles. Sure enough, SAM zipped over the top of the spot we had been occupying shortly before and charged on aimlessly to detonate himself in frustration at finding only empty air. I won’t swear to it, but I think he came from the same site that had hosed me before.

  We stayed low until we were down around the Black River when I figured we were in position to pick up some altitude and hunt. Then came the Migs to complete our exposure to all the defensive elements for the day. From the various calls on Mig position, the hastily drawn mental picture indicated that we could look for action in our area and it took only a couple of sweeps of the head before I located a Mig-21, all set up on a quartering head-on pass on us. He had good position and plenty of altitude, and he was really moving as he closed toward missile launch range from my ten o’clock position. I called the break and started a turn into him that increased the closure rate considerably and compounded his tracking problems to the point that he figured he could not score on that pass. My wingman and my element were up in perfect position and as the 21 whistled overhead, I started a reverse that would allow us to keep him in sight. He used his superior turning capability and pulled up and over in a wingo-ver that put him at about our four o’clock position as he started his second run. Our Thuds, relatively light on fuel, responded well to the full load of coal we poured on them, and as the element crossed underneath me and pulled up into position, the Mig found himself looking right down the axis of the scissors we had prepared for him. He could hardly have pressed the attack on either element without exposing himself to another pair of hungry Thud drivers. It took him only a second or two to realize this and he deferred. He wrapped that little beauty into a diving inverted turn as he disengaged and streaked back for the sanctuary.

  It is ultimately frustrating to have them turn you off completely whenever you achieve a setup that might give you a chance to clobber them. Even though we were not about to catch him, we stayed on his tail until we had gone far enough north to insure that all the strike flights had progressed through the area without having him turn on their tails, and then reversed and headed for the road leading from Hoa Binh back through the northwest hill country into China.

  I knew this road quite well and had developed the ability to note changes in the overview almost instantly. There were several supply, barracks and transshipment clusters along the route that had been hit, to some degree, during the previous months. Intelligence summaries reported them as unservicea-” ble, but that was just not so. They were used to some extent, depending on the traffic flow down from China or up from Laos, and if you worked the area intently you could spot changes, despite the fact that developments were well hidden just as they were all over the rest of the country. I noted little change in the first few clusters but the third one was different. There were several new buildings and many of the older buildings had been repaired since my last tour of the development. There were several new dirt roads scratched through the complex and the entire operation smelled of activity. As I swung slightly to the north to double back and recheck, I called my element and told them to help me check the development thoroughly, and at the same time I spotted six big fat loaded trucks back at my eight o’clock position. I stroked the burner and called out the trucks as I wheeled hard left across the valley floor and pulled up for altitude to start a strafing pass on the trucks. The element wheeled with me and before I had a chance to initiate my strafing run, I spotted another half dozen trucks on a newly scratched crossroad leading to some of the supposedly abandoned buildings. I knew the element could handle the first batch of six we had spotted, and I called them to take care of them as I pulled around another 90 degrees to go after the second group of six. A
s I rounded the corner and dropped the nose, the red pipper of my cannon sight climbed lazily to the firing position I wanted, and the trucks looked like six hunched-up brown toads squatting in line. I steadied the pipper out for a second and squeezed the trigger.

  The Vulcan cannon barked, and all hell broke loose. The entire valley floor lit up from both sides; I have never seen so much 37-millimeter fire in rny life. It came from everywhere. I was already on the run, so I held the trigger down and dispatched the line of trucks, but they zapped me while I was doing it. The white 37 puff balls were so thick it was like flying through a snowstorm and I couldn’t get away from them. They hit me hard in the vertical fin with a 90-degree deflection shot and I felt it. They had knocked a huge hole in the fin, taking all the electrical stability augmentation gear along with the surface metal and several supporting members, and the bird went ape. I was still heading down at almost 500 knots, and the loss of the electrical circuits threw her into a wild side-to-side oscillation that banged my head from one side of the canopy to the other. The puff balls still would not go away, and as I bounced harder and harder from side to side as the pendulum effect of the oscillations increased, I knew only one thing—that everything was white, except the green mountains approaching all too rapidly.

  My basic problem at the moment was quite simple, but the solution was almost out of reach. The hard hit back in the rear end someplace had deprived me of the normal smooth control forces. Gone were the electrical pick-oils on the control pressures that usually translated themselves into a damping effect to insure smooth control movements and a resulting smooth flight path, and in their place I had a runaway control system that could only interpret and apply full rudder control deflections. The result was a full rudder deflection in one direction that would start the aircraft swinging sideways. As soon as the sick system sensed this swing, it immediately called for full opposite control response; the system was in effect tearing me and itself apart, as it fought to correct its own ever increasing and opposing gyrations.

  The second phase of my problem was that I was physically unable to maintain a set position in the cockpit so that I might attempt some corrective action. The buffeting was not only hard on the head and shoulders, it also made it difficult to see properly, and the old headpiece can only take so much rapid swinging before those level bubbles get to be not so level. The G forces were high and getting higher with each exaggerated swing, which meant that my hands and arms were like swinging hunks of lead that I was trying to force to take switch actions within the cramped confines of the cockpit.

  Next came the problem of the ground. It rose sharply in front of me into a mountain ridge, and as I had been hit when my nose was pointed down with the speed close to 500, I was still pointed down on a collision course with the base of the mountains. Unless I could stabilize the machine and get that nose up, I was probably going to become a part of the local real estate. The real hooker in the whole thing was that they still had me cornered from the ground. That stuff was detonating all around me like popcorn, and the speed I had plus the wild motions I was going through were the only things that were keeping me from taking more hits. I couldn’t afford another hit, and I couldn’t afford to pull back on the power or fling out the speed brakes. Either action might give me the change in profile I needed to get the beast back under control, but that would be of little value if I got blown up in the attempt.

  I had been this wild control route before. I had an F-106 at 30,000 feet one day and, unknown to me, I had a dandy fire back in the weapons bay where a depot modification team had used a two-cent rivet rather than the ten-cent rivet they were supposed to use. When the fire got to the electrical control components, the stick locked full back and I went from flying at 30,000 feet to stalled out with the nose straight up at 40,000 feet before I knew what had happened, I fought that beauty for thirty minutes before I finally overpowered the controls and established a rudder exercise stall from 30,000 feet that allowed me to crash onto the runway at 250 knots.

  That one had been different, in that I had lots of altitude and time to play with. Here, I was running out of both altitude and seconds, and I was getting shot at.

  Ted had my element and when he saw the valley erupt in ground fire he immediately checked me on my strafing run and saw me disappear into the white cloud of flak after seeing my aircraft lurch as it took the hit in the tail. He knew I was in trouble, and he knew that the guns were on me and that he had to get them off me. It was no trick to establish the fact that those gunners were plentiful and accurate, but that did not even slow him down. He lit his burner and pulled himself and his wingman over the top and onto a strafing run from the other side of the valley. He knew that the only thing that would pull the gunners off me, now that they knew I was wounded, was a big dose of lead in the head, and that is what he gave them. He picked what looked like the center of the concentration and pulled the cannon trigger and drove right down to the tops of the gun barrels. When the center section of the guns faltered with the impact of his first rounds, he stirred his control stick around the cockpit and he kicked his rudders, and the nose of his aircraft responded by humping, bumping and swiveling in front of him. The stream of lead spitting from his Galling gun followed the nose of the machine and he sprayed arnmo all over the area. The impact of the lead and the sound of his Thud screeching across the gun pits had the desired effect, and while the central flak battery went out of business permanently, the rest of the gunners faltered in their concentration on me.

  The first thing I had to do was find a circuit breaker. A circuit breaker switch in a fighter is an obnoxious little piece of black plastic that looks something like the eraser and the top half inch of a lead pencil. Each breaker controls one of the many electrical systems or inputs that makes a complicated weapons system tick. There are so many of them that the least essential are not even in the cockpit but are in compartments throughout the aircraft, where the pilot has no control over them in flight. If one of the external breakers pops in flight you have lost that system for the duration. The designers took the zillion most important breakers and placed them in the cockpit, so the pilot could have the opportunity to check and reset some of the electrical systems when necessary. The problem is that there is not enough room for them and they are strung out in lines, globs and little bunches in all the remote corners of the pit that are unusable for other major components. Many of them are on the sides and behind the pilot, and a midget standing up in the seat and looking backward might be able to peer under and behind the seat and armrests and make out the minute lettering and number code that identifies one black pimple from another. When you are strapped in, especially with combat gear on, you can forget all that. Many of them you cannot see, and some of them you can hardly reach. You have to know where they are and, if you can reach them, operate them by feel. While Ted was getting the guns off my back, I was fighting the G forces and the oscillation as I forced my now heavy arm and left hand down and back along the left console panel behind my left hip in search of the stability augmentation switch. If I could find it and disengage it, I would cut out the entire control augmentation system, and while this would give me a spooky set of controls in all the aspects of pitch, roll and yaw, it should at least cut out the frantic and incorrect outputs that were wagging my tail with such alarming force.

  I found what I thought was the right one and managed to hook a thumb and finger under its narrow top lip, and I got it out about the time Ted got the gunners’ heads down. The instant I got it out I leaned on the right rudder with my right foot, as that was the direction I thought I was swinging toward at that instant. My hope was to lock onto one direction of oscillation and break the swing from side to side, and it worked as the bird slid to the right in an uncoordinated but single direction skid. The instant I felt response I threw out the speed brakes to alter my trajectory, honked back on the throttle, horsed back on the stick, then immediately rammed the throttle full forward and lit the burner as I eased o
ff on the right pedal. She was a long way from being a stable bird, but she responded, and the nose eased up as she waddled and bumped toward the sky above the treetops on the hills that were now under me,.and I cleared the mountaintops by less than I like to think about. She was wiggly, but she was flying, and Ted had made it back up from his valley floor excursion.

  I had only one of my other flights still working in the area, my SAM chasers, only a few miles to the south and east of me, and they still had a full load of ordnance. I called them into the area. They had no trouble finding the spot and were on the scene by the time I got my now slow-turning beastie around the corner and headed to the west and south. They needed only a quick description of the target, and each one of them picked a separate cluster of buildings and let fly with bombs. The results were spectacular and they got four secondary explosions out of four, with one the telltale white of ammunition, and another the black thick smoke spiral of fuel.

  That place was loaded. I had to hurry back to the base to report my find and figure out the best way of exploiting it.

  Hurrying was not the answer for me for the following hour or so. My wingman had pulled up alongside of me to take a good look at the condition of my tail feathers, and he advised that the hole was huge and was in effect,a jagged cut directly through the vertical fin and out the other side. The forward edge of the fin was held on only by the angled leading edge of the fin itself, and wires and loose skin flapped in the hole where supporting members and their covering aluminum skin used to be. His advice was simple, “Slow down before you tear that damn fin off.” I would have gone no place but down if I had torn it off, so slow down I did. I would have liked to go home at a comfortable low altitude and a low speed, but we had been working well to the north for some time and I had to have a shot of fuel to make it back. That meant up to altitude for the tanker, and I was a bit concerned about how my charge would handle up there, but we struggled up to 27,000 feet for our tanker. She didn’t handle too well, but I figured she was good enough so that a cooperative tanker crew and a good boomer could handle rne. I explained my problem to the boomer on the radio, and as I sat behind him, looking like an unhappy worm suspended by a string tied around his middle, he took careful aim and stabbed me the first try. I scarfed up a full load of fuel, just to be sure I had enough in case of any problems in the landing phase, and limped homeward thinking again how lucky we were to have such a good bunch of tanker troops on our side.