Thud Ridge (12 page)

As Bing had passed the top of the clouds, he had been doing Mach 1.2 and he caught a glimpse of Don through the wispy cloud and knew that he was finally closing on him. When you get one of these bombs going that speed, the process of slowing down could be as painful as the process of accelerating to that speed, and he yanked the power-, back to avoid overshooting his mysterious leader. He needed to get close to him and herd him out of there before they both bought a piece of the local real estate. As he raced through the bottom of the layer, he was blinded. The sun was down low in the west and it was richocheting off the rice paddies flooded with water like an orange and yellow searchlight focused on a mirror. It was worse than Bing had expected. They were low, dangerously low, and down in the range of even hand-held guns. The nose was still pointed down toward the paddies, and they were much too fast to be in a nose-down attitude and still pointed toward the ground. Collision with the ground was imminent and he couldn't see where he was going. Bing did a great job in maintaining control of his craft, and anyone with lesser skill and determination could well have been finished right then and there. Where was Don?

"A-RAAAH, A-RAAH, A-RAAH!" A stinking beeper, the loneliest and most pitiful cry in the world. A call for help that you most often can't answer. A wail from men and women you don't even know telling you their world has just been torn asunder. You can't cry back, you can't help, you can't do a damn thing but save your own behind.

"Kingpin three—this is four. Kingpin three, you still this frequency? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin lead, do you read four?"

"Five by. Kingpin three, do you read lead?"

"This is Kingpin four, how do you read lead?"

"Loud and clear, how me?"

Bing got his numbers and voices mixed up for a few seconds and let himself believe what he so much wanted to believe, what he knew he couldn't believe. Had he found his squadron commander? Was that Don on the radio? Had this all been some horrible mistake that he had imagined? He almost jumped through the radio. "Rog, this three?"

"Lead."

"Three, how do you read?"

Rod was still flying the perfect wing, protecting me as I hoped against hope that I could find Don and knowing that I had to get Bing back in the fold before we had another beeper. "Kingpin lead, we got bogies, far out at ten o'clock." I didn't have to tell him to keep track of them. He knew that I was down too low over nasty territory, and he knew that I had to try and put the pieces back together. Those bogies were his worry for the next few minutes. "Kingpin three, you on your way out?" Damn it. I knew I was too low, and I knew I wasn't positive of our exact location and I had dragged us right over the river and that rotten Yen Bai. Flak, bad flak, they almost got us—too close—trouble.

"Shooting, Kingpin." When you stumble into .a trap like that and your wingman tells you what you already know, you almost feel like saying something real stupid like, "Oh, really?" but you know it is serious. That was the kind of spot where you could lose one or two so fast you wouldn't know what happened. When those red streaks reach up from the ground and the black puffs spit at you and shake the aircraft and when you can hear the stuff cracking and shrieking all around you, you know that you screwed it up by being there and you know that the next few seconds could be your last.

"OK, let's go over hard, burner, keep it moving. Watch it down there on my left. Ten o'clock. WATCH IT1"

"Still shooting, Kingpin."

"Rog, keep her moving." Sometimes it's hard to believe it when it stops. "Kingpin three, how do you read lead?"

"Kingpin four here, read you loud and clear." By now Bing should be past the worst of the shooting and at least we still had three of us in operation. We should have put a special strike effort on Yen Bai a long time ago and cleaned that dump out. There's nothing there but flak, and we have known that for years. Yet we have to piddle our people away on dry runs instead of spending a couple of days eliminating that thorn.

"Rog, four, you lose three?"

"Kingpin lead, two's bingo."

"And four's bingo."

I was bingo myself and then some, and I knew that there was no time to waste in getting us to that tanker. You can't imagine how fast that fuel gauge falls when things get hectic.

"Kingpin four, you with three?"

"Negative, I lost him."

"Kingpin four, do you read three—correction—three do you read four?" It had been a hard afternoon and you could tell by the chatter that we were all pretty well beat out.

"Kingpin, we got a couple of bogies out front, low. Take a look at them."

"Kingpin three, do you read four? Kingpin three, do you read four? Lead, four is going to emergency frequency for a minute."

I rogered with "We'll stay this frequency until you get back," and Bing switched his radio equipment over so that it would transmit on our operating channel and on the emergency channel at the same time, making another attempt that we knew would not work.

"Hello, Kingpin three, do you read four? This is Kingpin four on emergency, three, do you read?"

The next wing was well on the way into the area and their leader, Baltic, wanted to know what was up. He switched his flight to our frequency and they sounded fresh and crisp as they checked in. "Baltic."

'Two."

"Three."

"Four."

"Kingpin—this is Baltic."

"Go ahead, Baltic—Kingpin."

"Rog, how's it look?"

"No good, there's a—it's broken, ah, broken coming down the Ridge, but in the target area itself, it's solid. There's no chance on it and, ah, it's loaded with, ah, Migs." I was amazed at how tired I sounded on the radio.

"OK, have y'all called it off?"

"Yeah, we called it off. We went in with a couple and came back out. We called it off. Abort."

"OK, ah, Kingpin, ah, what's your position now?"

"Ah, I'm headed back out now. The first three flights are pretty well spread out."

"OK, we'll come up there in case you need our help, and we're almost up there now."

I appreciated it, but I sure hoped we didn't need any more help today. Part of my job was to give him any ideas I had on where he might be able to do some good. "Rog, there's a little open area between the rivers, and it's stretching out toward the west and the northwest—there's an open area and you might find something in there, but it's down low and pretty solid over the target itself."

"OK, no chance of getting in."

"Nah, I wouldn't even mess with it."

"OK, is this Bob?"

"No, this is Jack." At least the Avis wing knew who the leaders were in our wing.

"Rog."

"Kingpin—this is four back on. No contact with three." "Rog."

4. People

If Don could have lasted a couple more weeks he could have been there when we started getting through on those targets that we had been sweating for so long. It was not that the weather turned good, it just got a little less horrible and allowed us to sneak in and do the job. We played the same old game and fought our way down Thud Ridge and found just enough room to work, and we did good work. We did good work under some grim conditions and we worked right on the edges of the sanctuaries that gave our adversaries all the breaks possible in working against us. We knew we were doing good work, not only from pur own assessment of the raids but from the fact that Hanoi screamed like a bunch of wounded eagles every time we got a good lick in. The teamwork and dedication displayed by the pilots on that particular series of raids was truly marvelous. I had the privilege of being the big leader on a majority of these and I could not have dragged a lesser bunch of men through some of the things I dragged them through.

One of the first times we got through must have been one of the most challenging rides down Thud Ridge anyone has ever had. As we turned the northern corner we knew that the Migs were up and nipping at our heels. There was a solid layer of cloud underneath us but something of the Irish intuition my mother, Elizabeth McGinley Broughton, passed on to me from her ancestors led me to believe that it was not too thick and that there might be enough of a hole down by the river to let us work. I was hungry for the larger military and commercial transshipment targets on the edges of Hanoi and if there was a chance I was determined to get my guys in after we had come this far.

As I headed south, the Migs moved into view and it appeared that the time was ripe both to confuse the Migs and to see what it looked like under the cloud. I started us all down through the murk with the target only minutes ahead. As I broke out underneath the clouds, I found Thud Ridge on my left covered with rain clouds that boiled under the main cloud blanket and went right down to the valley floor. The cloud deck and the rain sloped downhill away from me toward the river where it looked downright ominous. Maybe that hole wouldn't be there after all, but I had committed the forces and we were going to give it a try. I also found what an excellent job the gunners had done in estimating the height of the clouds as everything north and west of Phuc Yen let fly at once. It was obvious that I could not hold the troops down at this level, so I eased my twenty charges back up into the rain. We were bouncing along close to 600 in the slop when my trusty Doppler navigational gear, as usual, decided that things were too rough and it went ape. I knew pretty well how I had to steer from here for the next few minutes, but I obviously had nothing in the aircraft to check my progress and I could not see the ground to look for landmarks. My buddy Geeno had the element and I gave him a quick call, "Lost my Doppler. Steer me, Geeno."

The Migs, already in the air, had elected to stay on top of the cloud layer when I descended and were pacing us and waiting for us to reemerge. They climbed on board immediately and the show was now in a precarious spot. Because of the Migs, I couldn't stay up here either, and at the speeds we were moving, I hoped that we had passed the heavy area of ground fire that I had encountered several seconds ago, so I took us back down. This time I broke out in heavy rain just north of the Mig sanctuary at Phuc Yen and the traffic pattern was full of Migs taking off to go after my trailing flights and after the next wing due to follow me into the area. I flew almost down the runway itself and made what amounted to a head-on pass at several pairs of Migs turning out of traffic and preparing to attack. If I had not had that bombload on board and had not been herding my troops into the target I could have had a couple of them about the time they reached for the handle to pull their landing gear up. I could also have glide-bombed their airfield and torn it all to hell, but that was forbidden as were the Migs unless their wheels were off the ground.

I knew that the Migs I was now passing would only have to turn on their armament switches and make another 180-degree turn to be on the attack but there was not too much I could do about it except wonder why we had not cleaned their clock about a year ago. I ducked down another couple of hundred feet to avoid a heavy rainstorm, but this one held some of the promise I was looking for. The entire valley was a nasty shade of gray approaching black in spots, but this storm was a dirty brown color and as I sped toward it the brown got lighter and blended into an almost amber tone. That meant that there was good light on the other side and perhaps sunshine and the clearing we needed. It had to be, or we were out of business because the seconds were ticking away and the target had to be right there. Geeno called a few quick steers and we broke through the wall of rain and the river was under us. I had broken out on the right side of the target rather than the left as we had planned, but the hole was there and the target was there and we worked it. As I arched up into the long pull and turn to get in bombing position, one of the Migs we thought we had left in the murk behind us arched right along with me and the heat-seeking rocket he fired at me went streaking underneath my nose to detonate in my face and convince me of two things. First, that particular Mig-21 driver was either determined or stupid to press right into the mass of flak that now nipped at us from the target itself; and second, that I had better pull a little harder if I intended to complete this run. I completed the run and the egress across the delta was exceptionally noisy that day and involved a series of vertical gyrations, as every time I dropped down, the ground gunners reached up, and every time I went up a Sam burst at or close to my altitude and course, but I got out.

The number three man in the last of our flights was not quite so fortunate, since the Migs I had been forced to pass up as they took off from Phuc Yen had now settled on my last flight as their prime target. They waited for them until they came up off their run in the clear air to the south. They picked their target wisely, they maneuvered properly, they tracked and fired properly and they hit.

The first time Spade knew he had been hit was when he wound up crammed up against what was left of the front windscreen, with nothing left but the throttle grip, which he clutched in his left hand, and the seat on which he was sitting. His flight had been fighting the Migs off all the way down the Ridge but had made it to the target, bombed and were on the way out, but still in trouble. His wingman, number four, had been fragged to carry a cumbersome camera pod that takes nice color pictures for the documentary program but increases the drag on the machine considerably and thus slows you down. The number four man just could not keep up as the bombs came off and the Thuds headed out of the area. As a result of this incident, we were finally able to convince our headquarters that while the documentary program was nice, we could not afford to lug external camera pods to Hanoi. The fact that number four was dragging did not go unnoticed by one of the previously thwarted Migs, and he pushed in between and under the two separated Thuds and let fly with his air-to-air missiles, which had Spade's name all over them. Spade never saw them coming and when he found nothing under him or around him but air, he dropped the 6-inch-long throttle which represented all that was left of his multimillion-dollar steed and pulled the handles. His chute worked, though unknown to him at that instant his back was already broken, and he hit the ground 30 miles south of Hanoi.