Thud Ridge

by Jacksel Markham Broughton

  I thought that perhaps the drama had ended for the day, but I was wrong. The strangest little drama that I have ever been exposed to occurred during the next few moments. I have gone back over it time after time. I have listened to the magnetic tape from the minature Japanese tape recorder so that I could reconstruct these wild minutes back on the ground. I don’t know what happened to Don. I don’t know what he did or why. All I can do is relate what I saw and heard and try to fit the pieces together from what I now in retrospect can remember of my somewhat nervous, horribly intelligent little doctor friend. My friend who should have been teaching young men in the classroom, but who instead felt that he should be herding a 49,000-pound monster around the skies of North Vietnam at 600 knots in this crummiest of all so-called wars.

  When we figured that we had Geeno out of the bag, we headed back up the Ridge, planning to turn west at the north end and beat a track for the Red River and thence south to a tanker and home. Rod was still on my wing like glue and as we rolled clear of the flak from the Ridge, Don and Bing were on the right side and together, and everything should have been OK. We were still moving around; that flak from the Ridge could still reach us, and we all knew that there were plenty of Migs still capable of giving us trouble. I rolled about 20 degrees to the left and gained a few hundred feet, then dropped the nose and let it fall back to the right as I kicked in a little rudder to make the bird slide slightly sideways in an uncoordinated maneuver calculated to hamper the tracking activities of any gunners looking at me. Rod moved in the same general plane, but crossed his controls with a different degree of emphasis and timing so that while we moved together, we presented different, uncoordinated targets. If you fly smoothly or play the show formation game, you help the gunners solve their problem.

  As I came back to the approximate track I had left only seconds before, I automatically looked to the right to check the element, and I saw Don’s nose start gradually down while Bing held his wing spacing. As Don’s nose dropped, his speed increased and he pulled abreast and then slightly ahead of me. It was a strange move, and he made no radio transmission. (I did not realize it at the time, but replaying the tape later, I found that in all that melee of voices, Don had not spoken once since we had started down the Ridge. A good wingman or element lead doesn’t have to talk to get the job done, and it is ideal if he keeps quiet unless he has something important to pass to the other members of the flight, but there had been an, awful lot of calls made in the hassle and the odds were that some of them should have been Don’s calls.) Suddenly, the multiple ejector rack, better known as the MER, a big piece of metal to which the bombs are attached, left the belly of his aircraft smoothly and cleanly, indicating that he had jettisoned it from the cockpit. This was weird in that his bombs were already gone, and his tanks were gone, and while the MER is a slight additional drag factor, there are only a couple of reasons why you would drop it. The first would be a situation where the bombs were hung up and refused to release from the MER. If everything else fails, you can get rid of the load by pickling the MER and all, and the entire load of bombs plus the rack goes in one big, inaccurate blob. This was obviously not the reason for his action. The other reason for getting rid of the MER would be to insure that the aircraft was absolutely clean of all outside garbage in the event you wanted every bit of maximum speed you could get, and Don was a speed man. It wasn’t a logical move, as the speed difference is not that significant, and the MER’s were a critical supply item. (We were even bringing bombs back when they were hung up or we couldn’t get them where we wanted to put them, to say nothing of the racks. The official line that there was no bomb shortage forced us to use various subterfuges to keep visitors from finding out the truth. At the same time, some of our high-level commanders were in a race with the Navy to see which could record the most flying hours. The result of all this was that we were at one time sending kids out to attack a cement and steel bridge with nothing but 20-millimeter cannon, which is like trying to knock down the Golden Gate Bridge with a slingshot. Stupid missions like that cost us aircraft and people.)

  Even as I was trying to figure out what was going on with Don, I instinctively rechecked my left side. You learn early in this game that you can’t afford to keep your head still in the cockpit and you can’t depend on even the best wingman in the world to do all of your looking for you. Almost without brain command, the head moves constantly, the eyes searching. As mine swung left, I saw the prettiest aircraft I have ever seen, and I have never seen another one like it. It was a Mig-21 in about a 40-degree dive approaching me from above in my eight o’clock position. He looked like he had rolled over from far above me, perhaps 25,000 or 30,000 feet, and pointed his charge earthward in a graceful screaming dive, and he was really moving. He went by me so fast I could have imagined that my engine had quit and that it was time to eject. As he streaked past, just off m.y wing tip and in complete control of this beautiful piece of machinery, I saw the most unusual paint job I have ever seen. The craft was painted several shades of gray in a scalloped pattern with the peaks of the scallops pointing upward toward the top of the aircraft. The paint blended beautifully with the sky and clouds, and was one of the most effective camouflage jobs I have ever seen. I know of nobody who paints their machines like this, but it would be an excellent idea. This guy was different; he was no run-of-the-mill North Vietnamese trainee. I couldn’t see his eyeballs, but I’m willing to bet that they were both round and blue. It was a bit reminiscent of Korea many years before when you could pick out the master attempting to herd his charges through their combat upgrading. When they failed to respond properly, you could almost hear him scream “Idiots!” and launch into a masterful pass of his own. I certainly hope that our management of statistics and stories does not delude us into believing that we have met and conquered the best of the world’s airmen. It just is not so, and the 10 to 1 kill ratio racked up by the Mig-21’s a bit later ought to make somebody do a bit of thinking. I am not talking about a bunch of clods in old beat-up Mig-17’s and Mig-15’s; I’m talking about good pilots in good machines. We have many very competent adversaries lying in the weeds, but that is another one of those unpleasant things that as an Air Force and as a Department of Defense we have cultivated a deaf ear for. We don’t like to hear anything that does not please us.

  He never batted an eye at me and I had already instinctively plugged in my burner and started a swing toward his tail as he passed rne. He was so far ahead, it was hopeless, but you try anyway. My head swung back to the right, and what I saw horrified me. In just the few seconds since I had last looked at him, Don had fired up his burner and accelerated to a position several thousand feet below and in front of me. Our mutual protection was gone, and what was worse, I could tell that he was’ still accelerating and pulling further away. Bing was fighting madly to stay on his wing, but Don was pulling away from him. What was he thinking? He was heading for a break in the lower layer of the undercast, but it was only a small hole and there were only a few feet of clear sky between those clouds and the ground. Suddenly I knew what that pretty Mig was after. He had Don and Bing spotted and with his speed and maneuverability, he was gracefully floating into a position to blast them.

  “OK, Kingpin three and four, you got one on your tail.” I got no acknowledgment. The interval between them and the Mig shortened. “Keep going to the left, Kingpins.” They were almost to the edge of the hole now, and he wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t change course. “Kingpin three and four, go full burner, he’s closing on your tail.”

  “Cactus three, break out and fall back there with Cactus four. He’s got a tank hung and can’t keep up.”

  Magnum had headed for the deck, but he was not yet free. “Back up, Magnum, we got Migs coming in again.”

  Probably the most confused man of all was Bing, and as they ducked under the cloud ledge, he knew things were very wrong. He was obliged to stay on his element leader’s wing, and his job was to protect his boss, but his boss was
taking him down into an almost certain trap, and his boss was eluding the protection Bing was offering. Bing had long since gone to full burner and had gone through the speed of sound in his chase. He was now at Mach 1.1 and still not closing when he thought that perhaps Don had lost the continuity of events and thought that he, Bing, was a Mig in pursuit.

  “Kingpin three, this is four back here on your wing—”

  “Magnum, a pair high at ten.”

  The thought flashed through my mind that perhaps Don had somehow become confused on his call sign, but that just doesn’t happen very often. “OK, the pair of Thuds that just went under the clouds—Mig on your tail—get back up here.” If the call sign had been a problem, there was no answer to prove it.

  “Flamingo—SAM launch. Take it down two.”

  “Magnum two, light your burner. Light your burner.”

  “Kingpin lead—Chicago lead. Has the mission been aborted?”

  All I needed was some confused radio chatter. “Chicago, it’s aborted.” Our fancy Mig was still visible as he approached the cloud deck, and I was after him in hopes that he would maneuver enough to allow me to get on him before he got three and four. I rolled a little left and dropped my nose to let my beast pick up all the speed I could get. I was sure glad I didn’t have to worry about Rod, he was right there. “OK, Kingpin two, there’s our Mig right down there. Let’s go twenty degrees to the left—he’s right at the base of the clouds—full burner now.”

  “Kingpin—Chicago. Say again, has the mission been aborted?” What in hell was the matter with that clod?

  “ABORT—ABORT—ABORT!” And shut up. “Roger, understand the mission is aborted?” Unbelievable. “That’s affirmative.”

  Our Mig blended with the clouds like he was invisible and then he disappeared under them. I knew I couldn’t catch him or get on him underneath that deck if I didn’t have him when he dropped through that hole. I had to bet that he would not find it to his liking down there in the haze and among his own gunners and would pop right back up through the layer and allow me to tap him as he emerged.

  “OK, Kingpin, out of burner. Let’s stay on top and see if we can pick him up.”

  “Magnum, take it to the right. Go hard left, Magnum, hard left now. Magnum two, rock your wings.” Magnum was slightly scrambled; little wonder.

  “Flapper heading zero two zero. SAM at ten o’clock.” “Cactus one, go left. Go left, burner now.” I was glad to see that Cactus was still in good shape as I was concerned over the straggler with the hung tank. This was no place to be a loner, and with Don in some obvious trouble, we couldn’t afford any further complications.

  “Kingpin one, how about tapping burner? I’m a bit steep and slow.” I was abusing my competent wingman and practically had him standing on his head. His only complaint was that he needed that after-burner power to stay there.

  “Kingpin two, you got lead, OK?” I was sort of standing on my head also and wanted to be sure he was with me. “Roger.” He was there. “OK, good boy.”

  We had picked up some altitude and then had let our birds fall off on a wing and drop back toward the clouds. This way we could keep our speed up and cover the entire area where I expected our Mig to pop back on top. “Let’s go back up again, Kingpin. He’s still down underneath it.” “Say again?”

  “He’s right down here underneath us, but he won’t come back up again.” Then up he came, right where we wanted him. We had plenty of speed, and we had a couple of thousand feet altitude on him. It was only about a 20-degree turn for me, and I was on him and closing fast from his eight o’clock. He didn’t see me at first and I don’t know if his ground controllers gave him the word or if he saw me when he made a little 20-degree check turn to the left. Regardless, he was plenty smart and realized that a pair of Thuds hurtling down on him was less than desirable. It was time for him to disengage and get out of there, and he wrapped his little beauty into a vertical 180-degree turn to the left and was gone. Just like that. I couldn’t come close to staying with him, and he was gone. It must be great to call the shots like that.

  As Bing had passed the top of the clouds, he had been doing Mach 1.2 and he caught a glimpse of Don through the wispy cloud and knew that he was finally closing on him. When you get one of these bombs going that speed, the process of slowing down could be as painful as the process of accelerating to that speed, and he yanked the power-, back to avoid overshooting his mysterious leader. He needed to get close to him and herd him out of there before they both bought a piece of the local real estate. As he raced through the bottom of the layer, he was blinded. The sun was down low in the west and it was richocheting off the rice paddies flooded with water like an orange and yellow searchlight focused on a mirror. It was worse than Bing had expected. They were low, dangerously low, and down in the range of even hand-held guns. The nose was still pointed down toward the paddies, and they were much too fast to be in a nose-down attitude and still pointed toward the ground. Collision with the ground was imminent and he couldn’t see where he was going. Bing did a great job in maintaining control of his craft, and anyone with lesser skill and determination could well have been finished right then and there. Where was Don?

  “A-RAAAH, A-RAAH, A-RAAH!” A stinking beeper, the loneliest and most pitiful cry in the world. A call for help that you most often can’t answer. A wail from men and women you don’t even know telling you their world has just been torn asunder. You can’t cry back, you can’t help, you can’t do a damn thing but save your own behind.

  “Kingpin three—this is four. Kingpin three, you still this frequency? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin lead, do you read four?”

  “Five by. Kingpin three, do you read lead?”

  “This is Kingpin four, how do you read lead?”

  “Loud and clear, how me?”

  Bing got his numbers and voices mixed up for a few seconds and let himself believe what he so much wanted to believe, what he knew he couldn’t believe. Had he found his squadron commander? Was that Don on the radio? Had this all been some horrible mistake that he had imagined? He almost jumped through the radio. “Rog, this three?”

  “Lead.”

  “Three, how do you read?”

  Rod was still flying the perfect wing, protecting me as I hoped against hope that I could find Don and knowing that I had to get Bing back in the fold before we had another beeper. “Kingpin lead, we got bogies, far out at ten o’clock.” I didn’t have to tell him to keep track of them. He knew that I was down too low over nasty territory, and he knew that I had to try and put the pieces back together. Those bogies were his worry for the next few minutes. “Kingpin three, you on your way out?” Damn it. I knew I was too low, and I knew I wasn’t positive of our exact location and I had dragged us right over the river and that rotten Yen Bai. Flak, bad flak, they almost got us—too close—trouble.

  “Shooting, Kingpin.” When you stumble into .a trap like that and your wingman tells you what you already know, you almost feel like saying something real stupid like, “Oh, really?” but you know it is serious. That was the kind of spot where you could lose one or two so fast you wouldn’t know what happened. When those red streaks reach up from the ground and the black puffs spit at you and shake the aircraft and when you can hear the stuff cracking and shrieking all around you, you know that you screwed it up by being there and you know that the next few seconds could be your last.

  “OK, let’s go over hard, burner, keep it moving. Watch it down there on my left. Ten o’clock. WATCH IT1”

  “Still shooting, Kingpin.”

  “Rog, keep her moving.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe it when it stops. “Kingpin three, how do you read lead?”

  “Kingpin four here, read you loud and clear.” By now Bing should be past the worst of the shooting and at least we still had three of us in operation. We should have put a special strike effort on Yen Bai a long time ago and cleaned that dump out. There’s nothing there but
flak, and we have known that for years. Yet we have to piddle our people away on dry runs instead of spending a couple of days eliminating that thorn.

  “Rog, four, you lose three?”

  “Kingpin lead, two’s bingo.”

  “And four’s bingo.”

  I was bingo myself and then some, and I knew that there was no time to waste in getting us to that tanker. You can’t imagine how fast that fuel gauge falls when things get hectic.

  “Kingpin four, you with three?”

  “Negative, I lost him.”

  “Kingpin four, do you read three—correction—three do you read four?” It had been a hard afternoon and you could tell by the chatter that we were all pretty well beat out.

  “Kingpin, we got a couple of bogies out front, low. Take a look at them.”

  “Kingpin three, do you read four? Kingpin three, do you read four? Lead, four is going to emergency frequency for a minute.”

  I rogered with “We’ll stay this frequency until you get back,” and Bing switched his radio equipment over so that it would transmit on our operating channel and on the emergency channel at the same time, making another attempt that we knew would not work.

  “Hello, Kingpin three, do you read four? This is Kingpin four on emergency, three, do you read?”

  The next wing was well on the way into the area and their leader, Baltic, wanted to know what was up. He switched his flight to our frequency and they sounded fresh and crisp as they checked in. “Baltic.”

  ’Two.”

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Kingpin—this is Baltic.”

  “Go ahead, Baltic—Kingpin.”

  “Rog, how’s it look?”

  “No good, there’s a—it’s broken, ah, broken coming down the Ridge, but in the target area itself, it’s solid. There’s no chance on it and, ah, it’s loaded with, ah, Migs.” I was amazed at how tired I sounded on the radio.

  “OK, have y’all called it off?”