Going straight ahead, I climbed to four thousand feet, easing power back to 250 knots. After three minutes, time for six planes to be catapulted, I made a 180-degree turn to the left, and the rest of the flight, climbing out on the opposite heading, turned successively and joined up quickly.
As we passed by the carrier, I turned north and started a climb to ten thousand feet, checking out from ship control and switching to the Task Force 77 (TF 77) frequency on the five-channel very high frequency (VHF) radio. All of the TF 77 flights were under positive radio control from catapulting to arrestment. In the vicinity of the ship, it was the home carrier’s Air Operations Center. En route over the water, it was the commander, TF 77 (CTF 77) flagship’s Combat Information Center (CIC). When over Korea, the Tactical Air Control Center (TACC) in Taegu took over. The TACC was an Air Force flight-control center, colocated with the Joint Operations (JOC), which controlled, or really monitored, all air traffic over Korea, north and south of the front lines. Being under a radio controller from takeoff to landing was a good arrangement, analogous to the civilian air-control system in the United States. The pilots sometimes complained about the number of frequency changes and the check-in and checkout procedures with the daily changing code words, but the system was useful and reassuring.
Crossing the North Korean coastline at Wonsan, I switched to the TACC and checked in, giving my call sign, mission number, and type of aircraft, all in voice code. TACC acknowledged and went silent. We were now over enemy territory, and immediately the dirty gray puffs from enemy AA shells began to appear around us. The cockpits were silent except for the heavy breathing noises of the oxygen regulators. No chatter from the pilots. We were jinking, making random turns and climbs to give the enemy gunners a more difficult shot. We were working harder now and the adrenaline had kicked in.
Good navigation was essential. One wrong turn and we could be lost over this terrain, which all looked the same. There were no recognizable landmarks in this sector. I had planned to fly due north from our coast-in point, travel over four mountain ridges, and then turn northwest along the fifth valley and follow it ten miles to the confluence of the two rivers that formed the delta on which the village of Kisong-Ni was located. I had drawn this track with grease pencil on the acetate of my 1:250,000-scale chart and it required constant reference to stay on course. At the same time, I had to maneuver the formation constantly to avoid the heaviest concentration of tracers and gray AA puffs.
We made our left turn down the fifth valley. Now the clouds had lowered to mountain-top level and there was some scud below us as we jinked our way through the valley, below the hill tops at four thousand feet. We were at 98 percent full power, usually good for 450 knots, but the Panthers were only indicating about 280. The heavy external bomb load and the constant maneuvering had slowed us down. The flak had picked up and the tracers were clearly visible in the gloom of the overcast in the valley. It was uncomfortable. It was mainly 37mm and 20mm automatic fire, with some bursting rounds below us. The flak had become steady and was coming from all directions. The lighter stuff was passing through the formation between the planes.
Because of our low altitude and the scud, the target area could not be identified until we were almost over it. Then suddenly, there was Kisong-Ni. There was no time to rebrief the flight, so I simply called out, “Sealancer One commencing attack” and waggled my wings — the signal to follow me — and rolled left into a forty-degree dive. There wasn’t enough altitude to go much steeper. I pulled the nose of the plane around to put the sight pipper on a large barnlike structure. Heavy tracers were now coming head on from the vicinity of my target.
I was into my dive, passing through three thousand feet, when I heard a loud pow and the sharp rattling impact of shrapnel striking the fuselage. My plane had been hit. Pulling hard on the stick, I got a solid response and pushed the throttle hard, but it was already all the way forward at 100 percent rpm. The left-wing tip tank had been struck by an explosive 37mm round, and I was leaving a trail of blazing fuel. I called on guard channel (the frequency set up for the radio to communicate on in an emergency, overriding whatever preset channel the pilot has selected) for the air group commander, who was leading my second section, to take over the attack, as I was hit and heading south at max speed. I wanted to be as close to the front lines as possible when the engine quit or the fire took over, and I had to eject or ditch. I called my wingman to join up on me. No answer. This was not good. He was supposed to be there.
Then a Panther pulled up alongside my plane and I recognized from the side numbers that it was John Chambers, my wingman. There was blood smeared on the inside of his cockpit canopy. He signaled that his radio was out and held up his left arm, which was covered with blood. His plane had also taken a direct 37mm hit. As it turned out, the round had struck the plane in the fuselage below the cockpit and exploded under his seat. The parachute had absorbed most of the blast, but shrapnel had torn into his arms and legs.
On guard channel I called the TACC, gave them our approximate position, and asked for a vector to the nearest available search and rescue (SAR) facility. I turned my radar beacon to emergency, to identify my plane to the friendly radar operators as the Panther with the battle damage, and almost immediately the TACC picked us up on his radar and gave me a steer to K-18, the Republic of Korea field at Kangnung, which had a single, narrow, pierced-steel (Marston matting) runway. By now the fire in the wing was only intermittent, but my fuel gauge was going down alarmingly. I didn’t know how badly hurt Chambers was or whether his plane would make it to the friendly lines, still twenty miles away.
TACC vectored us straight into K-18. A khaki canvas — covered ROK army ambulance and a firefighting jeep were lined up by the runway. Chambers went in first and piled up about halfway down the strip. The medics got him out right away, but the jeep had trouble clearing the wreckage off the strip, a problem with Marston matting. Low on fuel, I crash-landed in the cleared paddy area alongside the runway. The plane was a mess, but I was unhurt.
I caught the crash jeep over to the medical tent where Chambers was already on the table, an ROK army doctor pulling shrapnel out of his arms and legs and cleaning up his wounds. He would be evacuated to a U.S. Army hospital an hour later by helicopter and then in a week sent to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, which was near his home. He returned to flight status a year later but was killed in Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom II. He was a carrier air wing commander.
Later that same day, Lieutenant Hayek, operations officer for VF-52, also made an emergency landing at K-18 accompanied by his wingman. His Panther was full of holes from heavy flak shrapnel, but he was unhurt.
An AD-2N Skyraider was flown in from the Boxer to pick us up at K-18 that afternoon. The AD-2N was a propeller plane with two seats in the fuselage behind the pilot for a pair of radar operators. In emergencies, like this, it was used as a transport between tactical airfields and the carrier. Back on the Boxer, I debriefed with the intelligence people, wrote a letter to Chambers’s parents, and then checked the flight schedule. I had another interdiction strike mission on a target twenty miles behind enemy lines, the next morning.