Thud Ridge (33 page)

As we dropped off the tankers and headed out across the hills, I was paying particular attention to my fuel consumption and waiting for that tank to go dry so I could dump it. About halfway in, I got the empty light and punched her off. Those monsters stand up on end in the airstream and just barely clear the aircraft, most of the time, and I was relieved to be rid of it, and relieved to have transferred the partial load of fuel into my main tanks where I knew I could use it. I wasn't relieved for long as the dizzy oil pressure gauge started to weave back and forth in my face. With the engine we had in that bird, a fluctuating oil pressure indication was a real red flag and was the typical first signal for a series of rapid reactions that left you minus engine. We were only a few minutes out from the target now and I wanted desperately to continue. The weather was now definitely marginal and I wanted to make the go or no-go decision. I didn't want to turn loose of my two-wing force, but the needle refused to stop its methodical up and down, up and down. I am constantly amazed at the wide range of thoughts that whistle through your head while you are flying combat. I wanted to convince myself that the fluctuation was not going to stop me and that the engine was not about to come unglued, and I managed to do it. I remembered one of my old midget-racing friends who had worked like a dog to get his machine in shape for one of the big races up in the northwest. His efforts paid off, and his driver pushed the car out in front and was holding a comfortable lead with three-quarters of the race completed when he suddenly pulled into the pits. Pogo, the driver, started to climb out, explaining that his oil pressure was fluctuating and he was afraid he would damage the engine. Ralph, the owner, wanted that race in the worst way and he practically gave Pogo a compression fracture as he stuffed him back into the seat and back onto the track. He had lost too much ground and they lost the race. There was nothing wrong with the engine, and the first thing Ralph did was cover the oil pressure gauge with tape. To my knowledge, he has never had a pressure gauge visible in any of his cars since. The microsecond it took me to recall that story whizzed past and I continued on to the target.

The mountains rise to about 5,000 feet in that section of the North until you have passed Hoa Binh, and then they drop rapidly to the flat sea-level floor of the delta. While we were not too far above the crests of the hills as we thundered off the last ridge, we still had to push the noses down a bit to get the approach altitude I wanted, and we had a real head of steam as we broke out over the flatland. The visibility was good enough to work, and although I found out to my surprise that the cloud deck at 8,000 feet was a solid overcast, I blasted out the code word for go and the strike was on. I knew that because of the ceiling the guys would have to alter their preplanned dive-bomb passes, but I also knew that these pros were good at that and that there would be no turning back in this wing today.

The target was harder to pick up than I had anticipated. The target photos that we had to work from were pretty sad and often outdated, and the first time you went on a new target that photo was usually the only clue you had on the details of what you were looking for. The countryside up there changes a great deal with the seasons, and rivers, streams and reservoirs can look completely different depending on the amount of rain that has fallen. This one had changed, and bore little resemblance to the target photo I had studied, and I had to turn almost 90 degrees further toward the north than I had intended. My number four man was actually the first one to get his bubble leveled and spot the target and as he called it out, I pulled hard to the left to line up for the attack. As I tugged at my 49,000-pound monster and prodded it around the corner, I was straining my head to look to the left and line up on the target. I tugged a little too hard along the up-and-down axis, and the tremendous bag of speed that I was carrying threw number two and myself up as well as around to the left. Since I was concentrating back over my left: shoulder I could not see that I was approaching an underhanging bank of clouds to my right front. I dragged number two and myself up into the murk in a hard left wingover at 600 knots and found myself with a few problems that required rapid, solution. I had to convert from visual flight to instrument flight and depend on my instruments to help me control the aircraft. In that I was really ricocheting along and was in a most unusual flight attitude this was not the easiest of transitions, but I managed to accomplish it. I needed to get back under that oloud deck so I could bomb and get out of there, and every second I stayed up in the murk took me further past my target, but I had to stay up there for a few seconds to give three and four a chance to gain a little displacement. They had been able to avoid the cloud and I didn't want to run into them as I came spitting back out the bottom. This is where the failure of my electronics guys to get my bird in shape almost did me in and I must have made a pretty picture on Sam's radarscope as I pushed over and got two and myself back out under the clouds. The Sam controllers knew the height of the ceiling, and as we emerged at the bottom, three Sams were upon us. We never saw them coming and I can only guess at their site of origin. One of them must have been set for detonation at the base of the clouds and the other two were using their normal fuzing and as the preset fuze detonated a bit short of the base of the clouds and directly under the belly of my aircraft, the other two shrieked between John, my number two man, and myself. With their tails now pointed toward us, they sped on in perfect formation at an amazing pace with the round incandescent eyes of flame on their tail ends winking at us. I thought I was dead.

There is no mistaking the sound and sensation of being hit. I have been tapped a total of eleven times in my 216 fighter combat missions, and the sensation does not become any less thrilling with repetition. The sound is not as loud as you might imagine, yet it is very precise and definite. I have searched for a good description and the best I can come up with is to take a quarter between your thumb and forefinger and hold it about four inches above a metal surface like a radiator, or even above a hardwood surface like a desk top. Now firmly, but not violently, rap the surface with the quarter. That's the sound, and there is nothing quite like it.

I never worry too much about where on the aircraft I have taken the hit since I have been hit everyplace from the windscreen to the tailpipe, and the specific location is pretty academic. There are four big things you need to know in a hurry. You need to know if the controls are working, and you can check that by simply moving the stick and kicking the rudders to see if the bird reacts. You also have to take a quick look at those hydraulic pressure gauges and see if they are up and holding a steady pressure, because if they are on the way down, there is a good chance that you are also on the way down. Next, you want to know if the mill is still with you, and this you can check by glancing at the engine gauges on the front panel to see if they are in the green and by jazzing the throttle a few times to see if the power follows the throttle. Then you need to see if you are on fire. Theoretically, the two fire warning lights sitting right in front of you will illuminate to give you the word on fire, but I also look around as best I can
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and when I have the chance, I take the mask off and sniff for the unmistakable odor of burning aircraft components. This entire check consumes only seconds.

I checked out OK, and John v/as still on niy wing, the target was in front of us, and the bad guys were shooting from the ground. I figured I had come all this way to do a job and that it wasn't too healthy sitting up there wondering how hard I had been hit. I was a bit concerned about putting the extra strain of a high-speed dive-bomb run and pullout on my machine, since the strain might complicate any damage I had taken, but that's the breaks. I had a job to do, and I got on with it and rolled into my run. Those two 3,000-pounders went as directed and we had dirt and buildings flying through the air to spotlight the target for the following flights. My bird recovered from the dive without incident and we charged out of the area and called the Avis wing to give them the go signal, plus a weather check on the target itself. The Avis troops did not fare too well. They had become tangled up with the weather and had been unable to maintain their formation; in fact some of their four-ship flights were split up. The Migs had also swung in behind them and as they milled about and tried to get organized, the Migs zipped through them and busted their entire effort wide open. Their leadman called their portion of the strike off, and as my machine was still doing OK, I took our flights over to their position and we managed to draw most of the Migs off them as they limped home licking their wounds. I limped back myself with my oil pressure still bouncing and my forward underside peppered by Sam fragments. The mill kept running until I got back to the base, but that was all she ran, and when I shut her down in the chocks she was all through. I got a new engine that night and had some sheet metal work done on my belly and we were ready to go again the next day.

Through the spring and early summer of 1967 there was little significant change in our attack pattern. We continued to work the full spectrum of allowable targets in the North and I managed to get into my favorite hunting grounds fairly often. The activity would vary in intensity from week to week, and the area would light up at one end while slowing down in another section, depending on the weather and the degree of traffic headed for the South, but you could always manage to stir something up if you could spend enough time in there. It was several weeks after my Sam encounter before they got to me again, and sure enough it was right back in my hunting grounds. They sneaked up on me this time and they didn't miss doing me in by very much.

The job for the day was to hit both Viet Tri and Phu Tho, and to see how much damage we could do to the rail facilities and associated equipment between the two towns. They are right on the main rail line that comes from China down through the northwestern portion of North Vietnam, and both spots were quite active. We decided that we could get the best coverage by splitting the strike force into two sections of two 4-ship flights each and letting our Sam hunters take care of both attacks as they roamed the area. I put the second section on Phu Tho and I took the first section to Viet Tri.

There were both good and bad points about taking a strike to Viet Tri. It was not so great in that they had tough gun coverage on the entrance route and there were several Sam sites that had done well around there: they could look across the flat terrain at you all the way, including the actual dive-bomb run itself. They also had a pair of 85- and 100-millimeter batteries that were particularly mean. They were active every time I went up there and, as a rule, they were not afraid to shoot. They usually picked you up just before you rolled in on the rail yard, and they could raise enough fuss to goof up your run. I have personally been on several missions when we dumped many pounds on their heads, but they seemed to come bouncing back with a new crew by the next time we passed their way. I happened to have a good view of one of their rings of gun pits one day when my number three man put a load right in the middle of them. One minute you could see them firing, and the next minute the entire ring was immersed in a fireball of detonating explosives. There is no doubt that he got the gunners but he obviously didn't kill the guns, so it was nothing but a messy clean-up job for them and they were ready to go again. You couldn't ask for a better hit than my number three got but it didn't really do the job. The answer is obviously better munitions. If you are going to expose your forces and battle the guns, you need a munition that will kill the guns as well as the gunners. You are not going to do it with 1930-style ladyfingers. A suitable weapon is well within the capacity of current technology, and as long as we continue to fight conventional wars we will need such a weapon. The ground guns are a most formidable threat to mission accomplishment, and unless we get off the dime and do something constructive to beat these gun systems, other than squashing them with falling fighter planes, we are going to be in bigger trouble if we take on bigger enemies. I am not the first to scream this fact, but like others ahead of me, I have seen little constructive effort in the antiflak area. In his history of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Bernard Fall called attention to the extraordinary toll of French planes shot down by the Vietnamese gunners, repeating the success of the North Koreans against the Americans during the Korean War. Apparently our strategists have still not absorbed these lessons.

Viet Tri was not limited to a couple of large gun positions. Like so many other areas up there, the guns were spread all over the complex and they could move freely from day to day. Looking down on the town you could see sparklers from each dirt road intersection and from the backyard of every standing building. It is tough to knock out a threat like that unless you get permission to knock out the entire deserted town. They had one large complex of buildings just north of town that was billed as a hospital,- and was naturally off limits. If it was in fact a hospital, it must have been a hospital for sick flak gunners, because every time we looked at it from a run on the railhead, it was one mass of sputtering, flashing gun barrels. Like I said, there is no sporting blood up there.

There were also good things about a strike on Viet Tri. Most targets in North Vietnam were very tough to pinpoint from any distance out, and you were thus fighting right up to the last second to be sure that you set your pattern of attack properly. But if you had any sort of acceptable visibility and cloud cover, you could plan and implement an attack on Viet Tri from 50 miles out. The landmarks were big and they were easy to read. They went down the line just like a batch of stepping-stones, and where the big hook in the river pointed directly to the target itself, there was even a reservoir directly in front of you to say, "pull up now." The target complex was also large enough so you could pick the most promising impact area with ease. I had picked Viet Tri this time because I wanted to lead the flak suppression flight and get another crack at those two big gun batteries to see if I could beat them.