War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam

by Ed Cobleigh

  Waiting is not an option either. The next burst may be more accurate. Worse yet, the lethal Firecan might lock on. I have to make my dive delivery now before bursting rounds impact Spectre and the fifteen guys inside. I know the gunship pilot has spotted the ground fire and is wondering what I, his trusty escort, intend to do about it. I push my mike button and transmit.

  "Spectre, Satan has the gun. I'm in from the west, got you in sight."

  The Spectre pilot replies, this time with his voice slightly rushed.

  "Roger, Satan, you-all take care now, you hear?"

  This is going to be tricky; a ragged shelf of clouds is partially obscuring the target, drifting over from the Laotian mountains to the east. I'm west of the gun site and I have a good view of where I want the cluster bomb to hit. If I run in from this direction, I'll have to pull off my dive up into the clouds. That's not so bad, except the moon is up far enough now to skylight my jet against the layer of gray fluff with grazing illumination revealing my jet to the gunners. However, if I wait until I'm further around the circle, I may lose the target and Spectre may get shot down in the meantime.

  Crazy Jack asks me from the rear cockpit what I'm waiting on. I think, "What the hell, who wants to live forever?" I roll the jet to the left and let the nose drop toward the imaginary point in the blackness where the gun site is theoretically located. This won't be pretty; there is no time to set up a classic dive bomb run. The dive angle, airspeed, and G loading will be whatever works out. All I have to do is to get the oval pattern of the bomblets somewhere around the gun pit, maybe nobody gets killed, but the explosions should stop them from shooting at Spectre.

  Holy shit! They may not be shooting at the gunship, but they're sure as hell shooting at me! In my peripheral vision I see the ECM scope showing the Firecan to be directly on my nose, the rattlesnake burr in the headphones is relentless. I see tracers stream over the top of my canopy, some from the left and more from my right. More are rising up in front of my flight path; I'll have to dive through them. The Laotian night sky is lit up like the Fourth of July.

  Jack yells, "Shit hot, go get them, Fast Eddie."

  That's just what I need now, a navigator with a death wish. We go down the dive chute with tracer bullets on all sides, plunging through a thin wisp of cloud. I see white, green, and red lights reflecting off the milky vapor flowing past.

  Shit! I've forgotten to turn off the external lights on my aircraft. Every gunner in southern Laos can see us bright and clear. They all do just that and all start shooting like mad fiends. In my peripheral vision, I can see tracers and shell bursts all around the jet. I can't reach over now and turn off the lights; the switch is out of reach on the left console. I can pull off and abort the run, but then the cluster bomb will fall ineffectively short. All this shooting is making me angry. I really, really want to kill these guys now. My instantly revised plan is to try to complete the bomb run and pull off into the sheltering clouds.

  It's funny what getting shot at does to you. My logical reaction should be one of. fear and a heightened sense of self-preservation. However, in a fighter jet, the psychologically comforting effects of being in a protective cockpit and the illusion of being in control predominate. The effect of having many folks trying to kill you isn't what you might think. It isn't terribly frightening as much as it is tremendously annoying. What do those jerks think they're doing? Don't they know whom they are dealing with here? My immediate reaction is anger and the desire to hit back, "First-est with the most-est" as J.E.B. Stuart said. Ordinarily, I would expend one cluster bomb on one gun site, saving the rest for the remainder of the mission, but these guys are really pissing me off with their guns. They get the full whammy.

  Jack calmly says, "Ready, pickle."

  I hit the pickle button on the top of the control stick six times in quick succession. I want lots and lots of bomblets down there doing their deadly thing while I attempt to make it to the clouds unscathed. I also want to teach these North Vietnamese bozos a lesson. The jet bounces upward slightly when each eight-hundred pound cluster bomb leaves. When the last canister falls away, I bury the stick in my lap and lay six Gs on the airplane. As the nose comes up, I scrunch up my leg muscles to keep from blacking out and my vision tunnels down to a circle in front of the airplane. My blood is draining from my overheated brain toward my boots, starving my retinas. Even through my visually dark tunnel, I can still see tracer bullets streaming in front of the Phantom. A fully lighted target, a Phantom with all its lights on, is inviting these guys to zero in.

  As quickly as the shooting started, it stops, and the tracers disappear off somewhere into the night. When a cluster bomb canister is explosively split, it announces its airborne arrival with a single bright flash in the sky. The live gunners know this well, the ones that didn't get the memo are dead. The smart ones realize that in three or four seconds a shit-storm of bomblets and flying fragments will blanket the area. Each bomblet contains dozens of bird-shot-sized pellets that will deluge the target area. The gunners, seeing the first canister's opening burst, dove into their shelters to escape the incoming steel rain and stopped shooting at us.

  As soon as its nose is twenty degrees above the horizon, the Phantom pops into the cloud deck. The canopy is enveloped in a dim white fog illuminated by those dammed navigation lights that almost got us killed. I can see the red flashing beacon reflecting in sharp pulses off the clouds. The effect is very disorienting. I relax the Gs to get back more night vision. As I let the stick ease forward, the jet starts feeling slightly sloppy and loose. The flight controls are slackening. I glance down at the dimly lit airspeed indicator to see it coming down through 300 knots. That's way too slow for a combat mission.

  Not content with already making one life-threatening mistake tonight, I decide to compound the situation with another screw-up. I shove both throttles past the detent into full afterburner, trying to keep the airspeed from decaying further. Instantly twin plumes of white-hot gases shoot thirty or forty feet behind the jet's engines and I feel a kick in the butt signaling extra thrust is reporting for duty. If the gunners aren't still cowering in their holes, they have an even more visible target to aim at. Two J-79s produce huge torches in the night sky. The afterburners light up the inside of the cloud, clean white flame reflecting off dirty white vapor. What little night vision I had is now gone, I can't make out the instruments, the inner lit cloud isn't bright enough and the instrument lights are too dim. It is like flying inside a giant frosted light bulb. A second later, someone turns on the light. Below in the jungles of Laos, thousands of bomblets are going off, each with a white fireball the size of a basketball. It is the sparkler show from Hell. The detonating bomblets light up the underside of the cloud deck, big time. The incandescent light surges through the clouds and illuminates my cockpit like the photo flashguns of a thousand paparazzi. I am totally messed up, having no idea which way is up or more importantly, down. With no visual references inside the cloud, no visible instruments, and no vision, I am not flying this jet as much as I am going along for the ride. Swiftly we burst from the ragged, flat top of the cloud layer pointed more or less into the absolute vertical. Both afterburners are still howling, but the airspeed is rapidly decaying toward zero. I can tell we are above the clouds and I can see the moon somewhere, but the bomblets' flashes dashed any hope of me making out the horizon.

  Into my mike I manage to say, "Uh."

  Instantly, Not-so-Crazy-Now Jack replies firmly, "I've got it."

  I relax my grip on the control stick and hope for the best.

  Jack is not a rated pilot, but he knows how to recover the jet from what are whimsically called "unusual attitudes." We practice this in the daytime. I tell him to close his eyes and then I roll, dive, and turn the jet, trying to tumble his internal gyros and disorient him. Then I say, "You've got it." After many repetitions of this basic flying exercise, I trust him explicitly to recover the airplane.

  'We have a pact, when one of us says, "I've g
ot it," that guy gets control of the airplane, no matter what. His job then is to open his eyes, focus on the attitude indicator and flight instruments in his rear cockpit, take over the stick and throttles and recover the jet to straight and level flight, despite whatever his inner ear says the jet is doing. After numerous practice maneuvers, each more violent than the last, my navigator is a whiz at recovering from unusual attitudes. During dive bomb runs at night, as soon as he calls "pickle," his attention goes directly to the instruments. He has been staring at the black ball of the attitude indicator, the altimeter, and the airspeed indicator all during our rapid passage through the clouds and as we erupted from the top like a sailfish broaching in the Sea of Cortez.

  Jack rolls the jet toward the nearest horizon, pulls the nose down to level, if inverted, flight, and then rolls right side up. As the airspeed builds to over 300 knots, he pulls the engines out of afterburner and says,

  "You can have it any time."

  I couldn't have done it better myself. As a matter of fact, I probably couldn't have done it at all.

  I take a few deep breaths of pure oxygen from the rubber mask around my face, turn up the cockpit lighting so I can see something, and check the airspeed and fuel. I glance outside at the horizon now clearly defined by the full moon. One look down at my leather-gloved hands confirms they have stopped shaking.

  I tell Jack, "Roger, I've got it," and take control of the jet, resuming the job of flying.

  The Spectre pilot comes on the air, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  "Satan, that was a pretty spectacular show."

  I reply after another deep breath to lower my voice pitch down to the manhood range.

  "Roger that. The things we do for you guys."

  Jack, reverting to crazy once again, asks, "How many cluster bombs do we have left? Let's go back and get those guys."

  I tell Spectre, "Satan is Winchester (out of ordnance)."

  Jack sighs the sigh of a man dealing with a wimp over the intercom as he hears my transmission to Spectre.

  Spectre comes back, "Roger that, this area is getting too hot anyway, we're RTB (Returning To Base)."

  As I point the jet westward to Thailand, I look back at the red line of burning trucks and the white. glowing residual embers of the cluster bombs on the black ground. This night in the sewer is one to remember. We cross the Mekong River "fence" with the moon shining brightly in our rearview mirrors.

  ***

  Jack and I are debriefing tonight's mission in the rat's nest that is the Wing Intelligence office. All USAF intelligence shops are incredibly messy, with papers, books, charts, manuals, and general-purpose trash stacked everywhere. This one is no exception. You have to have a Top Secret clearance to enter the cipher-locked room, no janitors or houseboys are allowed in. No self-respecting intelligence officer is going to do mundane house cleaning, so the piles of stuff grow and grow.

  At two o'clock in the morning, the duty Intelligence Officer is a male lieutenant. The cute female intelligence officers are only assigned to work in the daytime so the senior wing staff officers can ogle them. This male chauvinism is another less-than-good deal for us Sewer Doers. We are having a hard time getting through to this guy.

  Jack says, "I tell you I picked up an ECM cut of a Firecan near tonight's target area in Laos. They nearly nailed us."

  The intel weenie replies, "There are no Firecans in Laos. Seventh Air Force HQ in Saigon is quite adamant about that."

  Jack presses on, "I heard the rattle, I identified the signal, the ECM scope correlated the pattern. As we orbited, the strobe pointed to the same point on the ground."

  The lieutenant is unmoved. "You must have been mistaken, sir. There are no Firecans in Laos."

  Now we are well into the Crazy Jack mode. Jack, his voice rising, fires again, almost shouting.

  "Listen here, Sonny. I was tracing Firecans when you were still in three-cornered pants. If I say there's one in Laos, it's because I'm sure there is."

  The veins are standing out on Jack's neck. This green intel guy has just insulted Jack's professional expertise as an EWO. If he had called Jack's mother a whore, the impact wouldn't have been worse. I am getting worried that this debriefing may end up in Fist City.

  I interject, "Lieutenant, your job is to write up the after-action report as we tell it to you. All you need to do is to put down that we think a Firecan radar in Laos illuminated us tonight. If you do, Saigon will schedule an ECM recce bird to check it out. End of story. Then we can all go to the bar."

  The lieutenant sticks to his guns. "Saigon says, "No Firecans in Laos" and that's what I have to report. I can call them on the secure phone and you can hear it for yourself, sir."

  Jack is getting apoplectic. I fear violence in the intel shop. But by now, I have gotten the picture. I'm not dumb, just slow. The wing intelligence officers have been told to not forward any reports of a Firecan in Laos. If they do, the current Rules of Engagement require that the slow, vulnerable gunships be withdrawn from the danger zone. If Spectre doesn't work the trails, hundreds of trucks will escape getting racked up on the combat tally board. This will be a blow to the war effort, but a bigger blow to the staff officers who have sold the expensive gunship program to the brass. Also, the brass won't be able to brief the media in Saigon about all the trucks the USAF is killing every night.

  I tell Crazy Jack, "Jack, let me handle this alone. I'll meet you at the bar."

  Jack spurts a further protest but I continue.

  "If you don't haul ass right now, I'll never let you fly the jet again."

  That does it and Jack stalks out, slamming the security door behind him. I turn to the intel officer and stare him right in the eye, trying not to blink. I strive to speak in cold, measured tones, knowing that the underlying fury will burn through.

  "Lieutenant, you can put whatever the hell you want in the after-action report. I have no control over what you transmit to Saigon. You can put in whatever you have been told to put in. To be more accurate, you can omit what you have been told to omit. However, there is a Firecan radar in southern Laos. I heard it and Jack identified it. If and when the Bad Guys link that radar to their guns and judging by the flak we took tonight, they have; there will be hell to pay with the Spectre gunships. There will be a trail of blood that leads from this shop all the way to Saigon. Is that clear?"

  I get back from the chagrined intel type, "Yes, sir."

  Now, it is my turn to stomp out. For once, I'm glad that this intel officer is male. I don't know if I would have been able to make that point as forcefully to one of his distaff counterparts. I walk to the bar by the light of the full moon, trying to shed some light on the difficulty of reconciling official policy with hard facts.

  ***

  It's two nights later and I'm at the Officers' Club, enjoying a rare night off and a rare steak. Man lives not by Thai food alone. I intend to wash the steak down with plenty of the adult beverage distilled in Lynchburg, Tennessee. I'm still steamed by Jack's and my inability to get the USAF command authority to admit that there is a Firecan radar in southern Laos. My brain has obsessed with this issue so intently, all I can think of is a child's ditty, suitably modified:

  "Firecan, Firecan,

  Burning bright,

  In the jungles

  Of the night."

  Credence probably won't make a hit out of that one, but I can't get the doggerel out of my head.

  My meal arrives, served by a cute, curvy Thai waitress in a long slinky dress. She is tightly wrapped in the kind of thin dress that covers all but reveals everything. I wonder how she gets bright Thai silk to cling like that. Her skin-tight dress begs my overheated imagination to mentally picture its contents. It displays everything she has. As she walks away, there is no doubt in my mind that there is nothing under that dress but her. At least that's what I want to believe, therefore it's true. To me, she's nude but covered with gossamer silk. Some things can be hidden in plain sight. I guess some people see only
what they want to see and others are blind to things they are told not to find.

  My beef and brown whisky meal is interrupted when a squadron mate sticks his head in the side door of the club.

  He yells, "Spectre is in­bound to crash on the runway."

  An AC-130 gunship has been hammered by anti-aircraft fire in Laos and is limping back to the base with two engines out, hydraulic system trouble, wounded men on board, and many holes in the airframe. The crew has radioed ahead to prepare the field for a crash landing. They want the fire crews and medical personnel ready and waiting.

  Everyone there dining piles into the squadron jeep and we make it to the perimeter of the airfield just in time. With no warning, in the dark we hear the grinding, sliding noise of sheet metal scraping on hard concrete, like a ten-second auto crash. The big turbo prop has landed wheels up without lights, grinding its soft belly away on the runway.

  I see a shower of sparks erupt into a raging fire as the wrecked airplane finally slides to a stop. The wing fuel tanks rupture and ignite, sending flames hundreds of feet straight up into the night sky. The inferno doesn't catch gradually but erupts instantly like a can of gasoline thrown on a campfire. I can make out the black outline of the AC-130, silhouetted against the flames with one wing broken down, the flat-bladed props twisted by the impact, and the wreckage skewed sideways off the runway into the adjacent mud.

  Helplessly, I watch as men frantically climb out the shattered cockpit windows, black stick figures running through the flames. Maybe some of the flight deck crew escapes, but if there was anyone in the cargo compartment, they are doomed to incineration. Now, the whole aircraft is engulfed and the base fire trucks have reached the crash scene. There is no wind tonight, allowing the flames and smoke to boil straight up. The crash crew stops close in front of the burning wreck, their fire truck silhouetted in black like Lucifer's chariot against the fires of Hell.

  Before the fire-smothering foam squirted from the truck has a chance to beat back the inferno, the dead gunship's ammunition starts cooking off, the cartridges detonating in the heat of the fire. A Spectre carries thousands of rounds of high explosive shells and the flames are consuming most of them. It sounds like the Devil's own popcorn popper as the rounds cook off in bursts of ten or twenty in close succession. The bullets fly in random directions out of the fire like crazed swarms of bees.