Fighter Pilot

by Christina Olds

  These thoughts obsessed me as I flew to Bangkok and steeled myself for the meeting with my wife. I remembered being in love with Ella with the same undeniable force twenty years earlier. Our passion for each other brought us great joy. With laughter she had accepted my warning that I’d always be a fighter pilot, her beautiful face and light green eyes full of love. We adored each other, but the years and our differences wore us down. Little was left that was familiar, loving, or even comfortable. I was unhappy to leave Ubon for the mandated meeting in Bangkok but I tried to turn my dread to optimism. It was truly good to see her—at first. The fun lasted less than two days, then retreated under her sharp demands to return home, to leave the foolishness of war, to accept an assignment in Washington, D.C., to keep my family anchored, to do something SHE wanted and to turn away from what she saw as my complete selfishness and betrayal. In my heart, our marriage ended at that moment. Her unyielding negativity bored into me like a knife. We were from different worlds. I departed two days before the end of the planned six-day leave to return to my men. Ella stayed in Bangkok to visit tailors, order custom-made silk and suede suits, and buy a leopard skin coat before flying home. I wondered if I would ever see my children again.

  A problem had come to Ubon in my absence. Captain Bob Pardo had pulled a heroic stunt on March 10 that HQ deemed unseemly and unnecessary because it was against regulations. His feat became known as “Pardo’s Push.” I returned to my office to find Chappie in a lather, commencing court-martial proceedings against Bob. I plunged into damage control. After learning the facts, I went to Saigon to meet with Momyer.

  Pardo’s escapade was another in a string of incidents from our futile attacks on Thai Nguyen. Before the 8th Wing strike flight reached the target on the tenth, ground fire hit and damaged Captain Bob Aman’s F-4, but with his backseater, Lieutenant Bob Houghton, Aman stayed with the formation. Over the target, they were hit again and began to leak fuel badly. Bob Pardo, with Lieutenant Steve Wayne in the backseat, was hit and damaged as well. Pardo might have been able to reach a tanker and ultimately save his own aircraft, but Aman was going to run out of fuel before he could get to Laos, where he and Houghton could bail out with a reasonable chance of rescue. He was still over North Vietnam when he flamed out. Pardo decided to push Aman to safer territory. He brought the nose of his F-4 into contact with Aman’s aircraft, but turbulence off the other aircraft made it impossible to hold his position. He told Aman to drop his tailhook, then positioned the tailhook against his windscreen and pushed. Although the hook slipped frequently and had to be repositioned, the push succeeded. Aman’s rate of descent slowed. Pardo’s left engine caught fire. He was almost out of fuel himself. Both crews bailed out near the Laotian border and were rescued. Two F-4s were lost.

  AF regulations forbade pilots from attempting to push one airplane with another, so Pardo was in trouble for that plus the loss of his own F-4 in the effort. After learning the facts, and heated arguments with Chappie, I went to Saigon to intercede with Momyer. My position was that Bob had done something heroic, and while he’d lost the aircraft, four valuable crew members were alive at Ubon. It was a worthwhile trade. Bob eventually was awarded the Silver Star instead.

  The incident marked a turning point in my relationship with Chappie. There had been numerous instances when he was “talking the talk but not walking the walk,” often finding ways to hang back from the action in combat, yet glorifying himself after the mission. It disturbed me, but we had a wing to run and he was still the man to do it. Everybody loved Chappie for his great personality, his glib talk, and the sheer ease with which he connected with the men. I loved Chappie, but I knew that combat, specifically leadership in combat, proved the real mettle of a man. We had a deep friendship but I needed him to reach past his obsession with appearances and just think and act like a fighter pilot. Our greatest challenges at Ubon still lay ahead.

  In March the targeting opened up. The weather patterns shifted and we were going back to the hard ones in Route Packs V and VI. For the first time we could hit things that we thought were worthwhile like the steel mill at Thai Nguyen and thermal power plants. The navy hit a thermal plant at Haiphong and then one right in the middle of Hanoi. It was about time! Our own action was hot and heavy. On Easter Sunday, Phil Combies and I went round and round with seven MiGs. Fred Crow took a SAM and went down. The air force, navy, and marines were all working together for once. J. B. Stone finished his tour and went back to the States in the middle of the month. He would be missed.

  The word coming from Washington was about reassigning me to the Pentagon: Directorate of Operational Requirements and Development Plans in USAF HQ, report NLT 10 Oct 1967. Hell no! I fought back with a letter to Jim Jumper at personnel, and he responded with a request that I suggest something more specific than “no preference except TAC,” since there were no good TAC assignments, only ADC commander jobs at different bases, or maybe overseas with PACAF or USAFE. General Jumper told me the best idea was to come home for air staff or Joint Staff. Ella had called him personally and wanted me in D.C. Her influence in Washington was causing me problems.

  Then came a low-altitude strike at Thai Nguyen Steel Works on March 30. I had returned from 13th AF headquarters in the Philippines the afternoon of the twenty-ninth and was still fuming from a round of so-called Star Talks, a procedure invented by some headquarters fiend as a way to harass and intimidate wing commanders who had the misfortune of suffering an aircraft accident in their wing. The CO was supposed to divine the cause immediately, then proceed up the chain of command explaining the situation to the generals and their staffs. Such procedures sometimes precluded recurrences, but in combat they often simply detracted from the ability to focus on the mission.

  Before retiring that night, I posted myself on the next morning’s schedule to lead Plymouth Flight, escorting an F-105 strike force into North Vietnam. If the weather precluded the Thuds from getting to their primary target, they would proceed to their secondary target, and we’d drop off and sweep the airspace around Thai Nguyen. Briefing would be at 0600 with takeoff at 0800.

  A knock came on my trailer door close to midnight. That always meant trouble and this was no exception. One of the officers who worked in the command post stood there with a worried look on his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Sir, tomorrow’s strike package has been canceled and—”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I cut him off. “But why come all the way over here? Why not just call?”

  “Uh, sir, Plymouth Flight has been rescheduled to make a low-level run on the blast furnaces at Thai Nguyen and—”

  “Holy shit, you gotta be kidding me!” I couldn’t believe it.

  “No sir. Do you want me to schedule someone else?”

  He shouldn’t have said that and he knew it. “Hell no. Get hold of Bill Kirk, Combies, Greaves, and some of the other old-timers and have them meet me in ops plans, right now.”

  “Yes sir!” He hustled off.

  As I pulled on my flight suit I tried to imagine what idiot had ordered this strike. The blast furnaces; my God! Thai Nguyen! That damned steel mill had been under severe attack for a month. The enemy defenses were murderous. Both the Thuds and my outfit had lost a number of aircraft, making the ground around the complex look worse than the craters of the moon. Who was worried about the damned blast furnaces? What did those ops analysts in Washington think those furnaces were going to blast? This was going to be a bitch!

  An hour later, I finished up my briefing at ops and said, “OK, guys, that’s it. Six 500-pound high drags, three each on the inboard pylons, all with eight-second delay fuses. ECM pods on the right outboard, a 370-gallon drop tank on the left, 600-gallon centerlines, and only three of us. I don’t want a number Four flailing away and trying to cross the target before my bombs go off. We’ll hit the tanker, then drop down to the mountaintops, go low level the rest of the way in. And when I say low, I mean LOW. The weather stinks, so I’l
l have to play that one by ear. Thanks, guys. Let’s try to get some sleep. See you at 0600.”

  Sleep, hah! Everyone, including those not going, had butterflies.

  My backseater was Captain Dan Lafferty, Major George Greaves was number Two with Captain Gerald Finton, and Phil Combies was Three with Captain Lee Dutton. We hit the tanker right on time, headed north, topped off, and started down. We were over a mountainous section of Laos where our maps declared “Relief Data Inaccurate.” Bloody hell, that sure was comforting. We descended into the typical humid mist with about half a mile visibility. Dan called off our altitude as I peered ahead, watching for terrain to appear in the murk. Suddenly, there! A mountain ridge right in front of us! I pulled up to miss it and the three of us started ridge hopping our way north. I kept the airspeed at a comfortable 480 knots, and held our predetermined compass heading while Dan counted off the minutes as we ate up 8 miles for each of them. Just after we crossed the Black River the mist thickened into cloud. I called Phil and George to close in and climbed up to 4,500 feet. We were totally engulfed in cloud and on the gauges.

  “Dan. Alpha.”

  “Two forty-two,” he quickly responded, meaning we had two minutes and forty-two seconds to go to reach our checkpoint on the Red River.

  This was getting tense, particularly when my RHAW gear flashed a warning that we were being tracked by enemy radar, might be early warning, could be guns or SAMs. If they launched there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it but hope the missile missed.

  At two minutes forty I called, “OK, boys, here’s the river. Let’s go down.”

  God, please let this be right. We descended and didn’t break out. When we passed through 500 feet on the radar altimeter and hadn’t hit anything, I knew we were at least over the Thai Nguyen Valley. At about 300 feet we broke out, and sure enough, there was our checkpoint: a loop in the river not a quarter mile off my right wing. I didn’t want to think about the 3,000-foot mountain we had passed over during our letdown a mile back.

  “Good job, Dan,” I said quickly.

  I didn’t have to tell Phil and George to spread out. They already had. So down I went to about 25 feet off the deck. Later, Phil told me he thought he had flown low many times before but when he looked over at me he was looking down at the top of my aircraft. We skimmed treetops and flattened grass as we went. A small herd of water buffalo leaped straight up as we passed over and our shock wave hit them. We hurtled across the valley toward a gap near the north end of Thud Ridge. I pushed the airspeed up to 540 knots, flew through the gap, then pulled a hard right turn to proceed down the valley on the northeast side of the ridge. The weather was better here, if you want to call a 400-foot ceiling better; at least the visibility was good. Suddenly, there was a tremendous amount of “twinkling” on the ridge. All our low-level maneuvering hadn’t fooled Charlie one bit, and he let loose the damnedest barrage I’d ever seen. Flak mostly came in streams, often intense and heavy, but here, in this humidity, the stuff was coming into our faces like an orange-red blanket. They threw everything at us: 85s, 57s, 23 mms, God knows what else! The rice paddies around us boiled from the falling shrapnel. I felt my bird taking hits, but we were still on course. To hell with it, one of us might make it to the target, so nothing to do but press on.

  I glanced over at George, then at Phil. Yep, they were hanging in and still flying. I could see only the front third of their F-4s. The rest was hidden in vapor condensation, a pretty spectacular sight. If we weren’t under such heavy fire it might have been fun to watch.

  The target, those damned blast furnaces, stuck up like apartment buildings off our nose to the left. I waited until the proper moment, then made a hard left turn to line them up. George slid over to make his run behind Phil. We were flying so low that gunners on rooftops were firing down on us! The first two bullets hit my wing from above. As I pulled up to 200 feet I took a hard hit on my right wing. Oh shit.

  Phil called, “Plymouth Lead, you’re on fire!” Hey, that wasn’t good news at a time like this. What the hell, I determined if I took more bad damage on the run in to the target, I’d just fly directly into the blast furnaces and blow the whole place up to spare other pilots from having to attack it later. I poured on a little more speed to blow my wing fire out and descended toward the target. As we closed in we had to climb to clear an 80-foot chimney dead ahead. The furnaces came up, the sight picture was right; I pickled my bombs. Phil and George followed. As I made a hard left turn to get the hell out of there I looked over and saw our bombs going off all around the three furnaces. There were no more transmissions from Phil or George, both of whom I could see under the cloud, so I figured Lady Luck was with us and continued on toward the gap and the Red River beyond it. Once there, we sped across the flat plain, then the river, and entered a promising-looking valley that could hide us from SAM sites. Suddenly, we were in a cloud deck again and I couldn’t see anything but blackness beneath it.

  Holy crap! “Pull! Burners! PULL!” I yelled.

  We shot straight up in a 60-degree climb and broke out of the cloud like rockets, only 50 feet off the sheer face of North Vietnam’s highest mountain, each of us practically grazing the trees. My God, I had nearly run us straight into the side of that mountain! To hell with the SAMs, I thought, and continued on up to 20,000 feet. That was the worst moment of the whole mission, the absolute stuff of nightmares.

  Once at altitude I called for the tanker. At first he refused to leave his assigned track, but once I identified myself, he said, “Yes, sir!” and cruised to meet us. I had only 1,200 pounds of fuel remaining. We rendezvoused and took our normal off-load for the trip to Ubon. I had a big problem because fuel was streaming out of the right wing. Since I didn’t know the extent of the damage or if I could make it home, I asked the tanker pilot to stick with us all the way to home plate. Bless his heart, he did. I loved those tanker guys.

  When we landed, the whole base was out to greet us. Word had spread that the Old Man had been hit. During debriefing I asked Phil what he expected me to do when he told me I was on fire, get out and piss on it? He laughed, and showed me the piece of flak that had hit his right quarter panel and bounced around his cockpit. The blast of air through broken plexiglass rendered his radio useless, so he couldn’t transmit during the rest of the mission. By some miracle George’s bird didn’t even get scratched.

  It turned out I had taken five hits on our way to the target and then took that last one right through the main wing spar into the fuel tank. The hole was the size of basketball. Later it was found that the reverse flow check valve in that tank was inoperative. Fuselage fuel could flow backward to the wing tank, so it was a lucky thing I even reached the tanker, let alone made it home. My poor old F-4 was dismantled and shipped back to the depot in Utah. I don’t know if it ever flew again, but in my book, the old lady had done her work and had let us live to fly another day.

  The MiGs had been pretty quiet since we knocked the shit out of them in January, but they came up hard again in late April. They started hammering away at the Thuds, who had to jettison bombs to avoid being shot down. Thuds were lost, three in one day. It finally dawned on the 7th AF that we’d better have MiG combat air patrol (CAP) again. I convinced HQ that we could both escort and bomb. Escort only was an awful waste.

  F-4Ds loaded with pods started arriving at Ubon on May 8 and that changed things more than anything. Getting the Thuds up to about 12,000 to 14,000 feet in pod formation, going in like the hammers of hell, everybody was together; everybody knew who everybody else was, where they were, where they were going, and exactly what they had to do when they got there. If there were any other airplanes around, they were enemy—who else could they be? The Thuds weren’t to worry about that. I would worry about those. Thud guys go on! I’d be right back behind and wouldn’t let anybody get hurt. Ubon and Da Nang were put on the job of MiG CAP, and we got tied in with Takhli. For three or four weeks, and through May, it was escort. From the time of our first Mi
G CAP mission until the thing finished in June, not one Thud was lost to MiGs, but we lost Herm Knapp and his GIB, Chuck Austin, on egress April 24, best of officers and a damn shame.

  Late in April I was leading what was supposed to be a normal mission up north when I got all of us in big trouble. It started as I led Buick and Plymouth flights toward our prestrike tanker.

  “Orange 56, Buick Lead here, we have you at 1130. Closing for prestrike.”

  “Roger, Buick Lead. Take the perch.”