Thud Ridge (17 page)

It was a real heartbreaker. Bob was such a nice guy, and in this business you naturally gravitate toward eager young people who seem to have all the spunk and drive and desire that you are looking for. Bob was one of those guys we all felt very strongly for, and his loss got to the squadron and the wing, but especially to the guys in his flight. Bob's brother was over there at the same time and had been at our base visiting Bob shortly before this particular flight. He is also a fine young gentleman and is in the tanker business, refueling us as we go in and come out of the North. As soon as the flight got back on the ground and went through their formalities, they got in touch with Bob's brother and he came right back to see what he could learn. Unfortunately, you have a tough time explaining these things in exact detail and it often takes an amazing amount of mental research to reconstruct things that happen so fast and so violently. However, when Bob's brother came to the base we did everything we could to explain the situation and spell out our ideas of what had occurred.

I saw his brother that evening and that was a tough one. What do you tell a guy? You don't want to discourage him completely because you don't know what happened to the individual. You don't want to pump him up too much because you know that the chances of survival from bailout at that speed are mighty slim. You know that the flak-filling air that he went down through during his short descent was extremely dangerous. You know that his chances of injury on landing were extremely high. But here's a guy whose brother is at best missing, going back home to tell his brother's wife—what? I don't know. I appreciated his attitude and he was a wonderful man to talk to, but it was an awfully lousy conversation.

That same night, Hanoi Hanna came on the radio and announced that the same day an American aircraft had been shot down while raiding the Hanoi area. They have the usual line of chatter that all propaganda broadcasts use and a lot of it you can't believe at all. But this particular night, Hanoi Hanna said that one of the American pilots, a fine, young healthy boy had been shot down and severely injured, and that despite the best efforts of the North Vietnamese doctors, had died in the hospital shortly afterward. You can't always believe what they say and only time will tell if the announcement in itself was the truth, but I think it most interesting to note the terminology used in the broadcast. Most of the references to the Americans coming out of Radio Hanoi are highly uncomplimentary, and we are referred to as bandits, air pirates, Yankee dogs, rotten imperialists, and so on. Yet in this particular case, the individual is referred to as a fine, healthy, good-looking American boy. I wonder if this is an extremely clever bit of writing and narration designed to pluck at your heartstrings, or if perhaps young Bob impressed even the North Vietnamese as much as he impressed aU of us.

6. Behind the Flightline

Throughout my tour at Takhli, the basic rule held firm that it takes a lot of people to run a wing and to run a base. We had quite a community, and when I left, it was up to about five thousand men without a round-eyed white female in sight. The command section of a unit such as this is in many ways like the office of mayor in a small city. We had all the problems that you would expect in any municipality, and -these problems were compounded by the fact that it was a constant battle to scratch what you needed out of the jungle. Funding is controlled at higher command echelons and you seldom find those holding the purse strings sharing your operational enthusiasm for the things you feel you need. In short, making a first-class operation out of a bare strip in the jungle is plain hard work plus an awful lot of frustration.

The bases in Southeast Asia vary enormously from one to another, and some of them were pretty jumbled up and sorry. The differences were due in part to mission requirements, physical location or the varying degrees of higher command interest, but the big difference was the drive and the desire of the individuals running a particular unit. Southeast Asia is usually a one-year tour for those in command and staff positions, and there is always the temptation to let the tough things slide for the next replacement to worry about. This is especially true of the flying commanders, as things move very rapidly from the operational end and'there is a lot of ground to cover. Thus, you often do not get the opportunity to put the emphasis you want on the physical facilities.

The word jungle conveys different images to different people—quite naturally, because the jungle itself is so various. The image of vine-entangled trees, with Tarzan about to swing across the steaming pool of quicksand, seems quite apt in some corners of Asia. I took a small group out in the wilds north of Takhli in search of the engine from one of our Thuds that had crashed shortly after takeoff, and after three days out there I felt like the great white hunter when I returned. A couple of our pilots arranged a few days off duty and hooked up with a native Thai hunting party over toward the border of Burma, and their impressions were similar to mine, when they returned without a tiger. Other areas of the "jungle" are simply rolling green fields with trees that vary from sparse to nonexistent. I always enjoyed dropping down to a few hundred feet above the green carpet when it was practical to do so on the last hundred miles of the return leg of a combat mission. The color, the stillness and the variety are fascinating, and, to me, relaxing to view. It is not uncommon to see 200-foot-high trees with 75-foot trees nestled under them and still another 25-foot bramble of green undergrowth covering the jungle floor. Within a few hundred feet you may well see a native, who knows and cares little about your presence, scar farming a patch of burned-out open land that he will abandon when the urge to move on seizes him.

I personally thought the climate in the Takhli area was great. It got a bit soggy at times, and it was the home of the king cobra, but we had driven the cobra back with the noise of our jets and the bustle of approaching civilization. Temperatures topped 110 degrees during the extremes, but at that time of year the humidity was at its low ebb. Generally, the temperatures were moderate, the breezes were cool, the sunshine was bright and there was lots of good fresh air. When it rained, it rained like nothing I have ever seen and it was common to see 6-ihch puddles of water accumulate within a few minutes.

We were fortunate at Takhli in having exceptionally good people, hard drivers who wanted to get the job done properly and rapidly; and the base showed it. We had the finest physical facility in Southeast Asia this side of Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Of course, Clark had about a fifty-year head start on us and I doubt that anyone will catch'up in the next few days, but we were head and shoulders above anyone else in Vietnam and Thailand.

It was not always so. The first time I saw Takhli a few years ago, things were pretty grim. As far as air bases were concerned, Takhli was at the bottom of most anyone's ladder, anyplace in the world. We had a runway, a taxiway and a bunch of wooden hootches. (A hootch is a long, single-story, stilted wooden building of typical Thai rural design. The stilts discourage the cobra and his companions from sharing the building with you, and the sides are open and screened.) Through the cooperation of the local Thai military, we hired Thai labor, used Thai materials, and supervised the construction and placement of our first attempts at housing and working projects. Our originial hootches were definitely of the low-rent-district type and we had to cram thirty men into each one to give people a place to sleep.

We had nothing resembling roads except the mud trails serving the runway area. The jungle was all around and very much in evidence; in fact, the first time I got there you couldn't even see the runway lights because of the vegetation around the runway. Snakes were prevalent at this time and nobody with any sense wandered far from the tramped-down area. Other bases in the country had received more emphasis and were in far more promising condition than was Takhli. Korat, the home of the other F-105 wing, was a far better looking base, and Udorn, in my opinion, was the most promising of the whole group. General John Murphy was the big gear at Udorn at that time and he had some fine plans for developing the base. It did not turn out that way. Takhli, on the other hand, was in the soggy jungle and did not look like it would ever amount to anything but a hellhole.

Today, Takhli is first class with a wonderful set of base shops, good housing conditions, good recreational facilities on the way although not fully operational when I left, paved roads, and even street lights and extremely functional and attractive buildings. From an operational standpoint Takhli is far superior to a great many bases in the States.

So how did we get from number ten on the ladder to number one on the ladder? I could extol the efforts of any number of great people who immersed themselves in the growth of the Thailand operation, but I have chosen to tell a bit of the story of two individuals to illustrate the people we had doing the job. I will try and take you behind the scenes with a distinguished combat veteran, Lt. Col. Gordon Atkinson; and I want to show you something of a most distinguished nonflying lieutenant colonel named Max E. Crandall. From their stories you should be able to get a feeling for the support that goes into building and running a tactical fighter wing at war.

I was known around Takhli as Mister Vice. Mister Vice, being the number two colonel on the base, winds up with all the cats and dogs and all the things that the boss does*n't want, but that must be done. It is more than one guy can do effectively by himself, yet the command section is authorized only a very meager staff. For example, they are not authorized a wing sergeant major, or first shirt as he is known from the stripes of authority on his sleeve, in my opinion an absolute necessity. Who ever heard of running the show without a first soldier? I would have thought that the necessity of this position was an established fact, but not so in the banana and coconut air force. In our case, we took it out of our hide, the same way we solved so many-other manpower problems. The Air Force has an empire known as Manpower and Organization, which supposedly splits up the goodies peoplewise and insures that all necessary positions are justified and properly documented. I am sure that this is a big job but so far as the operating units are concerned, these manpower folks have yet to realize why the flying force is in being. Each of the three separate headquarters that we responded to from Takhli looked like zebra farm from all the stripes, but the tactical units of 5,000 men are not authorized a first shirt. Our assumption was that all of the senior noncoms were working in manpower at the headquarters, but we didn't fight the problem. We just picked the best qualified man we could find on base and used him where necessary, and the big books stayed balanced. It is the commander's job to juggle his people and get the job done. The-problem of too much headquarters, too much staff and too little at the operating level has never been properly addressed or solved.

Shortly after my arrival, I began agitating for an unauthorized executive officer. In other words, I was looking for a Vice for Mister Vice, an assistant upon whom I could unload some of the many responsibilities that I had. I wanted somebody whom I could trust to utilize the mature judgment of a seasoned combat commander yet someone who was enthusiastic enough and yet detail-minded enough to be sure that administrative niceties, visitors and physical arrangements were properly attended to. It was not too easy to sell the boss on this concept at first, as he did not feel the weight of detail as much as I did and he was not anxious to spread the badge of authority of the command section over any larger area than necessary. I finally convinced him that we could accomplish my aims in this project and still select somebody who would represent us proudly. It worked like a charm.

I found my boy in a balding, round-faced major named Gordon Atkinson who was operations officer in one of our fighter squadrons. I had not met Gordo prior to this tour but was immediately impressed when I did. At the time I got there he had some eighty missions in the theater and was highly respected by his people. I asked Gordo about going to work for me and at first I don't think he was pleased with the thought of being Vice to Mister Vice. However, after a bit of serious conversation and some explanation of what he might be able to learn from the position, but mainly by expressing my need for someone of his caliber, I managed to get Gordo to consider extending his tour and coming to work for me, with the consideration that he first be allowed to complete his hundred missions.

About that time I got an unintended assist from the personnel people. We worked on a reassignment system that involved throwing a card into the machine back in the States to determine a pilot's next assignment after he had been on board for a few months. This piece of paper, full of holes, represents the man; the holes spell out the specialties he has accumulated and are matched with more holes representing demands that have been fed into the same machine. When they matched up, the man was off to his next task. Gordo was an old fighter pilot who had been shanghaied into bombers when there was a large-scale program to that effect throughout the Air Force. He had served with distinction and generated a spot promotion to lieutenant colonel but had never ceased fighting to get out of the big loads and back to fighters. He finally made the grade with an assist from Ho Chi Minh, surrendered his spot promotion—he returned to the grade of major—and fought the battle of retraining and more schools to get his specialty changed back to fighters and to get assigned to our wing.

He was overjoyed at having the magic specialty numbers changed on his records and when the time came for him to forecast for his next assignment after Takhli, he volunteered for any fighter assignment: anywhere in the world, spelled out a few places he would prefer and stated that he was very opposed to any assignment that would return him to any facet of the big-bomber business. His card made the rounds and in due course returned to announce that not only was he going back to bombers, he was going back to the same location and to the same bomber outfit that he had just beaten his way out of. What a reward for fighting a good war. He was distraught, and we immediately started screaming for and with him. At first it was just "tough luck," and then we made the big discovery that the reason for the malassignment was that he was still carried on his little number card as a bomber jock, although all concerned acknowledged that this was not proper. It seems that the personnel weenies had improperly processed his card and had sent him into the machine for grabs based on the wrong number. We screamed some more and felt that surely the system must be responsive enough to acknowledge the error of a group of administrative people, compounded by an unthinking machine, and that he would be assigned where he was eager and qualified to go.
C H I Dooey
—sorry about that—the machine had spoken and the system had spoken and that was that. I found this most difficult to accept but although Gordo had been hurt, he had not been hurt as badly as some people by our goofs, and we still had a few angles left. We have done some grim things in handling our people.