Thud Ridge (21 page)

The ER is good for a laugh once in a while. Since your fate in this business hangs on it, there can be considerable consternation if you have one coming up and you know deep down inside that you have riled the powers that be. Geeno's boss had no problems with me, but there were those in our channels who looked upon his determination with less enthusiasm than I did. By the same token, he knew that I was the drone who prepared the actual papers that were later emblazoned with the big signature, and he knew that I would somehow or other manage to allow a peek at the finished product. Another facet of this monster that I confess I do not understand is the current vogue for not showing the report card to the man being rated. We used to, and I personally thought this gave people a fair understanding of how they stood with the guy they worked for. I hate leaving work at the end of the day with that gnawing in your stomach that indicates you don't know how well you are pleasing the one who has so much go or no-go power over your future in the Air force. Perhaps it is difficult for some to talk frankly with those who toil for them, and to be constructive in their criticism. In that I do not personally have this problem, I am intolerant of those who do, and I would suggest another block on the form to be filled in by those with such a problem. It could just say, "I am too chicken to discuss this man's performance to his face, yes or no." In fact, the man being rated is not precluded from seeing the report: he can do so simply by traveling a few thousand miles to the major air command headquarters and making an appointment to review his records file. Now I ask you, is this cost effective?

When it came time to prepare the ER on Geeno's boss, I decided it was time to have a bit of fun out of the grim business that took all of our conscious and many of our less than conscious moments. I sat down at the typewriter on a Sunday afternoon when I was not flying and dashed off the report that follows. I then went up to my trailer and called him on the phone saying I had something I wanted to discuss in private. He responded, and when he entered the trailer I managed to have the report on my desk, not quite concealed, where he was bound to see it. The curiosity factor was tremendous and he about flipped trying not to look at this all-powerful piece of paper that had his name and some wildly out-of-place markings on it. After a few minutes of idle chatter, I broke down and showed him the farce with a straight face. Concern changed to disbelief and then to laughter as he read through the paper. It went like this:

This Lieutenant Colonel is a most impressive officer with an intense interest in flying.
Fly, fly, fly, that's all the son of a bitch does. Every time you need him to get something done he's airborne. Try and pin him down for a decision
—
"the Colonel is flying."
During this reporting period his squadron has set several records for combat flying time and for the biggest number of fighter combat sorties from a single squadron.
Sure
—
what's so tough about that? He's got those poor pilots so scared of coming in second in anything that they pad more time than they fly. Who ever heard of a seven-hour mission to the bottom of route pack one? And those bandits in his maintenance section
—
those bastards would steal a rose off their grandmother's grave. The rest of the poor slobs on the flight line work their tails off and his guys run around all night stealing parts and switching aft sections.
He has welded his entire squadron into a tightly knit and cohesive unit.
You bet your ass he has
—
they all lie and cover up for each other like a bunch of cell mates. Call him on the phone and what do the airmen say? "Sorry sir, he's in an important conference and asked not to be disturbed." He's in the sack and they know it.
His dynamic personality has made a lasting impression on the local nationals and brought about a new era in Thai-US relations.
Who'll ever forget the night the Thai commander had us over to his place? He even ran out of Thai whiskey
—
and that funny little dance he did in his bare feet between the broken bottles.
He has been decorated, and decorated, and decorated.
That's all those poor Lieutenants and Sergeants do down there is make up decorations for him. They even tried to get him another Silver Star for making last week's staff meeting on time
—
for once. I
recommend that he be assigned at the highest possible staff level, preferably to the Pentagon,
That place is so jumbled up and big, that with his ability to get lost in the shuffle it is hard to see how he can do any harm up there.

As we progressed through the lines, we decided the levity was too good to hold to ourselves so I called the other two squadron commanders over and we all had a big guffaw. One of the other squadron commanders was now Geeno. When we had lost Don, we wanted to replace him immediately with a strong commander from within our own resources. Geeno was the logical choice, and though he took Don's job with the heavy heart that we all shared, he waded right into the problems he faced, and within a few days you would have thought that he had been a combat squadron commander for years. Unfortunately, we were not to have the benefit of Geeno's tough but gentle personality for very long. He believed in his mission too much, and he immersed himself so far in the details of his charges that a few weeks later we lost him.

It was a Saturday morning and Geeno had drawn the early briefing and takeoff as the mission commander for both the Korat wing and ourselves against that lousy Thai Nguyen railroad yard, which served the steel mill (at that time we had not yet been turned loose on the mill itself). This was one of the many wild setups over there and the North Vietnamese naturally wanted to extract the maximum price for letting us clobber that complex. They had enough stuff in there to protect both the rail yards and the steel plant, but as they were always pretty sure of our restrictions and what we could and could not hit, they could quite well afford to orient all their guns toward the protection of the rail yards and trust to luck and intelligence for the protection of the steel plant. We made their tasks lots easier in many respects.

Their Sam and Mig defenses were not hampered by being divided between the two targets lying one on top of the other, and they had excellent area defense. They had positioned their Sams in such a manner that they could cover our ingress to the target area of Thai Nguyen from any angle and protect both the yards and the mill. They had the benefit of lots of practice in tracking us as we came down Thud Ridge; and because they knew we would avoid both the Mig sanctuaries at Phuc Yen and Kep and the magic inner circles at Hanoi and Haiphong, they were able to look at us all the way in and have a fan- shot whenever the missile gear indicated conditions to be favorable.

The Migs were also in a favorable posture since they were based on-both sides of the Ridge—at Phuc Yen to the west and Kep to the east. I have often marveled at the Migs' amazing lack of success. I know airplanes very well and my three years of leading the USAF demonstration team, The Thunderbirds, did nothing to dim my perception of relative maximum performance capability among different aircraft. I have fought with the Migs in two wars now—be they declared, recognized, popular or not—and I have yet to see any general indication that the Mig drivers we have faced thus far are using the maximum skill or technical capability available to them. I don't think you will find a truly professional fighter pilot who would not sell his front seat in hell to be a Mig squadron commander in the face of an American fighter-bomber attack, should such a transformation be possible in our world of reality. Please remember I am only speaking professionally and am not expressing any desire to go the rice and fish route. I am simply saying that they could murder us if they did the job properly.

They don't go first class and our guys are both good and dedicated. I guess that is the difference. I have had a batch of them on my tail when they have had a better aircraft that could go faster, turn better, and outaccelerate me. I have been on the low end of odds as high as 16 to 2—and that's pretty lousy. (In this particular case of the poor odds, they hung me up for twenty-three minutes, an almost unheard-of time period for aerial combat even in the early Korea days when this occurred. They didn't scratch me, only because their cannon couldn't hit the round side of a broad.) I have had them come up from under my tail spewing red tracers that looked like a runaway Roman candle burst at the seams. Had those guns been properly harmonized, they would have nailed me without a doubt.

They have still not learned their lessons well and I suspect they do not do their homework properly. With the advantages they have going for them, I am sure glad that the majority of those we have tangled with to date are not
as
clever in this game as our guys are. Anyone who reads the air-to-air results and feels that American technology has scored another victory over the competition of the world is sadly misled. We have been able to take advantage of their mistakes and they have not seen, or have ignored, or have been inept enough not to take advantage of, our mistakes. I scream caution at the top of my lungs that we have not yet met the first team of Mig drivers but I have failed to observe a flow of listeners to my door. As a matter of fact, it becomes less popular and less rewarding each day to scream about basic convictions in the conduct of any struggle between men and machines. I feel very strongly that our inability to talk of practicality or to accept the word of those who physically do the job is hurting us all the way from the drawing board to the battlefield. Is our level of incompetence so high that the doer can never be heard? Is it inconceivable that a captain could know something from practical experience that a general doesn't know? I often wonder if Hannibal had any elephant drivers who tried to get the big message to him at the base of the Alps, but were swallowed up in a system that wanted to hear only good about itself.

But Geeno's problems were faster moving than Hannibal's and the Sams, the Migs and the flak were all zeroed in and waiting for him that bleak morning when he headed north for the last time—and he knew they were waiting. Like the rest of the Thud drivers, he never lacked a knowledge or appreciation of the forces aligned against him, but only a few flinched from the blanket of steel that waited, always active, always eager, never compromising. We had only four who couldn't hack it, four only whose fear overcame them and dealt them the gravest defeat man can suffer—to surrender to the cowardice that made them quit in the face of the enemy while those they had lived with went forth to take their chances on dying or rotting away in prison in order to defend their supposed right to default on their brothers-in-arms and still go forth unblemished. This is wrong and our system is wrong to tolerate it. You try and change it if you will. I have already tried and been rebuffed. No matter what demands the leadership imposes, the combat soldier who falters and fails in the face of the enemy's fire is an unspeakable wretch whose own insides must someday devour him.

There is no telling what type may display the unpardonable sin of reneging under fire. Our four covered the spectrum. We had one who had been a professional fighter pilot for about ten years. He loved the travel, adventure and challenge of the peacetime forces. He liked his aircraft and thought well of her demonstrated prowess on the gunnery range with the practice bombs and shells. When the press of events called him to the day when the gunnery range fired back and airplanes exploded and people died, he crawled on his belly and surrendered his image of a man because he was afraid. Another was a bomber guy who got caught up in the personnel conversion to this different machine. He was out of his element, almost as far out of his element as those poor slobs who have been rotting in Hanoi for over two years, so he fell on his face and cried, "I can't take it." He had been professionally raised under a banner that unfortunately says "Peace Is Our Profession" and he wasn't capable of transforming himself to the knowledge that war is our profession, as most of the rest of the bomber guys did. Our third failure was a lieutenant who almost cracked ,up earlier while pulling alert pad duty with nobody even shooting at him. Perhaps I should have spotted him then, but it took only a few lousy 37-millimeter shells, bursting woefully out of range, to surface this clever dodger in uniform. He decided that he would like to be a ground officer during the period of hostilities, and the last I heard he was getting away with it.

Our fourth was our worst. He wears the U. S. Navy ring of an Annapolis graduate. I always knew the Navy was smart, but how they figured this clown out ten years ago and got him transferred to the Air Force is beyond me. He was the worst in that he knew better and had demonstrated the capability, under fire, to do the job. He quit around the halfway mark when he was approaching the stage where he would have been a real value to us. Among other things, he developed a fear of heights after ten years as a jet pilot. He learned all the rules and all the angles and he played them to the hilt. When all else failed him, he managed a hardship discharge. Hardship indeed, that this leech defaced the profession as long as he did.

So do you suppose that Geeno was scared as he blasted off in the murk of a predawn departure from our own private piece of jungle? I suppose he was. Anyone who isn't scared is an idiot. It is completely plausible and quite a scintillating experience to be able to translate this being scared into the most dynamic courage and a determination to get the job done properly. Geeno knew what his job was. He had to lead two wings of F-105's to one of the nastiest targets in the North, and he and his three flight companions were to still the flak so the first Wave of strike aircraft could penetrate and get the job done.