“We were pulling 8 1/2 Gs. He was flying at 580 knots, and I was flying at 680 or 690. I fired three hundred rounds in that burst. One round caught the top of the left wing and may have punched out the fuel line and gone through the wing and possibly penetrated the tank that was underneath the wing and set it on fire. That fire acted as an anchor on his left wing, and he immediately slid into flat spin. It was like someone grabbed hold of his left wing. He was on his third spin when he hit the ground. I don’t think he had a chance to get out. I went through the fire from his airplane. My windshield and left intake were covered with melted aluminum. My engine started coughing and sputtering. I came back to idle to let the engine clear out. I turned for the water. Somebody else had seen the MiG explode and called me and said, ‘Good shot.’ As I turned for the water, I thought I wasn’t going to keep the engine running. I probably got aluminum on the rotor blades. Then an F-105 pulled up on my right wing. I thought it was John Flynn, my lead. We were talking but not making any sense.
“What happened when I went after the second MiG was the lead MiG ran across John’s nose and came after me and started shooting at me. I wasn’t worried about it because we were going faster than they were, and I didn’t think he’d get a lead on me. But John pulled in behind him. John didn’t have a gun sight, as I had suspected, and he was trying to shoot him down without a sight. He didn’t. I was sinking lower and lower, to about one thousand feet above the ground. I was thinking I might have to eject. I took the gun-camera film out and put it in my flak vest. Then I reestablished communication with the guy flying to my right, and it turned out it wasn’t John Flynn but Larry Wiggins, our number three. Larry thought I was his number four. There is a lot of confusion in combat.
Gun-camera film of Ralph Kuster’s MiG-17 kill, June 3, 1967. R. Kuster.
“About the time I was ready to eject, the engine started working again, and I was able to hold the airspeed and altitude. But I knew at a thousand feet I was flak bait. When I got to 315 knots I started climbing. When we went over the harbor at Haiphong, where I knew they had a lot of 85mm guns, I figured we’d get shot down for sure. But I guess they thought the raid was over and had left their guns for tea. I flew over the water, pretty low on fuel. My engine was humming along real good. We climbed up to twelve thousand feet. I called on guard channel and said, ‘I am about out of fuel, and I am going to punch out near one of the navy ships.’ Some KC-135 tanker driver heard me and said, ‘Hang on, I may have some fuel for you.’
“I said, ‘Don’t waste your time. I won’t have time to wait for you to get here.’ I pointed the airplane south and turned on my air to air radar and swung it back and forth. I picked up a target. It was the tanker, way up north in the Gulf of Tonkin. When he was about ten miles out, I swung into a hard turn, right behind him, and right on the boom. He started pumping gas immediately. After two thousand pounds, I slid off to let Larry have some fuel. I looked down and realized we were right back over Haiphong Harbor. We were still over water but within easy 85mm range. Larry was on the tanker taking on fuel. I called the tanker pilot. ‘Hey, turn this thing to the right, or we’ll be in China soon.’ He said, ‘I can’t turn while we are refueling except in an emergency.’ “I called him back and said, ‘Bend it around to the right. He can stay on.’ He rolled it into the standard KC-135 30-degree bank. It took forever to make a 180. I said, ‘That won’t do. Bend it around. Put it into a 45-degree emergency turn.’ He bent it around. Larry sat right on his tail and took on four thousand pounds. Then I rolled in and took on a couple more thousand pounds, and we wrote that tanker crew up for saving two F-105s. We would have lost those airplanes if the tanker had sat around in the orbit where it was supposed to have been.
“In the meantime, John, my lead, also came out in the gulf, low on fuel because we were using afterburner a lot. Somewhere, he found a tanker and the three of us managed to join up. We were way behind the rest of the formation because they hit the target and headed for home fast. They were about two hundred to three hundred miles ahead of us. We were flying along, feeling good. When we were abreast of Route Pack 2, I called the ground radar and informed him that we would turn across Route Pack 2 into Laos. ‘No, you can’t do that,’ he responded. ‘They have SA-2s in there and 85mm.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll spread out and turn our music boxes (ECM pods) on.’ The radar guy said, ‘They have guns in there. They’ll shoot at you.’ So what’s new? We flew across Route Pack 2 without incident. John was feeling kind of bad because the MiG had gotten away from him. Larry went over the field and made a victory roll. I followed and made two rolls to let them know we got two MiGs.
“I had my film in my flak vest. Larry left his in the airplane. The film guy came out to meet us, and I took him by his shirt collar and said, ‘There is a MiG kill on this film, and if you lose this film, I’ll come to kill you.’ They took care of my film. They lost Larry’s gun-camera film, and Larry was the one who blew his MiG up. Maintenance inspected the engine on my aircraft and cleaned the melted aluminum from the MiG off the windshield and the engine air intakes, and it was ready to go again. Two days later the airplane was shot down. That MiG kill cost me eight hundred dollars. I bought drinks in the Officers’ Club. That didn’t cost much, maybe fifty dollars. I bought a round of drinks at the NCO Club, and that cost me about two hundred fifty dollars. And I bought a round of drinks at the Enlisted Club, and we drank until about three o’clock in the morning. That cost me over five hundred dollars. I wasn’t fit to fly the next day.
“The day I was shot down, June 30, 1967, I was number fifteen out of a flight of sixteen aircraft. I was getting close to going home. Our ingoing altitude was 18,000 feet. Above 8,000 feet, the flak was pretty low. SA-2s started coming up at us, but they went all over the sky. We were using ECM pods and a staggered pod formation, staggered horizontally and vertically by 500 feet between airplanes. I flew at 18,000, my wingman would fly at 17,500 feet, and so on. With a six-teen-ship formation, we were spread across the sky for about two miles horizontally and 2,000 feet vertically. It was a nice, steady bomb run at 16,000 to 18,000 feet. Of course, on clear days the 85s could fire visually. The SA-2 Guideline missile doesn’t guide for six seconds or so—until then, it accelerates. When the rocket booster drops off, the guidance fins deploy, and that’s when the missile starts to follow operator commands. The SAM radar operator has an eight-by-eight-degree window on his screen, so a sixteen-ship formation with ECM pods denies him the target information he needs to guide the missile. Our loss rate to SAMs really dropped when we went to ECM pods, but it took discipline to fly such a formation.
“As long as you could see the telephone pole (SA-2 missile), you had nothing to worry about. With the spread in our formation, the missiles flew through and by us and exploded harmlessly. If the SAM was a threat, the missile would turn to a pinpoint in your field of vision. You knew it was heading for you. To evade the missile, you turned into it, down and up, forcing the missile into a turn it couldn’t follow. The missile would lose energy, become unguided, and explode harmlessly. Takhli, our sister wing, insisted on staying with the twenty-second popup maneuver for bomb delivery instead of using ECM pods and the pod formation. The North Vietnamese started picking off their number fifteen and sixteen aircraft two or three times in a row. Then PACAF (Headquarters Pacific Air Forces, Hickam AFB, Hawaii) finally ordered Takhli to use the pod formation. ECM pods were scarce at the time. We heard some F-4 wing didn’t believe ECM pods were useful and weren’t using theirs, so I grabbed a C-130 one day, went there, and brought all their pods to Korat. Every one of our aircraft then carried an ECM pod.
“Our target was the Thai Nguyen rail yard. This was the one day I had brought along my camera because I thought it would be a no-sweat mission. Before, I always felt I would be too busy flying to stay alive to take along a camera. I took pictures of KC-135 tankers, of SAM launches, of two MiG-15s who flew underneath us, and of the 85mm batteries cooking off below. As I came in over the target, I fe
lt a thump. I looked left and right, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I continued my bomb run. Then something hit underneath, jolting the aircraft, and I knew I was hit. I quickly lost my electrical system and radio. I suspected I had a fuselage fire. I had never known an F-105 to blow up, so I didn’t worry about that, and I figured I had time to get out of the area.
“I broke away from the formation and ran along the east side of Thud Ridge. Then I discovered I couldn’t come out of afterburner. I thought, ‘Hell, this airplane is going to run out of gas.’ Smoke was coming into the cockpit. I shut off the air-conditioning, and I opened the auxiliary air vent. Then I started losing my hydraulic system. The F-105 had three systems. Two are redundant, and I knew the second one would carry me for a while. Instead of following the route out across Thud Ridge and over Yen Bai, I cut straight across the valley, and I stayed low and swung up when I got to the mountains. My wing-man was still with me, both of us going supersonic in afterburner. I knew the way the airplane would go down with a fuselage fire. The fire burns through the hydraulic lines, and when the hydraulic lines give out the horizontal stabilizer tilts up. The stabilizer was aerodynamically loaded, so that when the hydraulics failed, air resistance would cause it to go up and throw the nose of the airplane down. When the nose dropped, you were going to get thrown against the top of the canopy—a real neck stretcher. And you couldn’t bail out, because when you activated the ejection seat, the canopy was going to pick up forward velocity and hit you in the butt and crack every vertebra in your body.
“I was going supersonic and I thought, ‘Boy, if the horizontal stabilizers go straight up at this speed, I’m really going to get a neck stretching.’ What to do? I couldn’t shut the engine down because I would crash. I rode it out. I thought, ‘If I take her up high into thin air, then the aerodynamic forces on the wing would be less, and I wouldn’t get such a neck bend, and I might be able to eject.’ I pointed the nose up, and she went up to forty-four thousand feet like a skyrocket. I was cruising supersonic at forty-four thousand feet. I tried to get the attention of my wingman. I waved at him to get him to join up on me. He was an ADC pilot and didn’t understand my hand signals. Finally, he pulled alongside of me, trying to figure out what was going on. I tried giving him SAC signals with my hands, telling him what was going on. He wasn’t reading any of them, either. The airplane flew for ten minutes. Then I ran out of gas. My wingman still had 650 gallons of fuel in his bomb bay tank, as did I, but I couldn’t get to mine without an electrical pump. When my number two hydraulic system gave out, I kicked out the ram air turbine, which activated the third hydraulic system. It didn’t have as much hydraulic fluid as the other two, but it would run for a while. Then the engine came back to idle, or it flamed out and it was windmilling, I don’t know which. I started losing altitude, but as near as I could tell the engine was still turning at 30 percent.
“I tried slowing her down as I lost altitude, trying to get to ejection speed, to around 200 knots. I had it down to about 220. I came through twenty thousand feet, and there was a big thunderstorm right in front of me, too wide to get around. I thought about circling down to a lower altitude, but when I looked down, I realized no matter what I did, I would come down in the mountains. I had come one hundred miles in ten minutes. I couldn’t see any roads or villages. There was a river down there, and the big thunderstorm was on the other side of the mountain range. I didn’t want to bail out in that thunderstorm. I had my camera with me. The whole time I was trying to figure out how I could bail out with the camera. I couldn’t come up with a way. As soon as I got back to Korat, some guy said to me, ‘Why didn’t you take the film out?’ I didn’t think of it at the time. She was at 220 knots, nose heavy. I couldn’t trim her up because I had no trim, no electricity. I tried to figure out how to eject. Obviously, I had to hold the stick back as I got out, or I would come off the seat as she tried to go down pulling negative Gs. How was I going to do that? I knew my right hand was more coordinated than my left. I would hold the stick with my right hand and squeeze the trigger with my left, and I would pop my right hand back into the seat and get out that way. I thought that was the best way. I ejected. I remember seeing the canopy floating by, the fire in the bottom of the cockpit from the charge that blew my seat out, and the nose of the airplane as it went down and away from me. All that seemed to happen very slowly.
“I sat up there, looking at the world, thinking, ‘Well, it’s not so bad.’ By the time I settled in on this nice ride, the butt-snapper went pow, and I flew out into space. About that time, I felt my right arm just about being torn off at the shoulder. ‘Hell, what is that?’ I thought. I looked over at my right arm, and I was still holding onto the seat handle. I shoved the seat away from me and started tumbling end over end. I had ejected at twenty-two thousand feet, so I got into a skydiving pose. Unfortunately, I ended up looking at the sky instead of the ground. What to do? I pulled in an arm and a leg, and I flipped over. I brought them back out straight, and I was again looking at the sky. I thought, ‘The next time, I’ll kick them out sooner.’ It worked. I was stretched out, looking at the ground, trying to figure out where to land. The automatic timer opened the parachute. The opening shock was in my groin. It really hurt. I looked down at my legs. I had a bottle of water in a lower pocket of my flight suit. The zipper was open. I remember seeing that bottle floating out of my pocket. I tried to grab it, but it floated away.
“The next thing I was supposed to do was deploy the survival kit and the life raft. I pulled the lanyard, and the pack didn’t open, but the life raft decided to open up. I heard a poof, and the orange life raft started forcing its way out of a tiny opening in the survival pack. I finally got the life raft out, and it floated up into the parachute. I was carrying a long bolo knife, which I had one of the natives make me at the jungle survival school at Clark out of an automobile spring. He had beaten the knife out over a charcoal fire. The reason I liked it was because I could go through a two-inch piece of bamboo with one chop. The blade was heavy at the end and light toward the back. I pulled the knife out of its scabbard and stabbed the life raft a couple of times and then cut it off. Poof. Off it went into space.
“I looked around and saw I was going to miss the ridge. I was two miles or so into Laos, a small piece of Laos that cut into North Vietnam. I could see a big tree, and I determined I was going to come down right in the middle of the tree. I blew up my Mae West life preserver and put my arms across my chest. I saw the tree rise up on my right. Somehow, the wind blew me over, and I came down beside the tree. The slope of the mountain was a steep forty-five degrees, but it felt much steeper than that. I tried to figure out how to land on the side of a mountain. They didn’t teach that in survival school. I decided to hit the mountain sideways, extending my right leg, keeping my left leg up, and throwing myself into the mountain. It worked perfectly, except that I bounced off the mountain into space. I tumbled down the mountain and stopped with a jerk. The parachute had caught the tree and jerked me off the mountainside, anchoring me to the tree. The tree saved my life. I tested all my fingers and toes. I did a push-up off the mountain. To my right and left I saw pine trees. The elephant grass was three to four feet high. I unhooked the chute and sat down. I got out one of my radios (I had three with me and six batteries) and tried calling my wingman. I never reached him, and he finally flew away.
“I looked at my watch. I had been ten minutes in the air before I bailed out. I was in the parachute for fifteen minutes before I hit the ground. On the ground I would be seventeen minutes, as it turned out. When my wingman left, I thought I saw a clearing on top of the ridge. If I got to that clearing, it would make it easier for a helicopter to get in and pick me up. I figured I’d climb up there and wait. I started up the side of the mountain. I stayed in the path I had made when I tumbled down. The elephant grass was as thick as my thumb and got hooked on my boots every step I took. I chopped at it with my bolo knife to free myself. I finally got myself up to the tre
e in which my chute got tangled. I looked to the right, and there was no opening, only more trees. But there was an opening to my left. So I made my way past the tree. Suddenly, I noticed I was walking but not getting anywhere. I seemed to be going deeper into the grass instead of making forward progress. I laid down my radio and helmet and bent over to look into the thick grass. I saw the tops of two black boots sticking out of the grass. I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I wiggled my feet. The boots were on my feet. I refocused my eyes downward and found I was about 250 feet up in the air on a thick layer of grass matting. I had walked off the cliff onto a carpet of dried grass. I knew I couldn’t use my feet. I thought, If I was in quicksand, I would swim out on my back.’ I got on my back and kind of swam off the grass until I was sure I was on solid ground again.
“It was a hell of a place for a chopper to put down his jungle penetrator, so I decided to go back to my initial landing place. I started down the hill. Every time I took a step, I slid a couple of inches and got locked up in that elephant grass. I rolled down sideways. Eventually, I ended up at the exact place where I started. About the time I got there, I heard an A-1 Sandy (a heavily armed, single-engine, rescue-support aircraft) coming into the area. I got one of my radios out and called him on guard channel. He said, ‘We have a chopper coming in. He should be here in a few minutes. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can spot where you are.’ He flew around, trying to spot me. I said, ‘I am trained as an FAC. Why don’t you let me direct you?’
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 29
