Lucky’s Bridge (Vietnam Air War Book 2)

by Tom Wilson

  He glanced up and saw the next flight starting its dive toward the target. Then, much closer, a bright light flared.

  "Ford four's hit," came the shrill voice of Lieutenant Francis.

  "It's your main fuel tank, four. Eject!" called Captain Tatro.

  The Thud was streaming brilliant fire from the top portion of its fuselage.

  "Get out!" radioed Tatro.

  Lucky Anderson saw the flash of the ejection rocket as Ford four punched out of his aircraft.

  "Weeep, weeep, weeep, weeep . . . ," the sounds of Francis's emergency locator beeper sounded. The beeper came on automatically when the parachute opened, and broadcast its plaintive cry on 243.0, the emergency frequency.

  Anderson continued his slow bank, shutting off emergency-guard frequency to eliminate the irritating noise of the beeper.

  "They're shooting at him in the chute," sounded Captain Tatro's outraged southern voice.

  Anderson saw that Lieutenant Bowes was pulling into position on his right wing.

  "Ford three," Lucky radioed. "Let's go home. Nothing we can do to help here."

  "The bastards are shooting at him. I can see the tracers."

  "Join up, three," ordered Major Lucky Anderson in a firmer voice.

  Except for a smattering of flak when they crossed back over the Red River into pack five, and a single sighting of a distant MiG-17, the flight home was quiet and uneventful.

  As they crossed the border into Laos, Lucky radioed the success code to Red Crown, indicating they'd destroyed the target. They found the tanker at the end of the refueling track, where the ground-radar controller said it was waiting, checked their switches and told the tanker pilot that their noses were cold, and took on enough jet petroleum to make the trip home.

  During the final hour of the flight, from tanker drop-off until they made their visual approach at Takhli, the three men in the cockpits of Ford flight became lost in their thoughts, remembering the young man named Francis and wondering about his fate.

  1930 Local—Hoa Lo Prison, Hanoi

  Major Glenn Phillips

  A guard harshly pushed the door open. Fishface, the chief interrogator at the Hanoi Hilton, whose chinless face and puckered lips made him resemble a carp, stepped inside, staring at the prisoner with a look of expectancy. Glenn stood, staggered once because his leg, though healing, was unstable at the best of times and had been immobilized for the past several days. He steadied himself, then tried to bow sharply at the waist as was demanded and expected of him, and staggered again. Fishface nodded to the doorway, and guards dragged a prisoner into the cell. Blood drained from the man's legs, leaving bright snail's trails.

  With a mocking expression, Fishface said, "Here is Pra-ans, another Mee cow-ard," which meant he'd been able to question the poor bastard. "Mee" was the Vietnamese word for Americans, and they spat out the word with a hateful tone. Fishface's English was improving. Likely, thought Glenn, because he was interrogating prisoners more often than before.

  When Glenn had first arrived at the stark, gray-walled Hanoi prison, the guards would just beat the hell out of the pilots who arrived in the New Guy building until they bent them and got them to talk, and then, except for periodic reeducation sessions, would generally ignore them. Now there seemed to be less meaning to the beatings. The gomers weren't any more sophisticated about their questioning, they just seemed more methodical. They'd beat a guy good when he first came into the New Guy building, to break him down and get all the target information and personal data they could. Then they'd just keep at him for a couple more weeks to destroy any vestiges of pride. Before they'd move him to another building or one of the other camps, they'd slack off some, just beat him every once in a while. Without purpose or reason they'd take him and bend him for a few days, then get him to write a letter or propaganda statement to make sure his mind wasn't healing before they moved him along.

  The pilots hadn't expected to be treated well when they were shot down. Some had even expected to be tortured for information and then killed. But none had expected the degree of savagery, the constant mistreatment and humiliation they had to undergo, or the relish with which the officer interrogators and enlisted turnkey guards enjoyed tormenting them.

  The gomers dropped the new man onto the second bunk, an elevated concrete slab with its wooden slat mattress on top.

  He was Air Force. Glenn could tell by the blood-soaked gray flight suit. The fact that he had a flight suit on at all was a bad sign. If a prisoner was lucid and in good condition when they captured him, the gomers would often strip off his flying suit as a humiliation measure. If the guy was bad off, they'd just take his watch, dog tags, and the stuff from his pockets, zip off his vest and g-suit, and leave on the flight suit while they decided what to do about him. This one was worse than bad off. His flight suit was dark and wet with blood, and he was unconscious, his face chalky pale as if no blood was left in there.

  After Glenn had been shot down, the gomers had mistreated his broken leg so badly that death had seemed a sure thing. Then, inexplicably, they'd taken him to the Bach Mai Hospital, where a Russian doctor had repaired his leg and inserted a metal rod to give it strength. After a questioning period at the hospital they d left him alone and he'd slowly mended. Since his return to jail, they'd put badly wounded prisoners in with him, as if he were a doctor. Kept him at Hoa Lo, instead of taking him to the Zoo or the other outlying prison camps where the other guys were sometimes moved. Glenn didn't know why the gomers were acting so strangely, acting as if he were a healer or a priest or something, and the one time he'd asked Fishface, the interrogator had done his rope tricks and hurt him so badly that he'd decided it would be unwise to ask again.

  Glenn had been alone for the past week, since they took away a badly burned Navy lieutenant who had somehow survived. He'd spent the entire week in wood and iron leg-stocks, holdouts from the previous century, that were so rusty they had to use heavy hammers to open and close them. His legs had grown progressively more painful and stiff until the feeling was gone, his miserable solitude interrupted only when the turnkey arrived with a plate of roach-infested, tasteless gruel, or let a prisoner in to haul out his bo-bucket of piss and shit. They'd given no reason for the punishment. Neither had they explained why they'd arrived a couple of hours ago and removed the leg-stocks and walked him around the room, ignoring him as he cried like a baby from the pain. Now he knew why.

  Phillips began to examine his new roommate with the guards still there. One started to chastise him, but Fishface growled something obviously funny to them and they left, laughing.

  No chance, was Glenn's immediate thought about the new prisoner's condition.

  A loud, shrill voice boomed from the speaker box in the hall, announcing the daily propaganda and listing the American soldiers killed in South Vietnam.

  "What's your name?" he whispered in the flier's ear.

  No response.

  He inspected closer and found multiple wounds in the chest and stomach. Before they'd captured him, the guy had somehow taken the two rolls of gauze and the elastic bandage from the survival kit and wrapped them tightly around the outside of the flight suit to form pressure bandages. The wounds were so bad that all the poor bastard had done was delay death long enough for Fishface and his crew to torture him.

  Glenn was surprised they brought the prisoner to him. Most of the ones this bad they just threw out next to the trash pile at the west side of the prison to be hauled off. He started to inspect the man closer and jumped when the body began to thrash about, feebly and without reason. Glenn tried to hold him down, then realized that it was for no good purpose, so he just stepped back and spoke a simple prayer as the limbs convulsed in their dance of death.

  The thrashing was feeble and quickly ceased. A gentle, sighing sound issued from the dying man's throat. Glenn watched for a while longer, then leaned over the still body.

  "Pra-ans," he muttered to himself, repeating what Fishface had called the man and
wondering what the name really was and how it was spelled.

  The primary task the prisoners had assigned themselves was to return home with their honor intact. Another was to memorize the names of all men taken prisoner. Once a prisoner's location and status was known, he was said to be "in the system," and his name was added to the list. The list had grown so long that ranking officers had assigned different portions of the list for various of the men to memorize.

  For Glenn Phillips to get and disseminate the name of the dead man was crucial.

  He found a laundry mark on the bloody T-shirt that tracked with Fishface's fractured mispronunciation. He wished he had more, like an initial, but it was all he could find.

  He went to the wall later that night and, using a tap-code developed in American prisons and adopted by the POWs, entered Francis's name into "the system."

  "N-U P I-S D-E-D. N-A-M-E W-A-S F-R-A-N-C-I-S."

  The captain in the adjacent cell tapped his acknowledgment.

  "See, buddy," Glenn told the body, which stank of blood, urine, and feces, "there was a reason you came to visit."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, April 21st, 1000 Local—354th TFS Pilots' Lounge, Takhli RTAFB, Thailand

  Major Lucky Anderson

  The morning following the mission to the Hanoi power plant, Lucky called a meeting of his C-Flight. There were many new faces in the group, and it was time to introduce them to one another, explain the rules, and start the process of getting them to pull together as a unit.

  The men chattered as they settled into the theater-style seats set up in the squadron pilot's lounge.

  Lucky went to the refrigerator and pulled out a frost-coated bottle of Coke. As he returned to the front of the group, organizing his words in his mind, Lieutenant Bowes hurried in, carrying a bulky sheaf of papers in a folder. He was finishing with the shitty details of clearing onto base.

  "C-Flight's all here now, Major," Turk Tatro announced.

  Lucky eyed the six pilots. Three captains and three first lieutenants. Only he, Captain Tatro, and Lieutenant Horn had any combat experience to speak of. Lieutenant Bowes and Captain Liebermann had only one or two missions under their belts. Captain DeVera and Lieutenant Walker had yet to fly their first mission. A somber thought preoccupied him. After he'd helped the new guys with the basics and got them working together, they'd still be beating the odds if half of them made it through their hundred-mission tours.

  "Once a week," he began, "we'll have these meetings. Not because I like them . . . I don't, and I've got plenty of other things to do. But the nature of the air war changes fast and often, and we've got to stay on top of things. So every week we'll sit down together, talk about flying combat, and go over any new restrictions they've thought up."

  "Restrictions?" asked Manny DeVera with a raised eyebrow. He'd been quick to pick up on the thing that stuck most in their craws at Takhli.

  "By damn, Manny, you'll wonder who's on our side when you hear the bullshit you've gotta remember when you're flying up there," said Turk Tatro in a southern accent so thick he could transform three-letter words into three-syllable ones.

  "What kind of restrictions?" growled Manny.

  "You can't fly within thirty nautical miles of Red China or within twenty miles of Hanoi unless specifically directed on a JCS target. You can't fly within twenty miles of a noncombatant ship, even if they're bringing ammo and missiles to shoot you with. You can't shoot MiGs on the ground, because all their bases are restricted. You can't bomb dams or dikes that might cause flooding. You can't . . ."

  Lucky lifted his hand and interrupted. "We'll go over them all later, Turk."

  Manny obviously didn't like what he'd heard. "And we've gotta obey all those restrictions? How the hell do we get air superiority if we can't take out the MiG bases?"

  "Yeah," said Anderson, with a trace of impatience, "we've gotta obey all the rules. No, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense."

  Manny glared. "Who makes that shit up?"

  Lucky ticked his answers off on his fingers. "Starts with the President. Passed to the Secretary of Defense, through the JCS offices at the Pentagon, out to CINCPAC, who's a four-star admiral based at Pearl Harbor. From him across the harbor to Headquarters PACAF at Hickam Field, General Roman's group. From PACAF to Seventh Air Force in Saigon, where Lieutenant General Moss runs things. From Seventh Air Force to the flying units, like the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing here at Takhli, and the 388th at Korat. Every general and staff puke in that chain gets a crack at interpreting the restrictions and coming up with ways to make sure you don't cheat. So don't."

  "Jesus," snorted DeVera. "You'd think they'd take away the Mickey Mouse bullshit when we go to combat, so we could do our jobs."

  "Yeah, Manny," Lucky said, "you'd think they'd do that."

  He leaned against a table placed in front of the theater seats, examining the men of C-Flight and sipping his Coke. They were the seeds of a good combat unit, each man possessing his unique skills. It was up to Lucky to mold and tune them into a single aerial machine that was much more than the sum of their potentials. He would have to build on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. The day before, he'd worried about the flying skills of First Lieutenant Fredrick G. Francis, but Francis had been weeded out before Lucky had gotten a chance to teach him the ropes. Thinking of that . . .

  "Any of you guys know Francis?" he asked.

  Walker and Bowes raised their hands.

  "You two help Captain Tatro get Francis's things sorted and boxed up. Turk, I'm appointing you as summary-courts officer. Tell the admin sergeant to type up the orders."

  Turk Tatro grimaced. No one liked summary-courts duties. Going through the personal effects of the guys who were shot down and making sure they were forwarded to the family, ensuring the family had been properly notified, was truly miserable work. But Turk was reliable and thorough, and Anderson knew it would be done right.

  Lucky returned to the immediately task. "I've met you all," he started, "but I want everyone in C-Flight to get to know one another like brothers. I want you to learn each other's birthdays, and what everyone drinks at the bar. One guy's girlfriend walks out on him, I want you all feeling shitty. The six of you will be moved into three adjoining rooms at the Ponderosa, that's the new air-conditioned pilot's quarters between here and the main gate. I know some of you asked to room with guys you knew from before, but I had that changed."

  Lucky Anderson shucked the cellophane wrapper off a cigar and mouthed it as they bitched about the sleeping arrangements. He savored the tobacco taste until the noise subsided.

  "I've also posted two notes," he continued, "one at the command post and the other at the squadron duty desk, telling them I want C-Flight to stay together on the flying schedule."

  No one complained this time, and it began to sink in what Lucky was about. To make sure they understood, he explained. "All of this togetherness isn't because I'm trying to promote brotherly love. I don't give a diddley shit if you hate the sight of each other. But I insist you learn what to expect from the guys you'll be flying combat with. We don't need surprises up there. The worst thing imaginable when you're flying in pack six, is to depend on someone and have them let you down."

  "Amen, by damn," muttered Turk.

  "I want you to learn to fly standard missions, with no surprises. That's the only kind I'll stand for. Remember . . . no surprises."

  Lucky paused. "You won't always get to fly together. There are five flights in the 354th squadron: A, B, C and D flights, and a Wild Weasel flight. All three squadrons in the wing have that extra flight, because each squadron has its own Wild Weasel airplanes and crews assigned. We're down to two Weasel crews in the 354th now, not even enough for their own four-ship flight, so periodically you'll be scheduled to fly with them. But other than augmenting the Weasels and occasionally getting tapped to fly with the brass, I intend to keep C-Flight flying together."

  "What do the Wild Weasels do?" ask
ed Lieutenant Walker, who had not yet flown combat. He and Manny were both scheduled for tomorrow's morning mission.

  "They fly two-seat F-105Fs," Lucky said, "with electronic equipment installed so they can home in on SAM site radars. They precede us going to the target area and trail us coming out, and try to keep the SAM operators busy while we're bombing. The Weasel front-seaters are high-time Thud pilots, and the backseaters are electronic-warfare officers, called bears."

  "Do they really help?" asked Manny DeVera with a dubious tone. Wild Weasel was a new concept. Fighter pilots were a conservative group and were often suspect of changes from traditional ways of doing things.

  "When they're in the area, we see fewer SAMs targeted for us, because the Weasels get the gomers to fire their missiles at them. And you'll celebrate every time they find and bomb a site, because there'll be that many fewer missiles launched at you. They're effective enough, but they take a lot of combat losses, and there's seldom enough of them to go around."

  "Everything about flying here can be measured in degrees of bad," interjected Turk. "It's damn hairy flyin' in pack six, even with the Weasels with us. Without 'em, it's worse."

  Lieutenant Bowes stirred, then spoke in a quiet voice. "I had a cousin who was a Weasel stationed here. Got shot down last month."

  "They've got a tough mission," said Turk Tatro, squinting hard at Bowes as if he recognized something but couldn't place it.

  They waited for Bowes to elaborate, but he'd returned to his silence. A loner? Lucky wondered. He nudged them back on track.

  "Time for introductions. I'm Paul Anderson, and I'm called Lucky by those who can't pronounce my one-syllable first name. I've got fourteen hundred flying hours in the Thud, mainly at McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas, and Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Before that I was in Huns at Luke, where I got six hundred hours in the F-100D, and before that I racked up three hundred hairy hours in bent-wing F-84Fs at Sembach Air Base, Germany."