“There was a river that ran down from the northwest to the coast. Right at the coast was a ferry crossing, Ron Ferry. From thirty thousand feet I saw lights on the road. My target was actually further north. I said to my nav, ‘Bill, I can’t believe there are lights on the road down there. It’s got to be some kind of a trap. Should we go and take a look?’ ‘Let’s,’ Bill curtly replied. As we got closer, I suddenly saw muzzle flashes and two strings of lights. ‘They have radar, Bill,’ I said. He grunted into the intercom. They were twin 57s, two of them, one in front and one in the rear of the column. I jinked as the red-hot beer cans came streaking up toward us. I said to Bill, ‘There must be a bunch of trucks down there lined up at the ferry. We can’t just leave them.’ ‘No, we can’t,’ Bill responded in his usual curt manner. I looked over the situation, and Bill and I decided to come in from over the water, the Gulf of Tonkin, low level. And we’d toss the bombs in there and see what happens. We carried eight funny bombs, four internal and four external. We got out over the water and entered a steep dive. There was no way to tell altitude because the altimeter was always behind where you really were. But I had a string of trucks out there as a point of reference. As they got more and more level on my horizon, I leveled out. When I was about two miles from them, I pulled up in a four-G pull and started pickling off the bombs. Some fell short, some long. As I got about vertical, the red-hot beer cans started coming by. I rolled over to the water and out to sea, then up to twenty-five thousand feet. We could see what we’d done. There were trucks burning from one end of that line to the other. I tried to call the C-130 command ship over Laos to get some recce aircraft to take pictures, but there was no reply. We sat up there for nearly thirty minutes, watching them burn. We counted what we thought were twenty-seven individual fires, the most trucks we ever got in one pass. The North Vietnamese thought no one was going to get close to them with their radar controlled twin 57s. We fooled ’em.
“Then F-4s arrived in Thailand, and someone decided to let the F-4s kill the trucks at night and use the B-57s for close air support down south in the Delta. They moved us to Phan Rang. When we got there, the only airplanes at Phan Rang were four squadrons of F-100s. They didn’t know anything about B-57s and quickly let us know that they didn’t care for us. Our new wing commander at Phan Rang didn’t know anything about B-57s either. He was a Hun (F-100) driver. But we were in his command. The Hun guys called us multiengine bomber pilots. In the Officers’ Club, they had their end of the bar, we had ours. They drew a line across the bar. Nobody met in between. The first mission I flew out of Phan Rang was a four-ship formation. Each of us carried twenty-one 260-pound frags (fragmentation bombs), four cans of napalm, four rocket pods, and the guns. We’re in the Delta. When we got to the FAC, I told him to clean up a great big place on his windshield. FACs use a grease pencil to record your ordnance, and they cross it off as you expend it. The FAC said, ‘OK, I’m ready.’
Ho Chi Minh Trail, 1967. Ban Karai and Mu Gia passes were bombed by B-52s and Thailand-based fighters throughout the war. Aces and Aerial Victories 2.
“‘We got eighty-four 260-pound frags, sixteen 750-pound napes (napalm canisters), ninety-two 2.75-inch rockets, 2,320 rounds of 20 mike-mike, and 4,800 rounds of fifty-caliber. And I’ll give you two hours over the target.’ There was silence. I guess he was still scribbling on his canopy. Then he said, awestruck, ‘J——C——, there aren’t enough targets in the entire Delta for your ammo load.’
“A couple of days later I was on a two-ship monkey-killer mission near the Cambodian border—monkey killer because we couldn’t see what we were bombing in the jungle. On the way back, I still had my guns. I was yelling for a FAC to find me a gun target because I hated to take ammunition home. I finally got a target north of Phan Rang. After I checked in with the FAC, a flight of F-100s also checked in. They had taken off from Phan Rang. I said, ‘Do you guys mind if I go in first because I am kind of short on fuel?’ One of the Huns said, ‘No, go right ahead. We still have our tanks. We couldn’t do anything anyhow. We’ll hold overhead at about two thousand.’ I said, ‘You better hold a little higher than that.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I fly a vertical pattern.’ ‘Bullshit,’ was the response from the Hun driver.
“I had a new guy on my wing. He was supposed to be pretty good, from what I heard, so I thought I’d give him a test. When the FAC fired a rocket into the target area, I was right on the tail of that rocket. I started firing two seconds after that rocket hit—fired, pulled straight up for a couple of thousand feet, rolled on my back, and held it there and flew back over the target, inverted. When I was at the other side of the target, I pulled it straight down and reattacked from the same direction as before. Normally, everyone would pull off the target to the left. On my second pass I looked for my wingman. I looked to the left—I was expecting him to be there. I didn’t see him. I looked right, and I didn’t see him. I happened to look in my mirrors, and there he was right behind me, inverted. He was as good as they said. We made eight passes.
“At the bar that night these four Hun drivers came in. One said, ‘Guys, you wouldn’t believe what I saw those damn bomber pilots doing,’ pointing at us. ‘Well, what’d they do?’ one of the others finally said. ‘They were out there strafing and flying a rectangular pattern.’ ‘They’ll get their asses killed flying those rectangular patterns,’ another Hun driver volunteered. The first pilot answered, ‘No, you don’t understand. This is a vertical rectangular pattern.’ We had impressed some of the single-engine guys with our acrobatics.
“The wing commander finally flew with me on a ride to get some experience. The target was over on the coast—a Viet Cong regiment. At the briefing he wore his G suit. I said, ‘Sir, it won’t do you any good. There is no place to plug it in.’ He said, ‘I know. I don’t need a G suit in a B-57.’ I thought, ‘You’ll learn.’ Anyhow, we got to the target, and I made several bomb runs and dropped our napalm. I was pulling four to five Gs, but it didn’t last long. Then the FAC gave us a strafe target. On the first pass, my wingman discovered his guns wouldn’t fire. I said, ‘You orbit and watch for ground fire and tell me where it’s coming from, and I’ll go in and strafe.’ I flew a constant five-G strafe pattern. I had trimmed the airplane up for five Gs. When I got my pipper on the target, I pushed forward a bit and fired for two seconds, then I went back to five Gs. When we got into debriefing, we gave Intelligence the BDA the FAC had given us, and how many dive-bomb and strafe passes we made. I said, ‘I made six strafing passes.’ The wing commander looked over at me and said, ‘No, Captain Rider, you only made one pass.’ I said, ‘No, Sir. I made six. You were asleep after the first one.’ He had blacked out after the first firing pass. After a while, they found that the F-4s that were supposed to take our job on the trail couldn’t hit the trucks. They sent us back up north. It was much further from Phan Rang than from Da Nang. If we couldn’t make it home we landed at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand or Udorn. We were doing good work up there, and the FACs loved us. The ground fire was mostly 37mm and ZSUs (Soviet-made mobile antiaircraft systems). The ZSU looks like a fire hose with green tracers—unbelievable how much stuff they can crank out. Anyway, someone found out that the wing commander didn’t believe our reports, and before he submitted them to Saigon, he’d divide our numbers by four. My squadron commander found out about that and went over and raised hell. ‘If you don’t believe we are doing anything,’ he told him, ‘why don’t you crawl into the backseat and go up there with us one night.’ Since he had flown with me before, I ended up with him in the backseat again. Phan Rang had the 101st Airborne on the perimeter to protect the base. They had a whole bunch of artillery and fired all night on suspected VC areas. There were specific egress areas to keep us from flying through their artillery fire. Our departure took us east, then south, then up the coast to Cam Ranh Bay, and then inland. It wasted about three thousand pounds of fuel. I took off toward the east. As soon as I got the gear in the well, I turned off the external lights so the to
wer couldn’t see me and made a steep 270, heading northwest. I flew right across the 101st compound and shook all the grunts out of bed and headed up a valley toward Da Lat. Once out of the valley I turned north.
“The wing commander in back didn’t like my maneuver. ‘What are you doing?’ he said, when I turned off the lights and did the 270. ‘Saving three thousand pounds of fuel, Sir.’ He didn’t say anything else. Over Laos, I checked in with the FAC, and he had a string of trucks on a road he wanted me to take care of. He had a nightscope and could see them. He dropped two log flares on either side of the road. The flares just lie there and burn for a long time. Then he told me how many funny bombs north or south of the flares the trucks were. We used the dispersal pattern of the funny bomb as a measurement. There was a string of 37s about a mile apart on each side of the road. On my first pass they were hammering at me from both sides. They were shooting at sound. I pulled straight up after each pass and hung inverted, zero Gs over the top, until the FAC told me where to put the next one, and I went straight down and lobbed the next one. We finally got rid of all of our funny bombs. The target wasn’t good enough to strafe, so I called the FAC and told him I had my boss along and would like the BDA. His reply was, ‘I can’t give you your BDA right now. I’m busy.’ I said, ‘I have my boss along, and he wants our BDA.’ The FAC got the message from my tone of voice, so he said, ‘Take two trucks destroyed and ten secondary explosions.’ He had an A-26 coming in which he was working and who was following the trucks down the road. We orbited for a while. The longer we orbited, the more trucks were blowing up because the bomblets from the funny bombs got inside of them, and eventually it got hot enough in there, and the stuff they were carrying cooked off. We had about eight trucks burning and blowing up, and secondaries going off all over the place.
“At home we had our standard intelligence debriefing. When Intelligence asked me about ground fire, I said, ‘Light and inaccurate.’ ‘Light, hell,’ was my wing commander’s comment. ‘That whole damn sky was full of that stuff—57mm, too.’ I had to correct him. ‘No, Sir, 37mm. They come out in clips of four, so we know it’s 37mm.’ Next question, BDA. ‘Two trucks destroyed, and ten secondaries,’ I reported. He said, ‘Bullshit.’ I said, ‘Sir, we must report what the FAC gives us.’ He jumped up and down over that. After that mission we were his B-57s.
“I never took any hits, and I killed more trucks than most. I tried to fly smart, not stupid and get killed. My normal tactics at night against a well-defended target were to get directly overhead at about eight thousand feet, roll inverted and pull the nose down to the target, drop my bomb at about five thousand feet, and pull up into a vertical climb. Just before I ran out of airspeed, I would pull the nose down to level and roll upright. This faked out the gunners, because they expected me to be off to the side of the target. I was only vulnerable in the first part of my pull-up.
“We were taking off about midnight to hit a truck park way up in Laos. I went around the airplane with the armorer and checked the fuses on the bombs for proper settings and the arming wires for proper routing. Then I spread my maps and showed them where we were going and what we were supposed to hit. We were in the northeast monsoon and had forty-knot winds down the runway. I flew my usual unorthodox night departure over the 101st compound up the valley to Da Lat. We stirred up a hornet’s nest when we got to our target. The flak was thick, and when it got close you could hear it popping like popcorn. When we left, we still had our 20 mike-mike. I called the airborne command post, a C-130, and he sent us down to Tchepone. A FAC had spotted some trucks at a ferry crossing. We contacted the FAC to coordinate altitudes before we got into his area. We used a secret base altitude which changed every twelve hours so the enemy couldn’t listen in and find out our altitudes and set the fuses on his shells. That night the base altitude was eight thousand feet. The FAC said he was at base plus four, meaning he was at twelve thousand feet. I wondered what he was doing up there. I said, ‘You must mean minus four.’ ‘No, plus four,’ he repeated. His flares were floating so high that they did not illuminate the ground, and I had to circle until I got their reflection on the river before I could see. I asked, ‘Why are you at plus four?’ He replied, ‘This thing won’t climb any higher.’
Ed Rider posing in front of his bomb-laden B-57, 1968. F. Rider.
“Bill, my navigator, suddenly piped up and said, ‘Bingo fuel,’ the minimum fuel we needed to get home plus a two thousand–pound reserve. I ignored him. A few guns were shooting at our sound but not coming close. I knew there were no radar-controlled guns because otherwise we would have been tracked and fired on accurately while we were circling. I finally got it worked out and caught the ferry in the flare reflection on the river. I rolled in, firing a three-second burst in a thirty-degree dive from 1,500 feet. The muzzle flashes lit us up like a Christmas tree, saying, ‘Shoot me.’ And they did. I knew why the FAC was flying so high. I pulled five Gs trying to get away from them, going straight up.
“The FAC was encouraging, saying that he had seen lots of hits on the ferry with his nightscope, so I got set up to go again. Bill didn’t think it was such a good idea. There were lots of guns protecting the ferry, most of them twin-barrel 37mm. The red-hot beer cans came in strings of eight. On my second pass, I had to use the same heading as on the first in order to see the ferry—not a smart thing to do. When our muzzle flashes lit us up again, I had the feeling that if I pulled up as usual, every gun would be aimed at our recovery path. Instead, I turned ninety degrees and continued at low altitude with a low power setting until I was far enough away from the guns. Then I pulled up. The sky behind us was filled with a spectacular display of fireworks. The FAC was jumping up and down because we had torched off some of the trucks on the ferry and on the south shore of the river, where the ferry was resting. We could approach from any direction and still see the target. My nav was getting insistent about our fuel situation—‘Bingo minus two,’ Bill said. Our two thousand–pound reserve was gone.
“After two more passes, we headed for home. Relieved of most of its fuel, the B-57 climbed like a homesick angel. In short order we were passing thirty-five thousand feet and we had to tighten our oxygen masks and start pressure breathing. The B-57 was old and had poor pressurization. As we passed forty-five thousand feet, we had to forcefully breathe out and relax and let the pressure blow up our lungs to breathe in. At fifty-three thousand feet we were above 95 percent of the atmosphere. At that altitude, the engines used little fuel. When we arrived over Pleiku, we were 150 nautical miles from home and had eight hundred pounds of fuel remaining. Normally, when we land with a two thousand–pound fuel reserve, that is considered an emergency. But I had done it many times before and was only concerned about being able to taxi to the ramp. To expedite our descent from fifty-three thousand feet, I shut down the right engine because we would be flying a left-hand traffic pattern. I flew a Mach .84 descent, which meant that it got progressively steeper as I entered hotter, denser air at the lower altitudes. I let down inside the 101st artillery donut at Phan Rang, and once inside the donut I extended the speed brakes. At five hundred knots, it’s like running into a brick wall. Our shoulder harnesses locked as we were thrown forward in our seats. I pushed the nose down and crossed the end of the runways at ninety degrees at about eight thousand feet. Then I did a 270-degree split S, leveling at fifteen hundred feet, heading down the runway; got an air start on my dead engine; and landed.
“There were many problems unique to flying in Vietnam. Call signs, security, and the rules of engagement were just three of many. We always used the same call sign. Ours, in the 8th Bomb Squadron, was Yellowbird. Our sister squadron’s, the 13th, was Redbird. Anyone listening to us knew immediately who we were and how many bombs we carried. There was a ferry crossing near Tchepone in Laos. Sometimes we’d drop our bombs, and they wouldn’t shoot at us until we told the FAC that it was our last bomb. Then the whole world would open up. I knew the North Vietnamese were listening to our radi
o chatter. One night, I went there alone as usual. When I was in the area I came up on freq and said, ‘Yellowbird, flight check.’ And I called out two, three, four, and so on to eight, changing my voice every time I called out a number. Then I called the FAC, this is Yellowbird flight with a flight of eight. We are loaded with one thousand–pounders and are after those guns. The FAC told me where to put my bombs, and I hit both sides of the ferry crossing. He asked me about the rest of my flight. I told him they were holding high, waiting for the guns to open up. Then I went in, dropped my remaining bombs, and did some strafing. Never got shot at.
“Security. We listened to Hanoi Hannah. One day, she said, ‘It is really too bad, but last night we shot down tail number 1234’—whatever it was, I can’t remember. We checked if that aircraft was missing. Maintenance said it was way down at the end of the flight line, behind the hangar, being washed. It wasn’t on the ramp any more. Somebody was calling in our tail numbers, and when one was missing, they thought it was lost.
“Many rules of engagement were stupid. We had a rule that we couldn’t bomb dikes and dams. Guess where the North Vietnamese put their guns? One day, I was working with a Fast FAC over North Vietnam—a two-seat F-100, their call sign always was Misty. We were after some trucks. He was holding away from the target because a 57mm gun was right on the dike. Every time I rolled in, the stuff popped all around me. Then I rolled in from twelve thousand feet, going nearly straight down. I dropped a one thousand–pounder, and after I pulled out of my dive I called the FAC and told him I had an inadvertent release. The FAC said, ‘Oh, well. By coincidence it hit right in the gun pit.’”
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 34
