Thud Ridge (8 page)

"Rog, I'm at thirty-three."

"Laredo's got another high one at eleven o'clock." This was vital information that needed to get through.

"Six two, are we bothering you, Bill?" I didn't know who in hell Bill was, but they were sure bothering me, and we were at the point where the steering had to be perfect.

"Pintail, steer four degrees right." Don responded with a precise 4-degree correction which at 600 knots is no small feat, and I knew he was receiving my calls.

"High threat indication—and he's going down—four five .say again."

Shut up, you idiot, is all I could think, but the old mouth worked better than the brain for a change, and I confirmed Don's turn with "Steady on."

We were quite close in and there was nothing resembling a break in the clouds. I would rather face the guns I can see than cruise along in anticipation of what I can't see underneath me. The clouds up there are sort of a dirty gray color at best. They looked downright ominous that day, and each Sam call made each of us sit a bit lighter in the seat.

"And Laredo's proceeding south of the Red down towards the Black. It's still solid."

"Roger." We didn't have much further to go now.

"Stewart, you on?"

I guess he was; I hadn't heard much other than support chatter. "Stewart going north, twenty degrees."

"Stewart, got a two and a half ringer at two o'clock."

"Laredo, keep it down. Sam activity at eleven o'clock. OK, Laredo, let's go right here. Keep him on the nose."

"Four five, you call a turn?"

"Ah, Rog, zero one, two. You make the calls and Til turn with you."

"Contact is back up, Laredo." Those two had a running battle for the air and I so wanted Laredo to win that I would have gladly throttled our supporters if I could have reached them.

"Pintail, one zero to the right." That was the final correction, and if we had been able to do so, that was the time we would have gone to work in earnest and would have been rolling over the top to face the guns and put the bombs on target.

"Rog, Pintail's following your Doppler. I'm over the edge of the area and it's definitely not open." Don had filled the square necessary to announce his decision.

I helped him with "Yeah, I agree, it looks like a loser to me. I concur and would say negative on the whole works for Pintail and all the rest of the flights."

Don executed the abort with "Pintail here, we're coming out, coming out. Left one eighty." Back down the line of flight leaders the call was echoed and each of the four-shippers swung to a preplanned divergent course to establish the necessary separation between the low-flying, fast-moving flight as everyone moved without delay to get someplace other than on top of that gray blanket covering the active defenses.

Laredo did his best to keep us advised, but continued to have trouble getting through. "Contact is back up, eleven o'clock, high indication."

"Ahh, Pintail, ah—this is Nash four five. What are your intentions?"

A proper reply would have been to tell him that I was going to talk to him about radio discipline when we got back on the ground, but Don confined himself to "Roger, withdrawing."

"Pintail—this is Harpoon. Understand you are withdrawing."

"Pintaa, that's Roger." That third flight of ours had been having trouble ever since they got their wingman on the wrong side way back by the river.

Laredo finally got through with "Pintail, suggest you exit back up the Ridge. We've got lots of high indications down here in the Phu Tho area." He really did good work for us and was most interested in seeing that we did not get down into the little box he had worked himself into as he baited the defenders.

"Roger, we'll cut back north," and the exit was in progress. "OK, Harpoons, we're withdrawing." He talked almost as much as the support guys.

Sam was not ready to quit and Laredo passed on, "OK, contacts at your four o'clock—high indication."

"Nash one one, four five returning to orbit." Good, I thought, maybe he'll be quiet out there.

While Nash faded, Harpoon made up for him with "Pintail —this is Harpoon. Understand you are calling it off." What was the matter with him?

"Rog."

"Ozark."

"Two."

"Three."

"Four."

This exchange told us that the first flight from the next strike wing was entering the area, and from the briefing, we knew that flight to be their Sam chasers who would be contacting our boys before long for a rundown on what was hot in the area.

Meanwhile, Otter flight, whom I had thought so unkindly of before, was still soaking up the Sams in the other quadrant and I felt much better toward them now that I was headed out of the area. "Contact is at one o'clock—high indication only. Otter, you hear me? Launch at one going to six." It sounded like they were having quite a day.

It looked like Ozark was going to inherit the same voice problems that Laredo had endured as he attempted to make initial contact with "Laredo—this is Oz—"

"Nash zero one, the target is three six zero now."

A patient retransmission of "Laredo—this is Ozark". showed he was still fresh and unfrazzled.

"Nash flight going to three six zero at this time" was all he got for his trouble and he wisely decided to wait awhile before trying again.

Our strike flights had the problem of finding an alternate area that was suitable to work and having flown all the way in on top of the clouds, we knew that would not be easy, yet we did not want to haul those bombs all the way home.

"Pintail—Elmo."

"Go ahead, Elmo—Pintail."

"Rog. Boy, you see anything north of the Red worth working on?" There was nothing really worthwhile and the only faint hope might have been back past the area of the initial turn-in.

"Ah, it looks like there might possibly be some slight breaks back to the northwest, but this—it's really solid."

"Nash, Nash, go three six zero at this time."

"Harpoon is up by the lake and there's nothing up here."

The radio was just too much for Mallard lead and he made the smart move with "Mallard, let's go flight manual, flight manual, Mallard." He had switched his radio to a preselected discreet frequency and would no longer know what everyone else was up to, but he felt he would rather look a bit harder to keep track of the rest of the flights and at least be able to direct his own people without being cut out on every transmission.

"Laredo, contact and guns, Phu Tho."

"Laredo—Ozark."

"Lead, Ozark's calling you."

"And the contact is down."

"Ah, Pintail—this is Nash four five. Ah, what—"

"Calling Pintail, say again?"

"All flights, the gap is open, the gap is open" was a reasonably good assurance that the way back out was no worse than it had been on the way in.

"OK, Laredo, we'll be heading back out now." The game was not over by a long shot and I had constantly drilled into all our guys the examples of the Thud driver who was relaxing straight and level at 18,000 feet on the way out, thinking he had it made, only to be blown from the sky by a wild but accurate Sam, and the flight lead who got complacent and low and slow with 50 miles of the homeward trip under his 'belt, only to ran across the top of a stray gun that knocked him out of the sky. We lost them both.

Elmo gave up on the radio. "Elmo lead, let's go to another channel."

"Rog, Elmo's, let's go to flight manual, flight manual."

But the supporters and their escort took up the vacated ether. "Three, I'll take the top."

"Three, Roger, OK."

"Hello, Pintail—this is Nash four five. Do you read?"

Patient Don showed not the slightest annoyance as he launched into the same discourse again. "Roger, Nash four five—this is Pintail. Go ahead."

"Roger, Pintail, what are your inten—"

"This is Royal, this is Royal. Time is four three, Mig scramble, sector sierra sierra, time four three, Royal out." That was the single most irritating call of the bunch, and it came from the heavy-voiced controller far from the battle, viewing the area on his radarscope, who seemed overjoyed to blast everyone off the air with his powerful transmitter. One of his scope heads had plotted a launch and, following the rales, he felt obliged to let the world know.

In the first place, the coordinates were worthless, and the information was old and contained nothing resembling direction, altitude or speed. Secondly, nobody cared what time it was by his clock, and we didn't need to be told twice who it was, as we could recognize his voice anytime and anywhere. Those of us with some knowledge of the state of the art in the recognition and defense business could not fathom the complete lack of accurate and timely information that would have done us some good, and which could have been presented in a far more acceptable manner. I complained repeatedly and bitterly about this completely unsatisfactory system, but my complaints either fell on deaf ears or else got me chewed out, as I supposedly did not have all the facts. I was able to see a very slight improvement toward the tail end of my tour over there, but the warning and control systems we use today are unsatisfactory and antiquated, run by insufficient numbers of inadequately trained people. Should you agree, don't bother taking up the sword for the cause. The real lack of aptness in the system is buried under mountains of phony statistics and denied by those in a position to demand improvement in the system. You have to go up there and get exposed to it from the driver's side, under stress, and nobody with enough horsepower to do anything about it is going to be caught in that position.

Royal's reverberating tones faded, and the chatter and the withdrawal progressed. "Pintail—Harpoon."

"OK, Laredo, keep your eyes open. We got two up there at eleven o'clock."

"That's a four-ship flight."

"OK, got them just below those clouds." Their external fuel tanks were empty and now could only slow them down when they needed speed, so he said, "Let's get rid of the tanks," and they jettisoned them. Laredo had found the Migs, no thanks to the warning system.

"Laredo—this is Pintail. We're clearing the area. Get moving. You're all by yourself."

Laredo knew that he was low on fuel and the last one in the box. This was not the time to attempt to become a Mig hero. The Migs had not spotted him and he had pickled his empty tanks to reduce drag and speed his exit to fight another day. "Rog, Pintail, Laredo's QK. We're heading for the Red."

"Laredo—Ozark."

"Roger, Ozark."

"What's the good word?"

"Roger, you can forget it. It's solid, about five thousand feet, solid as far as you can see."

"Where did you work?"

"I, ah, came up to the Ridge. Couldn't get across the Ridge. It's mostly enshrouded so I came south to Phu Tho and Viet Tri and it's still solid all the way." The entire series of transmissions had been clear and without interruption, and we were now satisfied that the first inbound flight knew the score, freeing us to move to another channel once we passed the word to the commander of the second part of the strike force who was still on the way in behind us. A small task— but then the radio exploded again.

"Rolleyes, go manual. Rolleyes, go manual."

"Relieves three—"

"One o'clock low—"

"Muskrat, flight manual—"

"—I'll be turning to zero two."

"Pintail three, can you contact the other force?"

"Pintail, why don't you try and get contact through Royal?"

"Say again."

Don had finally had all the noise he could use. "Pintail three, go to channel seven and see if you can pass the word to somebody. I'm going to manual frequency."

I was most happy to accept this little chore and came back with "OK, will do, I'll go to seven. Meet you on manual." The channel changer clicked through its paces and the silence was golden. Now if I could only get Lincoln to talk to me, "Lincoln—Pintail. Hello, Lincoln—this is Pintail."

"Pintail—Lincoln. Go ahead."

"Roger, Lincoln—Pintail. It's negative, negative, negative. No dice. We're on the way out." He rogered and we went home. It had been a crummy day and a crummy mission, and I had a headache when I crawled out of that beauty that evening.-

We sure telegraphed our punches. There were not all that many targets in that area, and it did not take too many smarts to figure out about where the force was headed, especially when we headed them there day after day, made them fly up to the target before making the go or no-go decision oh weather we knew was not acceptable, turned over the target and then came back the next day to try again. The pressure was on to get this complex, and when we got into that configuration, it was amazing how the simple basic portents of warfare slipped by the boards to be replaced by determination to accomplish what we had been directed to accomplish.

In the situation over there, the bosses were fighting several problems. The first has been discussed around many a table and is simply the target restriction problem. There are places that, in my opinion, should have been hit long ago. Some were more sensitive than others, but the hard-core targets were like little prizes dangled on a string in our face. When one of the fringe targets would be released, the eagerness to get to it immediately approached a panic. Unless the commanders could control the universe and set the elements aside in order to destroy a specified rotten plum, they seemed to feel that it was a personal insult and that the operators in the field were purposefully failing to cooperate. While it might have been an insult at some level of the maze, it was not so intended on the part of the operators. I know I never felt that my boss in sunny Honolulu showed any degree of incompetence by his demonstrated inability to translate the sunny skies of Lahina to the gruesome plains of the Red River delta, but the press became something almost personal and there I do argue with the directions we received.

Common sense and in fact military sense, often fell by the wayside, and the fact that Hanoi was not going to move during the next few days seemed lost to decision-making view as did the fact that we had waited a long time for these targets and could afford to wait a few more minutes to do the job right. Those doing the job felt that it would have paid better dividends to mix up the signals a bit and that if we had 1 feint and battle impossible weather parameters, it would at least have been wise to mix up the feints. We were all making a dry run if it looked like we had a chance, but i faced with the same weather odds the next day, we wanted t feint irt a different direction or go someplace else completely and come back a day or two later. In our restricted and over-supervised environment, the pressure would not allow that approach to the problem.