The landing was uneventful. I just backed way off from the runway and came driving in on a flat approach using minimum control pressures. There were many “ohs” and “ahs” as I taxied in and parked my wounded bird, and we found on looking at her on the ground that I had taken several small hits along with the big one. Our information man wanted a picture of me standing there with my head through the hole for a news release, and the maintenance guy and the factory representative wanted one for their bosses, but I refused. I have never allowed a picture to be taken of me with any one of my shot-up aircraft. I have had several friends who have posed for some rather spectacular photos of that type, and an amazingly high proportion of them are very dead from subsequent battle damage. I confined my activities to telling my crew chief to go steal an aft section off some sick bird that was down for maintenance, slap it on our rear end and get the painter to change the numbers. Of the F-105’s flying today there are few that do not exist on parts from other F-105’s.
We debriefed very thoroughly to be sure that we had all seen the same things on the ground and then got the intelligence staff working on all the pictures and background information that they could dig up on the area. What their effort boiled down to was some third-rate pictures that were extremely old and the information that the area had been a live target some time ago but had been dropped from active to inactive because of damage reported in the past and lack of recently reported activity. We were obviously not up to speed on developments in that little valley and that made our find all the sweeter. It might have gone inactive for a while, but it was obvious from the trucks, guns, buildings and secondary explosions we had observed that morning that this was no longer the case. I got on the horn to the big headquarters, described my jind in the most glowing terms I could conjure up, and asked for permission to take an entire strike wing into the place the next day to see what I could do about cleaning all that equipment out while it was still sitting in one spot. Response was not immediate, but I eventually got the go-ahead and my wing was delegated to my own control for only the second time in the entire tour. The headquarters intelligence types went to work for us also but only managed to come up with a few more outdated photos of the general area. I put the planners in my operations section to work, checked their initial efforts and gave them the go sign, and went about some of my other duties while looking forward to the early morning mission the next day.
We were all hot to trot the next morning and anticipation even took some of the sting out of the two-thirty alarm clock. The plan was simple. We would have two flights of Phantoms in the area and they would patrol between our force and Hanoi so we could feel relatively sure that the Migs would not get in our hair. I wanted to be able to concentrate on getting this job done completely the first time, and for once I was content to leave the Mig-sweep work to someone else. We would refuel and all drop off the tankers together, and I would lead into the area and give a go or no go on the weather. The rest of the flights would displace themselves behind me so that we would not bunch up in the limited airspace over the valley, and after I had worked I would call the succeeding flights in one at a time. I intended to orbit far enough away from the target to stay out of their way while they were working, but close enough so I could monitor their work and insure that we got the areas I wanted.
I was disappointed that the weather was not holding to the forecast we had received the night before and it did not look too great. At first the headquarters folks did not want to release us, but I got on the horn and was able to talk them into letting us go, and shortly afterward I pulled into the number one spot in the arming area with my strike force in tow.
The arming area is a strange little piece of concrete adjacent to the end of the runway that provides the last respite and physical check of both man and machine before the launch. It is a hectic spot, saturated with ground crews and supervisors who must constantly hustle to insure a smooth flow of aircraft onto the runway. They have to hurry carefully to guarantee that the aircraft is completely ready for the challenge ahead, yet they can’t afford any delay in the flow of traffic. A few minutes wasted in this crucial spot compounds rapidly into delayed takeoffs and delayed tanker rendezvous, and can compromise the timing and success of the entire effort. The crew is under the control of a senior sergeant who positions himself midway between the yellow painted lead-in lines that each pilot follows as he places his nosewheel on the spot that will line him up parallel to the next bird, with his nose pointing out into the boondocks to guarantee maximum safety should some piece of ordnance misfire during the arming process. It is always hot out there and as each fighter swings into and out of the pad, the stinging exhaust from the tail pipe adds to the heat. The noise and vibration is so intense that the standard ear protectors provide only minimal protection to the ground crews working there, and it is necessary to rotate the arming crews constantly to preserve their hearing.
As the crewman assigned to each particular spot directs the pilot into position, the first move is up to the pilot. He checks all his cockpit switches and when he is satisfied that all ordnance is in a safe condition, he merely holds both hands up in the air to say, “OK, men, go to work. I won’t shoot you or drop a bomb on your toes.” Once the signal is given, the ground crew swarms all over the bird. One group checks all the external weapons to be sure that nothing has vibrated loose while moving from the parking area to the runway, and then they pull the safety pins or set the switches that bring the bombs, rockets and guns to life, ready to detonate on command. Another crew covers every inch of the outside of the bird, looking for hydraulic or fuel leaks, loose panels, cut tires or any little unnoticed flaw that could cost us a man and machine over hostile territory. If they find something wrong, it represents the height ojf frustration to be sent back to the chocks when you have done all the preparation that is required to get to this point, but in this spot rank means nothing. If a two-striper says he doesn’t like the looks of the machine about to launch, colonel or lieutenant, back to the parking area you go. There is no telling how many people and machines this system has saved for us, as there are many things that can go wrong with a temperamental machine from engine crank to takeoff, and the old routine of simply kicking the tire and lighting the fire is definitely passe.
The pilot is busy during this period racing through the checklist to be sure he has not overlooked even one small switch setting, as once he pulls out of this pad it is too late to worry about details. It is also the spot to take a big suck on the plastic tube that leads to the thermos full of ice water behind the seat, and shift into the mental high gear that the next several hours will demand. This is a serious moment inside you, too. Fighter pilots are like racing drivers in that disaster always happens to someone else—not them. Yet, here for a few moments things sit still and the immensity of the personal challenge is very real.
Although I never bothered to inquire into the religious habits of my pilots, I was impressed by the numbers who made it to the chapel for one service or another, and I can tell you for sure there are very few atheists in the arming area. When you watch comrades fall from the sky day after day you realize that it is going to take some help and guidance from a level above your own to hack the course.
We always had at least one of our chaplains in the arming area, and day or night, rain or shine, they were there for every launch. While the crews were bustling about the birds the chaplain would move down the line from one aircraft to another, bless the man and the machine and give you a cheery thumbs-up signal. I usually showed the arming area and the launch of a strike to our important visitors, and I was surprised to find that a few of our supposedly more important types found the sweating men of the cloth somewhat hilarious as they moved amid the din of battle preparations. (Many of these visitors were the kind that usually traveled in the back end of a super gooney bird and got only close enough to the war effort to collect the same sixty-five dollars a month combat pay that the fighter pilots earned.) But nobody sit
ting in the driver’s seat of a Thud thought it was at all funny.
Two of our chaplains stood out from the crowd. I confess to being an Episcopalian snob who finds the-general run of military chapel activities less than completely attractive, but during this tour I was greatly impressed by a quiet Armenian Baptist and a charging Irish Roman Catholic. They were both very much a part of our operation, and they considered the pilots and ground crew on the flight line their primary charges for the year they worked with us. The Baptist was from California, and like many Airnenians from that area epitomized by J. C. Agejanian, automobile racing’s most colorful promoter, shared with me an interest in automobile racing. He was the kind of man I liked to talk to, and he seemed to impress all of us the same way. I did not spend as much time with the Roman Catholic, but when things got sticky he was always there to help. I always got a special sense of well-being from their thumbs-up.
My Irish friend was usually quite jovial around the air base, but he was never anything but serious in the arming area. Because it was a bit difficult to get a smile from him at that point, Ken determined to do it one way or another, and he carried an empty beer bottle with him one day as he strapped into his aircraft and taxied into the arming area. When, with his usual stern expression, the father approached in his tennis shoes and fatigues to bless Ken and his bird, Ken feigned a big swig on the empty beer bottle and handed it over the side of the cockpit to the amazed priest, who almost collapsed in a fit of laughter.
I tried to get my Baptist friend a Bronze Star for the tremendous effort he put into his tour, but I ran into trouble from our support headquarters in the Philippines, who could see nothing unusual about his accomplishments. Things are too comfortable down there, and the majority of those people never got with the effort. When he left for the States, he was replaced by a short plump little man, who from our first meeting reminded me of my grandmother. He took over as the boss chaplain and since he couldn’t preach, couldn’t sing, apparently considered the pilots, the crewmen and the arming area as somewhat bothersome details, and griped constantly about being overworked and persecuted, our relations with the chaplains went downhill. It was a shame, and I understand that my Roman Catholic friend ran head on into his new boss after I left and got hurt in the shuffle. They were great guys, and with their blessing I marshaled my forces on the runway and launched for the area where I had found a superior target the day before, and been hit in the process.
The black takeoff was not too bad, and as we reached altitude, the first light of day was piercing the horizon. The refueling was another story. It was the worst I have ever been through. I had Ken leading my element on his ninety-eighth mission and he has described the refueling as his single most harrowing flying experience. We had huge thunderstorms on all of our refueling tracks and they started on the ground and went up above 35,000 feet, even in the early morning hours. There was simply no possible way to avoid them, and though I tried desperately to keep the heaving, bouncing mass of fighters and tankers under control, it got pretty well messed up from the start: All of the flight leaders managed to locate their tankers in the rain and clouds, which in itself was quite a feat. It gets real spooky probing through a thick cloud trying to locate another moving object, and neither the tankers nor the fighters are maneuverable enough in the refueling posture to salvage the situation if somebody goofs.
Normally you take on a load of fuel when you first go on the tanker and then top off for a full load just before you leave. In bad weather two hookups are plenty demanding, but this day I had to accomplish eight separate hookups before I managed to get all my charges squared away. I don’t care if I never have to do that again. The further north we went, the worse the bumps became. We had people falling off refueling booms and sinking into the murk, separated from their flights, and we had entire flights slung oflf their tankers. There was just no place to go where conditions would be any better and it looked for a while like I would not be able to hold my troops together safely, and that I might have to scrub the mission I wanted so badly to complete. We all had to stay on the same radio channel so we could try to keep track of each other, and since every pilot was having problems, the radio turned into a screaming mess. I was trying to fly instruments, navigate the force, keep track of my tanker, and mentally picture the other tankers and fighters while attempting to figure out how I was going to maintain control of this mess. I had vertigo so many times I lost track of the number, and I repeatedly had to revert to straight instruments to convince myself that I was or was not in some degree of upside-down condition. The tankers were trying to give us all the help they could, but they became confused, and their turns became spastic as they bumped out of unison with us and exceeded the capabilities of our birds heavy with bombs and fuel. The entire situation approached the impossible.
In desperation I told everybody to stay off the radio for a few minutes and suffer in silence, and I contacted the pilot and navigator of my tanker on the radio. I told them that we were just about to blow the entire strike, and on top of that we were liable to run a bunch of us together if we kept lurching about as we were. Since we were the top cell, I told them to keep track of the others on their radar and to start moving up and down, searching for a break between layers of clouds where we could get the force back together. The process of climbing, diving, bending and turning, while we continually cycled off the boom in order to have a. full load to be able to take advantage of a break should we find one, was most painful, but we finally stumbled into a clearing between layers that was less than 1,000 feet high and less than 2 miles in diameter. It wasn’t a good setup, but it was this or nothing. I told the tanker to wrap it up in whatever turn was necessary to stay in that hole, and while we stood on our ears to stay with him we topped off on fuel once again.
I had little idea of our specific position since I had been dragging around behind my tanker during his gyrations. I called the tanker navigator, who gave me a set of coordinates for our present position which I managed to set into my navigation gear; at least the machine would know where we were. I then told my tanker to get out of the hole and head south, and to call each succeeding tanker and steer him and his fighters into this little clear spot with instructions to drop his fighters as soon as he reached the spot. I wrestled with my maps and figured a new course from our new drop-off point to the target and orbited in the restricted clearing until I knew that all tankers and fighters were en route with safe separation between each cell. When the big blunt nose of the second tanker burst through the clouds into my circle, I announced my new course and time on target to all the flight leaders and dumped my nose back into the thunderstorms to let down enroute to the target. What a horrible exercise.
After a bit more bouncing around, we broke through on the other side of the wall of thunderstorms and the air was clear above a low undercast that obscured the ground. All calculations were in the blind now and all I could do was follow my navigation gear and hope that both it and my new computations were correct. After battering us around so badly, the weather finally gave us a break, and as the seconds ticked away and ran out, I was over the desired spot and there was a break in the clouds that centered right over the valley I was looking for. The target complex was in the center of the break that extended from the ridgeline on the north of the target for about two miles to the other ridgeline, on the south of the valley. It was open for a couple of miles to the east and west and we could work, and I could hear the flights behind me breaking out of the thunder-bumps and charging north.
Everything looked just as it had the day before and I knew the precise target that I wanted. My selection of the gun pits that had clobbered me the day before as my target was both personal and professional. I flew east past the road where I had strafed the trucks the day before and placed myself in clear view of the guns that had hit me. I wanted to be sure that the North Vietnamese had not moved them, and I wanted to lure as many gun crews up and on the guns as I could. The gunners responded well,
and the valley lit up just as it had the day before, but this time I was ready for them. I made one of the best dive-bomb runs of my tour that day and as I pulled up and looked back over my shoulder, the guns were down, and things were blowing up throughout the gun pits on both sides of the road. I had^hit dead center and those guns never fired another round that day. The rest of my flight dropped on separate building clusters and each one of them was right on the money. Earl, my number two man, had the most spectacular drop; the complex he hit must have been loaded with ammunition, as it rocked with one secondary explosion after the other, spewing orange flame and dirty gray smoke skyward. It was still rattling ten minutes later.
Thud Ridge Page 28