by Tom Wilson
"MiG-21's!" he yelled as the flight continued their hard turn. "Dump your bombs and tanks and get 'em ready to fight, Talons." He eased the turn slightly, punched the jettison switch, and felt the weight drop away, then resumed his hard turn.
"Two." "Four," came the response to his call.
What the hell was wrong with Liebermann? he wondered.
"Talon three will retain my bombs," called Liebermann crisply, for they'd been briefed by the brass to keep their bombs to drop on the target and to avoid engaging MiGs.
There was no time to argue. Billy kept his Thud turning as hard as its stubby wings could manage while he frantically changed the weapons selector to the guns-air position.
0653 Local—Bac Giang Province, DRV
Air Regiment Commandant Quon
Blue-tails!
Once past the Mee, Quon immediately led his nimble MiGs into a hard right turn to reengage. He watched the Thunder plane leader and two others jettison bombs and fuel tanks. No longer such easy prey there. But the aircraft on the leader's right wing failed to jettison and was wallowing in its turn and becoming separated from the others.
Quon's MiG-21's easily outturned the Thunder planes. The lead Mee had come only half-circle when Quon was rolling wings level and slapping at the rocket-head enabling switch. He cut off and tracked the one with the bombs and fuel tanks still hanging, and positioned ever closer, glancing periodically at the ready light. It continued to blink, refusing to come on steady.
The Thunder-plane pilot before him tried to turn tighter but could not, yet was safe because the fornicating rocket-head refused to lock on. Quon was reaching forward for the selector switch to change to another rocket when the pilot before him reversed direction and engaged afterburner . . . providing a superb target for the K-13 heat-seaking rocket.
Steady light. Quon immediately fired, fervently hoping there'd be sufficient separation for the fuze to arm, for he was close.
During his reversal the stupid Mee pilot straightened for a split second, and it was enough. As Quon feared, the rocket's warhead did not explode, but it homed so true that it tore away the upper-engine exhaust and sheared off the vertical stablizer.
The Thunder plane slewed out of his vision, going down.
"Red Quon, break off," radioed the controller. "Phantoms at seven kilometers, closing."
0655 Local—Northeast of Hanoi, Route Pack Six, North Vietnam
Captain Billy Bowes
"Weeep, weeep, weeep," sounded Bob Liebermann's emergency beeper.
Billy had watched the shoot-down, and felt sick.
He'd told Bob about the MiG, told him to stay out of burner, to put his nose down and disengage. The Thud could outrun anything on earth down there. But he hadn't, just as he hadn't jettisoned his bombs, and now the sound of his emergency beeper told Billy he'd punched out of his airplane.
"Weeep, weeep, weeep."
Billy had no time to shut off emergency guard channel and wished Bob would turn his chute beeper off to help his concentration. He was closing on the rearmost MiG, still in a right-hand turn and hoping for a shot. There'd been no time to change his switches to get radar ranging from his gunsight, so he'd have to estimate it.
As he'd anticipated, the MiG driver saw him and reversed, so Billy held down his trigger as the MiG veered in front of him, spewing out 200 rounds in a wild, high-angle snapshot. He missed, and the MiG kept turning hard left, so Billy also reversed and engaged afterburner to take on the leader, the green MiG with the red stripe that had bagged Liebermann.
"Thud in the fight with the MiG-21, this is Trigger lead. Get out of the way so we can get a missile shot," sounded over the strike frequency.
The F-4's had arrived. About time, he thought.
"I'm gonna shoot this guy first, Trigger," called Billy.
"His wingman's on your ass, and you're about to get an Atoll up your tailpipe," said Trigger almost conversationally.
Billy kicked rudder and swiveled his neck to see a MiG-21 leveling its wings, in position and ready to fire. Oh, Jesus can they turn, he thought, and his next reaction was done without thinking.
He came out of burner and slapped the speed-brakes switch.
It was quick. He slowed from 590 knots to 550 almost immediately, and the MiG on his tail slid past as if he'd stopped dead in the air.
"Good going, F-105," yelled Trigger lead. "We're engaging, Triggers."
Billy immediately retracted his speed-brakes, but he was out of the fight. He tapped afterburner to regain airspeed and called for a position on his two remaining flight members.
"Talon four is five miles west, lead."
"Talon two's joining off your right wing," called Joe Walker, and Billy saw him when he glanced around.
He looked back at the MiGs, diving and twisting in the distance.
"Trigger two is Fox one," called an F-4, and a Sparrow missile zipped cleanly through the loose MiG formation.
"Fox one" meant they'd fired a midrange radar missile. "Fox two" identified their shorter range, heat-sinking Falcons or Sidewinders.
Billy led Walker into a left-hand turn toward Henry Horn, whose bird looked lonely by itself.
"Fox two," called another Phantom, without identifying himself, and Billy watched another missile miss. An AIM-4 Falcon, the shittiest missile in the inventory. The F-4Ds were close, but they weren't equipped with a cannon. They could outclimb and outdive the MiGs and damn near turn with them, but they didn't have a gun to shoot them with. It was a crime to send a fighter to war without a gun, he thought.
"You take a hit, Henry?" he asked Horn, worrying about his flight. He did not like the thought of anything being amiss this far from safety. Enough had gone wrong.
"I don't think so, Talon lead. The number two MiG was all over me like ugly for a couple seconds, but I dumped my nose like you were telling Bob and got the hell away."
"Weeep, weeep—" Bob Liebermann's beeper was finally shut off, and that was a good sign, because it meant he was healthy enough to switch it off.
Billy transmitted over guard channel, hoping Bob had his survival radio out. "Talon three, Talon lead. Can you hear me, buddy?"
A hiss of static, then something about being okay.
Billy sucked in a sad breath. "Beat it out of there if you can, Talon three. There's no rescue up here."
"Roger, lead. I'll think of something. There's a lot of farms around here, and a village close by, so I'd better hurry. Give 'em hell, Talons."
Billy kept his voice even. "See you later, Talon three."
"Talon three's out." Liebermann's survival radio went off the air.
The remainder of Talon was very quiet as they began to rejoin, heading west.
From the F-4 Phantoms Billy heard, "Trigger two is Fox one . . . splash."
The "splash" call meant Trigger two had downed one of the MiGs with a radar-guided Sparrow missile.
All in all, Billy figured as he and Joe Walker joined up with Henry and began to look one another over for damage, it had been a hell of an initiation. Welcome to leading a flight in pack six, he said to himself. He said a silent farewell to Bob Liebermann as they continued back toward Thud Ridge. If Bob had only been smart enough to know which of the silly-assed rules to ignore, he'd likely have made it through the fight. But then, maybe not. The northeast railroad was a hell of a place to have to fight, he thought as he looked back at a trio of SAMs arcing through the air, and a flight of Thuds maneuvering to dodge them.
All three Talons seemed okay, and since there didn't seem to be much enemy activity where they were, he assumed it was over the for day. Too bad, with the Thuds cleaned up for action as they were.
Two of the MiG-21's escaped, he thought, and that pissed him off again.
He called for a fuel check and then calculated they could all make it to the tanker with no problems. Of the three, he had the most fuel.
Enough for a slight diversion?
They were approaching Thud Ridge at 9,000 feet.
Just maybe . . .
"Talons, let's change to squadron common frequency," he said. He didn't want to broadcast his idea over the strike frequency.
0712 Local—Phuc Yen PAAFB, DRV
Air Regiment Commandant Quon
One Thunder plane killed, one MiG-21 lost to the fornicating Mee Phantom. He hoped his pilot had survived, for he was a good one, and too few of his Vietnamese airmen were sufficiently adept at flying the tricky small-tail MiG-21's. The other MiGs, led by Captain Ivanovic, had been discovered during their attack and escaped to China.
Quon's MiGs were low on fuel after the wild maneuvering to escape the Phantoms, and had to land quickly. It would've been handier to land at Kep, but that had become an authorized target for the Thunder planes, so he led his wingman back to the safety of Phuc Yen, still off-limits to the Mee pilots.
When he got on the ground, he would call to see if the Mee pilot he'd shot down had been captured, for he knew this one was from the despicable Pig Squadron.
He made a long, straight-in approach, remembering he had his show to perform. Whenever they flew, the ground crews watched as they returned, to see who would perform a victory roll, meaning he'd scored a kill. Thus far Quon had performed seven of them, four in the MiG-17 and three in his red-bannered MiG-21. This would be number eight.
As they approached the big base, he noted that he was down to a scant 500 liters of petrol. He decided on a quick flyby, then to immediately come about to land.
Near the end of the runway he pulled the nose slightly up and prepared to maneuver. The tower radioed something, but he ignored it in his concentration. He entered the roll maneuver nicely, nose held slightly high, and recovered smoothly, then gained a bit of altitude and turned downwind.
The tower operator was screaming words about a Thunder. . . .
He never saw his attacker, only felt his MiG-21 begin to lurch wildly and come apart.
He yelled a question over the radio as the small-tail slewed sideward, pinning him to the seat. When he pushed hard on the rudder, the aircraft corrected only slightly.
A glance into his mirror showed fire burning aft of the cockpit. His heart thumped as he fought the controls.
A Thunder plane loomed before him, pulling up into its recovery arc. He could even see the white letters RM on the tail.
They were not supposed to attack here!
The shrill scream of the engine abruptly stopped, and the silence was like an omen of death. He fearfully looked out and saw that his right wing had been shredded.
The MiG pitched up, out of control, and slewed sideward before beginning to tumble earthward. Quon was screaming uncontrollably, clawing for the ejection handle, but his hand was held away by the terrible force of the spin. He was begging for mercy when somehow he found and pulled the handle.
1030 Local—Intelligence Debriefing Room, Command Post, Takhli, RTAFB, Thailand
On the flight back to base, Billy and Henry and Joe had agreed that he'd been in hot pursuit of the MiG, which was the only reason he could legally be where he'd been to shoot it down.
Joe said he'd seen a chute, which meant the MiG driver had escaped death, and Billy felt somehow cheated. But even if the bastard was now safe and drinking with his buddies, it felt good to get his MiG kill.
Halfway through the intell debriefing, things started to turn to shit. Colonel Lyons came in and listened for only a moment before he jumped him, arguing first that Bowes had not been authorized to engage MiGs. When he heard the rest of the story, Lyons blamed him for the loss of Bob Liebermann, and that pissed Billy off.
"I don't feel proud of losing a member of my flight, Colonel," Billy said, "but I sure as hell didn't contribute to his getting shot down. If he'd dumped his bombs and tanks or disengaged like I told him to, he'd have made it.
That made Lyons even more irate. "You were explicitly told neither to engage MiGs nor to drop your bombs."
"We were told not to jettison unless it was necessary. For Christ's sake, Colonel, the MiGs had already fired a missile and we were fighting to save our lives!"
"Then why didn't you immediately engage burner and get your men out of there instead of trying to outturn MiG-21's."
Billy opened his mouth to respond when he realized that, regardless of being an asshole, the colonel had a point.
Lyons pressed his advantage. "You were derelict in your duty as flight leader."
Billy avoided the colonel's eyes. He thought of Liebermann and wondered.
Lyons spat the next words out hatefully. "Why didn't you just point your gun at his head and pull the trigger before takeoff, Captain? You would have gotten the same results, and we wouldn't have lost an airplane."
"He's alive, sir," said Billy, flushing with anger and self-recrimination.
"You don't know that, do you?" Lyons said.
"I talked to him on the ground."
"But you don't know if he's still alive, do you?"
Billy's response was slow coming. "No, sir."
Lyons nodded his head at the debriefing report in front of Billy, on which he'd been describing his MiG kill. "I also suspect your reason for shooting at a MiG in the restricted area."
"I was in hot pursuit, sir." But now Billy's words came out sounding uncertain.
Lyons glared. "Perhaps an inquiry will find differently."
Billy felt miserable.
"As of this moment, Captain Bowes, you are off flight status," Lyons said triumphantly.
354th TFS Duty Desk
Major Lucky Anderson
Lucky was talking to Bad Injin Encinos, the squadron commander, when Henry Horn went into the squadron building and told what had happened to Billy Bowes.
Encinos's expression clouded. He mumbled something about work, then went into his office and closed the door.
Lucky looked at Horn evenly. "Tell it to me one more time, Henry," he said. They walked into the privacy of the C-Flight office, and he listened.
When he'd heard it all, Lucky raised a single finger. "Only one question, Henry. You say Billy was in hot pursuit?"
Horn looked away and swallowed. "Sort of, sir. The MiGs weren't always in sight, but . . . we figured where they'd be going."
Lucky waited until Horn looked back at him, then spoke quietly. "If anyone asks, just remember one thing, you guys were in hot pursuit."
"Yes, sir," said Henry, relieved.
Lucky nodded a final look of encouragement and walked out of the squadron building toward the command post. Angry clouds boiled to the west of the field. They'd likely get another frog-drowner in a few minutes, he thought, so he hurried his step.
Billy Bowes and Joe Walker emerged from the command post door and approached, looking despondent. They saluted and Billy said, "I've got something to tell you, boss."
"Later," he said. "I've got something to do right now. See you both back at the squadron soon as I'm done."
"It's important," tried Billy.
"So's what I have to do. You guys go to the squadron and get a beer, and wait for me there."
He hurried on.
Inside the command post he asked for Colonel Lyons and was told he was in his office. He went there, knowing what he had to do and that it would be distasteful.
Lyons was alone in his office, speaking on the phone in a smooth voice, as if he were sweet-talking a female. He glanced out and saw Anderson and motioned for him to wait.
Lucky went inside and closed the door, careful to press the privacy lock to keep others out.
Lyons's mouth sagged. He told whomever he was talking to that he'd call back and slammed down the receiver.
"What the hell are you doing, Major?" he said in a loud and outraged voice.
"Well, Colonel sir, I figured that since you fucked with one of my men, we'd better straighten it out,
and I didn't think you'd want anyone hearing you change your mind."
Lyons's face grew crimson with outrage. He sputtered.
Lucky leaned against the door, taking it in.
"Get out of here!"
Lucky wagged his head. "No, sir."
"That is a direct order, Major. Get out before you make matters worse for yourself."
"I'll answer that with something I wish Captain Bowes had thought of. Get fucked . . . Colonel, sir."
Lyons's mouth dropped. "Are you demented?"
Lucky pondered. "Possibly. I hadn't thought of it like that. But I'm not leaving until we've had our talk."
Lyons stared at Lucky's face with distaste. "I will press charges, Major. Be assured that you will answer for your actions."
"Do you remember a certain chief master sergeant named Wallace who retired from here two weeks ago?"
Lyons stared.
"He told me he hated your fucking guts, Colonel, sir."
Lyons forced a thin smile. "I do not remember being overly impressed with the chief, either."
"He also wrote out a statement and signed it, and I was a witness. I suppose you remember calling him in and ordering him to take you off the flying schedule any time you were supposed to go anywhere but to pack one."
Lyons stared hatefully.
"I've checked and it's true. You haven't flown a mission outside of pack one. I figure Colonel Parker, maybe even General Moss, might be interested in that single-paged document signed by the chief. I don't know what you call it. Dereliction of duty? Giving an illegal order? Taking the easy missions so the dumb-shit lieutenants and captains are the only ones who get shot at?"
Lyons looked away. His hands clenched and unclenched before him. "It's just that I don't feel with . . . ah . . . all of my other duties, I am properly prepared to fly . . ."
"To fly where they might be shooting?" asked Lucky.
