Thud Ridge (36 page)

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.

I moved to the north of the target and cleared the second flight into the valley which was now well marked with fire, smoke and dust. I moved on an east-west axis that allowed me to observe the work of the succeeding flights as they methodically chewed up the building complexes. I also managed to spot a few new clusters that I had not seen the day before, and all indications were that our find was as good as or even better than we had figured. I swung back to the east from one of these new sightings just about the time my third flight followed my directions to perfection and left another cluster of buildings aflame. The fourth flight was a good minute out, and a small but well-constructed set of buildings followed a straight road now perpendicular to my wing. Why not? I rolled in and strafed the length of the complex with my flight and as we pulled off to the south, the fourth flight rolled in over the top of us and bombed to the north. As they pulled up they rolled into a wingover to the west and strafed what the intelligence people told us might be an early warning radar site in the hills on the northern edge of the valley. It was going like clockwork and I was elated.

As my fifth and last flight pulled off target, the area was pretty well saturated. The count at this stage of the game showed numerous fires burning throughout the area with two large secondary explosions—Earl's ammuniton hit, and a fuel hit that lofted black smoke and debris as high as 4,000 feet into the air. The gun positions were silent, and eight large buildings were completely destroyed while twenty-three others were damaged or burning. Eight trucks had been destroyed and left as hulks, and the suspected radar site had been well massaged. As I looked at the valley, I was pleased with the way my guys had worked, but there was one more job that needed to be done. One of the pilots had hit right on the corner of a good-sized complex and cleaned out several buildings, but there were still about a half dozen buildings in that cluster that needed to be hit. As I moved away from the cloud cover to the north I decided to attack these buildings in a high angle strafing pass with my cannon, and I lit the burner and pulled up and over onto a steep strafing run with my flight behind me.

As my nose dropped down toward the complex I was after, I was in trouble. The course I had selected placed at my two o'clock position the hills at the northern end of the valley that led up to the suspected radar site. In all of our attacks of the day before and of that day, there had been no fire from that area, but now the air between the green hills and my aircraft was alive with the piercing red balls of tracer ammunition from the ground. There were a lot of them, and they were curling my way. It only takes a few experiences to know when they are on you, and I was afraid that these gunners were on me. I wondered instantaneously where in hell they had come from and then I was in real trouble. My bird lurched to the left with the sickening click of another big hit and before I could even react she lurched and clicked again. Instantaneously the fire light on the instrument panel went to red and the reflexes built up from combat in the Thud threw my eyes to the hydraulic pressure gauges that indicated the number of pounds of pressure per square inch available to move the flight controls. If they went I was done, and there would be no controlling my diving steed. It was the too-familiar pattern that had cost us most of our Thud losses, and my eyes arrived there in fractions of a second only to find the primary system at zero and the indicator needle of the secondary system settling on zero.

I had already lost many of the systems necessary for normal flight and the only thing keeping me under control was the third and weaker utility hydraulic system. The little white needle on that system was already wavering. I was entering my strafing run and I was on fire, and it looked like I was about to become an unguided missile. I thought, What the hell, those lousy bastards may have me but I'm going to get them before I go, and I pressed on, mad and scared. Earl called, "Lead you're hit and on fire with smoke and pieces coming out the back end." I knew it, but I squeezed that trigger for all I was worth and sprayed a stream of lead into the guns and the buildings. If this was going to be it I wanted to get the job done first, and I did. I got about five hundred rounds right in the middle of them, and then it was time to start worrying about the old behind. Very gradually, I started back on the stick with an eye on the utility system. This was it, and if she didn't take now, the only alternative was a highspeed ejection attempt and that was not too promising a prospect. The pressure needle bucked and shuddered even with slight control pressures but she did not fall to zero and the nose started slowly up. I could use all the speed I could get to displace myself from any guns that might still be active, so an easy pullout that just cleared the ground was all I wanted, and that's just what I got.

My gradual pullout had carried me a fair distance to the north of the target area, but in my delicate condition north was not the place I wanted to go. I didn't want to use any greater control pressures than I needed to, as every activation of my one remaining emergency hydraulic system was tempting fate. I had at least one eye on that gauge all the time, and it set up a strange pattern that fascinated yet terrified me. It would hold relatively steady around three thousand pounds for about ninety seconds, then stagger a couple of times and drop down to zero, bounce off the bottom peg and shudder back toward three thousand pounds. If it stayed on the bottom I was out of flight controls, and each time it went through its cycle, my hands dropped involuntarily to the ejection handles at the base of my seat. I never knew if it was going to come back up again and it was most important that I get south while I was still able. I had to ease her around to the south and fly right back over the valley that I had been beating up for two days. Earl had stroked the burner as soon as he saw my tail light up and he pulled up close to me as I approached the valley from the north and said, "Chief, you better get ready to get out of that thing. I think the rear end is coming unglued and you have lots of fire back there." Just as he said that the hydraulic needle took one of its nose dives and for some reason I looked at my clock at that instant. It was quarter of twelve and I had a very clear thought, If I have to jump out of this thing right on top of these bastards I'll never make it even as far as the Hanoi Hilton. They'll eat me for lunch. The pressure came back up but I couldn't get the fire out and I was most concerned about: what the fire was eating up in the rear end of my bird.