The crew of Stagecoach 203 was more than grateful. The pilot pounded Jake on the back and pumped his had repeatedly. He had a dark, well-groomed mustache which was against ship policy. His teeth looked porcelain white. “Just shit hot! I owe you a fifth of your favorite some time in port, believe you me.
“It was nothing you you wouldn’t have done if our positions had been reversed. The fighter pilot, whose name tag proclaimed he was Fighting Joe Brett, released his grip on Jake’s hand.
“We’d like to think that, Grafton. But I mean it about the bottle.” A dozen loud conversations were going at once in the front of the room the while up in the offices Cowboy and the XO were conferring in low voices, getting and scratching missions were a necessary part back to earth. Just then the LSO in his white shirt strode into the group. In his hand was, the green book where he kept a record of every pilot’s approach to the ship.
“Grafton, you set some landing record with a no-grade and one cut pass. That last is the-worst-I’ve seen in many a moon-” The men fell silent. Half of them were looking at a cut grade and half were thinking a no-grade meant the pass was dangerous, almost an accident. No-grade was just above a cut.
The LSO continued. “Now you know as well as I do that with a pitching deck you have to be extra careful. You did a little dive for the deck on your first trap, overcontrolled on your bolter pass, but then on that last approach you really went for it. You could’ve easily torn the wheels off that plane or smashed it on the ramp. Some fine navy night you’re going to cram those main struts right up through the wings.”
Durfee wasn’t taking this lying down. “Hey, asshole, you heard me tell you the bleed air wasn’t working. Jake couldn’t see shit out the windscreen.”
The LSO turned to him. “Did it ever occur to you two geniuses to take a wave off and check the circuit breaker on the downwind leg? Did you check the circuit breaker?” he demanded of Razor.
Razor’s face turned red, and he leaned toward the LSO. “Did you hit the goddamn wave off lights, buttface?”
The LSO ignored the bombardier and focused on the pilot. “You ever come aboard like that again and I’ll see to it you never land another plane on this boat.” He turned and walked toward the front of the room.
Jake felt like a nude in church. He shrugged and looked at the embarrassed men around him. “Hell, I was desperate.”
Joe Brett grasped Jake’s hand again, and the skipper’s voice boomed out, “Jake, you go get some sleep. We have a brief in four hours.” Without another word the pilot turned and headed for his stateroom.
But Commander Camparelli was not finished yet. He motioned with his finger at the LSO, who obediently came over and stood in front of the skipper’s chair. “Listen, mister,” said Camparelli. “You know your job and you call ‘em like you see ‘em. But if you ever again read out one of my pilots like you just did, I’ll have your ass on a plate. Do you understand me?”
“Yessir, but-“
“I decide who flies and who doesn’t in this squadron not you. All I expect from you is your opinion.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now get out of here. I’m tired of looking at you. The LSO marched out the door. The skipper looked around the room at the hushed crowd. He settled on the mustachioed fighter pilot and smiled at him. “Have you got a sister?” he asked.
SIX
The two Intruders were alone in the crystal-blue morning. Several miles below, ragged clouds partially obscured the South VietNamese countryside.
Overhead the morning sun blazed with full tropical fury, warming the airmen’s necks and causing bodies encased in olive drab nomex to perspire agreeably.
Jake Grafton was relaxed. He kept his position about 300 feet aft and to the right of the skipper’s plane without conscious effort. Each plane carried sixteen Mark 82 500-pound bombs beneath its wings, plus the usual 2000-pound fuel tank hung on the center-line belly-station. The dark green bombs appeared almost black in the brilliant sunshine, in sharp contrast to the off-white airplanes that looked clean and polished.
Both Jake Grafton and Marty Greve, the bombardier for this flight, spent much time looking outside the aircraft. On most flights they were too busy to sightsee and over the ocean there was little to observe except clouds.
The radar controller in some anonymous hut near Da Nang directed the two warplanes south. On the left the South China Sea reflected the sunlight through the tears in the cloud blanket, while to the right they could see swatches of solid green jungle. As the earth slipped beneath them, the open spaces between clouds grew larger. The controller passed the flight to a forward air controller, a FAC, who would be flying a light plane with the call sign “Covey” somewhere up ahead. Greve toggled the radio to the assigned frequency, and Grafton keyed the mike twice to let the skipper know he was with him on the new frequency.
“Covey Two Two, this is Devil Five Oh One.”
“Five Oh One, Covey Two Two. Go ahead with your lineup and ordnance, please.”
“Devil Five Oh One is a flight of two Alpha Sixes, side numbers Five Oh One and Five Oh Five. Five Oh One has the lead. Each aircraft has sixteen Mark Eighty-Twos, over.”
“Copy your lineup, Devil. Say your position.”
“We’re about five minutes north of your location.”
“Roger. Here’s the situation. We have troops in contact, maybe two companies of Victor Charlie dug in along a tree line. We’re going to let you try and blow them out of there. The tree line runs north and south. About three hundred meters to the east we have friendlies. Your run-in will be from north to south or vice versa, as you prefer. Best bail-out is to the east, out to sea. No reported flak in the area. Do you copy, over?”
“Roger. Copy all.”
“How many runs can you give me?”
“Two each.” The skipper never took unnecessary chances; two runs were the most he would ever make. He felt that if you couldn’t hit the target in two attempts, you were just hanging out your ass to no avail, Marty leaned over and set up the ordnance panel to release eight bombs. Grafton consulted a card on his kneeboard and made the necessary adjustment on the 106 E bombsight mounted on top of the instrument panel in front of him. To see straight ahead he had to look through the glass of the bombsight. The pilot raised his seat slightly so his right eye aligned perfectly with the yellow cross hairs in the sighting glass. He double checked the switches on the armament panel; except for the master armament switch, which would put electric power to the panel and weapons circuits, all was ready. The skipper led Jake down from 22,000 feet in a gentle, descending turn.
Only a few low clouds dotted the scene below. Inland from the white-sand beach, road ran parallel to the coast. From three miles up, the airmen saw the stream that meandered toward the sea and the bridge that crossed it, and the rice paddies that lay near the road and stretched as far south as they could see.
“The point of interest today, gents,” the F A C said “is the rice paddy on the western side of the road, south of the stream.” A single line of trees edged the western side of this paddy. Behind the trees was low vegetation spotted with pools of stagnant water. From this height the landscape looked like a meadow, but it was probably swamp and tall grass. The V.C. had a backdoor if they wanted to use it.
“Okay, Devils, the Charleys are in that tree line south of the stream. I want the lead plane to start at the stream and march his bombs along that tree line. Number Two, you pick up where lead left off an march yours on down the tree line. Plaster the whole line. Got it?”
The skipper rogered and continued to descend. By now, the Intruders were down to 15,000 feet an inscribing a circle counterclockwise around the target. Grafton knew the men on the ground could hear and make out the white specks in the blue sky. The VietCong, or maybe North VietNamese regulars, were probably trying to dig into the earth and pull the hole in after them. The ARVN commander was undoubtedly watching the warplanes circling like hawks and grinning to himself. Viet Cong, you will di
e cheap.
Jake pulled back the throttles and dropped farther and farther behind the flight leader. He wanted to see where Camparelli’s bombs fell before he turned in for his dive.
“Devils, do you have Covey in sight?”
Both the A-6 pilots craned to find the little spotter plane. They saw it circling to the east, over the beach. As they watched, it turned and fired a smoke rocket into the tree line. Jake watched the smoke intently. It seemed to be drifting slowly toward the northwest. Maybe ten knots of wind. He would need to allow for the wind as he alined.
“That’s the target, guys.”
Both attack pilots Acknowledged.
“Okay, Devils, you are cleared in with Covey in sight. Call in hot and off safe.” The hot and safe calls referred to the position of the master armament switch. With the friendlies so close, an inadvertent weapons release for any reason could be disastrous.
The skipper angled in toward the target. Now the sun flashed on Camparelli’s wings and he was in his dive. “Lead’s in hot.”
Jake watched the accelerating airplane streak toward the earth. He saw the vapor condensation pour off the wingtips as Camparelli laid on the Gees to pull out of the dive. Yet nothing happened along the tree line.
“Lead’s off safe but we didn’t get a release,” Camparelli reported. A malfunction somewhere in the weapons-release system had kept the bombs firmly attached to the bomb racks.
Jake trimmed the plane for 500 knots. After a last glance at the altimeter, he locked his gaze on the trees and came in toward the line at an angle, trying to find that precise spot in space where he could roll and end 108 E up in a forty-degree dive on the proper run-in bearing with his nose just short of the target.
When it felt right, he keyed the mike. “Two’s in hot. He rolled the plane over on its back and pulled the nose down to the tree line as Marty flipped the master armament switch to the armed position.
He rolled upright and adjusted the throttles. The airspeed increased dramatically, and as he monitored the indicator and the altimeter without conscious thought he felt intensely alive. The yellow cross hairs on the bombsight glass were tracking just to the left of the trees. He made a small right turn to allow for the crosswind, then leveled the wings again. Marty was on the ICS: “Ten thousand … nine thousand. You are shallow. Eight thousand, thirty-eight degrees….
Jake eased in a correction for the shallow dive, and the airspeed approached the 500-knot trim setting, he felt the pressure on the stick neutralize.
Now! He mashed the stick pickle with his thumb. The plane shuddered as the bombs were kicked free. When the tremors stopped, he hauled back on the stick and the G forces drove the men down into their seats. As the nose climbed above the horizon Jake searched the blue for the white speck that would be the lead Intruder.
The bombardier lifted his left arm against the Gees and pulled the master armament switch down, then keyed his mike. “Two’s on safe.”
“Nice hit, Devil Two. Right on the money.”
Jake glanced back. The trees were enveloped in black smoke roiling aloft in the clear air. He dropped the left wing and soared up and around for another run. He was back at 15,000 feet when he saw the skipper’s plane racing earthward, then pulling off. “No soap today, Covey. They won’t come off.”
It was Jake’s turn again. Trim set, he rolled. Once again Marty caught the master armament and called the altitude. This time Jake was right on forty degrees.
The tree line grew larger and larger in the sight and he began to distinguish individual trees. At 6000 feet he pickled. On the pullout, he checked the altimeter. It stopped unwinding at 3700 feet and began to register their progress upward as the nose of the aircraft pointed ever higher.
Jake saw the skipper’s plane ahead and kept the throttles full forward to catch him. As the two planes headed northward, the F A C came back on the air: “Devil Two, I give you one hundred percent on target. Nice job. Devil One, sorry you couldn’t get your rocks off.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Have a safe flight home. Toodle-loo from Covey Two Two.”
He held the photo under the desk lamp. It shook slightly in his hands so he tightened his grip. He and Linda and Morgan and Sharon sat on the hood of his Olds 442 with the Olympic Mountains in the background. They had taken a day trip to Hurricane Ridge. When was it? Oh yes, that day in August 1971, after their first cruise. The faces in the picture were all young, all smiling.
A long time ago.
He laid the picture on the desk and stared into the shadows of the stateroom. He took a sheet of letter paper from a box in a drawer and played with his pen. He doodled awhile. He opened her letter to him and read it through several times. He examined the way the point of the pen slid in and out when he pressed the button on the top. He took the pen apart and looked at the spring and the refill and the little plastic cap. One by one, he dropped the parts into the wastebasket.
The paper he wadded into a ball. He tore Linda’s letter into tiny pieces and dribbled them slowly into the wastebasket.
At least Sharon had had the courage to try. He put the photo back in his safe and slammed it shut. Where did Lundeen keep his whiskeys The following day Jake again flew toward South Vietnam but this time he was the flight leader. Augie Canfield sat beside him in the right-hand seat his wingman was Corey Ford, a quiet aeronautical engineer from M I T who wanted to become a test pilot because it was a first step to becoming an astronaught. Ford’s bombardier was Bob Walkwitz, who had a very different personality from that of his pilot. Where Ford never spoke without weighing his words, Walkwitz was the master of the flip comment. He was noisy and irreverent, a man who lived for the moment. Because of his raging thirst for female companionship which alcohol aggravated, Walkwitz was known to comrades as the Boxman.
This morning the two machines flew south as the controllers on the ground called each other in a vain search for a target. Ordnance in the air was a valuable asset that had to be used before the aircraft ran low on fuel. “Anything in your sector?”
“I have two movers who need a target.”
“Any activity over your way?” Fifty miles north of Saigon, the controller turned the flight northwest toward the central highlands. “Hope this isn’t a wild goose chase,” Big Augie muttered glancing at the fuel gauge.
The rice paddies of the coastal plain gave way to meandering ridges and valleys covered with jungle. Gashes of red earth from old bomb craters appeared occasionally, but this rugged terrain had not suffer the scars of war like the areas around Hue and the Demilitarized Zone far to the north for the simple reason that here the Viet COng reigned supreme.
A low haze lay upon the ridges, but the sky was the temple of the sun.
The nomex-clad airmen perspired freely. Big Augie vainly thumbed the air-conditioning switch, already on its coldest setting.
The controller ordered a frequency shift, and Jake checked in with a F A C, call sign “Nail Two Four.” The A-6 crewmen listened as the F A C briefed them and a flight of A-7s. “I was flying up this road and saw a squad of about nine guys in black pajamas strolling along. They dived into the bush on the south side of the road as soon as they saw me. All were carrying small arms. We’re going to see if we can get ‘em.”
“Any friendlies about?” asked one of the Corsair pilots.
“Nearest friendlies are ten miles away.”
When the Intruders arrived at the scene, they began orbiting to the left at 18,000 feet. Jake saw the pair of A-7s several thousand feet below on the opposite side of the circle. Far below, silhouetted against the treetops, the spotter plane weaved along. When the reconnaissance was completed, the spotter plane fired a smoke rocket “The smoke is the farthest west I want you to go.
I’d like you to work your bombs east, just a pair at a time, along the southern edge of the road. You’re cleared in hot with Nail in sight. Call rolling in and off safe.”
The lead A-7 peeled away from
his wingman and pointed his nose at the earth. Seconds later, the shock waves from the concussions of each pair of bombs spread through the foliage in concentric circles. Two by two, the explosions marched along the edge of the road for three hundred yards. Black smoke boiled up. Chatter on the radio was limited to the required calls: “Lead’s in.”
“Off safe.”
“Two’s in. “Off safe.”
Anxious eyes scanned the jungle and the air around each diving plane for muzzle blasts and flak bursts. The planes were most vulnerable when diving, as they were then committed to a descending, predictable straight path. Their eyes searched in vain. Perhaps some of the nine enemy soldiers were shooting with their assault rifles, but if so they were wasting their ammunition. The jets never descended below the maximum effective altitude of of a rifle bullet, which was 3500 feet.
When each Corsair had dropped its ten bombs, the leader had a request: “We have some twenty millimeter to expend, Nail. Permission to make some high strafing runs.”
“Hose down the area south of the bomb impact zone.” This time each Corsair emitted a stream of white smoke as it dived, just a trace really, for several seconds before the machine began its pullout. The twenty-millimeter cannons threw a hundred shells a second at the jungle.
Jake Grafton watched in silence.
What must it be like down there? To be huddled on the ground near one of those trees, perhaps digging frantically in a pathetic attempt to create shelter against random death from the sky? The pilot worked fingertips up under his visor and swabbed the perspiration from his eyes.
When the Corsairs had joined up and disappeared to the northeast, the Intruders began their runs. Each Intruder carried sixteen 500-pounders, which they dropped in Pairs. The impact area was widened and deepened south of the road.
The weapons were randomly spaced. The bombs exploded in white flashes that were immediately engulfed in black smoke. As the fury subsided, the breeze caught the smoke and wafted it away gently.
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