Thud Ridge (31 page)

One kind soul accepted the challenge and tried to get with the program, but he was; unsure of himself and his resources and he was stumbling. 'When Ken came through with "Two hundred pounds, boss," I figured we had about had the stroke.

Then out of nowhere came the clear voice of White tanker. "Wabash—this is White. I think I have a beacon on you. I've passed all the gas I am authorized to for the day, and I just have enough to get back to home base, but if you are hurting as badly as I think you are I'm willing to give it a try. Have to land at an intermediate base and get my
wrist
slapped. Deviation from plans, you know."

At last. Someone who sounded like he knew what was going on. "Rog, White—Wabash here. You call the shots but make it quick."

"OK, Wabash, turn to zero nine zero and drop down to twenty-four thousand. I should be about forty miles back on the inside of your turn. OK, Wabash, roll out, roll out. Steady on. Now look at eight o'clock. Eight a little low."

"OK, Ken, we're going past him. There he is about seven to you. A little low."

"I got him and I'm showing zero on the fuel."

"I've still got two hundred pounds. Go get him. Pull your nose up and roll back to your left. You'll fall right down on top of him."

As Ken rolled up over his left shoulder and let the big nose fall through, there that big fat beauty was, and Ken's engine started chugging as the pumps reached for the last drops of fuel.

"White—Wabash two. Got you in sight and I'm naming out now. Toboggan. Go down. Go down. I'm flamed out. Hold two fifty and go down. Come on fellows—give me a chance—toboggan."

"White, he's flamed out, STUFF THAT NOSE DOWN. He's got to coast up to you. Don't miss, boomer."

As the big load with the lifesaving fuel pushed over into a dive, the now silent Thud coasted into position behind him and Ken almost sighed as he said, "Come get me boomer." And the sarge in the back end of the tanker lay on his belly, took hold of the controls of his flying refueling boom, aimed one time and rammed the boom into the Thud's nose. As the hydraulic locks bit into the receptacle, Ken was hooked up and being towed along for the ride. As the fuel poured into his tanks and the engine restarted, I was delicately charging into position on his wing as my fuel needle bounced on and off the empty mark. As his tanks registered a thousand pounds he disengaged and slid to the side while I moved into the slot, and before I chugged to silence the same expert gentleman stuck me and the fuel flowed. After I filled up, Ken came back on the boom and filled up and we left for home.

"Nice save, White. Where are you going to land?"

"I'll have to go into your place."

"Good, we'll see you on the ground. Beautiful crew, and that boomer is absolutely gorgeous."

"Glad we could help. See you later."

All the way home I didn't even talk to the various control guys whose areas we passed through. They were all very efficient now that we didn't need them, and it was not because I was pouting that I didn't talk. I just didn't trust myself to speak to them at the moment, as I am sure that I would have hurt someone's feelings. My next task was to get on the phone to my big bosses, which I did as soon as I got on the ground and again thanked White Tanker for his save.

One of Ken's additional duties, for he was a wing staff weenie, was running our Standardization and Evaluation program. Even in war we got inspected by inspection teams of as many as forty-five men from each of our headquarters, as often as four times a year. They stayed in Bangkok and commuted to the jungle daily in our gooney bird. It was an almost unbelievable farce, but they got combat pay for it. Among the other things we had to do to satisfy the inspectors was to document each pilot's proficiency at least once each six months, and our Stan-Eval guys had to complete and file a two-page report, with lots of signatures on it, documenting their flight checks on each of our pilots. I figured that if we had to play this silly game, then each time a Stan-Eval guy flew in a flight of four to Hanoi, the other flight members who made it back safely had demonstrated "proficiency," and they were automatically credited with a flight check, and another absurd square
was
filled on another absurd chart. A few days after we landed from this particular flight, Ken stopped by the office and advised, "Boss, you were due for a headquarters proficiency flight check," and handed me my report card. It said, "Colonel Broughton was given a proficiency evaluation while flying as Force, Commander on a combat strike mission. His demonstrated ability to command and control an entire strike force is outstanding. He was able to cope with several critical and unforeseen problems with cool and decisive action. Flight was debriefed." We almost laughed ourselves sick.

It takes a lot of manevivering of forces and some significant changes in plans to mount a sizable rescue effort such as we would need to try what I wanted to try. I thus had to convince those further up the line that we could be relatively sure of gaining something from the effort. If you launch for this purpose, you have to give up some more routine mission that you are scheduled for and this often causes raised eyebrows in some quarters. I guess they knew I felt quite strongly about this one and since we had verified the fact that there were signals coming from the area, and since we knew that Joe had been on the ground and in good shape, I got the OK for the next day. We provided the fighter cover and configured for that specific mission. The rescue people came up with the Spads and the choppers and we prebriefed to rendezvous crossing the border. We staggered our fighters so we could have good cover through both the search and the rescue, should that come to pass. It didn't come to pass. The Spads looked and got nothing. No noise and nothing visual. We escorted them back out through the quiet countryside where nothing moved, and nobody even fired a round that we saw. That was officially the end of the attempt. We had done all we could.

The next day, leading a flight, Ken was able to swing back over the area again. He repeated our previous pattern and bigger than hell the beeper came up on command. He called for voice contact expecting the same void that we had received two days before, but this time the beeper talked to him on the emergency channel. Only problem was that it was talking in an Oriental voice. It was not until then, on that Thursday afternoon, that the mission we had started on Sunday was finally all through.

10. The Easy Packs

When your daily job is to attack difficult targets in the Hanoi area, you sometimes take your alternate targets too lightly. Nobody can outguess the weather, especially in a place like North Vietnam where you may well get only a few really good days all year, so on each mission you have to plan to go any one of several ways. That's the reason for all the complicated mission planning I mentioned earlier. When you bank on going for the big one and at the last minute find yourself diverted to one of the easy Packs down in the southern part of North Vietnam, the emotions are bound to be varied. (A Pack, remember, is short for what the Air Force calls a Route Package.) Some feel mostly frustration that the prime job will not be done that day. Some feel a degree of fatality: nothing to be done about it and some of these kids will live longer because of it. The ones I worried about were those who had never learned, or who had forgotten, the bitter lesson that anyplace where they may shoot at you can be a source of dire trouble. It is a great temptation to ignore some of the rules you live by in an intense area when you are called upon to work in one that is not as intense but nevertheless hostile. There is nothing sadder than to lose a Thud and a pilot on an easy target, but it can and does happen for several reasons.

If the weather is bad enough to cancel the primary target, it is likely to be less than rosy in the rest of the country—not always, but quite often. Two particular weather bugaboos over there are far worse than they are anyplace else in the world that I have flown, and I've flown most places. The first is the thunderstorms, or even bumpy cumulus clouds that are in effect very junior thunderstorms. The big ones go up like nothing you can imagine, and when a good-sized cloud system sets into an area, you can expect It to be there for days. The clouds run from right on the deck to well about 50,000 feet, and as they grow, they roam back and forth and bump into each other, causing more thunder-bumpers and confusion. There is no going under, over or around a big batch of them, and if they are stretched across your path, you most often just have to grit your teeth, hang on as best you can and press for the other side. Any thunderstorm is a -rough ride, but these are rougher. The monsters and the cumulus type are alike as far as visibility is concerned—unbelievably bad.

The second phenomenon that makes Asian skies uncomfortable is the continuing poor visibility. Upon the arrival of a major or fast-moving weather system, the visibility will clear and the weather will be beautiful. Flying over there on a day like that gives you a sense of luxury. All the rest of the time the visibility varies from poor to dreadful. I have done my share of flying in smog and city-polluted air as well as dust over the deserts and smoke over an area like Tokyo, but they do not hold a candle to the murk that hangs in the air from Hanoi to Bangkok. In most reduced visibility conditions you can see straight down or at least penetrate the restricted visibility on some axis. Not thai: stuff. It is like somebody painted your sunglasses white. I guess some of it comes from the fact that everyone from India to Tokyo seems to be burning something, and part of it comes again from the heavy, wet air, but regardless, it is plain awful as far as seeing where you are going when you are flying a fighter.

Another thing that costs us on the easy ones is the appearance of the countryside and the lack of a skyful of flak to meet you upon your arrival in the target complex. The easy Packs look like the other side of the moon in lots of spots. The North Vietnamese have little need to clean up or rebuild the many crossings, fords, bridges and the like that we have destroyed in the past, as it is much easier to build a new route or find a new crossing. The hulks of the old targets scar the countryside. Moreover, nobody moves when you are flying over the area and only when you surprise something like a stray convoy of vehicles or construction equipment do you get any sensation of actuality or life below you. The guns are there, nobody doubts that, but they are not there in the concentration that you find up North. Many of the guns are on the move, while others have specific facets of the constant southward flow of men and equipment to protect. When you come upon this scene with a small maneuverable unit like a flight of two or a flight of four and gaze on the silent bomb holes and the silent roads and villages, and when you are excused from the rattle and burst of the heavier guns of Hanoi, it is easy to make the big slip. It is easy to forget that they will shoot. They are smart in the easy Packs, and most of the time they will hold their fire until you stumble into a position where they have a good chance of zapping you on the first try.

Another reason for Thud losses in the easy areas goes back to the combination of man and machine tempered by experience. Lots of us have flown many of the machines of the recent past as well as the present, and we have flown them on a variety of missions. Each one is different and each handles differently as you force or coax it through its performance spectrum. Like boats and cars, each model has its strong and its weak points, so that each one is best suited to a particular kind of mission. I would argue violently with the thought that any single machine could be desig'ned and built to accomplish all missions satisfactorily.

You can fly them all through the same sky, but that is a great deal different from doing the best possible job on each mission. The basic differences in speed, altitude, maneuverability and weapons delivery just do not make it good sense to assume away the differences and try to build one vehicle for all tasks. Pilots have a tendency to wish all good things from air machines they have flown into the one they are presently flying, and this can mean trouble. Those who have horsed an F-102 around a corner like a midget racer on dirt don't forget it, and someplace way back in the computer is the feeling that all century series fighters should turn like that. Those who have violently changed direction in the F-106 while still maintaining perfect control don't forget that. Those who have strapped the neat little F-104 onto their backsides and experienced the sensation that "I can make this baby doll go anyplace, anytime" do not forget that. Yet, when any of us fly the Thud with its almost complete lack of these sporty characteristics, we love the way we can whistle along on the deck with the big, high-drag bomb, tank and missile load, as we race down the Ridge to Hanoi with little fear for the Mig. However, when we take this same Thud and try to play maximum performance close support over terrain that often rivals Denver for elevation and rarefied air, we sometimes forget that we have a skinny little wing originally designed for high-speed, straight-and-level, on-the-deck nuclear delivery. When we forget that we can't turn like a deuce, honk like a six or skitter like a four, we ask for trouble and we most often find it.

We had a good example of the weather problem the day we lost Pete—the visibility was so bad you couldn't believe it. We had been reporting this to the head shed for several days, but were unable to convince anyone that it was too poor to work in safety. The show must go on. Although Pete was relatively new to us, he had made a great impression, and he had a wealth of experience to back it up. He was supposed to have been our next new squadron commander and with this in mind, we had him out setting his fingernails dirty in all the areas we flew in. That day he was flying number two and finding out what the wingrnen felt like in the nasty visibility of the near North. The big headquarters executed his flight to work with a forward air controller flying a slower prop aircraft, who would direct the fighters against targets he had identified on the ground. We figured the visibility would make the forward air control portion of the mission a loser from the start, but they had to go, and sure enough, by the time they arrived in the area, the airborne controller had aborted the mission because even in his slow prop job, he could not see his hand in front of his face, to say nothing of having adequate visibility to control high-speed fighters against pinpoint, sensitive targets. The controller had a change in plans for them and sent them out on their own to work an area that was no better as regards visibility but far less sensitive.