Thud Ridge (23 page)

The dizzy guns didn't light up the way they should have. The fire was only light and yet he knew that a goodly portion of the defenses in the North were concentrated down there. To bomb on the minuscule elements that revealed themselves would have helped, but only a little. What was the matter with those clods, were they asleep? Surely he hadn't surprised them, not after they had been hosing Sams at him for five minutes. He went as high as the clouds would allow and he had to make a move right away. This was Geeno's big decision, the instantaneous awful decision of a lifetime and he did the unheard of. He stayed up on top, and he calmly circled over the wildest array of weapons ever assembled in the his-,tory of ground-to-air warfare. He circled because they would not fire at him and if they did not show themselves he could not blast a channel for Ms strike aircraft and some of his boys would get hurt.

As he swung past the end of the yards, Sam broke the relative lull and the seventh, eighth and ninth launches of the day reached for him. As he swung violently out of their guidance capability he tried to set his lead element up to bomb the newly revealed and threatening site, but his evasive gyration had not only thrown the Sams off, it had swung him out of position to strike the site as its defending guns let fly all the lead they owned, since their charges had revealed their position during launch. His third and fourth aircraft, in the second element, were in good position, and satisfied that they could knock out this threat, he directed them to hit the site, calmly turned his back on them and proceeded to weave his way between the clouds and the rising crescendo of heavy gunfire that now committed itself fully from the other end of the yards. Those were the ones he wanted, the big ones that had remained hidden and were now making up for lost time.

He somehow made it back toward them and knew he had found the target he wanted. Two bombloads were on the Sam site and he stiD had his own and his wingman's bombs for these guns. Up and over he went for his bomb run and the timing was great as the first strike flight was approaching their own roll-in. He had to hurry—but not too fast. Sam had other ideas and, in the day's duel between Geeno and Sam, Sam was not to be denied. A site commander who had remained concealed must have realized the gravity of the threat with the suppressors on the run and the strike birds right on their tail, and he salvoed all six of his Sams directly at Geeno in a desperate attempt to get this wild one who had flaunted the strongest of defenses by loitering above them. There was no warning and there was no evasive action. All six Sams guided perfectly, all six proximity fuzes functioned, and Geeno was obscured in a six-sided puff ball of ugly red, brown and gray.

His Thud flew out the other side of the blossoming cloud, faltered for a moment, then rolled over for its final dive. His wingman had been wide of the burst and his bombs did the job. I hope Geeno knew.

Things were still moving at breakneck speed and the strike force was at work. There was no faltering, no hesitation, just deadly split-second precision work. You don't look for anybody else and you don't think about anybody else during these seconds when your ass belongs to Uncle Sam. Most of the time you can't assimilate anything else, and you definitely can't analyze it until later anyway; nor, even if you could, could you do anything about it. Each one of us understands that, but we don't particularly care to dwell on it. The strike was a beauty and everyone put them right in there and everyone got out. Everyone, that is, except Geeno—the fighter pilot commander who bet his life that he could knock out the toughest guns in the world and save his buddies.

8. The Longest Mission

Pilots get to be a superstitious lot as they approach that magic 100-mission mark. You can't get a 95-mission man to change his flying suit or wear a different pair of gloves—they won't do or wear anything differently. One friend of mine got a St. Christopher medal from his wife when he had only about five missions to go. He quickly put it in his footlocker reasoning, "Whatever I've got going for me now, I don't want to change." Another clown got hit on his ninetieth but made it back and swore he wasn't ever going to change his drawers or his socks until he got that hundredth mission.

My mother tells me that when I was a little kid I used to say, "Sunday is the best day," but in our wing we hated Sundays. It was one of those stupid superstitions, like accidents coming in threes, Friday the thirteenth, and all that. We didn't really believe it and consciously we ignored it, but when we really got clobbered, it always seemed to be on Sunday. One particular Sunday must certainly have been the longest day in the world for Leo and all the rest of us. It was so long, it finally ran into Thursday.

- Leo was our lead weasel and his business was clobbering Sam sites. We put these specialists in converted two-seat Thuds that we robbed from the training program back in the States. They flew as a two-man team, and we tried to keep the same two together all the time, because their job of monitoring, finding, and attacking the sites was a tightly knit two-man effort of interpretation and flying. Leo was good, and he was the boss man of all the rest of our weasels. I used him extensively as my liaison with this specialized bunch of experts and what Leo said, they did. We had them scattered throughout the squadrons, which I always thought was a mistake. I wanted to put them all in one squadron like they did in the Avis wing, but I never could sell my point. I considered their job different enough to group them together under one boss and let them fly all the weasel missions from one squadron. This would provide the advantage of always having a flight of four all playing the same game—as opposed to the arrangement we used, where you would have a flight made up of part weasels and part pickup team from the particular squadron providing the weasel coverage for the day. If I had been able to sell my point, I feel that Leo, Harry, Bob and Joe would all be with us today, or at least we would not have lost them all on the same Sunday.

Perhaps Leo's best single mission was when he took on most of North Vietnam all by himself. He spotted a Sam site and knocked it out in a hurry, moved to the next site down the pike and dumped that one also, and the route of the strike force was well defined with Sams and their supporting components exploding on the ground. The plaintive wail of a pair of beepers told him that his Wingman had been hit and that two weasels were in their chutes. He spotted a Mig intent on shooting the helpless pilots hanging in their chutes—they play dirty up there—closed to almost collision range and blew the vulture out of the sky. With the Mig's wingman on his tail, Leo, desperate for fuel, outraced his pursuer as he streaked southward for an aerial refueling. As darkness approached he returned, alone, found a flight of four Migs over the downed crew, flew directly into the middle of them and scattered them, shooting down yet another Mig. When the rescue proved hopeless he found there were no airborne tankers to refuel him and only through his own skill was he able to limp through the black night, penetrate the thunderstorms and land at an emergency base with little other than fumes in his fuel tanks. Leo was no stranger to stress, but a Sunday was to do him in.

As boss weasel, Leo scheduled the other weasels and when he was short of crews (but we don't talk about shortage of crews, do we?) he would take the double load himself. He took the early morning run to Hanoi for his ninety-sixth trip and turned himself around for his ninety-seventh and last trip that Sunday afternoon. Did he goof by scheduling himself twice? I suppose he did, but somebody had to go twice and Leo was the boss, so he went.

I was leading the force that day and the mission was rotten from the start. The weather was OK and the briefing and preparations went OK, but we were in trouble from the time we started to taxi to the runway for takeoff. As we rolled down the taxi strip to the arming area, the gruesome sound of a beeper split the air. Somebody's beeper was stuck in the on position and it saturated the radio. The control tower picked it up right away and tried to get a steer on the offending airman but could not pinpoint it. Everything was laid on, tankers, support aircraft and the like, and you simply can't stop and start all over. We had to try everything we could to locate that beeper and get the guy with it to abort the mission and fill his spot with a spare aircraft. We started taking steers on each other as soon as we got airborne and managed to pin it down to Leo's flight but we couldn't tell which aircraft the beeper was coming from. Once you get strapped-into that monster with all that gear on, there is no way you can check your own beeper. You can't move anything but your hands and feet and there is no way to reach behind you and examine the contents of your chute. We split Leo's flight into elements and moved individual flight members fore and aft of the tankers as we headed north and we got the tankers to try and spot the beeper with their direction-finding gear but we couldn't get a valid steer. The continuous transmission was strong enough to clutter the air but not strong enough to give a good steer at that altitude. The silly little things will transmit for a couple of days on a good battery, so there was little hope that it would go off by itself and we were in for a noisy afternoon. Just how noisy we did not know.

Another thing that we did not know—and it was coincidence rather than plan—was that three of us within the strike force were carrying miniature Japanese tape recorders. We flew so many divergent paths that afternoon, and the noise and confusion level was so high, that ordinarily it would have been close to impossible to reconstruct the activity. With a good deal of homework we were able to recreate all the sounds of that Sunday, as there was at least one recorder in the midst of the action at all times, and we had an added benefit of one recorder in the two-place lead weasel aircraft to give us some additional insight into that two-man crew. These tapes usually helped us to study and learn, but that Sunday they combined to weave a complicated tale.

I was Waco lead and my weasels were Carbine flight. I had Oakland, Tomahawk and Neptune flights as the other bombers and Dallas and Chicago were flights of Phantoms assigned as my Mig cover, though, as it turned out, those two flights might better have stayed home that day. As we dropped off the tanker and headed for the river, Carbine switched his flight over to prestrike radio frequency and swung away to the north to troll for the Saim sites we knew would be active. Ben and Norm were in the number one Carbine aircraft and even before we had switched radio frequencies in the rest of the force, Norm had already alerted Harry, his number two, Leo in his number three machine and Bob in number four that one of his indicators was sputtering like a rattlesnake with an ugly prelaunch warning. "Four miles to go now, strong signal. OK, Sam's up and he's off to our right. He's at one o'clock, stronger signal, now he's fading. No threat—and here's another one. He's at twelve. One at twelve, one at one."

About that time, as Waco lead, I called all the strike flights over to the prestrike channel and we checked in on the radio. It is a reassuring sound to me as the flight lead barks his call sign and the flight members crisply respond with their number in the flight.

"Waco."

"Two."

"Three."

"Four."

"Oakland."

"Two."

"Three."

"Four."

"Tomahawk."

"Two."

"Three."

"Four."

"Neptune."

"Two."

"Three."

"Four."

Everybody was there and ready to go to work. You get so you can recognize most of the voices, and as they check in you can almost see and feel those strong alert men straining against their shoulder straps and sitting tall in their cockpits.

"Waco—Carbine. You gonna stay this frequency or go to strike channel?" Now that's a nice polite reminder from the weasels I had briefed that we would switch channels as we crossed the river. I guess Carbine lead was ready to go to the noisy channel. Everybody else would be on that one and we would get to listen to our Phantom escorts go through their preflight briefing that they should have accomplished back on the ground—but it was a necessary evil.

"Waco flights to ten, button one zero." And again, the staccato check-in followed by my final preparatory command, "Clean 'em up, green 'em up and start your music." All was now go.

"Dallas flight, let's get rid of the tanks," served to announce that our escorts were in the area, and more important, everyone must watch out as they were in the process of dropping those damn tanks through our ranks again. We never did figure out why they had to drop them right on top of us, and I can assure you that a 20-foot-long fuel tank in the face can ruin your entire day.

"Weak guns at twelve o'clock low," came from Carbine lead and then he said "Negative Sams." This was a very significant call. The lead weasel was scanning the scene and he had no indications of any Sam prelaunch activity. While it only takes them a few seconds to launch a Sam, they must go through some prelaunch activity and they were not yet engaged in it.

Next came the most significant call of the day—or what could have been the most significant. Had it been accomplished properly, it could have saved us three Thuds and four people. The flight indicator call sign was garbled and all you could tell was that it was one of the Phantom escort flights. "Drumfphe—Aaah—got two Sams at nine o'clock level." But the weasels had no indication of Sam activity and they don't miss that. Had Mig-21's sneaked behind and below the weasels and launched a pair of air-to-air rockets at the trailing element of Carbine flight? I think so. Was this the first time that one of the escort drivers had seen a missile in flight? Was he so steeped in Sam briefings that a Sam was all he correlated with something white streaking through the sky with fire on the end? Did the adrenaline garble ids transmission? By his nine o'clock positioning on his call, did he indicate that he was between the Migs and Carbine flight, and that the missiles were already on the way and eating up the precious few seconds between a break call and missile impact? I think so.